The Little Drummer Girl

by John le Carré

  ‘And the warder was her,’ said Litvak softly from Kurtz’s side. ‘His own daughter. Wow!’

  ‘The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe it. I screamed at him, “Open the bloody door!” His hand literally refused.’

  Litvak was writing like a man possessed. But Kurtz was less enthusiastic. Kurtz was at the file again, and his expression suggested serious reservations. ‘Charlie, in this one interview you gave – the Ipswich Gazette, is this? – you tell some story how you and your mother used to climb a hill outside the prison together and wave so as your father could see you from his cell window. Yet, ah, according to what you told us, just now, you never went near that prison once.’

  Charlie actually managed to laugh – a rich, convincing laugh, even if it was not echoed from the shadows. ‘Mart, that was an interview I gave,’ she said, humouring him because he looked so grave.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So in interviews one tends to sauce up one’s past to make it interesting.’

  ‘You been doing that here at all?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Your agent Quilley recently told someone of our acquaintance that your father died in prison. Not at home at all. More saucing it up?’

  ‘That’s Ned talking, not me.’

  ‘Quite so. So it is. Agreed.’

  He closed the file, still unconvinced.

  She couldn’t help herself. Turning right round in her chair, she addressed Joseph, indirectly begging him to get her off the hook.

  ‘How’s it going, Jose – all right?’

  ‘Very effectively, I would say,’ he replied, and continued as before with his own affairs.

  ‘Better than Saint Joan?’

  ‘But, my dear Charlie, your lines are a lot better than Shaw’s!’

  He’s not congratulating me, he’s consoling me, she thought sadly. Yet why was he so harsh to her? So brittle? So abstaining after he had brought her here?

  South African Rose had a tray of sandwiches. Rachel was following her with cakes and a thermos of sweet coffee.

  ‘Doesn’t anybody sleep around here?’ Charlie complained as she helped herself. But her question went unheard. Or, rather, since they had all heard it clearly, unanswered.

  The sweet time was over and now it was the long-awaited dangerous time, the middle hour of watchfulness before the dawn, when her head was clearest and her anger sharpest; the time, in other words, to transfer Charlie’s politics – which Kurtz had assured her they all deeply respected – from the back burner to a more conspicuous heat. Once again, in Kurtz’s hands, everything had its chronology and its arithmetic. Early influences, Charlie. Date, place, and people, Charlie: name us your five guiding principles, your first ten encounters with the militant alternative. But Charlie was in no mood for objectivity any more. Her fit of drowsiness was past, and in place of it a sense of rebellion was beginning to turn restlessly inside her, as the crispness of her voice and her darting, suspicious glances should have told them. She was sick of them. Sick of being helpful in this shotgun alliance, of being led blindfold from room to room without knowing what these trained, manipulating hands were doing on her elbow and what these clever voices were whispering in her ear. The victim in her was spoiling for a fight.

  ‘Charlie, dear, this is strictly but strictly for the record,’ Kurtz declared. ‘Once we have it for the record, we shall be able to shed a couple of veils for you,’ he assured her. But he still insisted on dragging her through a wearying catalogue of demos and sit-ins and marches and squats and Saturday-afternoon revolutions, asking in each case for what he called ‘the argumentation’ behind her action.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, stop trying to evaluate us, will you?’ she threw back at him. ‘We’re not logical, we’re not informed, we’re not organised –’

  ‘So what are we, dear?’ said Kurtz with saintly kindness.

  ‘We’re not dear either. We’re people! Adult human beings, get it? So stop riding me!’

  ‘Charlie, we are surely not riding you. Nobody here is riding you.’

  ‘Oh, screw you all.’

  She hated herself in this mood. She hated the harshness that came over her when she was cornered. She had a picture of herself beating her puny, girl’s fists uselessly against a huge wood door, while her strident voice battled with dangerously unconsidered slogans. At the same time, she loved the bright colours that came with anger, the glorious release, the smashed glass.

  ‘Why do you have to believe before you reject?’ she demanded, remembering a grand phrase Long Al had fed to her – or was it someone else? ‘Maybe rejecting is believing. Has that occurred to you? We’re fighting a different war, Mart – the real one. It’s not power against power, East against West. It’s the hungry against the pigs. Slaves against oppressors. You think you’re free, don’t you? That’s because someone else is in chains. You eat, someone starves. You run, someone has to stand still. We have to change that whole thing.’

  She had believed it once; she really had. Perhaps she still did. She had seen it and had it clear before her in her mind. She had knocked on strangers’ doors with it and watched the hostility lift from their faces as she made her pitch. She had felt it and marched for it: for the people’s right to free the people’s minds, to unclog one another from the engulfing morass of capitalist and racist conditioning, and turn towards each other in unforced companionship. Out there, on a clear day, the vision even now could fill her heart and stir her to feats of courage that, cold, she would have shrunk from. But inside these walls, with all these clever faces, she had no space to spread her wings.

  She tried again, more strident: ‘You know, Mart, one of the differences between being your age and mine is we’re actually a bit fussy about who we give up our existence for. We’re not keen, for some reason, on laying down our lives for a multi-national corporation registered in Liechtenstein and banking in the bloody Dutch Antilles.’ That bit was Al’s for certain. She had even borrowed his sarcastic rasp to wash it down. ‘We don’t think it’s a very good idea to have people we’ve never met or heard of or voted for going round ruining the world for us. We’re not in love with dictators, funnily enough, whether they’re groups of people or countries or institutions, and we’re not in love with the arms race, or chemical warfare, or any part of the whole catastrophe game. We don’t think that the Jewish state has to be an imperialist American garrison and we don’t think Arabs are either flea-ridden savages or decadent oil-sheikhs. So we reject. In favour of not having certain hang-ups – certain prejudices and alignments. So rejection is positive, right? Because not having them is positive, got it?’

  ‘How ruining the world, exactly, Charlie?’ Kurtz asked while Litvak patiently jotted.

  ‘Poisoning it. Burning it. Fouling it up with trash and colonialism and the total, calculated mindbending of the workers, and’ – and the other lines I’ll remember in a minute, she thought. ‘So just don’t come asking me for the names and addresses of my five main gurus – right, Mart? – because they’re in here’ – she thumped her chest – ‘and don’t go sneering at me when I can’t recite Che Guevara to you all bloody night; just ask me whether I want the world to survive and my babies to –’

  ‘Can you recite Che Guevara?’ Kurtz asked, interested.

  ‘Hold it,’ said Litvak, and lifted one flimsy hand for pause while he wrote furiously with the other. ‘This is great. Just hold it for one minute, Charlie, will you?’

  ‘Why don’t you dash out and buy yourself a bloody tape-recorder?’ Charlie snapped. Her cheeks were hot. ‘Or steal one, since that’s what you’re into?’

  ‘Because we don’t have a week set aside for reading transcripts,’ Kurtz replied while Litvak continued writing. ‘The ear selects, you see, dear. Machines don’t. Machines are uneconomical. Can you recite Che Guevara, Charlie?’ he repeated while they waited.

  ‘No, of course I bloody well can’t.’

  From behind her – it seemed a mile away – Jos
eph’s disembodied voice gently modified her answer.

  ‘But she could if she learned him. She has excellent recall,’ he assured them, with a touch of the creator’s pride. ‘She has only to hear something and it belongs to her. She could learn his entire writings in a week, if she put her mind to it.’

  Why had he spoken? Was he trying to mitigate? Warn? Or impose himself between Charlie and her imminent destruction? But Charlie was in no mood to heed his subtleties, and Kurtz and Litvak were conferring again, this time in Hebrew.

  ‘Do you mind speaking English in front of me, you two?’ she demanded.

  ‘In just one moment, dear,’ said Kurtz pleasantly. And went on talking in Hebrew.

  In the same clinical fashion – strictly for the record, Charlie – Kurtz led her painstakingly through the remaining disparate articles of her uncertain faith. Charlie flailed and rallied and flailed again with the growing desperation of the half-taught; Kurtz, seldom criticising, always courteous, glanced at the file, paused for a word with Litvak, or, for his own oblique purposes, jotted himself a note on the pad before him. In her mind, as she floundered fiercely on, she saw herself in one of those improvised happenings at drama school, working her way into a part that increasingly lacked meaning for her as she advanced. She watched her own gestures and they no longer belonged to her words. She was protesting, therefore she was free. She was shouting, therefore she was protesting. She listened to her voice and it belonged to nobody at all. From the pillow-talk of a forgotten lover she snatched a line of Rousseau, from somewhere else a phrase from Marcuse. She saw Kurtz sit back and, lowering his eyes, nod to himself and put down his pencil, so she supposed that she had finished, or he had. She decided that, given the superiority of her audience and the poverty of her lines, she had managed quite decently after all. Kurtz seemed to think so too. She felt better, and a lot safer. Kurtz too, apparently.

  ‘Charlie, I surely congratulate you,’ he declared. ‘You have articulated with great honesty and frankness and we thank you.’

  ‘Sure do,’ murmured Litvak the scribe.

  ‘Be my guest,’ she retorted, feeling ugly and overheated.

  ‘Mind if I attempt to structure it a little for you?’ Kurtz enquired.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ said Kurtz, unsurprised.

  ‘We’re an alternative, that’s why. We’re not a party, we’re not organised, we’re not a manifesto. And we’re not for bloody-well structuring.’

  She wished she could get out of the bloodies somehow. Or else that her swearing would come more easily to her in their austere company.

  Kurtz did his structuring all the same, and made a point of being ponderous while he was about it.

  ‘On the one hand, Charlie, we seem to have what is the basic premise of classic anarchism as preached from the eighteenth century down to the present day.’

  ‘Oh balls!’

  ‘Namely, a revulsion against regimentation. Namely, a conviction that government is evil, ergo the nation-state is evil, an awareness that the two together contradict the natural growth and freedom of the individual. You add to this certain modern postures. Such as a revulsion against boredom, against prosperity, against what I believe is known as the air-conditioned misery of Western capitalism. And you remind yourself of the genuine misery of three-quarters of the earth’s population. Yes, Charlie? You want to quarrel with that? Or shall we take the “Oh balls” for granted this time?’

  She ignored him, preferring to smirk at her fingernails. For Christ’s sake – what did theories matter any more? she wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it’s often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be.

  ‘In today’s world,’ Kurtz continued, unperturbed, ‘in today’s world I would say you have more sound reasons for that view than ever your forebears had, because today the nation-states are more powerful than ever; so are the corporations, so are the opportunities for regimentation.’

  She realised he was leading her, yet she had no way left to stop him. He was pausing for her comments, but all she could do was turn her face away from him and hide her growing insecurity behind a mask of furious negation.

  ‘You oppose technology gone mad,’ he continued equably. ‘Well, Huxley did that for you already. You aim to release human motives that are for once neither competitive nor aggressive. But in order to do this, you have first to remove exploitation. But how?’

  Yet again he paused, and his pauses were becoming more threatening to her than his words; they were the pauses between footsteps to the scaffold.

  ‘Stop patronising me, will you, Mart? Just stop!’

  ‘It is on this issue of exploitation, so far as I read you, Charlie,’ Kurtz continued, with implacable good humour, ‘that we spill over from anarchism observed, as we might call it, to anarchism practised.’ He turned to Litvak, playing him off against her. ‘You had a point here, Mike?’

  ‘I would say exploitation was the crunch issue, Marty,’ Litvak breathed. ‘For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has him hooked twice over.’

  ‘Great,’ said Kurtz comfortably. ‘The pursuit of property is evil, ergo property itself is evil, ergo those who protect property are evil, ergo – since you avowedly have no patience with the evolutionary democratic process – blow up property and murder the rich. You go along with that, Charlie?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody silly! I’m not into that stuff!’

  Kurtz seemed disappointed. ‘You mean you decline to dispossess the robber state, Charlie? What’s the matter? Shy, suddenly?’ To Litvak again: ‘Yes, Mike?’

  ‘The state is tyrannous,’ Litvak put in helpfully. ‘Charlie’s words exactly. She also referred to the violence of the state, the terrorism of the state, the dictatorship of the state – just about everything bad a state can be,’ Litvak added, in a rather surprised voice.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I go round murdering people and robbing bloody banks! Christ! What is this?’

  Kurtz was not impressed by her alarm. ‘Charlie, you have indicated to us that the forces of law-and-order are no more than the satraps of a false authority.’

  Litvak offered a footnote: ‘Also that true justice is not available to the masses through the law courts,’ he reminded Kurtz.

  ‘It isn’t! The whole system is crap! It’s fixed, it’s corrupt, it’s paternalistic, it’s –’

  ‘Then why don’t you destroy it?’ Kurtz enquired perfectly pleasantly. ‘Why don’t you blow it up and shoot every policeman who tries to stop you, and for that matter every policeman who doesn’t? Why don’t you blow up colonialists and imperialists wherever you find them? Where’s your vaunted integrity suddenly? What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘I don’t want to blow anything up! I want peace! I want people to be free!’ she insisted, scurrying desperately for her one safe tenet.

  But Kurtz seemed not to hear her: ‘You disappoint me, Charlie. All of a sudden you lack consistency. You’ve made the perceptions. Why don’t you go out and do something about them? Why do you appear here one minute as an intellectual who has the eye and brain to see what is not visible to the deluded masses, the next you have not the courage to go out and perform a small service – like theft – like murder – like blowing something up – say, a police station – for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds are enslaved by the capitalist overlords? Come on, Charlie, where’s the action? You’re the free soul around here. Don’t give us the words, give us the deeds.’

  The infectious jolliness in Kurtz had reached new heights. His eyes were so creased at the corners that they were black curves cut into his battered skin. But Charlie could fight too, and she was talking straight at him, using words the way he did, clubbing him with them, trying to beat a last desperate exit
past him to freedom.

  ‘Look, I’m superficial, got it, Mart? I’m unread, illiterate, I can’t add or reason or analyse, I went to tenth-rate expensive schools, and I wish to God – more than anything on earth I do – I wish I’d been born in a Midland back-street and my father had worked with his hands instead of ripping off old ladies’ life savings! I’m sick of being brainwashed and I’m sick of being told fifteen thousand reasons every day why I shouldn’t love my neighbour on equal terms, and I want to go to bloody bed!’

  ‘You telling me you’re recanting on your stated position, Charlie?’

  ‘I haven’t got a stated position!’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No stated position, no commitment to activism, except that you are unaligned.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Peaceably unaligned,’ Kurtz added contentedly. ‘You belong to the extreme centre.’

  Slowly unbuttoning a pocket of his jacket, he fished in it with his thick fingers, producing, from among a lot of junk, a folded press cutting, quite a long one, which, judging by its exclusive position, differed in some way from those contained in the folder.

  ‘Charlie, you mentioned in passing a while back that you and Al attended a certain residential forum down in Dorset some place,’ said Kurtz as he laboriously unfolded the cutting. ‘“A weekend course in radical thinking” was how you described it, I believe. We didn’t enter very deeply into what transpired there; it is my memory that for some reason we kind of glossed over that part of our discussion. Mind if we dig a little deeper?’

  Like a man refreshing his memory, Kurtz silently read the press cutting to himself, occasionally shaking his head as if to say, ‘Well, well.’