The Secret Pilgrim

by John Le Carré

watching the elderly trains disgorge their middle-aged commuters.

‘Oh, I don’t think I’m a legend at all,’ Smiley protested as he clambered to his feet. ‘I think I’m just a rather fat old man wedged between the pudding and the port.’

actually. Better we eat the soup, not stir it.’

Britta had provided the summation of my confusion until now. She had articulated my sense of trying to hold on to a world that was slipping away from me, my susceptibility to every stray argument and desire.

It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn’t notice. It wasn’t weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we’ve had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves. One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges – why then, Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser.

Your weapons for this task are your grey locks and your palpable good nature, which I have observed that you are not above putting to perfidious use.

You knew long before you shook his hand that he had no truck with a whole category of life that ranged from art to public transport. You were silently forewarned to keep your distance if you were that kind of fool.