Shikasta

When they had sexual relations - almost at once, since for her sex was an appetite to be fed, and no more - he felt confirmed in his deepest sense of himself: the cold efficiency of the business, never far from perversity, seemed to him a statement of what life was.

He had never felt warmth for any human being, only admiration, a determination to understand excellence, as he defined it.

He did not want, or claim, attention from the public or the press or any propaganda instrument: the world was contemptible to him. But when he had pulled off, with or without the "network" (he often worked alone, or with The Brand), a coup that was always inside the empire of one of his families, he would leave his mark, so that they should know whom they had to thank: an X, like that of an illiterate.

In bed with The Brand, he would trace an X over the raised pattern of the concentration camp number on her forearm, particularly in orgiastic moments.

He was never caught. Later, he joined one of the international police forces that helped to govern Shikasta in its last days.

INDIVIDUAL SIX (Terrorist Type 8)

The parents of this individual were in camps of various kinds throughout World War II. The father was Jewish. That they survived at all was "impossible." There are thousands of documents testifying to these "impossible" survivals, each one a history of dedication to survival, i

The parents did not make friends easily: their experience had cut them off from the people around them, all of whom had been reduced to the edge of extinction by the war - but few had been in the camps. The parents did not often speak about their years in the camps, but when they did, what they said took hold of the child with the strength of an alternative vision. What did these two rooms they lived in, poor, but warm and safe, have to do with that nightmare his parents spoke of? Sometimes at this time of life, youngsters in the grip of glandular upheaval crystallise in opposition to their parents with a vigour that preserves opposition for the rest of their lives.

This boy looked at his parents, and was appalled. How was it possible? was his thought.

I digress here to the incredulity referred to in my report on Individual Three, who spent years examining the deprivations of the people around him with: How is it possible? I simply don't believe it! Meaning partly: Why do they put up with it? Meaning, too: That human beings should treat each other like this? I don't believe it!

In Individual Six this incredulity was wider far than that of Individual Three, who saw the streets around him, then a town, and could only with difficulty envisage the Northwest fringes, let alone the central landmass, the world: it took years of experience in the war to enlarge his boundaries.

But Individual Six felt himself to be the war, and the war had been a global event: had printed his vision of life as a system of interlocking, interacting processes.

From the time he first began to think for himself, he was unable to see the developments of events as the generation before his had done. There was no such thing as a "guilty nation," any more than there could be defeated or victorious nations. A single nation could not be solely responsible for what it did, since groups of nations were a whole, interacting as a whole. The geographical area called "Germany" - it had become another name for wickedness - could not be responsible entirely for the mass murders and brutalities it had perpetrated: how could it be, when one day with the facts in a library was enough to show that "World War II" was multicaused, an expression of the whole of the Northwest fringes, a development of "World War I." How was it possible that these old people saw things in this isolated piecemeal way, like children, or like idiots! They were simple-minded. They were stupid! Above all, they did not seem to have any idea at all of what they were like.

A boy of fifteen imposed on himself a regime completely distressing to his parents. He did not have a room of his own, but there was a folding bed in the kitchen, and this he covered with what they had been given in the camps: a single, thin, dirty blanket. He shaved his head, and kept it shaved. On one day a week he ate only the diet provided in the camp during the final days of the war: hot greasy water, potato peelings, scraps from rubbish bins. He was careful, not to say obsessed, in getting his "food" for himself, and put the filthy stuff on the table at mealtimes, eating reverently - a sacrament. Meanwhile, his parents ate their frugal meals; their damaged stomachs could not absorb normal amounts of food. He read to them passages from biographies, accounts of conditions in camps, the negotiations or lack of them that led to "World War II" - always stressing multicause and effect: if that nation had done that, then this would not have happened. If such and such warnings had been heeded... that step taken... that statesman listened to...

For these poor people it was as if a nightmare they had escaped from only by a miracle had returned and was taking over their lives. They had made for themselves a little sheltered place, where they could believe themselves kept safe, because evil was the property of that other place, or that other nation; wickedness was contained in the past, in history - terror might come again, but thank God, that would be the future, and by then with luck, they would be dead and safe... and now their refuge was being broken open, not by "history" or "the future," but by this precious child of theirs, who was all they had been been able to bring out from the holocaust.

The father begged him to take his truths elsewhere.

"Are they true or not?" the youngster challenged.

"Yes... no... I don't care, for God's sake..."

"You don't care!"

"Your mother... you don't know what she had to put up with, go easy on her!"

The boy added to his discipline by wearing, on certain days of the week, dirty rags and tatters. All over the walls of the kitchen, which after all was the only room he had, and he was entitled to consider them his, were a thousand pictures of the concentration camps, but not only those of the Northwest fringes: soon the pictured record of the atrocious treatment of man by man covered the walls.

He sat quiet at the table, his father and mother hastily eating their meal in a silence that was a prayer he would not "begin again" - and then he would begin again, reciting facts, figures, litanies of destruction, deaths by ill treatment and torture in communist countries, non-communist countries, any country anywhere.

[SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3011, The Age of Ideology, "Self-Portraits of Nations." Geographical areas, or temporary associations of peoples for the purposes of defence or aggression. Such an entity capable of believing itself different, better, more "civilised" than another, when in fact to an outside view there is nothing to choose between them. And VOL. 3010, Psychology of the Masses, "Self-Protective Mechanisms."]