Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  But came the times of ease, of ‘affluence’.

  When he was a youth, he had a clear knowledge of those opposing him, ‘the class enemy’. Their characteristic was that they did not tell the truth. They lied. They cheated. When it was a question of defending their position, what they had, there was no trick or meanness they would not descend to. In any confrontation between them, those representatives of the ‘ruling classes’, and the men who spoke for the struggling millions, they presented the bland calm faces of accomplished liars, who were proud of that accomplishment. He had seen himself, as a youth, a fighter armed with truth and with the facts, against these armies of thieves and liars.

  And now? He would watch a good-humoured, smiling affable man, presenting a case, and remember …

  They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their ‘betters’. He, his kind, had been taken captive by everything they ought to hate, and had hated but had forgotten to hate. They had looked, earlier in their history, into the faces of their oppressors, who bullied and bluffed – and tricked; and had felt themselves superior, because they were honest, and stood on the truth. And now they, too, bluffed and bullied and tricked – just like everyone else of course. Who did not? Who did not lie and steal and filch, and take what he could grab? And so why should they be any different?

  What he was thinking was a sort of treason.

  Thinking like this, not wanting to think like this, being ashamed of himself, and then telling himself he was right, and should hold fast to these thoughts, he had a breakdown. He was given leave for a year by concerned – and relieved – colleagues. He had been for months now sitting silently through deliberations of various kinds and then coming out with something like: ‘But shouldn’t we get back to first principles?’ Or: ‘Why do we tolerate so much thieving and crookedness?’ Or: ‘Yes, but that isn’t true, is it?’ – and with a wrung face and the hot dry eyes of sleeplessness.

  He went home to his wife, who was out all day working at a job which he thought was unnecessary and degrading to her. She worked because she said she couldn’t make ends meet, but he told her that he earned enough to live in a way their respective parents would have thought luxury. Why shouldn’t she make something of herself, something serious! What, for instance?

  Well, she could go to night classes. Or learn some real skill. Like what? And what for?

  Or she could start some association for improving the position of women?

  But she continued to earn money in order to fill the house with furniture he thought of as pretentious. She could never stop replacing clothes and curtains, or stocking freezers with enough food to feed great families.

  He went off on a long walking trip, by himself, visiting old friends, some of them not seen for years. They had become possessed, it seemed to him, as happened in fairy tales, by some kind of evil spirit, for he could not find anything in them of what they had been. Or what he had thought they were?

  Tramping, wandering, alone, he kept returning to himself as a boy, when everyone he saw seemed to him only a shadow of what was possible, for he could see so clearly their potential self, what they ought to be, could be, would be … or had he imagined all that?

  He went to visit a sister, not the one whom he had cherished, and comforted silently in his thoughts, for the dreadfulness of her life, for she had died of tuberculosis; but another, much younger than himself. He found a woman who was tired. That was her characteristic. She ministered to her husband, a pleasant enough man who seemed tired and silent, too, and who did not seem to care for her much beyond what she provided for him. They both went to bed early. She talked a good deal to her cats. The daughter had gone to Australia with her family. She was worried about a carpet she felt should be replaced, but was finding the whole thing more than she could face, the disturbance of it, the getting rid of the old one, the workmen coming in and out. She could not talk of much else. Apart from the war, which she remembered with fondness because of ‘everyone being so kind to each other’.

  When he got home from an extensive walking tour, he told his wife he was going to sue himself.

  ‘You are going to what?’

  ‘I am going to put myself on trial.’

  ‘You have gone crazy, you have,’ said she, quite accurately, of course, departing to tell friends and colleagues that he had not yet got over whatever it was that ‘was eating him’.

  He appeared at a meeting of his union and informed them that he was going to put himself on trial, ‘on behalf of us all’, and invited their cooperation.

  They indulged him.

  But he could not find anyone to take his case.

  At that time exemplary trials of every kind were not uncommon. A group of people would set up a trial of some process or institution that seemed to them inadequate or dishonest.

  What our friend wanted was to set up a trial where his youthful self prosecuted his middle-aged self, asking what had happened to the ideals, the vision, the ability to see individuals as infinitely capable of development, the hatred of pettiness and evasion, the hatred above all of lies, and double talk, the deceits of the conference tables and committees, the public announcements, the public face.

  He wanted that burning, fiery, hungry, marvellous young man to stand up in public and expose and shred to pieces the awful dishonest smiling tool and puppet that he had become.

  He went from lawyer to lawyer. Individuals. Then organizations. There were a thousand small political groupings, with different aims, or at least formulations.

  The big political parties, the big trade unions, all the organs of government had become so enormous, so cumbersome, so ridden with bureaucracy, that nothing could get done except through the continually forming and re-forming pressure groups: it was government by pressure group, administration by pressure group, for government could not initiate, it could only respond. But all these groups, sometimes admirable for their purpose, had ideologies and allegiances, and not one was prepared to take on this odd and freakish case, and not one saw that incorruptible, truthful young man as he did. They indulged him. Or, again and again, he saw that he was about to find himself on some platform defending partisan causes. He was going from group to group engaged in interminable and usually acrimonious discussions, arguments, definitions: at first he was prepared to see the acrimony as a sign of inner strength, ‘integrity’, but then could no longer. He wondered if what he admired in himself, when young, had been no more than intolerance, the energy that is the result of identification with a limited objective?

  It was not long before he had a heart attack, and then another, and died.

  If Taufiq had been there, the case would have been perfectly adapted to his capacities.

  He would not have permitted this ‘trial’ to be freakish, or silly, or self-advertising. It would have captured the imaginations of a generation, focusing inner quests and doubts; have led above all to a deeper understanding by young people of the rapid shifts and changes in the recent past, which to them seemed so distant.

  INDIVIDUAL FOUR (Terrorist Type 3)

  [For a list of the different types of terrorists produced during this period, See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III.]

  This young woman was known to her colleagues, and to the world in her brief moment of exposure, as The Brand.

  She had spent her childhood in concentration camps, where her parents died. If there were members of her family still alive, she made no attempt to trace them. She was given a home by foster parents with whom she was obedient, correct – a shadow. They were not real to her. Only people who had been in the camps were real to her. With them she maintained contact. They were her friends, because they shared a knowledge of ‘what the world is really like’. She was part-Jewish, but did not identify with any aspect of being Jewish. As soon as she was grown up, pressures came on her to be normal. To these she responded by calling herself The Brand. She had r
efused to remove the tattoo of the camps. Now she had shirts, sweaters, with her brand on them, in black. In bed with her ‘lovers’ – where she challenged the world in the cold indifferent way that was her style – she would take the fingers of the man or woman (she was bisexual) and smile as she placed them on the brand on her forearm.

  She sought out, more and more, people who had been in concentration camps, refugee camps, prisons. Several times she slipped through frontiers to enter camps, prisons: these exploits were ‘impossible’. Daring the ‘impossible’ she was alive, as she never was otherwise. She prepared more difficult exploits for herself. She even lived as a member of a corrective prison in a certain Northwest fringe country for a year. The inmates saw her as engaged in some political task, but she was testing herself. For what? But her ‘historical role’ had not yet been ‘minted by history’: her vocabulary consisted entirely of political slogans or clichés, mostly of the left, together with concentration camp and prison jargon. At that stage she did not see herself with a definite future. She had no home of her own, but moved from one flat to another in a dozen cities of the Northwest fringes. These were owned by people like herself, some of whom had ordinary jobs, or got money illegally in one way or another. Money did not matter to her. She always wore trousers, and a shirt or sweater, and if these did not have on them her brand, she wore it on a silver bracelet.

  She was a stocky plain girl, with nothing remarkable about her; but people would find themselves watching her, uneasy because of this coldly observant presence. She was always in command of herself, and hostile, unless when with her other selves, the products of the camps. Then she was affectionate, in a clumsy childish way. But only one other person knew the full details of her exploits among the camps and prisons. This was a man called ‘X’.

  When terrorist groups sprang up everywhere, most of them of younger people than she, The Brand was not far from a legend. People saw this as a danger, ‘exhibitionism’, and kept clear of her; but in that network of flats, houses, where these people moved, she had always just left, or would soon be there, someone knew her, she had helped somebody. One man, respected among them, who was about to start, correctly and formally, a group of whom he would be ‘leader’ – though the word was understood differently among them – refused to talk about her, but allowed it to be understood that she was more skilled and brave than anyone he had known. He insisted that she should be asked to be a member of his group: insisted against opposition.

  He had said she was a mistress of disguise.

  She came to a flat one afternoon in an industrial city in the north of the Northwest fringes. It was a bitter cold day, snowing, a freezing wind. Four people in their twenties, two men, two women, saw this woman enter: blond, sunburned, a little overfed, in a fur coat that was vulgar and expensive, with the good-humoured easy smile of the indulged and sheltered of this world. This middle-class woman sat down fussily, guarding her handbag that had cost a fortune but was a bit shabby, in the way people do who care for their possessions. Her audience burst out laughing. She became an elder sister to them, an infinitely clever comrade, who had always done, and with success, more difficult things than any of them had dreamed of. This circle of outlaws was her family, and would have to be till death, for they could never leave such a circle and return to ordinary life – a condition that was not desirable or understandable to any of them. Her self-challenges, her feats, were disclosed by her, discussed, and all kinds of practical lessons drawn from them.

  This was one of the more successful of the terrorist groups. It operated for more than ten years before The Brand was caught, with eight others. Their goals were always the same: an extremely difficult and dangerous feat that needed resources of skill, bravery, cunning. They were all people who had to have danger to feel alive at all. They were ‘left-wing’ socialists of a sort. But discussions of a ‘line’, the variations of dogma, were never important to them. When they exchanged the phrases of the international left-wing vocabulary, it was without passion.

  They did not court, or crave, publicity, but used it.

  Most of their engagements with danger were anonymous and did not reach newspapers and television.

  They blackmailed an international business corporation or individual, for money. Large sums of money would find their way to refugee organizations, prisoners escaping or in hiding, or to the ‘network’. Young people in refugee camps would find themselves mysteriously supported into universities or training of some kind. Flats and houses were set up in this country or that, sometimes across the world, for the use of the ‘network’. Organizations similar to theirs, temporarily in difficulties, would be helped. They also blackmailed and kidnapped, for information. They wanted details of how this business worked, the linkages and bonds of that multinational firm. They wanted information about secret military installations – and got it. They acquired materials to make various types of bomb, weapon, and supplied other groups with them. If any one of these young people had been asked why she or he did not use these talents ‘for the common good’ the reply would have been ‘But I do already!’ for they saw themselves as an alternative world government.

  When they were caught, it was by chance; and this is not the place to describe how.

  The Brand, and her associates, were in prison, all with multiple charges against them. Murders had been committed, but not for the pleasure of murder. The pleasure – if that is a word that may be used for the heightened, taut, lightning shimmer of excitement they sought, or rather, manufactured – did not come from the isolated brutal act or torture of an individual, but from the exploit as a whole – its conception, the planning, the slow building of tension, the exact scrupulous attention to a thousand details.

  INDIVIDUAL FIVE (Terrorist Type 12)

  X was the son of rich parents, business people who had made a fortune through armaments and industries associated with war: World War I provided the basis of this fortune. His parents had both been married several times, he had known no family life, had been emotionally self-sufficient since a small child. He spoke many languages, could claim citizenship from several countries. Was he Italian, German, Jewish, Armenian, Egyptian? He was any one of these, at his convenience.

  A man of talent and resources, he could have become an efficient part of the machinery of death that was his inheritance, but he would not, could not, be any man’s heir.

  He was fifteen when he brought off several coups of blackmail – emotional legerdemain – among the ramifications of his several families’ businesses. These showed the capacity to analyse; a cold far-sightedness, an indifference to personal feelings. He was one of those unable to separate an individual from her, his circumstances. The man who was his real father (though he did not think of him as such, claimed a man met half a dozen times almost casually, whose conversation had illuminated his life, as ‘father’), this ordinary, harassed, anxious man, who died in middle age of a heart attack, one of the richest men in the world, was seen by him as a monster, because of the circumstances he had been born into. X had never questioned this attitude: could not. For him, a man or a woman was his, her circumstances, actions. Thus guilt was ruled out for him; it was a word he could not understand, not even by the processes of imaginative effort. He had never made the attempt to understand the people of his upbringing: they were all rotten, evil. His own milieu, the ‘network’, was his family.

  Meeting The Brand was important to him. He was twelve years younger than she was. He studied her adventures with the total absorption others might bring to ‘God’, or some absolute.

  First there had been that casually met man whose ruthless utterances seemed to him the essence of wisdom. Then there was The Brand.

  When they had sexual relations – almost at once, since for her sex was an appetite to be fed, and no more – he felt confirmed in his deepest sense of himself: the cold efficiency of the business, never far from perversity, seemed to him a statement of what life was.

  He had never
felt warmth for any human being, only admiration, a determination to understand excellence, as he defined it.

  He did not want, or claim, attention from the public or the press or any propaganda instrument: the world was contemptible to him. But when he had pulled off, with or without the ‘network’ (he often worked alone, or with The Brand), a coup that was always inside the empire of one of his families, he would leave his mark, so that they should know whom they had to thank: an X, like that of an illiterate.

  In bed with The Brand, he would trace an X over the raised pattern of the concentration camp number on her forearm, particularly in orgiastic moments.

  He was never caught. Later, he joined one of the international police forces that helped to govern Shikasta in its last days.

  INDIVIDUAL SIX (Terrorist Type 8)

  The parents of this individual were in camps of various kinds throughout World War II. The father was Jewish. That they survived at all was ‘impossible’. There are thousands of documents testifying to these ‘impossible’ survivals, each one a history of dedication to survival, inner strength, cunning, courage – and luck. These two did not leave the domain of the camps – they were in a forced labour camp in the eastern part of the Northwest fringes for the last part of the war – until nearly five years after the war ended. There was no place for them. By then the individual who concerns us here had been born, into conditions of near starvation, and cold: impossible conditions. He was puny, damaged, but was able to function. There were no siblings: the parents’ vitality had been exhausted by the business of setting themselves up, with the aid of official charitable organizations, as a family unit in a small town where the father became an industrial worker. They were frugal, careful, wary, husbanding every resource: people such as these understand, above all, what things cost, what life costs. Their love for the child was gratitude for continued existence: nothing unthinking, animal, instinctive, about this love. He was to them something that had been rescued – impossibly – from disaster.