by J. T. Marsh
But the working man’s part of town is mostly spared by this dramatic new escalation of violence, with only a misplaced round here and there to mark the day. No longer is his concern that of paying the rent or forcing himself through another day, instead he, now, concerning himself with standing guard at the door while his neighbours look on. The landlord has stopped coming around to collect rents; some say he’s learned not to bother and all but abandoned this place, while others say he’s dead, killed unknowingly by someone settling a score in these chaotic times. It’s a frightening turn of events, one which prompts the working man, sometimes, to look back and in so looking consider the possibility that he may have been wrong, that the future these people thought they’d been fighting for all along was scarcely better than whatever hellish nightmare the old way was to have offered them. But this is a foolish thought, and the working man pushes it from his mind, denouncing these self-doubts as mere echoes of the lies he’d once been so fed. After seizing the Borealis, Dmitri and his colleagues secure all compartments and then muster on the bridge. They signal to the rebels their success by taking down the naval jack and flying in its place the flag of the popular front, a simple yet elegant design of crimson and gold. “Now we prepare for battle,” says Dmitri. He turns to his fellow crew and says, “the simple part is over.” Critically short on food, fuel, ammunition, and all the other supplies that fighting men and women need to fight, the crew of the Borealis have only strength of will to see them through.
For the police hadn’t expected resistance when they’d moved in to evict the residents of Dominion Courts, making the brief exchange of gunfire enough to shock them into retreat. Still, in the larger struggle it looks like the residents have won a dashing victory, and in the larger struggle how it looks is more important than how it is. On that night, the working man guards the door, looking through it and projecting himself into the world outside, joining the rebel in spirit if not in form in this latest, decisive assault on the way of things, that the way of things might yet become something incomparable to what the world has seen. In truth, Dmitri and the others on board the Borealis know theirs is a struggle that can only lead them to a place of pain and suffering. Once secure, the Borealis casts off, then makes down river a few hundred metres before dropping her anchor and training her main guns to maximum elevation. Without knowing what can come, Dmitri has teams assembled to go ashore and secure supplies, but it’s a futile effort as the men don’t get far before they’re set upon by a mob of confused and frightened people. Without options, Dmitri orders the crew of the Borealis to loot a nearby storehouse for food, then commandeer a civilian tug and seize its fuel from the desperate crew. The crew of the Borealis haven’t made any new friends among the local population, not amid the rebel’s offensive against the entire city and across the country, but they’ve secured their own survival. For the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front this new and dramatic escalation of the war in the streets is but a calculated gamble, an expenditure of so much strength in service of an offensive to push the enemy over the edge.
Not all is as it seems. In this city, where Valeri lives, the streets are filled with near-total anarchy, violence, and bloodshed, as are the streets of many other cities across the country. But there are those cities, whole provinces even, where an almost-calm still prevails. The working class here in Britain and across the whole of Europe is not yet united under the banner of their own liberation, as the consensus has not been forged. As columns of smoke rise throughout London to mark the spots where the rebel has staged his attacks, discarded shell casings and broken bodies litter the pavement. A clarity emerges from behind the thick, grey haze. In the time it takes one moment to blend with another, the last vestiges of peace begin to fall apart in the face of a sequence of events none could’ve predicted but all should’ve seen coming. After all that’s happened, it was inevitable that the governor should lose his ability to so govern, in the face of withering attacks from all sides the decisive moment in his fall coming not in the halls of the capitol but in that narrow space between one moment and the next, in an instant, late at night, a single bullet fired or a single fist raised finally depleting the last of his will to power. But where one’s will depletes, another’s strengthens, in short order the spiralling of events out of control playing right into the hands of he who would set the world on fire.
An explosion, another explosion, this one preceded by a warning phoned-in scarcely a half-hour in advance. As the working man stops to look on his screens at the carnage in the streets, he devotes the thoughts lingering in the back of his mind not to the lives lost nor to the bodies mangled on that afternoon but to the bare cupboards waiting for him when he’s to go home at the end of the day. As another of the day’s explosions booms across the sky, this one much closer, close enough to sound like the trembling of an earthquake, the working man looks up from his screen and promises that this, this will be the moment he last worries about such things as the growling of his own stomach. It’s not that he won’t ever tend to his own needs again; rather, it’s his newfound willingness to push through this momentary discomfort and on to the new beginning promised him by the future history has so earnestly promised him.
An explosion, another explosion, tearing across the city, snapping the working man out of his self-imposed reverie, forcing his attention on the here and now. He knows not what to make of this escalating campaign of terror and lawlessness; he knows only that the rebel reassures him, in a curious, backwards, roundabout sort of way, that it’s all part of some master plan, that it will lead inevitably to the changing of the guard and through to a new, better tomorrow. Amid the cacophony, an unbearable lightness settles into the working man’s nerves, freeing him, if only for this one night, from the burden of caring for himself, of caring for what happens to his person, aware as he is, now, of the greater whole to which he belongs. In the night, through the night, the restrained passions of so many of the working man’s brothers and sisters ignite, chasing themselves round and round in an endless orgy of self-delusion and self-sacrifice. All through this interlude when the working man realizes himself, events unfold which will soon enough give the working man his leadership, and in so giving place him firmly in control of his own destiny. At night, in the night the working man lies in bed and stares at his apartment’s ceiling, imagining patterns in the cracked drywall and visualizing colourful lights swirling around the darkened room. We’re almost there. It’s almost time. In the night that follows all that’s lead up to this point, the working man takes around his little apartment, boxing up books, clothes, a pair of shoes, before he leaves taking one last look around the mess he lives in, right now, and decides--realizes his lot belonged thrown in with rising tides of history all along. But it’s never that simple. It can never be that simple.
Then, in the night, it comes. A new government proclaims itself in power, having liquidated parliament, arrested all MPs, placed the King in detention, and taken command of the armed forces under its new banner, calling itself the Provisional Government. Neither republic nor monarchy, the Provisional Government is led by a mysterious coalition of unknowns who proclaim an end to the violence in the streets and promise a people’s government. Gone, they say, are the days of degradation and greed of the old regime, to come a new era of peace and prosperity for all. They invite the rebel Elijah and his Popular Front to join them, but Elijah refuses. Though Elijah and the Popular Front have achieved their long-sought goal of fostering the overthrow of the capitalist state, they see only a new betrayal rising in the Provisional Government’s determination to continue the war against the nation’s foreign enemies and to preserve the wealthy man’s dominion. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the people are sceptical, even more than the working class of London and all other cities in England. Nothing’s changed. The rebel Elijah sees nothing less than total liberation for the working man as his goal, and these unknowns are the kind of spineless cowards who will come to be manipulated by an evil into adva
ncing not liberation but oppression. For now, we watch, and wait for the rebel Elijah to make his next move.
28. Betrayal
As news spreads of the British people’s betrayal, so too spreads anger and fear. So early in the morning, a small crowd forms outside the now-closed parliament buildings, the crowd swelling as the sun slowly brightens the sky. Soon, the square fills with rage, with the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner massing in action against this latest outrage, the accumulation of so many outrages and so many indignities overpowering the feeble orders marshalled against them to cease. Then, gunshots crack across the cold winter’s morning, by some stroke of fate the course of our history changing, again, forever. Not yet out of options, not yet with his back against the wall, the working man assails himself against the decrepit remains of the state, the crowds stepping over the bodies of their own to advance on the troopers ahead. As Valeri mans the ramparts at Dominion Courts, in the distance there’s the sound of thunder rolling over the horizon, channelling through the city’s streets between tall buildings like a burst dam unleashing water along a canyon cutting a path deep into the earth. Defying the law, working men like Valeri form their own ad hoc governing councils, declaring their own autonomy even as they secretly harbour fealty to the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front. As they were before, Valeri’s cupboards are still bare, his windows are still broken, and halls still smell of cigarettes, only now mixed with the acrid and sour stench of spent gunpowder and the thick, oaky stink of fires only just burnt out. Soon, but for the colours of the flags flying from parliament Valeri can see no evidence of a change in power. It’s all a confusing mess, but soon enough the working man will form from among this confusing mess his future. He needs only to reach out and seize what’s rightfully his with both hands.
Aboard the cruiser Borealis the word arrives of the Provisional Government’s determination to carry on the war abroad. Immediately, Dmitri declares, “we can’t follow this banner either,” receiving a chorus of agreement among the rest of the bridge. Around this time, the crew receives word from a Coast Guard station on the Suffolk coast offering safe haven, the station’s new commander elected from among the men and determined to oppose the Provisional Government, too. It’s a gamble, but with no other options Dmitri orders the crew to weigh anchor and make down the Thames for the North Sea. “It’s a great risk,” says Dmitri, “but if we stay here for long then we’ll starve.” The rest of the men on the bridge nod their quiet but determined assent. Dmitri orders the banner of the Provisional Government flown, hoping to deceive anyone who might try to stop them. When night falls, the Borealis makes up the river, slowly, quietly, limping along, every turn of her screws bringing the first vessel in the Popular Front’s unofficial navy closer to her own liberation.
Still in the midst of jeopardy, the working man has grown to be fully confident in himself, in the fists of rage he raises, in the defiance of the order. After all that’s happened, and with all that’s yet to happen, the working man’s enemies seem teetering on the edge of their final collapse. But not all is as it seems. Even in these heady times, the love which once bound us together now can only be found in pieces, shredded like so much useless paper, the fires of liberation fuelled by the rage of the ten thousand fists in the air. That night, as news spreads of this current government’s collapse, there’s no readily apparent path to the thatching together of a new one. Every bridge has been burned, every alliance has been torn asunder, every last possible piece of goodwill has been cast into the same fiery cataclysm that now threatens to consume us all. But it’s not all for nought. For Valeri, this in-between time is a time of uncertainty; his contacts in the Popular Front have spared him precious little information since their offensive. He worries they’re dead. It seems only yesterday Valeri was a troubled but determined young man living in a world of grinding poverty, hopelessness, and violence meted out by unthinking, uncaring businessmen and their apparatchiks. Now, their passions aroused, men like Valeri can stand invulnerable as guardians of the future.
In the night, it comes quickly, unexpectedly, like a blade between the ribs. In the morning, nothing is left but the smoldering ruins of where once there’d stood a national pride, an emblematic sleight of hand never once successful in its intended purpose but kept up anyways. In the night, halfway around the world our army has suffered a devastating defeat, leaving many mothers without their sons and daughters without their fathers. As news spreads of this, the army’s latest humiliation at the hands of its vastly inferior enemy, so, too, does an anger, an anger new, unlike the anger already festering in every factory, every mill, every university and every pew, even as it all seems so eerily familiar to those with the time and the inclination to remember. “Parliament has been overthrown!” shouts Tonya from across the room. At Dominion Courts they’ve taken refuge in a third-floor flat, repurposed as a makeshift headquarters. “I can’t believe it,” says Roger. “I can,” says Valeri, confidently. It seems their moment of victory is at hand. But once the residents of Dominion Courts realize this new regime is to change nothing for them, their celebration turns, first to despondency, then to grim determination to carry on the struggle, no matter the cost.
The new government’s determination to carry on with the war effort becomes less credible, less tenable with each of these defeats. When Valeri takes to the streets, he does so with a muted despondency, worrying he’ll never see Sydney again but nevertheless proud to have known she who would grow to pledge her life in service of their struggle. Whether she is lost is become of no consequence to life on the streets, her place in the masses immediately taken by some other pathetic soul. But love is not so easily sacrificed, even in the name of a noble cause like the working man’s struggle which Valeri has come to devote himself to. In love, Valeri meets with Hannah, one last time before she’s to disappear from his life, from their shared life, forever. In the street outside what’s left of his apartment they come together and embrace. “I admire your courage,” she says, “to join the fight as you are.” “It’s not courage,” he says, his voice low, his jaw straight in a grim look that betrays his uncertainty, “I’m fighting because there’s no other way to go about this. We can fight and take our chances, or die lying on our backs. I choose to fight.” “That’s what I admire about you,” Hannah says. “Don’t admire me,” he says, “I’m only a man, and this is what men do. We are all bound by the same duty.”
Hannah sighs and looks away, then says, “I don’t understand you when you talk like that.” Valeri says, “I didn’t expect you would.” But Valeri realizes this is not his. He doesn’t have that conversation in the street, she doesn’t ever explain her true motives for fleeing the country for the relative safety of an old family friend’s in western Canada. This is merely his imaginings, the way he might’ve preferred it to be, the mind powerful enough to create its own fiction yet vulnerable enough to need to use its powerful to reassure itself. But as the world collapses all around us, it seems only a matter of time before the end comes. In those heady days when once it seemed the promise of the uprising fifteen years ago had at last been realized, Valeri was ecstatic. But now, as he sees on his screens the talking heads pledging us all to carry on the war against our foreign enemies, his heart hardens again. As our defeats mount, the lists of the dead and dying that used to be released to the public are released no longer, the screens instead filled with bombastic paeans to victories past, present, and future. At exactly the right moment, timed to occur at the precise time when one such paean reaches its triumphant peak, a bang, a flash, and a plume of smoke rising into the air mark another of the rebel’s attacks, while Valeri watches from his place on the picket lines, in the midst of the greatest coordinated act our world has ever seen. But Valeri can only look away and wonder, truly wonder what has come to be. Then, a bang, a crack, Valeri looking down the street in time to see a tank’s cannon spitting fire in his direction, blood spilling in the street as Valeri and the o
ther picketers scramble for cover, finding none, in the time it takes one thousandth of a second to flash to the next a surge of adrenaline coursing through his veins and propelling him to superhuman strength. It’s all come to this.
But Valeri is never alone. “At last, at last, we have our vengeance!” shouts a voice, squawking over the radio. “At last, at last, we fulfill our destiny!” the voice shouts. That night, the world burns brighter and hotter than ever before. Reaching out, Valeri finds himself marching along a path, a narrow, winding path, his brothers and sisters at his side, the voices of the thousands carrying as they all stride into their future, together. But then, we all have our roles to play, and play them we must even as the futility of our efforts becomes clear to all but the most deluded among us. The wealthy man, once so much wealthier than he is now, must continue to muster all his remaining strength against the forces arrayed against him, forces which, once so arrayed, are become all but unstoppable. It’s a small thing, a simple truth, meaning so little when held up against the vast continuum of our shared history, our history which once seemed so impersonal but which now seems to know us so well it’s frightening. But we’re not afraid. We can’t be. Fear has come to be an excess, an indulgence we can no longer afford. Along the way through to our common future, we must discard our fear and embrace the horror of all that’s come to pass; it’s only in rejecting our own narrow, personal self-interest that we can come to earn the future we’ve so long deserved.