by Jim Crace
Marin Scholla’s limousine had surely reached the campus gates by now Lix concentrated on settling his nerves by breathing through his nose and focusing on the woman in his rearview mirror, the shrunk and silvered planes and facets of her shaded and reflected face. He was mesmerized by her but almost queasy with misgivings at the certain prospect of the ardor and the kissing that were promised him. He practiced breathing, his feet braced against the floor of the van. He bedded Weather Report into the radio-cassette. He checked the ignition on the van—this must not turn into a farce. The engine turned and purred at once. The gas tank was full.
“Not long now,” Freda said. Again she leaned forward, reached across his shoulder to stroke the side of his cheek. Not long for what? Not long before they’d trade the chairman for an orgasm?
THEY COULD HAVE WAITED there for three more months before the chairman showed his face. His foundation stone was finally laid in March 1982, when the Laxity had ended, the city streets were calmer and predictable, and once again we truly had good cause to demonstrate if only we could demonstrate. But Marin Scholla never crossed the river to the campuses that December afternoon. He did this duty at MeisterCorps’s new central offices and then flew out, in his own jet, ahead of any snow, to Rome.
Lix and Freda concentrated on the exit door for forty minutes. It owed its only movement to the wind. Of course, they feared the worst: kidnappers arrested and a bungled afternoon, their comrades spilling all the beans, their future ruined by their foolishness.
Finally, more than an hour after their appointment and not a sign of Marin Scholla, Freda got out of the van, fiercely angry with herself and everyone, and walked around the campus blocks to hunt for their three accomplices and to check if anything was happening. It was. The Poles.
Alicja Lesniak—so much to answer for—had wrecked RoCoCo’s plans. That very morning in Gdansk, troops had opened fire on demonstrating workers. Seven dead. At General Jaruzelski’s hands. The news had reached the small clutch of demonstrators, plump Alicja included, who gathered every afternoon outside the Polish trade mission opposite the campus gate to protest against their country’s martial law. And some mad Pole, who’d never been to Poland once, as it turned out, had fired a hunting gun and chipped the paintwork on the mission’s door. The streets around the mission were closed at once. Armed police moved in, with snipers, horses, and armored vans. The Pole was shot in the leg and then bitten by a police dog. Military bullets chipped a lot more paint and shattered windows in the mission as police “secured” its safety for the afternoon. Anyone who looked remotely Polish was rounded up, including the building’s employees and the head of mission himself. Alicja Lesniak was shoved into a cell and kept there until midnight, when her father phoned his “good friend” in the ministry and she was chauffeur-driven home in the snow.
The two shaven anarchists and the tidy lesbian, bizarrely dressed and late for their appointment anyway, were trapped behind the barriers, two hundred meters from their Scholla ambush site. What could they do (but thank their lucky stars)? And MeisterCorps (which had considerable shipbuilding interests in Gdansk) had been advised to keep their chairman safely in the quiet parts of the town. The campuses were undisturbed.
“That fat-witted idiot,” Freda said as she and Lix drove off in their rental van in the last light of the day. She held Alicja Lesniak, her bourgeois rival for Lix’s heart, entirely responsible for the failings of the afternoon. She meant to, had to, settle scores immediately, revenge herself on both the woman and the farce. She wanted 1968.
FREDA AND LIX SHOULD, of course, have gone first to the Arts Laboratory on the wharfside where their four edgy and—by now—baffled actor comrades would be killing time waiting for their audience and for the curtain to go up. Lix, unquestionably, should at least have phoned them. He was almost a professional actor himself and a tense one. He must have discovered in his two-plus years of training how intolerable first-night nerves could be, even when the expected audience was only one old man, dragooned and obedient. He must have recognized how jittery they would be feeling, not fearing critics exactly but more the unpredictable attentions of the police, especially when they would have heard the sirens from across the river and the thrumming whir of helicopters, and finally the crack of gunfire.
Yet by the time he and Freda had traversed Navigation Island, in brewing silence, and crossed Deliverance Bridge into the old part of the city, they were focused only on themselves, their personal distress, their unreadiness for admitting yet to anyone—even to each other, indeed—that they had made themselves a laughingstock. They could not, would not, show themselves to the Street Beat Renegades without the chairman in tow. It would be humiliating, for Freda because she would dread acknowledging so farcical a failure, and for Lix because he would not want to expose his immense relief. They’d let their comrades simmer for a while.
Besides, who could guarantee that one of the other three farceurs from RoCoCo had not already made the call or even dropped in at the ArtsLab with their narration of events that afternoon, how seven dead Poles had robbed the chairman of the Fat Man and the Cat, how one plump girl had ruined everything. So Freda and Lix felt if not exactly free, then at least excused to turn their backs on the blemished afternoon and indulge the moment and the still-unblemished prospects for the night.
The chairman had eluded them, but all their other plans and passions were in place. They needed shriving, urgently, spreadeagled like two crosses on the bed, to rid themselves with body sins of all the punctured virtues of their politics. Their blood was up. There were more urgent things to do than hunt a telephone. More urgent than the minor needs of friends.
They hardly spoke, of course. The vibration of the van, the parabolic headlights of the passing cars, the blare of people going home, the very first snowflakes provided all the commentary and all the stimulation they required. Everything’s symphonic and arousing when the object of your journey is a body and a bed. Sometimes in matters of the heart words are not required. Are ill advised, in fact. A misjudged word deflates. She’d only had to say, “Take me somewhere,” and push her fingers underneath his linen kerchief and touch his earlobe once for Lix to be in no doubt what was required of him. These were the clearest stage directions he could hope for.
So let the acting comrades wait. The lovers had to hurry first to Lix’s rooms—and then when they were finished with each other, they could perhaps drive down to the theater with their disappointing news but fortified and rescued from humiliation by their lovemaking.
Not telling their comrades sooner about the shambles on the campuses, having them waiting with their stilts and their accordions, was part of the excitement. For Freda anyway It made her irresponsible and negligent when her more public attempts at being irresponsible had so recently been aborted by “that idiotic Pole.” She liked to keep men waiting and men guessing, anyway. She liked to see their lungs dilate, their nostrils flare, their vocabularies shrink just because she’d passed extremely close to them.
It showed their weakness and her strength. How mystified and paralyzed they seemed to be by her. Perhaps that’s why she’d chosen harmless Lix in the first place, because her choice would mystify the waiting men, the self-satisfied, better-looking ones who’d done their best for the past seven terms to sleep with her—and failed.
By choosing slightly blemished Lix she had confounded all the rules. She was declaring what she truly felt about the mass confusion that seemed to value looks above the hidden virtues. Of course, she’d been a victim but also, she knew, a beneficiary of the confusion. Still, it was satisfying to think that when she’d make love to Lix that afternoon, she’d not be making love to all the other suitors in her life, the other handsomer men whom she’d imagined making love to her, whom she’d rebuffed in dreams. She’d wanted them, but they’d been turned away. The corridor was crowded with these men. Only she and unexpected Lix were in the room. Not making love to many men was what made making love to one so flavorsome.
By the time they had finally found a place to park their empty, unproductive van and walked—not even holding hands—the half a kilometer against the homeward-rushing crowd and chilly winds through narrowing streets and climbed the stairs to Lix’s rented room, Freda had already formed a plan for their lovemaking. Her nerves were shot by all the waiting in the parking bay behind the campuses, but not so shot that the sexual subtext that had always underscored their plans to kidnap Marin Scholla had been wiped out. Embracing tension as she did in politics was her pathway to arousal. To be so purposeful and incorruptible on the picket line or in the ruck of demonstrators or up against the chests and chins of police was to dance the tango of pressure and release.
By now—they’d reached the shabby, postered door to Lix’s room—it seemed as if the kidnapping was history, successful history, airbrushed, rewritten, and perfected. They’d caught / released the chairman, nudged the tiller of the world, and now could celebrate amongst and with themselves. Their fear and bravery had only been a prelude, an act of preparation, for the sex. Passion of the soul, and passion of the genitals.
Therefore, a frigid woman (“fat-witted” Alicja Lesniak) could never make a true and unbowed revolutionary, in Freda’s view, any more than a timid leafleteer (“that idiotic Pole” again) could prove to be convincing in the sack. You had to feel it big to give it big, in other words.
So then she had decided, by the time her Lix’s shaking hand had got the key into the lock, that their lovemaking would be a little reassuring drama of a sort, two comrades pumping courage into each other once they had pumped some courage into the world. Her usual mantra, then? “I am in charge.” She knew exactly what she wanted from her comrade on the far side of the door. He must not change his clothes, undress, when they got into the room, for a start. He must not take his kerchief off. She’d break his fingers if he tried to loosen it. The jaunty knot was part of what she wanted from the man. Nor must he slip into some open-throated bourgeois sentimentality, dutifully whispering sweet platitudes, proclaiming love instead of solidarity. She wanted camaraderie of spirit, not romance of the soul. Romance was for life. Romance was too soft and feeble to truly satisfy. She wanted the drama of the streets relocated in between the sheets. They’d be two partisans and they’d be making love between the detonation and the bomb. It didn’t matter what he wanted out of her. She was in charge. This was her needy afternoon.
His room was tidier than she remembered it, a disappointment of a sort. The sort of tidiness to mark a mother’s visit or an inspection by the concierge. The bed was made up like a dormitory bed. Lix tried to put the light on, but Freda held his hand. “We have to hurry up,” she said. “Come on.” She fantasized the clatter of militia boots, fast running up the stairs. “I want you now.” The you was not quite Lix and not quite nobody. The Czech was trapped between her legs, wild-haired and beautiful. She straddled him, and pushed his shoulders back onto the bed and pushed his shirt up onto his shoulders, and kissed the bare and perfect rack of ribs, her lips as urgent as a Russian gun.
She was too fast for him. He held her head and tried to kiss her on the lips. She turned away. Too intimate. It was not intimacy that she required. The opposite. She wanted urgency and alienation, the meeting of two strangers united only by a single cause. For once his instant penetration was required, allowed, demanded. She put her hand between his legs and felt through the cloth for that part of him that could convey the whole of him. “No kissing, Comrade Lix. It’s counterrevolutionary.” A joke of sorts, of course, but one intended to inform her lover what her desires truly were. He was quick to understand. He was an actor, after all, well versed and trained in improvisation and picking up on what a partner hinted at with her ad-libs. He said, “The Rebel and the Mutineer,” the title of a film he’d long admired. “Too insubordinate to kiss.”
He tried to pull her coat off her arms but she shoved back his hands. “Today,” she said, “the woman is in charge.”
Again, he let her be in charge.
WHERE HAD IT all gone wrong, this briefest love affair? It had gone wrong that afternoon. He knew that much. Marin Scholla flew with it to Rome. General Jaruzelski gunned it down. It couldn’t last beyond that afternoon. It was as if that afternoon had been the only destination for their love. Thereafter, they were in decline.
Lix often spooled it through his memory, that hour in that little room. He could not identify the point of separation. Nor specify his guilt. He’d let her be in charge, despite his fantasies. He’d let her hurry him. He had not tried to hurry her—for he well knew that Freda was a young woman who dismissed that underpinning law of physics, that an action of any energy or force should only result in a reaction of equal energy or force. Anything mildly unwelcome, the breeziest of pressures, she would greet with the fury of the seven spinster winds. So, certainly, she would not tolerate an overzealous lover, too keen to dominate her on a bed, too eager to have his way. She’d called the shots, the modern woman making up for all quiescent females in the past. There’d been benefits in that for him, of course. Uncomplicated penetration for a start, though under her and not on top. She’d been audacious and abandoned because the politics and history said she could.
In fact he had been glad, aroused, that she had pushed him back and held his wrists. Like that, he was too trapped and too engrossed by her urgent passion to make his own mistakes. As she hovered over him, directing him—how would he ever come with her on top demanding that he come?—he had not seen much evidence of romantic love in Freda, nor in her sudden interest in his ribs, his kerchief, and his shirt. She hadn’t spoken his name. Or even looked him in the eye. Yet her passion was all too evidently real. Passion’s something that truly can’t be faked, not even on the stage or in the films. An actor never quite captures the randomness, the disarray. So there can be nothing more honest and reassuring—in the short term—than a partner’s lust. These are the moments in your life that are sincere. You mean it, absolutely mean it, until the moment’s absolutely gone.
Lix absolutely meant it, too. Some cultures claim that when lovemaking has reached perfection, the earth has moved, or the yolk has separated from the albumen, or the clocks have chimed in unison, or the lovers’ bodies have dissolved. Here we say “the bed grew roots.” The bed grew roots that afternoon for Lix.
The universe was suddenly minute: its all-consuming detail pressed against his face, snagged at his toes, the linen and her skin almost impossible to tell apart. If anything or anybody but this long-necked girl, her breasts and earrings swinging like a hypnotist’s watch, had crossed his mind that snowy evening, then it was only briefly and diffusely. A car horn from the street below, perhaps. The tock of high heels on the wooden stairs, as someone else came home. The clink of cups and bottles from the sidewalk cafe below. And possibly, but only for an instant, the aging memory of that little information clerk, their bruising minutes at the kitchen windowsill—and then her tears illuminated by the cruel and sudden timer lights as she, that troubled stranger, fled. And now, the rattle of his bedroom window frames as what was forecast—wind and snow—announced itself across the city in gusts of frozen air.
WE LEAVE THEM lying on his bed, intimately awake, relieved from their desires, engaging with the calm that only sated fervor can provide, and looking forward to some time alone. Not quite tranquillity, but self-possession. The farce of MeisterCorps had ended without too much embarrassment, without too many tears or bruises. They could forget it easily or portray their happy failure as something heroic. Nobody from RoCoCo had been shot or dragged away. Nobody had been compromised. They were the victims only of bad luck and bad timing. Finally, though, they’d got it right: exactly as they’d hoped and planned, Lix and Freda had honed and blunted all the sexual edges of their day. Now was the time to disengage. Withdraw.
Let’s not forget, though, that this bed on Cargo Street was cursed. This narrow student’s cot with its new sheets and its cheap coverlet had played its ancient trick on Fredali
x. The roots it had grown were tougher, deeper, than they’d bargained for. Some mischievous coincidence had made this little room high above the wharfside district dangerously fertile, an efficacious city version of the Vacuum Cave in fairy tales where couples spent the night to guarantee a pregnancy (and risk pneumonia). Lix had already produced a child in it, a girl—and now that he’d been mad enough to take a second woman there, another child had been implied, a son, a George, an heir.
The explanation is mundane. The contraceptive Lix had readied and slipped beneath the bed had let the lovers down and either Lix had spilled his semen or Lix had pulled on the sheath too late. Or their lovemaking might have dragged the contraceptive loose, shortened it and buckled it, like ankle socks, cold and corrugated on his shrinking penis end. Or they had stayed with it just half in place for far too long after he’d ejaculated, allowing his emissions to leak and seep and fertilize.
So Lix and Freda might imagine that their day of lunacy and passion had let them off scot-free, no police, no blame, no aftermath. Except? Except that Freda had become some moments earlier the unexpecting mother of his child. It was a pregnant woman now who slumped down on Lix’s chest and concentrated only on the pumping of the once loved lover’s lungs. It was a pregnant woman, too, who hugged the actor to her chest and whispered that she had to wash and dress, who peeled herself away from him, separating their adhering clothes, despite the vents and furrows of their skin clinging on with semen glue and sweat. It was a woman quick with child who was already imagining the pulling over of the sheets, her journey home, the getting on with life and no regrets. It was a mother who pulled aside the window blind in Lix’s room and looked down on the office workers, overworked, as they made muffled progress to their streetcars and took on the trembling rearrangements of the weather-laden wind, the scrim of falling snow which seemed to make our city both lighter and darker at once.