Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  To have seized a group of ordinary rich people, even millionaires, held no interest for Jeroen. Money, though it would have to figure on the list of demands, was the least of the commando’s objectives. Furthermore, extorting ransom from a handful of plutocrats would fatally shift the emphasis: a jugular strike based on principle and aimed dramatically at the “superstructure,” in Marxian terms, of Western capitalism would take on the appearance of another pinprick hardly distinguishable from run-of-the-mill criminality. Millionaires could pay “a king’s ransom” and barely feel it, just as your rich bourgeois, held up on the street, surrendered his purse gladly, unlike the poor man—there was plenty more where it came from. To deal a blow at this society, it was necessary to take from it something it deemed irreplaceable.

  That, at any rate, had been the concept behind the capture of the Boeing, known to be carrying an international committee of liberal cat’s paws of the energy interests to investigate torture in Iran. The other passengers were of no concern—bystanders or civilians, to be sent about their business as rapidly as possible. “Excess baggage,” as Horst had formulated it; for the coup to make its point, the committee must be seen to be the exclusive target. Seizing this body of self-appointed just men on an errand of mercy to the Third World struck at the core of the West’s pious notion of itself. And to strike not at random but selectively, choosing showcase models of civic virtue whose price was above rubies and whom the West would have to save at any cost or renounce its image of “caring,” was, of course, sacrilege. Without sacrilege, as history showed, there could be no terror worthy of the name. And the fact that these good souls were journeying on a patently selfless mission, in Economy class as befitted their social outlook, could be counted on to add to the horror and condemnation the deed would call forth. A reaction of universal shock and outrage was essential to the success of the design. There would have been nothing like it since the Olympic Games “massacre,” and those were only athletes.

  To the people’s ear, the chorus of indignation would have a comic sound, for the West, in fact, set no value on concerned and high-minded citizens except when they could be used to further some purpose of its own. Had this committee perished in a plane crash, Washington, ordering a day of remembrance, would have been relieved, on the whole, to be rid of them, since its anti-Soviet interest required a simulation of friendship with the Shah, despite pressures from business elements hurt by the oil “squeeze” and desirous of a tougher line with him—this conflict of interests, out of which such a committee of innocents would tend to be born, was a typical contradiction of late capitalism.

  Yet a pretense of valuing its critics was still essential to the system in its present stage, and the price of maintaining the pretense in this case was going to be rather high. To save these sacred skins, the horrified West would have to accept an exchange: for every just man, four people’s army militants, to be released from the imperialists’ jails. Having calculated the ratio with an eye to due measure, Jeroen had not believed that they should ask more. To ask more might decide the imperialists to refuse any concessions, on the ground that terror, knowing no bounds, could be met only with firmness. For the commando, there would then be nothing for it but to execute the prisoners.

  In the new circumstances, however, that thinking was no longer viable. It had been natural to postulate the release of class-war militants according to a strict ratio, particularly for the German comrades, who had had Andreas and Ulrike in mind and Gudrun and Jan-Carl and the other Werner and Irmgaard…. But that goal, they would have to see, was no longer within reach of the commando. Study of the passports proved that, contrary to earlier and supposedly “sure” information, the venerable prelate from Köln was not among the prisoners—Greet and Jeroen, in the Boeing, had already thought as much—hence, Bonn could sit back and smile at the fantasy of such a demand. Similarly, an American rabbi and Israeli stooge “guaranteed” to be with this committee was nowhere in evidence, so that the Zionist state could smile, too, at any ultimatum calling for the freeing of the Arab brothers it held. Bad luck for the Palestinian army, but it would have to be accepted. The whole position would have to be re-thought, in view of the current actuality, and larger demands conceived. It was a challenge to the imagination to find a truly radical approach. The old formula of a body-for-bodies exchange was too often unproductive, leading to killing for want of a better result. The enemy by his attitude, rather than proletarian justice, dictated your disposal of the prisoners.

  In any case, killing was not a choice Jeroen cared to make except as a last resort. Killing the cat had been a botch, offensive to his workman’s instinct; he had felt momentary pleasure in the act of taking aim, but using the poor creature to set an example to the passengers had surely been unnecessary. He blamed his nerves, which had been on edge as the pilot kept circling over Schiphol and it had begun to look as if they could not land. Killing accomplished little and with forethought could usually be avoided. As for torture, that was not envisioned. Elfride had been eager to give these liberals a taste of the conditions of detention suffered by comrades in the imperialists’ jails. But solitary confinement, as at Stammheim, in a windowless box with a judas-hole and a blinding overhead light burning night and day, was clearly impossible in these living quarters which had not been designed as a prison. Perfect reciprocity—an eye for an eye—was an ideal that the revolutionary with his inferior means could not hope to achieve. Furthermore, the age of most of the hostages and their soft habits of life would make simple detention, with the inevitable crowding and inadequate toilet facilities, a species of harsh punishment that in their case suited the crime.

  “Torture” in fact was the word they were already using to describe having had to sleep without blankets or mattress “like sardines in a can,” one lot on the floor of the family livingroom and the rest in the unfinished attic—those who had passed the night in the living-room objected to the bad air and those who had been sent to the attic protested the lack of heating. Posted with his rifle at the head of the stairway, Carlos had had to hear their grumblings and their intermittent snores. And now Greet reported that a petition was about to be presented by the pastor asking, on humane grounds, that any who wished it should be allowed to sleep in the helicopter; in the family room they were still disputing over the wording. Jeroen could have told them that they were wasting their breath. It was a rule of guerrilla operations never to disperse your hostages.

  In the original plan, of course, excessive crowding had not been foreseen. The addition of twelve from first class to the nucleus of eight liberals was responsible. Yet if these people proved to be important collectors of art, then the difficulties of housekeeping and management created by their numbers would seem slight in comparison to the matchless opportunity their uninteresting bodies represented. If their collections were to contain a single Titian or Giorgione, their presence in the chosen plane constituted a windfall that Jeroen in his wildest dreams would hardly have dared to conceive.

  Back in the Boeing, having brought him the incredible news, Greet, woman-like, had cooled in the face of his enthusiasm. All at once, she professed not to see the difference between a collector of paintings and any other Mr. or Mrs. Moneybags. “What causes you to think they are better, pray?” “Not they in themselves,” he had answered. “What they have is better. Better than cars or yachts or ‘securities.’ Maybe not in our eyes but in the eyes of their society.” “In your eyes, Jeroen,” Greet had retorted. “I do not like to see you so excited.” And in a moment she had added “I think I am sorry I told you.” Faced with that wilful blindness, he had had to make her understand the uniqueness of the opportunity: finding this tour aboard put them within striking distance of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of priceless works of art. How they would manage to get hold of a few of those treasures was not yet clear to him. He would have to think, he had told her. But once they had managed it, no demand would be too bold. This society had two talismans: one moral and therefore hyp
ocritical, honored by lip service, and the other material, honored in daily practice and most highly venerated in the form of works of art. In the interior of the Boeing, by one chance in a million, the pair coexisted, even if for the moment the art works were present only nominally, at a second remove. Such a chance would never arise again; if they let the collectors go, they would renounce a prize that would not be offered them twice. If they kept them, they ran no extra risk.

  In the end, his arguments had persuaded her. The polder house, he had showed her, was one incentive the more, almost dictating their action to them. When again would they possess a stronghold with ample storage facilities, completely isolated and yet accessible by helicopter? It would not even be necessary for the helicopters bringing the canvases to land; their cargo could be dropped in the open field. In the event that large canvases were delivered—statuary, unless small, should not be attempted—the barn roof could be finished and insulated, which would be a job for the hostages.

  Jeroen sighed. Thinking backward, to the great moment of decision in the Boeing, his mind was leaping too far ahead. Doggedly, he pulled the set to him and tried the Aachen frequency. Only static. Yet he could not make a serious plan until he knew what the collections, if in fact they existed, consisted of. There was no point in interrogating the prisoners, as Carlos had proposed: they would lie. And if there were no important works of art in the collections, it was hardly worth the effort. Better to get rid of the whole tour, though he could not think how. He would not accept dubious attributions or “school” or “follower” works. And no American stuff. His heart was set on the masters. He wanted Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Vermeer, as well as the Titians and Giorgiones, which may have been only a figure of speech. With American buying power in mind, he had been choosing, letting his memory range over the whole history of art. “You have gone back to your old love, Jeroen,” Greet had reproached him on the plane. Now she slid open the door and, seeing him with the radio, she said it again. “Back to your first love. Be careful, Jeroen.”

  The accusation was partly true. In his young days in Amsterdam, when the word “waarde” had sounded in his brain, it had not once occurred to him to work to become rich so that he could own a fine canal house with pictures in it. His idea had been to consecrate himself, in poverty like a monk, to the value people called “art” by learning, if possible, to make some of it himself. As though to pay back a debt he owed for the joy his eyes were experiencing in the museums and along the canals. For a time he tried to teach himself by sketching in the Rijksmuseum and eventually also in the Stedelijkmuseum—he still loved Van Gogh as a person and as an artist. He went to night classes in drawing. But then he became interested in his trade union and began to give his evenings to union meetings and slowly he grew disillusioned with art. Next, moving steadily leftward, by a process that now seemed to him logical and as natural as the growth process in an organism, he joined the Party. There he got his only higher education—his parents had put him to work at the legal school-quitting age of sixteen. In the Party, too, he had learned to make prints and to letter; they paid for his going to classes and used his crude work in posters and handbills and sometimes in De Waarheid, their paper. He knew it was crude and was proud of that, for now the sole value he saw in art was that of transmitting messages to the people to incite them to action—at election times he painted wooden placards to be placed on the bridges urging the masses to vote for the C.P.N. He hated “art for art’s sake,” though he accepted the Party’s teaching that in a classless society such a wasteful indulgence could finally be afforded. Then he became disillusioned with the Party and turned sharply against it. He saw that he had let himself be deceived: it was merely another part of the system of world-wide oppression—openly as in the Soviet Union or covertly as in Holland, where it served as a willing safety valve for the masses’ discontent. He was ashamed of having had his work in De Waarheid, which did not tell the Truth, as its name pretended, but just a different set of lies. When he broke, he passed almost overnight to direct action. He became what was called a terrorist.

  Now art, even the Party kind of making propaganda, lost all interest for him, except in the sense that a deed was a work of art—the only true one, he had become convinced. The deed, unless botched, was totally expressive; ends and means coincided. Unlike the Party’s “art as a weapon,” it was pure, its own justification. It had no aim outside itself. The purpose served by the capture of the Boeing was simply the continuance or asseveration of the original thrust; ransom money, the release of fellow-actionists, were not goals in which one came to rest but means of ensuring repetition.

  Direct action had a perfect circular motion; it aimed at its own autonomous perpetuation and sovereignty. And the circle, as all students of drawing knew, was the most beautiful of forms. Thus in a sense he had returned to where he had started: terrorism was art for art’s sake in the political realm. Some in the movement believed that their action would give rise to a new society, but this belief was an impurity. Jeroen was not even sure that the construction of a just society ought to concern a revolutionary; that dream had been dreamed too often. He thought Trotsky was right in his notion of the permanent revolution, right but insincere—in his day of power his ruthless repression of the sailors of Kronstadt had exposed his real attitude. Revolution, if it was not just a catchword, should mean revolving, an eternal spinning, the opposite of evolution, so attractive to the bourgeois soul. For the true revolutionary, the only point of rest lay in the stillness at the center of the circle, just as a wheel rapidly turning on its axis gave the appearance of arrested motion.

  Such ideas were deeply troubling to Greet. She did not like to hear him state that the struggles of the Palestinian people were merely a parenthesis, to be closed without regret when they had served their purpose—“Your theories again.” She was jealous of his brain, which she regarded as an untrustworthy organ capable of leading him away from her and the others into a foreign sphere. As she sat across the table somberly gazing at him, he could read her mind. She was fearing that his interest in the group of collectors was a sign of softening or backsliding, that he would let himself be diverted by his old passion from the main end. There she was wrong. His “artistic” interest in them was of another sort; he was excited by the sheer beauty of the coup he envisioned. He had seen that they could be transmuted; it only needed the Midas touch of exchanging them against their masterpieces to turn their base substance into pure gold. The method of persuasion remained to be studied—whatever was best calculated to convince the collectors to accept the principle of paying their ransom “in kind.” He foresaw a two-way airlift: crates of art descending, the “owners” ascending, to be shipped back home or to Teheran according to their mood. The transfer would put an end to the crowding and, far more interesting, it would render the farmhouse impregnable. Once the house contained irreplaceable masterpieces, any notion of taking it by storm would have to be abandoned by the imperialists unless they wished to pass for “barbarians” before the eyes of their entire “civilized” world. At that point, the commando could dictate its own terms and at its own good leisure; there would be no hurry.

  Yet in the immediate time was pressing. It might only be a matter of hours before the disguise of the polder house was penetrated. The short-wave radio, indispensable as it was at this stage, was also a danger that had to be reckoned with. If the enemy were to pick up the “pirate” transmissions, the unlicensed frequencies could of course be spotted, and the authorities at both ends, having mapped the bearings, would swiftly close in. Here on the polder, the hostages were a safeguard, precluding an instant swoop, but the comrades in Aachen risked being surprised with their mobile transmitter by a cordon of police. Each transmission was increasing the likelihood of detection. The remedy was to shift to another set of frequencies, but there was a limit to how long that game could be played. Out of regard for the Aachen comrades, communications should be discontinued at the earliest possible moment. Yet
to break off contact while New York was still to be heard from would constitute a defeat, and the Aachen cell, so far, agreed. For a while longer, Werner would keep trying and accept the risk, only moving to a neighboring frequency, by agreement, every third hour. The best hope was that the possibility of clandestine transmissions to and from the “criminal band” would be slow to occur to the authorities. And up to now there had been no discernible attempt at jamming—the usual warning sign. Yet unfortunately the absence of interference could read in two opposite senses.

  There was nothing to do but stupidly wait. The fact that this morning no plane had yet come prowling overhead was at least a reassurance. The fools might be off on another track. Every hour the radio announced that an “energetic” hunt for the missing helicopter was in progress but gave no particulars. The evening news on television was bound to be fuller, if only in order to pander to the public’s craving for thrills; they might even be shown the “dragnet” of search planes and police with walkie-talkies, or would it be merely interviews with the Defense and Justice ministers and the families of the hostages? Belgian and German radio reported a “security blanket,” and of course there was not a hope of seeing a newspaper. As the hours passed, Jeroen grew unwontedly restless. To be marooned here with no news except that doled out by official sources was an experience he had not pictured in his planning. He felt cut off, left out of events and decisions that nevertheless should concern him as a prime actor—hardly, in that respect, in a better position than the hostages, who must be guessing and speculating too.