by Gavin McCrea
She obeyed the order.
In a big hall with concrete walls, she ate sausage rolls and drank orange juice and chatted with the people who shared her table. On learning that she was English, they were quick to express their disgust with De Gaulle and to ask her, in hopeful tones, about the Labour government in Britain: were things any better under them? She took pleasure in enlightening them. Her interlocutors enjoyed her candour and expressed appreciation for her insights. It was refreshing, they said, to encounter a foreigner with genuine revolutionary principles, for they had witnessed over the previous weeks an invasion by the cynical and the unbelieving: those who had merely come to see. They deemed her a different breed, and, as a reward, let her in on some of the things about France that outsiders tended not to know, and gave her advice on getting by here. Then, when she had finished eating, they conducted her to the lift and pressed the button for the relevant floor, the eighth.
—Victory for Vietnam, they said as the lift doors closed.
She raised a fist in return:
—Fight to win peace.
At the communications office she was welcomed by a woman in a mini skirt and high boots called Kati, who presented her to the rest of the team. Right away Eva was in no doubt that the office was run by agreeable people. They embraced her and inquired into her circumstances and, seeing her puffy eyes and chapped lips, gave her water and coffee and sticks of make-up for her own personal use. With almost excessive patience they explained to her the purpose of the office, the roles they themselves carried out — phone operator, filing clerk, typist, translator, transcriber, illustrator, printer — and the tasks that each role involved. Kindly they gave her some degree of freedom in choosing the work she would like to do. They were respectful, they were serious, they were stylish, they were well-meaning.
Be that as it may, she was obliged to feel sorry and not a little embarrassed for them. For at the end of the day they were all women. Not a single man amongst them. Which could only mean that the power resided elsewhere, in the auditoriums and the committee rooms below, and that here, stuck up in the attic, they were condemned to observe and react only. The secretaries, the shit-workers, the movement chicks who clocked in and out and were rung for — that was who they were, and she, to her own embarrassment now, was about to become one of them.
She chose to assist in the printing of posters. On a large central worktable, a woman stretched silk screens across wooden frames. A second traced the designs on. A third blocked the solids out with gum and coated the surface with varnish. A fourth used the wooden plank to drive the ink across the screen. A fifth lifted the frame and pulled out the freshly printed sheet. Eva’s job, as the sixth, was to hang up the damp posters to dry. EVERY VIEW OF THINGS WHICH IS NOT STRANGE IS FALSE, said one. WE WANT COMMUNICATION, NOT TELECOMMUNICATION, another. Skulls in police helmets. De Gaulle as an assassin. Barbed wire across a television screen. The media as a bottle of poison: DO NOT SWALLOW!
Eva had previously been dismissive of this kind of work. Her sister Iris, after dropping out of art college, had worked for a while at the Poster Workshop in London, which Eva had teased her about. What a waste of time, she used to say. Why make everything by hand when you can produce it en masse on an offset press? The refusal of political artists to avail themselves of the most advanced technology was, in Eva’s view, conservative, bourgeois, pointless. Iris’s counterargument, that production for use rather than profit had to be based on handicraft, failed to convince Eva. A paintbrush could never be a match for a printer. Drawing a picture of a bomb was an indulgent luxury when every night the television screen showed hundreds of bombs dropping on peasant villages. The media ruled the world now, and only radical performance, because it was live, the meeting of body with body, would ever be able to mount a real challenge to it.
But after a couple of hours working at the silk screen, Eva wondered if perhaps her past judgements had been rash. She was beginning to see the attraction of materials and of craft. Of having in one’s hands a single object, and of changing it simply by changing it, and of never rushing but rather seeing each step through. Iris had been right. It was satisfying. There was dignity in it. And no small amount of peace. In the place of the noise of machines, there was the hush of concentration, and the smell of linseed oil and ink and white spirit and cigarettes. Was this not how the people in China lived?
At around four o’ clock, a group of men came in, members of the Student–Worker Liaison Committee, five in all.
—Here they are, whispered her neighbour at the worktable. The cocks.
—Pardon me? she said, surprised, for until now she had not heard any cross words spoken.
—The cocks, her neighbour repeated, flicking an eye to the men by the door. The strutting roosters. The ridiculous bastards.
The men were crowded round Kati’s desk. They had drafted a short text, which they wanted typed up, illustrated and duplicated as a leaflet. Kati read it and handed it back.
—We don’t just put any old thing into production, she said. What’s your aim with this?
Visibly taken aback, unused to having to justify themselves, they passed the text around in order that each man in turn should check that this was not some inferior earlier draft, that indeed it was the version that they had agreed upon, before placing it down on the desk and smoothing it out in front of Kati once more.
—As the Student-Worker Liaison Committee—
The man who spoke was handsome enough for Eva to want to be noticed by him.
—our aim is to make contact and establish links with the proletariat. These leaflets, which you will produce, mademoiselle, will be distributed in the first instance to the striking workers at the Renault plant, and thereafter to any group of workers who share our general libertarian-revolutionary outlook. This text was drawn up in committee, following many hours of discussion, and subsequently submitted to general criticism. It has attained majority approval. Neither you nor anyone in this office has the authority to censor it.
Kati was not intimidated. She picked up the text between thumb and forefinger and shook it in the air while she calmly sketched out the process of printing a leaflet, the expense of it, the number of people it required, the time it took. Did the men honestly think this was worth spending so much of the revolution’s limited resources on? Listening to her, Eva was confident that eventually Kati would accept the text. Her show of resistance was intended to make a point only: it was all well and good to spend your time in committees and public debates, but the real work was done here, behind the scenes, in offices like this, by women like us, toiling day and night, and it was about time that men like you — handsome, idle men — took notice.
The man rested his fingertips on Kati’s desk and began to argue with her, rationally. She responded equally rationally. Eva’s impulse was to intervene, but she held herself back.
—You’re right, she whispered instead to her neighbour. Quite ridiculous.
At six, the men came back, more of them this time, to accompany the women to the demonstration. One or two of the women put on their jackets to go, but the majority did not move from their stations. Diligent, dedicated, they were forgoing the excitement of the march in favour of the relative quiet here, a decision they made not out of modesty, Eva thought, but rather in acknowledgement of their own importance.
—You coming?
The handsome man grinned at her.
She shook her head: no. She would stay.
She was kept on the silk screens until around midnight, at which point the focus of the activity in the office switched to reporting on the demonstration, and she was assigned to turning the handle on the printing press. The temperature in the room rose sharply as people rushed in with reports and missives to be typed, and rolls of film to be developed. Animated discussions took place about which line to take in the forthcoming bulletins. The phone rang and the wire rapped. Somehow spirits remained fes
tive even as orders were shouted and bodies rushed about from one post to another. When things calmed down again at five a.m., she was sent off to get some sleep. When she returned soon after nine, the office was empty except for a couple of women in the back room manning the radios. She volunteered to take over from one of them and spent the rest of the morning transcribing the French transmissions from Radio Beijing.
This rhythm — busy nights at the worktables followed by quiet mornings at the radio — became her routine over the following days. She adapted swiftly and learned to enjoy herself in it. The people she came into contact with metamorphosed automatically into friends. They were for the most part of a plain and sensible sort, untheatrical, but she respected them because they did things well. They applied themselves to their work without a divided mind, and in their relations with each other they engaged neither in flattery nor in unkindness — an efficiency which sprang up when women had an industry and were left alone to organise it, and which was no different from love.
After four days — an eternity, the longest period she had been separated from the Wherehouse group since its establishment — Max appeared. Even in his French clothes and after years of foreign living, he looked red and Londonish. A pair of fashionable glasses did not fully conceal the white discs that encircled his eyes. The thinness of his limbs accentuated the fat which had collected at his stomach, bloating out from his bones like an oversized cyst. He came in accompanied by a Frenchman two decades his junior: thick-haired, unshaven, not unhandsome, evidently Max’s boy because he had on a variation of the same thin silk scarf as Max, and was wearing it in the same mode, one end thrown loosely over the shoulder.
In his initial scan of the room, Max did not see her because she was concealed by a line of drying posters. He went to the desk to enquire and quickly got into an argument with Kati about whether or not he had the right to ask her who she was and what authority she held.
—Now it’s the pederasts, whispered her neighbour. The tough men have given up on us, so they’re sending in the fruitcakes.
The woman chuckled to herself and was still chuckling to herself when:
—Never mind, there she is!
Max broke away from his altercation and came over to Eva, embraced her.
—I knew I’d find you eventually.
Her cheek pressed against his, she glanced past Max’s ear. Her neighbour was once again engrossed in her work, her face set in a bare expression which said: I have not seen you, I have not heard you, what you do is your business.
—What a ball breaker, Max said, referring to Kati. How in Christ have you been putting up with that?
—She’s nice, Max, if you don’t act the dickhead. And I’ve been enjoying it here actually.
—Really? Wouldn’t have thought the typing pool was for you.
She took his arm and pulled him away from the worktable to the social space by the window.
—Not so bloody loud.
With an open palm, she invited him to sit down.
He looked at the dirty old sofa and laughed.
—Stop being such a little prefect, Eva. Trying to control everyone. It’s a revolution, or haven’t you noticed?
Max’s boy, who had been perusing the posters on the walls, came to join them:
—Eva, isn’t it? I’m Cyril.
—Cyril, Eva, said Max. Eva, Cyril.
—Enchanted, she said as they kissed.
Max took a photo of them.
—Not here, she said. Please.
—In that case, let’s get out of here.
—To go where?
—Place de la Sorbonne. There’s a special march planned. You can’t miss it. Come. I’ll explain on the way.
—No, Max. I can’t. It’s busy here.
—Shh-shh-shh—
Max pressed a finger against his own lips.
—I want you to listen to me now, Eva, okay?
His voice was curt and stern, insisting on compliance.
—The rest of your group, whatever you’re called, are waiting at place de la Sorbonne. I’m going to meet them there at six, as I said I would. And you’ll be coming with me. You and I both know that’s what’s going to happen, so let’s drop the interim dramatics and just cut to the inevitable outcome, shall we?
—So you’ve seen them?
—Alain hosted an artists’ meeting at his flat this morning, and I went upstairs to the room to invite you all down. It seems you haven’t been sleeping in the room. Álvaro tells me you haven’t been back there since you arrived.
She sighed.
—What’re you playing at, Eva?
—None of your business, Max.
Max took off his glasses so that the solemnness of his grey eyes would travel to her unobstructed:
—And Iris? You left London without your sister.
—She wasn’t around. We needed to leave. In your telegram you said to hurry.
—I’ve told you before, you undervalue your sister. Which is the same thing as mistreating her. All you see is a hippy, and you think hippies are—
—The new snobs.
—Right, which means you miss how interesting she is, and how capable actually, more capable, I’m absolutely positive, than any of the other little darlings in your groupuscule.
Cyril put a hand on Max’s arm:
—Please, Max. Go softly.
She wanted to slap the boy, softly, about the face.
—I’ll need to apologise to Iris when I get back, she said. I know that.
Max blew onto the lenses of his glasses and wiped them using the end of his shirt.
—And Álvaro? he said. You’re going to lose him, you know. He’s a good bloke, and you’re going to chase him away.
—Max, said Cyril. Be soft, I said.
Max ignored him:
—This grouplet, they’re your people, Eva. You handpicked them. You have a basic duty not to desert them.
—Please don’t give me a lecture, all right? How are they?
—You mean what remains of them. Half of them have gone back to England.
—Shit.
Tension shot up her back and neck. She closed her eyes and rolled her shoulders.
—D’you blame them? D’you care?’
She paused. Then:
—Yes. I do care.
—Álvaro thinks you might’ve gone back to London too. I told him he was wrong. I knew you’d never bail out.
—Thank you.
—My guess was, after the stunt you pulled at the Odéon, you’d just want to be keeping a low profile.
—They told you about that?
—Yes. But the Odéon’s not what Álvaro’s angry about. He’s angry you disappeared, obviously.
—Some of that is his fault. He left and didn’t come back.
—Getting separated isn’t the problem. He’s angry, they all are, that you didn’t rejoin them at Alain’s room. That was your meeting place. They were waiting for you there.
She pictured all their bodies crushed into that room, gone stale and smelly with the days.
—Now it’s time for you to make up with them, said Max. To salvage what’s left of your collective.
Over the previous days she had thought constantly, and with a deepening sense of concern, about her people. Iris. Álvaro. The other Wherehouse members. Where are they? What are they doing? Are they angry with me? She had abandoned them, so they had reason to be. Yet she was angry with them too, and had her own reasons for being so, and for doing what she did. They might well be the abandoned ones, but she was the lost one — is that not what everyone thinks? — and it was not clear to her who was worse off.
Being lost was for her not a straightforward feeling, nor did it necessarily contradict the feeling of being home. She had grown up in the old servants’ q
uarters above her grandparents’ hotel in Bloomsbury. At that time her parents were struggling actors and could not afford a place of their own, and as long as they insisted on calling themselves communists, her grandparents would not pay for one. She had a false memory of wandering freely in the hotel, from guest room to guest room, gaining access to all kinds of human stories, when in reality she had been confined to a cramped flat and subject to a hundred rules about where she could go, what she could touch and what she could ask of the staff. And although she followed these rules obediently, still she never definitively figured out what was by rights hers and what was for the paying guests only, whether she should go up the principal staircase or the workers’ ladder at the back, or if a given corridor was public or unfrequented.
After the hotel, there was a series of flats around London, and then, when her parents joined a travelling theatre troupe, a string of boarding houses and, for a time, a camper van, and, as before, a hundred rules designed to keep her — the child of parents who had themselves driven out of the mainstream — from going missing.
She was convinced that any problems she had came from that time. Her unhealthy desire to belong. Her fear of being in the wrong place or of not arriving at the right one. Her morbid fascination with the new. Her belief that the present could only be made tolerable by the future. A recurring nightmare she had saw her at risk of losing her part in a plan and compensating for that by making endless plans — which was precisely what she found herself doing when she was awake.
It was not until boarding school — insisted on and paid for by her grandparents — that, for the first time, she felt immersed in a flow whose course she did not want to swim against. There, on the Sussex coast, in the Victorian mansion and the surrounding grounds that they called Mountfield, everything was in tune with nature and God’s command, and was leading to a pleasant conclusion: popularity, success, association.
The girls’ dormitory was the first place she felt truly lost, that is, truly at home. There, her parents had no authority over her. She was outside the control of boys and men. There were many rules, but the teachers who policed them — by constant surveillance, including spying through peepholes — did so with the understanding that their own behaviour, as the only adults in this little realm, was also under inspection by the pupils and liable to be reported on in the larger world, so they were surprisingly generous in the amount of leeway they gave to the girls to mould and to adopt their own personalities.