When he got home from an extensive walking tour, he told his wife he was going to sue himself.
"You are going to what?"
"I am going to put myself on trial."
"You have gone crazy, you have," said she, quite accurately, of course, departing to tell friends and colleagues that he had not yet got over whatever it was that "was eating him."
He appeared at a meeting of his union and informed them that he was going to put himself on trial, "on behalf of us all," and invited their co-operation.
They indulged him.
But he could not find anyone to take his case.
At that time exemplary trials of every kind were not uncommon. A group of people would set up a trial of some process or institution that seemed to them inadequate or dishonest.
What our friend wanted was to set up a trial where his youthful self prosecuted his middle-aged self, asking what had happened to the ideals, the vision, the ability to see individuals as infinitely capable of development, the hatred of pettiness and evasion, the hatred above all of lies, and double talk, the deceits of the conference tables and committees, the public announcements, the public face.
He wanted that burning, fiery, hungry, marvellous young man to stand up in public and expose and shred to pieces the awful dishonest smiling tool and puppet that he had become.
He went from lawyer to lawyer. Individuals. Then organisations. There were a thousand small political groupings, with different aims, or at least formulations.
The big political parties, the big trade unions, all the organs of government had become so enormous, so cumbersome, so ridden with bureaucracy, that nothing could get done except through the continually forming and re-forming pressure groups: it was government by pressure group, administration by pressure group, for government could not initiate, it could only respond. But all these groups, sometimes admirable for their purpose, had ideologies and allegiances, and not one was prepared to take on this odd and freakish case, and not one saw that incorruptible, truthful young man as he did. They indulged him. Or, again and again, he saw that he was about to find himself on some platform defending partisan causes. He was going from group to group, engaged in interminable and usually acrimonious discussions, arguments, definitions: at first he was prepared to see the acrimony as a sign of inner strength, "integrity," but then could no longer. He wondered if what he admired in himself, when young, had been no more than intolerance, the energy that is the result of identification with a limited objective?
It was not long before he had a heart attack, and then another, and died.
If Taufiq had been there, the case would have been perfectly adapted to his capacities.
He would not have permitted this "trial" to be freakish, or silly, or self-advertising. It would have captured the imaginations of a generation, focussing inner questionings and doubts; have led above all to a deeper understanding by young people of the rapid shifts and changes in the recent past, which to them seemed so distant.
INDIVIDUAL FOUR (Terrorist Type 3)
[For a list of the different types of terrorists produced during this period, SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III.]
This young woman was known to her colleagues, and to the world in her brief moment of exposure, as The Brand.
She had spent her childhood in concentration camps, where her parents died. If there were members of her family still alive, she made no attempt to trace them. She was given a home by foster parents with whom she was obedient, correct - a shadow. They were not real to her. Only people who had been in the camps were real for her. With them she maintained contact. They were her friends, because they shared a knowledge of "what the world is really like." She was part-Jewish, but did not identify particularly with any aspect of being Jewish. As soon as she was grown up, pressures came on her to be normal. To these she responded by calling herself The Brand. She had refused to remove the tattoo of the camps. Now she had shirts, sweaters, with her brand on them, in black. In bed with her "lovers" - where she challenged the world in the cold indifferent way that was her style - she would take the fingers of the man or woman (she was bisexual) and smile as she placed them on the brand on her forearm.
She sought out, more and more, people who had been in concentration camps, refugee camps, prisons. Several times she slipped through frontiers to enter camps, prisons: these exploits were "impossible." Daring the "impossible" she was alive, as she never was otherwise. She prepared more difficult exploits for herself. She even lived as a member of a corrective prison in a certain Northwest fringe country for a year. The inmates saw her as engaged in some political task, but she was testing herself. For what? But her "historical role" had not yet been "minted by history": her vocabulary consisted entirely of political slogans or cliches, mostly of the left, together with concentration camp and prison jargon. At that stage she did not see herself with a definite future. She had no home of her own, but moved from one flat to another in a dozen cities of the Northwest fringes. These were owned by people like herself, some of whom had ordinary jobs, or got money illegally in one way or another. Money did not matter to her. She always wore trousers, and a shirt or sweater, and if these did not have on them her brand, she wore it on a silver bracelet.
She was a stocky plain girl, with nothing remarkable about her; but people would find themselves watching her, uneasy because of this coldly observant presence. She was always in command of herself, and hostile, unless when with her other selves, the products of the camps. Then she was affectionate, in a clumsy childish way. But only one other person knew the full details of her exploits among the camps and prisons. This was a man called "X."
When terrorist groups sprang up everywhere, most of them of younger people than she, The Brand was not far from a legend. People saw this as a danger, "exhibitionism," and kept clear of her; but in that network of flats, houses, where these people moved, she had always just left, or would soon be there, someone knew her, she had helped somebody. One man, respected among them, who was about to start, correctly and formally, a group of whom he would be "leader" - though the word was understood differently among them - refused to talk about her, but allowed it to be understood that she was more skilled and brave than anyone he had known. He insisted that she should be asked to be a member of his group: insisted against opposition.
He had said she was a mistress of disguise.
She came to a flat one afternoon in an industrial city in the north of the Northwest fringes. It was a bitter cold day, snowing, a freezing wind. Four people in their twenties, two men, two women, saw this woman enter: blond, sunburned, a little overfed, in a fur coat that was vulgar and expensive, with the good-humoured easy smile of the indulged and sheltered of this world. This middle-class woman sat down fussily, guarding her handbag that had cost a fortune but was a bit shabby, in the way people do who care for their possessions. Her audience burst out laughing. She became an elder sister to them, an infinitely clever comrade, who had always done, and with success, more difficult things than any of them had dreamed of. This circle of outlaws was her family, and would have to be till death, for they could never leave such a circle and return to ordinary life - a condition that was not desirable or understandable to any of them. Her self-challenges, her feats, were disclosed by her, discussed, and all kinds of practical lessons drawn from them.