Free Making Enemies by Francis Bennett Page A

resistance to the guardianship of the two strangers.
    They walk him down the corridor, one of them holding his arm in case he should try to escape, until they find an empty room. They push him roughly inside, close the door, sit him down in a chair facing them and the questioning begins.
    They ask him about his mother because they are using him to frighten her.
    When does she leave the apartment in the morning?
    When does she return?
    What does she talk about?
    Who are her friends?
    They will have sown ideas in his head, she is sure, because that is how they do these things. The few certainties in his life will have crumbled in their presence. He is too young and they are too skilful and too brutal for him to find any escape.
    She sees the depth of her son’s confusion. He is terrified, unsure, he has no idea what is happening nor why they are questioning him. She feels the anger well within her, the familiar controls on her emotions threatening to burst under the strain of her fury. How can we live like this? How can we submit our children to interrogation so they are turned against their parents?
    Then the mechanics of years of self-discipline move into place. Accept, she reminds herself. Slip away into the shadows. Live where you cannot be noticed, out of sight, on the margin. Where you’ve always lived.
    But she cannot avoid the grief in her son’s eyes nor the coldness of his skin against hers. Anger sits in her heart.
    ‘What else did they ask you?’
    ‘Were you a member of the Communist Party?’
    ‘What did you tell them?’
    ‘I said no.’
    ‘You were right.’
    ‘They said my father betrayed the state.’
    ‘They were trying to frighten you.’
    ‘They said the son of a traitor is a traitor himself.’
    ‘Then they are lying.’
    ‘How do I know?’
    That was why he had cried. It was a familiar betrayal, lies as evidence to threaten the bond between mother and son. How can she prove her love for her son except by the life she lives? By the touch of her hand, by a kiss on his sleeping cheek, or by her anxieties, her evasions, all the sacrifices she has made and must make to protect him? How can she tell him this? The state knows she can’t, which is why they dress their lies in the clear lines of truth, why they present their case to the defenceless child, why they must destroy the one relationship that can still threaten their dominance.
    What can she say to him? How can she tell her own child that his ordeal is to remind her that powerful forces still control her existence? She resists the temptation to say anything.
    ‘How do I know?’
    That is his question. How can he be sure of anything any more in a world where the few certainties of his young life have been suddenly and brutally challenged?
    There is only one honest way to answer his question. She must initiate her son into the double life, describing the secret territory of the heart which lies untouched in a country where emotions, loyalties, even love are dictated by an external authority, not by the truth you feel.
    ‘They will tempt you with their certainties,’ she tells her son. ‘Their truths will have the appearance of the hardest rock, the toughest steel. They will build their positions out of the impeccable logic of their Marxist-Leninist arguments, which they don’t understand – they can only repeat what they have been told to say, the ideology that has outlawed doubt, where every piece fits tightly with its neighbour.’
    She sees his white face, the deep, black shadows under his eyes, she sees him growing older before her. She has always known that one day this moment would come when she would have to tell him the truth.
    ‘You cannot fight that,’ she says, ‘not one person against this edifice of power. Nor should you try. But quietly and secretly within yourself, you must resist it. You must learn, too, how to be patient.’
    ‘Does that mean there are two truths?’ he asks.
    ‘No,’ she says, ‘there is only one