Tremor of Intent Read Free Page A

of exterior friendship, though with many lacunae (war, peace, his marriage, my posting to Pulj); his last communication with the West was a picture post-card to myself, the message cryptic and, so I gather, still being pored over by the cipher-boys:
Two minutes to four – up all their pipes – martyrs’ blood flows through them
. Let us get certain things straight about Roper. Approach Number One will never work. I don’t think for one moment that Roper can be persuaded to go back to anything. He has this scientist’s thoroughness about disposing of the past. He never rummaged among old discarded answers. If he’s a heretic at all it’s your heresy he subscribes to – the belief that life can be better and man nobler. It’s not up to me, of course, to say what a load of bloody nonsense that is. It’s not up to me to have a philosophy at all, since I’m nothing more than a superior technician.
    I understand the reason, sir, for two approaches to Roper,persuasion first and force after. There’s the propaganda value of freedom of choice, even though the horse’s-mouth official letters in my jacket-lining neigh fantastic offers. And then, after a month or so, the judgement. Anyway, I confront Roper. I prepare to confront him by being not myself but Mr Sebastian Jagger (the rubber man wasn’t needed, of course, for my fake passport). Jagger, typewriter expert; why didn’t you christen me Qwert Yuiop? Jagger goes ashore and, in some restaurant lavatory, is swiftly transformed into something plausible and quacking, totally Slavonic. And then, if things go as they ought to go, a swift taxi journey to wherever Roper is at that hour of night, to be peeled off from the rest of the delegates of the scientific
sbyezd
. And then it will be I, very much the past, very much the old ways, not merely smelling of a West that has given him no answers but smelling of himself, an old formula discarded.
    You think he can be persuaded? Or rather, do you think I can find it in my heart to be all that persuasive? How far am I (I am able to speak boldly now, this being my last assignment) convinced enough to want to convince? It’s all been a bloody big game – the genocidal formulae, the rocketry, the foolproof early warning devices mere counters in it. But nobody, sir, is going to kill anybody. This concept of a megadeath is as remotely unreal as specular stone or any other mediaeval nonsense. Some day anthropologists will comment in gently concealed wonder on the ludic element in our serious flirting with collective suicide. For my part, I’ve always played the game of being a good technician, superb at languages, agile, light-fingered, cool. But otherwise I’m a void, a dark sack crammed with skills. I have a dream of life, but no one ideology will realise it for me better than any other. I mean a warm flat, a sufficiency of spirits, a record-player, the whole of
The Ring
on disc. I would be glad to be rid of my other appetites, since they represent disease, and disease, besides being expensive, robs one of self-sufficiency. A doctor I met in Mohammedia on that hashish-ringassignment persuaded me that a simple operation would take care of both, since they are somehow cognate. Ultimately I have a desire for a spacious loghouse on a vast Northern lake, conifers all about, all oxygen and chlorophyll, paddle-steamers honking through the mist. The bar on board the
Männikkö
is stocked with drinks of intriguing nomenclature –
Juhannus
,
Huhtikuu
,
Edustaja
,
Kreikka
,
Silmäpari
– and the captain, who has a large private income, is round-buyingly drunk but never offensive. They serve mouthwatering food – fish soused and salted, garnished with gherkins; slivers of hot spiced meat on toasted rye-and there are blonde pouting girls who twitch for savage anonymous love. Some day I will have that operation.
    Look in my glands and not in the psychologist’s