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INTRODUCTION
in
Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity.
This part of him was bloodless and inhuman—Smiley in this role was the international mercenary of his trade, amoral and without motive beyond that of personal gratification.
By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life.
For four years he had played the part, travelling back and forth between Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden. He had never guessed it was possible to be frightened for so long.
Smiley was no material for promotion and it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was—in the nicest possible way—on the shelf.
Smiley was grateful it was Peter Guillam’s duty that night. A polished and thoughtful man who had specialized in satellite espionage, the kind of friendly spirit who always has a timetable and a penknife.
He told me the whole story—seemed quite happy to mention names—and then we went to an espresso café he knew near Millbank.” “A what?” “An espresso bar. They sell a special kind of coffee for a shilling a cup. We had some.”
My God, thought Smiley; you really do work round the clock. A twenty-four-hour cabaret, you are—“We Never Closed.” He walked out into the street.
It was a worn face, racked and ravaged long ago, the face of a child grown old on starving and exhaustion, the eternal refugee face, the prison-camp face, thought Smiley.
“It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr. Smiley,” she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; “and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.”
“You call yourself the State, Mr. Smiley; you have no place among real people. You dropped a bomb from the sky: don’t come down here and look at the blood, or hear the scream.”
“I see. Fennan decides to commit suicide. He asks the exchange to ring him at 8:30. He makes himself some cocoa and puts it in the drawing-room. He goes upstairs and types his last letter. He comes down again to shoot himself, leaving the cocoa undrunk. It all hangs together nicely.”
Smiley had a fleeting vision of Elsa Fennan as a child—a spindly, agile tomboy like George Sand’s “Petite Fadette”—half woman, half glib, lying girl. He saw her as a wheedling Backfisch, fighting like a cat for herself alone, and he saw her too, starved and shrunken in prison camp, ruthless in her fight for self-preservation. It was pathetic to witness in that smile the light of her early innocence, and a steeled weapon in her fight for survival.
“We seem to be at cross-purposes,” he said. “I send you down to discover why Fennan shot himself. You come back and say he didn’t. We’re not policemen, Smiley.” “No. I sometimes wonder what we are.”
He was suddenly alert. Something had moved in the drawing-room. A light, a shadow, a human form; something, he was certain. Was it sight or instinct? Was it the latent skill of his own tradecraft which informed him? Some fine sense or nerve, some remote faculty of perception warned him now and he heeded the warning.
He was bored by the light above him, and wished there was more to look at. He was bored by the grapes, the smell of honeycomb and flowers, the chocolates. He wanted books, and literary journals; how could he keep up with his reading if they gave him no books? There was so little research done on his period as it was, so little creative criticism on the seventeenth century.
Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
He had the nerve not to drink in a university where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.
He used to quote Kleist a great deal: ‘If all eyes were made of green glass, and if all that seems white was really green, who would be the wiser?’
“Samuel always said: ‘They will win because they know and the others will perish because they do not: men who work for a dream will work for ever’—that’s what he said. But I knew their dream, I knew it would destroy us. What has not destroyed? Even the dream of Christ.”
He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism.
