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First published in the United States of America by Franklin Library 1979
Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1980
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © David Cornwell, 1979
Introduction copyright © David Cornwell, 2000
All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to reprint a verse by W. H. Auden.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN : 978-1-101-53529-5
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For my sons,
Simon, Stephen,
Timothy, and
Nicholas, with love
INTRODUCTION
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Cornwall, October 2000
Smiley’s People is the third and final novel in what became a trilogy recounting the duel of wits between George Smiley of the British Secret Service, which I called the Circus, and his rival and alter ego, code name Karla of the KGB, which I called Moscow Centre. The first novel of the trilogy was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; the second, The Honourable Schoolboy. My grand ambition was to write not just three but a whole scad of them—ten or fifteen—describing an epic stand-off between my two protagonists that would cover every corner of the globe and collectively constitute a kind of Comédie Humaine of the cold war, told in terms of mutual espionage.
Spying, in all its different forms, was after all what the cold war had for a battlefield, and the spies were its ground troops. Hot wars like Korea and Vietnam might come and go, but spying was a continuum. The obsession of the two great economic systems with each other’s identity, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses had produced by the 1970s a state of mutual watchfulness and paranoia that seemed to know no bounds. Each side was ready to pay any sum, take any risk, tell any lie, to gain a seeming intelligence advantage over the other. Neither seemed able to grasp the utter sterility of this situation. It is no wonder that, when the players were finally able to look at one another’s cards, it tuned out that each had vastly exaggerated the other’s strategic capability. In that sense, the quest for intelligence took on at its worst an almost mythic form, with the spies not so much required to report the truth about the enemy as paint him in a form monstrous enough to keep the alarm bells ringing for all eternity.
And at the heart of this war of fantasies lay the war between intelligence services of the opposing Blocs themselves—surely the most sterile, the least productive, and the most addictive of all the games spies play, since it neither enlightens nor benefits the real world which gives them their daily bread, and turns the basically very simple trade of espionage into a never-ending maze of mirrors to which only professionals are admitted, and nobody looks the wiser. Along the way, I had preachier notions I wanted to slip into my great oeuvre, provided I could find a way to dramatise them, even seditious ones—the moral corruption that the cold war was leaving in its wake in the Western as well as the Communist world, for instance; and how the cold war’s cult of lying was permeating every area of Western public life so that in this country alone there was scarcely an organ of government, from the parish pump upwards, that couldn’t invoke the spectre of national security to disguise its bias, incompetence, and corruption. And Smiley would be my champion, my mouthpiece, my knight errant. And my readers would listen to him where they wouldn’t listen to me. Because he was a better man than I was, and part of a grand story. And if Smiley on the insistence of some secret loyalty board of American-inspired witch-hunters was one day hauled before a kangaroo court of his peers—such things happened in those days—and charged with harbouring sympathies incompatible with his secret work, then my readers would rush to his protection and send his accusers packing. In my head I had a lot of this stuff planned, and more of it in notebooks.
So what stopped me from fulfilling this grand design?
In part, Smiley did. The older I became, the more I wanted to write about younger passions and a changing society. There had been a time when Smiley had been my proxy father, almost my father confessor. But as my knight errant he cast too old an eye on the world. Where he saw change, it pained him. And where his corrosive eye and brave past had once provided me with a voice and a disguise, I was beginning to find these very assets a liability. Smiley was still my hero, but he had got above his station. He was too patient for me. His radicalism was the thinker’s, not the doer’s. Ultimately, whatever his misgivings, he always knuckled down and did the job, even if he had to leave his conscience outside the door. Which meant he and the reader had the best of both worlds. Alec Guinness’s superb portrayal of him only added to my problems. When Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first shown on the BBC, the only independent channel in those days obligingly staged a strike and for six precious weeks the entire British viewing public had to choose between BBC1 and BBC2. In consequence, we were pulling in audiences of up to eleven million for each episode, and the series became a kind of public institution, with endless chat on the radio about who understood how much or how little of the plot, and George Smiley briefly became a kind of myopic national hero, solving crossword puzzles that defeated the rest of us.
The problem went further than that. George Smiley, whether I liked it or not, was from then on Alec Guinness—voice, mannerisms, the whole package. And I did like it. I liked it enormously. Once in a writer’s life, if he’s lucky, an actor plays one of his characters to perfection. And Alec did that. He was as good at being Smiley as Cyril Cusack was at being Control in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Better. On the other hand, I didn’t at all enjoy the fact that Smiley had somehow been taken over by my public. It was a thoroughly odd sensation, and not at all a pleasant one, when I went to get my character back after Alec had finished with him, to discover that I had been given used goods. I think I even felt a little bit betrayed.
Another thing that held me back from my great design was a drastic change in my writing methods for which to this day I can’t quite account. Writing Tinker, Tailor had been a static exercise. I sat in Cornwall and scribbled. Though the story had scenes in Hong Kong, Delhi, and Prague, I had visited none of those places in order to write the novel. I had fed off my memory
and imagination, and got away with it. Perhaps for this reason, when I came to write The Honourable Schoolboy, I took to the road in a very big way indeed. Basing myself in Hong Kong, I shot off to north-east Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Taiwan in quick order, and wrote, as it were, from the stirrup. Along the way, I tasted hot warfare for the first time, though mercifully very little of it, and by the time I’d seen what I set out to see, I was beginning to regard Smiley and Karla as superfluous baggage. The Honourable Schoolboy was kindly received, but I still believe it might have been a better novel without their presence.
For all these reasons then, Smiley’s People was intended to be a requiem for the old spy, and to me that is what it remains. Smiley popped up again in The Secret Pilgrim, but only in a retrospective rôle. To provide him with a good send-off, I assembled all the usual suspects: Peter Guillam, Toby Esterhase, Connie Sachs, and, of course, the old fox himself, code name Karla. The grand finale takes place in divided Berlin. Where else could I choose? In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold it was at the Berlin Wall that Smiley was heard shouting at Alec Leamas not to go back for the girl Liz. For his last act, Smiley would return there, and in his heart beg Karla not to leave the East. Smiley wins, Karla loses. But at what cost to both of them? Facing each other, they are the two no-men of no-man’s-land. Karla has sacrificed his political faith, Smiley his humanity.
I always remember the words of a Berlin comedian when, against all prediction, the Berlin Wall did finally come down. “The right side lost but the wrong side won.” He meant, I suppose, that having defeated Communism, we are left with the problem of how to tackle our own greed, and our indifference to human suffering in the world outside our own. I’ll bet you that George Smiley, if he is still with us, is still agonising over the answer.
1
Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Smiley from his dubious retirement. The first had for its background Paris, and for a season the boiling month of August, when Parisians by tradition abandon their city to the scalding sunshine and the bus-loads of packaged tourists.
On one of these August days—the fourth, and at twelve o’clock exactly, for a church clock was chiming and a factory bell had just preceded it—in a quartier once celebrated for its large population of the poorer Russian émigrés, a stocky woman of about fifty, carrying a shopping bag, emerged from the darkness of an old warehouse and set off, full of her usual energy and purpose, along the pavement to the bus-stop. The street was grey and narrow, and shuttered, with a couple of small hôtels de passe and a lot of cats. It was a place, for some reason, of peculiar quiet. The warehouse, since it handled perishable goods, had remained open during the holidays. The heat, fouled by exhaust fumes and unwashed by the slightest breeze, rose at her like the heat from a lift-shaft, but her Slavic features registered no complaint. She was neither dressed nor built for exertion on a hot day, being in stature very short indeed, and fat, so that she had to roll a little in order to get along. Her black dress, of ecclesiastical severity, possessed neither a waist nor any other relief except for a dash of white lace at the neck and a large metal cross, well fingered but of no intrinsic value, at the bosom. Her cracked shoes, which in walking tended outwards at the points, set a stern tattoo rattling between the shuttered houses. Her shabby bag, full since early morning, gave her a slight starboard list and told clearly that she was used to burdens. There was also fun in her, however. Her grey hair was gathered in a bun behind her, but there remained one sprightly forelock that flopped over her brow to the rhythm of her waddle. A hardy humour lit her brown eyes. Her mouth, set above a fighter’s chin, seemed ready, given half a reason, to smile at any time.
Reaching her usual bus-stop, she put down her shopping bag and with her right hand massaged her rump just where it met the spine, a gesture she made often these days though it gave her little relief. The high stool in the warehouse where she worked every morning as a checker possessed no back, and increasingly she was resenting the deficiency. “Devil,” she muttered to the offending part. Having rubbed it, she began plying her black elbows behind her like an old town raven preparing to fly. “Devil,” she repeated. Then, suddenly aware of being watched, she wheeled round and peered upward at the heavily built man towering behind her.
He was the only other person waiting, and indeed, at that moment, the only other person in the street. She had never spoken to him, yet his face was already familiar to her: so big, so uncertain, so sweaty. She had seen it yesterday, she had seen it the day before, and for all she knew, the day before that as well—my Lord, she was not a walking diary! For the last three or four days, this weak, itchy giant, waiting for a bus or hovering on the pavement outside the warehouse, had become a figure of the street for her; and what was more, a figure of a recognisable type, though she had yet to put her finger on which. She thought he looked traqué—hunted—as so many Parisians did these days. She saw so much fear in their faces; in the way they walked yet dared not greet each other. Perhaps it was the same everywhere, she wouldn’t know. Also, more than once, she had felt his interest in her. She had wondered whether he was a policeman. She had even considered asking him, for she had this urban cockiness. His lugubrious build suggested the police, so did the sweaty suit and the needless raincoat that hung like a bit of old uniform from his forearm. If she was right, and he was police, then—high time too, the idiots were finally doing something about the spate of pilfering that had made a beargarden of her stock-checking for months.
By now the stranger had been staring down at her for some time, however. And he was staring at her still.
“I have the misfortune to suffer in my back, monsieur,” she confided to him finally, in her slow and classically enunciated French. “It is not a large back but the pain is disproportionate. You are a doctor, perhaps? An osteopath?”
Then she wondered, looking up at him, whether he was ill, and her joke out of place. An oily gloss glistened on his jaw and neck, and there was an unseeing self-obsession about his pallid eyes. He seemed to see beyond her to some private trouble of his own. She was going to ask him this—You are perhaps in love, monsieur? Your wife is deceiving you?—and she was actually considering steering him into a café for a glass of water or a tisane when he abruptly swung away from her and looked behind him, then over her head up the street the other way. And it occurred to her that he really was afraid, not just traqué but frightened stiff; so perhaps he was not a policeman at all, but a thief—though the difference, she knew well, was often slight.
“Your name is Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova?” he asked her abruptly, as if the question scared him.
He was speaking French but she knew that it was not his mother tongue any more than it was her own, and his correct pronunciation of her name, complete with patronymic, already alerted her to his origin. She recognised the slur at once and the shapes of the tongue that made it, and she identified too late, and with a considerable inward start, the type she had not been able to put her finger on.
“If it is, who on earth are you?” she asked him in reply, sticking out her jaw and scowling.
He had drawn a pace closer. The difference in their heights was immediately absurd. So was the degree to which the man’s features betrayed his unpleasing character. From her low position Ostrakova could read his weakness as clearly as his fear. His damp chin had set in a grimace, his mouth had twisted to make him look strong, but she knew he was only banishing an incurable cowardice. He is like a man steeling himself for a heroic act, she thought. Or a criminal one. He is a man cut off from all spontaneous acts, she thought.
“You were born in Leningrad on May 8, 1927?” the stranger asked.
Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her—which in the long run was an act of near clairvoyance—that he proposed to push her under it. He didn’t, but he did put his next question in Russian
—and in the brutal accents of Moscow officialdom.
“In 1956, were you granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for the purpose of nursing your sick husband, the traitor Ostrakov? Also for certain other purposes?”
“Ostrakov was not a traitor,” she replied, cutting him off. “He was a patriot.” And by instinct she took up her shopping bag and clutched the handle very tight.
The stranger spoke straight over this contradiction, and very loudly, in order to defeat the clatter of the bus: “Ostrakova, I bring you greetings from your daughter Alexandra in Moscow, also from certain official quarters! I wish to speak to you concerning her! Do not board this car!”
The bus had pulled up. The conductor knew her and was holding his hand out for her bag. Lowering his voice, the stranger added one more terrible statement: “Alexandra has serious problems which require the assistance of a mother.”
The conductor was calling to her to get a move on. He spoke with pretended roughness, which was the way they joked. “Come on, mother! It’s too hot for love! Pass us your bag and let’s go!” cried the conductor.
Inside the bus there was laughter; then someone shouted an insult—old woman, keeps the world waiting! She felt the stranger’s hand scrabbling inexpertly at her arm, like a clumsy suitor groping for the buttons. She pulled herself free. She tried to tell the conductor something but she couldn’t; she opened her mouth but she had forgotten how to speak. The best she could manage was to shake her head. The conductor yelled at her again, then waved his hands and shrugged. The insults multiplied—old woman, drunk as a whore at midday! Remaining where she was, Ostrakova watched the bus out of sight, waiting for her vision to clear and her heart to stop its crazy cavorting. Now it is I who need a glass of water, she thought. From the strong I can protect myself. God preserve me from the weak.
Karla Trilogy Digital Collection Featuring George Smiley : Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley###s People (9781101570852) Page 99