Going Home - Doris May Lessing [18]
I knew the geography of that wall as I knew the lines on my palm. Waking in the morning I opened my eyes to the first sunlight, for the sun shot up over the mountain in a big red ball just where my window was. The green mosquito gauze over the window had tarnished to a dull silver, and my curtains were a clear orange; and the sun came glittering through the silver gauze and set the curtains glowing like fire. The heat was instant, like a hot hand on your flesh. The light reached in and lay on the white wall, in an irregular oblong of soft rosy red. The grain of the wall, like a skin, was illuminated by the clear light. There were areas of light, brisk graining where Tobias the painter had whisked his paint-brush from side to side; then a savage knot of whorls and smudged lines where he had twirled it around. What had he been thinking about when his paint-brush suddenly burst into such a fury of movements? There was another patch where he had put his hand flat on the whitewash. Probably there had been something in his bare foot, and he had steadied himself with his hand while he picked his sole up to look at it. Then he had taken out whatever was in his foot and lifted his brush and painted out the handmark. Or thought he had. For at a certain moment of the sunrise, when the sun was four inches over the mountains in the east, judging by the eye, that hand came glistering out of the whitewash like a Sign of some kind.
It took about five minutes of staring hard at the walls where the light lay rosy and warm for it to turn a clear primrose-yellow. This meant that the sun had contracted and was no longer red and swollen, but yellow and its normal size, and one could no longer look at it without hurting one’s eyes.
High near the roof, above the clear yellow sun-pattern, there were a series of little holes in the wall. These were the homes of some hornets, who like dried mud to live in. I don’t know if hornets are like birds, returning to their nests, but there were always hornets at work on that wall. They were elegant in shape, and a bright, lively black, and they buzzed and zoomed in and out of the room through the propped-open door. One would fit itself neatly inside a hole and begin working inside it, and you listened to fragments of mud from the wall flopping down on to the floor.
And if the wall was in a continual state of disintegration and repair, an irregular variegated surface of infinite interest, then the floor was not at all the flat and even surface of convention.
Long ago, the good, hard surface of dung, mud and blood had been protected by linoleum; and this in its turn had hollowed and worn as the earth beneath had hollowed or heaved because of the working of roots or the decay of old roots. A young tree used to shoot up under my bed every wet season. There was a crack in the mud there; the linoleum began to bulge upwards, and then split; and out came a pale, sickly, whitey-yellowish shoot which immediately turned a healthy green. We cut it off; but it sprouted up once or twice every wet season. As soon as the rains stopped, the shoot sank back, sullen and discouraged until next year, biding its time. One year I decided not to cut it. The first thing every morning I put my head out from under the mosquito net, over the edge of the bed, to see how the shoot was getting along. Very soon it was a small, green bush, pushing up against the wire of the mattress. The next thing, it would have split the mattress as it had split the linoleum. I moved the bed, thinking it would be attractive to have a tree growing in the middle of my bedroom, but my mother would have none of it. She had it chopped down, and a lot of fresh mud laid and stamped hard and flat. Next season the shoot came up at the side between the fresh bit of floor and the old, near the wall. It came pushing up with a watch clutched in its leaves. This was because my father, who had many theories about life, had a theory about watches. Foolish, he said, to buy watches costing 5 or 10 guineas which, being delicate and expensive, were bound to