The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  He led me from the house and across the courtyard, carrying my case in one hand and bearing my weight with the other, because the bath had weakened me as well as easing the pain. I peered round for the henchmen but saw none.

  “The cold air will be good for you,” he said, with the confidence of an expert.

  He led me to a parked car, and it did not resemble either of the cars that had taken part in my arrest. A toy steering wheel lay on the back seat. We drove down empty streets. Sometimes I dozed. We reached a pair of white iron gates guarded by militia.

  “Don’t look at them,” he ordered me, and showed them his papers, while I dozed again.

  We got out of the car and stood on a grass clifftop. An inshore wind froze our faces. Mine felt big as two footballs. My mouth had moved into my left cheek. One eye had closed. There was no moon and the sea was a growl behind the salt mist. The only light came from the city, behind us. Occasionally phosphorous sparks slipped past us, or puffs of white spume spun away into the blackness. This is where I’m supposed to die, I thought as I stood beside him; first he beat me, then he gives me a warm bath, now he shoots me and shoves me over the cliff. But his hands were hanging glumly at his sides and there was no gun in them, and his eyes—what I could make out of them—were fixed on the starless darkness, not on me; so perhaps someone else was going to shoot me, someone already waiting in the dark. If I had had the energy, I could have killed Jerzy first. But I hadn’t, and didn’t feel the need. I thought of Mabel, but without any sense of loss or gain. I wondered how she’d manage living on a pension, whom she’d find. Fräulein Stefanie is not at home, I remembered . . . Then perhaps it was Stefanie who answered, Smiley was saying . . . So many unanswered prayers, I was thinking. But so many never offered, either. I was feeling very drowsy.

  At last Jerzy spoke, his voice no less despondent than before. “I have brought you here because there isn’t a microphone on earth can hear us. I wish to spy for your country. I need a good professional to act as intermediary. I have decided to choose you.”

  Once more I lost my sense of time and place. But perhaps he had lost his too, for he had turned his back on the sea and with his hand clutched to his leather hat to hold it against the wind, he had undertaken a mournful study of the inland lights, scowling at things that needed no scowling at, sometimes punching the windtears from his cheeks with his big fists.

  “Why should anyone spy for Holland?” I asked him.

  “Very well, I propose to spy for Holland,” he replied wearily, indulging a pedant. “Therefore I need a good professional Dutchman who can keep his mouth shut. Knowing what fools you Dutchmen have employed against us in the past, I am understandably selective. However, you have passed the test. Congratulations. I select you.”

  I thought it best to say nothing. Probably I didn’t believe him. “In the false compartment of your suitcase you will find a wad of Polish secret documents,” he continued, in a tone of dejection. “At Gdansk airport you will have no Customs problems, naturally. I have given orders for them not to examine your luggage. For all they know, you are by now my agent. In Frankfurt, you are on home ground. I shall work for you and nobody else. Our next meeting will be in Berlin on May 5th. I shall be attending the May Day celebrations to mark the glorious victory of the proletariat.”

  He was trying to light a fresh cigarette, but the wind kept putting out his matches. So he took his hat off and lit the cigarette inside the crown, lowering his fat face to it as if he were drinking water from a stream.

  “Your people will wish to know my motive,” he continued when he had taken a deep draught of cigarette smoke. “Tell them—” Suddenly at a loss, he sank his head into his shoulders and peered round at me as if pleading for advice on how to deal with idiots. “Tell them I’m bored. Tell them I’m sick of the work. Tell them the Party’s a bunch of crooks. They know that anyway, but tell them. I’m a Catholic. I’m a Jew. I’m a Tartar. Tell them whatever the hell they want to hear.”

  “They may want to know why you have chosen to come to the Dutch,” I said. “Rather than to the Americans, or the French or whoever.”

  He thought about that too, puffing at his cigarette in the darkness. You Dutch had some good joes,” he said ruminatively. “I got to know some of them pretty well. They did a good job till that bastard Haydon came along.” An idea occurred to him. “Tell them my father was a Battle of Britain pilot,” he suggested. “Got himself shot down over Kent. That should please them. You know Kent?”

  “Why should a Dutchman know Kent?” I said.

  If I had weakened, I could have told him that, before our so called “friendly” separation, Mabel and I had bought a house in Tunbridge Wells. But I didn’t, which was as well, because when Head Office came to check the story out, there was no record of Jerzy’s father having flown anything larger than a paper kite. And when I put this to Jerzy several years later—long after his loyalty to the perfidious British had been demonstrated beyond all doubt—he just laughed, and said his father was an old fool who cared for nothing but vodka and potatoes.

  So why?

  For five years Jerzy was my secret university of espionage, but his contempt for motive—his own particularly—never relaxed. First we idiots do what we want to do, he said; then we look round for justifications for having done it. All men were idiots to him, he told me, and we spies were the biggest idiots of all.

  At first I suspected that he was spying for vengeance, and drew him out on the people above him in the hierarchy who might have slighted him. He hated them all, himself the most.

  Then I decided he was spying for ideological reasons, and that his cynicism was a disguise for the finer yearnings he had discovered in his middle age. But when I attempted to use my wiles to break his cynicism down—“Your family, Jerzy, your mother, Jerzy. Admit you’re proud to have become a grandfather”— I found only more cynicism beneath. He felt nothing for any of them, he retorted, but so icily that I concluded that he did indeed, as he maintained, hate the entire human race, and that his savagery, and perhaps his betrayal too, were the simple expression of this hatred.

  As to the West, it was run by the same idiots who ran everything in the world, so what’s the difference? And when I told him this simply was not so, he became as defensive of his nihilist creed as any other zealot, and I had to rein myself in for fear of angering him seriously.

  So why? Why risk his neck, his life, his livelihood and the family he hated, to do something for a world he despised?

  The Church? I asked him that too, and significantly, as I think now, he bridled. Christ was a manic depressive, he retorted. Christ needed to commit suicide in public, so he provoked the authorities until they did him the favour. “Those God-thumper guys are all the same,” he said with contempt. “I’ve tortured them. I know.”

  Like most cynics, he was a Puritan, and this paradox repeated itself in him in several ways. When we offered to drop money for him, open a Swiss bank account, the usual, he flew into a rage and declared he was not some “cheap informant.” When I picked a moment—on the instruction if Head Office—to assure him that if ever things went wrong, we would spare no effort to get him out and provide him with a new identity in the West, his contempt was absolute: “I’m a Polish creep, but I would rather face a firing squad of my fellow creeps than die a traitor in some capitalist pigsty.”

  As to life’s other comforts, we could offer him nothing he had not got. His wife was a scold, he said, and going home after a heavy day at the office bored him. His mistress was a young fool, and after an hour with her he preferred a game of billiards to her conversation.

  Then why? I kept asking myself when I had exhausted my checklist of the Service’s standard-issue motives.

  Meanwhile, Jerzy continued to fill our coffers. He was turning his Service inside out as neatly as Haydon had ever done with ours. When Moscow Centre gave him orders, we knew of them before he passed them to his underlings. He photographed everything that came within
his reach; he took risks I begged him not to take. He was so heedless that sometimes he left me wondering whether, like the Christ he was so determined to deny, he was looking for a public death. It was only the unflagging efficiency of what we were pleased to call his cover work that protected him from suspicion. For that was the dark side of his balancing act: God help the Western agent, real or imagined, who was invited to make his voluntary confession at Jerzy’s hands.

  Only once in the five years that I ran him did he seem to let slip the clue I was searching for. He was tired to death. He had been attending a conference of Warsaw Pact Intelligence chiefs in Bucharest, in the midst of fighting off charges of brutality and corruption against his Service at home. We met in West Berlin, in a pension on the Kurfürstendamm which catered to the better type of representative. He was a really tired torturer. He sat on my bed, smoking and answering my follow-up questions about his last batch of material. He was red-eyed. When we had finished, he asked for a whisky, then another.

  “No danger is no life,” he said, tossing three more rolls of film on the counterpane. “No danger is dead.” He took out grimy brown handkerchief and carefully wiped his heavy face with it. “No danger, you do better stay home, look after the baby.”

  I preferred not to believe it was danger he was talking about. What he was talking about, I decided, was feeling, and his terror that by ceasing to feel he was ceasing to exist—which perhaps was why he was so devoted to instilling feeling in others. For that moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of why he was sitting with me in the room breaking every rule in his book. He was keeping his spirit alive at a time of his life when it was beginning to look like dying.

  The same night I dined with Stefanie at an American restaurant ten minutes’ walk from the pension where Jerzy and I had met. I had wangled her telephone number from a sister in Munich. She was as tall and beautiful as I remembered her, and determined to convince me she was happy. Oh, life was perfect, Ned, she declared. She was living with this terribly distinguished academic, not in his first youth any more—but look here, nor are we—and completely adorable and wise. She told me his name. It meant nothing to me. She said she was pregnant by him. It didn’t show.

  “And you, Ned, how did it go for you?” she asked, as if we were two generals reporting to each other from successful, but separate, campaigns.

  I gave her my most confident smile, the one that had earned me the trust of my joes and colleagues in the years since I had seen her.

  “Oh, I think it worked out pretty well actually, thanks, yes,” I said, with seeming British understatement. “After all, you can’t expect one person to be everything you need, can you? It’s a pretty good partnership, I’d say. Good parallel living.”

  “And you still do that work?” she said. “Ben’s work?”

  “Yes.”

  It was the first time either of us had mentioned him. He was living in Ireland, she said. A cousin of his had bought a tumbledown estate in County Cork. Ben sort of caretook for him while he wasn’t there, stocking the river and looking after the farm and so on.

  I asked whether she ever saw him.

  “No,” she said. “He won’t.”

  I would have driven her home, but she preferred a cab. We waited in the street till it came, and it seemed to take a terribly long time. As I closed the door on her, her head tipped forward, as if she had dropped something on the floor. I waved her out of sight but she didn’t wave back.

  The nine o’clock news was showing us an outdoor meeting of Solidarity in Gdansk, where a Polish Cardinal was exhorting an enormous crowd to moderation. Losing interest, Mabel settled the Daily Telegraph on her lap and resumed her crossword. At first the crowd heard the Cardinal noisily. Then with the devotion Poles are famous for, they fell silent. After his address, the Cardinal moved among his flock, bestowing blessings and accepting homage. And as one dignitary after another was brought to him, I picked out Jerzy hovering in the background, like the ugly boy excluded from the feast. He had lost a lot of weight since he had retired, and I guessed that the social changes had not been kind to him. His jacket hung on him like someone else’s; his once-formidable fists were hardly visible inside the sleeves.

  Suddenly the Cardinal has spotted him, just as I had.

  The Cardinal freezes as if in doubt of his own feelings, and for a moment makes himself neater somehow, almost in obedience, pressing in his elbows and drawing back his shoulders to attention. Then slowly his arms lift again and he gives an order to one of his attendants, a young priest who seems reluctant to obey it. The Cardinal repeats the order, the priest clears a path to Jerzy; the two men face each other, the secret policeman and the Cardinal. Jerzy winces, as if he has digestion pains. The Cardinal leans forward and speaks in Jerzy’s ear. Awkwardly, Jerzy kneels to receive the Cardinal blessing.

  And each time I replay this moment I see Jerzy’s eyes close apparently in pain. But what is he repenting? His brutality? His loyalty to a vanished cause? Or his betrayal of it? Or is squeezing the eyes shut merely the instinctive response of a torturer receiving the forgiveness of a victim?

  I fish. I drop into my little reveries. My love of English landscape has, if possible, increased. I think of Stefanie and Bella, and my other half-had women. I lobby our Member of Parliament about the filthy river. He’s a Conservative, but what on earth does he imagine he’s conserving? I’ve joined one of the sounder environmentalist groups; I collect signatures on petitions. The petitions are ignored. I won’t play golf, I never would. But I’ll walk round with Mabel on a Wednesday afternoon, provided she’s playing alone. I encourage her. The dog enjoys himself. Retirement is no time to be wandering lost, or puzzling how to reinvent mankind.

  8

  My students had decided to give Smiley a rough ride, just as they’d done to me from time to time. We’d be running along perfectly smoothly—a double session on natural cover, say, in the late afternoon—when one of them would start hectoring me, usually by adopting an anarchic stance which nobody, in his right mind could sustain. Then a second would chime in, then all of them, so that if I didn’t have any sense of humour shining-ready—and I’m only human—they’d be trampling me till the bell rang for close of play. And next day all would be forgotten: they’d have fed whatever little demon had got hold of them and now they’d like to go back to learning, please, so where were we? At first I used to brood over these occasions, suspect conspiracy, hunt for ringleaders. Then cautiously I came to recognise them as spontaneous expressions of resistance to the unnatural harness that these children had chosen to put on.

  But when they started in on Smiley, their guest of honour and mine, even questioning the entire purpose of his life’s work, my tolerance ended with a snap. And this time the offender was not Maggs, either, but the demure Clare, his girlfriend, who had sat so adoringly opposite Smiley throughout dinner.

  “No, no, Ned,” Smiley protested, as I leapt angrily to my feet. “Clare has a valid point. Nine times out of ten a good journalist can tell us quite as much about a situation as the spies can. Very often they’re sharing the same sources anyway. So why not scrap the spies and subsidise the newspapers? It’s a point that should be answered in these changeable times. Why not?”

  Reluctantly I resumed my seat, while Clare, snuggling close against Maggs, continued to gaze angelically at her victim while her colleagues smothered their grins.

  But where I would have taken refuge in humour, Smiley elected to treat her sally seriously:

  “It is perfectly true,” he agreed, “that most of our work is either useless, or duplicated by overt sources. The trouble is, the spies aren’t there to enlighten the public, but governments.”

  And slowly I felt his spell re-unite them. They had moved their chairs to him in a disordered half-circle. Some of the girls were sprawled becomingly on the floor.

  “And governments, like anyone else, trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don’t,” he said. Thus delicately passing beyon
d Clare’s provocative question, he addressed a larger one: “Spying is eternal,” he announce simply. “If governments could do without it, they never would. They adore it. If the day ever comes when there are no enemies left in the world, governments will invent them for us, so don’t worry. Besides—who says we only spy on enemies? All history teaches us that today’s allies are tomorrow’s rivals. Fashion may dictate priorities, but foresight doesn’t. For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars, and madmen in the world we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.”

  And with the topic, thus neatly turned back to their own future, he once more warned them of its perils:

  “There’s no career on earth more cockeyed than the one you’ve picked,” he assured them, with every sign of satisfaction. “You’ll be at your most postable while you’re least experienced, and by the time you’ve learned the ropes, no one will be able to send you anywhere without a trade description round your necks. Old athletes know they’ve played their best games when they were in their prime. But spies in their prime are on the shelf, which is why they take so ungraciously to middle age, and start counting the cost of living how they’ve lived.”

  Though his hooded gaze to all appearance remained fixed upon his brandy, I saw him cast a sideways glance at me. “And then, at a certain age, you want the answer,” he continued. “You want the rolled-up parchment in the inmost room that tells you who runs your lives and why. The trouble is, that by then you’re the very people who know best that the inmost room is bare. Ned, you’re not drinking. You’re a brandy traitor. Fill him up, someone.”

  It is an uncomfortable truth of the period of my life that follows that I recall it as a single search the object of which was unclear to me. And that the object, when I found him, turned out to be the lapsed spy Hansen.