Life in the West

10. Slatko

A gleaming band of light out to sea separated day from night. Although it was not yet entirely dark, a few stars shone. Thursday was sinking without trace into Ermalpa harbour.

It was possible to stand on the seaward side of the Via della Cala and gaze across a low concrete wall at the old port. Among a muddle of derricks and sheds, the masts of a sailing ship could be discerned. Beyond the masts was the sea, the Mediterranean.

Squire stood with his hands in his pockets, looking across the wall. He let the memory of other seas refresh his mind, but thoughts of the difficulties he faced, here and at home, stayed with him.

Pedestrians brushed past as they hurried home. He glanced at his watch. It was almost time for the last session of the day, at which his friend Herman Fittich would speak; for Fittich’s sake, he would submit to being incarcerated again in the mirrored conference hall. As he turned to make his way back to the Grand Hotel Marittimo, he caught sight of Selina Ajdini walking towards him; accompanying her was one of the more cut-glass young Italians, Enrico Pelli, who had earlier delivered a prolix paper on ‘Psychiatry and the Popular Understanding of Prehistory’. Ajdini saluted Squire with some eagerness in her gesture, and the customary mocking note in her voice.

‘Are you looking for more flying saucers, I suppose?’

‘In search of the miraculous? Waiting for a sign?’

She laughed. ‘I’ve seen too many signs in my life. They all point different ways.’

‘Ha! “What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? Passion and reason, self division cause.” ’

If she recognized a couplet from one of Aldous Huxley’s favourite poems, she gave no sign, saying cheerfully, ‘If you are about to turn back to the hotel, Signor Pelli and I will walk along with you.’

He smiled warmly at her, suddenly full of affection, loving that naked face, and reflected again on the beautiful curvature of her lips, only made possible by the topography of her lower jaw. How long would you have to live with Selina before you failed to notice those affecting proportions? Enrico was no doubt under the spell of them. He had given Squire no greeting. His face was clouded, his heavy brows drawn together, his back rigid. As he moved reluctantly to walk beside Ajdini and Squire, the latter thought, ‘So he’s been propositioning her hard, and had no luck.’

And, as his gaze rested on her, ‘I wonder what luck I’d have?’

‘There’s a sailing boat moored by the harbour,’ he said, walking on the other side of Ajdini from Pelli, and addressing her left profile. ‘How pleasant to sail away now, before the moon is up, to forget all your responsibilities… To discover a little sunlit island no one had ever happened across, with a golden beach and no footballers…’

‘Footballers! How did they get there?’

‘They didn’t.’

‘And on the island…?’

‘Coconut palms…’

‘Your dreams are so standard. Better natural products are oil, wheat and whisky…’

‘I wasn’t planning to work or get rich.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I’m not a bad sailor.’

Outside a bar in a side alley, a broken sign burned, advertising a Belgian lager with the words ‘STELLA ART’ in blurred mauve neon. He took it as a good omen: there were islands somewhere, even if not readily accessible.

‘ “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…” ’

‘It would be a good alternative to listening to Herman Fittich, I’m sure.’

‘I like the man. I’m confident he will have something interesting to say.’

She gestured. ‘His perpetual irony I cannot stand. A defeated man. But I don’t like the Germans in any case.’

‘They did make themselves a bit unpopular a few years ago.’

She flashed him a reproving expression.’ Don’t you start on the irony. You were safe in Britain when the Germans were killing off Europe. Me, I am Yugoslav by birth, or half Serbian and half Turkish, plus a dash of Persian.’

‘So you have reason to hate the Germans.’

She gave a curt nod, and tossed her head.

‘I was a tiny girl when the damned Nazis invaded my homeland. Everyone fought them, young and old. No country was more brave, more determined, than Serbia. My father was killed by the Bosch, then my elder brother. So I can’t help hating them. An uncle and I escaped to the United States after the war, but one does not forget those times. They leave a mark.’

Pelli said something to her angrily in Italian, but she silenced him with one of her quelling glances.

‘The Americans understand little of the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘But you see I am not like that, although I have American citizenship.’

‘Yugoslavia’s a magnificent country. If you’re so Left Wing, and you dislike the States as much as it seems you do, why don’t you return to Yugoslavia?’

She appeared to undergo a sudden change of mood. As if dismissing the subject, she slipped a slender arm on which bracelets clattered through his arm, and made him look with her in a small lighted shop window. Pelli stood awkwardly by, hands impatiently on hips.

‘That handbag’s not bad, eh? I bet it was made in Milano. You know Yugoslavia, don’t you? You have lived there?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘There are more job opportunities for me in the States.’

‘Thank democracy for that, Selina. Be grateful for what you’ve got.’

She sighed and they walked up the street in silence.

‘Well, dear, dear. You see, Tom, I do really quite fancy you — much more than I fancy this sulky young man who wants only to go to bed with me and fortunately does not talk English. Well, I go to bed with whom I feel like and maybe tonight I feel like you if you are so inclined. So I don’t want to offend you. But you are — oh, so simple. The British are like Americans, they do not know the real world. Okay, there are more job opportunities in the States, but that’s only your debating point to be scored. You don’t see why there are all those jobs more.

‘Jobs are what capitalism’s all about — getting people to work for the bosses. That’s really why I hate capitalism, because it is just a huge business and industrial machine gone mad, with all the stupid “free citizens”, as they call themselves, really mere consumers, chained for life to support the machine, proud of their sharing.’

He seized her wrist and shook it till the bracelets jangled, laughing in irritation. ‘At the risk of being left off your visiting list tonight, let me tell you that you are the victim of propaganda — outdated propaganda at that. If the world was as you say, it wouldn’t be worth living in! You’ve got a silly argument, like Krawstadt with his pinball machines. Work’s okay, work gives us identity. And do people cease to consume, to need goods, under other systems than capitalism? It’s just that other systems are less efficient at producing the goods.’

‘That may be, and the other systems may have their faults, but it is the efficiency of the capitalist system I also dislike. It exploits the world for the privileges of a few. Who needs an electric carving knife? That efficiency is itself a crime; I’ll give you an example.’

She had got her wrist free from his grasp, and sank her long crimson nails into his arm with a sort of humorous cruelty.

‘We were talking about the Nazis. Okay. In the First World War, Germany had three important chemicals firms, Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. You know all the names today. The Germans managed to synthesize ammonia and nitric acid in a successful industrial process. The British and Americans got millions of tons of natural nitrates needed for high explosives from Chile, and so their chemical industry fell behind Germany.

‘The three firms united to become I.G. Farben, a conglomerate which totally identified itself with the Nazi cause. It employed slave labour, it ran its own concentration camp, it manufactured Zyklon B to gas Jews with, as well as manufacturing the usual agents of mass-destruction. I could say its products killed my father and brother.

‘The bosses of I.G. Farben were tried at Nuremberg after the war, but they just got cynical sentences of two or three years’ imprisonment. Farben was dissolved, but Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF started up again. What’s more, they and their subsidiaries got reparation settlements from America, millions of dollars.

‘Now they have bought themselves into the American pharmaceuticals industry, so that Bayer, for instance, has forty per cent of its assets in the US. Isn’t that an international conspiracy? You see how criminality, murder, become legal as long as they serve the system. Big money is always linked with death in capitalism.’

Squire shook his head. As he stared into the aquarium of the shop window in which five handbags drowned, her words brought a sort of helplessness.

He had a vision of her honed beauty as being formed by flight. In her mind, early terror had separated brain from will. Now the brain worked without further external referent and, seizing on its giant excuse, the shattering experience of war, projected an image of the evil which had destroyed her father leaping from country to country — from Serbia to Germany, from Germany to the USA, ever in pursuit of her. Where would safety be but in the country that had wished to exact vengeance from Germany after the war, and to de-industrialize it entirely?

This interpretation came to him with sudden persuasive power.

The stain of Ajdini’s personal bitterness had extended until it coloured her outlook on the whole world. America had become an uncaring step-mother, exchanged for the mother she loved and had left; every pretext which served to bolster her hatred was welcome. The tone of her voice indicated as much.

Tearing his eyes from the sunken handbags, he clasped her arm with his arm and said, ‘That’s a false perception. A lie. Everyone merchandizes death. Don’t think otherwise. Supposing your facts are roughly correct — I expect you’re loading them — then it proves nothing, nothing except that firms like nations go through good periods and bad. Are Bayer still manufacturing Zyklon B? Ask yourself that.’

‘Christ, I give you proof of the evils of capitalism and you don’t listen. BASF and the American firm Exxon were linked by trade even in wartime. But you can’t see. You’re conditioned. It’s like living among robots, talking to you people!’

She pulled her arm away and started to march up the street. Pelli caught at her other arm but she beat his hand down.

Falling in beside her, Squire said urgently, ‘You told me earlier that you had a belief in the miraculous. Perform a miracle on yourself. You’re a splendid woman, Selina — knowing you only two days, I can see such qualities in you.’ He was saying more than he had intended, and almost drew back, but the sight of that taut bone-like countenance spurred him on. ‘You’re poisoning yourself with hatred, somehow, I don’t know how, but I sense it.

‘Face the fact of your father’s death, see it simply as a bitter misfortune of war — and war not as an organized system but as a pandemic at this stage of human development. Try to blame no one! Hate cripples us. Don’t erect that death into a great structure which will eventually overpower all your happiness and wisdom.

‘You’ve lived in peace in the United States. Try to love it, to accept its vastness — and your own vastness. See the two processes as one. Forgive, let go, accept. Invest in the miraculous. There’s no way you can get revenge — from what, dear Selina? — except on yourself.’

They crossed the Via Milano dangerously. She turned an angry face on him.

She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices. He was blind to screaming traffic.

‘You, what are you doing? Trying some damned Freudian rubbish on me? You know I hate and despise it! Telling me that what I see clearly before me is all in my head! Fool, sentimentalist, bloody Freudian!’

On the pavement, she moved towards him with an attacking movement, then veered so that Pelli bumped into her. Pelli, with no idea what the row was about, tried to grasp her again. Ajdini smacked his hand and almost ran for the hotel door.

‘Selina, Marx is a dead duck — neither he nor his creed can help you. He’s a damned sight worse than Freud. It’s the miraculous — that’s what you need!’

She was already hastening through the revolving doors.

Squire turned and looked at the glowering Pelli.

‘Life’s a bugger, isn’t it, chum?’ he said.

The traffic screamed by him. What were the drivers all so mad about? Was all of Ermalpa a conspiracy by the Fiat Motor Company?

She fled. One of the displaced, the uprooted, one of the mourners… Branded just as surely as the concentration-camp victims.

The modern generation, the generation of his son John, didn’t know about that branded generation of which he himself was one in ways hardly less decisive than Ajdini. They might one day have to learn the bitter way.

What was that curious statement of Marcuse, uttered in One-Dimensional Man? ‘Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man — the space flights, the rockets and missiles, the “labyrinthine basement under the Snack Bar”…’

Just as the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War had paved the way for the second, so the nightmare induced by the second was building up shock waves which would culminate in the third. His inward response to Ajdini’s tale of the meshing of German and American pharmaceutical industries had been to exclaim, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s how the evil gains,’ remembering William Burroughs’s comment that the paranoid is the man who has just discovered what’s going on. What real panacea, what escape, was there, except to advise people not to suffer, and to delight in what they could while they could?

That was no certain way. Pleasure was often the forerunner of trouble. It would be a pleasure to go to bed with Selina, if she was not just a tease, but the unhappy repercussions might be many, as had been the repercussions of his pleasure with Laura Nye in Singapore and elsewhere a year and a half ago. There was no Sure Way. The way of the mystic was not his.

As the civilized world, so called, expanded, driving out the animal kingdom, the labyrinthine chain of cause and effect grew more complex. People became so confused, not understanding the cause of their confusion, that any false prophet like Billy Graham or Karl Marx or von Daniken who came along offering them a thread through the labyrinth was received rapturously by millions. It was not so much the truth the millions cared about, but the thread itself. Something to hold on to.

Thinking his melancholy thoughts, Squire was more inclined to go in search of Ajdini — would she be lying weeping face down on her bed, or smoking a cool cigarette with d’Exiteuil? — rather than listen to Fittich; but a desire to support his German friend drove him into the hotel and towards the conference hall.

‘Squire, you’re useless. Too well-meaning. It’s weak to be well-intentioned. Why don’t I face up to how blackly corrupt the world is, and junk my pathetic the dansant optimism? Why not just go and screw Selina, never mind her troubles, get some joy myself, which is what I really want to do, and to hell with Laura and the rest. As for Tess…it’s just my fool optimism makes me think she cared in the first place…’

He went and sat down in his place, between d’Exiteuil and Vasili Rugorsky. The two men were laughing together. Rugorsky said, ‘Dr d’Exiteuil owes an apology to you, Thomas.’

D’Exiteuil said, ‘You were right about the miraculous, in saying that it can happen. I believe you did observe a UFO earlier today.’

He produced a copy of the local evening newspaper. It featured a photograph of rooftops and a blurred object in the sky. Black headlines proclaimed, ‘Flying Hardware over Ermalpa — Have they Come from Outer Space?’

‘You see,’ said d’Exiteuil, reading, ‘Hundreds of people leaving their offices and factories at midday saw bright objects in the sky over the centre of the city. An Alitalia DC-9 landing at the airport sighted a flight of three flying beneath the plane and heading along the coast in the direction of Palermo. The objects were capable of staying stationary and then of moving off at colossal speeds.

‘Some of the objects were cigar-shaped, others the more familiar saucer shape. There were similar previous sightings a month ago. The Air Force is correlating all reports and would be glad to receive any photographs of the flying hardware.’

Squire stared at the print and the photograph in silence.

‘It’s a form of madness,’ Rugorsky said. ‘You see, these people are well-meaning, but they want to make a drama, like all under-developed people. One child’s balloon floating in the sky and they can feel free to imagine an air force of extra-terrestrials. Theatre rules them, not reasoning.’

‘But Squire saw one. You didn’t want a drama, did you,

Tom? I don’t know, there were sightings over Paris recently. I begin to think there must be something in it after all. I mean, this has been going on for years…’

‘There are sightings everywhere. It’s a cargo cult merely.’

‘I think it’s good publicity for the conference. I shall phone the newspaper. Excuse me.’

As d’Exiteuil left, Squire told the Russian, ‘I know I saw something. Since I don’t know what I saw, it belongs in the category of You-Foe. But now that I see this report in the newspaper I confess I find my belief weakening. Perhaps, as you say, it was a child’s balloon — first hanging motionless, then swirled away in an updraught.’

‘Notice that all photos of flying saucers show them about the same size, whatever the text claims — and blurred. The cameramen think these things are at infinity, and so they focus their cameras at infinity. Maybe the objects could be only fifty feet away, just above the rooftops. Then if they move on a wind gust at forty miles an hour, they appear to move four thousand miles an hour because the mind believes them not near but at infinity.’

‘Modern cameras focus automatically, Vasili…I was immediately convinced that I saw a You-Foe. I didn’t want to see one.’

‘No, you didn’t want to see one. But you were typical in interpreting what you saw as a part of high-technology. The power of the imagination is to create images, and even science progresses by images, images of what is possible. So, the Greeks thought that the heart was a fire, because they knew fire. The heart could not be visualized as a pump until the Renaissance, when pumps were invented.’

‘But there are flying saucer visions in the Bible, or what sound like visions. Ezekiel and all that.’

‘Hindsight, Tom. You must not believe anything but cause and effect. Always cause and effect. That belief supports all of science and our culture. I may piss on a fire to put it out, but I cannot light it that way.’

This response silenced Squire.

Many candidates were still dawdling at the entrance to the conference hall, as if reluctant to enter. Squire decided on a quick tour of the ground floor, hoping to catch sight of Ajdini.

Instead, he was captured by d’Exiteuil, who came bustling cheerfully out of a telephone kiosk and put an arm about Squire’s shoulders.

‘A reporter from Oggi in Ermalpa is coming round to interview me. Perhaps we have a success on our hands after all. How are you enjoying the events, Tom? We have both been so busy that we have hardly made any conversation in two days. I must thank you for your contribution, by the way. And Geo Camaion is okay — don’t worry. Aren’t there some interesting people here?’

‘I wish there was more time for private talk, but one always feels that way at conferences. Rugorsky is an attractive character.’

D’Exiteuil squeezed him. ‘And I believe that Selina Ajdini has caught your eye. She certainly catches mine. Ah, Tom, if I were younger… While I am here, my dear Séverine is also at a conference on education in New Orleans. We are so often apart, and one does get lonely. It’s difficult to be human, eh? Our volume of proceedings will be important. How are you enjoying the standard of the papers? Krawstadt was fiery, yes?’

‘You know how difficult I am, Jacques — I believe that many papers would be better and clearer if all the Marxist jargon was dropped. The underlying assumptions that the Western world is about to collapse and a bloody good job if it does is malicious, treasonous…’

D’Exiteuil tut-tutted and shook his head decidedly.

‘You are not an academic, but you must understand that after all we must speak in a proper rigorous language; you even referred to that necessity in your speech. There’s nothing to fear except imprecision. Marxism is our analytical tool, a method of cognition. It’s a method, no more, designed for our scientific age. You understand that, I think.’

Squire looked disconcerted. ‘You must know a lot more about Marx than I do, Jacques. He bores me. But Marx would not have accepted what you say for one minute. “Method of cognition”? Karl Marx believed only in a crude dialectic which reinforced the inevitability of revolution. That’s what Marxism is really all about, isn’t it? The overthrow of the established order.’

‘Tut, that’s old fashioned. That’s vulgar Marxism, such as you might find a British trade unionist spouting.’

‘Haven’t vulgar and academic Marxism, to use your terms, got that much in common, that they sanction anything in the way of aggression or sabotage or repression as long as it ruins society, so that some imaginary classless utopia, of which the ghastly living doppelganger is the Soviet Union, may rise from the ashes?’

‘You’ve been reading the Tory press, Tom. You don’t really think that the state of affairs in France or Britain is all that could be desired, do you?’

‘Of course I don’t. But with equal certainty, I can foresee the sort of blackguards who would grab power if our present social structures collapsed or were brought low. You don’t answer my question. You do work for revolution, don’t you?’

‘Well, capitalism is in decay, you have to face the fact.’ He laughed.

‘A definitive answer. That it’s a lie helps to show the weakness of your case. I might as well say that communism is dead in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Indeed, that’s a more accurate statement than yours, because communism is dead on its home ground. It has been proved not to work, and its shibboleths are kept going only by force, by the exertion of power by an entrenched gang of criminals.

‘Marx said that capitalism was dying over a century ago, and that bit of nonsense has been parroted ever since. He made a mistake, a big historical mistake, because what he observed was capitalism in a raw early state. Our societies have improved beyond recognition since then, and will improve faster if only we shrug off this dead preaching which impedes — it doesn’t hasten — social justice.

‘If the West collapsed, then we should have not the millennium, as you pretend, but a period in which freedom and justice go to the wall, as they have done in Russia, when the effectively aggressive bastards on the Left would smash up every virtue in the old order and anyone who stood for its values. Which does, incidentally, include all left-wing intellectuals like you.’

D’Exiteuil stood stock still in the middle of the corridor, folded his arms, stroked his beard.

‘Please don’t provoke me with such nonsense. From you of all people, such paranoia. I expect you to be more civilized. Why are you saying this?’

‘I’m not paranoid. I’m probably not particularly civilized either. But it doesn’t take a very wise man to see how the contagion spreads. Every strike, every failure in the economy, and you feel the more entitled to declare boldly that capitalism is done for. Every time you do so, claiming the backing of some sort of invalid “scientific” theory, you are assisting the destructive forces who ferment trouble inside industries and inside the trade unions. That’s how your vulgar and your academic Marxists aid and abet each other.

‘You may not dream of revolution personally because I should think you have sense enough to value your skin, but whenever you mouth those ugly phrases you bring nearer the day when it is legal for a thug with an armband to kick you in the guts for as long as he wants.

‘If you like that sort of thing, okay, head for one of those countries where your catch-phrases are the going religion, but while you remain here have the decency to respect the civilized blessings, including the rule of law, however capricious, under which you are given the chance to enjoy your life.’

The Frenchman was rigid; his face had flushed a dull red.

‘You’re crazy, talking to me like this. Are you trying to attack me personally or the entire conference? Every point of view is welcome, yours or Cantania’s or Krawstadt’s, but we have to aim for some common critical language. It’s the diagnosis that has upset you… Hm…you really are scared beneath the surface. You must be symptomatic of the whole bourgeois world, already sweating at the collar because you know the day is coming.’

Squire grunted contemptuously. ‘The day is coming! Listen to your own phrases. “The day is coming.” It’s a nut-cult slogan. Better to believe that You-Foes are bringing a wise alien race to rescue us from sin.’

D’Exiteuil tucked his hands in his pockets and stood a little taller. ‘Well, I just don’t happen to believe in sin, not in the sense that you old-fashioned liberals understand it at any rate. Sin is nothing anyone can do anything about, since it’s ingrained and presupposes some ridiculous system of divine punishment no one can comprehend — ’

‘I don’t believe in divine punishment either.’

‘Maybe you don’t, but you behave as if you do.’ The phrase was delivered flatly and with considerable contempt. ‘What I do just happen to believe in is that a day is coming when exploitive systems will be swept away. Maybe we don’t have a working example in the world as yet, but that’s no reason why we should not strive for better systems.’ D’Exiteuil spoke with spirit. Both men had grown red in the face. Several delegates, lounging about the foyer, watched the argument with covert interest.

‘Jacques, I do not believe that you personally hate the past and the present; but such is the attitude that all these old dried figs of cliché enshrine. “Systems” you talk about — typical French intellectual pretension to want to live under a system — but it is all simply materialism — ’

‘System is just a word! We all have to live under some bloody system, you know!’ He rattled his remarkable locks about his head.

‘Karl Marx was a nineteenth-century materialist without much historical insight. He saw the miserable condition of the workers, and for that we respect him although he was far from alone in doing so, but he was typical of that progress-obsessed generation. It thought everyone would be happier when reduced to systems. He was just one more pedagogue. His idea of a classless society is one more dotty millennial creed. We should all forget about his theorizing, just as we’ve forgotten about Disraeli’s “Young England” movement. Instead of remaining hypnotized by some vain illusion of pie in the future, forget it, junk it, free your mind, and rather try to enjoy and strengthen the present.’

He was alarmed by the venom in his own voice, alarmed by what he had said to his old friend. In the pause, he saw d’Exiteuil gather himself to attack, and feared what was to come.

‘You have no creed, no scientific philosophy to guide you. Just “enjoy the present” — that’s really the feeble message behind “Frankenstein Among the Arts”, isn’t it? Enjoyment. How trivial! Sure, Karl Marx made some mistakes; but his is a whole reasoned programme for conduct, now and in the future. You when you speak make out the case against yourself. You think a classless society is dotty — or rather you hope it. On the contrary, it is a lofty ideal. We want men united, not divided, and the honest truth is — though I admit I am not much of a revolutionary — that Britain and France and Germany will have to be destroyed before all the old divisions which — ’ he pressed an index finger against Squire’s shirt button — ‘which you embody in your privileged position are destroyed. I’m sorry that I make you angry, but so were dinosaurs made angry when they saw little mammals trot by.’

‘Again an analogy drawn from last century. Evolutionary argument twisted to fit human society. We’re trapped by the outworn garments of last century when we should be free to face the future, free to see that enjoyment is not trivial but central — ’

‘Sorry, Tom, I’ll listen to no more. You insult me unnecessarily, I who have fought many battles on your behalf. We have hitherto managed to keep our politics apart from our friendship. Obviously that is no longer possible. I am deeply hurt, deeply offended.’

Squire looked worried.

‘I’m sorry, Jacques. Perhaps the conference has been too much for me. I have no wish to offend you personally. We must each stand up for our own beliefs.’

D’Exiteuil spread his hands. ‘Didn’t I invite you here as guest of honour? Now you call me the worshipper of a nut-cult. Well, we’ll see — you observed the flying saucer, not I. There are good men here, your friends and allies, as I counted myself. You really insult and disgrace us all.’

‘That wasn’t my intention. Forgive me for speaking out. You know I have personal troubles — possibly the strain has told on me. I shouldn’t have been personal.’

‘Excuse me, I am required in the conference hall.’

Squire stood mopping his neck with a handkerchief. He went to the bar and ordered himself a beer, which he drank standing, conscious of having made a fool of himself. He looked at his watch. He followed along to the hall, where almost all the seats except Ajdini’s were already filled.

Enrico Pelli turned a murderous glare on him.

In a minute, Gianni Frenza called upon Herman Fittich to give his paper on science fiction as a modern literary form.

Fittich, soberly dressed in a grey suit, rose, clearing his throat as he looked nervously about him. ‘To avoid a few translation problems I intend to deliver my paper in English, since possibly more of you speak that language here than speak German. My apologies to my hosts that I don’t try it in Italian, my congratulations to them that I won’t.’

‘When I shall return home, when I will return home, friends will ask me how I enjoyed Ermalpa. “A lovely, fascinating, and complex city”, I may answer. I’m hardly going to tell them that I have spent almost all my time in the Grand Hotel Marittimo, and in fact in this very room. But I do know from a study of some guide books before I left Germany that this city is many things. It’s a melting-pot, that’s a phrase that comes to mind, a melting-pot. A melting-pot of conflicting cultures. Ermalpa has been a western city looking towards the east, and also an oriental city looking towards the west. Many races have made their contribution, from Phoenicians and Greeks to Arabs, Normans, and even the British.

‘Melting-pot is a funny description. Things don’t melt down that easily in human terms. After many centuries, the various traits remain pretty distinct. But that is what makes it interesting still. We don’t want an imposed uniformity of any kind.

‘So Ermalpa is a good place in which to hold this first serious critical enquiry into the aspects of the popular culture of our time. My subject is science fiction literature, or fantascienza, the excellent Italian word, or Utopische Romane, the less effective and in consequence now obsolete German phrase. Science fiction — or SF — is a melting-pot much like Ermalpa. It also contains conflicting cultures. It looks to the future and to the past and, by implication, most searchingly to the present. Many disciplines make their contribution, such as science, of course, notably astronomy and cosmology and the physical sciences, but also any other science you care to name, genetics, biology, down to soft sciences such as sociology and anthropology. Also such more general themes as religion, mythology, apocalypse, catastrophe, utopia, perfectionism, literature, adventure, and sheer crazy speculation.

‘All such things and many more go into the melting-pot. They don’t actually melt down, but they all give the brew a flavour. Its contents are so diverse that readers can pick and choose their own specialities. This is why it’s difficult for two people to agree on what SF is all about. Despite the popular misconception that it’s all about space, it’s actually more important than that. It’s all about everything.

‘It is the modern literature read almost obsessively by the young in all industrial countries, although sadly neglected by their seniors.’

Yes, but what SF’s not about is things like this conference. It simplifies, whereas this conference complicates. It substitutes simple aliens for the complexity of nationalities and inter- nationalities. And in the examples I’ve read, it externalizes evil, making it a menace from without instead of within. Perhaps that’s why it’s so popular. Even Marxists like it, or use it for their own purposes.

But maybe SF tells the truth in showing how change is everywhere. How the present nations, the current power blocs, will disappear, leaving not a wrack behind — or only a bootee and a bridle. I remember the Scythians and their deep-frozen underwear. In their time, they thought the world was their oyster.

Now I suppose the Marxists feel the same way. What’s wrong with all that, apart from its high boredom factor, is that it is presented as the Ultimate. There’s no ultimate in human affairs, or won’t be for many thousand million years, we hope. Surely a proper study of the future would vanquish ideology? There’s only a process, forever continuing. Eternal artistries of circumstance.

Meanwhile, on the humdrum level, I have offended Jacques. That outburst was unpardonable. Or was I feeble to apologize? Am I secretly afraid of losing his friendship? I suppose I am. But I did speak badly out of turn. I’ll write him a letter of apology, leave it in his letter rack. He is a nice man, I am fond of him. That distinction he made between upper and lower Marxism just made me mad — as it would have done Marx himself.

My affairs are a bit of a cock-up. On Monday I go back to England — to what? Teresa, you will never never know what you’ve done to me. I kicked out the girl I loved for your sake, didn’t I, because I loved you more? What else did I have to do to appease you?…

I should have stayed in the bar and had another drink. Why does old Herman look so nervous?

Selina. What did Jacques say about her? Has he been trying to make her?

I suppose he also has his private reasons for being angry. Wife at some conference or other, fears that this one may flop…

We’re all being ground down by some ghastly historical process. It’s better when you’re young because you think the process is remediable by action, political action, picketing power stations, or a bullet. I did. My son does. His son will. History in a nutshell… Fuck it all. Thighs. Thighs. No wonder that thighs are so perennially popular, and don’t get less so as you grow older…

No name with whatsoever emphasis of passionate love repeated that grows not faint at last. History is our attempt to retain that passionate love, to commemorate what has gone. Thus we extend our lives. Science fiction, I suppose, extends our lives into an imagined future…

How is Pippet Hall to survive? I must keep it on, it must remain a going concern. It enshrines history more effectively than any book, any monument. The present generation, with its inverted snobberies, despises anything of cultural wealth, but surely that attitude, that little ice age of the spirit, won’t last. The trouble is, I’ve no heart to go on without Teresa. Poor girl, poor jade! Terrible to imagine oneself offended.

There is no way in which one can give up in life, short of committing suicide. I’ve no quarrel with that. Falling on your sword is honourable, if you really have reached a dead end.

But that’s not for me. I’m as corrupt as anyone. I’d rather take Selina back to the Hall and fall on her. Iron out her bitterness. She has a fine spirit. She communicates.

Beautiful woman. Damned politics.

Part-Serb. It would be splendid to replenish the Squire stock with Serbian blood, as old Matthew Squire did with German blood. Brave buggers, the Serbs. None braver. I’m not too old to start another family.

But almost.

And sod you too, Pelli…

‘You may perhaps think my view of a critic’s function rather old-fashioned, but I am more interested in appreciation than classification. The reader must be borne in mind. Readers of SF are most struck by its originality although, if they read too much of it, they complain of unoriginality, and find they enjoy it less and less. This is because they have ceased to look for the other qualities SF possesses.

‘Goethe’s Faust is by no means the first story of a man making a deal with the devil; Shakespeare’s Hamlet is after all just another renaissance play on the common theme of revenge. Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is just another tale of a chap who is off-balance getting a ride in a spaceship. But it is only when we look at these works in another light that we see their individual qualities — although we must always remember that they are interesting because they are also about a chap dealing with Mephistopheles, a chap trying to avenge his father, a chap getting a trip about the galaxy. Each of these three experiences goes straight down like a taproot of a tree into the awareness of the age which engendered it.

‘I should add here, if the remark is not obvious, that it doesn’t matter a bit that nobody has had a trip about the galaxy and maybe never will. Neither has anybody held a dialogue with the devil or a conversation with the ghost of their father. But this essence of the unlikely aligns SF with some striking monuments of literature — the imaginative and non-realist vein. I believe that Isaac Asimov is wrong, despite his great authority and reputation, in claiming that the space race justified SF. It needs no such justification. Our admiration for Cervantes’s Don Quixote would not be heightened if we found that some old knight had actually had a fight with a real windmill. The quality we admire is imagination, not realism.

‘This is where SF breaks from the old style of the nineteenth-century novel, and where it pleases the young and dismays the old. The novel no longer has novelty, but SF has, though we should maybe despise facile novelty just as we are suspicious of a new model of automobile — the last model may have had better qualities, if less chrome. One indicator of the novel’s lost impetus is that novels have become rather inward-looking and a bit provincial, at least in Germany and England. In the US, things are a little better, though how many new Russian novels have you read with interest lately?… Well, never mind. Arts need freedom.

‘Critics of the novel of a previous generation, such as Ortega y Gasset, held the idea that one prime function of the novel was to portray character and its development. The view is still echoed unthinkingly in the seats of orthodoxy.

‘The fact is, people just don’t believe in character, or in development for that matter, in the old way. Two world wars, the inroads of psychology, the increasing fate of man as a statistic, or a consumer, or just as a faceless speck of proletariat so beloved of Marxist jargon — all such factors have transformed us into fragmented beings. The container of custom has been shattered.

‘First cinema and then television have also profoundly affected the novel. Also inflationary economies have directed many impoverished novel-writers to more profitable fields. That non-literary consideration must be taken into account when you sum up today’s state of play. Yet SF has flourished; ill-winds for the novel have proved good winds for SF. That’s true especially of this decade, when cinema and television have actually fed the appetite for SF.

‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics — he may not even have a sex life, poor chap — is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character — because that’s how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’

Good old Herman. An attempt to think things out and express the results clearly. Amazing how you can meet a stranger and love him after two days. Quite a brave man, too, under his resigned veneer.

Not a bad fellow to have with you in the slit trench when the shit’s flying. That’s the acid test. Herman and Vasili.

Rugorsky is a real character. Extraordinary — choosing a German and a Russian to fight with you in a slit trench. How our thoughts have been formed by war… Not so many years ago, I’d have been fighting against Herman. And in a few more years will probably die fighting against Vasili Rugorsky.

The idea — even the irony of it — doesn’t terrify me, as maybe it should. Better fight and die than give in. You defend your own territory. You fight for your own hearth, your own home, your own country. Something the modern generation believes silly. They’ll find out too late when the chips are down. You fight for England. It is atavistic, but the human race hasn’t evolved beyond that yet. If you aren’t prepared to defend, someone else will attack.

Of course, if the You-Foes are real and contain aliens from another planet, the whole course of human history becomes changed. Perhaps that’s why so-called civilized people are reluctant to believe in flying saucers; they are felt to be inappropriate, a discord. The orchestra’s playing Borodin’s Second Symphony; suddenly more musicians enter and start playing Mozart.

If the aliens are hostile… Well, we shall have a situation where Vasili and I will be sharing a slit trench.

I still can’t make him out. Wrote a poem called ‘Winter Celebration’, likening the Soviet system to a medieval feast. Medieval starvation, more like. Exiled by Stalin, then possibly reprieved and disappeared for a while. Disgrace, atonement… Sounds like a typical Ruskie existence. That chap at the consulate, Parker-Smith, thought that Rugorsky might possibly defect. Not here, but in Rome when we’re flying back on Monday. Interesting. If that’s what he intends, he may feel he knows me well enough to flash a warning signal. Perhaps I shall have to help him.

I wonder what Selina’s doing. Will she be dining with me this evening? If not, then perhaps Herman and I can rustle together Cantania, Morabito, the two Frenzas, and even d’Exiteuil, if he’ll speak to me. We’ll have a meal and some drink. Vasili, too. I’d rather talk to him than listen to any Western left-wing nonsense. Actually, I’d rather talk to him than anyone here, except Selina perhaps.

A drink would go down well. Old Herman does go on.

‘Charles Dickens’s novels are among the first to reflect the atomization of modern society brought about by metropolitan life. The faces in his novels are glimpsed vividly — often with nightmare vividness — but briefly, before they disappear. They are known from the outside. SF carries this process further. We see people only in relation to the unknown. The strangers have moved in.

‘Some people praise the logic of science fiction. But I am more interested in the kind of SF which creates mythical beings, robots, monsters, androids, aliens, machines, creatures from the future or the id, revenants, voices from other dimensions, which proliferate in SF as nowhere else. They are a clear indication of the struggle going on within twentieth-century man. In no other form of literature are they so freely allowed on parade.

‘Surely in the future men will see SF as the literature of our time. I am well aware that much of SF is rubbish, like much of ordinary fiction, written for retarded children by superanuated children, but there’s no reason why we should pay attention to that end of the spectrum. As we still listen to the ancient Greek myths, so men of the future will care for ours, which define technological man. We have no reason to doubt that the first tellers of the Greek myths were scorned in palace and court. The new is never welcome. So SF is scorned today in high places.

‘The distinguished founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, who is with us in Ermalpa as our guest of honour, has spoken of our task as “exploring the familiar”. That clever phrase describes pretty precisely what SF does. In paradoxical manner, the best stories present Today in a disguise which reveals it nakedly as it is. That is a true imaginative function. Emmanuel Kant has shown how the power of our imaginations, the power of mental picture-making, is essential to us if we are to understand the world. Otherwise, we can’t recognize any object, for objects are only intelligible as members of a class, of classes of vehicles or of whatever you wish. SF helps us to distinguish ourselves as one phenomenon among many, and our planet as one among many, and our lifetime as one among many. It opens the windows of our fancy and can give us a true perspective. For example, it banishes an obsolete socio-economic theory, which has gained some ground here and there, which claims that human beings can profitably be divided into abstractions labelled “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”.

‘But instead of quoting Kant, for I don’t want to seem nationalistic, I will finish by quoting the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, because he says something in hisDefence of Poetry, written at the beginning of last century, which describes with vivid accuracy the plight of today from which a study of science fiction can free us.

‘Shelley says,

We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionately circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

‘I believe we have to live with that slavery, at least for a while. But SF, I know from experience, is one way of making it tolerable.

‘Thank you for listening to me.’

As Frenza asked for questions or additional statements to be limited to a duration of five minutes, Rugorsky wrote a note and pushed it over to Squire, making it slide across the green baize, one fat finger simultaneously propelling and holding it captive.

The note consisted of four words. ‘But Shelley is dead.’

It was difficult to decide on Rugorsky’s meaning. An idle joke. Or perhaps a positivist Soviet rejection of the poet’s negative remarks. Possibly even a threat of some kind. People did die, and that wasn’t pleasant. As Selina’s Serbian father had died…

Inner vision could fly northwards, away from the Mediterranean, over the Alps and France, across the Channel, across England, to Pippet Hall in the heart of the Norfolk countryside, could enter there undetected and find its way up to the children’s playroom, the old wooden room now painted white which — in the days when it was stained with brown varnish — had been home for Tom, Adrian, and Deirdre.

Striking in through the windows in the room’s brown varnish days, the sun had lit it till it glowed like the interior of a honey-pot. Each worn yellow floor-board had an individual character and an individual role. In winter, a coal fire burned in the grate.

Next to the grate was a cupboard with a lock mechanism which worked only with difficulty. Inside the cupboard was a secret compartment where Tom stored a few personal possessions. At the back of the compartment was a large tin box with its own lock. The box contained, along with precious things like cigarette cards and postcards and a penknife with bone sides, a fat red notebook on which was printed the one grave word, ‘MEMORANDA’.

To the playroom one day, impelled by grief, together with a certain sense of dramatic intensity, Tom had gone, removing his red notebook from the recesses of the cupboard, and writing in it in black crayon, ‘March 12th, 1937. Daddy Died.’ From then on, the words being so desperately final, he wrote nothing more in the notebook.

The notebook still existed. So did that entry. So did the death.

John Matthew Squire had bestowed on his eldest son a love of arts and shooting and the countryside which lasted all his life. John Matthew Squire’s death had bestowed on the son who found his body a sense of violence and frustration which equally had never worked itself out of his system.

The arrival of the refugee Normbaums, like crows gathering at a battlefield, had proved the herald of a great violence, the war. The war. Growing up, going to school, knowing always that tremendous actions involving courage and hardihood were taking place not a hundred miles away. Hearing the planes roar over the rooftops at night — all of Norfolk was an aerodrome. The intense love for Rachel Normbaum. Puberty. Fondling her in a quiet room, an erection flaming against her thigh and the intense astonishment, mingled with pride and annoyance, when, at the touch of her fingers, semen spurted over his grey trousers. Something to do with being a soldier. Preparing to join the struggle, to leave school, to get into Europe, to taste that traditional harsh life of war — waiting, fighting, killing, marching, winning, going hungry, enjoying the fruits of conquest — women, booze, good companionship, self-glorification. Then Berlin was taken and the war collapsed.

Tom Squire was just too young to fight. He had missed the biggest initiation rite of the century. The allied armies were being disbanded. Detumescence had set in.

On the surface, he was relieved. Below, frustrated, disappointed. Oh, to have liberated Paris!

Only to his Uncle Willie did he make his real feelings known. Uncle Willie had friends in London, connected with the county. Young Tom Squire was on National Service, and completing his preliminary square-bashing at Aldershot, when he was posted for special training at a camp near Devizes. After some tests, he was transferred to M16 to a department specializing in overseas operations. The Cold War was tightening its grip on the world. Men like Squire were needed.

He was given leave. A friendly man drove up to Pippet Hall; later, Squire met the friendly man in Whitehall. Following a hot tip, Squire applied for a job with a consortium of manufacturers who were interested in new export markets. He got the appointment and went to night school to learn Serbo-Croat.

War-battered Europe was putting itself together again. The Americans, with a gesture of unique generosity, launched the Marshall Plan. Britain, its overseas investments exhausted after paying for the war, set to work cheerfully on an export drive. The war had been won; now they were to win the peace.

The frontiers of the peace were already established. The Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, and the luckless nations of the Continent found themselves either on one side or the other; with one exception. The nation of Yugoslavia.

Although Yugoslavia was communist, there were remarkable differences between it and the other communist countries. Their leader, Tito, was a national hero and had conducted a formidably courageous war against the Nazis; he became a popular peacetime leader, and was not imposed on the country by the Soviet Union. Britain had supported Tito during the war; Churchill had made wise decisions there; so a friendship of sorts remained possible across barriers of ideology.

The BIA (British Industries Abroad) opened an office in Belgrade and attempted to develop trade with the Yugoslavs only a comparatively few months after the official cessation of hostilities. On their staff was a young secretary, Thomas Squire, with a briefing to travel to all regions of Yugoslavia looking for trade. He had the perfect job for undercover work.

‘You may not like Yugoslavia very much until you settle in,’ Squire’s head of department said. ‘After that, you’ll hate it.’

Squire loved it. There was something in this mountainous country — particularly in Serbia — in its songs, in its turbulent history, which corresponded to the violence trapped in his own nature. Moreover, a war was still going on, a war of minds. As an impoverished and broken economy picked itself up, the nation fended off its enemies. The Yugoslavs were intensely nationalistic, intensely suspicious. Foreigners were constantly watched.

Belgrade, the Serbian and national capital, was at that time a city in ruins. Of the housing that remained, much was old and substandard; the energetic rebuilding was new and substandard. Greyness and cold prevailed. Filth, disease, misery, mud, flowed like blood through the ruptured veins of the capital. Food was short. It was all that Squire desired; here was the harshness and challenge of the world war he had missed.

A Serbian girl called Roša came his way. He knew she was an agent. He embraced her as eagerly as he did his new life. In her pallor, her treachery, her nakedness, she was a paradigm of her country.

‘Obey your operating orders, whatever they are,’ he said — he rapidly became fluent in Serbo-Croat, ‘but make me part of you. Let’s do everything. Be extreme. Involve me, involve me!’

He thought she loved him in a way. She tried to dye her hair blonde, with disastrous results. They both laughed; then she fought with him and wept. Her parents had been shot by Nazis for some petty offence. The country was an armed camp. The army built roads, bridges, bicycle factories. Ferocious drink- parties took place in which people fell out of windows and died. Roša got drunk and sang folk songs about the centuries of Turkish tyranny, the beauty of Serbian hills, and red wine spilt on white tablecloths. Her voice was like zeppelins crashing. It made him weep.

Squire travelled down to wild cities in the south, Titov Veles, Kumanovo, Bitola, Prilep, Skopje. He passed on some information in Skopje, and two Russian agents were arrested. He saw how one of them was beaten up; he only just managed not to vomit, ashamed of his own weakness.

Back in Belgrade. Roša had earned a rare holiday, she said. She took him on an old steamer down the Danube, brown with all the corpses of history. They stopped at Smederevo. Smederevo Fortress was one of the places Roša sang about when drunk. In its time it had been the largest fortress in all the Balkans. Its gigantic and ruinous towers stood against the Danube. It was a cold, depressing place; the wind blew from Russia. Masses of peasants had been forced to pile stone on stone, to erect this monstrous stronghold against the Ottoman Empire.

There was no defence against history and the Turk. When Smederevo fell in 1459, the medieval state of Serbia was quenched like a torch in the river.

A man was waiting for them in Smederevo. He was big and black-bearded. His name was Milo Strugar, and he became Squire’s friend. On that first occasion, he was hostile. He drove Roša and Squire away in an old black German car to a wooden-tiled house in the woods. There Squire was made privy to some of the plans of Yugoslav counter-intelligence.

He never saw Roša again after that occasion. The bastards had sent her away, just to show him that you did what you were told. He learned the lesson.

Long before the war, the Yugoslav and Soviet communist parties had forged close links; they were brother Slavs. But Stalin had offered Tito little support in his struggle against German invasion. The old channels of communication were now being obliterated. Yugoslavia had to stand on its own legs or fall under Soviet domination.

Squire saw evidence of how ruthless both sides were. In this corner of Europe, in the broken towns and forests, the Cold War was real. Yugoslavia stood between East and West, mistrusting both; the fight was not merely of words, but of guns, fists and boots.

Living became more complex while its issues simplified. The remnants of the fascist Ustache in Croatia, once linked to Hitler, were allying themselves with the Soviet Union. Their plan was to kill Marshal Tito. They had to be smashed. There were weeks, months, when tank movements on the other side of the frontier suggested that Soviet invasion was imminent.

Squire thought much of his gentle father in those times. He thought of the dogs that had devoured his face. To some acts, there was no adequate response but killing. So in Serbia.

He slept rough, became familiar with the forest. War was not a natural activity of man, but the equations of life forced it on him.

He understood perfectly that the Yugoslavs had no alternative but to resist the Russians. Like tigers, they loved their freedom, and would defend it.

More important to the strategists in the West was the fact that here communist was fighting communist for the first time. It gave cause for hope. The struggle was of immense significance for the rest of the world. As he identified with the Yugoslav cause, he saw clearly a parallel between this lonely war at one end of Europe and the role played at the other end of Europe by Britain, only seven years earlier.

After Milo Strugar had tested him, the Yugoslavs began reluctantly to trust Squire. The Serbs preferred him to the Croats. In part, they trusted him because he was British. The label ‘Englishman’ was sweet in their mouths.

Early in the ill year of 1948. Countries of Central Europe like Czechoslovakia sinking further under Russian ice. Romania becoming more sovietized, and more hostile to Yugoslavia. The USSR beginning to hamper traffic between Berlin and the West.

The BIA sent Squire to the Yugoslav port of Rijeka, where mixed elements in the population caused unrest. Snipers still lurked in the hills above the city. Squire’s contact was a Serb called Slobodan, who ran a printing press as a cover for his other activities. Slobodan was a wild and unkempt man, extremely emaciated, who had lost his left eye in the mountains during his term as one of Tito’s partisans.

Over cigarettes and slivovitz, and through many curses, Slobodan in his little oily shop explained how a shipment of arms of British manufacture had arrived in Rijeka from the British Zone in Germany. It was delivered in an armoured freight train, and the train was hauled into railway sidings near the docks, where it was guarded by a Special Operations unit of the Yugoslav Army. Regulars, not conscripts, said Slobodan, spitting. After some delay, the officer commanding Rijeka Arsenal — sited some miles inland from Rijeka — arrived with a convoy of trucks to take charge of the shipment. The train was empty.

The major had immediately arrested the captain in charge of the guard unit, the driver and engineer of the train, the train guards, and just about all the officials connected with port operations. But the arms were not recovered.

A full-scale search of Rijeka was in progress when Squire arrived. Slobodan, a true anarchist, had no patience with the blundering military. With mighty curses, he told Squire that he had better ideas of his own.

‘I’ve got orders to contact the major i/c arsenal,’ Squire said.

‘Screw that, I have more genius in my arse than him in his head. Listen to my report.’

Slobodan had received a tip from an informant that a barge or barges had been sighted off-shore during the previous night, a few miles to the north. The barges were showing no navigation lights. All was obvious to Slobodan — you cut out the floors of the freight cars, remove the crates of arms, and steal them away by sea, not land. Sea is safer by night than land by day or night.

‘Barges don’t get far in one night. Come, we go see for ourselves in my fast car.’

Squire found himself packed into a tiny Zastava, bumping dangerously over the coast road, while Slobodan gave him an almost incomprehensible resume of his family history, in which dismemberment figured rather largely.

After making a few enquiries, they stopped at a small bay west of Opatia, under the humped slopes of Mount Ucka. A black-clad widow-woman who lived up the mountainside swore she could see from her window a newly risen rock or a newly sunken ship under the surface of the Adriatic.

They parked the car and went down to examine the situation. The waters of the Kvarner Bay lapped a line of beach rare on this rocky coast. There were fresh but confused marks in the sand — someone had obliterated tell-tale signs with a sack. The steeply shelving shoreline would allow a shallow draught barge to pull into the beach without trouble, and under cover of dark unloading operations could be effected with little risk of discovery: this region, Istra, was under dispute between Yugoslavia and Italy, with parts still administered by British forces; many of the inhabitants had fled, leaving the country almost deserted. The ravages of incessant warfare were plainly seen.

Slobodan and Squire prowled the beach. On trees and bushes fringing the sand they found freshly broken branches, as if vehicles had moved in. They were searching among the bushes when they came on the body of a man dressed in fisherman’s clothes. His jersey was clotted with blood. He had been stabbed several times in the rib-cage. His beard was matted with mud and blood. Anger and pain still contorted his rigid face. Ants crawled between his teeth.

‘It’s Milo,’ said Squire. ‘Milo Strugar…’

‘Jebem te sunce!’ growled Slobodan, thrusting a rampant fist up at the sky. When he recovered, he stuck a cigarette into Squire’s mouth and asked, ‘What do you know of this man?’

‘Milo was my mentor, the first Serb to trust me. As to what he was working on hereabouts, it was secret. I know of it only in general.’ He hesitated, not entirely trusting the savage Slobodan, then plunged on, still overcome with shock. ‘Milo had a lead given him by a Croatian Member of the Skupstina [Parliament], an old Partisan pal of his. That I know. I heard only that trouble of some kind was going on in Labin — the Croat spoke of a planned armed insurrection, aimed at getting rid of Tito and manned by disaffected Ustashe elements. Supported by high-level Soviet backing. Where is Labin?’

Slobodan dragged the cigarette from his mouth and pointed inland with fist and cigarette. ‘Twenty kilometres up in the hills, not more. Let’s go!’

Squire leaned over his friend’s torn body, but Slobodan grasped him roughly by the shoulder.

‘Cut out that girlie stuff. Weep for your pal later — first, revenge the bugger. Let’s get to Labin, stir up things there, find guys who’ll help us. These thugs here are desperate.’

Sten guns, magazines, old Cyrillic type-faces, carpenter’s tools, and hand grenades mingled on the back seat of Slobodan’s car. They had rattled noisily on the road from Rijeka. He threw a blanket over them before proceeding. They rattled again as the car accelerated in a pungent whiff of Jugopetrol. Milo Strugar’s body was left lying in the bushes with the ants as they headed up the steep tracks of Istra.

The season was late April. The sun made the hillsides blaze with warmth, exhaling a sweetness that reached them through the open windows of the Zastava. Bumblebees buzzed among short-lived flowers. They drove amid a stand of pines, in which the sun flickered as through a blind, and swerved round a gigantic bend to confront the characteristic landscape of Istra.

Among disorderly and tumbled hills of karst were contrasting patches of cultivation, or the thread of a river. Tender green larches shone from broken slopes, backed by darker pines and cypresses. Fertile and barren lay close, yet distinct. Uncompromising on extravagant bluffs, towns stood out, fortresses as well as villages, each with its Italianate steeple, each dilapidated and without sign of life, each the colour of the hillside it crowned. As the car wound along the road which linked the deserted towns, it passed an occasional donkey, led by a peasant whose ruddy face was powdered by the dust of the thoroughfare.

Squire scrutinized this landscape through field glasses, alert for movement. Istra could provide cover for a whole army. The lorries loaded from the barge could not be far off: they would travel by night, remaining in hiding by day. They drove past shells of houses that bore evidence of the bitter civil war which had still to die completely. Slogans painted crudely on their facades, reading ‘Mi Smo Hrvati’ and ‘Hocemo Tito’ (‘We are Croats,’ ‘We want Tito’), had provided their occupants with a kind of rough life insurance. The gutted facades threw back the sound of their passage as they roared by; the car could be seen and heard for miles. And the karst towered above them in a welter of flowering maquis and broken stone.

Labin appeared round a shoulder of mountainside, grey on the top of its appointed hill. It was perhaps five winding kilometres distant when Squire saw figures on a looming hillside to their right. Not sheep. Men, running. Two of them, three. They dived for cover behind a stone wall and were seen no more. Beyond the wall was a grey-roofed building, slotted into the dip between two hills.

‘Turn up to the right,’ Squire said. ‘Someone’s had a moment of panic up there.’ He felt his stomach knot unpleasantly. There was no knowing what they would meet.

Some metres further on, a track led off the road to the right. Without hesitation, without decelerating, Slobodan turned up it, belting between stone walls in a cloud of dust. Squire leant back, grabbed a sten from the rear seat, rammed a magazine in it, and set it on Slobodan’s lap, muzzle forward. He selected another sten for himself and held it at the ready. His eyes searched the landscape for hostile movement. Without a word, steering perilously with one hand, Slobodan leaned back and picked up three hand grenades, which he stuffed into a pocket. He winked at Squire. Seeing the point of the operation, Squire also pocketed some grenades.

The narrow track twisted in a manner more suitable for sheep than cars. Twice, metal shrieked as they clipped the stone walls with their mudguards. Then they broke through into a farm yard. Some miserable pullets scattered before their bumper. Ahead and to their left were ruinous buildings. Slobodan braked, keeping the car in clutch and rolling slowly forward as the two men craned their necks for signs of life, stens pointing through the car windows. The farm building to their left had been a mean habitation at the best of times; now the ground- floor windows were roughly boarded up, and the words ‘Hocemo Tito’ painted on the stonework in inelegant red lettering, with a communist star for emphasis.

In its remote situation, it was a place that had already witnessed violence.

As the Zastava came level with the last window, a machine gun opened fire from the upper room. The rear side window of the car shattered and glass flew. Slobodan swore.

Without hesitation, he spun the wheel and sent the car speeding forward, turning left and shooting round the corner of the farm building. He pulled one of the grenades from his pocket. The car braked just before it ran into a wall of stone. With a yell at Squire, Slobodan jumped out of the vehicle and flung himself behind it. Squire followed, chased by another burst of fire from above.

Squire was still feeling numb. He watched as Slobodan pulled the pin from his grenade, stood to aim, and flung the grenade through the nearest upstairs window of the farmhouse. The grenade disappeared. A second of silence. Then it exploded. Cries and shouts sounded. Tiles clattered down.

Time seemed to move very slowly. Smoke drifted from the window in a leisurely fashion. And Squire regained his ability to move.

Someone was firing at the Zastava from the lower floor, taking pot-shots through the boarded windows with a revolver. Squire left the shelter of the car at a run, throwing himself down against the front of the building. One of the boards blocking the window by the front door was broken. He crawled to a position beneath it. Rising, he lobbed a grenade through the hole. Pressing himself against the stonework, he waited in fierce anticipation, teeth clenched. As the explosion came, he moved to the door. He kicked it in and burst forward, firing his sten, all strictly according to the training manual. It came like second nature.

Smoke, dirt, whirling particles of straw, billowed in his face. Through the filth, he saw that the meagre room contained six men. All were in a demoralized state. The two nearest Squire had suffered directly from his grenade. Their uniforms were torn and bloody. They sprawled on the floor groaning, surrounded by blood and guns. Squire kicked the guns out of the way. At the other end of the room were four men who had been sitting round a table, drinking coffee from a metal flask; one was hurt and clutched his face, moaning; the other three offered no resistance and climbed nervously to their feet at the ferocious sight of Squire, raising their hands above their heads.

Pointing the sten at them, he went forward, satisfied to see them cower back. They were dressed in rough civilian clothes. All were young and pallid of face. They had no guns. It occurred to him that they might be drivers. He made them undo their belts and throw them out of the nearest window, through a broken board. They stood facing him, holding up their trousers and shaking visibly, faces ghastly. They plainly expected to be murdered. He felt no compassion.

He whistled through the board to Slobodan, who whistled back and pointed upstairs. The important people would be up there. Squire blazed away experimentally through the boards above his head. Oaths sounded. Through the loose boards in one of the rear windows, he saw a body go by — someone had jumped for it. Slobodan’s sten chattered. He wouldn’t let them get away.

There was nothing for it but to rush the stairs, hoping the enemy there were also temporarily demoralized. He ran up the steps in a crouch, yelling, firing from the hip. He flung himself flat as he entered the room. Bits of tile went flying as Slobodan fired from below.

A narrow-faced man with a mole on one cheek, his eyes narrowed, fired point blank at Squire and missed. He was crouching behind a wooden crate. His uniformed sleeve had snagged on a bent nail. As he jerked his arm to free himself, Squire half-rose and swung his sten. He caught the narrow-faced man hard across the eyes with the barrel.

He staggered to his feet. Another uniformed man, who had been taking cover behind an upturned wooden bed, rose and jumped from the window. A shot and a shout sounded. Slobodan was in control out there.

‘Okay, Squire?’ he yelled. ‘Want help?’

Slobodan’s first grenade had effectively wrecked the room. Maps and a leather briefcase lay on the floor, against a shattered vodka bottle. In one corner, the walls were splattered with blood; a man lay there, his head hidden. He twitched faintly. Squire went over and kicked him, but he was completely out of action. That left only the narrow-faced man, who had fallen face-down over the packing case.

Squire prodded him in the ribs with his gun. ‘Up!’

Despite the blow with the sten, which should have cracked the front of his skull, the man still had fight in him. He had concealed a broad-bladed military knife in his right hand. As he came up from the crate, he struck at Squire with a practised underarm stroke. Squire swerved to save his ribs and kicked the man on the shin. The man fell back onto his other leg, his face suffused with blood, his pupils dilated with the determination to kill. He charged in again, knife first. The bullets from Squire’s gun caught him full in the chest. He staggered backwards over the crate and fell to the floor among shards of roofing tiles. His left leg kicked for a moment.

Squire went and leaned against the nearest wall, panting and trembling. He slung the sten over one shoulder and wiped repeatedly at his face with his hand. Sweat poured from him. ‘Father, father, I’m sorry…’ When he realized he was repeating the phrase over and over, like a mantra, he tried to take control of himself. A fit of sneezing overcame him.

He went to the rear window and spat out into the bushes beneath, cleansing his mouth.

‘You finito up there?’

Slobodan stood below, covering three men with his gun. They leaned, faces inwards, against the farmhouse, hands above their heads, trousers round their knees. Slobodan gave the Thumbs Up sign.

Squire could not speak.

‘I’ve got Zvonko Nedec here. That’s worth something. Who’ve you got up there?’

Nedec was a well-known pro-Soviet Croat, high on the Belgrade wanted list.

Squire went into an empty corner of the room and was violently sick. Sweat poured from him. He found himself weeping. The vomit splashed his boots and slacks.

Confused, he realized after a moment that Slobodan was in the room, driving Nedec before him, the latter with hands tied and face ashen; stains down the front of his trousers showed where he had pissed himself in fright. Only Slobodan was enjoying himself. He clapped Squire on the shoulder.

‘Take it easy.’

Squire sat shaking on the rear window sill, mopping his mouth and face. Chill overcame him. He had shot a man down like a dog. Almost without comprehension, he took in the view from his vantage point.

Behind the house ran a ruinous stone wall with a steep drop on its far side. Parked under the drop were three old German army lorries with camouflage canopies lashed into place. No doubt that they contained the stolen arms from the arms train. Beyond the lorries, the broken Istran landscape fell away, giving place to a magnificent panorama of the Kvarner Bay. The sun shone dazzling on the blue water. Resting on the breast of the sea were the islands of Cres and Losinj. Squire stared at the sea with longing, until a movement nearer at hand caught his eye.

Parked under a tree at a distance from the lorries was a white Zastava. A thick-set young man in civilian clothes had broken cover and was running towards it. He climbed in and started up the engine.

At the sound, Slobodan rushed to the window. He pointed at the car.

‘Why don’t you shoot? That’s one of the rats we saw first, maybe!’

Squire shook his head. Slobodan produced his last grenade, pulled its pin, and hurled it at the car, already moving downhill. The grenade exploded behind it. The car kept on going, bumping across the field, and disappeared behind a fold of hill.

Losing interest, Slobodan gave Squire a cigarette. Both men lit up. Squire was ashamed of how much his hand shook.

‘Come and look see this. It’ll cheer you up. Here’s Milo Strugar’s killer, okay.’

Slobodan turned and set his foot against the shoulder of the man Squire had shot, so that head and narrow face rolled over in Squire’s direction. A further nudge from Slobodan’s boot brought the head into a beam of sunlight, which blazed in through a gap in the roof. The features of the dead man were unpleasantly illuminated, so that Squire’s stomach lurched again. The features were heavy and sagged in death. On the left cheek was a large mole, its long dark hairs glinting in the sun. It made the man look harmless in death.

There was no doubting his identity.

‘You killed Slatko, my clever young friend!’

Squire had studied the dead man’s photograph a number of times in Belgrade. Codename Slatko had been active ever since Stalin ceased to be Tito’s patron and master; he was the Russian colonel in charge of softening-up operations in Yugoslavia prior to a Soviet take-over. As head of Department XIII of Soviet Counter-Espionage, he was answerable only to the Soviet Central Committee. Slatko’s presence here in Istra showed how confident the Russians had become of defeating Tito. Perhaps the stolen arms were to reinforce an intended strike presided over by Slatko, and timed to take place while the West had its energies and attention involved with the Berlin air-lift. If so, Slatko had been over-optimistic.

‘You killed Slatko,’ Slobodan repeated. He embraced Squire.

‘I need a crap,’ Squire said.

The official break between Stalin and Tito, marked by Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform for hostility to the USSR, came less than two months later. From then on, the Yugoslavs went their own way, negotiating a difficult path between East and West.

By that time, Thomas Squire had returned to England. He had been too successful — the Yugoslavs feared attempts on his life. They gave him an enormous party in Belgrade and sent him home.

Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state.

What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche. For months, he could not rid himself of the vision of Slatko dying, the leg kicking, the Istran sunlight blasting through the broken building.

The department de-activated him, and Squire returned to private life. Following family tradition, he went up to Cambridge, and spent three years there reading Medieval History, without great distinction. Among his friends were James Rotheray and Ronald Broadwell, later to become Squire’s publisher.

He invested the money paid by the BIA, and a legacy that accrued to him on his twenty-first birthday, in a directorship in a city insurance firm. Then he settled down to pretending that he took himself for an ordinary man. Several years passed before he could realize that he was an ordinary man.

‘By the way,’ d’Exiteuil said, turning an unfriendly face to Squire as they were leaving the conference hall. ‘You said yesterday in your opening speech that we had to forge a methodology for the future. Well, we have one, despite anything you or Fittich may say to the contrary. It’s Marxism. Academic Marxism. And it’s already started to run future culture. Popular arts, after all, can never belong to reactionaries like you. We have to shape them to the needs of society. You will be out of it from now on, as I expect you will discover after the conference.’