Blackshirts.
Oswald Mosley’s ragtag band of fascists had been co-opted by King Edward, forming, in effect, a second, brutal police force. I watched their impassive faces, their black uniforms, and I felt fear suffocate me. It was difficult to breathe, my heart was beating too fast in my chest, my palms were sweating. I needed to escape. I saw one of the Blackshirts raise his hand in a throwing motion. He was holding something long and black and heavy in his hand. It rose into the air in an arc and travelled high above the panicked spectators’ heads, to land between the policemen and the masked protesters.
For a moment, nothing happened.
I saw the protester I had noticed before, the woman, turn her head towards the device. Everything seemed to happen so slowly. I heard a policeman near me say, ‘What the—’ and begin to move slowly away, and then the black device disintegrated, and a bright ball of expanding flame burst out of it, impossibly fast, rushing at the retreating policemen, the protester on the Duke of Wellington statue, the spectators and me. It blossomed like a flower, petals like shards of molten metal flying in all directions. I was thrown back and fell, painfully, and the sound of the explosion erupted in my ears and was abruptly cut.
All sound ceased.
My eyes felt gummed together. I painfully pushed them open. My vision shifted and swam as if I were watching things from the bottom of a deep, murky pool. Slowly, I pushed myself up. My face burned. A terrible pain seized my head in a vice. I turned my head and saw the body of the policeman lying in a pool of blood, his uniform burned clean off his body. I retched. I had not eaten earlier and now all that would come out was a thin trickle of sour, noxious liquid that burned my tongue. Looking up, I saw a forest of moving legs – and prone bodies. Smoke bellowed into the air, stained fantastical reds and yellows. I saw rather than heard gunshots. I saw a Blackshirt fall down, blood spreading on his chest where he’d been hit. I saw a protester in a Lenin mask run, holding a pistol, and saw him drop to the ground, half his head blown off.
I had to get away. There were people dead all around me, policemen and spectators and insurgents alike. Their corpses lay in grotesque forms on the ground. Blood and smoke and something else, too, a terrible smell that made my eyes burn – some sort of gas, I thought. I stood on unsteady feet, ghostly figures moving through the smoke around me in silent motion. When I looked up, there was a hole in the sky, reaching down. A cone of darkness reaching to where the Duke of Wellington statue had been. A Blackshirt loomed at me out of the smoke suddenly, a billy club studded with nails raised, a sneer of hatred on his animated face.
He swung it at me and I fell back. I felt the hiss of air as the club sailed by my face, narrowly missing me. Someone bumped into me. I turned instinctively, held on to muscled arms. Her mask fell off to one side of her face, her long black hair spilling down to her shoulders. There was an ugly gash on her face, her left eye was a black mess. There was blood on her shirt.
She looked up at me and I pushed her, hard, and turned, too late, holding up my arm as the studded billy club smashed into it. I screamed, feeling the bones in my arm breaking. The Blackshirt grinned and swung back for a death blow. Then she was standing beside me, the girl with the black hair, and she had a gun in her hands. I did not hear the shot. The Blackshirt stared at us, dumbly, then looked down. Blood spreading on his black shirt, turning it muddy. I saw the flash of the second shot and the impact of the bullet in the Blackshirt’s belly. He sank to his knees, the club falling from his hands.
The girl took my hand and suddenly sound rushed back in and I could hear the screams of the wounded, the sound of gunfire, and the trill of whistles blowing in futility. Ahead of us, the remaining protesters were huddled with their wounded in the square. The black tongue came down from the sky and licked at them and then, just like that, they were gone. I turned and the girl collapsed into me. I held her with my good arm and cursed. I tore the mask off her and dropped it to the ground. Without it she was just another spectator. I began to drag her away.
2.
Her name was Anastasia.
‘But you can call me Anna,’ she said.
3.
In the night, I awoke into darkness and the touch of something cold and sharp against my neck, an unfamiliar weight on my chest. I was pinned down. It was early. I could hear my landlord’s snores from beyond the thin walls. A cockerel cried out and was abruptly silenced. My bandaged arm shot darts of pain at me. I blinked. Slowly, features resolved in the room, and I saw her face. She was straddling me, leaning over me with a knife pressed against my throat. Her long hair fell down and tickled my face. Her eyes were dark and serious and her face oval, and lovely. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Where am I?’
‘You were hurt,’ I said. ‘At the bank. I carried you away.’
‘Where am I?’
‘On Brick Lane,’ I said, and, at her look of confusion, ‘the East End of London. Don’t worry, you’re safe here.’
Still the knife would not leave my throat. She shifted her position on me. Her touch made me ache… She said, ‘Who did this to me?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said, quickly. ‘A neighbour, a nurse. Mrs Gernsbacher. She came. She removed your clothes and cleaned and bandaged your wound. You were shot in the shoulder. She said you were lucky. Had it hit any lower…’
Her eyes opened wider. For the first time, she seemed to really see me. ‘You’re hurt too,’ she said. The pressure on my throat eased, a little.
‘Yes,’ I said. She touched my arm gingerly, prodding it with her finger, and I suppressed a groan.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘The Blackshirts. We did not count on them arriving so quickly…’
‘They threw a bomb!’ I said. She almost smiled.
‘Yes…’ she said. ‘They would blame us, later. Call us terrorists. It is their method.’
‘You are a communist,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘From… Mir?’
This time, she did smile. The pressure of the knife on my throat eased further. ‘Evidently,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you do it? It was a massacre!’
She examined my face. As if deciding something, she suddenly lifted her arm. The knife glinted in the faint light coming from outside. Dawn was coming. She climbed off me, awkward with one hand, and I realised just how fragile she really was. She tossed the knife away, and then, surprising me, she lay down beside me, as easy and as natural and trusting as though it were the simplest thing in the world. We had shared the mattress in the night, of course. There was nowhere else to lie: the bed was my desk and my dining table when it wasn’t used for sleeping.
‘It was a diversion,’ she murmured. I could feel the heat of her. She lay with her back to me. I expelled breath that I didn’t know I was holding. Turned carefully, my good arm against the thin mattress. I stared at her bare shoulders.
‘A diversion?’ I whispered.
‘The British…’ she said. She sounded drowsy. ‘They have anti-gate technology now… We couldn’t open a gate into the bank. We had to break in… the old-fashioned way.’
‘You robbed the Bank of England?’ I said, horrified.
‘I… hope so,’ she said. Then she began to gently snore.
4.
It was only later, much later, that I realised that I had asked the wrong question.
I had asked why.
I should have asked what.
5.
The next morning, we sat awkwardly at my tiny table having breakfast. I had boiled two eggs and gone down the road for fresh bagels. I boiled tea, black. Anna put a sugar cube between her teeth and took a sip of tea. I watched the sugar dissolve between her white, slightly crooked teeth. It was the first time I got to study her properly. Her face was tanned, made almost black by the alien rays of the sun which bathe Mir, or so it is said. Her arms were muscled, strong. She was used to physical work. She seemed to me, in my enchanted state, a true wo
rker, a poster girl for the Socialist revolution. Her eyes were brown, and sparkled with tiny flecks of gold in the wan sunlight coming in through the window. She had a small, old scar on the left side of her mouth. When she smiled, it was as though the Mir sun shone through her, transforming the room into a temple – though I had never seen it, the Mir sun; not then, not yet.
We ate without speaking. I cut a cucumber and served it with some salt. Anna ate quickly, hungrily. She did not waste food. Earlier, I had gone and purchased the newspaper. COMMUNISTS TERRORISE CENTRAL LONDON, the headline read. BOMB ATTACK LEAVES FIFTEEN DEAD. There was no mention of the Blackshirt fascists, and no mention of a break-in at the Bank of England either. I didn’t know if it meant the insurgents had been unable to carry out their objective, or whether they had been successful and the news was suppressed.
‘Mathieu,’ Anna said when she had done eating. I liked the way she said my name.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘What you did was very dangerous.’ She reached over and squeezed my hand. ‘Thank you.’
Her hand was very hot. She released her hold quickly. ‘I must sleep now,’ she said. Just as quickly she rose, and went to the bed, and lay down. I listened to her breathing change. Sleep came easily to her. I was left alone at the table with my Daily Express, but, for once, I could not concentrate on its banalities. Much had been left unsaid between us. One thing we both knew, and wouldn’t say, not then: sooner or later, they would come looking for her.
6.
A week later, they came.
I had begun to think we were safe. Why would anyone remember us, or count how many insurgents there were, or note that one, still alive, had been left behind?
‘A man was asking for you today,’ Menachem, the butcher, told me one afternoon. I had gone out for food. I had been neglecting my pupils but I didn’t care. My arm was healing and I had Anna to look after, Anna to replace all that may have meant something to me in my life before.
‘What sort of a man?’ I said. Menachem just shrugged – the only answer he needed to give.
‘There was a government agent asking about me today,’ I told Anna that same day. ‘He was told I was gone, that I have been gone a week already. A goyish man in the East End asking questions is like a Jew asking the Church for forgiveness. In neither case is an answer forthcoming. But they’ll be back. Sooner or later, they’ll be back, Anna.’ I looked at her. To my surprise, she was radiant. Her smile was ecstatic, the smile of the devout at prayer.
‘Then we did it,’ she said. ‘We were successful!’
Her joy made me afraid.
Had the burglary been a failure, I realised, no one would have cared one whiff for a lone rebel on the loose. But if the insurgents were successful… if they had broken into the vaults of the Bank of England, the security forces would stop at nothing, would trace every last insignificant lead.
By assisting Anna, I realised, I had become an enemy of the state.
And I realised that I had known that all along, and that I didn’t care.
‘We have to leave London,’ I said. ‘Tonight.’
She nodded, flashed me a quick smile of sympathy. ‘I have already made the arrangements,’ she said.
7.
Charing Cross Station, at night, and the last train to Dover… The street lamps burned electric and there was a manic, almost forced, gaiety in the air, like a curlicued end to the thirties.
War, Anna had told me.
War is coming.
And it seemed to me that I had known, for a long time, that it was so; and that the people thronging the capital’s streets that night, drinking and laughing and puffing on cigarettes, knew it too.
Charing Cross Station and the whistle of train engines, the chuga-chuga of metal wheels on the track, the calls of the newspaper vendors, the smell of pasties and caramelised peanuts, the suggestion of foreign shores. A short and nervous man, balding, with a French cigarette, went past us. His arm brushed Anna’s. Then he was gone and she was holding a small handbag that wasn’t there a moment before.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
8.
On the way to Dover, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and was boarded by men in plain clothes that fooled no one. I sat tense by the window, but Anna beside me was the image of smiling unconcern.
‘Tickets, please. Identification.’
A thin man, with round glasses and a trim moustache as thin as he was. I handed over my carte de travail. He barely glanced at it. ‘You are from Hungary?’ he said.
‘Budapest,’ I said. ‘I am returning home, with my fiancé…’ I half-shrugged. He looked at Anna. ‘You seem to have both been in an accident recently,’ he said.
‘Thugs,’ Anna said, with sudden passion. ‘We were attacked, for being foreign. Is this how your country treats visitors?’
‘These are difficult times,’ the thin man said. ‘Your papers?’
She gave him her documents. Again, he barely looked at them. Instead, he looked at her, and at me. Then he shrugged. ‘Here,’ he said, returning the documents to us. ‘My apologies for your misfortune. Please have a safe onward journey.’ For a moment, he hesitated. ‘You would be advised not to travel by ferry, mademoiselle. Many eyes are watching the channel, and not all are as friendly as mine.’ He spoke low. No one else could have heard him. He smiled at my horrified face, gave us a quick salute, and was gone down the aisle. ‘Tickets, please. Identification.’
I sank back in my seat. My heart was beating at a rapid, irregular rhythm. ‘He knows,’ I said. Anna gripped my hand.
‘Sympathisers to our cause are everywhere,’ she said. ‘But so are our enemies.’ We held hands, and did not speak again, until we reached Dover.
9.
We crossed the Channel into France by fishing boat, in the dead of night, and I was sick several times; and that is all that I wish to say on that subject.
10.
You must understand that my story is not one of a hero. I was not responsible for any of the things that transpired on the world stage. I am merely an observer, a man caught, as all of us were caught, in the violent changes then overtaking the world. That I survived, where so many didn’t, is enough for me. The fate of two people during that great war is of no significance. This is how I came to Mir:
We beached at a cove beyond the port of Calais…
We were met by a group of insurgents. A diverse group: an old woman in a peasant’s shawl, a boy of perhaps fifteen, three men dressed like bankers, others dressed like soldiers, women in the starched uniforms of maids and others in the outfits of upper-class ladies of leisure. It was as if we had gone aground not just in another country but in a sort of fairyland: these people seemed to me an actors’ troupe, a disreputable travelling show. I could not for the life of me account for their presence there, though clearly Anna had been expecting them. For the first time, the question rose in my mind: what was I doing here? My old life was gone forever, and I did not know what was to replace it. I felt apprehensive, yet also, strangely, free. Perhaps that is what is meant by revolution, I thought. It is an upheaval, an explosion that tears your old life away from you, forever, and leaves you falling free. Where you’d land, and how, is sometimes up to you, but more often a subject to historical process. And so:
‘The train will arrive in one hour,’ a man in a sombre banker’s suit and a wide-brimmed hat – the latest fashion from Paris – said. He seemed to be in charge. ‘We must be ready by then. The comrades on the line are ready – we must not let them down.’
Bewildered, I followed Anna and the others. We boarded automobiles that took us, separately, to the train station in Calais. There were perhaps twenty of us altogether, with nothing in common. Once at the station, we seemed like any kind of crowd waiting on a platform, a group of disparate strangers.
It was there, while waiting for the train to Paris, that Anna first kissed me.
I remember it, even after all those years, so vividly. Her ha
nd was on the back of my neck, she smelled of salt water and sweat and soap, her eyes sparkled, flecked with gold. She pulled me to her and our lips met. She was so warm… ‘What was that for?’ I said.
‘Just in case,’ she said.
‘In case of what?’
‘In case there is no later,’ she said, simply.
The train arrived. We boarded it. I noticed, as we walked through, looking for seats, that the train bore a large contingent of military personnel. They were easy to spot: they bore prominent swastikas on their shoulder patches. Germans. Escorting someone high up in Hitler’s National Socialist Party? I wondered, uneasily.
A round-faced man in a suit sitting amidst them, neat and proper. ‘Herr von Ribbentrop,’ Anna whispered to me after we passed and settled into our seats. ‘The German Foreign Minister.’
‘Shouldn’t he be in Berlin, for the Olympic Games?’ I said, surprised.
‘I believe he has just concluded a meeting with the British,’ she said, ‘which could not wait.’
About whatever it was the insurgents had stolen from the bank? But Anna said no more, merely gripped my hand. I felt her tension, and felt apprehensive. ‘We are going to Paris, are we not?’ I said; but she only smiled.
11.
In 1908, a vast object crashed into the Earth’s surface, impacting in Siberia, near the Tunguska River. The resultant explosion destroyed a forest of some eighty million trees covering an area of nearly a thousand square miles.
A cadre of socialist revolutionaries were sent by Lenin to investigate the crash. They had expected a large meteorite, perhaps. What they found instead was anything but natural.
The train, moving through the French landscape. Flat lands and fields, low-lying villages in the distance. A low, dim sun in a blue sky dotted with clouds.
‘Now,’ Anna said.
Her good hand went into her handbag. Came out with a small silver gun. All over the train seemingly random people rose as one. I recognised them from the beach, earlier. The three bankers, the young boy, the old peasant woman. They were all holding silver guns. The Nazi soldiers started, reaching for their weapons, but they were too late. I saw the old woman raise her gun and press the trigger. Instead of a gunshot an impossible beam of light burst from the muzzle of the gun and hit the nearest soldier. His head was simply erased, leaving behind a stump of a neck, neatly cauterised. The body collapsed to the ground.
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