The High Place (8 page)

‘In the camp the dearest guest is honour,’ replied Ashkar, warning him off the frontier.

‘And for me and mine,’ said Juan, ‘for I am a true com­munist.’

That nearly sunk the whole interview. The captain was Arab enough to enjoy a good, fast game of parables and proverbs, but the essential Ashkar to keep in mind on his own precious frontier was
much nearer some tough old French sous-officier. I could see him mentally reaching for stamped paper and taking a signed statement from Juan Villaneda. The colour pattern of his politics was
primitive as that of any other policeman; he saw the existing order, whatever it might be, as white and every­thing else as dripping red.

I couldn’t understand what Villaneda was up to. He told me afterwards that in many villages he had been nicknamed The Communist, that Ashkar would certainly hear of it, and so it was
better to deal with the coming accusation at once.

‘Men may well have honour in Russia,’ said Ashkar doubt­fully, but politely—for after all Villaneda was his guest.

‘They may,’ Juan agreed, ‘provided the State orders them to have it. But I said I was a true communist, captain. And, by God, there are no men on earth, capitalists, socialists
or plain sons of bitches who hate the Soviet dictatorship as a true communist.’ 

‘You do not want communism as in Russia?’ Ashkar asked patiently.

‘Never! I am a libertarian communist. There is no need for the State, no need for economics. When you are in want, you have a right to ask and be given. Suppose to-day I sell the
cap­tain a chicken for two piastres and next week he comes to me and sells me a cabbage for two piastres, which of us is better off? Why should we not have supplied each other’s needs in
the first place without giving or asking money?’

Ashkar relaxed. The anarchist creed of voluntary association was in his blood. The Christians had been preaching it for the last two thousand years from all the monasteries between the
Mediterranean and the Euphrates; and while they preached it, the Moslem Fellahin, who seldom had two piastres anyway, quietly lived up to it.

‘You are religious then at Kasr-el-Sittat? asked the captain.

‘Perhaps,’ Villaneda answered. ‘But so was Jules Verne.’

Ashkar seemed to appreciate this obscure remark immedi­ately. His mind, as Juan had already discovered, dealt in symbols and catchwords without being confused by the original reality. As for
me, I needed a long minute’s thought before I could arrive at what was meant and understood by this con­versational shorthand. It was, roughly, that Juan disclaimed any organized religion
for Kasr-el-Sittat, but suggested they might be prophets whose dreams and ideals would come true, as had the prophecies of Jules Verne.

Villaneda developed for the captain his visionary political theories: that all the ills of men resulted from their lust for property, and that progress based on the mere possession of objects
could only be illusion. It was a simplification of his creed, evolved for and partly by the strangers he met on the roads of Syria, of whom hardly a man would have more pos­sessions than he
could pile on a handcart. When Juan was talk­ing to revolutionaries, well-read in their own doctrines, I swear he didn’t use a substantive of less than four syllables.

Ashkar was disarmed by this deliberately exaggerated inno­cence, and even grumbled that every honest man would be a communist—or at least one of Villaneda’s libertarian
commun­ists—if he believed that communism could or would end in the withering away of the State.

‘How do you recruit your members?’ he asked. ‘How did you yourself come to Kasr-el-Sittat?’

Villaneda gave us a dry and humorous sketch of his life. He had known as much spiritual disillusionment as anyone in Kasr-el-Sittat, yet his voice was wholly without bitterness. I suspect that
in the raw unconscious at the bottom of their souls Elisa and Osterling looked on the colony as a last weapon to the use of which they had fallen. For Juan it was a fulfilment of all his hopes, to
which he had risen.

He was born and bred in Morocco, where his father had been the confidential peon of an army contractor, loyally under­taking whatever business was too dirty to permit the personal appearance
of his boss. Then Villaneda senior won a big prize in the Christmas Lottery, and, though he could neither read nor write, doubled and doubled and doubled again this unex­pected capital by
buying horses and selling them to the cavalry.

Meanwhile Juan was receiving a first-class formal education, and, in spite of it, developing his principles; after the death of his father he lived up to them, and simply gave his capital away.
What to? Anything but the Church, he said. And it took him a fair time. He explained that people were always paying him back with interest. His magnanimity must have been catching.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he made his way to Barcelona and enlisted in a communist formation. He rose swiftly to command of a company, and impressed on it his own belief that the
only value of human life was to prepare the way for the next generation. They died, he told us (apolo­gizing for the word) like saints. He also convinced his company that the dictatorship of
the proletariat, or of anyone else, was a quite unnecessary stage on the way of the generations, and so was shot in the back while defending Madrid by a political sergeant attached to him for that
very purpose. His men had dealt with the sergeant, inserting into his person a detonator with a length of slow fuse. This Juan regretted, for the detona­tor did nothing to prove which of them
was the better com­munist. Moveover, the bullet had missed his spine by a centi­metre, and his heart by—Juan held up a finger and thumb that might have admitted between them a grain
of barley.

From hospital he passed into the camps of the defeated across the Pyrenees, and so to forced labour in East Prussia. He was liberated by the Russians who exhibited him as a rescued
comrade—his proletarian goodness would have impressed the most jaundiced secret policemen—and allowed him to see something of their state. To him, a Spaniard bred on variety, it seemed
the negation of all human values. The public parks, he said, infuriated him; every one in every big town was exactly the same, with the same statue in the middle. He couldn’t get over his
horror of mass-produced amenities.

During the long years of war he had been ready to accept, after all, the infallibility of the Kremlin, but now the fires of his youth burned again, and more fiercely than ever. In the Ukraine,
seething with hopeless rebellion and discontent, he joined a guerilla band of some five thousand men and women who fought their way to the Carpathians and reached them four hundred strong. Then
they separated, and Juan with a few others infiltrated into the American zone of Austria. There, he said, he had been persuaded to join the colony of Kasr-el-Sittat by a certain Eugen Rosa.

I preserved the poker face of a bad actor, which could have been recognized as such twenty yards away; but fortunately Juan Villaneda was looking at Ashkar, not at me. The captain leaned forward
and poured some more wine. He was intent and courteous, and I could have sworn he had never heard of Eugen Rosa. He had been caught cleverly and completely off his guard, but it was simply not in
his Levantine nature to show surprise.

Ashkar effortlessly ignored the end of Juan’s life story and picked up the beginning. He asked him if he hadn’t at least missed the smell of stables when he decided to give his
posses­sions away. When Juan admitted that about the only envy left to him was envy of other people’s horses, Ashkar, who loved to behave like a prince when he could, at once offered to
mount him on anything he liked whenever he chose.

In spite of the ghost of Eugen Rosa, the captain declared, as soon as Juan had left, that there was a man with whom he could do business. He went so far as to call him a natural leader. When I
asked him if he didn’t think Villaneda too eccen­tric for command, he replied in a self-satisfied tone that men answered to the heart, not to the head.

Soon after this meeting, responsibility for the Syrian affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat divided itself naturally and well, with hardly a conference between us. Elisa dealt with Damascus; Villaneda with
Ashkar and the rare district officials; and I with such secret illegalities as were beyond the power of influence or friendship to arrange.

The pattern of the colony’s organization became plainer to me, though I was always in the position of a confidential peon, like Villaneda’s father, possessing such secret information
as the Secretariat was compelled to give me, yet having little know­ledge of who shared it, or what was the chain of command.

It was Elisa who had planned and created the colony, and was responsible for its organization and finance. Osterling was in charge of propaganda; Czoldy of what one might call opera­tional
intelligence; and Gisorius of security and subversive activities. He lived permanently in Istanbul. I imagine that even if he and his network had been exposed, the final link between him and
Kasr-el-Sittat might have been indiscoverable.

In the East the organization was underground; and its weapons were terrorism and that art, which the Russians called sabotage, of exploiting government-made confusion until the government
servants themselves were paralysed. In the West their chief instrument was World Opposition, which, outwardly, confined itself to propaganda. Under this cover, however, it had fomented strikes
against state-control—with the help, as Elisa had hinted, of communist funds—and in countires under socialism, where the routine of innumerable offices could be dislocated by a pretence of mass stupidity or a flood of wrong
returns and well-meant enquiries, it was experimenting with the Russian form of sabotage.

Although the rank and file of the party members were drawn from the middle classes, they had no control. The Secretariat had captured, financed and developed a movement of the revo­lutionary
proletariat; and the action committees abroad were largely composed of libertarian communists, who saw clearly that their first enemy was no longer private capitalism, since it was rapidly
evolving, everywhere, into state capitalism. That accounted for the importance of Juan Villaneda. The com­mittees knew his record of idealism and were reassured by his presence at
Kasr-el-Sittat.

And what of the mass of the colonists? Well, they had been chosen for the sake of background or special knowledge, for their sufferings and disillusionment, but most of them had only a very
general idea of the tactics of the Secretariat. The colony, in fact, was not unlike a great central office of Political War­fare, with its clerks and linguists, its quartermaster’s office
and ration parties, its electricians, wireless operators and mainten­ance parties of engineers. All this ‘personnel’ would, in a war­time organization, have been carefully
selected to ensure that each individual was in sympathy with the main object, but would have known no more than the colonists of Kasr-el-Sittat of the methods and secrets employed.

And I? What was I, who had never been an anarchist by conviction, who had never seen the State at work upon my loved ones like a smug and incompetent veterinary surgeon? To-day when I remember
the fire and fearlessness of Elisa, I accuse myself of being a revolutionary no more genuine than some corrupt conservative. Yet in fact I had no calculating self-interest, and my allegiance to
Kasr-el-Sittat sprang from an emotional despair.

I will leave an attempt at explanation to Elisa. Whether there is any meaning I do not know, but that harsh voice, quivering under the impact, the lonely impact of her thoughts, as if she were
playing to herself some instrument in the silence of my garden, may gather up with it a sense that the clarity of my desk and daylight gives me not at all.

She so loved to sleep under the stars that I had arranged a high square tent of fine mosquito netting, large enough for us to choose a miniature garden from the greater, and lie upon the turf,
enclosing with us such flowers as she desired to smell and touch. It was August, and the night was a hot blackness, moving a little as the air spread inland from the beaches. There was no light but
the gleam of her body.

‘Do you know, Eric,’ she said suddenly, ‘you are a craftsman, a superb craftsman who hasn’t any craft. That’s why you are with us.’

I answered lazily that I didn’t feel particularly unfulfilled.

‘You did. But that was not what I meant. You have the crafts­man’s intolerance. You want technique, and you are furious at any pretence of it when it isn’t there. You
don’t really hate the State. You hate the pretentious men who compose it.’

‘It’s the same.’

‘No, it is not the same. You’re no prophet. It’s only your intellect that tells you whither the world is bound – to the cruelty of the hive, to the end of all fear and all hope. You
have no vision of those grey faces hurrying obediently from school to work, and work to pension—so painless a living that they will not know when they are dead.’

She was silent, and I could feel her heart—for in that spare body vein and sinew pulsed so near the surface—racing in some imaginary struggle. In her dream world, at least, she won
the victory, for the heart-beat dropped and she turned to me.

‘At first when I came to you,’ she said, ‘my vision of past and future was always with me. I had not time to know that I was here. I used to tell myself that in a moment, a
blessed moment, I could be nowhere else but here. And now—it isn’t only in your arms. If you are near me, I am here all the time. A self. Myself? If it exists, Eric, what would you do
for it?’

‘Anything.’

‘Why? Just for a body that you think beautiful?’

‘No. For those eyes. Or for that head.’

She gave a low laugh of derision.

‘What sentimental differences you find, my dear! Or would you do for my eyes what you wouldn’t for this white flame, as you poetically call it? What would you do for
me
, I asked.
This body isn’t me.’

I told her that without using the word soul, which was taboo to her, I couldn’t answer.