Jim Crace - Genesis

“We’ll have to organize a vigil,” someone said. Exactly Lix’s thought.

Then Freda spoke, not bothering to stand, not bothering to raise her voice. A typical riposte, uncompromising and seductively extreme: “Pickets are a waste of time. You know they are. The police just box you in.”

“A moving picket, then!”

“A picket or a vigil, what’s the difference? Somebody, please, suggest a petition. Or a delegation! Or a letter-writing campaign. Just as ineffectual.” Freda had discovered that she could say exactly what she felt. Her beauty licensed her. Nobody dared to take offense, especially if she spoke as softly as a kindergarten teacher or a nurse. “A line of little placards or a bit of paper with some signatures isn’t going to trouble MonsterCorps, is it? Correct-me-if-I’m-wrong.” A little singsong phrase. She raised her eyebrows, waited for a moment, looked around the room. “No, we need to give Marin Scholla a surprise. And shake him up a bit. Something memorable. If what we do doesn’t put us on the evening news, then what’s the point?”

Her unruffled escalation shut the meeting up, or almost did — for out of somewhere, wide of script, entirely unrehearsed, ad lib, Lix saw an opportunity, a rash and sexual opportunity. He said, to her, “Why don’t we grab him? Lock him up. Give Meister Scholla a chance to …” To what? Lix hesitated for the words. He wanted to seem breezy and ironic. He’d almost blurted out, too solemnly, “We give him the chance to quantify his crimes.” Surely Freda would approve of that. Instead, he said, in the perfect accent of a tenth-generation Bostonian, “You’ve dined, old man — and now it’s time to face the waiter and the bill. ” Rescued, flattered even, by a legendary movie line. Burt Lancaster.

He noticed Freda leaning forward as he spoke. She’d had to twist her madly lengthy neck to stare at him along the row of student radicals. Her earrings hung as heavily as pears. Her bangles clacked as she pushed back her hair to clear her view and show her throat. Lix was, for once, pretty certain that she was not staring at the blemish on his face. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were bright. She was admiring him. She’d hardly even noticed him before.

“Then what?” somebody asked. “It’s risky, isn’t it? Kidnapping millionaires is only officially authorized in Italy. What do we do with him, anyway?”

“You grab the millionaire. You grab the headlines, too. That’s it.” Lix was performing like a lovestruck teenager, unable to restrain himself. “And then you have to let him go, of course. Eventually.” He hardly recognized himself. He’d transformed for her. Picasso syndrome, it was called: the artist’s style of painting changed for every woman in his studio or bed.

“We let him go, but only when he’s signed an Admission of Responsibility, an Admission of Liability, ” said Freda, not bothered by whether or not she sounded breezy and ironic. “That would look good in the newspapers. That’d be front page.”

“He won’t do that. He wouldn’t even sign the Seven Principles. Even GlobeOil signed the Seven Principles.”

“Even Nescafé.”

“We keep him till he does.” She craned her neck again and smiled at Lix. His neck rushed red for her. He came out in a sudden sweating blush which seemed to fill his eyes and drench his hair. His pulse had quickened, and his mouth was dry. Men fall in love more speedily and much more bodily than women. It was for Lix a joyful new experience, this unexpected triumphing of self. How brave he must appear to her — and must continue to appear. And how he wished he’d never said a word.

So it began, the kidnapping, the love affair, the making love, the life of Lix’s second child.

AS IT HAPPENED, theirs was little more than flirting talk at this stage. RoCoCo was not truly dangerous, any more than the Laxity was truly a revolution. It was only striking poses in the names of Liberty and Love, with no more consciousness of the consequences than a T-shirt has for its silk-screened slogans. RoCoCo’s members were soft and inoffensive youngsters, essentially, freshly baked survivors of their teens, trying to sound less mild and dreary than they really were, and only wanting to be a part of this great city’s quest for romance and advancement. They could alarm nobody but themselves. RoCoCo walking down the street, all nineteen of them in a gang, despite their voices and hair, their leather belts and wallet chains, would not cause anyone to step aside. A bunch is no more chilling than a single grape.

Theirs was the sort of reckless moment, then, that could not hope to flourish in maturer company. A wiser group would quickly audit all the pros and cons and realize that kidnapping could only backfire on the kidnappers. The headlines would be roasting. Their protest would bear bitter fruit. The only lasting victims would be themselves. So the prudent ones at the meeting sank into their chairs, voted to support the “action,” but did not volunteer themselves. They sat with faces like a Chinese Monday hoping not to catch sweet Freda’s eye. They knew how prevailing she was, and how seductive just a glance from her could be. And dangerous. A kidnapping, even if it were short-lived and justified, could put them all in jail, despite the Melt, or jeopardize their academic grades or disappoint their lecturers. Their parents would not sympathize. Not all their parents could afford to buy them out. Their job prospects would be undermined. Travel visas would be denied them, long after the events. Anyway, they were not sure (though silent on this matter in such company) if kidnapping was “right.”

So in the end, in this most skittish time, there were just four from RoCoCo prepared to spread their wings beyond a picket line and stand with Freda: a glumly cute gay woman from the Language School (who wanted more than anything to disappoint her lecturers and undermine her job prospects), two tall and overweight post-Maoist anarchists from Freda’s science faculty, and Lix, all of whom it was soon apparent aspired to more than comradely contact with their dazzling colleague. They were the four comrades most unhinged by her and most ardent for her approval. The heart controls the head and makes us mad and brave and radical. The revolution rides the lustiest of mares.

Five volunteers would never be enough for the swarming ambush that Freda had in mind at first, her show of force, her mighty kick against the pricks. She’d seen the glorious newsreels from 1968, the year of barricades, with the columns of police rebuffed by mobs of students, armed only with their banners and some cobblestones. Never by as few as five. Again the city had let her down, she felt. Only thirteen years previously, Peking, Paris, Prague, Chicago, Santiago, Rome had all been pulled apart by people less than thirty years of age. It must have seemed to Freda that Youth could be truly powerful in every corner of the world, excepting ours. She kept a press photo from 1968 in her wallet: a Czech, wild-haired and young and biblically beautiful, his jacket pushed back on his shoulders, his shirt pulled open, was baring his chest, his rack of ribs, a centimeter from the barrel of a Russian gun in a gesture that, for Freda, was sensual and thrilling. It always made her think of The Fox’s Lament, “Stop me, shoot me, if you dare / For I’m too far and fast to care.”

She wondered sometimes if he was still alive, this seminaked man. Was he still a radical? He looked, she thought, a bit like Lix. She’d noticed it when he’d been standing up so pompously and so theatrically at the RoCoCo meeting. That birthmark, certainly, made his face seem challenging. She’d wondered what his ribs were like and how his hair would look if ruffled up a bit by her. Would it look more like the Czech’s? What could she do to make him look more Czech?