going to get ten years. And then some chap in a rumpled suit and a Balliol tie turned up and told me that if I helped him I might be able to sort out my problems. Work off my debt.”
“So you became an informer.”
“That’s more or less it. They were desperate for people who could fit in. Everyone could always tell a policeman. Hair, shoes— they stuck out a mile. The bastards kept on at me. They always had something else for me to do, someone else for me to get to know. At first it was drugs, but pretty soon it was political stuff. Who was at what meeting. Who knew who.”
“Did they put you in that cell with me?”
He nodded. “God, that was an awful job. All day on that march I felt like shit. Because I was against the war, you see. I really was. But each time I tried to drop out they threatened me. And what I was giving them seemed so innocuous. For Christ’s sake, it was innocuous. There were all those pseudo Trotskys yabbering away, but most of them didn’t have a clue. All that revolutionary fervor— it was a sort of wishful thinking. Oh, I don’t deny there were things that needed doing — I mean, Britain was a joyless hole of a place before our generation got hold of it — but no one could see farther than the end of their noses. We thought it was all about us. Even Vietnam was about us. And there we were, in the middle of the Cold War.”
“At least some of us tried to do something. At least we stood up to them.”
“Can’t you even admit it now? Anything that destabilized the British state was to the advantage of the USSR.”
He drained the rest of his pint.
“And since then?” I asked. “Did they let you off the hook?”
“Eventually. But, oddly enough, by that time it had turned into a career. There was something called the Information Research Department. A Foreign Office setup. They gave me a job in a press agency. They used it to place things in the newspapers.”
“Disinformation.”
“Propaganda, certainly. Things that made the other side look bad.”
“So much for wanting the world to change.”
“Oh, and you made the right choices, did you? ‘Trying to do something.’ You were irrelevant, don’t you get that? History doesn’t care about what you did. Who’s even heard of you? Ideology’s dead now. Everyone pretty much agrees on how to run things. And you know what, Chris? I don’t mind. Let’s all get on with gardening and watching the soaps and having kids and going shopping. You’ve done it. You’ve been able to lead a dull life because there’s no real conflict anymore. In a couple of years it’ll be a new millennium and, with luck, nothing will bloody happen anywhere, nothing at all. That’s what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by.”
“How the hell do you face yourself in the morning?”
“Don’t patronize me. I don’t see you’ve any call to occupy the moral high ground.”
“No, I mean it. What’s it like, trying to live like you do?”
“It’s very simple. It’s what most people do. You don’t need to agree with me. You don’t need to approve of me. But it’s not people like me who are the problem. All right, let’s say I don’t believe in anything. Well, one great advantage of that is not wanting to blow anyone up.”
We sat there in front of our empty glasses.
“So,” he said, “now that we’re actually talking, what about you? What happened to you after you walked off the boat that afternoon?”
What happened to me? I did what you did in those days. I got on a bus. I had a passport and five thousand pounds, a huge sum of money, enough to keep me alive for several years if I lived cheaply. As far as I was concerned, my life in Britain was over. I didn’t have any clear intention; I just wanted to move, as quickly as possible.
So I got on a bus at Victoria station and headed for the Continent. It was the beginning of a period of drifting through Europe that ended about three months later, in a street in Istanbul. I remember that time as a flip-book of cheap hotel rooms, a two-guilder dormitory in Amsterdam, a flophouse in Naples where you could hear cockroaches scuttling about on the tiled floor after they turned out the lights. At first, out of habit, I gravitated toward places with a counterculture. I sat around on my bedroll in main squares, listening to long-haired kids playing guitars and hustling one another for dope. I went to gigs and lost myself in the amplified darkness, the anonymous strobing of the lights.
I don’t remember much about what I thought or how I felt. I was treading water, turning round and round, existing rather than living. I had the idea that I’d try to find somewhere very beautiful and very simple and settle there, far away from all kinds of violence and destruction. To say I was disillusioned with politics would be too simple. I still hated the system, hated the cops in their gray or green or blue or brown uniforms, pushing people around, moving them on from the Damrak or St. Pauli or the Strøget. But I didn’t trust myself anymore. I was suspicious of my instincts, my capacity for violence.
Khaled had ordered us to kill someone. His name was Gertler, a Jewish businessman who owned a supermarket chain. Gertler’s crime was Zionism. He donated large sums to right wing political groups. The British government had given him a knighthood. Every morning he took his nine-year-old daughter to school, waiting on the pavement outside his house for the driver to bring his Bentley round from the mews where it was garaged. The plan was to ambush him and shoot him dead.
I was confused about many things, but I knew what I thought about that. Perhaps Khaled and Yusef were justified in fighting the enemies of their people. Perhaps, having no army, they had no alternative but horrific, spectacular violence. But I couldn’t see how it was justified for me, who’d never even been to Palestine, to kill a man out of some abstract sense of revolutionary solidarity or
third world internationalism. No matter how crisply logical the theory, no matter how tightly one blocked one’s ears to the historical hiss of Zyklon B, on a simple human level Khaled’s plan still meant killing a man in front of his child and that had nothing to do with what I believed in. I wanted an end to poverty, to carpet bombing, to the numbness and corruption of the death-driven society I’d been born into. Instead it seemed death had corrupted me too.
Sooner or later, in every city I visited, I’d see someone I thought I knew. I would hide or walk the other way, but before long I’d start turning the incident over in my mind and decide they must have recognized me. I’d feel as if I were being followed. Eventually I’d pick up my things and run to the railway station, in the grip of a sweating, heart-racing paranoia.
All that came to a head in Istanbul. The city was seething with bad vibes. There had recently been a military coup and soldiers were patrolling the streets, grim men in fatigues who checked papers and lounged around contemptuously at intersections, watched by the sullen populace. People were always tugging at my sleeve in the bazaars, trying to sell me drugs or steer me into their shops. I was spending most of my days looking for someone to give me a ride farther east, knocking on doors at my hostel, hanging around outside a café called the Pudding Shop, which had a traveler’s noticeboard and a crudely painted mandala on the wall. One afternoon I picked up an eight-week-old copy of The Times, which had somehow survived, preserved with various other archaeological relics of the foreign media, on a stall just off the Grand Bazaar.
TWO DEAD, OTHERS SOUGHT AFTER LONDON TERRORIST RAIDS
The shopkeeper watched me curiously as I tore off the plastic wrapping and read. The article was frustratingly terse. Following a tip-off, police had raided premises in north and east London, looking for weapons and explosives. They’d arrested three men