“No Führer now,” Liese shook out her tresses. “Have to attract through ideas, not charisma. Behavioral psychologists checking every word of our book. No mention of past, of Nazism. Just positive things. Warmth, love, progress, stability.”
Lessing was amused. “You could hire an actor… a ‘Vincent Dorn’ to give speeches “
Liese sniffed scornfully and buried her head in her arms to let him massage lotion into the nape of her neck. Mrs. Delacroix took him seriously, however: “We thought of that. We may do it yet, if we cannot find a charismatic leader. Speeches, television, public appearances… all are so important, n’est-ce pas? We have also thought of keeping Monsieur ‘Dom’ anonymous… comment?… incognito. But that could not continue after we become a public political force.”
The whole thing struck him as silly. A movement without a leader? A mob of psychologists collaborating with ad-men and ghost-writers to compose the Holy Writ? It was a TV executive’s wet dream! People were convinced by people, not by books: physical presence, words, and deeds — not abstract theories. Whatever else he may have been, Hitler had had the right idea about the realities of personal power. Hadn’t Alexander, Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus all made it without too much reliance upon tracts and manifestos? Marx and Engels had written books, of course, but then they themselves had not fought in the revolution that swept Czarist Russia into the dustbin. Men like Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin had led that, for better or for worse. Jameela’s Prophet Muhammad had had a book, of course, the Qur’an, but he could never have succeeded without charisma. He had given speeches, met people, argued issues, gathered adherents, fought opponents — and eventually won. No, Lessing knew from his own military experience that people wanted real, live human beings to lead them. That was why abstract, impersonal visions of God tended to become displaced by very human father-images, son-images, mother-images, and pantheons of saints, demigods, imams, gurus, holy mystics, or what have you. Human beings might die for an abstraction, but it would be another human being who convinced them the sacrifice was worth the candle.
He uttered a noncommittal grunt.
The swimming pool and its surrounding garden were as crystal-still as a photograph in some glossy resort brochure, an oasis of serenity cut off from the universe. Nothing entered without Mrs. Delacroix’s approval; nothing was allowed to change. It was as though there would always be sunlight; blue, chlorine-smelling water; tiles that were hot and wet and blindingly white; damp towels; gay-fringed, pink parasols; and little, rickety tables of glass and wire overflowing with bottles and magazines and all the bric-a-brac of leisure.
Liese rose to her feet and stretched. She picked up a towel, muttered something about a shower, and glided off, barefoot and mostly bare elsewhere as well, toward the house. Lessing’s eyes followed her of their own accord. Her legs were very good indeed.
“You will be kind to Liese?” Mrs. Delacroix’s voice sliced into his revery.
“What?”
“You know. I am neither naive nor yet quite senile, eh?”
It was useless to dissemble. “Neither of us — We haven’t made any moves yet.”
“You have both made it plain. I leave you two alone, and it becomes bedtime, no?”
He laughed at her turn of phrase. “Maybe. Anyway I have… other commitments… back in India. Nothing happens until I’ve decided about those. I don’t have fun, then run.”
“Bien. It should be what you both want.” She extended one waxen, paper-pale hand from the shadow into the sunlight. It looked almost disembodied. “You would know about Liese?”
He said nothing, and she took his silence for assent. “Liese is American, Alan. Like yourself. She ran away from home when she was twelve. She does not speak of it, but I think it was her father… child abuse… you know. The American family is more than half destroyed, the old values gone. She ended in one of your cities, was taken in by a Black gang, was put to work as a prostitute on the streets, then was sold to someone in New York who took her to Cairo… a pornographer, a broker in human flesh. One of our people saw her there and bought her… literally. He brought her to Frankfurt and made her… what do you call it?… a mannequin, a model of fashions. She was no common prostitute. Anyone could see that She had too much… I do not know the expression “
“Class,” Lessing murmured.
“Ah, oui, class. I was raised in the Free Republic of the Congo… now neither free nor a republic, but that is another story. My English is better than my German… my grandfather’s language… but my French is best. Do you speak French, Alan?”
He shook his head, and she gave him a mournful, little half-smile. “Too sad, you Americans. No languages. So. Liese suffered… I need not tell of it. You hear the effects in her speech: she does not find it easy to converse. She writes, though. Her writing is good and gets better.”
So that was why Liese spoke as she did. “My God,” he breathed. “How she must hate!”
“Ah? No. Not hatred. Not the way some women hate men, with less cause. Not Liese. She is hard and cautious, like a… a crab in a shell. Tough, ready to fight… but fragile, and inside very soft. She tries to be philosophical. What happened to her happens to many these days. She does not hate, but she does want to dismantle the system that hurt her. Replace it with a world in which such horrors cannot exist.”
“Who could blame her? But she’s an idealist. There’ll always be wars and killing and cruelty and exploitation and crime and prostitution No government, no ‘movement,’ no starry-eyed political philosophy will stop those.”
“There speaks the mercenary: the soldier, the pragmatist. Perhaps you are right, Alan. But we… Liese and the rest of us… have to try. Otherwise there is no point to life, eh?”
He wiped his face and shoulders roughly with the fluffy, blue towel Liese had given him. Suddenly the chlorine smell of the swimming pool was suffocating. “I have to get back to India. I don’t want to put you out….”
“Put me out? What does it mean? Oh, to disturb me. No, my secretary, Mrs. Van Tassel, has your ticket and documents. I shall add a gift to repay you for your services.” She rose to her feet, twitched her while sun-dress into place, and smiled. “So? You and Liese? Not now?”
He grinned back. “Later. Maybe.”
She laughed outright. “Liese needs a good man, Alan. Perhaps you are good enough? A challenge?”
He chuckled and followed her into the house.
Dinner was awkward. Neither an average, middle-class, American upbringing nor years in various armies had prepared Lessing for people who ale with twelve pieces of silverware. Thank God South Africa had at least abandoned dinner jackets and starched dickeys! Mrs. Delacroix’s six male guests were attired in a miscellany of sportswear, bush shirts, and business suits. The four women, including Liese, wore fashionable cheong-sam-like dresses slit up the thigh, made of a metallic-looking, silky, synthetic fabric and accompanied by matching bodices with a little over-jacket of translucent, lacy stuff. Sex had joyfully returned after long decades of stuffy, Born Again puritanism. The only one wearing a traditional dinner gown was their hostess herself, as regal and gracious as a portrait of some dowager empress.
Lessing found himself between an elderly Afrikaner and a younger man in the uniform of a captain of the South African police. The former sized Lessing up at once, made a polite remark or two, and then turned to the woman on his right to discuss horse racing in Johannesburg. The policeman was more forthcoming: bluff, balding, tanned, and familiar with the profession of arms. Mutual mercenary friends offered a starting point, and they went on to talk of native resistance groups, racial unrest in America (about which the policeman knew more than Lessing, who hadn’t lived there for years), and the present situation in his own country.