Shikasta. Doris Lessing

As soon as she was grown up, pressures came on her to be normal. To these she responded by calling herself The Brand. She had refused to remove the tattoo of the camps. Now she had shirts, sweaters, with her brand on them, in black. In bed with her ‘lovers’ – where she challenged the world in the cold indifferent way that was her style – she would take the fingers of the man or woman (she was bisexual) and smile as she placed them on the brand on her forearm.

      She sought out, more and more, people who had been in concentration camps, refugee camps, prisons. Several times she slipped through frontiers to enter camps, prisons: these exploits were ‘impossible’. Daring the ‘impossible’ she was alive, as she never was otherwise. She prepared more difficult exploits for herself. She even lived as a member of a corrective prison in a certain Northwest fringe country for a year. The inmates saw her as engaged in some political task, but she was testing herself. For what? But her ‘historical role’ had not yet been ‘minted by history’: her vocabulary consisted entirely of political slogans or clichés, mostly of the left, together with concentration camp and prison jargon. At that stage she did not see herself with a definite future. She had no home of her own, but moved from one flat to another in a dozen cities of the Northwest fringes. These were owned by people like herself, some of whom had ordinary jobs, or got money illegally in one way or another. Money did not matter to her. She always wore trousers, and a shirt or sweater, and if these did not have on them her brand, she wore it on a silver bracelet.

      She was a stocky plain girl, with nothing remarkable about her; but people would find themselves watching her, uneasy because of this coldly observant presence. She was always in command of herself, and hostile, unless when with her other selves, the products of the camps. Then she was affectionate, in a clumsy childish way. But only one other person knew the full details of her exploits among the camps and prisons. This was a man called ‘X’.

      When terrorist groups sprang up everywhere, most of them of younger people than she, The Brand was not far from a legend. People saw this as a danger, ‘exhibitionism’, and kept clear of her; but in that network of flats, houses, where these people moved, she had always just left, or would soon be there, someone knew her, she had helped somebody. One man, respected among them, who was about to start, correctly and formally, a group of whom he would be ‘leader’ – though the word was understood differently among them – refused to talk about her, but allowed it to be understood that she was more skilled and brave than anyone he had known. He insisted that she should be asked to be a member of his group: insisted against opposition.

      He had said she was a mistress of disguise.

      She came to a flat one afternoon in an industrial city in the north of the Northwest fringes. It was a bitter cold day, snowing, a freezing wind. Four people in their twenties, two men, two women, saw this woman enter: blond, sunburned, a little overfed, in a fur coat that was vulgar and expensive, with the good-humoured easy smile of the indulged and sheltered of this world. This middle-class woman sat down fussily, guarding her handbag that had cost a fortune but was a bit shabby, in the way people do who care for their possessions. Her audience burst out laughing. She became an elder sister to them, an infinitely clever comrade, who had always done, and with success, more difficult things than any of them had dreamed of. This circle of outlaws was her family, and would have to be till death, for they could never leave such a circle and return to ordinary life – a condition that was not desirable or understandable to any of them. Her self-challenges, her feats, were disclosed by her, discussed, and all kinds of practical lessons drawn from them.

      This was one of the more successful of the terrorist groups. It operated for more than ten years before The Brand was caught, with eight others. Their goals were always the same: an extremely difficult and dangerous feat that needed resources of skill, bravery, cunning. They were all people who had to have danger to feel alive at all. They were ‘left-wing’ socialists of a sort. But discussions of a ‘line’, the variations of dogma, were never important to them. When they exchanged the phrases of the international left-wing vocabulary, it was without passion.

      They did not court, or crave, publicity, but used it.

      Most of their engagements with danger were anonymous and did not reach newspapers and television.

      They blackmailed an international business corporation or individual, for money. Large sums of money would find their way to refugee organizations, prisoners escaping or in hiding, or to the ‘network’. Young people in refugee camps would find themselves mysteriously supported into universities or training of some kind. Flats and houses were set up in this country or that, sometimes across the world, for the use of the ‘network’. Organizations similar to theirs, temporarily in difficulties, would be helped. They also blackmailed and kidnapped, for information. They wanted details of how this business worked, the linkages and bonds of that multinational firm. They wanted information about secret military installations – and got it. They acquired materials to make various types of bomb, weapon, and supplied other groups with them. If any one of these young people had been asked why she or he did not use these talents ‘for the common good’ the reply would have been ‘But I do already!’ for they saw themselves as an alternative world government.

      When they were caught, it was by chance; and this is not the place to describe how.

      The Brand, and her associates, were in prison, all with multiple charges against them. Murders had been committed, but not for the pleasure of murder. The pleasure –