Shikasta (22 page)

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.

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.