There’s a paper-towel dispenser but no paper towels. A soap dispenser but no soap. There’s a condom dispenser on the wall but I bet it has no condoms. This whole toilet is trying to look like it belongs in a modern Western European country where things work, but actually it’s a knock-off like the not-Rothko paintings in the waiting room. Even so it’s not what you expect in a police station or prison or wherever I am.
The goons escort me back. The men with guitars smirk at me some more from the walls. At the end of the corridor past the waiting-room door I see a heavy door with a sign above it that lights up, but is currently dark. In the waiting room, the handsome woman is standing, a paper folder in her hands, talking to the air again. There’s a tray come for me. Coffee and toast as billed. Without stopping talking, she nods to me to drink, to eat.
We finish at the same time.
“So,” she says. “They are ready for us. We will go.”
She opens the door for me and there are the faithful goons. This time we turn right. The sign over the heavy door is lit up. She heaves the door open and beyond there’s a second door, and then the clues begin to fall into place. I’m entering a small provincial television studio. The sad gloss of a long-lost modernity, the once-bright colours, the pleading faces of performers with unfashionable haircuts, the airport-hotel décor from around 1975: if they hold their nerve for another decade or so it could become the look again, but they won’t. Someone will slip them a contraband batch of The World of Interiors and they’ll lose their innocence. These thoughts sustain my pretence that I’m a detached observer of my surroundings. The truth is I’m deeply scared and finding all this somewhat unreal.
Lights shine on a little stage. Two armchairs wait on either side of a coffee table. On the table, a jug of water and two glasses. Behind, a piece of scenery designed to look like one wall of a suburban living room. The goons have remained outside in the passage. My smart companion and I appear to be alone in the studio. She beckons me to one of the chairs in the circle of light.
“Don’t worry if you make mistakes,” she tells me. “We always tape more than we need. We can edit out the mistakes later.”
I have been adopting a policy of saying nothing in case I incriminate myself. But all this is so far outside my understanding that I decide to change my policy and start asking questions.
“Why am I here? Where am I?”
She sits down and opens her folder on her lap and smoothes her quite short skirt towards her knees. Her legs are tanned, and she does not wear tights or stockings. She has excellent legs, they’re her best feature.
“My name is Magdalena,” she says. “I’ll be talking to you on the show today.”
She flicks heavy shiny hair from across her eyes.
“What show?”
“Aha!” She wags a finger at me. “I ask the questions!” She smiles as if this is a joke between us. “Soon now we start the show, and then the tape is recording and we miss nothing, you know?”
I don’t know. But now I sense movement around me. There are three television cameras, big old EMI cameras, standing in an arc before us, and their lenses are in motion. Some remote operation is causing the barrels of the lenses to turn, and as they turn they reach towards us and withdraw again. At their feet are television monitors on which I can see myself growing bigger and bigger, and then, on a sudden cut, reduced to the smallness of full figure, the two of us seated in our fake suburban living room.
Magdalena is listening to a voice in her ear. I study the space around me. High up in one far wall I find the sound-proof window through which I can see the technicians who are controlling the cameras. Three men, each illuminated by a tiny light on the desk before him. And behind, in shadow, a tall gaunt figure that I know at once to be the man who has haunted me, and is now my captor.
This is some kind of interrogation.
“We are ready now,” says Magdalena.
She turns her face towards one of the cameras and puts on a dazzling professional smile. A red light springs on. She starts to speak to camera, in her own language, in a bright voice punctuated by a series of gestures that she believes to be charming. She flicks back her hair, opens her palms to camera, bobs her head in eager little nods. I think she looks wacko. Then she turns to me.
“So,” she says, leaning forward and touching my knee. “Welcome to the show. This is your first visit to our country. We’re all so interested to know how you find it.”
This has to be some kind of joke.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your first impressions. Is it so different from England?”
“This is a trick, right?”
She shakes her head at me, still smiling.
“We’ll edit that out,” she says. “You are a little abrupt, forgive me for saying. I know you don’t want to sound discourteous. You are in a way an ambassador for your country.”
“Listen.” I’m beginning to feel pissed off by this game, as well as scared. “I was picked up by armed police and brought here as a prisoner. Don’t give me this ambassador shit.”
“A prisoner?” She looks horrified. “Oh, no, no, no! You are here as our guest.”
“So I can go?”
“Of course. But first, if you please, the interview.”
“I don’t want an interview.”
“But all is ready. It would be of such interest to our viewers. It would create a good impression, you know?” She’s giving me a pleading look. “I understand your papers are not entirely in order.”
Her eyes are begging me: play the game. Don’t go. I look back at her, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Just lay it out for me, okay? If this is a deal, tell me.”
“Our show is very popular. It is seen by everyone in the country. We have only one channel, you know? And no commercials.” Her smile is getting positively desperate. “The show will make you famous. You will be a star.”
“I don’t want to be famous.”
Now her eyes register shock.
“Of course you want to be famous. Everyone wants to be famous.”
It now occurs to me that maybe she’s as much of a dupe of the interrogation process as I am. Also that she’s nervous.
“Are you famous?” I ask.
“Maybe a little.” She calms down. Pulls her skirt towards her knee and strokes one shapely calf. “I think it begins for me, yes.”
“So you’re new at this job?”
“A little new,” she concedes.
This gives me confidence.
“Well, you see the man standing at the back of the control room up there? He’s an officer of the state security police. He’s not here to learn my impressions of your country.”
“But we are all so interested! Someone from the West!”
It must be question one on her list. She’s not bright enough to move past it until it’s been answered. I meet people like this all the time. They’re expecting a certain kind of answer from you and if you say something else they simply don’t hear you. Your words have no place ready to receive them in their brain, so it’s like you haven’t spoken.
What the hell. I have nothing to lose. Also I doubt that I’m being given the choice of walking out. I decide to play their game and see where it leads.
“Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Ah! Now you make me happy! Now we have a wonderful time, and we make a wonderful show!”
“Don’t count on it.”
She smiles and once more wags a mock-angry finger as me.
“Oh, you! We’ve done our research. We know all about you.”
So she composes herself on her chair and we start again. The spiel to camera. The turn to smile on me. There’s my face on the floor monitors. I seem to be talking.
“My first impression of your country,” I’m saying, “is that everybody is afraid.”
The smile modulates into a look of concern and understanding.
“Ah, yes. You refer to the state of e
mergency.”
“I don’t know what it is. Just, everyone’s afraid.”
“These are very difficult times for us. We have a very serious problem, the terrorism. But you know this.”
“I know there’s some kind of war going on.”
“A war, of course. For five years now the terrorists have fought a war against us. They bomb our shopping centres and our public buildings. They assassinate our senators and our judges. We are all so afraid. Even I am afraid. Those who have children are most afraid. I have no children myself at this time, though of course I love children, and I hope that when I am less busy, and when the right man—” She stops, blushing and feeling her earpiece. She nods and looks down at her notes. “The terrorism, yes. Over two thousand people have been killed since the state of emergency was declared.”
She pauses again to listen to the voice in her earpiece.
“We will edit in some news clips here, of the atrocities. You would like to see?”
On the floor monitors I now see a succession of mute news items, showing mostly the aftermath of bomb explosions. Smashed buildings, running people, police waving onlookers away. Then close shots of dead bodies, all mutilated by the blasts: arms ripped off, torsos disembowelled, faces smashed beyond recognition. The camera lingers in a way we never see on our television screens at home. It’s too much. I look away.
“Yes, these things are more than one can bear. They are the work of the terrorists. This is why people are, as you say, afraid.”
“That, and the police.”
She blinks at me, confused.
“The police protect us. We have nothing to fear from the police. Only terrorists, and those who support terrorists, need fear the police.”
I shrug. Not my country.
“But you English understand these things. In your country you have terrorists also. Your police do their best to track down these evil men, who murder innocent people.”
I nod.
“And England is a free country.”
I nod. Then I catch sight of the monitor on the floor just behind Magdalena. It has been showing a shot of me, but now it’s showing something different. At first I think it’s another close-up of a corpse. The screen is black and white, the image-definition poor. Then the focus shifts and I see it’s a living face, badly wounded. The eyes move. Whoever it is must be close to death. The nose, the cheeks, are raw, torn, bloody.
Magdalena talks on.
“We too are a free country. My country is famous for its writers and poets, for its cheeses, and for its beautiful women.”
I’m staring at the wrecked face. I know that face.
“I’m told I’m quite typical of my people.”
“What is that?”
She looks back at me, waiting for the compliment.
“What are they showing on that screen?”
As I ask the question, the grisly image goes, to be replaced by my own agitated face. Magdalena looks round, following my gaze, and finds nothing out of the ordinary.
“That is the output of Camera Two, which is your camera. Mine is Camera One. Camera Three has the two-shot. We will have to edit, yes?” This to the silent listeners in the control room. She attends to her earpiece, nods, checks her notes. Then the puppyish smile is back, eager to please. “We continue?”
I shrug. Why not? I want them to show me that injured face again. It was for my benefit, not Magdalena’s, that much is clear. She knows as little as me about this process.
“So I am very interested to ask you this question,” she says, reading from her notes. “What would you do in England, which is a free country, if a foreign visitor entered the country illegally and gave assistance to terrorists?”
I go very still. She’s looking up again, eyes bright, wanting to hear my answer. She has no idea of the implications of what she has just asked. Why tell her anything? But she’s not the only one listening. Maybe it’s time to put forward some kind of defence.
“Well,” I say, playing for time, “did he know what he was doing, or was he an unwitting tool?”
Magdalena gazes at me with glossy unseeing eyes, the look she wears when listening to the voice in her ear. Then:
“Suppose he’s an unwitting tool, but he’s murdered a member of the security forces.”
“He could still be innocent.”
“How?” She’s puzzled: that question’s her own. Then comes a piped question. “If he’s innocent, naturally he would go to the police at the first opportunity. But what if he doesn’t? Suppose he runs, and hides, and is protected by dissidents. Suppose he attacks and robs more members of the security forces. What—in your country—would happen to him?”
“Justice,” I say. “A fair trial.”
I’m trying as hard as I can to go on looking like none of this is a big deal, but the truth is this interview is starting to spook me. I know she’s just a dummy mouthing someone else’s words, but the ventriloquist is listening too.
“So you wouldn’t send him home?”
I shake my head.
“How long would the process take?”
“Quite a long time.”
So this is the threat. Not all the threat, however. The monitor behind Magdalena is showing me a man tied to a steel chair, with his forehead strapped against the chair back. His tongue hangs out of his mouth. Two crocodile clips are clamped to his tongue. Wires run from the clips to somewhere out of frame. There’s no sound. The man’s eyes are swivelling from left to right in desperation and fear. Then his body goes into spasm, all the muscles of his face turn rigid. He strains against his bonds, his tongue flaps up and down, sweat streams from every pore. This is a man helplessly in the grip of unbearable pain. I look away the minute, the second it begins, but it’s too late. I’ve seen it. Magdalena of course has not. She is checking her list of questions.
“Now we move on to your impressions of the people. As you may know, we are called ‘the happy hosts,’ because we are a hospitable people. You have already made friends in our country, you know?”
As she speaks, the image of the tortured man on the monitor is replaced by the image of a woman dancing. The shots have evidently been taken with a secret camera. The woman is dancing in a nightclub with a much older man. She wears a tight-fitting top and a micro-skirt. She turns and sways closer to camera, and I see that it is Petra.
“No,” I hear myself saying. “I’ve made no friends so far.”
“But I think,” Magdalena teases me, checking her research, “maybe a pretty little girlfriend?”
“No,” I say. “Nobody.”
On the monitor I’m seeing a dark bedroom, an indistinct impression of activity on the bed. After a few moments, the movements stop and someone gets off the bed and heads for a door. As the door opens, light enters the room and reveals Petra lying naked on the bed, on her side, her back to the hidden camera, her bottom rising in a voluptuous curve.
By now Magdalena has taken in that I’m more attentive to the monitor than to her. With a little pout of irritation, she turns to see what I’m looking at. As she does so, the image changes again and I’m seeing a tennis game. A sixteen-year-old girl is playing, extremely well. Petra again, from some years back. A service and a blistering return, and there’s my face back on the monitor.
“So,” says Magdalena. “This is from the archives. This young lady, she was one of our tennis stars, I think the best.” The shots have confused her. She listens to her earpiece, nodding. Then she checks her notes. “You wish to know more about her?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I have the details here. Yes. I may tell you. Her father was a very successful businessman. Her mother a famous actress. She went to the best private schools. She was a tennis star. Later she was a model. Such a person has much to thank her country for. You agree?”
I nod.
“Well. She is a terrorist.” I can see from Magdalena’s face as she reads this that she is astonished. “She has chosen to destroy her homeland.
This gifted young woman had everything she could desire. And she chose destruction.” She looks up at me. “Can you understand that?”
I shrug. Don’t ask me, ask a shrink. Though as a matter of fact in a very small way I can understand it. I come from a privileged background and have been given just about everything I want. For some perverse reason if people go on giving you things there comes a time when you want to smash the gifts out of their hands. It’s as if the act of giving is also an act of oppression. All this is very ungrateful of course but being grateful can get to be wearing. Even so I’ve never quite made the move into terrorism.
“This young woman,” Magdalena is reading to me, “has convinced herself that she is permitted to use violence as the means to further what she believes to be a noble cause. However, she deceives herself. The acts of violence themselves are her end, and the noble cause is her means to that end.” She blinks. “This is a report from the psychologists. You see, we do our best to understand the motives of the terrorists.”
“Why have you been asked to tell me this?”
Magdalena’s fingers scurry through her notes. “I think you know this young lady.”
Time to cut to the chase.
“Am I under arrest?”
This calls for higher instruction. Her fingers fondle her earpiece.
“That has not yet been decided.”
“What am I charged with?”
Pause.
“That too has not yet been decided. It’s possible you have been an ignorant dupe, whose subsequent actions have been driven by
fear.”
Yes! I shout within myself. Yes! That’s how it all happened! Don’t blame me. Don’t hurt me.
“It’s also possible you suffer from a dangerous psychotic condition, like our young friend here.”
The Society of Others Page 14