Meanwhile, it is clear that people cannot remember what happened during those five days. I mean this absolutely and precisely. When I try to remind them, I see that look I know so well, the glazed empty look. It is funny that it has taken me so long to recognise that look.
And I myself have more than once found my mind going dim as I try to recall exactly that atmosphere, or even that it all did happen.
It did happen.
It happened.
What happened?
At least one knows what is possible.
I have recollected what you said to me as you left that morning: Well, you can't win them all!
Ah, what nonchalance! What insouciance!
Of course there is a question which you can't expect us at the very least not to adumbrate. Which is, Why take so much trouble if you know in advance it is a write-off? At the most a 1,000-1 chance?
No, don't bother to answer.
Just as you said when I told you about Rachel, Well, better luck next time.
O.K., O.K., I am joking.
But only just.
I babble. Of necessity. Forgive me.
I have not been able to find anyone to bring this before. We are coming to the end of the Friendship and Learning Month, which is tedious beyond belief. The usual interminable meaningless bickering discussions about things that will never happen. The Leadership of the Youth Armies has passed a resolution agreeing to "attempt to adjust their activities with the administration of Pan-Europe."
I have several times mentioned His Nastiness to our Benefactors, if for no other reason than that it is amusing to see their hasty, embarrassed and overcorrect manner as they assure us that his visit was entirely in order and approved of.
Ah, but by whom, that is the question.
So, what do you want me to do next.
COMRADE CHEN LIU, to PEKING, COMMITTEE of PUBLIC DIRECTION and COMPREHENSIVE CO-ORDINATION
I have yet again to report hardship due to insufficient food supplies allocated to European sector. The levies on farm produce have caused the predicted passive resistance by farmers throughout the area. Over-ardour on the part of the Local Administration in fulfilling the laudable and legitimate demands of the Centre is counterproductive. From Ireland to the Urals, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean (the area for which I have the honour to be responsible) the people are suffering famine. I took the liberty of saying in my last Report that in my view the inelastic attitude towards the Pan-European area is due to an un-verbalised desire for revenge for centuries of colonial oppression. I humbly begged that the Council should consider ways of making representations to the Aligned Committees for the Emergent Nations to consider well the results of their policy. If it is desired to exterminate the peoples of Pan-Europe, then this should be formulated and steps taken to put plans into action. I have been informed by my envoy to you that my words on this subject were considered offensive. I hope that my record of Service to the People will speak for me. It has never been part of our policy to inflict wholesale suffering on the countries we have taken under our Benevolent Tutelage. It has always been our aim to re-educate where possible even those recalcitrant sections of the population who show little signs of understanding. Therefore I took the liberty - and do again in this Report - to ask if it is the considered policy of our Council to support the Aligned Committees for the Emergent Nations? - if it is, in fact, the intention to empty Europe for colonisation from the South? If this is the aim, then I find myself impelled to protest, and purely on the grounds of expediency. Whatever happens in Europe will be ascribed to our Beneficent Guidance. All eyes are upon us. The fact that local representatives have ceased resistance due to our re-education, of various degrees of stringency, and have mostly been replaced by our guidance, adds weight to the argument in favour of making sure that the policies followed by the Aligned Committees for the Emergent Nations will add to our reputation as the true Elder Brother of the Deprived peoples of the world.
Letter enclosed with this Report to CHEN LIU'S friend, Chairman of the Council, KUYUANC
I have not heard from you. Does that mean you did not get my last letter? Or that you did - I do not know which thought is worse.
If you did, you will not need to read this.
I beg of you to do what you can. Even in the camps and townships of the Youth Armies, which are at least regularly if insufficiently supplied, there is hardship. The suffering generally is offensive and severe. Is it that our Council now bows before the Emergent Nations? The Centre is dominated by the limbs? Is it that this is not weakness but policy? Do we no longer feel able even to express an opinion? Or we protest, but privately? Out here in the colonies of course it is hard to keep adequately informed. But I do what I can: for instance, an analysis of the innumerable meetings, conferences, councils, of the last twelve months through the southern hemisphere, reveals that there were over a hundred speeches on the theme of revenge, and not one (or one recorded) expression of moderation, or even of an intelligent intention to use and exploit human and other resources, rather than destroying them.
My old friend, I find myself in a mental and emotional conflict that keeps me awake at night, and destroys my pleasure in my work for our great People. When you told me you would send me to oversee Pan-Europe, I told you I was not necessarily the best man for the job. Your reply was that a man conscious of reservations and emotional difficulties would be better than one who was not. I wonder! I work daily, hourly, with our officials, men and women of the highest calibre, and who seem to suffer no indecision in their work. And yet, to repeat, for the last few months this work has not been - I hope? - the results of decisions from us, the Centre.
I loathe the white-skinned peoples. Physically they repel me. Their smell offends me. Their avidity and greed have never struck me as anything but disgusting. They are clumsy in movement, awkward in thought, unsubtle, overbearing. Their assumption of superiority is that of the country bumpkin, the big man of the little village, who comes to the city and does not know that the sophisticates find him ludicrous as he swaggers and boasts.
Their savagery has never done less than appal me. The cold-bloodedness of the intentions behind their imposition of opium, the wanton destruction of our cultural heritage, or its theft, their inferiority... but I need not go on, for we have discussed it often enough. I live among a race I dislike to the roots of my being. Even in their decline and their subjection, some of them, indeed, many of them, manage to behave as if they have been unjustly deprived of a sinecure, and a few even manage the airs of dispossessed royalty bravely suffering the rabble.
Imagine my situation, then, forced to stand by while a policy is being implemented that my emotions applaud, my lowest instincts enjoy, that returns me to savagery. My old friend, I am writing under pressures you will surely understand, and you will make allowances. I believe that our cadres here are in fact as cheerful and enthusiastic in their work as-they seem to be. They can be so cheerful only because (a) they applaud the policies of the Emergent Nations and approve what they see and have to do, or (b) they do not understand what it is they are seeing - do not understand what it means for us that these policies are being implemented, for surely they cannot be our policies, our Will? I watch them and wonder if it is possible that our Great People can so willingly agree to deliberate mass murder, or if perhaps they are able to persuade themselves that what is going on is something else.