Shikasta

He simply could not believe that this extreme of deprivation was possible in a country – he saw the problem in terms of his own country, even his own town, for ‘the world’ to him was names in newspapers – that described itself as rich, and headed a world empire.

He was informed beyond most of his fellows, because his father was a workers’ representative, insofar as his hard life allowed him time and energy to be. There were books in his home, and ideas apart from those to do with the struggle to feed and clothe his family.

He was in the army five years, in World War II. His predominant emotion of marvelling incredulity that people could inflict such suffering on others, changed. He was no longer incredulous: as a soldier he travelled widely, and he saw the conditions of his upbringing everywhere. The war taught him to think in terms of Shikasta as a whole, and of interacting forces, at least to an extent: he was not able to encompass the dark-skinned in his compassion, not able to withstand the influences of his upbringing which had taught him to think of himself as superior. But he was also being affected, like everybody in or out of the army, by the general brutalizing, coarsening. He accepted things as ‘human nature’ which as a child he would have rejected. But he was full of purpose, dreaming of returning home to uplift others, rescuing, supporting, shielding them from realities which he felt himself able to withstand, though they could not.

When he got home from the army, he set himself actively to ‘speak for the working class’, as the phrase then went, and he very soon stood out among others.

The period immediately following World War II was bitter, impoverished, grey, colourless. The nations of the Northwest fringes had shattered themselves, physically and morally. [See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. SUMMARY CHAPTER.] The Isolated Northern Continent had strengthened itself and was supporting the nations of the Northwest fringes on condition they become subservient and obedient allies in the military bloc this continent dominated. Wealth flowed from the military bloc into the Northwest fringes, and about fifteen years after the end of World War II there was a sudden brief prosperity all over the area. That was a paradoxical thing, in a paradoxical time, and deeply demoralizing to populations already demoralized and lacking in purpose.

The system of economic production depended on consumption of every conceivable kind of goods by everyone – consumption of entirely unnecessary objects, food, drink, clothes, gadgets, devices. Every person in the Northwest fringes – as in the Isolated Northern Continent – was subjected, every moment of every day, through propaganda methods more powerful than any ever known before, to the need to buy, consume, waste, destroy, throw away – and this at a time when the globe as a whole was already short of goods of every kind and the majority of Shikasta’s people starved and went without.

The individual under consideration here was at the age of forty an influential person in a workers’ organization.

His role was to prevent the people he represented from being paid less than they could live on decently – this was a minimum goal; otherwise to get them ‘as large a slice of the cake as possible’; otherwise – but this aim had long since been secondary to the others – to overturn the economic system and substitute a workers’ rule. He often contrasted how he saw things now with how he had seen them when he was a child and streets, areas of streets, no, whole cities, hungered and dwindled. This spurt of quite spurious and baseless affluence so soon to end, was intoxicating. Suddenly everything seemed possible. Within reach were experiences, ways of living he had never dreamed of as available to people of his kind. Not ‘a decent living wage’, which slogan now seemed to him mean-spirited and cowardly, but as much as could be got. And this attitude was reinforced all the time, by everything around him. It was not that the working classes got anything like what the rich still got, but that millions were getting more than had seemed possible without some shocking overturn of society, or a revolution … in this atmosphere where there seemed no limit to what could be expected, there seemed no reason either why the workers of the nation should not exact retribution for the poverty of their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, for the humiliations of their own childhoods. Revenge was a motive, clear to everyone to see.

But it was not in the nature of things that the Age of Affluence could continue: and the reasons were not to be sought in local conditions but globally – so far our friend did understand. He was still one who examined events less narrowly than most. He remained solitary. He was referred to as ‘an odd man out’. Where groups of people are close, kept together by forces they combat by being defensive, the characteristics of individuals become affectionately regarded, are prized, made much of.

He was admired for standing for minority points of view. For being quiet, observant, reflective, often critical.

This was his role.

He had integrity.

He was proud of this, was still proud, but now saw that such words can acquire a double edge. He noted that people were very ready to congratulate him on this integrity of his. He had seen that people are willing to compliment others in the way these want to be complimented: an exacted flattery.

‘Integrity’ was his perquisite.

Not the only one. Many good things came his way because of this position of his, as representative of the workers. But why not? Nothing compared to what came the way of ‘his betters’ – as he had been expected as a child to call them, and had so stubbornly rebelled. And everyone did it. Did what? Nothing very much! Little crumbs and bits of this and that off the cake. What was the harm? For one thing, it could be said that these ‘perks’ were not for him, personally, at all, but were an honour paid to his position and therefore to the workers. He would brood, secretly, about bribery, where it began and where it ended. About flattery as a food that sustained – and bought? He seemed to be spending hours of his time in definitions, self-assessments, doubts.

Nearly fifty, his life two-thirds gone, his children grown up. His children dismayed him. They cared for nothing but their own good, their pleasure, their possessions, their comfort. Criticizing them, he told himself that this was no more than how parents always were with their children. (Rightly, he might utter obstinately to himself, but not to his wife, who thought him prickly and difficult.) He was also proud of them, because by an inevitable process that he understood perfectly, they were a step up on the class ladder from him in this infinitely class-divided society; just as their children, his grandchildren, could expect to be a step higher still – but he was proud with a part of himself that he despised. He was self-divided, delighted they made demands on life that he was not able to believe even now were his due, while it was at the cost of rising in a society which he despised as much as ever he did.

But, criticizing his children, he was criticizing, too, the younger members of his own union – an entire generation. This was dangerous because treachery and disloyalty threatened. But he could not banish his thoughts. The incredulity that had been the strongest emotion of his childhood returned, transformed. How was it possible that people could forget as they did, taking everything that came their way as their due – thieves, snatching what they could whenever they could (and everybody knew it, including themselves), but they were even proud of it, regarding this pilfering and skiving as a sort of cleverness on their part, a way of outdoing the world – they were all careless, heedless, thoughtless, unable to see that this time of ease and even wealth was due to some transitory shift in the international economic juggling. Yet these were the sons and daughters of people so bitterly afflicted that they had gone to bed hungry more often than not, and were so stunted in growth that in looking at a crowd of working people it was a simple thing to pick out grandparents, even parents, who were often dwarves compared to their progeny. The history of the lower classes in this country had always been one of dire poverty and deprivation. Had they forgotten it? How was it possible? How could all this be happening?

Meanwhile, he was busy, in a hundred ways, sitting on committees, arguing with employers, travelling and making speeches, attending conferences.

What exactly was it that he was doing?

Where did he stand now compared with his dreams for himself at the end of World War II?

He would find himself at a meeting, or a conference, with men and women, whom he had known sometimes since he was a child. He would observe, hoping he was unobserved, feeling himself increasingly a stranger to them.

All his life he had polished and perfected a certain practice: that of keeping bright and close certain memories of his childhood as a conscience, or gauge, to measure present events against. After the war, beginning his work on the committees, there was a memory that was strong and alive, and kept so by what he could see around him. A cousin had sold vegetables from a barrow on a pavement. His fight to survive had been dreadful, and had worn him out early. He stood by the barrow all hours of the day and evening, and in all weathers, coughing, shivering, just holding himself together. But it was that stance of his which stuck in the mind – that of a schoolboy who has been knocked down by bullies so many times he knows the effort of getting to his feet will result only in his being knocked down again. It was a swaggering bravado, and every gesture said, You can’t get me down, I’m a big man, I’m strong, I’m on top of circumstances … and so he swaggered there, the poor victim. Well, to the small boy who watched, it was terrible; and now, he was seeing all the same gestures, the bravado, in the people around him, and it was terrible again.

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 refused 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 –