Jim Crace - Genesis

So Lix had not only rehearsed for Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars , he had also prepared for the Afteract with Freda. He’d cleaned his room, tidied up the scattered careless clues to the compromiser he really was. Binoculars , a German magazine, products from companies that he ought to boycott, postcards from his mother, tubs (unused) of nevus masking cream, pajamas from his teens. What kind of love affair was this, that he felt safer when he hid himself from her? He’d bought new bedclothes, too. Blue sheets. He’d primed the gramophone with music he knew she liked. Not Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter crazy on the sax, but Souta’s Chinese Symphony . He’d purchased decent coffee and a pair of pretty cups. No bread and beans for her. No vagrant’s soup. He’d got fresh Maizies and fruit preserves and joss sticks bunched together in a metal vase. He’d scrubbed his dirty little sink. He’d torn the corner off a pack of contraceptives and slipped them underneath the bed. He wouldn’t want to battle with the cellophane in case his moment passed.

Lix’s moment, actually, was perilously close. Their appointment with the chairman was for three-fifteen. He’d not be late. By five-fifteen, Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars would have been premiered and the charmed and blindfolded captive bundled back into the van. By six, the chairman would be home for tea. Fredalix’s madcap afternoon would soon be in the past. Like 1968.

“What are you thinking about right now?” She broke into his fantasies.

“Umm, 1968. To tell the truth.”

She was startled. “Me, too,” she said. And then, “I’m waiting for your answer, anyway.”

“What answer’s that?”

“Our little anniversary.”

What could they do to celebrate then? He had his answers, but he didn’t dare say He said, “You choose.” There was no point in voicing his desires, he thought. They were too shoddy and infantile, and dangerously mature, to speak out loud. Besides, in twenty-seven days of love, he’d learned that Freda always called the shots.

He’d learned, as well, to his surprise, that in extremis Freda had a timid facet to her character, not that she trembled with alarm when any hazard offered itself — as it was being offered there and then, with Marin Scholla on his way — or would even take a single, compromising side step to avoid a conflict or a test. No, her apprehension took a more reactionary form. She turned into a sort of harebrained girl, a teenager, a chatterer. Perhaps this was the vestige of the privileged daughter she had once been and was frightened of becoming again but needed to hold on to like a child might need its security blanket. This was how she drove off doubt and fear: with chattering.

Small talk was Freda’s way of steadying herself. She’d learned to smother her worries with blankets of trivia. So now — awaiting their heroic moment in the van — she pressed herself against the back of Lix’s driver’s seat, a hand on his shoulder, and babbled on about their “anniversary.”

Lix twisted his mouth toward her hand and kissed the sinews of her multibangled wrist. He kissed her bruising knuckles, too. The sweetest liberty. She smelled of soap and coat and nicotine. Familiar. As were her favorite black wool skirt, her blond meringue of pinioned hair, her walking boots with yellow laces, her smoker’s throat. Nothing she was saying was typical of the Freda that attracted him. In fact, there’d been no evidence all afternoon — not since they’d collected the van from the rental agency in their false names (Alicja Lesniak again, and Smudge), half hidden behind their high, disguising scarves — of her trademark stridency, her usual impatience at any trace of sentimentality (“our anniversary,” indeed!), her absolute conviction that her views were unassailable. Her voice was hesitant. Her hand was shivering — not from his kissing, surely, and not only from the cold. (It was cold, though. Our city always is in mid-December, that Thursday being no exception — and especially throughout that winter of 1981, when storms and wind and multinationals came into this neglected and contented city to fill our empty spaces and all our current troubles started.)

No, it was the prospect of their perilous adventures that shook her usual confidence, that dried her throat, that raised her pulse into the nineties in ways that her love for Lix never could, that made her want to urinate as often as a dog. “We ought to celebrate,” she said. “We must. What can we do that’s big enough?”

Lix was by now familiar with this single vulnerability, the self-inflicted comfort of her prattling. After all, they had been passionate and inseparable comrades in almost a month of politics. He’d stood beside her on the picket lines supporting Sakharov and Bonner, two Russian intellectuals he’d only heard of when she mentioned them but who were on a hunger strike and were worthy of support for reasons he had not dared to ask. She and Lix (on their first date as Fredalix) had joined the unlicensed procession to the Soviet consulate. The closer the police lines had got with their reverberating shields and their billy clubs, clearly forgetting for the moment, despite their sideburns, that they were in the middle of the Big Melt, the less Freda had sloganized and the more she’d talked about a holiday she planned in Greece, if only she could bribe a visa for herself. She had not ceded a centimeter to the policemen’s clubs. Instead, she’d switched the danger off, relit her thoughts with Adriatic sun and chattering — and, surely, that was valiant. And worthy of support.

He’d wept with her in clouds of tear gas and mace when police had tried to break up the “Geneva Solidarity” disarmament march on the Combined Defense Consulates. This time she’d taken blubbering comfort from recalling, word for word, a conversation she’d had that afternoon with her Natural Sciences tutor. It seemed that they had parents from adjacent villages. Lix, the novice at so many things, had been one of the first to flee that demonstration. His eyes, stomach, and lungs had not been trained to cope with nausea, blistering, and pulmonary edema. So he’d abandoned his first love on a traffic island and had only rejoined her twenty minutes later when he rediscovered her in exactly the same spot, standing almost alone, enveloped in the fog. The gas had dispersed but she had not. She’d taken comfort from “adjacent villages.”

He’d held her shaking hand when they had paraded by the barracks jail with their lit candles in the midnight vigil for detainees — and conscripts coming off their shifts (for laxity can cut both ways) had dealt out kicks and punches to the men and shouted in the faces of the women: bitch and cow and whore and bitch again.

Freda was not used to being anything but loved by men. Nor was she used to tolerating raised voices other than her own. She’d treated the loudest and the crudest conscript to one of her dismissive routines. She’d invited him to go home to mommy and not come back to town until he’d learned to tie his own laces and to button up his own shirt and to zip up his own mouth. He’d responded with some shocking, vulgar menaces. She’d trembled then, a mixture of theatrical distaste for vile and vicious men and some honest, justified distress for herself. Soldiers raped in every corner of the world, and would ever do so, with impunity. Our city was no different. You only had to see the porn magazines that had so recently arrived along with the Laxity. You only had to watch the men in bars. You only had to hear the venom in the conscript’s voice. She felt that, finally, she’d become a citizen, she’d said — and let us not forget her age, her admirable naïveté—of the Commonwealth of Universal Womanhood, the Femetariat. She was truly horrified for all the sisters in the world, the bitches and the cows and whores, the wives, who soaked the bruises up.