from the council as commands. Liberated areas were henceforth to be isolated and severely policed; people in these areas were to know only what the movement wanted them to know. Roads and bridges on the perimeter were to be blown up. There were to be no telephones, no newspapers from outside, no films, no electricity. There was to be a renewed emphasis on the old idea of liquidating the class enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no class enemy left in these villages, the people to be liquidated were the better off. The revolutionary madman Willie and Keso had met had spoken of the philosophy of murder as his revolutionary gift to the poor, the cause for which week after week he walked from village to village. Something like this philosophy was brought into play again, and presented as doctrine. Murders of class enemies—which now meant only peasants with a little too much land—were required now, to balance the successes of the police. Discipline in the squads was to be tightened up; squad members were to report on one another.
Willie was reassigned to a new squad, and found himself suddenly among suspicious strangers. He lost the room in the low-eaved hut, which he had grown to think of as his. His squad was a road-destroying and bridge-destroying squad, and he lived in a tented camp, again constantly on the move. He became disorientated. He remembered the time when it consoled him, gave him a hold on things, to count the beds he had slept in. Such a hold was no longer possible for him. He wished now passionately only to save himself, to get in touch with himself again, to get away to the upper air. But he didn’t know where he was. His only consolation—and he wasn’t sure how much of a consolation it was—was that, amid all the strangers whose characters he didn’t want to read, whom (out of his great fatigue and disorientation now) he wished to keep as mysteries—his only consolation was that at the two-weekly meetings of the section he continued to see Einstein.
Now there came the order for the squad to get villagers to kill better-off farmers. This was no longer optional, a goal that might be reached one day when conditions were suitable. This was an order, like a retail chain ordering its managers to improve sales. The council wanted figures.
Willie and another man from the squad went with a gun to a village at dusk. Willie remembered the madman’s story of going to a village after nightfall and asking the first labourer he saw to kill the landlord. That had happened thirty years ago. And now Willie was living through it again. Only now there was no landlord.
They stopped a labourer. He was dark, with a short turban, and had rough, hard hands. He looked well fed.
The man with Willie said, “Good evening, brother. Who is the richest man in your village?”
The villager seemed to know what they were leading up to. He said to Willie, “Please take your gun and go away.”
The man with Willie said, “Why should we go away?”
The villager said, “It will be all right for you two. You will go away to your nice houses. At the end of this business, if I follow you, I will get my arse beaten by somebody or other. Of that I am absolutely sure.”
The man with Willie said, “But if you kill the rich man, that will be one less man to oppress you.”
The villager said to Willie, “You kill him for me. Besides, I don’t know how to use a gun.”
Willie said, “I’ll show you how to use a gun.”
The villager said, “It really will be much simpler for everybody if you killed him.”
Willie said, “I’ll show you. You hold it like this, and look down here.”
Down the sight of the gun a farmer came into view. He was coming down a slight hill. He was at the end of his day’s labour. Willie and the man with him and the villager were hidden by a thicket beside the village path.
Looking down the gunsight at the man, the gun moving minute distances as if in response to the uncertainty or certainty in his mind, the scale of things altered for Willie, and he played with that change of scale. Something like this had happened in Portuguese Africa when, after a mass killing of settlers, the government had opened the police