XLII
A glum thought, nods the exhausted reader. But wouldn't things have come to this juncture anyway, even without our English friend's assistance? Sure they would have, given the so-called dynamics of the modern world, which means the population explosion and the industrial gluttony of the West. These two would suffice; no need for a third party, let alone for an individual agency. At best, our English friend just articulated what was in the air or, as it were, afoot. Other than that, he was utterly insignificant. Sooner or later this was bound to happen, Kim or no Kim, Russia or no Russia. Well, without Russia perhaps it would have taken a touch longer, but so what. Individuals are incidental, it's all economics, isn't it? In this sense, even if an individual exists, he doesn't. Sounds a bit solipsistic, in a Marxist way; but our English friend would be the first to appreciate that. Mter all, historical necessity was his motto, his credo, his occasional rebuke to pangs of conscience. And after that, for all the professional hazards of one's trade, a belief in the imminent triumph of one's cause is safe betting, isn't it? (What if your cause triumphs in your lifetime, eh?) At any rate, from the standpoint of historical necessity, our man was of no use, at best he was redundant. For the objective ofhistory was to make the Arabs rich, the West poor, and the Russians bob and bubble in limbo. This is what the bottom line says in that true bel canto of necessity, and who is the author to argue with it? A penny, then, for our friend's sense of mission; but not much more for the author's flight offancy either. Anyway, what are his sources?
xliii
"Sources?" shrugs the author contemptuously. Who needs them? Who can trust sources? And since when? And does the reader realize what he is getting into by suspecting his author of being wrong, not to mention by proving it? Aren't you afraid, dear reader, that your successful refutation ofthe author's little theory might boil down to an inescapable conclusion on your part that the dark brown substance in which you find yourself up to your nostrils in the world today is immanent, preordained on high, at the very least sponsored by Mother Nature? Do you really need that? Whereas the author aims to spare you this anguish by proving that the aforementioned substance is of human manufacture. In this respect, your author is a true humanist. No, dear reader, you don't need sources. Neither sources nor tributaries of defectors' evidence; not even electronic precipitation raining onto your lap from the satellite-studded heaven. With our sort of flow, all you need is an estuary, a mouth really; and beyond that, a sea with the bottom line for a horizon. Well, that much you've already seen.
XLIV
Nobody, though, knows the future. Least of all those who believe in historical determinism; and next to them, spies and journalists. Perhaps that's why the former often disguise themselves as the latter. Of course, when it comes to the future, any occupation is good cover. Still, information gathering beats them all, since any bit of information, including a secret one, is generated by the past: almost by definition, information deals with faits accomplis. Be it a new bomb, a planned invasion, or a shift in policy, you can learn only about what has already happened, what has already taken place. The paradox of espionage is that the more you know about your adversary, the more your own development is stunted, since this knowledge forces you into trying to catch up with him, to thwart his efforts. He keeps you occupied by altering your own priorities. The better your spies, therefore, the more you fall into dependence on what you learn. You are not acting any longer: you are reacting. This maroons you in the past, with little access to the present and none to the future. Well, not to a future of your own design, let alone your own making. Imagine the Soviets not stealing American atomic secrets and thus spending the last four decades with no nukes to brandish. It could have been a different country; not much more prosperous, perhaps, given the doctrine, but at least the fiasco that we have recently witnessed might have occurred much earlier. If worse came to worse, they might have built a viable version oftheir socialism. But when you steal something, the catch possesses you, or at least your faculties. Considering the industry of our English friend and his pals, it went far beyond faculties; both hands of their Russian fence were, for quite some time, too busy to build socialism, they were hoarding goods. It could be argued that by betraying the empire in such volume, the boys, in fact, served the empire in a far more substantial manner than its most ardent standard-bearers. For the wealth of secret intelligence passed to the Soviets by the Cambridge class of 1931 mesmerized its recipients to the point of making at least their foreign policy thoroughly contingent on the harvest yielded by their own plants. For the men in Moscow Center, it's been like reading the Sunday papers nonstop seven days a week instead of doing the dishes or taking the kids to the zoo.
xlv
So you can't say it was all in vain, dear reader, can you? Even though you may be as tired of the subject as the author himself. Let's claim fatigue, dear reader, and reach no conclusion, and spare ourselves the distrust, not to say the acrimony. On the whole, there is nothing wrong with intricacy of thought except that it's always achieved at the expense of thought's depth. Let's get into your Japanese Toyota, which doesn't consume a lot of the Arab oil product, and go for a meal. Chinese? Vietnamese? Thai? Indian? Mexican? Hungarian? Polish? The more we bungle abroad, the more varied our diet. Spanish? Greek? French? Italian? Perhaps the only good thing about the dead spies was that they had a choice. But as I write this, the news comes over the wireless that the Soviet Union is no more Armenian, then? Uzbek? Kazakh? Estonian? For some reason, we don't feel like eating at home tonight. We don't want to eat English.
XLVI
Why should one bother so much about dead spies? Why can't one contain the repulsion that rises at the sight of a literary magazine's cover? Isn't this an overreaction? What's so new about someone's belief that a just society exists elsewhere, so special about this old Rousseauish lunacy, enacted or not? Every epoch and every generation is entitled to its own utopia, and so was Philby's. Sure, the ability to cling to that sort of garbage beyond the age of down payment (not to mention the age of retirement) is puzzling, but one can easily put this down to temperament or to some organic disorder. A Catholic, a lapsed Catholic especially, can appreciate the predicament, and make a meal out of it if he is a writer; and so can a heathen. Or did I feel queasy simply because of the violation of scale, because of the printing enlargement of something small, a stamp really, as a result of which the perforation line takes on the dimension of a cloth fringe: a hanky's, a pillowcase's, a bedspread's, a petticoat's? Maybe I have a problem with fringed linen—a childhood trauma again? The day was hot and for a moment it felt like the enlargement of the stamp on the magazine's cover would go on and on, and envelop Belsize Park, Hamp- stead, and keep growing, larger and larger. A vision, you know. Too much reading of surrealist poets. Or else too many placards with the Politburo members' faces on the old retina—and the man on the stamp looks like one of them, for all his resemblances to Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard. Plus, of course, the Cyrillic . . . enough to get dizzy. But it wasn't like 'that. There was no vision. There was just a face, of the kind you wouldn't pay attention to were it not for the caption, which, apart from anything else, was in Cyrillic. At that moment I regretted that I knew Russian. I stood there groping for an English word to shield my wits from the familiarity that the Cyrillic letters exuded. As is often the case with mongrels, I couldn't come up with the right word instantly, and so I turned and left the store. I only remembered the word well outside, but because of what it was, I couldn't get myself back to the store to buy the issue. The word was "treachery."