The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  “During his confinement, he has been guilty of many breaches of regulation. He has hoarded food and attempted to buy the collaboration of comrades in his plans to escape.”

  The student sighed and made more notes “What else has he failed to mention?” he asked patiently.

  “He has been wearing his foot chains improperly. When the chains were being fastened, he braced his feet illegally, leaving the chains loose for his escape.”

  Until that moment Hansen had managed to persuade himself that Marie was playing a cunning game. No longer. The game was the reality.

  “He is a whoremonger,” she screamed through her tears. “He debauches our women by bringing them to his house and drugging them. He pretends to make a bourgeois marriage, then forces his wife to tolerate his decadent practices. He sleeps with girls of my own age. He pretends he is the father of our children and that our blood is not Khmer! He reads us bourgeois literature in Western languages in order to deprave us! He seduces us by taking us for rides in his jeep and singing imperialist songs to us!”

  He had never heard her scream before. Nor evidently had the student, who appeared embarrassed. But she would not be checked. She persisted in denying him. She told them how he had forbidden her mother to love her. She was expressing a hatred for him that he knew was unfeigned, as absolute and inordinate as his love for her. Her body shook with the pent-up hatred of a misused woman, her features were crumpled with hatred and guilt. Her arm struck out and she pointed at him in the classic posture of accusation. Her voice belonged to someone he had never known.

  “Kill him!” she screamed. “Kill the despoiler of our people! Kill the corrupter of our Khmer blood! Kill the Western liar who tells us we are different from one another! Avenge the people!”

  The student made a last note and ordered Marie to be led away.

  “I prayed for her forgiveness,” Hansen said.

  In the bungalow, I realised, it was dawn. Hansen was standing at the window, his eyes fixed on the misty plateau of the sea. The girl lay on the daybed where she had lain all night, her eyes closed, the empty Coca-Cola can beside her, her head still supported by her arm. Her hand, hanging down, looked worn and elderly. A terseness had entered Hansen’s voice, and for a moment I feared that with morning he had decided to resent me. Then I realised it was not me he was at odds with but himself. He was remembering his anger as they carried him, bound but not chained, to the stockade to sleep— if sleep is what you do when your body is dying of pain, and the blood is filling your ears and nose. Anger against himself that he had implanted in his child so much loathing.

  “I was her father still,” he said in French. “I blamed Marie for nothing, myself for everything. If only I had made my escape earlier, instead of counting on her to help me. If only I had fought my way out when I was strong, instead of placing my reliance in a child. I should never have worked for you. My secret work had endangered her. I cursed you all. I still do.”

  Did I speak? My concern was to say nothing that would obstruct his flow.

  “She was drawn, to them,” he said, making her excuses for her. “They were her own people, jungle fighters with a faith to die for. Why should she reject them?

  “I was the last obstacle to her acceptance by her people,” he said, explaining her. “I was an intruder, a corrupter. Why should she believe I was her father when they were telling her I was not?”

  Still lying in the stockade, he remembered her on the day the young commissar dressed her in her bridal black. He remembered her expression of distaste as she stared down at him, fouled and beaten, a beggar at her feet, a cringing Western spy. And beside her, the handsome commissar with his red headband. “I am wedded to the Angka,” she was saying to him. “The Angka answers all my questions.”

  “I was alone,” he said.

  Darkness fell in the stockade, and he supposed that if they were going to shoot him they would wait for daylight. But the notion that Marie would go through life knowing she had ordered her father’s death appalled him. He imagined her in middle age. Who would help her. Who would confess her? Who would give her release and absolution? The idea of his death became increasingly alarming to him. It will be her death too.

  At some point he must have dozed, he said, for when dawn came he found a bowl of rice on the floor of the stockade and he knew it had not been there the night before; even in his agony he would have smelt it. Not rolled into pellets, the rice, not hoarded against the naked skin, but a white mound of it, enough for five days. At first he was too tired to be surprised. Lying on his stomach to eat, he noticed the quiet. By this hour the clearing should have been alive with the sounds of soldiers waking for the day: singsong voices and washing noises from the river bank, the clatter of pans and rifles, the chant of slogans led by the commissar. Yet when he paused to listen, even the birds and monkeys seemed to have stopped their shrieking and he heard no human sounds at all.

  “They had gone,” he said, from somewhere behind me. “They had decamped in the night, taking Marie with them.”

  He ate more rice and dozed again. Why have they not killed me? Marie has talked them out of it. Marie has bought me my life. Hansen set to work chafing his bonds against the wall of the stockade. By nightfall, covered in sores and flies, he was lying on the river bank, washing his wounds. He crawled back to the stockade to sleep, and next morning, with the remainder of his rice, he set off. This time, having no prisoners or livestock, they had left no tracks.

  All the same, he went in search of her.

  For months, Hansen thinks five or six, he remained in the jungle, moving from village to village, never settling, trusting no one— I suspect a little crazed. Wherever he could, he enquired after Marie’s unit, but there was too little to describe it by and his quest became indiscriminate. He heard of units that had fighting girls. He heard of units that consisted of girls only. He heard of girls being sent into the towns as whores to gather information. He imagined Marie in all these situations. One night he crept back to his old house hoping she had taken refuge there. The village had been burned.

  I asked him whether his cached wireless had been disturbed.

  “I didn’t look,” he replied. “I didn’t care. I hated you all.”

  Another night he called on Marie’s aunt, who lived in a remote village, but she hurled pans at him and he had to flee. Yet his determination to rescue his daughter was stronger than ever, for he knew now that he must rescue her from herself. She is cursed with my absolutism, he thought She is violent and headstrong; it is I who am to blame. I have locked her in the prison of my own impulses. Only a father’s love could ever have blinded him to this knowledge. Now his eyes were open. He saw her drawn to cruelty and inhumanity as a means of proving her devotion. He saw her reliving his own erratic quest, yet deprived of his intellectual and religious disciplines—vaguely believing, like himself, that her assumption into a great vision” would bring her self-fulfilment.

  Of his walk to the Thai border he said little. He headed south-west towards Pailin. He had heard there was a camp there for Khmer refugees. He crossed mountains and malarial marshes. Once arrived, he besieged the tracing centres and pinned her description on camp noticeboards. How he achieved this without papers, money or connections, yet kept his presence in Thailand secret, is a mystery to me still. But Hansen was a trained and hardened agent, even if he denied us. He was not disposed to let much stop him. I asked why he did not turn to Rumbelow for help, but he shook off the idea contemptuously.

  “I was not an imperialist agent any more. I believed in nothing but my daughter.”

  One day in the office of a relief organisation, he met an American woman who thought she remembered Marie.

  “She left,” she said cautiously.

  Hansen pressed her. Marie was one of a group of half dozen girls, said the woman. They were whores but they had the assurance of fighters. When they were not entertaining men, they kept themselves apart from everyone and were tough to handle. One day
they broke bounds. She had heard they were picked up by the Thai police. She never saw them again.

  The woman who said this appeared unsure whether to say what else was on her mind, but Hansen gave her no choice.

  “We were afraid for her,” she said. “She gave different names for herself. She gave conflicting accounts of how she came to us. The doctors argued over whether she was mad. Somewhere along her journey, she had lost track of who she was.”

  Hansen presented himself to the Thai police and, by threats or animal persuasion, traced Marie to a police hostel run for the enjoyment of the officers. They never asked him who he was, it seems, or what he had for papers. He was a round-eye, a farang, who spoke Khmer and Thai. Marie had stayed three months, then vanished, they said. She was strange, said a kindly sergeant.

  “What is strange?” Hansen asked.

  “She would speak only English,” the sergeant replied.

  There was another girl, a friend of Marie’s, who had stayed longer and married one of the corporals. Hansen obtained her name.

  He had ceased speaking.

  “And did you find her?” I asked after a long silence.

  I knew the answer already, as I had known it from halfway through his story, without knowing that I knew. He was sitting at the girl’s head, which he was gently stroking. Slowly she sat upright and with her little, old hands rubbed her eyes, pretending she had been asleep. I think she had listened to us all night.

  “It was all she understood any more,” Hansen explained in English. while he continued to stroke her head. He was speaking of the brothel where he had found her. “She wanted no big choices, did you, Marie? No big words, no promises.” He pressed her to him. “She wishes only to be admired. By her own people. By us. All of us must love Marie. That is what comforts her.”

  I think he mistook my reticence for reproach, for his voice rose. “She wishes to be harmless. Is that so bad? She wishes to be left alone, as all of them wish. It would be a good thing if more of us wished the same. Your bombers and your spies and your big talk are not for her. She is not the child of Dr Kissinger. She asks only for a small existence where she can give pleasure and hurt no one. Which is worse? Your brothel or hers? Get out of Asia. You should never have come, any of you. I am ashamed I ever helped you. Leave us alone.”

  “I shall tell Rumbelow very little of this,” I said as I rose to leave.

  “Tell him what you like.”

  From the doorway, I took a last look at them. The girl was staring at me as I believe she had stared at Hansen from outside the circle of chains, her eyes unflinching, deep and still. I thought I knew what was in her mind. I had paid her and not had her. She was wondering whether I want my money’s worth.

  Rumbelow drove me to the airport. Like Hansen, I would have preferred to do without him, but we had matters to discuss.

  “You promised him how much?” he cried in horror.

  “I told him he was entitled to a resettlement grant and all the protection we can give him. “I told him you would be sending him a cashier’s cheque for fifty thousand dollars.”

  Rumbelow was furious. “Me give him fifty thousand dollars? My dear man, he’ll be drunk for six months and spill his life story all over Bangkok. What about that Cambodian whore of his? She’s in the know, I’ll bet.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “He turned me down.”

  This news astonished Rumbelow so profoundly that he ran out of indignation altogether, preserving instead a wounding silence that lasted us the rest of the journey.

  On the plane I drank too much and slept too little. Once waking from a bad dream, I was guilty of a seditious thought about Rumbelow and the Fifth Floor. I wished I could pack off the whole tribe of them on Hansen’s march into the jungle, Smiley included. I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the object of it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.

  Yet I was content, as I am content to this day whenever I think of Hansen. I had found what I was looking for—a man like myself, but one who in his search for meaning had discovered a worthwhile object for his life; who had paid every price and not counted it a sacrifice; who was paying it still and would pay it until he died; who cared nothing for compromise, nothing for ourselves or the opinion of others; who had reduced his life to the one thing that mattered to him, and was free. The slumbering subversive in me had met his champion. The would-be lover in me had found a scale by which to measure his own trivial preoccupations.

  So that when a few years later I was appointed Head of the Russia House, only to watch my most valuable agent betray his country for his love, I could never quite muster the outrage required of me by my masters. Personnel was not all stupid when he packed me off to the Interrogators’ Pool.

  10

  Maggs, my unpleasing crypto journalist, was trying to draw Smiley on the amoral nature of our work. He was wanting Smiley to admit that anything went, as long as you got away with it. I suspect he was actually wanting to hear this maxim applied to the whole of life, for he was ruthless as well as mannerless, and wished to see in our work some kind of licence to throw aside his few remaining scruples.

  But Smiley would not give him this satisfaction. At first he appeared ready to be angry, which I hoped he would be. If so, he checked himself. He started to speak, but stopped again, and faltered, leaving me wondering whether it was time to call a halt to the proceedings. Until, to my relief, he rallied, and I knew he had merely been distracted by some private memory among the thousands that made up his secret self.

  “You see,” he explained—replying, as so often, to the spirit rather than the letter of the question—“it really is essential in a free society that the people who do our work should remain unreconciled. It’s true that we are obliged to sup with the Devil, and not always with a very long spoon. And as everyone knows—” a sly glance at Maggs produced a gust of grateful laughter—“the Devil is often far better company than the Godly, isn’t he? All the same, our obsession with virtue won’t go away. Self-interest is so limiting. So is expediency.” He paused again, still deep inside his own thoughts. “All I’m really saying, I suppose, is that if the temptation to humanity does assail you now and then, I hope you won’t take it as a weakness in yourselves, but give it a fair hearing.”

  The cufflinks, I thought, in a flash of inspiration. George is remembering the old man.

  For a long time I could not fathom why the story had continued to haunt me for so long. Then I realised I had happened upon it at a period when my relationship with my son Adrian had hit a low point. He was talking of not bothering with university, and getting himself a well-paid job instead. I mistook his restlessness for materialism and his dreams of independence for laziness, and one night I lost my temper and insulted him, and was duly ashamed of myself for weeks thereafter. It was during one of those weeks that I unearthed the story.

  Then I remembered also that Smiley had had no children and that perhaps his ambiguous part in the affair was to some extent explained by this. I was slightly chilled by the thought that he might have been filling an emptiness in himself by redressing a relationship he had never had.

  Finally I remembered that just a few days after coming upon the papers, I had received the letter that anonymously denounced poor Frewin as a Russian spy. And that there were certain mystical affinities between Frewin and the old man, to do with dogged loyalty and lost worlds. All this for context, you understand, for I never knew a case yet that was not made up of a hundred others.

  Finally there was the fact that, as so often in my life, Smiley turned out once again to have been my precursor, for I had no sooner settled myself at my unfamiliar desk in the Interrogators’ Pool than I found his traces everywhere: in our dusty archives, in backnumbers of our duty officer’s log and in the reminiscent smiles of our senior secretaries, who spoke of him with the old vestal’
s treacly awe, part as God, part as teddy bear and part—though they were always quick to gloss over this aspect of his nature—as killer shark. They would even show you the bone-china cup and saucer by Thomas Goode of South Audley Street—where else?— a present to George from Ann, they explained dotingly, which George had bequeathed to the Pool after his reprieve and rehabilitation to Head Office—and, of course, like the Grail itself, the Smiley cup could never possibly be drunk from by a mere mortal.

  The Pool, if you have not already gathered as much, is by way of being the Service’s Siberia, and Smiley, I was comforted to discover, had served out not one exile there but two; the first, for his gall in suggesting to the Fifth Floor that it might be nursing a Moscow Centre mole to its bosom; and the second, a few years later, for being right. And the Pool has not only the monotony of Siberia but its remoteness also, being situated not in the main building but in a run of cavernous offices on the ground floor of a gabled pile in Northumberland Avenue at the northern end of Whitehall.

  And, like so much of the architecture around it, the Pool has seen great days. It was set up in the Second World War to receive the offerings of strangers, to listen to their suspicions and calm their fears or—if they had indeed stumbled on a larger truth— misguide or scare them into silence.

  If you thought you had glimpsed your neighbour late at night, for instance, crouched over a radio transmitter; if you had seen strange lights winking from a window and were too shy or untrusting to inform your local police station; if the mysterious foreigner on the bus who questioned you about your work had reappeared at your elbow in your local pub; if your secret lover confessed to you— out of loneliness or bravado or a desperate need to make himself more interesting in your eyes—that he was working for the German Secret Service—why then, after a correspondence with some spurious assistant to some unheard-of Whitehall Under-Secretary, you would quite likely, of an early evening, be summoned to brave the blitz, and find yourself being guided heart-in-mouth down the flaking, sandbagged corridor, on your way to Room 909, where a Major Somebody or a Captain Somebody Else, both bogus as three-dollar bills, would courteously invite you to state your matter frankly without fear of repercussion.