A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY by John le Carré

He started the engine. The grey columns stirred with inter­est, pleased by the white Jaguar.

‘Bradfield!’

‘Well.’

‘I beg you. Five minutes. I’ve got a card to play as well. Something we’ve never mentioned. Bradfield!’

Without a word, Bradfield opened the door and got out. ‘You say we have no part in it. We have. He’s our product, you know that, we made him what he was, crushed him between all those worlds… we ground him down into himself, made him see things no one should ever see, hear things that… we sent him on that private journey… you don’t know what it’s like down there. I do! Bradfield, listen! We owe him. He knew that.’

‘All of us are owed. Very few of us are paid.’

‘You want to destroy him! You want to make him nothing! You want to disown him because he was her lover! Because-‘

‘My God,’ Bradfield said softly, ‘if that were the task I had set myself I would have to kill more than thirty-two. Is that all you wanted to tell me?’

‘Wait! Brussels… the Market… all this. Next week it’s gold, the week after it’s the Warsaw pact. We’d join the bloody Salvation Army if it pleased the Americans. What does it matter about the names?… You see it clearer than any of us: the drift. Why do you go on with it like this? Why don’t you say stop?’

‘What am I to do about Harting? Tell me what else I can do but disown him? You know us here now. Crises are academic. Scandals are not. Haven’t you realised that only appearances matter?’

Turner searched frantically about him. ‘It’s not true! You can’t be so tied to the surface of things.’

‘What else is there when the underneath is rotten? Break the surface and we sink. That’s what Harting has done. I am a hypocrite,’ he continued simply. ‘I’m a great believer in hypocrisy. It’s the nearest we ever get to virtue. It’s a statement of what we ought to be. Like religion, like art, like the law, like marriage. I serve the appearance of things. It is the worst of systems; it is better than the others. That is my profession and that is my philosophy. And unlike yourself,’ he added, ‘I did not contract to serve a powerful nation, least of all a virtuous one. All power corrupts. The loss of power corrupts even more. We thank an American for that advice. It’s quite true. We are a corrupt nation, and we need all the help we can get. That is lamentable and, I confess, occasionally humili­ating. However, I would rather fail as a power than survive by impotence. I would rather be vanquished than neutral. I would rather be English than Swiss. And unlike you, I expect nothing. I expect no more from institutions than I expect from people. You have no suggestion then? I am disappointed.’

‘Bradfield, I know her. I know you, and I know what you feel! You hate him! You hate him more than you dare admit. You hate him for feeling: for loving, even for hating. You hate him for deceiving and for being honest. For waking her. For putting you to shame. You hate him for the time she spent on him… for the thought, the dream she had of him!’

‘But you have no suggestion. I imagine your five minutes are over. He has offended,’ he added casually, as if passing the topic once more in review. ‘Yes. He has. Not as much against myself as you might suppose. But against the order that results from chaos; against the built-in moderation of an aimless society. He had no business to hate Karfeld and none to… He had no business to remember. If you and I have a purpose at all any more, it is to save the world from such presumptions.’

‘Of all of you – Listen! – Of all of you he’s the only one who’s real, the only one who believed, and acted! For you, it’s a sterile, rotten game, a family word game, that’s all; just play. But Leo’s involved! He knows what he wants and he’s gone to get it!’

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