by Jim Crace
2
THEY WERE in love, the blemished student actor and the swan-necked girl. Theirs was a clumsy love, admittedly, rushed and bodily and bruising, as first loves often are. It was (to use the country phrase) “a jug thrown by the potter’s toes,” ill formed.
We excuse the lovers for their gaucherie. They were scarcely adults then. This was only 1981, the first—and only—year of what we called at the time (depending on our politics and age) either the Big Melt or the Laxity, when, having practiced kissing for twenty months or so—life after Life—and having benefited from the unexpected tourist revenues and the unforeseen attention of some foreign capital, our city governors withdrew into their meeting rooms and chambers, their dining clubs, to concentrate on getting rich and getting laid. Thus letting all the rest of us get on with life.
Remember it, how brief it was, the melting of the civic snows, the urban thaw? Remember how for not-quite-long-enough even the policemen let their sideburns grow and let their patience lengthen also, how foreign books, LPs, and films came in, uncut, unmarked, the shock of glamour magazines, how we Last Tangoed and Deep Throated amongst ourselves as if the untried ardors of the cinema could light the way to paradise?
It’s hard to credit now our absurd lightheartedness, our determined disregard for any law and regulation (the pettier the better), our contempt for grammar, and proprieties, and common sense, and modesty. All the things our parents should have cared about (if they’d not been melted by the Melt themselves) were flouted on the street, without a care, with appetite.
It was possible, without much fear of being challenged, to walk around without IDs, to pilfer food in the spirit of democracy and beg for cigarettes, to make a din at night and hang out in the squares all day, to ride the streetcars without a ticket, to park our parents’ cars on prohibited sidewalks, and to boulevard ourselves as brashly as we wanted to, as drunk, as stoned, as underdressed.
How effortlessly modern and valiant it seemed, after all those years of being sensible and neat, just to dress badly. An hour of impulse shopping at the new black-market gutter stalls that sprang up everywhere that year equipped you for the revolution. The streets were full of gypsy partisans, denim clerks with hairstyles from the L.A. seventies, wiry Bolsheviks in fat-man overcoats, white aboriginals in T-shirts with slogans calling for the replacement of God with punk and government with Panarchy, and women in skirts of every cut and cloth and color, displaying lengths of flesh or tights that previously had only been approved for foreign visitors and imported magazines. Even Navigation Island was prized free from its wardens for a while and turned into a nonstop festival of music, drugs, and picnicking. Woodstock Nation—finally. Our city had some catching up to do.
Remember all the litter and the buskers in the streets, the open windows and the jaywalking, the sudden obligation to sample newly tolerated taboos in bed, the suicides, the debts, the pregnancies, the jazz, the reggae, and the rock, the blissful loss of self-control, the arguments, the endless, carefree jousting with the couldn’t-care-less police? Ah yes, the laxity that only lasted, only could be tolerated, for a year, but which briefly made us Free at Last, free to speak our minds, free to organize and demonstrate and not be “disappeared.”
We understood and we forgave the lovers, then. Forgave them for their arrogance and foolishness, the risks they took when risks were safe to take. They were only the excited products of their time, no more responsible for how they were than lungs are guilty for the air.
That December Thursday was their twenty-seventh day together, the high point of their reckless, infinitely short affair. A day of intercourse and action. Never in their lives again would Fredalix, these two guileless doctrinaires, feel so apprehensive and elated, so nauseous with fear, so poised, so eager, and so licensed to escape into the refuges of flesh once they had done their foolish duty for the world.
LIX CAN’T BE SURE even to this day whether it was his shared infatuation with this lofty campus beauty (shared by anyone who laid eyes on her) or merely a desire to prove himself a decent partisan before both the Laxity and his student days were over, that had prompted him to stand up at the November meeting of the Roesenthaler Comrades Cooperative (so named mostly to achieve the acronym RoCoCo) and suggest, as if he were proposing nothing more perilous than leafleting, that they kidnap Marin Scholla.
His idea had been a crudely simple one, and only mischievous. That was the Spirit of the Times, his public contribution to the Big and Famous Melt. He’d meant to draw attention to himself, to say what he had guessed the firebrand Freda would like to hear. He’d not intended to be taken quite so seriously.
The Arts Academy where Lix was in his final year of Theater and Stagecraft Studies had been endowed the semester before with nearly $7 million by MeisterCorps, the electronics and engineering giant from Milan, Berlin, Boston, and Hong Kong, to pay for a new cafe, a theater, a concert hall, a gallery, and a cinema on the campus, all in one custom-built star-shaped complex. A pentacle of creativity.
These were tainted millions, actually—or so the more progressive of the students judged. They’d not be seduced by the prospect of new facilities and subsidized alcohol, especially as their own studies would be over by the time the pentacle was built. These dirty dollars, they claimed in the student newsletter, had been made from low wages in the Far East, “the blanket marketing of shoddy and environmentally damaging products in dishonest packaging,” arms-for-timber deals in Africa, and from stock market trickery (which many of their parents had fallen victim to).
Now, on Thursday the seventeenth of the coming month, just as the students would be going home for their winter vacations, MeisterCorps’s American chairman, Marin Scholla, would be visiting the city to open the company’s new central offices in the tower block that we have known since then as Marin’s Finger and to pass on (or so the rumormongers claimed) his yellow envelopes of thanks in thousand-dollar bills to our finest councillors and planning commissars. He was a worthy target, certainly.
Lix stood before the nineteen students in RoCoCo, then, with something safely moderate in mind at first. It’s always best to stand, if you are tall enough, to concentrate an audience. He held a photocopy of a news report he thought would interest them. He read it out in his trained voice, reducing to a whisper almost when he reached the part about the chairman’s final appointment of the day.
Lix knew, of course, that he was being watched by everybody in the meeting room (stagecraft again)—and that included Famous Freda Dressed in Black, the campus beauty with the sculptor’s head who could have been a model had she chosen, who could have slept with anybody there, then dined on them, and still had volunteers, who could have been in films or (on our newsstands finally) stapled into Playboy magazine. At 5 p.m. or thereabouts, Lix read, Scholla planned to “drop in” at the campuses to lay the first stone of what is still the MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts, or MeCCA. (Though MeisterCorps itself, of course, is no longer with us. It finally buckled to its creditors in the Labor Day Free Fall, “the Wall Street Dive of Two Thousand and Five.”)
“We’ll have to organize a vigil,” someone said. Exactly Lix’s thought.
Then Freda spoke, not bothering to stand, not bothering to raise her voice. A typical riposte, uncompromising and seductively extreme: “Pickets are a waste of time. You know they are. The police just box you in.”
“A moving picket, then!”
“A picket or a vigil, what’s the difference? Somebody, please, suggest a petition. Or a delegation! Or a letter-writing campaign. Just as ineffectual.” Freda had discovered that she could say exactly what she felt. Her beauty licensed her. Nobody dared to take offense, especially if she spoke as softly as a kindergarten teacher or a nurse. “A line of little placards or a bit of paper with some signatures isn’t going to trouble MonsterCorps, is it? Correct-me-if-I’m-wrong.” A little singsong phrase. She raised her eyebrows, waited for a moment, looked around the room. “No, we need to give Marin Scholla a sur
prise. And shake him up a bit. Something memorable. If what we do doesn’t put us on the evening news, then what’s the point?”
Her unruffled escalation shut the meeting up, or almost did—for out of somewhere, wide of script, entirely unrehearsed, ad lib, Lix saw an opportunity, a rash and sexual opportunity. He said, to her, “Why don’t we grab him? Lock him up. Give Meister Scholla a chance to …” To what? Lix hesitated for the words. He wanted to seem breezy and ironic. He’d almost blurted out, too solemnly, “We give him the chance to quantify his crimes.” Surely Freda would approve of that. Instead, he said, in the perfect accent of a tenth-generation Bostonian, “You’ve dined, old man—and now it’s time to face the waiter and the bill.” Rescued, flattered even, by a legendary movie line. Burt Lancaster.
He noticed Freda leaning forward as he spoke. She’d had to twist her madly lengthy neck to stare at him along the row of student radicals. Her earrings hung as heavily as pears. Her bangles clacked as she pushed back her hair to clear her view and show her throat. Lix was, for once, pretty certain that she was not staring at the blemish on his face. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were bright. She was admiring him. She’d hardly even noticed him before.
“Then what?” somebody asked. “It’s risky, isn’t it? Kidnapping millionaires is only officially authorized in Italy. What do we do with him, anyway?”
“You grab the millionaire. You grab the headlines, too. That’s it.” Lix was performing like a lovestruck teenager, unable to restrain himself. “And then you have to let him go, of course. Eventually.” He hardly recognized himself. He’d transformed for her. Picasso syndrome, it was called: the artist’s style of painting changed for every woman in his studio or bed.
“We let him go, but only when he’s signed an Admission of Responsibility, an Admission of Liability,” said Freda, not bothered by whether or not she sounded breezy and ironic. “That would look good in the newspapers. That’d be front page.”
“He won’t do that. He wouldn’t even sign the Seven Principles. Even GlobeOil signed the Seven Principles.”
“Even Nescafé.”
“We keep him till he does.” She craned her neck again and smiled at Lix. His neck rushed red for her. He came out in a sudden sweating blush which seemed to fill his eyes and drench his hair. His pulse had quickened, and his mouth was dry. Men fall in love more speedily and much more bodily than women. It was for Lix a joyful new experience, this unexpected triumphing of self. How brave he must appear to her—and must continue to appear. And how he wished he’d never said a word.
So it began, the kidnapping, the love affair, the making love, the life of Lix’s second child.
AS IT HAPPENED, theirs was little more than flirting talk at this stage. RoCoCo was not truly dangerous, any more than the Laxity was truly a revolution. It was only striking poses in the names of Liberty and Love, with no more consciousness of the consequences than a T-shirt has for its silk-screened slogans. RoCoCo’s members were soft and inoffensive youngsters, essentially, freshly baked survivors of their teens, trying to sound less mild and dreary than they really were, and only wanting to be a part of this great city’s quest for romance and advancement. They could alarm nobody but themselves. RoCoCo walking down the street, all nineteen of them in a gang, despite their voices and hair, their leather belts and wallet chains, would not cause anyone to step aside. A bunch is no more chilling than a single grape.
Theirs was the sort of reckless moment, then, that could not hope to flourish in maturer company. A wiser group would quickly audit all the pros and cons and realize that kidnapping could only backfire on the kidnappers. The headlines would be roasting. Their protest would bear bitter fruit. The only lasting victims would be themselves. So the prudent ones at the meeting sank into their chairs, voted to support the “action,” but did not volunteer themselves. They sat with faces like a Chinese Monday hoping not to catch sweet Freda’s eye. They knew how prevailing she was, and how seductive just a glance from her could be. And dangerous. A kidnapping, even if it were short-lived and justified, could put them all in jail, despite the Melt, or jeopardize their academic grades or disappoint their lecturers. Their parents would not sympathize. Not all their parents could afford to buy them out. Their job prospects would be undermined. Travel visas would be denied them, long after the events. Anyway, they were not sure (though silent on this matter in such company) if kidnapping was “right.”
So in the end, in this most skittish time, there were just four from RoCoCo prepared to spread their wings beyond a picket line and stand with Freda: a glumly cute gay woman from the Language School (who wanted more than anything to disappoint her lecturers and undermine her job prospects), two tall and overweight post-Maoist anarchists from Freda’s science faculty, and Lix, all of whom it was soon apparent aspired to more than comradely contact with their dazzling colleague. They were the four comrades most unhinged by her and most ardent for her approval. The heart controls the head and makes us mad and brave and radical. The revolution rides the lustiest of mares.
Five volunteers would never be enough for the swarming ambush that Freda had in mind at first, her show of force, her mighty kick against the pricks. She’d seen the glorious newsreels from 1968, the year of barricades, with the columns of police rebuffed by mobs of students, armed only with their banners and some cobblestones. Never by as few as five. Again the city had let her down, she felt. Only thirteen years previously, Peking, Paris, Prague, Chicago, Santiago, Rome had all been pulled apart by people less than thirty years of age. It must have seemed to Freda that Youth could be truly powerful in every corner of the world, excepting ours. She kept a press photo from 1968 in her wallet: a Czech, wild-haired and young and biblically beautiful, his jacket pushed back on his shoulders, his shirt pulled open, was baring his chest, his rack of ribs, a centimeter from the barrel of a Russian gun in a gesture that, for Freda, was sensual and thrilling. It always made her think of The Fox’s Lament, “Stop me, shoot me, if you dare / For I’m too far and fast to care.”
She wondered sometimes if he was still alive, this seminaked man. Was he still a radical? He looked, she thought, a bit like Lix. She’d noticed it when he’d been standing up so pompously and so theatrically at the RoCoCo meeting. That birthmark, certainly, made his face seem challenging. She’d wondered what his ribs were like and how his hair would look if ruffled up a bit by her. Would it look more like the Czech’s? What could she do to make him look more Czech?
IT WAS at that moment, peering across the room at Lix, his eagerness to please, she decided she’d accept him as a lover for a while and even that she would allow herself a period of being in love. She had not flushed like he had flushed for her. Her pulse had not increased for him. Her feelings were not bodily She was calmly concentrated on the chance that Lix had offered her of pushing back the jacket, pulling open the shirt, and making politics with kisses on a comrade’s rack of ribs. Freda always needed someone in her bed when the optimistic ghost of 1968 invaded her. Her body and her spirit demanded company But not just yet. She’d let his role intensify as all the action of the coming weeks intensified, as they prepared to pull the cobbles loose and press their chests against the police and MeisterCorps. She’d save their best encounter for the aftermath of Marin Scholla’s kidnapping. She would defeat him on his bed. That was her long-term urgency.
Time to begin. Freda followed blushing Lix out of the meeting room and made him talk to her as they walked across the campus to their almost neighboring Academies of Human Science and Theater Studies for their evening lectures. She was, she said, again in her soft, fiercely reasonable voice, “irretrievably disillusioned” with RoCoCo. Marin Scholla was being virtually delivered into their hands. And they could only muster five. “Some throng.” They’d need twenty-five at the very least to rush the chairman off his feet, she said. They could not expect the head of a leviathan like MeisterCorps to stride into their university unaccompanied, like some delivery boy There would be the usual digni
taries and luminaries surrounding him, men and women in their best clothes who would be easy to intimidate. There’d be private guards as well. Americans were paranoid whenever they left home. They moved around in skittish flocks, “like trigger finches,” never trusting anyone. “Americans are terrified of streets,” she said. And there’d be armed police, perhaps, despite the recent ruling that the campuses were off limits to any unauthorized civic forces. There’d be the television and the press, of course, and beefy businessmen from MeisterCorps who maybe, emboldened by their lunch and their genetic hatred of the young and studious, would be quick and eager to deploy their shoes and fists.
Besides, even if RoCoCo had volunteered en masse and were a hundred strong, Scholla would avoid a crowd. He’d steer clear of anybody seeming faintly aggressive. Anyone approaching him would have to look absolutely safe. He had his share of enemies who would be glad to land a punch on his old Yankee chin, or splash an egg across his suit. (Making “garbage that didn’t last and enemies that did,” she joked, was MeisterCorps’s contribution to the world.) She’d heard that men like Scholla never walked closer than five meters to a building in case some demonstrator on the seventh floor was standing by an open window on a chair, ready to spit or urinate. “Or dump,” suggested Lix. They laughed together for their first time.
“We need,” Lix said, already seeking ways of reining in his Mad Idea, but reining in, as well, the female of his dreams, “a strategy that’s more in keeping with the Melt.”
She snorted in reply and stretched her neck and shook her hair. A frisky thoroughbred. “The Melt’s a cheap diversion. They’ll let you change your clothes, but just you try changing anything that matters.”
“Well, then, something smaller-scale at least. You can’t beat men like Scholla with force, anyway. There’s five of us. And three of them can’t run. No, you have to beat a man like that with weapons that he hasn’t got.”