The High Place

by Geoffrey Household

  It was safer that Ashkar should be of the common opinion that my interest in the colony was commercial and licentious, so I never approached him directly on questions of the frontier. I kept in the background, but managed to get rid of that unsatis­factory arrangement by which he was expected to keep his eyes closed. He was requested, instead, to keep them open; and he adopted a neutrality so benevolent that our few clandestine travellers were all but handed over to him for forwarding.

  Again it was friendship, the friendship of Ashkar and Juan Villaneda, which produced the result. Villaneda had been born in Spanish Morocco, and the North African dialect of Arabic was one of his native language; it hadn’t taken him long to pick up the classical Syrian speech. He loved to refresh himself by contact with the simple, and to them he appeared as mis­sionary rather than monk. In his occasional wanderings through Syria and the Lebanon he was a walking advertisement that Kasr-el-Sittat was full of harmless cranks.

  That, I thought, was his chief use to the colony—that, and the firm friends he made among the villagers and the very poor. When I suggested to Elisa that I should arrange an interview between Ashkar and Villaneda, I had no idea that Juan was of any importance. Indeed, it was Ashkar’s respect for him that made me ask questions and discover his key position in the colony.

  On the day of the meeting I arrived at Ashkar’s billet well before Villaneda, and explained to him over lunch that by talk­ing to this friendly and eccentric Spaniard he might satisfy him­self that Kasr-el-Sittat was not interested in petty smuggling. Ashkar took it very well, remarking sententiously that a gen­darme could lose nothing by increasing the circle of his acquaintances, and might in an emergency gain much.

  Juan Villaneda, with the good sense of Mediterranean man, arrived after we had had a comfortable siesta. He was not seen at his best when delivered at the door by a powerful American car, for he looked like any poor Syrian who could just afford a suit of European clothes. To win the heart of a suspicious stranger he should have come on a dusty donkey or on foot.

  ‘I do not often travel like this,’ said Villaneda at once, ‘and I don’t like it. A man can’t stop and talk on the road. I see a face that pleases me, and by the time the driver has stopped I a half a kilometre further on. Then reverse, you say? But, my friends, confidence has gone. Would you talk to a man who comes roaring at you backside foremost?’

  Ashkar smiled in his moustache, while preserving perfect dignity and uttering the conventional exclamations of welcome. To impress the unknown envoy he had put on his best uniform and shiniest boots, and posed a careful group of his orderly and horses.

  Villaneda’s sincerity of manner was a little too abrupt for the long formalities of Arab courtesy, but now he took the shortest route to the captain’s heart; he admired the horses, and plunged straight into the sporting slang of the breeder. Ashkar uttered a word of warning as Villaneda closely examined a foul-tempered roan taken over from one of the French Light Squadrons, but the horse seemed to be just as impressed by the Spaniard’s knowledge as I was myself.

  He was a compact, sturdy little man. His round face, vigor­ously invaded by thick eyebrows and black, coarse hair growing low on the forehead, was that of many southern peasants, but the nose and mouth were sharp, mobile and sensitive. A peasant, you would have said, but one who had far more interest in spirit than soil.

  We sat formally on hard chairs in the shade, while Ashkar pressed on us cold savouries and wine—a commercial brand with gaudy label which he kept for conventional hospitality merely because it was expensive. I turned the conversation to Kasr-el-Sittat, and, so far as I could, paraded Villaneda’s character for inspection.

  He played up beautifully, offering flowery thanks to Ashkar, as representative of his government, for the freedom that Syria allowed to the colony.

  ‘Christian and Moslem alike,’ he said, ‘you have learned charity from each other. Where but here could we have found such a refuge and such tolerance?’

  ‘To the poor, the whip. To the wealthy, tolerance.’ Ashkar answered, as if complimenting the colony on its prosperity.

  Villaneda caught the allusion, and flung it merrily back.

  ‘Shall the guest prove ungrateful?’ he asked.

  ‘In the camp the dearest guest is honour,’ replied Ashkar, warning him off the frontier.

  ‘And for me and mine,’ said Juan, ‘for I am a true com­munist.’

  That nearly sunk the whole interview. The captain was Arab enough to enjoy a good, fast game of parables and proverbs, but the essential Ashkar to keep in mind on his own precious frontier was much nearer some tough old French sous-officier. I could see him mentally reaching for stamped paper and taking a signed statement from Juan Villaneda. The colour pattern of his politics was primitive as that of any other policeman; he saw the existing order, whatever it might be, as white and every­thing else as dripping red.

  I couldn’t understand what Villaneda was up to. He told me afterwards that in many villages he had been nicknamed The Communist, that Ashkar would certainly hear of it, and so it was better to deal with the coming accusation at once.

  ‘Men may well have honour in Russia,’ said Ashkar doubt­fully, but politely—for after all Villaneda was his guest.

  ‘They may,’ Juan agreed, ‘provided the State orders them to have it. But I said I was a true communist, captain. And, by God, there are no men on earth, capitalists, socialists or plain sons of bitches who hate the Soviet dictatorship as a true communist.’

  ‘You do not want communism as in Russia?’ Ashkar asked patiently.

  ‘Never! I am a libertarian communist. There is no need for the State, no need for economics. When you are in want, you have a right to ask and be given. Suppose to-day I sell the cap­tain a chicken for two piastres and next week he comes to me and sells me a cabbage for two piastres, which of us is better off? Why should we not have supplied each other’s needs in the first place without giving or asking money?’

  Ashkar relaxed. The anarchist creed of voluntary association was in his blood. The Christians had been preaching it for the last two thousand years from all the monasteries between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates; and while they preached it, the Moslem Fellahin, who seldom had two piastres anyway, quietly lived up to it.

  ‘You are religious then at Kasr-el-Sittat? asked the captain.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Villaneda answered. ‘But so was Jules Verne.’

  Ashkar seemed to appreciate this obscure remark immedi­ately. His mind, as Juan had already discovered, dealt in symbols and catchwords without being confused by the original reality. As for me, I needed a long minute’s thought before I could arrive at what was meant and understood by this con­versational shorthand. It was, roughly, that Juan disclaimed any organized religion for Kasr-el-Sittat, but suggested they might be prophets whose dreams and ideals would come true, as had the prophecies of Jules Verne.

  Villaneda developed for the captain his visionary political theories: that all the ills of men resulted from their lust for property, and that progress based on the mere possession of objects could only be illusion. It was a simplification of his creed, evolved for and partly by the strangers he met on the roads of Syria, of whom hardly a man would have more pos­sessions than he could pile on a handcart. When Juan was talk­ing to revolutionaries, well-read in their own doctrines, I swear he didn’t use a substantive of less than four syllables.

  Ashkar was disarmed by this deliberately exaggerated inno­cence, and even grumbled that every honest man would be a communist—or at least one of Villaneda’s libertarian commun­ists—if he believed that communism could or would end in the withering away of the State.

  ‘How do you recruit your members?’ he asked. ‘How did you yourself come to Kasr-el-Sittat?’

  Villaneda gave us a dry and humorous sketch of his life. He had known as much spiritual disillusionment as anyone in Kasr-el-Sittat, yet his voice was wholly without bitterness. I suspect that in the raw unconscious at the bottom
of their souls Elisa and Osterling looked on the colony as a last weapon to the use of which they had fallen. For Juan it was a fulfilment of all his hopes, to which he had risen.

  He was born and bred in Morocco, where his father had been the confidential peon of an army contractor, loyally under­taking whatever business was too dirty to permit the personal appearance of his boss. Then Villaneda senior won a big prize in the Christmas Lottery, and, though he could neither read nor write, doubled and doubled and doubled again this unex­pected capital by buying horses and selling them to the cavalry.

  Meanwhile Juan was receiving a first-class formal education, and, in spite of it, developing his principles; after the death of his father he lived up to them, and simply gave his capital away. What to? Anything but the Church, he said. And it took him a fair time. He explained that people were always paying him back with interest. His magnanimity must have been catching.

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he made his way to Barcelona and enlisted in a communist formation. He rose swiftly to command of a company, and impressed on it his own belief that the only value of human life was to prepare the way for the next generation. They died, he told us (apolo­gizing for the word) like saints. He also convinced his company that the dictatorship of the proletariat, or of anyone else, was a quite unnecessary stage on the way of the generations, and so was shot in the back while defending Madrid by a political sergeant attached to him for that very purpose. His men had dealt with the sergeant, inserting into his person a detonator with a length of slow fuse. This Juan regretted, for the detona­tor did nothing to prove which of them was the better com­munist. Moveover, the bullet had missed his spine by a centi­metre, and his heart by—Juan held up a finger and thumb that might have admitted between them a grain of barley.

  From hospital he passed into the camps of the defeated across the Pyrenees, and so to forced labour in East Prussia. He was liberated by the Russians who exhibited him as a rescued comrade—his proletarian goodness would have impressed the most jaundiced secret policemen—and allowed him to see something of their state. To him, a Spaniard bred on variety, it seemed the negation of all human values. The public parks, he said, infuriated him; every one in every big town was exactly the same, with the same statue in the middle. He couldn’t get over his horror of mass-produced amenities.

  During the long years of war he had been ready to accept, after all, the infallibility of the Kremlin, but now the fires of his youth burned again, and more fiercely than ever. In the Ukraine, seething with hopeless rebellion and discontent, he joined a guerilla band of some five thousand men and women who fought their way to the Carpathians and reached them four hundred strong. Then they separated, and Juan with a few others infiltrated into the American zone of Austria. There, he said, he had been persuaded to join the colony of Kasr-el-Sittat by a certain Eugen Rosa.

  I preserved the poker face of a bad actor, which could have been recognized as such twenty yards away; but fortunately Juan Villaneda was looking at Ashkar, not at me. The captain leaned forward and poured some more wine. He was intent and courteous, and I could have sworn he had never heard of Eugen Rosa. He had been caught cleverly and completely off his guard, but it was simply not in his Levantine nature to show surprise.

  Ashkar effortlessly ignored the end of Juan’s life story and picked up the beginning. He asked him if he hadn’t at least missed the smell of stables when he decided to give his posses­sions away. When Juan admitted that about the only envy left to him was envy of other people’s horses, Ashkar, who loved to behave like a prince when he could, at once offered to mount him on anything he liked whenever he chose.

  In spite of the ghost of Eugen Rosa, the captain declared, as soon as Juan had left, that there was a man with whom he could do business. He went so far as to call him a natural leader. When I asked him if he didn’t think Villaneda too eccen­tric for command, he replied in a self-satisfied tone that men answered to the heart, not to the head.

  Soon after this meeting, responsibility for the Syrian affairs of Kasr-el-Sittat divided itself naturally and well, with hardly a conference between us. Elisa dealt with Damascus; Villaneda with Ashkar and the rare district officials; and I with such secret illegalities as were beyond the power of influence or friendship to arrange.

  The pattern of the colony’s organization became plainer to me, though I was always in the position of a confidential peon, like Villaneda’s father, possessing such secret information as the Secretariat was compelled to give me, yet having little know­ledge of who shared it, or what was the chain of command.

  It was Elisa who had planned and created the colony, and was responsible for its organization and finance. Osterling was in charge of propaganda; Czoldy of what one might call opera­tional intelligence; and Gisorius of security and subversive activities. He lived permanently in Istanbul. I imagine that even if he and his network had been exposed, the final link between him and Kasr-el-Sittat might have been indiscoverable.

  In the East the organization was underground; and its weapons were terrorism and that art, which the Russians called sabotage, of exploiting government-made confusion until the government servants themselves were paralysed. In the West their chief instrument was World Opposition, which, outwardly, confined itself to propaganda. Under this cover, however, it had fomented strikes against state-control—with the help, as Elisa had hinted, of communist funds—and in countires under socialism, where the routine of innumerable offices could be dislocated by a pretence of mass stupidity or a flood of wrong returns and well-meant enquiries, it was experimenting with the Russian form of sabotage.

  Although the rank and file of the party members were drawn from the middle classes, they had no control. The Secretariat had captured, financed and developed a movement of the revo­lutionary proletariat; and the action committees abroad were largely composed of libertarian communists, who saw clearly that their first enemy was no longer private capitalism, since it was rapidly evolving, everywhere, into state capitalism. That accounted for the importance of Juan Villaneda. The com­mittees knew his record of idealism and were reassured by his presence at Kasr-el-Sittat.

  And what of the mass of the colonists? Well, they had been chosen for the sake of background or special knowledge, for their sufferings and disillusionment, but most of them had only a very general idea of the tactics of the Secretariat. The colony, in fact, was not unlike a great central office of Political War­fare, with its clerks and linguists, its quartermaster’s office and ration parties, its electricians, wireless operators and mainten­ance parties of engineers. All this ‘personnel’ would, in a war­time organization, have been carefully selected to ensure that each individual was in sympathy with the main object, but would have known no more than the colonists of Kasr-el-Sittat of the methods and secrets employed.

  And I? What was I, who had never been an anarchist by conviction, who had never seen the State at work upon my loved ones like a smug and incompetent veterinary surgeon? To-day when I remember the fire and fearlessness of Elisa, I accuse myself of being a revolutionary no more genuine than some corrupt conservative. Yet in fact I had no calculating self-interest, and my allegiance to Kasr-el-Sittat sprang from an emotional despair.

  I will leave an attempt at explanation to Elisa. Whether there is any meaning I do not know, but that harsh voice, quivering under the impact, the lonely impact of her thoughts, as if she were playing to herself some instrument in the silence of my garden, may gather up with it a sense that the clarity of my desk and daylight gives me not at all.

  She so loved to sleep under the stars that I had arranged a high square tent of fine mosquito netting, large enough for us to choose a miniature garden from the greater, and lie upon the turf, enclosing with us such flowers as she desired to smell and touch. It was August, and the night was a hot blackness, moving a little as the air spread inland from the beaches. There was no light but the gleam of her body.

  ‘Do you know, Eric,’ she said suddenl
y, ‘you are a craftsman, a superb craftsman who hasn’t any craft. That’s why you are with us.’

  I answered lazily that I didn’t feel particularly unfulfilled.

  ‘You did. But that was not what I meant. You have the crafts­man’s intolerance. You want technique, and you are furious at any pretence of it when it isn’t there. You don’t really hate the State. You hate the pretentious men who compose it.’

  ‘It’s the same.’

  ‘No, it is not the same. You’re no prophet. It’s only your intellect that tells you whither the world is bound – to the cruelty of the hive, to the end of all fear and all hope. You have no vision of those grey faces hurrying obediently from school to work, and work to pension—so painless a living that they will not know when they are dead.’

  She was silent, and I could feel her heart—for in that spare body vein and sinew pulsed so near the surface—racing in some imaginary struggle. In her dream world, at least, she won the victory, for the heart-beat dropped and she turned to me.

  ‘At first when I came to you,’ she said, ‘my vision of past and future was always with me. I had not time to know that I was here. I used to tell myself that in a moment, a blessed moment, I could be nowhere else but here. And now—it isn’t only in your arms. If you are near me, I am here all the time. A self. Myself? If it exists, Eric, what would you do for it?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Why? Just for a body that you think beautiful?’

  ‘No. For those eyes. Or for that head.’

  She gave a low laugh of derision.

  ‘What sentimental differences you find, my dear! Or would you do for my eyes what you wouldn’t for this white flame, as you poetically call it? What would you do for me, I asked. This body isn’t me.’

  I told her that without using the word soul, which was taboo to her, I couldn’t answer.

  ‘All my psycho-patho-neuro-wormfood?’ she laughed. ‘No, I wouldn’t be served for the sake of that. Besides, you serve it very well already.’