“Quite so,” said Fiedler softly, “of course you would.” He stood up and went to the window.
“You should see it in the autumn,” he said, looking out. “It’s magnificent when the beeches are on the turn.”
* * 13 * Pins or Paper Clips
Fiedler loved to ask questions. Sometimes, because he was a lawyer, he asked them for his own pleasure alone, to demonstrate the discrepancy between evidence and perfective truth. He possessed, however, that persistent inquisitiveness which for journalists and lawyers is an end in itself. –
They went for a walk that afternoon, following the gravel road down into the valley, then branching into the forest along a broad, pitted track lined with felled timber. All the time, Fiedler probed, giving nothing. About the building in Cambridge Circus, and the people who worked there. What social class did they come from, what parts of London did they inhabit, did husbands and wives work in the same Departments? He asked about the pay, the leave, the morale, the canteen; he asked about their love-life, their gossip, their philosophy. Most of all he asked about their philosophy.
To Leamas that, was the most difficult question of all.
“What do you mean, a philosophy?” he replied. “We’re not Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people.”
“Are you Christians then?”
“Not many, I shouldn’t think. I don’t know many.”
“What makes them do it, then?” Fiedler persisted: “They must have a philosophy.”
“Why must they? Perhaps they don’t know; don’t even care. Not everyone has a philosophy,” Leamas answered, a little helplessly.
“Then tell me what is your philosophy?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Leamas snapped, and they walked on in silence for a while. But Fiedler was not to be put off.
“If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?”
“Who the hell said they were?” Leamas replied irritably.
“But what is the justification then? What is it? For us it is easy, as I said to you last night. The Abteilung and organizations like it are the natural extension of the Party’s arm. They are in the vanguard of the fight for Peace and Progress. They are to the Party what the Party is to socialism: they _are_ the vanguard. Stalin said so–” he smiled drily, “it is not fashionable to quote Stalin–but he said once ‘Half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.’ He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a great cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counterrevolution can hardly stop at the exploitation–or the elimination, Leamas–of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of rationalizing society. Some Roman said it, didn’t he, in the Christian Bible–it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many?”
“I expect so,” Leamas replied wearily.
“Then what do you think? What is your philosophy?”
“I just think the whole lot of you are bastards,” said Leamas savagely.
Fiedler nodded. “That is a viewpoint I understand. It is primitive, negative and very stupid–but it is a viewpoint, it exists. But what about the rest of the Circus?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“Have you never discussed philosophy with them?”
“No. We’re not Germans.” He hesitated, then added vaguely: “I suppose they don’t like Communism.”
“And that justifies, for instance, the taking of human life? That justifies the bomb in the crowded restaurant; that justifies your write-off rate of agents–all that?”
Leamas shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“You see, for us it does,” Fiedler continued. “I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us farther along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance–so many women, so many children; and so far along the road. But Christians–and yours is a Christian society–Christians may not draw the balance.”
“Why not? They’ve got to defend themselves, haveji’t they?”
“But they believe in the sanctity of human life. They believe every man has a soul which can be saved. They believe in sacrifice.”