After all my talk about self-sufficiency. I do really believe what I’m saying, but how many times am I able to act that way?
Well, if you didn’t answer me before you’ll never answer me now.
Work at the center is endless and all I do is complain about it. David and Mother try to stay away from me at night, and even Nicholas starts to yawn and blink after a while. I work with ten other girls and we’re responsible for sixty-six children. (!) We waste a lot of time standing around waiting for our supervisor, etc. Even that’s tiring. The worst times are the lunch breaks when we either monitor the children (who throw everything and trade food and fight about it nonstop until the period runs out) or eat with the other girls on the staff. The children wear me out so quickly: it’s tiring having to think myself into their world and stay detached from it at the same time. And the girls on the staff are worse: I have to close my ears to their chatter. Sometimes I actually start humming to myself while they talk. Every time I join in it seems like a big concession and I immediately regret it. They come in every morning thrilled with the NUP and the war and go home just as blinkered. I usually manage to stay in the background, because of my shyness. I wish I could keep it up, but I catch myself showing off in little ways, trying to teach them. It’s awful, this craving I have to be noticed. And look: even as I write that I’m wondering how it looks on paper. Where do I get ideas like that? Who am I to think I’m too good for these people? What arrogance! Where did I get it from?
They fired off some live ammunition near the center this afternoon. My ears are still buzzing.…
Will you write? You never tell me about yourself, though I suppose I don’t ask as much as I could. I often wonder who you’re with at some point in the day, and who you’re friendly with in general. You never talked about that. Who you like best, for instance. Have you met anyone new? Are you mostly alone? Are all those questions stupid at this point?
Leda
The image of the young man would not go away from Karel. He saw the young man’s face on the window glass during the whole trip back to the Assessment Center. He didn’t speak to Kehr until they’d arrived and gone inside. The heat had let up a little and they sat in the patio off the dining room. The patio was littered with broken red and white ceramic tiles that crunched and skittered when they moved their feet.
“Thanks for the letter,” Karel said.
“It came while we were gone,” Kehr said. He looked at his watch.
“Lucky the people you know going back and forth are willing to carry those letters,” Karel said.
“Yes it is,” Kehr said. “Luck follows me around.”
Gnats had settled into Karel’s drink. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “Thinking about that guy.”
“Weakness is kicked in the teeth in this world,” Kehr said. “Which is a shame.”
Two men at the next table were explaining a long-handled metal instrument to a third man, who had trouble catching on.
“What’d he do?” Karel asked. “Did he do anything? Aren’t things like the bedframe against the law?”
The laws were iron, Kehr said. And some people were outside the law’s protection.
In the far corner of the courtyard two children were sitting on a square of cloth on the pavement and playing with rubber balls and a toy lizard. A haggard man in a prisoner’s shirt was watching them.
“Some of our officers occasionally have to bring their children,” Kehr explained. “I’ve seen days when it was like a school around here.”
“There are no rules?” Karel asked faintly. “Anybody can do anything? Downstairs?”
Not at all, Kehr said. In fact, they were cleaning up the system. That had been a big source of tension. He looked over at the children. The prisoner was pointing out to one a ball that had rolled away. Karel should have seen the conditions and methods at the Ministry of Social Welfare: Kehr had thought he could not watch such things. Much different from the sort of things Karel had seen. Another order of intensity altogether.
He saw Karel’s expression and tried to explain. By “excesses” he meant for the most part acts carried out individually, for personal goals. There’d been for example what they’d considered too much individual initiative on the part of operatives at night in the prisoners’ cells. Especially the women’s cells. This for the most part had had to stop. This was why: no one really minded what was being done as long as it was continually clear that it was being done at the instructions of the state. Because once people were clear on that, it was just a matter of finding out the rules and playing by them.
Karel looked shocked.
Please, Kehr said. This wasn’t news. Everybody knew. He surveyed his glass, which was also dotted with gnats. He said there was an argument that those who restrained their cruelty did so only because theirs was weak enough to be restrained, but that, he thought, oversimplified the situation. The political man at arms had to be a model of correctness in dress, deportment, and behavior. Otherwise where was his authority in ideological reorientation? Those who understood that had nothing but distaste for the rabid types who behaved as if they were dressed in horns and pelts. The good torturer lacked the capacity for hatred. Pain was administered the way power was to be exercised: dispassionately, from on high.
They left the patio and headed to the prisoner assessment room again. Kehr said that one could get to the point where what he did made extraordinary wine or fragrances possible, made contemplation possible, made sleep possible.
The young man was carried onto the bedframe. The man in the apron returned and did not seem to be in as pleasant a mood this time. Two prisoners set up bright lights on tripods and a third took photographs. The man in the apron introduced innovations: a horseshoe-shaped electric prod applied simultaneously to the ears and teeth that they called “the telephone,” and a small electrified metal rectangle with legs that sparked and hopped erratically around the young man’s back and that they called “the spider.” While they worked the lights created a double image behind them of their shadows gigantified on the walls.
Afterward the young man passed out and nothing could be done with him. He was carried to the infirmary.
Kehr sat Karel down behind the lattice screen and told him it was time they examined what had been going on here. He asked if Karel had any questions. Karel asked again despite himself why they hadn’t asked the young man any.
He was not ready to speak, Kehr said. With experience you understood that. Softening up was required before it was even worth the bother.
Karel wanted to know how they knew someone was telling the truth. Kehr explained that a specific tone appeared in the voice in that situation, and that again, training and experience allowed one to recognize that tone. Subjects under that sort of stress invented the most farfetched things. One woman he’d been associated with had sent over fifty people to prison, and none of them as far as he knew had provided anything yet, or seemed likely to.
The special methods were indispensable to the cause of truth; with each application another layer of deceit was stripped away, until the last truth was told, finally, in the last extremity.
Why was he here? Karel wanted to know. What did they want from him?
It was becoming clearer and clearer to the Civil Guard, Kehr said, that to do its job with maximum efficiency it would need to recruit more heavily among nonmembers of the Party, to systematically build a core of people who were not Party members or known supporters. They’d allow for greater flexibility in operations. That would do two things: it would create a more omniscient intelligence service, and it would create the impression of a more omniscient intelligence service.