Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  In the darkness I could hear her moan, curling her body up tighter as she pulled the covers over her head.

  And that was the last time I ever saw her. The next morning she was gone. Escaped or let go or something else altogether? I didn’t ask. No one talked about the ones who had blue slips of paper marked “Out” by their names on the board that we checked in and out of every day. And when the checkout board was redone in a few months’ time, if their names were gone no one asked why.

  After she left, the Old Man called me down to his office.

  “Pat was difficult for you,” the Old Man said. He could see that. Pat was like my mother, someone I could never imagine abandoning the revolution.

  He said those things before I could even think them.

  We talked all night. We talked about the difference between childish idealism and revolutionary commitment. We talked about what happened to soldiers in basic training, how they were broken down and rebuilt, and that was as close as we came to talking about Polly and the eggs. How not everyone was strong enough to be a soldier to the end.

  And in the darkness of his office, I thought about the thousand different ways there were not to be strong enough. You could want things, like music or your own underwear or to hug a dying relative goodbye one last time. You could daydream about things, like taking a bath or spending a day alone or kissing somebody. You could remember people you loved and the life you had. You could forget why you were here, what you were working for. You could try and sleep all day, or not be able to sleep at night. There were a thousand different ways to be weak. But the only way to be strong was to stay.

  TWENTY

  I was sitting on the toilet when Mary T stepped out of the shower. With up to eighty people in the brownstones, it was considered protocol to share the bathroom with the same sex while showering. Her body still dripping wet, her long hair stuck to her back, the first thing she did was dry her hands and light a cigarette.

  When I told the Old Man about the Christmas present I got one year at the commune, the lamb I named Bert and how when the commune started running out of money everyone voted to eat him, the Old Man told me Mary T’s Chinese father had forced his family to eat the family dog when she was little. He implied this was only one of her father’s crimes, that for all the fondling and groping I’d endured, Mary T had suffered much worse. My stories were sad, but hers were sadder.

  As she took a long first haul of her cigarette, I saw that her pubic hair had recently been shaved off.

  Just like mine.

  With the same razor I imagined—the electric razor the Old Man kept in the bottom desk drawer along with the shoebox of makeup. The sight of her honey-coloured skin, tender and uncovered, made me feel like I was falling, like I’d missed a step on a stairway. I had asked about Mary T, but all he would say was that it was different than what he had with me. Different relationship, same razor.

  And suddenly I understood the look that she’d given me for so long, half-angry, half-amused, even after I’d stopped being a probationary member and became one of the Old Man’s staff. Understanding that she was jealous, I felt a little sorry for her, in a way that I hadn’t even after the story about the dog and the father. Only later did I wonder if she felt sorry for me, too, for realizing how things really were.

  The new girl, Jayne, had the same initials as my mother, JL, and within a month or two she’d taken over my number on the checkout board, a board with slots for each of us. The numbers beside our name were how we called for people over the CB radio between the apartments. Each addition or subtraction of cadre affected which number we had, since we were alphabetically arranged on the checkout board.

  Was the Old Man surprised when he called for #25 and she showed up? Not the second time he wasn’t. Jayne was another smart girl, Mensa smart and from a good college. But that made it worse. The Old Man worked harder with people from money, harder and faster. I’d begun to see that pattern too. I could smell the Paco Rabanne on her skin as she came looking for file folders and labels. The Old Man had given her the job of re-ordering his files, the same job I’d done only months before.

  But then one day her father came and picked her up. Had she called or had he tracked her down? She walked right out the front door. Even leaving was easy for a girl like that.

  On my eighteenth birthday, the Old Man gave me a sheer pale yellow blouse that he’d had Mary T go out and buy and I modelled it for him braless, before he fell asleep on his couch.

  My other gift that year came from John who gave me a chocolate bar. Happy birthday, Waif, he said, using the nickname he’d given me not long after I’d arrived. I ate it in the bathroom, letting the sweet waxy chocolate melt in my mouth as I cried. One minute I was crying because the revolution was only 329 days away and I might not live to see another birthday. And the next because it seemed like even one more day was too long to wait for things to change.

  The batteries in my Walkman began to wear out: the strings on Street Hassle slowed and Lou Reed began to sound like he was singing underwater. But it was still beautiful. I’d put in the request for the three-dollar batteries, but instead, after my second request, Politburo asked for the Walkman, since it was so handy for people to listen to classes on. Maybe I knew this would happen, as I tried to hold the button down just right, force Lou to sing for me at a speed close to normal. I knew this like I knew Dana was never coming back, like I knew the day I walked into that office that the Old Man was going to try and fuck me. So maybe the story my father used to tell about me was true, that I was psychic, that I could predict the colour of the card coming up next in the deck.

  The days on the countdown continued to fall away, and in small, measured acts—burns on her arms and scratches on her face—Barbara was the next to declare herself insane. The night watch reported finding her in the bathroom washing the floor on her knees, saying the Catholic rosary over and over again. She began washing her hands five and six times every hour. First with soap and the next day, with Ajax.

  Lisa was assigned to watch over her. Lisa kept her by her desk outside the Old Man’s office. Lisa found things for Barbara to do. Fold pillowcases, alphabetize index cards. Polish a boot with a toothbrush. Barbara whispered as she did these jobs, encouraging herself to get each thing just right. The crease of the cloth, the shine of the heel.

  But not even Lisa could manage her alone. The first day I saw her there, both Barbara’s eyes were black. She had been banging her head against her knees. She was smiling and whistling as Lisa was trying to coax her into giving back a pen she had in her hand. On Barbara’s arms were little ink and blood stab marks she had already made. Hail Mary, full of grace. She smiled as we bandaged her arms, put peroxide on the match burns she’d made on her legs. We bandaged her head after she hit it against the wall. She smiled, digging her fingernails into her wrists.

  The Old Man called me into to his office.

  He said something had to be done. He said, “She’s our responsibility.”

  He wanted me to kill Barbara.

  It would be the kindest thing, the Old Man said. Merciful. It happened in war, he said. Not everyone makes it.

  “Think about what the alternative is. Hospitals. Pills. Think about that.”

  I thought about that. My aunt’s psych-ward white body jumping up and down on the motel bed. The way she’d made Dana and the rest of us a kind of sad that couldn’t be forgotten or forgiven, even though there was no one to blame. After Dana died, she’d jumped out a third storey window. Somehow she survived, but the accident had left her walking with a cane and almost unrecognizable after she’d broken most of the bones in her face. She hadn’t been trying to kill herself, she said; Dana’s ghost had pushed her. Of all the things she’d said over the years, I believed that one the most. I wanted to believe that one the most.

  “It’s the kindest thing,” the Old Man said. “But it’s your choice, your decision. This is not an order. It’s a request.”

  Whenever Li
sa had to leave her desk, to eat or use the bathroom, she called me to come and sit with Barbara. That was military time, too, guarding Barbara, as she grinned at me through a mask of self-inflicted bruises whispering Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. The blood dripping from a fist clenched tight around an opened paper clip as she began to pray again.

  It took me three days to decide.

  Dialectics was the struggle between opposing forces. Communism and capitalism, sane and crazy, certainty and doubt. You could not fix what would not admit to being broken, you could only overcome it, destroy it. Destroy it and believe that from its ashes would come another kind of life, a better kind of life.

  The Old Man said whatever I decided he would understand.

  And I said yes.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Outside the world was white. I sat by the window and watched the snow fall over Crown Heights. The courtyard below was white and clean as though no one had ever walked there before. I felt high from all the Sudafed I was taking. I’d had bronchitis for weeks. Every breath I took I could feel the small protest in my lungs. Nothing was simple anymore, not even breathing. I took another pill.

  Across the courtyard I thought I saw a man watching me from behind a pair of red curtains. Some days I thought I could see the flash of a gun. There were less than a hundred days left.

  I turned back to look at the room. Mary T was sitting in the corner, reading over the polemic one of the field liaisons has typed up. She rubbed at the side of her face, in a distracted kind of way, running her fingertips over the bruises on her cheekbone. In parts, it was a dark wine purple, and others, a softer burgundy.

  What had she done to make the Old Man so angry? I’d only ever seen people with bruises like that when they were caught trying to leave. There had been a few of those, runners caught halfway down the street. But no one in leadership, not even Polly, whose legs and back had been struck with the whip, had ever shown a bruise before—but then she only took showers late at night when everyone else was asleep. I couldn’t imagine Mary T either trying to defect or being stupid enough to get caught. But still she had the only thing I would have punished her for, that small half-smirk. Only Mary T could wear a black eye like a mark of status.

  The empty courtyard. Mary T’s hands on the bruise. The flutter of the curtain. Once you started watching you could never stop.

  Who was it that was watching me watch them? The NYPD, the FBI? Who knew about us, about what we did in this house, this house we called safe?

  Barbara had been a test of some kind, but had I passed or failed? I remembered looking at the guns in his room, the olive green room, and wondering which one would be used. The one I’d choose for myself was the Old Man’s silver .45 pistol, since it was intimate but certain to get the job done. I didn’t know how it would happen. I hoped Barbara wouldn’t be afraid, that she would know the act was from love.

  A day or two after I told the Old Man I’d do it, Barbara was gone. I woke up and there was a blue slip by her name, and that was the end of it. Maybe the Old Man killed her himself. I didn’t think so. I didn’t think anyone had, although for the first time I let myself imagine fully what it might have been like. If she struggled, if she did not accept her fate, if the gun wobbled or the shot was overheard. Was Barbara dead? And which was I more afraid of believing? That the Old Man was a killer, or that he’d never meant it at all, that he was a liar?

  I didn’t know.

  I didn’t want to know.

  It was an act of faith or defiance, to turn my back to the window, to look away from the clean snowy emptiness of the concrete yard, and return to the smoky clutter of the room before me, to face the room with its three work tables and seven manual typewriters. The sign at the front door that read “Check Out with Control.”

  That was me.

  If Barbara was a test, this was another kind of test. To take the girl who failed math from Grades 4 to 10 before dropping out altogether, and make her Control, put her in charge of logistics. Every night ask her to divide sixty-three cadre into five apartments using six cars. Subtract who is slowly going crazy, who is looking for a way out. Subtract who is new and exotic. Divide potential lovers and other suspect alliances. Factor in the twelve who can drive stick, take away the twenty who have not left this apartment in years.

  At the Control desk, I made the lists, I marked off the names. On the schedule board that was bigger than my desk, the hours were marked in coloured squares on quad-ruled paper, a row for each of us. And on the wall beside me was the checkout board with a blue slip by Barbara’s name.

  When I’d first arrived at NOC, the blue slips on the checkout board had intrigued me most. The slips were colour-coded by location and time stamped with the big industrial stamper that sat by the desk. Yellow for the first floor, green for the basement. Blue for all those who were Out. Nicaragua, I’d thought in the beginning, guerrilla training camps, clandestine meetings, secret trips in the dead of night. But I’d learned that usually blue meant AWOL. Blue was the colour of their childhood bedroom in a New Jersey suburb, or the vein in the arm when they were tying off. Blue was where people went when they stopped being here.

  Six slots on the board had new blue slips in them. Joe Hassan got picked up by men in a black limo one day, by what we assumed were rich relatives. Love affairs were revealed when two people disappeared overnight. We found Gemini tied up outside the supermarket after the woman we’d sent out to buy butter never came back. That was the end of going out alone for all of us, even with the dog.

  At the beginning of the fall we were eighty in the safe house and the surrounding area. By winter we were sixty-three. Two women in the last month had been caught trying to get out, and were beaten for it. But mostly people did get away and we threw out everything they left behind. Half a dozen in the few months since I became Control, including the woman who’d been Control before me. People said they were going down to the basement for potatoes, and they ran out the back door. They jumped out of cars at stoplights, they stepped out of a subway car at the wrong stop.

  “Out” I wrote on a blue tag by their names.

  After a week or so I began to black them from the cadre list and the call lists for the CB radio and the next time we updated the checkout board, a lot of us had new numbers again.

  Six thousand, one hundred and seventy-four hours each week. Each hour was mapped out, coloured in. And yet still we struggled. Still we were running out of time. A lost hour could never be recovered. And on my lists, these new black lines that covered over the names we never said again.

  Pat. Barbara. Lisa.

  Maybe a month after Barbara disappeared, Lisa followed. She was on an all-night watch; we didn’t even realize she was gone until the outside housing crew came in and woke us all up.

  When Lisa left, the Old Man got the limo and a couple of his main guys and went out looking for her. It almost made me jealous to think of the Old Man looking through the tinted windows for her face on a street corner, even if I knew probably what he wanted to do was kill her. I wondered if he would ever do that for me.

  The last time I went down to the basement, I saw the cats she’d been feeding. They scattered in all direction when I walked past them, swollen-faced with pink eye, hissing and mewing. Some of them had already gone blind. I didn’t know what to do. I added this to the list, the list of things I did and didn’t see.

  The milky blue stares of blind cats.

  The shine of metal from a courtyard window, the flicker of a red curtain.

  The smudge of his comb-in hair dye on a woman’s shirt.

  The shifting colours of the bruises along the edge of Mary T’s broad cheek.

  ——

  When I made my logistics, I started by writing down those who always stayed behind at NOC. Polly, Struggler, Mary T. Most of the men stayed. I stayed. I pressed down hard on the paper, making four copies of each sheet.

  Then I marked off who was going to outside housing: the loy
al but unimportant, the emotionally stable.

  And lastly I worked through the rest of the names, those who presented a problem of some kind. People getting too flirtatious or too close, someone caught crying in a bathroom, someone new or who had caught the Old Man’s attention. Assigning transportation and beds to the question-mark cadre was the longest and most complicated part of my job. When I was done, I passed the lists on to Mary T, the first of three people who approved them every night.

  It was a class night so I had to hurry to get the lists cleared before class began. I started in the late afternoon and by the time I finished, the last of the light had faded from the courtyard and it was time to call everyone for dinner. The shifting light through the window, the sound of my voice echoing through all the rooms as I announced dinner over the CB radio: these were the small pleasures of my day. Since I’d been assigned to Control I sat at this desk every day for fifteen hours or more, leaving only for bathroom breaks and to get my clothes from the basement. I ate at this desk and slept on the couch right beside it. Outside, the courtyard was street light and shadow, snow and stone and even when I turned my back to the window, I could hear on the CB the sound of the falling snow, the soft whisperings of static.

  It was two in the morning by the time class was over and people crowded around my desk, looking for their list of cars and travelling companions, one leader and one list to a car, all of them eager to get started before the weather got worse.

  “There’s no one else?” John asked, looking over his list. “There’s no one else on here that can drive?”

  The dark shadows under his eyes and the way he held his cigarette, tight to keep it from shaking, told me how exhausted he was. It was two a.m. now, and he’d have to be up and on the road by six-thirty tomorrow morning. Even a nap in the car from here to Manhattan would help.

  Lately I’d found myself remembering the days when I still did PRO runs. Being outside, witnessing the world. Driving in a cube van along the East River, watching the sun on the water and drinking coffee from waxed paper cups, thinking I was going to make it all different.