COVER PERSONALITY

   

  

 

   

‘The first duty of an underground worker is to perfect not only his cover story but also his cover personality.’ (Kim Philby, My silent war. London, Panther, 1969, p. 180).

THREE POSSIBLE WAYS

    There were three possible ways of punishing man for the Fall:  the mildest was the way actually used, expulsion from Paradise;  the second was destruction of Paradise;  the third – and this would have been the most terrible punishment of all – was the cutting off of life everlasting and leaving everything else as it was.

Franz Kafka, The Third Notebook  from The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cambridge, Exact Change, 1991
 

IT'S A BATTLEFIELD 2

He opened his eyes and saw Milly, quite clearly, in relief against the reading-lamp, blackness all round her and he was aware that she was bewildered and hopeless and needed him and that he was dying; it seemed to him that she was watching him with horror as if he was the first of all men whom sooner or later she must come to know; he unsealed his ears and heard the breathing catch in her throat.  He put his foot against the rail and urged his jaw to open, his muscles to respond;  then there was pain and a sense of something breaking and the taste of blood and his throat filling and a struggle to breathe.

  He never knew that he screamed in spite of his broken jaw; but with curious irrelevance, out of the darkness, after they had left him and his pulses had ceased beating and he was dead, consciousness returned for a fraction of a second, as if his brain had been a hopelessly shattered mirror, of which one piece caught a passing light.  He saw and his brain recorded  the sight:  twelve men lying uneasily awake in the public ward with the wireless headpieces clamped across their ears, and a nurse reading under a lamp, and nobody beside his bed.

Text:  Graham Greene, It’s A Battlefield (1934)