"Charlie, dear, this is strictly but strictly for the record," Kurtz declared. "Once we have it for the record, we shall be able to shed a couple of veils for you," he assured her. But he still insisted on dragging her through a wearying catalogue of demo's and sit-ins and marches and squats and Saturday-afternoon revolutions, asking in each case for what he called "the argumentation" behind her action.
"For Christ's sake, stop trying to evaluate us, will you?" she threw back at him. "We're not logical, we're not informed, we're not organised--
"So what are we, dear?" said Kurtz with saintly kindness.
"We're not dear either. We're people. Adult human beings, get it? So stop riding me!"
"Charlie, we are surely not riding you. Nobody here is riding you."
"Oh, screw you all."
She hated herself in this mood. She hated the harshness that came over her when she was cornered. She had a picture of herself beating her puny, girl's fists uselessly against a huge wood door, while her strident voice battled with dangerously unconsidered slogans. At the same time she loved the bright colours that came with anger, the glorious release, the smashed glass.
"Why do you have to believe before you reject?" she demanded, remembering a grand phrase Long Al had fed to her--or was it someone else? "Maybe rejecting is believing. Has that occurred to you? We're fighting a different war, Mart--the real one. It's not power against power, East against West. It's the hungry against the pigs. Slaves against oppressors. You think you're free, don't you? That's because someone else is in chains. You eat, someone starves. You run, someone has to stand still. We have to change that whole thing."
She had believed it once; she really had. Perhaps she still did. She had seen it and had it clear before her in her mind. She had knocked on strangers' doors with it and watched the hostility lift from their faces as she made her pitch. She had felt it and marched for it: for the people's right to free the people's minds, to unclog one another from the engulfing morass of capitalist and racist conditioning, and turn towards each other in unforced companionship. Out there, on a clear day, the vision even now could fill her heart and stir her to feats of courage that, cold, she would have shrunk from. But inside these walls, with all these clever faces, she had no space to spread her wings.
She tried again, more strident: "You know, Mart, one of the differences between being your age and mine is we're actually a bit fussy about who we give up our existence for. We're not keen, for some reason, on laying down our lives for a multinational corporation registered in Liechtenstein and banking in the bloody Dutch Antilles." That bit was Al's for certain. She had even borrowed his sarcastic rasp to wash it down. "We don't think it's a very good idea to have people we've never met or heard of or voted for going round ruining the world for us. We're not in love with dictators, funnily enough, whether they're groups of people or countries or institutions, and we're not in love with the arms race, or chemical warfare, or any part of the whole catastrophe game. We don't think that the Jewish state has to be an imperialist American garrison and we don't think Arabs are either flea-ridden savages or decadent oil-sheiks. So we reject. In favour of not having certain hang-ups--certain prejudices and alignments. So rejection is positive, right? Because not having them is positive, got it?"
"How ruining the world, exactly, Charlie?" Kurtz asked while Litvak patiently jotted.
"Poisoning it. Burning it. Fouling it up with trash and colonialism and the total, calculated mind bending of the workers and"--and the other lines I'll remember in a minute, she thought. "So just don't come asking me for the names and addresses of my five main gurus--right, Mart?--because they're inhere"--she thumped her chest--"and don't go sneering at me when I can't recite Che Guevara to you all bloody night; just ask me whether I want the world to survive and my babies to--
"Can you recite Che Guevara?" Kurtz asked, interested.
"Hold it," said Litvak, and lifted one flimsy hand for pause while he wrote furiously with the other. "This is great. Just hold it for one minute, Charlie, will you?"
"Why don't you dash out and buy yourself a bloody tape-recorder?" Charlie snapped. Her cheeks were hot. "Or steal one, since that's what you're into?"
"Because we don't have a week set aside for reading transcripts," Kurtz replied while Litvak continued writing. "The ear selects, you see, dear. Machines don't. Machines are uneconomical. Can you recite Che Guevara, Charlie?" he repeated while they waited.
"No, of course I bloody well can't."
From behind her--it seemed a mile away--Joseph's disembodied voice gently modified her answer.
"But she could if she learned him. She has excellent recall," he assured them, with a touch of the creator's pride. "She has only to hear something and it belongs to her. She could learn his entire writings in a week, if she put her mind to it."
Why had he spoken? Was he trying to mitigate? Warn? Or impose himself between Charlie and her imminent destruction? But Charlie was in no mood to heed his subtleties, and Kurtz and Litvak were conferring again, this time in Hebrew.
"Do you mind speaking English in front of me, you two?" she demanded.
"In just one moment, dear," said Kurtz pleasantly. And went on talking in Hebrew.
In the same clinical fashion--strictly for the record, Charlie--Kurtz led her painstakingly through the remaining disparate articles of her uncertain faith. Charlie flailed and rallied and flailed again with the growing desperation of the half-taught; Kurtz, seldom criticising, always courteous, glanced at the file, paused for a word with Litvak, or, for his own oblique purposes, jotted himself a note on the pad before him. In her mind, as she floundered fiercely on, she saw herself in one of those improvised happenings at drama school, working her way into a part that increasingly lacked meaning for her as she advanced. She watched her own gestures and they no longer belonged to her words. She was protesting, therefore she was free. She was shouting, therefore she was protesting. She listened to her voice and it belonged to nobody at all. From the pillow-talk of a forgotten lover she snatched a line of Rousseau, from somewhere else a phrase from Marcuse. She saw Kurtz sit back and, lowering his eyes, nod to himself and put down his pencil, so she supposed that she had finished, or he had. She decided that, given the superiority of her audience and the poverty of her lines, she had managed quite decently after all. Kurtz seemed to think so too. She felt better, and a lot safer. Kurtz too, apparently.
"Charlie, I surely congratulate you," he declared. "You have articulated with great honesty and frankness and we thank you."
"Sure do," murmured Litvak the scribe.
"Be my guest," she retorted, feeling ugly and over-heated.
"Mind if I attempt to structure it a little for you?" Kurtz enquired.
"Yes, I do."
"Why's that?" said Kurtz, unsurprised.
"We're an alternative, that's why. We're not a party, we're not organised, we're not a manifesto. And we're not for bloody-well structuring."
She wished she could get out of the bloodies somehow. Or else that her swearing would come more easily to her in their austere company.
Kurtz did his structuring all the same, and made a point of being ponderous while he was about it.
"On the one hand, Charlie, we seem to have what is the basic premise of classic anarchism as preached from the eighteenth century down to the present day."
"Oh balls!"