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.
When Individual Seven left university, nothing she had learned there seemed of any relevance to her. Her family expected her to marry a man like her father or her brother, or to take a job of an unchallenging kind. It seemed to her, suddenly, that she was nothing at all, and nothing of interest lay ahead of her.
This was the time when ‘demonstrations’ took place continually. The populace was always taking to the streets to shout out the demands of the hour.
She had taken part in demonstrations at university, and, looking back on them, it seemed to her that during the hours of running and chanting, of shouting and singing, in great crowds, she had been more alive and feeling than ever in her entire life.
She took to slipping away from home when there were demonstrations, for a few hours of intoxication. It did not matter what the occasion was, or the cause. Then, by chance, she found herself at the front of a crowd fighting the police, and she was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with a policeman, a young man who grabbed her, calling her insulting names, and tossed her like a bundle of rags into the arms of another, who threw her back. She screamed and struggled, and she was dragged away from the police like a trophy and found herself with a young man whose name she knew as ‘a leader’.
He was a common type of that time: narrow-minded, ill-informed, dogmatic, humourless – a fanatic who could exist only in a group. She admired him completely and without reservation, and had sex with him that night before returning home. He was indifferent to her, but made a favour of it.
She now set herself to win this youth. She wanted to be ‘his woman’. He was flattered when it became known that this girl was the daughter of one of the city’s – no, the Northwest fringes’ – rich families. But he was stern, even brutal with her, making it a test of her devotion to the cause (and himself, for he saw these as the same) that she should engage herself more and more in dangerous activity. This was not the serious, well-planned type of feat, or coup planned by terrorists type 12, or 3. He demanded of her that she should be with him in the forefront of demonstrations, and fling herself at lines of police, that she should shout and scream louder than the other girls, that she should struggle in the hands of the police, who in fact enjoyed these hysterical women. He was demanding of her, in fact, an ever-increasing degree of voluntary degradation.
She enjoyed it. More and more her life was spent dealing with the police. He was always being arrested, and she was in and out of police stations standing bail, or going with him in police wagons, or handing out leaflets about him and associates. These activities came to the notice of her parents, but after consultation with other parents, they consoled themselves with the formula: young people will be young people. She was furious at their attitude: she was not being taken seriously. Her lover took her seriously. So did the police. She allowed herself to be arrested and spent some days in jail. Once – twice – three times. And then her parents insisted on bailing her out and so she was always leaving ‘her man’ and her comrades in police cells while she was being driven home behind a chauffeur in one of the family cars.
She changed her name, and left home, insisting that she should live with her man. Which meant, a group of twelve or so young people. She accepted everything, living in a filthy hovel that had been condemned years before. She exulted in the discomfort, the dirt. She found herself cooking and cleaning and waiting on her man and his friends. They took a certain pleasure in this, because of her background, but she felt she was taken seriously, even that she was being forgiven.
Her parents found her, came after her, and she sent them away. They insisted on opening a bank account for her, despatching messengers with cash, food, artefacts of all kinds, clothes. They were giving what they had always given her – things.
Her lover would sit, legs astraddle a hard chair, arms folded on the back of it, watching her with a cold sarcastic smile, waiting to see what she would do.
She did not value what she knew had cost her parents nothing enough to return them: but dedicated all these things, and the money, to ‘the cause’.
Her lover was indifferent. That they eat anything pleasant, wear anything attractive, care about being warm or comfortable, seemed to him contemptible. He and his cronies discussed her, her class position, her economic position, her psychology, at length, shuffling and reshuffling the jargon of the left-wing phrase books. She listened feeling unworthy, but taken seriously.
He demanded of her that at the next ‘demo’ she should seriously assault a policeman. She did it without question: never had she felt so fulfilled. She was three months in prison, where her lover visited her once. He visited others more often. Why? she humbly wondered. Not all of them were of the poor and the ignorant; one of his associates was in fact quite well off, and educated. But she was very rich, yes, that must be it. They were all more worthy than she was. In prison, among the other prisoners, most of them unpolitical, she radiated a smiling unalterable conviction which manifested itself as humility. She was always doing things no one else would do. Dirty tasks and punishment were food and drink to her. The prisoners christened her, disgusted, 'the Saint' but she took it as a compliment. ‘I am trying to be worthy to become a real member of – ' and she supplied the name of her political group. ‘To become a real socialist one has to suffer and aspire.’
r /> When she came out, her man was living with another woman. She accepted it: of course, it was because she was not good enough. She served them. She waited on them. She crouched on the floor outside the room her lover and the woman were wrapped together in, comparing herself to a dog, glorying in her abasement, and she muttered, like the phrases of a rosary, I will be worthy, I will overcome, I will show them, I will … and so on.
She took a kitchen knife to the next ‘demo’ and did not even look to see if it was sharpened: the gesture of carrying it was enough. Intoxicated, lifted above herself, she fought and struggled, a Valkyrie with flying dirty blond hair, reddened blue eyes, a fixed, ugly smile. (In her family she had been noticed for her ‘sweet gentle look’.) She attacked policemen with her fists, and then took out the – as it happened – blunt knife, and hacked about her with it. But she was not being arrested. Others were. There was such a disproportion between the atmosphere, and even the purpose, of this demonstration, and her appearance and her frenzy, that the police were puzzled by her. A senior official sent the word around that she was not to be arrested: she was clearly unbalanced. Ecstatic with renewed effort, she yelled and waved the knife about, but perceived that the demonstration was ending and people streaming home. She was not being taken seriously. She was standing watching the arrested being piled into the police vans like a child turned away from a party, the knife held in her hand as if she were intending to chop meat or vegetables with it.
A group of people had been watching her: not only this day, but at previous demonstrations.
A girl standing like a heroic statue on the edge of the pavement with the knife at the ready in her hand, hair falling bedraggled round a swollen and reddened face, weeping tears of angry disappointment, saw in front of her a man waiting for her to notice him. He had a smile which she thought kind. His eyes were ‘stern’ and ‘penetrating’: he understood her emotional type very well.
‘I think you should come with me,’ he suggested.
‘Why?’ said she, all belligerence, which nevertheless suggested a readiness to obey. ‘You can be of use.’
She automatically took a step towards him, but stopped herself, confused. ‘What to?’
‘You can be of use to socialism.’
Briefly on her face flitted the expression that means: You can’t get me as easily as that! while phrases from the vocabulary whirled through her brain.
‘Your particular capacities and qualities are just what are needed,’ he said.
She went with him.
This group was in a large shabby flat on the outskirts of the city, a workman’s home, one of the refuges of these twelve young women and men whose leader had accosted her. While the circumstances – poverty made worse, and emphasized – of her previous living place had been of emotional necessity to the work of self-definition of her previous group, these people were indifferent to how they lived, and moved from opulence, to discomfort, to middle-class comfort in the space of a day, as necessary, without making anything of what they were surrounded by. The girl adapted herself at once. Although she had been lying, exulting in her misery, outside the door of her lover and his new woman, for days, now she hardly thought of that life – where she had not been appreciated. She did not immediately see what was to be asked of her, but was patient, obedient, gentle, doing any task that suggested itself.
These new comrades were engaged in planning some coup, but she was not told what. Soon she was taken to yet another flat, where she had not been before, and told that she was to strip and examine a young woman brought in for ‘questioning’. This girl was in fact an accomplice, but just before the ‘examination’ began, Individual Seven was told that ‘this one was a particularly hard case’ and that ‘there was no point in using kid gloves on her’.
Alone with her victim, who seemed dazed and demoralized, the girl felt herself uplifted by the same familiar and longed-for elation of her combats with the police, the atmosphere of danger. She ‘examined’ the captive, who, it seemed to her, had every mark of disgusting stupidity and corruption. It was not far off torture, and she enjoyed it.
She was complimented on the job she had done by this group of severe, serious responsible young revolutionaries. Thus they described themselves. But she had not yet heard them define their particular creed or commitment. And in fact she was never to hear it.
She was told not to go out, to keep herself hidden: she was too valuable to risk. When the group moved, she was always blindfolded. She accepted this with a humble joy: it must be necessary.
This group added to the kidnapping of rich or well-known individuals a refinement, which was the kidnapping and torture, or threat of torture, of their relatives – mistresses, sisters, wives, daughters. Always women. The girl was given the task of torturing, first in minor ways, and then comprehensively, one young woman after another.
She looked forward to it. She had accepted her situation. Moments of disquiet were silenced with: They have more experience than I have, they are better than I am, and it must be necessary.
Reflecting that she did not know their allegiances, she was comforted by the phrases she was familiar with, and had been ever since – as she put it – she had become politically mature.
At moments when sharp pleasure held her in its power either because of some encounter just over or one promised her, she wondered if perhaps she had been physically drugged: whether these new friends of hers were feeding her stimulants, so alive did she feel, so vital and full of energy.
This group lasted three years before it was taken by the police, and the girl committed suicide when it was evident she could not avoid arrest. The impulse behind this act was a continuation of their dictate that she must not ever be visible – go out, be seen, or even know where she was. She felt that under torture – she now lived in her mind in a world where torture was not merely possible but inevitable – she would ‘betray them’. Her suicide was, therefore, in her own eyes, an act of heroism and self-sacrifice in the service of socialism.
It will have been noted that none of the individuals categorized here was among those identified with a particular injustice, such as suffering under an arbitrary or tyrannous power, or being deprived of a country, or persecuted for being one of a despised or subjugated race, or kept in poverty by the thoughtless, the careless, or the cruel.
I could not contact the next individual through the Giants, or anything like them. I had been looking for someone suitable, and during my trips in and out of Shikasta, I had seen an old friend, Ranee, waiting on the margins of Zone Six at that place where the lines form for their chance of re-entry. I had told her that I needed very soon to spend time with her, and why. Now, searching up and down the lines I could not see her, and saw, too, that they were shorter and more sparse. I heard that there were rumours of an emergency, of frightful danger, in Zone Six, and all those able to understand had left to help people escape. The souls remaining in the lines were too fixed on their hope of an early re-entry, crowding each time the gates opened, jostling each other, their eyes only for the gates, and I could not get anything more out of them.
I walked on past them into the scrub and thin grasses of the high plateau, quite alone, as evening came on. I felt uneasy, and thought first this was because I had been told there was danger, but soon the sense of threat was so strong that I left the scrublands and climbed a small ridge, scrambling from rock to rock upwards, in the dark. I set my back to a small cliff, and my face to where I could expect the dawn. It was silent. But not completely silent. I could hear a soft whispering, like a sea … a sea where no sea was, or could be. The stars were crowding bright and thick, and their dim light showed low bushes and outcrops of stone. Nothing to account for this sound, which I could not remember ever hearing before. Yet it whispered danger, danger, and I stayed where I was, turning myself about and sensing and peering, like an animal alerted to some menace it cannot understand. When the light came into the sky and the stars went, the sound was there, and st
ronger. I descended from the ridge, and walked on, soon coming to the desert’s edge, where I could hear the steady sibilant hissing. Yet there was no wind to blow the sand. Everything was quite still, and there was a small sweetness of dew rising from around my feet as I set them down on a crunchy surface. I walked on, every step slower, for all my senses shouted warnings at me. I kept close to my right the low ridge I had used for shelter the night before. It ran on in front of me until it joined black jagged peaks far ahead that were sombre and even sinister in the cool grey dawn. The rustling voice of the sands grew louder … not far from me I saw wisps of sand in the air, which vanished: yet there was no wind! The lower clouds hung dark and motionless, and the higher clouds, all tinted with the dawn, were in packed unmoving masses. A windless landscape and a still sky: and yet the whispering came from everywhere. A small smudge in the air far in front of me enlarged, and close to me the sands seemed to shiver. I left them and again climbed the ridge, where I turned to look back at where I had been standing. At first, nothing; and then, almost exactly where I had been, I saw the sands shake. They lay still again. But I had not imagined it. At various places now over the plain of sands that lay on the left of the ridge I saw smudges of sand hanging. To the right of the ridge I had not yet looked, not daring to take my eyes away from the place I had been in, for it seemed essential to watch, as if something might pounce out like an animal, if I once removed my gaze. There was no reason in it, but I had to stand fixed there, staring … the place where the sands had moved, quaked again. They moved, definitely, and stopped. As if an enormous invisible stick had given half a stir … the soft whistling filled my ears and I could hear nothing else. I waited. An area I could span with my arms stretched wide was stirred again by the invisible stick: there was the slow, halting movement of a whirlpool, which stopped. Half a mile ahead I believed I could see a spinning underneath one of the air smudges. But I kept my eyes on the birth – for now I knew that this was what I was watching – of the sand whirlpool near to me. Slowly, creakingly, with halts, and new beginnings, the vortex formed, and then at various distances around it, the sand shivered, and lay still, and began again … Then the central place was in a slow regular spin, and grains of sand flung up and off to one side glittered as they fell. So the sun was up, was it? I looked and saw all the sky in front a wild enraged red, shedding a ruddy glow down on to the gleam of the sands.