Call For The Dead

'She's alive. Don't worry. Go on?'

'Fennan liked you, you know. Freitag tried to kill you . . . why?'

'Because I came back, I suppose, and asked you about the 8.30 call. You told Freitag that, didn't you?'

'Oh, God,' she said, her fingers at her mouth.

'You rang him up, didn't you? As soon as I'd gone?'

'Yes, yes. I was frightened. I wanted to warn him to go, him and Dieter, to go away and never come back, because I knew you'd find out. If not today then one day, but 1 knew you'd find out in the end. Why would they never leave me alone? They were frightened of me because they knew I had no dreams, that 1 only wanted Samuel, wanted him safe to love and care for. They relied on that.'

Smiley felt his head throbbing erratically. 'So you rang him straight away,' he said. 'You tried the Primrose number first and couldn't get through.'

'Yes,' she said vaguely. 'Yes, that's right. But they're both Primrose numbers?'

'So you rang the other number, the alternative..'

She drifted back to the window, suddenly exhausted and limp; she seemed happier now — the storm had left her reflective and, in a way, content.

'Yes. Freitag was a great one for alternative plans?'

'What was the other number?' Smiley insisted. He watched her anxiously as she stared out of the window into the dark garden.

'Why do you want to know?'

He came and stood beside her at the window, watching her profile. His voice was suddenly harsh and energetic.

'I said the girl was all right. You and I are alive, too. But don't think that's going to last.' She turned to him with fear in her eyes, looked at him for a moment, then nodded. Smiley took her by the arm and guided her to a chair. He ought to make her a hot drink or something. She sat down quite mechanically, almost with the detachment of incipient madness.

'The other number was 9747?'

'Any address — did you have an address?'

'No, no address. Only the telephone. Tricks on the telephone. No address,' she repeated, with unnatural emphasis, so that Smiley looked at her and wondered. A thought suddenly struck him — a memory of Dieter's skill in communication.

'Freitag didn't meet you the night Fennan died, did he? He didn't come to the theatre?'

'No?'

'That was the first time he had missed, wasn't it? You panicked and left early?'

'No. . . yes, yes, I panicked.'' 'No you didn't! You left early because you had to, it was the arrangement. Why did you leave early? Why?'

Her hands hid her face.

'Are you still mad?' Smiley shouted. 'Do you still think you can control what you have made? Freitag will kill you, kill the girl, kill, kill, kill. Who are you trying to protect, a girl or a murderer?'

She wept and said nothing. Smiley crouched beside her, still shouting.

'I'll tell you why you left early, shall I? I'll tell you what I think. It was to catch the last post that night from Weybridge. He hadn't come, you hadn't exchanged cloakroom tickets, had you, so you obeyed the instructions, you posted your ticket to him and you have got an address, not written down but remembered, remembered forever: 'If there is a crisis, if I do not come, this is the address': is that what he said? An address never to be used or spoken of, an address forgotten and remembered for ever? Is that right? Tell me!'

She stood up, her head turned away, went to the desk and found a piece of paper and a pencil. The tears still ran freely over her face. With agonising slowness she wrote the address, her hand faltering and almost stopping between words.

He took the paper from her, folded it carefully across the middle and put it in his wallet.

Now he would make her some tea.

She looked like a child rescued from the sea. She sat on the edge of the sofa holding the cup tightly in her frail hands, nursing it against her body. Her thin shoulders were hunched forward, her feet and ankles pressed tightly together. Smiley, looking at her, felt he had broken something he should never have touched because it was so fragile. He felt an obscene, coarse bully, his offerings of tea a futile recompense for his clumsiness.

He could think of nothing to say. After a while, she said: 'He liked you, you know. He really liked you . . . he said you were a clever little man. It was quite a surprise when Samuel called anyone clever.' She shook her head slowly. Perhaps it was the reaction that made her smile: 'He used to say there were two forces in the world, the positive and the negative. 'What shall I do then?' he would ask me; 'Let them ruin their harvest because they give me bread? Creation, progress, power, the whole future of mankind waits at their door: shall I not let them in?' And I said to him: 'but Samuel, maybe the people are happy without these things?' But you know he didn't think of people like that.

'But I couldn't stop him. You know the strangest thing about Fennan? For all that thinking and talking, he had made up his mind long ago what he would do. All the rest was poetry. He wasn't co-ordinated, that's what I used to tell him . . ?'

'... and yet you helped him,' said Smiley.

'Yes, I helped him. He wanted help so I gave it him. He was my life?'

'I see?'

'That was a mistake. He was a little boy, you know. He forgot things just like a child. And so vain. He had made up his mind to do it and he did it so badly. He didn't think of it as you do, or I do. He simply didn't think of it like that. It was his work and that was all.

'It began so simply. He brought home a draft telegram one night and showed it to me. He said; 'I think Dieter ought to see that' — that was all. I couldn't believe it to begin with — that he was a spy, I mean. Because he was, wasn't he? And gradually, I realised. They began to ask for special things. The music case I got back from Freitag began to contain orders, and sometimes money. I said to him: 'Look at what they are sending you — do you want this?' We didn't know what to do with the money. In the end we gave it away mostly, I don't know why. Dieter was very angry that winter, when I told him?'

'What winter was that?' asked Smiley.

'The second winter with Dieter — 1956 in Murren. We met him first in January, 1955. That was when it began. And shall I tell you something? Hungary made no difference to Samuel, not a tiny bit of difference. Dieter was frightened about him then, I know, because Freitag told me. When Fennan gave me the things to take to Weybridge that November I nearly went mad. I shouted at him: 'Can't you see it's the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is this what you want?' I asked him: 'Would you do this for Germans, too? It's me who lies in the gutter, will you let them do it to me?' But he just said: 'No Elsa, this is different? And I went on taking the music case. Do you understand?'

'I don't know. I just don't know. I think perhaps I do?'

'He was all I had. He was my life. I protected myself, I suppose. And gradually I became a part of it, and then it was too late to stop .... And then you know,' she said, in a whisper; 'there were times when I was glad, times when the world seemed to applaud what Samuel was doing. It was not a pretty sight for us, the new Germany. Old names had come back, names that had frightened us as children. The dreadful, plump pride returned, you could see it even in the photographs in the papers, they. marched with the old rhythm. Fennan felt that too, but then thank God he hadn't seen what I saw.

'We were in a camp outside Dresden, where we used to live. My father was paralysed. He missed tobacco more than anything and I used to roll cigarettes from any rubbish I could find in the camp — just to pretend with. One day a guard saw him smoking and began laughing. Some others came and they laughed too. My father was holding the cigarette in his paralysed hand and it was burning his fingers. He didn't know, you see.

'Yes, when they gave guns to the Germans again, gave them money and uniforms, then sometimes — just for a little while — I was pleased with what Samuel had done. We are Jews, you know, and so .. ?'

'Yes, I know, I understand,' said Smiley: 'I saw it too, a little of it.'