"Namely, a revulsion against regimentation. Namely, a conviction that government is evil,ergo the nation-state is evil, an awareness that the two together contradict the natural growth and freedom of the individual. You add to this certain modern postures. Such as a revulsion against boredom, against prosperity, against what I believe is known as the air-conditioned misery of Western capitalism. And you remind yourself of the genuine misery of three-quarters of the earth's population. Yes, Charlie? You want to quarrel with that? Or shall we take the ‘Oh balls' for granted this time?"
She ignored him, preferring to smirk at her fingernails. For Christ's sake--what did theories matter any more? she wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it's often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be.
"In today's world," Kurtz continued, unperturbed, "in today's world I would say you have more sound reasons for that view than ever your forebears had, because today the nation-states are more powerful than ever; so are the corporations, so are the opportunities for regimentation."
She realised he was leading her, yet she had no way left to stop him. He was pausing for her comments, but all she could do was turn her face away from him and hide her growing insecurity behind a mask of furious negation.
"You oppose technology gone mad," he continued equably. "Well, Huxley did that for you already. You aim to release human motives that are for once neither competitive nor aggressive. But in order to do this, you have first to remove exploitation. But how?"
Yet again he paused, and his pauses were becoming more threatening to her than his words; they were the pauses between footsteps to the scaffold.
"Stop patronising me, will you, Mart? Just stop!"
"It is on this issue of exploitation, so far as I read you, Charlie," Kurtz continued, with implacable good humour, "that we spill over from anarchism observed, as we might call it, to anarchism practised" He turned to Litvak, playing him off against her. "You had a point here, Mike?"
"I would say exploitation was the crunch issue, Marty," Litvak breathed. "For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has him hooked twice over."
"Great," said Kurtz comfortably. "The pursuit of property is evil,ergo property itself is evil,ergo those who protect property are evil,ergo--since you avowedly have no patience with the evolutionary democratic process--blow up property and murder the rich. You go along with that, Charlie?"
"Don't be bloody silly! I'm not into that stuff!"
Kurtz seemed disappointed. "You mean you decline to dispossess the robber state, Charlie? What's the matter? Shy, suddenly?" To Litvak again: "Yes, Mike?"
"The state is tyrannous," Litvak put in helpfully. "Charlie's words exactly. She also referred to the violence of the state, the terrorism of the state, the dictatorship of the state--just about everything bad a state can be," Litvak added, in a rather surprised voice.
"That doesn't mean I go round murdering people and robbing bloody banks! Christ! What is this?"
Kurtz was not impressed by her alarm. "Charlie, you have indicated to us that the forces of law-and-order are no more than the satraps of a false authority."
Litvak offered a footnote: "Also that true justice is not available to the masses through the law courts," he reminded Kurtz.
"It isn't! The whole system is crap! It's fixed, it's corrupt, it's paternalistic, it's--
"Then why don't you destroy it?" Kurtz enquired perfectly pleasantly. "Why don't you blow it up and shoot every policeman who tries to stop you, and for that matter every policeman who doesn't? Why don't you blow up colonialists and imperialists wherever you find them? Where's your vaunted integrity suddenly? What's gone wrong?"
"I don't want to blow anything up! I want peace! I want people to be free!" she insisted, scurrying desperately for her one safe tenet.
But Kurtz seemed not to hear her: "You disappoint me, Charlie. All of a sudden you lack consistency. You've made the perceptions. Why don't you go out and do something about them? Why do you appear here one minute as an intellectual who has the eye and brain to see what is not visible to the deluded masses, the next you have not the courage to go out and perform a small service--like theft--like murder--like blowing something up--say, a police station--for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds are enslaved by the capitalist overlords? Come on, Charlie, where's the action? You're the free soul around here. Don't give us the words, give us the deeds."
The infectious jolliness in Kurtz had reached new heights. His eyes were so creased at the corners that they were black curves cut into his battered skin. But Charlie could fight too, and she was talking straight at him, using words the way he did, clubbing him with them, trying to beat a last desperate exit past him to freedom.
"Look, I'm superficial, got it, Mart? I'm unread, illiterate, I can't add or reason or analyse, I went to tenth-rate expensive schools, and I wish to God--more than anything on earth I do--I wish I'd been born in a Midland back-street and my father had worked with his hands instead of ripping off old ladies' life savings! I'm sick of being brainwashed and I'm sick of being told fifteen thousand reasons every day why I shouldn't love my neighbour on equal terms, and I want to go to bloody bed!"
"You telling me you're recanting on your stated position, Charlie?"
"I haven't got a stated position!"
"You haven't."
"No!"
"No stated position, no commitment to activism, except that you are unaligned."
"Yes!"
"Peaceably unaligned," Kurtz added contentedly. "You belong to the extreme centre."
Slowly unbuttoning a pocket of his jacket, he fished in it with his thick fingers, producing, from among a lot of junk, a folded press cutting, quite a long one, which, judging by its exclusive position, differed in some way from those contained in the folder.
"Charlie, you mentioned in passing a while back that you and Al attended a certain residential forum down in Dorset some place," said Kurtz as he laboriously unfolded the cutting. " ‘A weekend course in radical thinking' was how you described it, I believe. We didn't enter very deeply into what transpired there; it is my memory that for some reason we kind of glossed over that part of our discussion. Mind if we dig a little deeper?"
Like a man refreshing his memory, Kurtz silently read the press cutting to himself, occasionally shaking his head as if to say "Well, well."
"Seems quite a place," he remarked genially as he read. "Weapon training with dummy guns. The techniques of sabotage--using plasticine instead of the real stuff, naturally. How to live in hiding. Survival. The philosophy of the urban guerrilla. Even how to look after an unwilling guest. I see: ‘Restraint of unruly elements in a domestic situation.' I like that. That's a fine euphemism." He glanced over the top of his cutting. "This correct, this report, more or less, or are we dealing with the typical exaggerations of the capitalist Zionist press here?"
She no longer believed in his goodwill, nor did he want her to. Kurtz's one aim now was to alarm her with the extremity of her opinions, and force her into flight from positions she did not realise she had taken. Some interrogations are conducted in order to elicit truth, others to elicit lies. Kurtz wanted lies. His grating voice had therefore discernibly hardened, and the fun was fading quickly from his face.
"Want to give us a more objective picture, Charlie, maybe?" Kurtz enquired.
"It was Al's scene, not mine," she said defiantly, making her first withdrawal.
"But you went together."
"It was a cheap weekend in the country at a time when we were broke. That's all."
"That's all," Kurtz murmured, leaving her with a vast and guilty silence too heavy for her to shift single-handed.
"It wasn't just me and him," she protested. "It was--God--twenty of us. Kids, acting people. Some of them were still at drama school They'd hire a bus, take some hash, play musical beds till morning. What's wrong with that?"
Kurtz had no opinion, just then, of what was wrong with anything.
"They,"he said. "What were you doing? Driving the bus?--the great driver we hear you are?"