Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

Then one day Miranda stopped browsing the rack of greeting cards and asked whether I’d like to take her for a drink.

Olla’s shop was an odd vantage point from which to watch the new decade assemble itself. After my long absence the difference in mood was stark. If I watched the news or read a paper, both of which I tried to avoid, I found myself dragged back into questions I thought I’d buried. Miranda used to berate me for my lack of politics. She was always getting involved in causes: Amnesty, Free Tibet. She bought mugs and sweatshirts. Her concerns had the character of enthusiasms, fleeting, scattergun. Once in a while she’d wonder aloud about going on a march. As her cosmetics business grew, she benefited from all the things she vaguely disapproved

of, deregulation and low taxation and the other strategies of the disciplinarian economics that had bafflingly become known as the “free” market, and because she’d never really understood the reasons for her disapproval, she gradually stopped vocalizing it and then, eventually, it was as if she’d never held such views at all and was free to compete, to run and jump and jostle with all the rest. And meanwhile, in secret, it gradually came to seem important to me to make something unified from the broken threads of my life, not to lose touch altogether with Chris Carver and his dreams of revolution. Did anything connect me with who I’d once been? And if not, what had I lost, owning only half of a life?

“When did you find me?” I asked Miles, as we sat in the pub, whose midafternoon pall was only accentuated by the piped music, a speeded-up woman singing about getting higher to the accompaniment of some kind of synthetic drumbeat.

“Her Majesty’s government would love to say you were never lost, but you were. I heard they picked up Michael Frame a couple of years ago. A passport check, most probably.”

“Why didn’t they arrest me right away?”

“Oh, they were probably saving you for a rainy day.”

“And here you are.”

“Here I am. Pitter-patter.”

He walked me back to the house and told me to make my arrangements because someone would be picking me up in the morning to take me to London. After he left, I sat in the study, watching the workmen larking about on the lawn and thinking how thin life was, how easily the whole charade of Mike Frame and Miranda Martin could be torn down, like an old net curtain.

Here, under the tower, I’m frozen to the bone, but the line of hilltops is clear along the horizon, the sky’s blacks opening up into purples and inky blues, bruise colors. The smashed-up sky persuades me to get up and walk around, forcing blood into my legs, into my feet, which feel like two clubs inside my beaten-up tennis shoes.

Likewise blood filters slowly into the sky, until finally the sun spills over the ridge like metal over the lip of a crucible and a faint heat starts to warm my face.

I make my way down the hill to the Bar des Sports and when it opens, I buy a cup of coffee and an apple brandy, which I sip, eyed suspiciously by the woman behind the zinc, who thinks, rightly I suppose, that I am up to no good and should be kept under observation. When the alcohol has risen through my body and broken my solid chill into constituent bergs and floes, I pay my bill and walk back up the sloping street to Anna’s house. The line of doors winds upward, some shabby, others neat and bright, and there are early signs of life, open shutters, a man on a Mobylette, its engine rising in pitch as it labors over the cobbles.

It occurs to me that maybe she will kill me.

Here is the door. It’s painted a dull ochre yellow. I recognize the house beside it, with its row of geraniums in terra-cotta pots, the one belonging to the old women who told me Anna was Swedish.

I knock.

I hear her come to answer it. The door opens. She is wearing a cotton kimono, printed with a design of woodblock bamboo. Her hair has fallen over her face; as she looks up at me, she sweeps it back with one hand and stares, fixing me with clear gray-blue eyes, which, like her mouth, are nested in a tracery of delicate lines.

“Anna.”

“ Excusez-moi ?”

“Anna, it’s me. Chris.”

“Who?”

“Chris Carver. I’m alone. No one followed me here, Anna.” She looks blank. “I don’t think I know you.”

In both French and English, she speaks with an accent. Scandinavian, it sounds like. I look at her and say my name again. And a third time.

“Chris Carver. You remember me, Anna Addison. I know you remember me.”

“I’m not Anna. I never heard of any Anna. Do you know what

time it is? It’s very early in the morning.”

I look at her face and suddenly I’m not sure. It seems softer,

ill-defined, not much like Anna’s tribal mask. But it’s been such a

long time. Anything could have happened. She could have had

plastic surgery.

“Anna Addison,” I say, with more insistence. “Don’t pretend.”

“I don’t know this person.”

“Please, don’t pretend.”

“I tell you I don’t know her.”

I realize I’m scaring her. I hear myself raising my voice and her

telling me she’ll call the police and all the time I look at her, staring

hard into her eyes as if daring her to blink, and finally I’m forced

to admit that I’m completely adrift, without reference or marker.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” I say.

She slams the door in my face and I realize Anna is dead. She

has been dead all along, a charred corpse in a Copenhagen confer-

ence room, mute and fanatical, fixed in the past like amber.

I walk slowly down the hill and phone Miles from the Bar des

Sports.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in France.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I just saw Anna Addison. How about that?”

“Don’t be stupid. Anna’s dead.”

“Is she? Yes, I suppose she is.”

“Chris, where are you? I’m worried about you.”

“Is Anna dead, Miles?”

“Of course she’s dead. She’s been dead forever. Are you all

right?”

“I thought I saw her.”

“Chris.”

“What do I tell Miranda? I want her kept out of it.”

“Chris, you should come home.”

“Talk to me about Miranda.”

“You don’t have to tell her anything, not if you don’t want to. We can come and get you. Stash you away somewhere. How about it? A nice country hotel.”

“Run away. Fuck off and hide. Good plan.”

“Look, how about this? Twenty grand and a head start. More cash than that, if I can swing it. Forget what I said about a trial. I was angry. You come back, you do the interview, you hang around long enough to give the press a taste — until the job’s done, absolute minimum, no more. We’ll help you. Give you somewhere to hide out. Someone to handle your calls. Then it’s over and you disappear. By the time the police, or whoever else you’re afraid of, arrive, you can be long gone. I’ll help you, Chris. Come in and I’ll help you.”

“Don’t lie, Miles. I’m too old to start again.”

“No, you’re not. Like I said, more if I can swing it. Probably more like thirty grand.”

“And you could get me a passport?”

“Yes. That too. A clean slate, if that’s what you want. All your sins forgiven.”

“Have you got kids, Miles?”

“Yes, a son and a daughter. Twelve and fourteen.”

“You still with the mother?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know how it is.”

“No I don’t. That’s the funny thing. I don’t know how it is. Never have.”

Miles gives me a number and an address in London. He wants me to ditch the car and.y. If I tell him exactly where I am, he’ll sort it out. Just go to Toulouse. Dump the car. There will be a ticket waiting for me at the BA desk. He’ll meet the flight. He can’t help enough. His voice is soothing and richly compassionate.