Willie said, “What a relief.”
“I wanted you to know. I know how close you two were.”
“Are you going to do that action?”
“I mustn’t talk any more about it. You can talk these things away, you know. It’s like mathematics when you’re young. It comes to you without your knowledge, when you are most silent.”
Willie thought of the little weaver colony as he had last seen it: the red sky, the clean front yards where yarn was spun into thread, the three-wheeler scooter-taxi in front of the house where Raja lived with his elder brother. He remembered the cooking fire, festive-looking in the fading light of day, in the half-open kitchen of the leaf-cigarette makers a hundred yards away: people twice as well off, or half as poor, as the weavers; that early fire seeming to mark the difference between them. He remembered the elder brother’s wife in her cotton peasant skirt falling to the floor of the little house before Bhoj Narayan, holding his knees and pleading for her brother-in-law’s life beside the home-made loom.
He thought, “Who here would know that I cared for those men? Perhaps both brothers are better off dead. Perhaps it’s as Ramachandra said. For people like Raja and his brother the damage is already too great. This generation is lost, and perhaps the next as well. Perhaps both brothers have been spared an untold amount of useless striving and needless pain.”
EVERY TWO WEEKS now there were district meetings. Squad leaders or their representatives came from liberated areas in different parts of the forest in a kind of mimicry of old-fashioned social life. The news they brought, unofficially, was of police arrests and the liquidation of squads, but the fiction of successful revolution and the ever-expanding liberated areas was still maintained, at least in the formal discussions, so that these discussions became more and more abstract. They might debate, for instance, with great seriousness, whether landlordism or imperialism was the greater contradiction. One man might become vehement about imperialism — which in the setting really felt very far away — and afterwards someone might say to Willie, “He would say that, of course. His father is a landlord, and when he is talking about imperialism what he is really saying is, ‘ Whatever you people do, stay away from my father and family.’ ” Or they might debate — they did it every two weeks, and everyone knew what would be said on either side — whether the peasantry or the industrial proletariat was going to bring about the revolution. In spite of all the killings, the movement was becoming more and more a matter of these abstract words.
In the middle of this came news of Einstein’s action. He had done it all as he had said, and it had failed. Einstein had said that the high wall of the minister’s official house was good for the action because it would hide Einstein and his friends in the kidnap car. But his research was not as thorough as he had boasted at the sector meeting. What the wall also did was hide the full security arrangements of the house from Einstein. He had thought that there was only one armed guard and he was at the gate. What he discovered, on the day of the action, and seconds away from the intended kidnap, was that there were two further armed guards inside. He decided to call the whole thing off, and almost as soon as he had entered the yard he pushed his way back past the guard at the gate and got into the car. The lights were against them, but the man they had deputed to stop the cross-traffic did his job beautifully, walking slowly to the middle of the road, pulling on big white gloves and stopping the traffic. Some people had thought that this was the weakest part of the plan. As it turned out, this was the only part that worked. And, as Einstein had said, it was hardly noticed.
When he reappeared among them, he said, “Perhaps it’s for the best. Perhaps the police would have come down really hard on us.”
Willie said, “You were pretty cool, to cancel at the last moment. I probably would have pressed on. The more I saw myself getting into a mess, the more I would have pressed on.”
Einstein said, “All plans should have that little room for flexibility.”
A senior man of the council of the movement came to the next section meeting. He was in his sixties, far older than Willie had expected. So perhaps the boastful madman who had talked about being in all the movements for thirty years was right in some things. He was also something of a dandy, the senior man of the council, tall and slender and with beautifully barbered, glossy grey hair. This again was something Willie hadn’t expected.
Einstein, to turn the talk away from his own abandoned plan, said to the man of the council, “We really should stop talking about the liberated areas. We tell people in the universities that the forest is a liberated area, and we tell people in the forest that the universities are a liberated area. Unlikely things happen: these people sometimes meet. We are fooling nobody, and we are putting off the people we want to recruit.”
The man of the council fell into a great rage. His face became twisted and he said, “Who are these people who will want to question me? Have they read the books I have read? Can they read those books? Can they begin to understand Marx and Lenin? I am not Kandapalli. These people will do as I say. They will stand when I tell them to stand, and sit when I tell them to sit. Have I made this long journey here to listen to this kind of rubbish? I might have been arrested at any time. I have come here to talk about new tactics, and I get this tosh.”
His rage — the rage of a man who had for too long been used to having his own way — clouded the rest of the meeting, and no one raised any further serious points.
Later Einstein said to Willie, “That man makes me feel like a fool. He makes us all fools. I cannot imagine that we have been doing what we have been doing for his sake.”
Willie said (a little of his ancient London college wit unexpectedly coming back to him, overriding his caution), “Perhaps the big books he has been reading have been about the great rulers of the century.”
THE NEW TACTICS that should have been discussed at that meeting came directly from the council as commands. Liberated areas were henceforth to be isolated and severely policed; people in these areas were to know only what the movement wanted them to know. Roads and bridges on the perimeter were to be blown up. There were to be no telephones, no newspapers from outside, no films, no electricity. There was to be a renewed emphasis on the old idea of liquidating the class enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no class enemy left in these villages, the people to be liquidated were the better off. The revolutionary madman Willie and Keso had met had spoken of the philosophy of murder as his revolutionary gift to the poor, the cause for which week after week he walked from village to village. Something like this philosophy was brought into play again, and presented as doctrine. Murders of class enemies — which now meant only peasants with a little too much land — were required now, to balance the successes of the police. Discipline in the squads was to be tightened up; squad members were to report on one another.
Willie was reassigned to a new squad, and found himself suddenly among suspicious strangers. He lost the room in the low-eaved hut, which he had grown to think of as his. His squad was a road-destroying and bridge-destroying squad, and he lived in a tented camp, again constantly on the move. He became disorientated. He remembered the time when it consoled him, gave him a hold on things, to count the beds he had slept in. Such a hold was no longer possible for him. He wished now passionately only to save himself, to get in touch with himself again, to get away to the upper air. But he didn’t know where he was. His only consolation — and he wasn’t sure how much of a consolation it was — was that, amid all the strangers whose characters he didn’t want to read, whom (out of his great fatigue and disorientation now) he wished to keep as mysteries — his only consolation was that at the two-weekly meetings of the section he continued to see Einstein.