Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  The parents did not make friends easily: their experience had cut them off from the people around them, all of whom had been reduced to the edge of extinction by the war – but few had been in the camps. The parents did not often speak about their years in the camps, but when they did, what they said took hold of the child with the strength of an alternative vision. What did these two rooms they lived in, poor, but warm and safe, have to do with that nightmare his parents spoke of? Sometimes at this time of life, youngsters in the grip of glandular upheaval crystallize in opposition to their parents with a vigour that preserves opposition for the rest of their lives.

  This boy looked at his parents, and was appalled. How was it possible? was his thought.

  I digress here to the incredulity referred to in my report on Individual Three who spent years examining the deprivations of the people around him with: How is it possible? I simply don’t believe it! Meaning partly: Why do they put up with it? Meaning, too: That human beings should treat each other like this? I don’t believe it!

  In Individual Six this incredulity was wider far than that of Individual Three, who saw the streets around him, then a town, and could only with difficulty envisage the Northwest fringes, let alone the central landmass, the world: it took years of experience in the war to enlarge his boundaries.

  But Individual Six felt himself to be the war, and the war had been a global event: had printed his vision of life as a system of interlocking interacting processes.

  From the time he first began to think for himself, he was unable to see the developments of events as the generation before his had done. There was no such thing as a ‘guilty nation’, any more than there could be defeated or victorious nations. A single nation could not be solely responsible for what it did, since groups of nations were a whole, interacting as a whole. The geographical area called ‘Germany’ – it had become another name for wickedness – could not be responsible entirely for the mass murders and brutalities it had perpetrated: how could it be, when one day with the facts in a library was enough to show that ‘World War II’ was multicaused, an expression of the whole of the Northwest fringes, a development of ‘World War I’. How was it possible that these old people saw things in this isolated piecemeal way, like children, or like idiots! They were simple-minded! They were stupid! Above all, they did not seem to have any idea at all of what they were like.

  A boy of fifteen imposed on himself a regime completely distressing to his parents. He did not have a room of his own, but there was a folding bed in the kitchen, and this he covered with what they had been given in the camps: a single, thin, dirty blanket. He shaved his head, and kept it shaved. On one day a week he ate only the diet provided in the camp during the final days of the war: hot greasy water, potato peelings, scraps from rubbish bins. He was careful, not to say obsessed, in getting his ‘food’ for himself, and put the filthy stuff on the table at mealtimes, eating reverently – a sacrament. Meanwhile, his parents ate their frugal meals; their damaged stomachs could not absorb normal amounts of food. He read to them passages from biographies, accounts of conditions in camps, the negotiations or lack of them that led to ‘World War II’ – always stressing multicause and effect: if that nation had done that, then this would not have happened. If such and such warnings had been heeded … that step taken … that statesman listened to …

  For these poor people it was as if a nightmare they had escaped from only by a miracle had returned and was taking over their lives. They had made for themselves a little sheltered place, where they could believe themselves kept safe, because evil was the property of that other place, or that other nation; wickedness was contained in the past, in history – terror might come again, but thank God, that would be the future, and by then with luck, they would be dead and safe … and now their refuge was being broken open, not by ‘history’ or ‘the future’, but by this precious child of theirs, who was all they had been able to bring out from the holocaust.

  The father begged him to take his truths elsewhere. ‘Are they true or not?’ the youngster challenged. ‘Yes … no … I don’t care, for God’s sake …’ ‘You don’t care!’

  ‘Your mother … you don’t know what she had to put up with, go easy on her!’

  The boy added to his discipline by wearing, on certain days of the week, dirty rags and tatters. All over the walls of the kitchen, which after all was the only room he had, and he was entitled to consider them his, were a thousand pictures of the concentration camps, but not only those of the Northwest fringes: soon the pictured record of the atrocious treatment of man by man covered the walls.

  He sat quiet at the table, his father and mother hastily eating their meal in silence that was a prayer he would not ‘begin again’ – and then he would begin again, reciting facts, figures, litanies of destruction, deaths by ill treatment and torture in communist countries, non-communist countries, any country anywhere.

  [SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3011, The Age of Ideology, ‘Self-Portraits of Nations’. Geographical areas, or temporary associations of peoples for the purposes of defence or aggression. Such an entity capable of believing itself different, better, more ‘civilized’ than another, when in fact to an outside view there is nothing to choose between them. And VOL. 3010, Psychology of the Masses, ‘Self-Protective Mechanisms’.]

  Through a series of chances, it had become impossible for this youngster to identify himself with national myths and self-flatteries. He literally could not understand how others did. He believed that they must be pretending, or were being wilfully cowardly. He was of that generation – part of a generation – which could not see a newspaper except as a screen of lies, automatically translated any television newscast or documentary into what the truth probably was, reminded himself all the time, as a religious person might remind himself of the wiles of the Devil, that what was being fed to the world or nation about any event was by definition bound to be only a small part of real information, knew that at no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.

  All this was good, was a step towards freedom from the miasmas of Shikasta.

  But it was useless to him, for he had no kindness.

  He was intolerable to his parents. The mother, still only a middle-aged woman of ordinary reckoning, seemed old to herself, became ill, had a heart attack. The father remonstrated, pleaded, even used words like: Spare her, spare us.

  The stern avenging angel of righteousness remained in the meagre rooms that held the family, his eyes fixed in unbelieving dislike on his parents: How is it possible that you are like this!

  At last his father said to him that if he could not treat his mother – ‘Yes, and me too! I admit it!’ – more gently, then he must leave home.

  The boy was sixteen. They are throwing me out! he exulted, for everything he knew was being confirmed.

  He found himself a room in the home of a school friend, and thereafter did not see his parents.

  At school he set himself to be an unsettling presence. It was an ordinary small-town school, providing nothing remarkable for its pupils in the way of teachers and teachings. He sat at the back of the class and emanated a punishing dislike, arms folded, legs stretched to one side, maintaining a steady unblinking stare first at one target, and then at another. He would rise to his feet, first having most correctly held his hand up to ask permission: ‘Is it not a fact that …? Are you perhaps unaware …? You are of course familiar with Government Report No. XYZ …? I take it that such and such a book will be part of the curriculum for this subject? No? But how can that be possible?’

  He was feared by the staff, and by most of the pupils, but some of these admired him. At this time, when every kind of extreme political group tormented the authorities, and ‘the youth’ was by definition a threat, he had not reached his seventeenth year when his name was known to the police, for the headmaster had mentioned him to them with the air of one
covering himself against future probabilities.

  He drifted towards various groups first right-wing and unaffiliated to a political party, then fell in with a left-wing revolutionary group. But this had very specific allegiances: this country was good, that bad, this creed abhorrent, this one ‘correct’. Again he was saying; ‘But surely you must be aware …? Have you not read …? Don’t you know that …?’ It was clear that he would have to form his own group, but he was in no hurry. To keep himself he pilfered, and took part in various petty crimes. He was indifferent about how he came by a couple of months in a flat somewhere, or free meals for a week, or a girlfriend. He was completely, even amiably, amoral. Accused of some lie or theft he might allow himself a smile that commented unfavourably on everything around him. His reputation among the political groups was still unformed, but on the whole he was seen as clever, as skilful at surviving in ways respected by them, but careless.

  When his group of a dozen young men and women crystallized out finally it was not on the basis of any particular political creed. Everyone had been formed by experiences of emotional or physical deprivation, had been directly affected by war. None could do anything but fix the world with a cold, hating eye: This is what you are like. They did not dream of utopias in the future: their imaginations were not tuned to the future at all, unlike those of previous revolutionaries or religionists: it was not that ‘next year, or in the next decade, or next century, we create paradise on earth …’ only, ‘This is what you are like.’ When this hypocritical, lying, miserably stupid system is done away with, then everyone would be able to see …

  It was their task to expose the system for what it was.

  But they had a faith, and no programme. They had the truth – but what to do with it? They had a vocabulary, but no language.

  They watched the exploits of guerrilla groups, the deeds of the terrorists.

  They saw that what was needed was to highlight situations, events.

  They staged the kidnapping of a certain politician who had been involved in some transaction they disapproved of, demanding the release of a man who seemed to them innocent. They detailed the reasons why this imprisoned man was innocent, and when he was not released, shot their hostage and left him in the town square. This is what you are like was what they felt, as they murdered him, meaning, the world.

  The murder had not been planned. The details of the kidnapping had been adequately worked out, but they had not expected they would kill the politician, had half believed that the authorities would hand over their ‘innocent’. There was something careless, unthought-out about the thing, and several of the members of the group demanded a more ‘serious’ approach, analyses, reconsideration.

  Our Individual Six listened to them, with his characteristic careless smile, but his black eyes deadly. ‘Of course, what else can be expected from people like you?’ he was communicating.

  Two of the protesting individuals met with ‘accidents’ in the next few days, and he now commanded a group that did not think of him as ‘careless’ – or not as they had done previously.

  There were nine of them, three women.

  One of the women thought of herself as ‘his’, but he refused to accept this view of the situation. They had group sex, in every sort of combination. It was violent, ingenious, employing drugs and weapons of various kinds. Sticks of gelignite, for instance. Four of the group blew themselves up in an orgy. He did not recruit others.

  It was observed by the four remaining that he had enjoyed the publicity. He insisted on staging a ‘funeral service’ which, although the police did not know which group had been responsible for this minor massacre, was asking for notice and arrest. Elegies for the dead, poems, drawings of a heroic figure were left in the warehouse where the ‘socialist requiem’ was held.

  By then it had occurred to them that he was mad, but it was too late for any of them to leave the group.

  They staged another kidnapping. The carelessness of it amounted to contempt, and they were caught and put on trial. It was a trial that undermined the country, because of their contempt for the law, for legal processes.

  At that time, throughout the Northwest fringes, almost every person regarded the processes of the law as a frail – the frailest possible – barrier between themselves and a total brutal anarchy.

  Everyone knew that ‘civilization’ depended on the most fragile supports. The view of the older people of what was happening in the world was no less fearful, in its way, than that of the young ones like Individual Six and his group, or of the other terrorists, but it was opposite in effect. They knew that the slightest pressure, even an accident or something unintended, could bring down the entire fabric … and here were these madmen, these young idiots, prepared to risk everything – more, intending to bring it down, wanting to destroy and waste. If people like Individual Six ‘could not believe it’, then ordinary citizens ‘could not believe it’ either: they never did understand each other.

  When the five were brought to trial and stood in the dock loaded with chains, and behind barriers of extra bars, they reached their fulfilment, the apex of achievement.

  ‘This is what you are like,’ they were saying to the world. ‘These brutal chains, these bars, the fact that you will give us sentences that will keep us behind bars for the rest of our lives – this is what you are like! Regard your mirror, in us!’

  In prison, and in court, they were elated, victorious, singing and laughing, as if at a festival.

  About a year after sentence, Individual Six and two others escaped. They went their separate ways. Individual Six got fat, wore a wig and acquired a correct clerky appearance. He did not contact either the escaped members of his group or those in prison. He hardly thought of them: that was the past!

  He deliberately courted danger. He would stand chatting to policemen on the street. He went into police stations to report minor crimes, such as the theft of a bicycle. He was arrested for speeding. He actually appeared in court on one charge. All this with a secret glowing contempt: this is what you are like, stupid, incompetent …

  He went back to the town he had grown up in, and got an undemanding job, and made a life for himself that lacked any concealment except for the change of name and appearance. People recognized him, and he was talked about. Knowing this gave him pleasure.

  His father was now in an institution for the elderly and incapacitated, his mother having died, and, hearing his son was in town, he took to hanging about the streets in the hope of seeing him. He did, but Individual Six waved his hand in a jolly, friendly, don’t-bother-me-now gesture, and walked on.

  He was expecting from his inevitable re-arrest a trial of the same degree of publicity as his first. He wanted that moment when he would stand chained, like a dog, behind double bars. But when he was arrested, he was sent back to jail to serve his sentence.

  An elation, a lunacy – which had been carrying him up, up, up, from the moment of truth when he had first seen what the world was like, had ‘had his eyes opened’ – suddenly dissolved, and he committed suicide.

  INDIVIDUAL SEVEN (Terrorist Type 5)

  This was a child of rich parents, manufacturers of an internationally known household commodity of no use whatsoever, contributing nothing except to the economic imperative: thou shalt consume.

  She had a brother, but as they were at different schools and it was not thought important that they should meet, she had little physical or emotional contact with him after early childhood.

  She was unhappy, unnurtured, without knowing what was wrong with her. When she reached adolescence she saw there was no central place in the family, no place where responsibility was taken: no father, or mother, or brother – who never had any other destiny but to be his father’s heir – imposed themselves on circumstances. They were passive in the face of events, ideas, fashions, expected conduct. When she had understood it – and she could not believe how she had taken so long – she saw that she was the only one of her family
who thought like this. It occurred to none that it was ever possible to say ‘no’. She saw them and herself as bits of paper or refuse blown along streets.

  She did not hate them. She did not despise them. She found them irrelevant.

  She went to university for three years. There she enjoyed the double life of such young people: democratic and frugal in the university, and the luxuriousness of an indulged minority to whom everything was possible, at home.

  She was not interested in what she was taught, only in whom she met. She drifted in and out of political sects, all on the left. She used in them the cult vocabulary obligatory in those circles, the same in all of them – and they might very well be enemies at various times.

  What they all had in common was that ‘the system’ was doomed. And would be replaced by people like themselves, who were different.

  These groups, and there were hundreds of them in the Northwest fringes – we are not now considering other parts of the world – were free to make up their own programmes, frameworks of ideas, exactly as they liked, without reference to objective reality. (This girl never saw for instance that during her years among the groups she was as passively accepting as she had ever been in her family.) [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3011, The Age of Ideology, ‘Pathology of Political Groups’.]

  From the time the dominant religions lost their grip not only in the Northwest fringes, but everywhere throughout Shikasta, there was a recurrent phenomenon among young people: as they came to young adulthood and saw their immediate predecessors with the cold unliking eye that was the result of the breakdown of the culture into barbarism, groups of them would suddenly, struck for the first time by ‘truth’, reject everything around them and seek in political ideology (emotionally this was of course identical to the reaction of groups that continuously formed and re-formed under the religious tyrannies) solutions to their situation, always seen as new-minted with themselves. Such a group would come into existence overnight, struck by a vision of the world believed by them to be entirely original, and within days they would have framed a philosophy, a code of conduct, lists of enemies and allies, personal, intergroup, national and international. Inside a cocoon of righteousness, for the essence of it was that they were in the right, these young people would live for weeks, months, even years. And then the group would subdivide. Exactly as a stem branches, lightning branches, cells divide. But their emotional identification with the group was such that it prohibited any examination of the dynamics which must operate in groups. While studies by psychologists, researchers of all kinds, the examiners of the mechanics of society, became every day more intelligent, comprehensive, accurate, these conclusions were never applied to political groups – any more than it had ever been possible to apply a rational eye to religious behaviour while the religions maintained tyrannies, or for religious groups to apply such ideas to themselves. Politics had joined the realm of the sacred – the tabooed. The slightest examination of history showed that every group without exception was bound to divide and subdivide like amoeba, and could not help doing this, but when it happened it was always to the accompaniment of cries of ‘traitor’, ‘treachery’, ‘sedition’, and similar mindless noises. For the member of any such group to suggest that the laws known (in other areas) must be operating here, was treachery; and such a person would be instantly flung out, exactly as had happened inside religions and religious groups, with curses and violent denunciations and emotionalism – not to mention physical torture or even death. Thus it came about that in this infinitely subdivided society, where different sets of ideas exist side by side without their affecting each other – or at least not for long periods – the mechanisms like parliaments, councils, political parties, groups championing minority ideas, could remain unexamined, tabooed from examination of a cool rational sort, while in another area of the society, psychologists and sociologists could be receiving awards and recognition for work, which were it to be applied, would destroy this structure entirely.