Monday, January 15, 2007

Our local economy

Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been "What's the matter?"
"I dreamt--" he began, and stopped short. It was too somplex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum inot his mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a fast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the glass was teh done of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear sofe light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had consisted in --a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on teh news film, trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, fefore the helicopters blew them both to pieces.
"Do you know," he said, "that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?"
"I didn't murder her. Not physically."
In the dream he had remembered the last glimpse of his mother, and witwhin a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier; how much earlier, he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances o the time: the periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywherem, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scrounging long afternoons spent with other boys in ther ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelingm sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scrapped away the cinders: and also in waiting for the passing of trucks which traveled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in teh roadm, sometimes split a few fragments of oilcake.
When his father disappearedm, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. IT was evident even to Winston that shw was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed--cooked, washed,emended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost

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