by J. T. Marsh
So long as Valeri stands, he stands among brothers and sisters. In his working class apartment block, they ready themselves for the coming storm. Pooling their limited resources, they cobble together the money to buy a semi-automatic rifle and some ammunition off the street. With the couple of handguns and the one bolt-action rifle they’ve had between them, it’s a small arsenal Valeri declares enough to defend their right to live in their own homes.
19. Seeds of Deception
As disorder spreads like wildfire, the paths of the wealthy man and of the working man diverge considerably. At the helm of the armed forces are a group of men loyal to the flag, or so they seem at a moment’s glance; in truth, they are of a stock unlike any other, their allegiance owed to ideals found in no constitution, represented in no colours worn on the sleeve but those they’ve made up for themselves. Like the revolutionary, these men choose not to take immediate action, knowing as they do to wait for the perfect moment to strike. With the election weeks away, already the popular front has called for it to be boycotted; after the massacre, recruitment into the Worker’s Party and the People’s Party has skyrocketed, with other, minor parties joining the front and pledging themselves to its cause. For Valeri, his work is not yet done. Still he keeps on drawing his pittance, here and there, using it to sustain himself in some minimal way while he stores his armaments with the other tenants in his apartment block and awaits the coming strike. Stanislaw’s asleep when the army arrives, but his fellow prisoners wake him hurriedly. He makes it to the front just in time to see the army troops take up position halfway up the road. When he sees they’ve brought artillery, he’s certain they’re going to attack, but they don’t, not yet. Instead, he watches through binoculars as the army troops position their artillery at the front of their roadblock, aiming right down the road at the prison’s front gates, then stop and wait. “Why don’t they just attack and get it over with?” he asks. “They want to make us sweat it out for a while,” says another. Stanislaw and the rest of the prisoners know they can only wait for the inevitable, and so they wait. In the meanwhile, though, an unexpected help arrives.
“You must let me know what’s the strange thing you’ve got hiding,” Graham says one night, “I’ve got nothing but trouble now. And you were always such a good tenant.” They’re in the halls, and Graham has heard much rumour and hearsay of what Valeri’s been up to. “It’s going to hear itself out, old man,” says Valeri, “you’ll not hear from me again, when the time comes.” The owners have been giving Graham trouble for all the missed rents, so many tenants in the building now out of work or unable to get to work that there’s little point in enforcing the rules. But there’s more to it than that. For now, they wait, gathering strength, forming alliances, negotiating a complex political landscape behind the scenes with all the precision of a surgeon cutting out the smallest of malignant tumours. Still the old order persists, as it will for a long time, resilient as it is. These men are not loyal to the way things were before all this began; rather, they are loyal to an idea in their head, a conception of the way things had been that they still hold to be the way things ought to be now. Led by an officer in the army named Douglas Schlager and a one-time minister in government named Nathan Williams, they will rise in time with and in opposition to the budding popular front which seeks a democratic way of life. These men, they’re content to work behind the scenes for now, but soon enough they’ll step onto the stage and make themselves known to all. Early in the morning, the brigade has left the armoury under tight security, Private Craig Thompson in the back of the last lorry towing one of their artillery pieces. He wonders why they’d need artillery against a civilian uprising; it seems a criminal affair from the start. On arriving at the prison, they take up positions along the access road, then wait for further orders. It’s an eerie thing, with the troopers manning the roadblock once vacated by the police and the skies clear but for the odd cloud tracing a lazy path across the crystal, azure expanse. It’s a moment of confusion and disillusion for all involved, with Private Thompson thinking back to the troops’ agreement to mutiny should they ever be deployed abroad. Now, deployed to English streets to oppose they who would only seek their own measure of justice, the Private and the other men are left uncertain what to do next.
“We should destroy everything,” Valeri says, “we should burn it all down. We should go into the streets, drag the wealthy from their mansions and make them watch as we set fire to everything they own. We should have done all these things many years ago. If we had done so then we would be in a better place now.” This is the discussion had in a basement somewhere in one of the working class districts, organized secretly by Arthur Bennington. Still in this early period, those sympathetic to the forbidden popular front can’t meet openly; large, disorganized protests with no specific aim or plan aren’t stopped by police despite the imposition of martial law, but smaller gatherings would be trivial to sniff out and shut down. Valeri has angered after deaths, and Arthur Bennington is recruiting people like him into the popular front. Arthur Bennington sits not at the front of the room but stands against the back wall, watching as men like Valeri vent their frustrations. But events are afoot. As the violence in the streets slowly but steadily escalates into open warfare, life for the working man has changed little. For Garrett Walker, the last of a long line of unemployed and unemployable men to lose all they’ve had, this is a time not of great uncertainty but of great certainty. In the morning he sees the opulent palaces built for the criminal wealthy class, the investors who have so long ago seized everything in this country he’d held dear. In the streets of his own hometown there’s shouting, hurling of bricks and stones, even sporadic gunfire rattling off into the night, but still nothing infuriates him as the knowledge these corrupt investors, the yet-nameless and -faceless criminals should abscond with their ill-gotten gains, escaping punishment for their crimes. After his daughters were killed, Garrett is listless and confused as anyone, but out of his listlessness and confusion there arises in the night a clarity he now knows was surely there all along. His whole world aflame, he turns to the next day and stands.
After Valeri has spoken, a few more men and women take their turn, most of them even younger than he. “Are you not ready for the coming storm?” asks Arthur Bennington, taking the chair only to deliver a closing address. There are no stenographers, no cameras, nothing to create any record of this meeting. “Are you not willing to surrender your lives in service of the cause?” asks Arthur Bennington. All have been made to agree this meeting is not happening, but have as well been committed to following the decisions it lays out. “Are you not ready to die so that your deaths may be used by our cause to advance itself?” Arthur Bennington asks. “None of you are, not yet, no matter how you many insist you are. But with time, you will be ready. Many of our brothers and sisters have given their lives, and many more are still to give. But all will be lost if not the full commitment of all working men is not given over to the cause for which we fight. Remember this fact as you return to the community and ready yourselves.” As the crisis steadily worsens, the wealthy investors who have so driven prices sky-high and plunged wages realize their time is come. In the night they concoct the latest of their schemes, then enact it the following morning. By the time news breaks on the screens of the working men across the country and around the world, the bottom has already fallen out, just as the rebel Elijah had predicted it would. As Elijah’s word has come to be proven true, the inevitable turn of events has come to mean life for the working men of the world will get worse before it gets better. In the underground church the congregants mourn the loss of their rogue priest, confident as they are in the coming of the new way of things. For Darren Wright, the eliciting of constriction means little in the here and now, the darkness of the underground church concealing everything that doesn’t matter while revealing all that does. Bibles open, the faithful studying intently in preparing for their spiritual war’s next offensive. They hear of the go
vernment’s collapse, of the impending election, but what they hear means little to them. In the darkness of their underground church they put their heads down and pray for guidance, the sounds of distant gunfire rattling against the silence of their prayer. Darren hasn’t seen his young friend Sheila, not since their street occupation had turned the tide of their spiritual war, but he harbours no worry for her. Only some months earlier Darren had his doubts. Now he has none.
As the wealthy and criminal foreign investor realizes there’s no further profit to be had in exploiting these particular people in this particular part of the world, they have absconded with their ill-gotten wealth, in the time between sundown and sunup squirrelling it all away in havens on the other side of the world. Materially, nothing has changed in the night; all the same factories, most already shuttered, operate, all the same workers still possess them same capacity for work, all the same knowledge still lies in the backs of the minds of working men here and around the world. Yet Valeri wakes, one morning, all has changed, the construction cranes which once erected the wealthy man’s apparatus now falling motionless, the prices for a loaf of bread in the grocery stores increasing fivefold, the gas stations running out of gas in the time it takes the desperate to line up and empty their pockets for fuel so expensive the signs on the side of the road don’t have the space to display the price. “What thievery is this?” asks one man. “I need to feed my family,” says another. “Why are we allowing this to happen?” asks a third. Soon, the police arrive, deploying their troops not to enforce the working man’s right to life but the wealthy man’s right to property. In the streets, there’s the rattling of gunfire and the chattering of voices. In the streets, Valeri steps over the bodies of the dead and dying, in the last of the day’s hours clutching at his shoulder, pain from a stray round having numbed to a dull soreness. After ending their occupation of the polytechnic, the students disperse, among them Sean Morrison taking refuge in a nearby apartment block built decades ago for student housing. On the roof, Sean looks through binoculars at the red flag still flying from the polytechnic’s roof, in the morning the sight enough to inspire him to have at each and every day. But then, one morning, he sees nothing, only a bare rooftop; the police have reasserted control of the area, moving in the night to occupy strategic positions in securing the country for the coming election. In meeting with Julia Hall and the other students, he declares they must resist and refuse to turn out for the election; in so refusing, he says, they withdraw their consent to be governed. It’s a lesson they’ve come to learn at some great cost.
Still the working man works, through his work finding the spiritual sustenance needed to make it through the day. Where once the wealthy man absconded with his ill-gotten wealth, now he carefully considers where to put his wealth to use against the steadily rising insurrection. Unlike the working man, the wealthy man can know no spiritual sustenance, condemned as he is to pursuit of pleasures of the flesh. In the morning after this latest clash in the streets, the rebel deploys his guerrillas, from secret bases hidden in the maze of working class apartment blocks and shantytowns striking out at the troopers. Unlike before, these attacks are carried out in force, with shots fired not only to provoke but to kill. The rebel’s guerrillas happen upon an army patrol, waiting in the alleys and on the rooftops until exactly the right moment, then pop out shooting, the crack of gunfire followed by the dropping of bodies to the pavement. This scene plays itself out here and in cities and towns across the country, so fast no one can make any sense of it all. Even the army’s troops in the street can’t deter the attacks, nor can they stop them, the guerrilla’s hit and run tactics causing the army’s infantry to shoot confusedly at shadows and noise. With each day seeming to bring a new escalation of the war in the streets, no one can imagine it getting any worse.
But the end is not yet come. The crew of the cruiser Borealis worry they’ll be caught up in the war at home. This, after he’s had the crew spend the weeks on endless drills, even rousing the men from their sleep in the middle of the night to practice loading munitions by hand again and again. Then, in one late night drill a young sailor mishandles a torpedo, slipping with the torpedo falling on him, knocking him on the back of the head and killing him instantly. Still Captain Abramovich orders more drills. It makes little sense to the men to be so drilled when the carnage in the streets ought to demand full attention. The rumours they’ll be deployed as marines to the streets gain credibility when Abramovich has a supply of small arms brought on board. Among those selected to secure the extra stores, Dmitri sees the crates of assault rifles and shotguns. No longer do the crew worry they’ll be deployed abroad; when Dmitri tells the others what he’s seen, they don’t know what to make of it. All keep worrying about their loved ones. For his part, Dmitri thinks of the young wife he’d left behind in Liverpool when he joined the Navy and was assigned to the Borealis. Inwardly he’s already committed himself to the cause of the rebel and the popular front, even if he doesn’t realize it. And when one of his crewmates suggests they’ve “We’re soon to find out,” Dmitri surmises, “one way or another.”
20. January Skies
It’s become normal for the working man to live every day under threat of eviction, but new to him is this daily threat of death. He becomes subject to the terror and the lawlessness of random outbursts, never sure that around the next corner there isn’t a bomb waiting to go off in the back of some car, or some storm trooper looking for an excuse or even just tired after too many hours spent on the street looking for something that can’t be found. After Sydney has left town, perhaps for good, Valeri can’t help but wish, despite all the differences between them, that she might live through this crisis where so many have lost their lives. “It’s an indulgence,” Valeri says, talking with Sydney on a secret phone call made from the lobby of a local gymnasium, “but it’s an indulgence I’d rather have than not.” Each know the other can’t promise to keep in touch, that every word exchanged on any call might be the last between them. In the country, there’s no war, not yet, as the urban rising has yet to reach that far. She’s safe, but Valeri hangs up knowing, in the instinctive way he does, that she won’t be safe forever. After the death of a sailor, the crew of the cruiser Borealis fall deeper into despondency. Captain Abramovich sees this when inspecting the troops daily, able to sense these things in the men even as every last one remains silent and stone-faced. Soon, non-coms are posted in the mess hall, there to squelch any dissent before it even happens. But they can’t police the little half-conversations that take place every night in the bunks, in hushed tones when they ought to be sleeping. “I won’t be the next to die,” says one of Dmitri’s bunkmates. “I’m already convinced we might not have the choice,” says Dmitri, “unless we do something about it first.” Their chance will come sooner than they think.
It’s inevitable, perhaps, for this climate of fear and unrest to produce action which should, somehow, someway set it all on fire. Three or four weeks pass between upsets, this time the same size of the first quarter results in the second, a gun laid down after deaths, too many deaths, more broken, lifeless bodies in the street, their blood draining into the sewers a copper, maroon sort of colour. It’s in this environment that election day arrives; as he’s always known these to be a fraud, Valeri has long determined not to participate, and he enthusiastically declares this intention in the basement where Arthur Bennington meets with them next. “In refusing to participate, we withdraw our consent to be governed,” Valeri declares, “and we deprive the enemy of their moral authority over us.” It’s what he’s learned, as he’s been hurling stones and throwing his voice, and as he stands he winces in pain slightly at the place where a bullet was removed from his shoulder. Arthur Bennington watches from the back, but doesn’t speak. “We oppose the enemy in all things,” says one young woman. “They’re all criminals,” says a young man. “The only good that can come from parliament is to burn it to the ground,” says another young woman. These are Val
eri’s unemployed compatriots, among those most radicalized against the current order but not part of the armed struggle. In this basement, they agree, but beyond these walls there are still those among them who might be tempted to place their faith in the way of things, hoping their lives, wretched as they are, can be salvaged. It’s a fool’s endeavour, and Valeri knows this even as there’s some small part of him still holding hope otherwise. He doesn’t know it, but all can see in him the doubt; his is emblematic of the working man’s malaise, his aversion to act. This is why Arthur Bennington does not yet take them into the ranks of the popular front’s guerrillas.