“I’m not a Christian.”
Fiedler shrugged. “You know what I mean.” He smiled again. “The thing that embarrasses you. . . . I’ll put it another way. Suppose Mundt is right? He asked me to confess, you know; I was to confess that I was in league with British spies who were plotting to murder him. You see the argument–that the whole operation was mounted by British Intelligence in order to entice us–me, if you like–into liquidating the best man in the Abteilung. To turn, our own weapon against us.”
“He tried that on me,” said Leamas indifferently. And he added, “As if I’d cooked up the whole bloody story.”
“But what I mean is this: suppose you had done that, suppose it were true–I am taking an example, you understand, a hypothesis, would you kill a man, an innocent man–”
“Mundt’s a killer himself.”
“Suppose he wasn’t. Suppose it were me they wanted to kill: would London do it?”
“It depends. It depends on the need. . . .”
“Ah,” said Fiedler contentedly, “it depends on the need. Like Stalin, in fact. The traffic accident and the statistics. That is a great relief.”
“Why?”
“You must get some sleep,” said Fiedler. “Order what food you want. They wifi bring you whatever you want. Tomorrow you can talk.” As he reached the door he looked back and said, “We’re all the same, you know, that’s the joke.”
Soon Leamas was asleep, content in the knowledge that Fiedler was his ally and that they would shortly send Mundt to his death. That was something which he had looked forward to for a very long time.
* * 19 * Branch Meeting
Liz was happy in Leipzig. Austerity pleased her–it gave her the comfort of sacrifice. The little house she stayed in was dark and meager, the food was poor and most of it had to go to the chilthen. They talked politics at every meal, she and Frau Lüman, Branch Secretary for the Ward Branch of Leipzig-Neuenhagen, a small gray woman whose husband managed a gravel quarry on the outskirts of the city. It was like living in a religious community, Liz thought; a convent or a kibbutz or something. You felt the world was better for your empty stomach. Liz had some German which she had learned from her aunt, and she was surprised how quickly she was able to use it. She tried it on the children first and they grinned and helped her. The children treated her oddly to begin with, as if she were a person of great quality or rarity value, and on the third day one of them plucked up courage and asked her if she had brought any chocolate from “_drüben_”–from “over there.” She’d never thought of that and she felt ashamed. Alter that they seemed to forget about her.
In the evenings there was Party work. They distributed literature, visited Branch members who had defaulted on their dues or lagged behind in their attendance at meetings, called in at District for a discussion on “Problems Connected with the Centralized Distribution of Agricultural Produce” at which all local Branch Secretaries were present, and attended a meeting of the Workers’ Consultative Council of a machine tool factory on the outskirts of the town.
At last, on the fourth day, a Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could one day be. They had chosen a wonderful title for the evening’s discussions–“Coexistence After Two Wars”–and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularized; they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighborhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.
Seven people came.
Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. She could scarcely concentrate on the speaker, and when she tried he used long German compounds that she couldn’t work out anyway. It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like midweek evensong when she used to go to church–the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing–it was awful really but she did–she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation–it was something you could react to.