Shikasta. Doris Lessing
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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