Shikasta

She had taken part in demonstrations at university, and, looking back on them, it seemed to her that during the hours of ru

She took to slipping away from home when there were demonstrations, for a few hours of intoxication. It did not matter what the occasion was, or the cause. Then, by chance, she found herself at the front of a crowd fighting the police, and soon she was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with a policeman, a young man who grabbed her, called her insulting names, and tossed her like a bundle of rags into the arms of another, who threw her back. She screamed and struggled, and she was dragged away from the police like a trophy and found herself with a young man whose name she knew as "a leader."

He was a common type of that time: narrow-minded, ill-informed, dogmatic, humourless - a fanatic who could exist only in a group. She admired him completely and without reservation, and had sex with him that night before returning home. He was indifferent to her, but made a favour of it.

She now set herself to win this youth. She wanted to be "his woman." He was flattered when it became known that this girl was the daughter of one of the city's - no, the Northwest fringes' - rich families. But he was stern, even brutal with her, making it a test of her devotion to the cause (and himself, for he saw these as the same) that she should engage herself more and more in dangerous activity. This was not the serious, well-pla

She enjoyed it. More and more her life was spent dealing with the police. He was always being arrested, and she was in and out of police stations standing bail, or going with him in police wagons, or handing out leaflets about him and associates. These activities came to the notice of her parents, but after consultation with other parents, they consoled themselves with the formula: young people will be young people.

She was furious at their attitude: she was not being taken seriously. Her lover took her seriously. So did the police. She allowed herself to be arrested and spent some days in jail. Once - twice - three times. And then her parents insisted on bailing her out and so she was always leaving "her man" and her comrades in police cells while she was being driven home behind a chauffeur in one of the family cars.

She changed her name, and left home, insisting that she should live with her man. Which meant, a group of twelve or so young people. She accepted everything, living in a filthy hovel that had been condemned years before. She exulted in the discomfort, the dirt. She found herself cooking and cleaning and waiting on her man and his friends. They took a certain pleasure in this, because of her background, but she felt she was taken seriously, even that she was being forgiven.

Her parents found her, came after her, and she sent them away. They insisted on opening bank accounts for her, despatching messengers with cash, food, artefacts of all kinds, clothes. They were giving her what they had always given her - things.

Her lover would sit, legs astraddle on a hard chair, arms folded on the back of it, watching her with a cold sarcastic smile, waiting to see what she would do.

She did not value what she knew had cost her parents nothing enough to return them: but dedicated all these things, and the money, to "the cause."

Her lover was indifferent. That they eat anything pleasant, wear anything attractive, care about being warm or comfortable, seemed to him contemptible. He and his cronies discussed her, her class position, her economic position, her psychology, at length, shuffling and reshuffling the jargon of the left-wing phrase books. She listened feeling unworthy, but: taken seriously.

He demanded of her that at the next "demo" she should seriously assault a policeman. She did it without question: never had she felt so fulfilled. She was three months in prison, where her lover visited her once. He visited others more often. Why? she humbly wondered. Not all of them were of the poor and the ignorant; one of his associates was in fact quite well off, and educated. But she was very rich, yes, that must be it. They were all more worthy than she was. In prison, among the other prisoners, most of them unpolitical, she radiated a smiling unalterable conviction which manifested itself as humility. She was always doing things no one else would do. Dirty tasks and punishment were food and drink to her. The prisoners christened her, disgusted, the Saint; but she took it as a compliment. "I am trying to be worthy to become a real member of - " and she supplied the name of her political group. "To become a real socialist one has to suffer and aspire."

When she came out, her man was living with another woman. She accepted it: of course it was because she was not good enough. She served them. She waited on them. She crouched on the floor outside the room her lover and the woman were wrapped together in, comparing herself to a dog, glorying in her abasement, and she muttered, like the phrases of a rosary, I will be worthy, I will overcome, I will show them, I will... and so on.

She took a kitchen knife to the next "demo" and did not even look to see if it was sharpened: the gesture of carrying it was enough. Intoxicated, lifted above herself, she fought and struggled, a Valkyrie with flying dirty blond hair, reddened blue eyes, a fixed, ugly smile. (In her family she had been noticed for her "sweet gentle look.") She attacked policemen with her fists, and then took out the - as it happened - blunt knife, and hacked about her with it. But she was not being arrested. Others were. There was such a disproportion between the atmosphere, and even the purpose, of this demonstration, and her appearance and her frenzy, that the police were puzzled by her. A senior official sent the word around that she was not to be arrested: she was clearly unbalanced. Ecstatic with renewed effort, she yelled and waved the knife about, but perceived that the demonstration was ending and people streaming home. She was not being taken seriously. She was standing watching the arrested being piled into the police vans like a child turned away from a party, the knife held in her hand as if she were intending to chop meat or vegetables with it.

A group of people had been watching her: not only this day, but at previous demonstrations.

A girl standing like a heroic statue on the edge of the pavement with the knife at the ready in her hand, hair falling bedraggled round a swollen and reddened face, weeping tears of angry disappointment, saw in front of her a man waiting for her to notice him. He had a smile which she thought kind. His eyes were "stern" and "penetrating": he understood her emotional type very well.

"I think you should come with me," he suggested.

"Why?" said she, all belligerence, which nevertheless suggested a readiness to obey.

"You can be of use."

She automatically took a step towards him, but stopped herself, confused.

"What to?"

"You can be of use to socialism."

Briefly on to her face flitted the expression that means: You can't get me as easily as that! while phrases from the vocabulary whirled through her brain.

"Your particular capacities and qualities are just what are needed," he said.

She went with him.

This group was in a large shabby flat on the outskirts of the city, a workman's home, one of the refuges of these twelve young women and men whose leader had accosted her. While the circumstances - poverty made worse, and emphasised - of her previous living place had been of emotional necessity to the work of self-definition of her previous group, these people were indifferent to how they lived, and moved from opulence, to discomfort, to middle-class comfort in the space of a day, as necessary, without making anything of what they were surrounded by. The girl adapted herself at once. Although she had been lying, exulting in her misery, outside the door of her lover and his new woman, for days, now she hardly thought of that life - where she had not been appreciated. She did not immediately see what was to be asked of her, but was patient, obedient, gentle, doing any task that suggested itself.