Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Largely uninformed about the labor movement except in spirit, Willy did not stop talking worker revolt from that day forward. He followed Europe’s flirtation with common property and progressive government with all the devotion of a sports fan backing an underdog team. His new enthusiasm, however, did little to alter his brick production one way or the other.

  Hubert was not the only young person who learned his politics from Will, but he was the only one to devote himself to it with the seriousness of the master. Willy knew that Hubert was the only crab in his brook, so he groomed the boy carefully. Although no one knew who in all of Belgium, Holland, France, or Luxembourg Hubert’s mother had procured to father the boy, it was certain that Will was not the one. But equally certain, Hubert came dutifully on each Maastricht visit to sit as a disciple at this man’s feet.

  Since his forced retirement, Willy had grown increasingly vocal. His declamations reached the point where the town police had to lock him up regularly for what was called Disruptive Conduct, a catch-all, part-political, part-civic charge that took very little incourt proving. The arrest usually took place around the twenty-fourth of each month, so that Willy would appear on the prison rosters on the first of the following month, thereby counting toward the precinct’s tax-credit calculation. It was in following one of these arresting officers once, intending to bomb or at least throw stones at his house, that Hubert instead had met the policeman’s daughter, Wies.

  Hubert arrived at Will’s house on the last day of July to find his entire world changed.

  —Hubie, I want to tell you before you go shooting your mouth off outside my house that we’re working things a little different these days.

  —What different? We’re going to warm your gun up some, Oom Will?

  Hubert had continual designs on his “uncle” Willy’s gun, a twin-barrel shotgun that Will hunted ducks with on the lakes that fed the Maas. Hubert was convinced the public needed physical prodding to realize what was good for it. He didn’t want to use the gun so much as just to brandish it menacingly.

  —We’re not going to use the gun, but we are going to start using a lot less of your mouth, little man.

  —But Oom Will, you said So-veet will not be silenced until the breaking of the last chain.

  —That’s poetic, son. From now on, we’re going to undertake the silent revolution.

  —You’re joking. You’re testing me. That’s not policy. That’s not the way the pressed worker goes about getting control, eh, old man?

  —Let your gums sleep a bit, Huub. I’m tired of going to jail. No more. The place smells bad. They put poisons in your soup and fifteen men in a room all have to shit into a single bucket. That’s embarrassing for a man with my condition.

  Will alluded to his second favorite topic of conversation. Temperament and the chemical atmosphere at the brick plant had combined to inflict him with ulcerative colitis. His bowel movements could not, by any stretch of semantics, be called statistically normal.

  Hubert sat out on Will’s front porch, listening in stunned disbelief to the change in policy. The single Dutch stoop, one of a house-row of hundreds, was little more than a bump in the narrow stone walk. Lazy foot traffic had to detour around the two conspirators. Will pointed out a foot patrolman across the street.

  —They’ve been after me for two weeks now. But they won’t get me this month, providing you keep your trap shut. Tomorrow starts August, and I’m out of the lion’s den. Now talk, normal-like, about anything except the you-know-what.

  Without the old familiar topic, Hubert was lost for conversation. Besides, he needed full concentration to figure out how his world could change so totally and irrevocably without warning. So Willy did all the talking. He skillfully stretched out talk about the weather, taking even longer than a technical reporter would need to write it up. He went on to tell three dirty stories that were, aside from changes in locale and cast, variations on a single punchline. He fought heroically to keep the law on the far side of the street. Yet after weather and pornography, conversation had no place to turn except to current events.

  —Hey, Hubie. See the headlines this morning? I’ll tell you, little man, the Germans are going to go through Belgium like THAT.

  He shouted the last syllable, using a fierce swipe of his penknife at the loaf of bread they’d been eating to demonstrate his point. The Kaiser two years earlier had made a similar swipe in the air, using the same figure—“My armies will cut through Belgium like that”—in front of a startled visiting British staff officer. Now Will was not telepathic and shared nothing with the Kaiser, aside from indiscretion masquerading as shrewdness. It was simply one of those gestures—the sudden appearance of dandelions in spring, the flu in late fall—that become ubiquitous. Millions repeated it throughout the coming week. Nevertheless, the police officer, an old friend, was across the street in seconds.

  —Hello, Willy. Pretty dangerous words, those. You wouldn’t be planning anything, would you?

  Within a half hour Hubert appeared at the tobacco shop trying to catch his breath. Peter hated having his ward show up here at the scene of his crime, and expressed his anger in an unwitting but accurate imitation of an American capitalist.

  —This better be important, you little toad, or we’re going to tie you up and burn you all over with cigars.

  —They came and arrested Oom Will. They got him in prison.

  —Again? That’s all? You came here against my orders to tell me that? You’re feeding me yesterday’s news as stew.

  The vogue expression meant the hot item was old hat. Happens all the time. And so things do, with only the level of boredom changing.

  —And, and . . .

  —And what, you epileptic?

  —And the German armies are going to cut through Belgium like THAT.

  The gesture lacked something without a stale loaf of bread for prop. Yesterday’s news as stew. This time, however, Peter acted. In the space of three slow breaths, he evaluated the reliability of his brother as a news source, weighed his personal versus collective responsibility, and at once came to a course more resolute and defensible than the German Schlieffen Plan or the French Plan 17. He walked to where the widow was tidying up and threw himself consequentially into the act of sorting cigars.

  —Think you could find some long-term work for two Dutchmen?

  Hubert surfaced briefly from bitterness long enough to knock on Wies’s door. She was surprised to see him back so soon after their last parting, and her visiting cousin’s condition was more compromising than usual. But Hubert’s agitation showed he was in great trouble. As such, her sainthood rose in her like a glamour stock until she felt willing to do anything for him, beginning with following him unquestioningly into the street.

  Once outside, a silent Hubert herded her along with shoves and prods. She objected, demanding information. She complained that he hurt her. But she fell short of calling to the passers-by for help. His purposeful behavior infected her; she felt a certain destiny waiting for her at the end of the block.

  Without thinking, Hubert sensed that the only place with enough solitude for the job in question was Will’s now vacant home. A nesting instinct: if Hubert did not puff out his neck like a pigeon, it was because he needed the muscles to hold his cigarette in place at this brisk pace. Will, shuffled off by a policeman who was in a hurry to make the August first deadline, had not had time to lock up the place. Hubert forced the door and pushed Wies inside.

  —Now. Start talking God.

  —But Huubje, we already . . .

  —Shut up and start it. Now. “God grows angry when . . .”

  He twisted her arm, not well or effectively enough to hurt her. She began hastily, knowing exactly what a request for the speech meant. Her voice carried no tone or purpose, as far away and tinny as a wireless.

  — . . . Too, God grows angry at those who throw his temple away on pleasure. God gives each human. . . .

  The rite began as usual but soon took a
wrong turn when he ripped through her frilly, grotesque underclothes, which offered only modest resistance. Cut through like that. This time, there were no recriminations after.

  He at once demanded to know if she was pregnant. Stunned, she giggled. She thought he suspected her of trying, in a few months, a bribe of the Alicia variety. She called him a pet name, a diminutive, and told him not to worry, that the evil of the day was sufficient thereunto. He struck her with a force that stunned even himself.

  For the first time, this orphan frightened her. She reasoned correctly that one so naïve as to think a woman could feel the moment of conception was beyond protecting, beyond saving, beyond even nursing into a reconciliation with the world. Innocents always present the most danger. She had to give him the correct answer to his demand, but she had no idea of what answer he wanted. She could not know that, taking his brother Adolphe’s example, Hubert had developed the notion that soldiers off to war were secretly obligated to impregnate someone. She offered a very tentative yes.

  Immediately he bent into a grin: her old playmate Hubert. He called her every lovename, mostly edible foods, that he could think of. He gave her the May Day photo, carefully folded into quarters, that he had stolen from Peter for this purpose. She played along until she saw a chance to escape from the house. With great difficulty, he wrote something on a scrap of paper and forced it into her hands. She did not look at it until reaching the security of the policeman’s home. There she carefully opened the scrap to reveal where a shaky hand had spelled out a much-practiced word, a German surname.

  Hubert stole Will’s shotgun. After all, Willy had taught him well that a man with moral cause stands outside the law. He took, also, a half box of buckshot scatter shells. What’s good for the duck was good for what he had in mind. He biked the Maas ford into Belgium, where the river, with no apparent change, became the Meuse. He headed upstream, where in about fifteen miles he expected to find Liège and the Belgian fortresses. He rode about five miles, even managing to stay on the road for good stretches at a time. He spent the night sleeping soundly in a hayrick.

  In the morning, the owner of the property found him taking eggs out of a hen house. Hubert explained that he had left a pack of cigarettes in the nest to pay for them. He said, in addition, that he was going to help repel the Germans from his native Belgium. The farmer scoffed at the idea, pointing out that the Germans had co-signed the guarantee of Belgian neutrality. The farmer’s wife ended the ensuing debate by hard-boiling the eggs for the monkey-faced boy, and making her husband give back the cigarettes, with half a pack of Belgian brand thrown in as a gift.

  Hubert bicycled through midday, wondering what he and Will would talk about now that there was no more Soviet. Maybe Will would get used to jail again and they could go back to the old ways, which were best, after all. His riding grew erratic under these complex thoughts. An explosion very near him knocked him clean from the bike.

  Under the impression that the German invasion had begun, he lowered his shotgun in the direction of the commotion, unloading one barrel, then the other. The recoil hurt his shoulder. Belgian engineers, demolishing bridges in the event of a German advance, went down hurt or seeking cover. An incredulous gunner opened up an automatic small arm in the direction of the bicyclist. The repeating weapon continued to go off, nervously, even after vacancy had taken hold in the air.

  That day, the Germans violated Luxembourg at a town called Trois Vierges: the Three Graces, or virgins.

  Chapter Six

  Two Leads on a Fata Morgana

  You see what I’m doing: there was an empty space left in the trunk which I’m filling with hay; that’s how it is in our life’s baggage; no matter what we stuff it with, it’s better than having an empty space.

  —Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

  —I found my thri-i-ill

  In John Stuart Mill. . . .

  Delaney’s voice strongly resembled a Phantom jet in the hands of a developing nation. His strafing run had as objective a reticent molded-plastic-cum-printed-circuit-card that generated what the magazine referred to as “fully user-programmable” coffee. The machine, however, had long ago rewritten its own software, and now refused to wander from REHEAT MODE. Although the machine’s microprocessor could make decisions in milliseconds, it invariably decided to do the same thing time and again: bring the water to 65 degrees and dribble it miserably into the waiting flask. The U.S. Army had, at Ardennes, 1917, devised a method—big pot of lukewarm water with grounds stirred in—that beat the IC technology in both taste and throughput.

  Delaney, having changed his tune this quarter hour ever so slightly to “I found my thrill in diddling Jill,” perhaps knowing somewhere in his voluminous preconscious that by cashing his checks on Powell Trade Magazine Group, he morally obligated himself to accomplish at least a little something each morning, annexed a cup and made his best imitation of a straight line toward Mays’s module.

  —Do you realize that if I stretched out your small intestine it would reach all the way to the latrine and back? Save you the trip.

  Mays concealed what he had been working on and filled his face with a polite, functionary look. He had been raised under the moral imperative that considered impoliteness a far more serious crime than, say, killing a loved one, so he was always attentive. He adopted the servile attitude of the smaller of two dogs that, after token resistance, ends a scrap by rolling over and baring its throat.

  —Doug, I’ve got this job, see? Maybe Mr. Moseley would like to chat.

  In fact, Moseley had taken a rare break from red-penning manuscripts to work on his pet project: the noise vacuum. In the plan, a microphone sent incoming sound to an analyzing loop, which built a sound wave exactly inverse to the source. Where the natural-source sound wave had a crest, the machine’s resultant wave formed a trough, and vice versa. The two waves thus summed to a resultant wave of zero: silence. Moseley worked on his circuit whenever Delaney went on a spree. At the sound of his name, Moseley adjusted the wall of plants around his desk, closing a dangerous gap in the shrubbery barrier.

  Delaney had no intention of taking Mays’s hint.

  —Dougo, can’t you at least go through the motions of doing some work?

  —I belong to the union, I’ll have you know.

  —Do you want us to be overtaken by the competition?

  Mays alluded to regular pep talks that Caroline—Madame Chairperson, to Delaney—gave the staff in meetings or parceled out in discreet memos. Brink, not by nature a competitive person, normally had no more sympathy for the underdog than had the average American citizen since the Spanish-American War. But when it came to Micro’s standing with regard to its competitors in the trade press, Caro grew fangs.

  A triumvirate of interchangeable magazines competed for what might loosely be called “market share” of the early 1980s’ microcomputer design readership. The trade press being to real magazines what government prop films are to Hollywood, rival journals cannot “compete” in any except the literal sense of the word. Still, the chief editors of Micro News, Monthly Micro, and Micro Monthly News viewed each other with the mutual animosity of diplomats, devoting less time on articles than on badmouthing the enemy.

  Distinguishable only to themselves, the three magazines maneuvered around one another for undisputed control of the design engineer. But as with Orwell’s Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania, complete superiority was impossible. The market had a random reader distribution built into it. Each magazine hired the same coveys of pollsters to produce “independent reader surveys.” Each survey, regardless of the most sophisticated statistical tampering, remained adamant: at most two hundreths of a percent swing in preference over the last six-month period. If one of the three obtained a flukish one percent or more “market” lead, the other two would tacitly cooperate to bludgeon the giant down to a humble equality.

  This inviolable deadlock resulted from the magazines’ being in all respects interchangeable. They ran to the same numbe
r of pages. They carried the same four-color, full-page ads. (The slogan of the day in the leading industrial parks was “Saturate the available outlet-organs.”) They received identical press releases and converted them into roughly equivalent dialects of technobabble: “Ease Dual Process Control” and so on. Most important, each magazine kept close watch on its competitors, expressly prohibiting innovation. One former chief had been dismissed for proposing a title change not containing the word “Micro.” Any innovation that did sneak through was instantly and mercilessly copied by the two rival presses until it became a harmless status quo.

  Executives of each book played an elaborate, felonious espionage game: spies and industrial thieves stole confidential editorial schedules and sold them to rivals, who then promptly tailored their own calendars to match. Each staff, knowing it was the object of espionage, made it easy for spies to collect the desired information without ransacking too many valuable files. Nobody wanted escalation: the other fellow might retaliate if you hid your secrets too well. That could only end with everyone thrown back on their own resources.

  Color spreads in each magazine harped on niggling differences between the books in an attempt to convince potential advertisers of the dangers of appearing in either of the inferior rags. Monthly Micro began a slander campaign against Micro News, running a photo of an old man dressed from the turn of the century propping himself up with a cane and perusing a copy of Micro News. The book trailed a foot of spider webs complete with black widow spider. A caption asked: “What’s so new about Micro News?” The ad lamented that the rival’s “lead time”—a favorite term of indefinite meaning—was so long that many components were obsolete by the time they were reviewed in print. The text did not mention that, in this field, the design life of new introductions averaged four months.

  Micro News retaliated within two weeks—no lead-time problem here—distributing a glossy flier carrying an enlarged Webster’s entry for “monthly.” The headline screamed: “What’s so monthly about ten times a year?” The ad pointed out that two Monthly Micro issues, the so-called “Product Bonanzas,” tried to pass as double issues simply by calling themselves the May/June and the November/December issues. The broadside asked if any serious professional in so voluble a field could get by without “data update” for as long as sixty days. Mays, on first reading the copy, remarked that he had gone without data update for the first seventeen years of his life, had been updated only intermittently since then, and didn’t see why he needed it monthly now.