Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary

by Sonja Larsen

  And in my journal I wrote, The neighbour is beating his wife again.

  Not even in my diary could I tell myself the truth.

  The neighbour beats his wife and I can hear it through the radiator pipe. God how I wish the punks would be loud on the stoop again, but it is too cold, and I stare out the window and listen.

  Struggler getting beat up that night was a different sound than Polly’s soft whimper, the slap of flesh, the complicated intimate noises that slipped through the gap under the door when Polly got the whip. Struggler’s cries rose up from the floor below, she wailed, she was frantic when he beat her. The crash of falling furniture in the Old Man’s office, and the sound of her voice, keening like an animal. Sometimes I heard the Old Man’s voice, too, but I suspected there was someone else too, someone holding her, or maybe hitting her on his behalf. Polly? Mary T? Maybe both. In less than two months, the revolution was scheduled to begin. I looked at the shadows of branches on the street, at every suspicious face or car that went by. I listened, but the only thing I heard was Struggler’s voice crying no, no, no.

  By my nineteenth birthday in the spring, I knew all this would be over. One way or another, it would all be different.

  A few weeks later I was on night watch again. Someone new was working the Control desk in the morning, sleeping on my couch. She only worked a few days a week at the desk. The Old Man wanted me available to work on a special project. Word of this project was delivered to me from other people’s conversations with him, but already Mary T was training people on the Control desk. The new project had to do with creating training programs. While I waited for clearer orders I helped out with night watch and other duties and watched the days get changed on the countdown. It seemed late to be starting training programs. Mary T talked about the project like it was a promotion but that almost made it worse. This next thing did not sound as real or even as important as what I was giving up: my desk and my couch, my voice on the radio and my presence in the centre of things.

  “Who’s up there?” he called over the CB radio. Outside it was starting to get light.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Sonja.” Had the Old Man ever said my name?

  He told me to bring him down a pot of coffee. He was smiling when I walked into his office.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. Sit down. I’ve got a story to tell you.”

  Dialectics was the truth that inside each thing was the force drawing everything towards its opposite. That’s what Pat told me. “Shut up, shut up,” she’d screamed in the Old Man’s face, her hands clenched in shaking fists, the veins in her neck standing out like bones.

  Dialectics said that there was a connection between the quantity and quality of things too. A single grain of rice was still rice, but we needed lots of rice for it to truly fulfill its purpose. Sand, snow, rain. I had come up with a dozen examples, and now I had learned even more.

  A single lie, a dozen lies.

  Hours that added up to years, that counted down to a single day.

  Maybe dialectics could explain how I went from being that girl who thought she could see through everybody to the one who couldn’t, who wouldn’t, see what was right in front of her. All those signs. They should have added up to something. Something more than trembling hands and coded phrases in a diary.

  The names of the women he fucked or beat, or promised to fuck, or threatened to beat.

  The lies I had heard him tell, the pills I knew he took.

  The pleading note from Struggler I’d found back when I still cleaned the Old Man’s office. The note in the desk drawer was folded crookedly, into a small rectangle. Struggler’s thin spidery writing, girlish even, on the lined paper, saying she couldn’t stand it anymore. If the beatings didn’t stop, she said. She’d do anything to make it stop. She’d kill herself. She’d take all the blame.

  The note wasn’t dated. Had Lisa found it too? How many other women did just what I did and fold the note back into each crease, placing it just so, so that no one would know it had been touched? So we could all pretend it hadn’t been seen.

  The beatings didn’t stop. Another sign.

  But in the end, I didn’t need any signs at all. Because he told me. He told me it was all a lie.

  He said: “Close your eyes and imagine it’s February eighteenth. It’s morning, and the sun is shining, and everyone is waiting. They are all waiting for the revolution to begin. And they wait. And then it’s late morning. And I call you on the radio. And you come down here, and I’m lying on the couch, and I tell you I want chicken soup. I tell you I’m not feeling well. And then it’s afternoon, and a lot of the cadre have left. I can hear them, walking out the door. Some of them are crying.

  “And I call you down here on the radio again. And I tell you I want more soup.”

  I could picture the day he was talking about. It was a day like today, a day like yesterday. A morning just like this one, a morning that was fading into an afternoon, that was fading into another day I couldn’t get back again. Sixteen days from now. I knew I had to stay, if only to see what happened at the end of the story. Maybe instead of leading a revolution the Old Man would choose me to go out to Montauk Point with him. He’d talked about that a few times before. Taking a drive out to someplace pretty, just us and the silver .45, leaving this corrupt world behind. And despite everything I knew and everything I suspected, I thought I would still say yes.

  Because I did not know how to say no to him.

  Because what I wanted, what the Old Man wanted, was to be important, to be the catalyst, the hero. But I could see that neither of us was going to get that, and neither of us knew what to do about it. And suddenly I felt like I had known this for a long time already.

  “I’d bring you the soup.” I said. “But it would be cold.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know you’d bring me soup.”

  The sun was getting stronger through the slats in the window. I lit the Old Man another cigarette, and one for me, and stared at the landscape painting on the wall and that tiny square of shadow and light where everything worked.

  “I have a story for you,” I said. “Russian peasants discover that their wheat is bad, that eating it is going to drive them crazy. So they appoint a committee to watch over them, and give the committee the small supply of uncontaminated wheat. And it all works fine until the townspeople decide that the committee is crazy, and kill them.”

  “What’s your point?” the Old Man said.

  “I don’t know.” It was four a.m. Who were the townspeople in our story, who was the committee? Maybe we were all the wheat. “It’s just a story I heard.”

  He said that was a story from World War II. There was another one about an army commander who told his troops that every time they’d lost, he’d heard a strange laugh. The next battle, the troops hear the laugh and as they’re being captured and taken prisoner, they see that it’s their commander, laughing at them.

  For years there has been a rumour, apparently spread by saboteurs in left-wing media, that the organization was a government front. I had never seen these accusations and how exactly that would work had never been clear to me. Could the Old Man be saying this was true? We sat in silence for a while.

  Finally I said, “If I really believed that’s what was going to happen on the eighteenth, I don’t know what I’d still be doing here. Why wait? Why stay?” I started to cry.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re doing here. Leave. You can leave right now if you want to.”

  That’s what he said. But I’d learned that words weren’t reliable, words shifted tense and ownership and intent too easily. Can for should, will for might. I already knew that about words, and about people too. Instead I looked at body language, I looked at recent events. And I didn’t think the Old Man was really going to let me walk out that door.

  I didn’t think I wanted to be caught, halfway through that door.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Nine
days before the revolution was supposed to begin we woke up to Harold, sitting behind the Ops desk where Struggler usually sat. Harold was a tall black man who had the stillness and powers of concentration of someone used to confined spaces (and it won’t surprise me, years later, to learn that he’d been an escaped prisoner, convicted of murder). As part of my own training, I’d sat in on many of Harold’s recruitment briefings when he’d come from a field office a year earlier. I felt some pride in how, after only a year, he was authentic to the revolution in a way that many of us knew we could never be.

  Harold told us he had orders from the Old Man. We were taking a day to regroup. We weren’t allowed to work. We weren’t allowed to do anything except sit and think about what the fuck we were doing. By noon, we were all still sitting in the meeting room, where we usually held the morning briefing, some of us spilling into the kitchen and hallway. I was grateful to be sitting at the Control desk instead of stuck, like some of the others, sitting on the floor.

  Watching Harold, with his booming voice and balled-up fists as he read from the pronouncements the Old Man had given him, I felt certain that the Old Man hadn’t told him the same story he’d told me. Since talking to the Old Man, I’d been watching the faces of the Central Committee members, listening for whispers of dissent and anger. The worry sore that Struggler had on the crown of her head, the place she rubbed at when anxious, was raw and Polly looked like she had the flu. They knew. But not Harold.

  We spent the morning dozing and reading anything that happened to be near us—until these activities were also declared unacceptable. We raised our hand for permission to go to the bathroom. Harold went between the meeting room and the Old Man’s office, his heavy footsteps on the stairs the loudest sound we heard for hours.

  At five o’clock the Old Man went to sleep, and Harold suddenly thought about dinner, which was usually an all-day job.

  Harold shouted: “Who’s gonna cook this mother-fuckin’ dinner?”

  Finally he picked Mary T and Polly.

  “Everybody fucking cooks. No shit jobs in the revolution, people. Everybody fucking cooks.”

  But, of course, he was wrong.

  Harold was wrong and now he had to be killed. That’s what the Old Man was shouting the next morning, shouting in Struggler’s face as he leaned into her face, his gimpy foot lifting off the floor. He’s going to fall on her, I thought. He told Struggler he had to kill Harold and it was her fault. She’d let him question her authority; she’d allowed him to challenge the position of the Party’s leadership.

  “Now he’s got to go and it’s all your fucking fault.”

  Struggler’s pale blue eyes were big as she worked to understand what he was saying.

  “But Oldie …” she said. Oldie was her special name for him, almost no one else called him that. Was she going to point out the obvious, that the Old Man put him in charge, that no one really believed Struggler was the Party’s leader? And then, as though at the same moment Struggler and I realized the same thing: it didn’t matter what she said. She stopped talking.

  “All your fucking fault,” the Old Man yelled.

  I was standing at the doorway holding the Old Man’s breakfast tray. I could feel my legs starting to shake. I’d been up all night on watch duty again. A few hours ago I’d been watching the sun come up and writing in my diary.

  I am sitting at a window 3 and a half hours now, I am watching a street I rarely walk along.

  Shortly after that he called me down to his office and I’d spent the rest of the night delivering coffee and cigarettes and food. I’d fallen asleep on his couch sometime after the sun came up and when he woke me he gave me a big orange pill. “Stay with me, kid.”

  Now the pill was looking for places to go in my blood, banging on my heart like someone trying to get out. I was used to taking Sudafed for my bronchitis and also to keep me awake, sometimes five or six in a day. But this was the first time I’d had one of the Old Man’s pills. At about 8:30 he’d sent me to make him scrambled eggs and bacon, and when I came back, he was telling Struggler they had to kill Harold. The quiet hours I’d spent watching the window before this all began felt like a lifetime ago, like it happened to someone else completely.

  I could see the light in Struggler’s eyes change. They’d been filled with something. Doubt. Uncertainty. Panic. Concern for Harold. Suddenly all that was gone, and what was left was emptiness, metallic and flat. Outside, the snow and clouds were making the sky shift in the windows, a luminescent grey. Inside, Mary’s eyes went their palest blue as she gave up.

  “Just tell me what you need me to do, Oldie.”

  “Whatever you say, Oldie.”

  I spent all day in and out of the Old Man’s office, watching the molecules of air shimmer and waiting for someone to kill Harold. Every time I drifted off to sleep the Old Man gave me another pill. He got me to make him lunch, canned chili with saltines stacked neatly around the rim while he made phone calls on his private line. This was the first time I’d spent with him since he told me the story, the chicken soup story, he called it at the time. Now he acted like that whole conversation had never happened.

  I was on the third or fourth pill by the time I sat down next to the Old Man at the folding table for class night, the first and only time he’d ever ask me to sit beside him. The air was a television screen made up of tiny points of light that shifted between static and perfect focus. Struggler staring straight ahead. Harold looking like a man straining to overhear a conversation. He knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know the something was him.

  When the Old Man picked up a cigarette, I lit it for him with his brass Zippo, the one with the Airborne logo engraved on it.

  The Old Man said when you jumped from a parachute, there was a moment where you were no longer falling towards the ground, but, instead, the earth was rising up at you. I thought about the look in Struggler’s eyes, how that was another trick of light, an optical illusion. To watch the blue of someone’s eye change from the soft blue of concern and confusion to icy clarity and determination. The clarity of knowing that giving in was the only way out. The determination that whatever was going to happen, it wouldn’t happen to her.

  The Old Man said that the ground rose up to meet you, and you were caught, motionless in space. That’s what it felt like, just before you hit the ground. I knew it was just a shift in perspective, that it wasn’t real. But I was approaching this moment. I could feel it in every cell in my body.

  The day before the revolution the men in uniform came across the back courtyard wall, and on the roof. They came down the street. They came, as though in slow motion, or maybe it was only lack of sleep that took the speed out of things, that made everything seem unhurried and inevitable. If we’d had a plan, something we knew we were supposed to do, we might have panicked, trying to carry it out. Instead most of us just sat and waited for them to come through the doors.

  Except the front watch, who shouted, “They’re here, they’re here.”

  And the Old Man, who screamed as he fell down the dumbwaiter, trying to escape.

  We were all in the courtyard, huddled against the cold. It reminded me a little of fire drills at school, the sun-light and the sudden giddy surprise of finding yourself outside.

  “We’re all lost,” Lilia said. Lilia was standing beside me. Like many of us, she was dressed in a donated janitor uniform, the men’s extra large, the shirt hanging down to just above the knees, but she still smelled like soap and cinnamon, like she had the first day I met her. A shampoo maybe, or a cologne, something she’d hung on to in all the time she’d been here.

  We’d been standing outside for hours already, watching as plaster dust plumed through the open windows of the apartments into the February air. Inside, the FBI and city police were tearing out the walls of the two suites we used most. They’d begun bringing boxes out of the house. Clothes, papers, a box of shoes—there seemed to be no logic to what they carried away. At our request, and after
looking them over, they’d brought us out our boxes of bedding, cigarettes and socks. Some of us wore the socks as mittens.

  I was watching the police officers, standing shoulder to shoulder, relaxed but with the clubs still in their hands.

  Lilia said, “Without the Old Man we don’t know what to do. Our own training manual says every organizer should be replaceable. But look at us. This is not how it’s supposed to be. This is classic charismatic leadership.”

  I looked around. I could see how pale we all were, compared to the cops and the FBI and the curious neighbours. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen many of these faces in natural light. We looked like refugees, displaced people, in our blanket coats and our grey janitor clothes.

  “Shut up,” I said to her and walked away. How could she say this when we were surrounded by cops? When the Old Man was hurt, and the cops wouldn’t let anyone see him?

  Still, even I wondered why we hadn’t at least practised the dumbwaiter. If that was the plan, shouldn’t we have tried it out first? Why didn’t I know about it?

  The dumbwaiter hadn’t held his weight, and he’d fallen down the shaft and broken his leg. Which one? No one was sure yet. He was in the doctor’s office with the police and the ambulance attendants.

  By afternoon we were still standing in the courtyard. Someone started to sing. We started with “This Land Is Your Land,” and we went on from there.

  We sang so the Old Man could hear us, so he would know we were waiting for him. We sang because it was something for us to do, and now that the fear had worn off, the boredom had set in. I sang because I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to think about the story that the Old Man told me, or about the phone calls he’d been making, or about how the cops didn’t really seem very interested in us. They asked us if we were being held against our will, if anyone of us wanted to leave, but they didn’t ask for our names. I sang because I didn’t want to think about whether Lilia was right, and maybe neither did she, because when I looked over, she was singing too.