The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  But Marie had stayed apart from everyone. She sat in the dust of the clearing on the other side of the poles, watching over her father from dawn till night. Even when they hauled her mother from the stockade and her screams for Hansen rang out from behind the hillock, changing to screams for mercy and ending with the usual pistol shot, Marie’s eyes never flinched from Hansen’s face.

  “Did she know?” I asked in French.

  “The whole camp knew,” he replied.

  “Had she been fond of her mother?”

  Was it my imagination or had Hansen closed his eyes in the darkness?

  “I was the father of Marie,” he replied. “I was not the father of their relationship.”

  How had I known that the mother and daughter had hated each other? Was it because I sensed that Hansen’s love for Marie had been a jealous and demanding one—absolute, like all his loves, excluding rivals?

  “I was not allowed to speak to her, nor she to me,” he was saying. “Prisoners spoke to nobody on pain of death.”

  Even a groan was enough, as one of the luckless Liu brothers learned when the guards reduced him to permanent silence with their rifle butts, and replaced him next morning with a cringing leftover from the stockade. But between Marie and her father no words were necessary. The stoicism Hansen saw in his daughter’s face was the impassioned determination of his own heart as he lay bound and helpless in his chains. With Marie to support him, he could bear anything. Each would be the salvation of the other. Her love for him was as fierce and single-minded as his for her. He did not doubt it. For all his loathing of captivity, he thanked God he had followed her.

  A day passed and another, but Hansen remained chained to the stake, burning in the sun, shaking in the evening cold, stinking in his own filth, his gaze and spirit fixed always upon Marie.

  In his head, meanwhile, he was wrestling with the tactics of his situation.

  From the start it had been clear to him that he was a celebrity. If they had been planning to capture a European, they would have made their attack before Hansen left his house, and searched the house afterwards. He was unexpected treasure, and they were waiting to hear what should be done with him. Others on the stake were fetched and disappeared, all but the one surviving Liu brother and the woman fortune teller, who after days of noisy questioning reappeared as camp trusties, abusing their former companions and trying by every means to ingratiate themselves with the soldiers.

  An indoctrination class was formed, and each evening the children and selected survivors sat in a circle in the shade to be harangued by a young commissar with a red headband. While Hansen burned and froze, he could hear the commissar’s shrill squawk, hour by hour as he ranted against the hated imperialists. At first he resented these classes because they took Marie away from him. But when he made the effort, he could still lift his head high enough to see her straight body seated strictly at the far side of the circle, staring at him across the clearing. I will be your mother and your father and your friend, he told her. I will be your life, if I have to give up my own.

  At other times he reproached himself with her spectacular beauty, regarding it as a punishment for his random lusts. Marie at twelve was without doubt the most beautiful in the camp, and though sex was forbidden to the cadres on the grounds that it was a bourgeois threat to their revolutionary will, Hansen could not help observe the effect that her thinly clothed figure had on the young fighters as they watched her pass; how their dulled eyes drank in her sprouting breasts and swinging haunches beneath the torn cotton frock, and their scowls darkened when they yelled, at her. Worse still, he knew she was aware of their desire, and that her emerging womanhood responded to it.

  Then a morning came when the routine of Hansen’s captivity unaccountably improved, and his apprehensions deepened, for his benefactor was the young commissar in the red headband. Escorted by two soldiers, the commissar ordered Hansen to stand. When he was unable, the soldiers lifted him to his feet and, taking an arm each, let him stagger to a point along the river bank where an inlet made a natural pool.

  “Wash,” the young commissar ordered.

  For days—ever since they had bound him—Hansen had been vainly demanding the right to clean himself. On his first evening he had roared at them, “Take me to the river.” They had beaten him. The next morning he had flung himself about on his chains, risking more beatings, yelling for a responsible comrade, all to assert his right to remain a person whom his captors could respect and consequently preserve.

  Under the gaze of the soldiers, Hansen sufficiently rallied his racked limbs to bathe and—though it was a crucifixion—rub himself with the fine river mud before being led back to the stake. On each journey, he passed within a few feet of his beloved Marie in her habitual place beyond the ring of poles. Though his heart leapt at her nearness and the courage in her eyes, he could not suppress the suspicion that it was his own child who had purchased the rare comfort he was now enjoying. And when the commissar grunted a greeting to her and Marie lifted her head and gave half a smile in return, the anguish of jealousy added itself to Hansen’s pains.

  After his bathe, they brought him rice—more than they had given him in all the time he had been their prisoner. And instead of making him eat it from the bowl like a dog, they untied his hands and let him use his fingers, so that he was able to secrete a small amount in his palm, and drop it down the front of his tunic before they chained him again.

  All day long he thought of nothing but the pellet of rice inside his shirt, making sure no movement of his body crushed it. I will win her back, he thought. I will supplant the commissar in her admiration. When evening came and they again led him to the river, he achieved the miracle he had been planning. Staggering more dramatically than was necessary, he succeeded in dropping a pellet of rice at Marie’s feet, unnoticed by his guards. As he passed by her again on his way back, he saw to his secret ecstasy that it had vanished.

  Yet her face told him nothing. Only her eyes, straight and sometimes lifeless in their devotion, told him she returned his absolute love. I was deluding myself, he decided, as they refastened his chains. She is learning the prisoner’s tricks. She is chaste and will survive. That evening he listened with a new tolerance to the commissar’s indoctrination class. Lead him on, he urged her in the telepathic dialogue he conducted with her constantly; lull him, bewitch him, gain his trust but give him nothing. And Marie must have heard him, because as the class broke up he saw the commissar beckon her over to him and rebuke her while she remained cowed and silent. He saw her head fall forward. He saw her walk away from him, her head still lowered.

  Next day and for a week, Hansen repeated his trick, convinced he was unobserved except by Marie. The pellet of rice, rolling lightly over his stomach each time he shifted his body, became a source of vital comfort to him. I am nourishing her from my own breast. I am her guardian, the protector of her chastity. I am her priest, giving her Christ’s Sacrament.

  The rice was all that mattered to him. His concern was to contrive new ways to smuggle it to her, waiting till he was past her and flicking the pellet backward, letting it fall down the inside of his tattered trouser leg.

  “I was inordinate,” he said softly, in the tone of a penitent.

  And because he had been inordinate, God took Marie from him. Suddenly one morning when they unchained him and led him to the pool, there was no Marie waiting to receive her Sacrament. At the evening indoctrination class, he saw that she had been elevated to the commissar’s side, and he thought he heard her voice above the rest, intoning the liturgical responses with a new self-confidence. When night fell, he picked out her silhouette among the soldiers’ fires—an accepted member of their company, sharing their rice like a comrade. Next day he did not see her at all, nor the day after.

  “I wished to die,” he said.

  But in the evening as he waited in despair, prone and motionless, for the guards to chain his feet, it was the young commissar who marched towards h
im, and Marie, dressed in a black tunic, who trotted at his side.

  “Is this man your father?” the commissar asked as they reached Hansen.

  Marie’s stare did not falter, but she seemed to be searching her memory for her reply. “Angka is my father,” she said finally. “Angka is the father of all oppressed.”

  “Angka was the Party,” Hansen explained for me, without my asking. “Angka was the Organisation that the Khmer Rouge prayed to. In the Khmer Rouge’s ladder of beings, Angka was God.”

  “So who is your mother?” the commissar asked Marie.

  “My mother is Angka. I have no mother but Angka.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “He is an American agent,” Marie replied. “He drops bombs on our villages. He kills our workers.”

  “Why does he pretend he is your father?”

  “He wishes to trick us by claiming to be our comrade.”

  “Test the spy’s chains. See that they are tight enough,” the commissar commanded.

  Marie knelt to Hansen’s feet, exactly as he had taught her to kneel in prayer. For a moment, like the healing touch of Christ, her hand closed over his festering ankles.

  “Can you insert your fingers between the chain and ankle?” the commissar asked.

  In his panic, Hansen behaved as he always did when his feet were being chained. He flexed his ankle muscles, hoping to give himself more freedom when he relaxed. He felt her finger probe the chain.

  “I can insert my little finger,” she replied, holding it up while she kept her body in the line of sight between the commissar and Hansen’s feet.

  “Can you insert it with difficulty or easily?”

  “I can insert my finger only with difficulty,” she lied.

  Watching them march away, Hansen noticed something that alarmed him. With her black tunic, Marie had put on the stealthy waddle of the jungle fighter. All the same, for the first time since his capture, Hansen slept soundly in his chains. She is joining them in order to deceive them, he assured himself. God is protecting us. Soon we shall escape.

  The official interrogator arrived by boat, a smooth-cheeked student with an earnest, frowning manner. In Hansen’s mind, that was how he named him: the student. A reception committee led by the commissar met him at the river bank and escorted him over the hillock to headquarters. Hansen knew he was the interrogator because he was the only one who did not turn his head to look at the last remaining prisoner rotting in the heat. But he looked at Marie. He stopped in front of her, obliging everybody to stop with him. He stood before her; he held his studious face close to her while he asked her questions. Hansen could not hear. He kept it there while he listened to her parrot answers. My daughter is the camp whore, thought Hansen in despair. But was she? Nothing he had ever heard about the Khmer Rouge suggested they appointed or even tolerated prostitutes in their midst. Everything suggested the contrary. “Angka haït le sexuel,” a French anthropologist had said to him once.

  Then they are ravishing her with their puritanism, he decided. They have locked her to them in a passion that is worse than a debauching. He lay with his face in the earth, praying to be allowed to take her sins of innocence upon himself.

  I have no coherent picture of Hansen’s interrogation for the reason he had little himself. I remembered my own treatment at the hands of Colonel Jerzy, and it was child’s play by comparison. But Hansen’s recollections had the same imprecision. That they tortured him goes without saying. They had built a wooden grid for the purpose. Yet they were also concerned to keep him alive, because between sessions they gave him food and even, if he remembered rightly, allowed him visits to the river bank, though it may have been a single visit broken by spells of unconsciousness.

  There were also the sessions of writing, for in the literal mind of the student, no confession was real until it was written down. And the writing grew harder and harder and became a punishment in itself, even though they unstrapped him from the grid to make him do it.

  As an interrogator, the student seems to have proceeded simultaneously on two intellectual fronts. When he was checked on the one, he shifted to the other.

  You are an American spy, he said, and an agent of the counter-revolutionary puppet Lon Nol, also an enemy of the revolution. Hansen disagreed.

  But you’re also a Roman Catholic masquerading as a Buddhist, a prisoner of minds, a promoter of anti-Party superstitions, and a saboteur of the popular enlightenment, the student screamed at him.

  In general, the student seems to have preferred making statements to asking questions: “You will now please give all dates and places of your conspiratorial meetings with the counter-revolutionary puppet and American spy Lon Nol, naming all Americans present.”

  Hansen insisted that no such meetings had occurred. But this gave the student no satisfaction. As the agony increased, Hansen recalled the names from an English folksong that his mother had used to sing him: Tom Pearse . . . Bill Brewer . . . Jan Stewer . . . Peter Gurney . . . Peter Davey . . . Dan Whiddon . . . Harry Hawk . . .

  “You will now please write down the ringleader of this rabble,” the student said, turning a page of his notebook. The student’s eyes, said Hansen, were often nearly closed. I remembered that about Jerzy too.

  “Cobbleigh,” Hansen whispered, lifting his head from the desk where they had sat him. Thomas Cobbleigh, he wrote. Tom for short. Covername Uncle.

  The dates were important because Hansen was concerned he would forget them once he had invented them, and be accused of inconsistency. He chose Marie’s birthday and his mother’s birthday and the date of his father’s execution. He altered the year to suit Lon Nol’s accession to power. For a conspiratorial place, he selected the walled gardens of Lon Nol’s palace in Phnom Penh, which he had often admired on his way to a favourite fumerie.

  His fear while he was confessing to this rubbish was that he would reveal true information by mistake, for it was by now clear to him that the student knew nothing about his real intelligencegathering activities, and that the charges against him were based on the fact that he was a Westerner.

  “You will please write down the name of each spy paid by you in the last five years, also each act of sabotage committed by you against the people.”

  Not in all the days and nights that Hansen had passed anticipating his ordeal had he imagined he might fail on the score of creativity. He recited the names of martyrs whose agonies he had contemplated in order to prepare himself, of Oriental scholars safely dead; of authors of learned works on philology and linguistics. Spies, he said. All spies. And wrote them down, his hand jerking on the paper to the convulsions of the pain that continued to rack him long after they switched off the machine.

  Writing desperately, he made a list of T. E. Lawrence’s officers in the desert, which he remembered from his many readings of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He described how on Lon Nol’s personal orders he had organised the poisoning of crops and cattle by Buddhist priests. The student put him back on the grid and increased the pain.

  He described the clandestine classes he had held in imperialism, and how he had encouraged the spread of bourgeois sentiment and family virtues. The student opened his eyes, offered his commiserations and again increased the pain.

  He gave them nearly everything. He described how he had lit beacons to guide American bombers, and distributed rumours that the bombers were Chinese. He was on the brink of telling them who had helped him to lead American commandos to the supply trails, when mercifully he fainted.

  But throughout his ordeal it was still Marie with whom he lived in his heart, to whom he cried out in his pain, whose hands drew him back to life when his body was begging to relinquish it, whose eyes watched over him in love and pity. It was Marie to whom he sacrificed his suffering and for whom he swore to survive. As he lay between life and death, he had an hallucination in which he saw himself stretched out in the well of the student’s boat and Marie in her black tunic seated over him, paddling them uprive
r to Heaven. But he still was not dead. They have not killed me. I have confessed to everything and they have not killed me.

  But he had not confessed to everything. He had remained true to his helpers and he had not told them about his radio. And when they dragged him back next day and strapped him once more to the grid, he saw Marie sitting at the student’s side, a copy of his confession lying before her on the table. Her hair was cropped, her expression closed.

  “Are you familiar with the statements of this spy?” the student asked her.

  “I am familiar with his statements,” she replied.

  “Do the spy’s statements accurately depict his lifestyle as you were able to observe it in his company?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” the student asked, opening his notebook.

  “They are not complete.”

  “Explain why the spy Hansen’s statements are not complete.”

  “The spy Hansen kept a radio in his house which he used for signalling to the imperialist bombers. Also the names he has mentioned in his confession are fictitious. They are taken from a bourgeois English song which he sang to me when he was pretending to be my father. Also he received imperialist soldiers at our house at night and led them into the jungle. Also he has failed to mention that he has an English mother.”

  The student appeared disappointed. “What else has he failed to mention?” he asked, flattening a fresh page with the edge of his small hand.