7

ABOUT FOUR WEEKS AFTER I TOOK THE VOW, I HAD BECOME SO MAROONED in the repetitions of Raymond James Burns’ course in World Communism that I made the mistake of yawning in class.

“Hubbard, am I boring you?” Ray Jim asked.

“No, sir.”

“I’d like to hear you repeat what I’ve just said.”

I could feel my father’s temper stir in me. “Look, Mr. Burns,” I said, “I’m not bored. I get it. I know the Communists are treacherous, and double-dealing, and use agents provocateurs to try to subvert our labor unions and work double-time to befuddle world opinion. I know they have millions of men in their armies getting ready for world domination, but I have to wonder one thing .  .  .”

“Shoot,” he said.

“Well, is every Communist a son of a bitch? I mean, are none of them human? Isn’t there one of them somewhere down the line who likes to get drunk just for the fun, say, of getting drunk? Must they always have to have a reason for what they’re doing?”

I could feel by the shift in the class that I was by now marooned in Harry-Hubbard-Land, population: 1. “You’ve told us,” I went on, “that the Communists condition people to the point where they can only receive approved ideas. Well, I don’t really believe what I’m going to say next, but for the sake of argument”—I was obviously preparing for a graceful exit—“would you say that we’re receiving something of the same nature, although different in degree, and, of course, democratic, because I can speak in freedom without reprisals.”

“We’re here,” said Ray Jim, “to sharpen your instincts and your faculties of critical reasoning. That is the opposite of brainwashing. Specious political reasoning is what we’re on the lookout for. Find it and uproot it.” He was striking the palm of one hand on the back of the other. “Now, I like your example,” he said. “It shows critical faculties. Just carry them further. I’m willing to accept the idea that there’s a dedicated Communist here and there who might get a hard-on without Party approval, but I’ll tell you this. Before long, he’s got to decide. Is it his career, or his dick?”

The class laughed with him. “Hubbard,” he stated, “you can put all of the Soviet people into three categories. Those who have been in a slave camp, those who are in a slave camp now, and those who are waiting to go.”

I now rejoined the fold by saying, “Thank you, sir.”

One night, visiting the Montagues at their canal house, I brought it up with Hugh. He didn’t take long to reply. “Of course the question is more complex than good stalwarts like old Ray Jim would have you know. Why, we’re debriefing a Soviet defector right now who’s obsessed with one fellow he destroyed, a silly drunk whom he’d encourage to booze up in some black hole of a bar in Siberia. So much anti-Soviet sentiment was milked out of the drunk that not only the poor wretch but all of his family were sent off to a camp. All of them harmless. But our defector had a quota of arrests to make, in the same way New York police are given parking tickets to hand out. It revolted him. A human Communist, so to speak.”

“Let me ask a stupid question,” I started. “Why are Communists so awful?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why?” He nodded. “It’s very Russian to be awful. Peter the Great once beached a small fleet of his on the bank of some large lake in Pereslavl. Then he didn’t go back to the place for thirty years. Of course, his beautiful boats had just about rotted out on the muddy lakeshore. Peter’s rage is captured in a formal document. ‘You, the governors of Pereslavl,’ went his pronunciamento, ‘shall preserve these ships, yachts, and galleys. Should you neglect this obligation,’”—here Harlot’s voice rose in imitation of his idea of Peter the Great—“‘you, and your descendants, will stand to answer.’”

He nodded. “Extreme, would you say?”

I nodded.

“Normal. That is, normal to the pre-Christian view of things. Christ not only brought love into the world, but civilization, with all its dubious benefits.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Well, as I seem to recollect telling you, Christ adjured us to forgive the son for the sins of the father. That’s amnesty. It opened the scientific world. Prior to this divine largesse, how might a man dare to be a scientist? Any error which proved an insult to nature could bring disaster down on his family. The Russians are spiritual, as every Russian will rush to tell you, but their Greek Orthodoxy gagged on that gift from Christ. It would have wrecked the tribal foundations. Forgive the sons? Never. Not in Russia. The punishment must remain greater than the crime. Now they want to march forward into technology land, and they can’t. They’re too spooked. Deathly afraid of terrible curses from Mother Nature. If you sin against nature, your sons will perish with you. No wonder Stalin was a total paranoid.”

“In that case,” I said, “the Russians ought to be easy to overcome.”

“Easy,” said Harlot, “if the retarded parts of the Third World have a true wish to enter civilization. I’m not sure they do. Backward countries may dream of cars and dams, and rush to pave their swamps, but it’s halfhearted. The other half still clings to pre-Christian realms—awe, paranoia, slavish obedience to the leader, divine punishment. The Soviets feel like kin to them. Don’t sneer altogether at Bullseye Burns. It is awful over there in the Soviet. Just today a paper crossed my desk about a sect of twelve poor Doukhobors who were rounded up in some alley of an outlying town in some poor half-forgotten province. The present Soviet leaders know the potential power in a dozen starved clerks and workers. Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and Bukharin and Zinoviev, all of that top layer, were also a ragtag circle once of impoverished clerks. In consequence, the KGB doesn’t cut down the sapling, it looks to extirpate the seed. That has huge effect. Suppose I hand you a six-chamber Colt with one round in it, spin the barrel, and say, ‘Now for Russian roulette.’ The chances in your favor are five to one as you pull the trigger, but in your heart it will feel no better than even money. Indeed, you probably expect to die. Ditto with extreme punishment. Let it fall on twelve individuals, and twelve million will shiver. Bullseye Burns is not so far off the mark.”