Jim Crace - Genesis

That brutal night of menaces, only two days after their romance had begun, had been the first time Freda and Lix had shared a bed. A significant moment for any lovers: admission to a woman’s bed, in those uncomplicated times, was an admission that her privacies were ready to be breached. Sex in the car or on the settee was for irregulars and opportunists. But to share your pillow and your nightie with a man, the body-worn sheets ornamented with your own dead hairs, the linen batiked with your saliva, sweat, skin cream, and makeup, was to offer up a tender invitation to be loved again, again, again.

They had not shared many privacies that night. They’d simply hugged like camping pals, like cousins, in fact, with Freda wanting nothing more than the solaces of touch and only Lix expecting greater things. It was a pity to leave such an opportunity unused , he had thought. Well, unexploited was a truer word. To share a bed, to share a pillow even. To be so close to her and yet disarmed. Yet he was wise enough by then (despite so far having only that single — or was it double? — full experience of binocular sex two years previously) to know that a woman who’d been spooked by threats of rape and had only recently joined the ranks of Universal Womanhood would not be in the mood for happy-go-lucky sex. He’d had to bide his time, resist the impulses to push his hands beneath her clothes or tug her buttons and her zippers. He’d had to treat the cousinly hugging as an opportunity to show his finer love for her, to be diffuse and not display his physical desires too obviously.

So Lix had hugged his lover in her rented room as anodynely as he could, as indirectly as he could, his body arched to shield his treacherous tumescence. And he had listened to his Freda handling her fears by chattering about — bizarrely — the American actress Natalie Wood, who’d drowned a few weeks previously and who — together with the bare-chested Czech and Che Guevara — had been “a sort of icon” for teenage Freda, the biddable and dutiful family girl she’d once been.

Lix had held her in her wrap of shawls, curled up around her on her bed, until his lover’s body had dropped asleep and she’d been free to wake again as certain of herself as ever. And they had masturbated each other for the first time and then shared breakfast on her sunlit dormitory bed.

SO HERE THEY WERE in place, RoCoCo and the Street Beat Renegades, waiting with their Trade Winds and their flattery, their blindfold and their charm, their instruments and their circus skills, their well-intentioned thoughtlessness, for Marin Scholla to arrive and lay his foundation stone. Their day of heartfelt fun had come. The chairman’s limousine would any minute now come curling around the campus service road, past the Masters Lawn with its bad statues and its frosted beds toward the university president’s official residence. There’d be official handshakes and smiling faces from the reception party, naturally. A $7 million gift would brighten anybody’s face.

At most, it would take ten minutes for the chairman and his group to reach the elevator doors. A rich old man never wants to hang about, particularly on days like this when every breath he’d take would carry a chill. In fifteen minutes then, or less, the exit door beyond the service corridor would open on the wind-torn parking bay, where Fredalix, as tense as athletes in their blocks attending on the discharge of the pistol shot, were waiting, and planning their evening out — such innocence — their anniversary, where they might dance (for Lix was quite the hero of the discotheque. The darkness suited him), where they might eat, what play or film they could investigate to mark their love’s longevity. No talk of making love.

The vehicle was shaking, not as it might seem to Lix from Freda’s shuddering, but partly from the wind which slapped and pressed their van’s high sides and partly from the fast and heavy traffic speeding past their parking spot on the highway ramp behind the campuses. It was a biting afternoon, with gelid blueness, spiteful gusts, and forecasts of snow Disruptive snow, intent on injury. The City of Balconies did its buttons up.

You might have thought if you had encountered Fredalix for the first time that afternoon that it was Freda who, for once, on this occasion, would prove to be the quitter and that Lix must be the braver of the two. Of course, that was not just. Nor likely. For all her trembling, for all her trivia, Freda was fully resolute. They’d go ahead with their madcap plan because she said they would.

No turning back. They’d take the risk. They’d face the consequences. Talk of their coming anniversary was only Freda’s way of saying, “We will be free next week. We’ll not get caught. We’ll not be robbed of our certificates. Our parents will not be informed. In just a couple of days, exactly as we’ve planned, we will have earned our little place in folklore, campus history. Our hidden faces will be on the front of newspapers.” Her constant naive mantra was (would always be) “I am in charge.”

Lix, deceiving Lix, deceiving both himself and anyone he met, the master of disguises and of masquerades, despite his outward calm, his steady hand and voice, his best attempts to remind himself that what they were attempting was not so revolutionary, was intensely apprehensive. Just twenty-two years old, and already he was in the tightening grip of his major flaw, his main regret, his saving grace — timidity.

He should — and could — have kept the company of gentler souls than Freda. Alicja for one. She’d also set her heart on him. Yes, Alicja Lesniak, the unsuspecting and innocent dedicatee of Marin Scholla’s Trade Winds , the girl who’d be (so Freda hoped) the prime and named suspect in his kidnapping. She was that year’s plump but clever president of the student caucus. Indeed,

Lix had a few months previously, against his better judgment, accepted an embarrassing approach from her, an innocent invitation to a film but made while she was touching the back of his hand with a single finger. Only their shoulders had touched in the cinema. On another occasion, she had held Lix by the elbow in the campus bar, on some pretext, and turned her unpretentious face too readily to his.

Alicja was Polish by descent. The Lesniaks were one of our city’s richer families, and she was keen to prove her political independence from her inheritance. She was, of course, active that year in Poles Abroad for Solidarity, and Lix had last met her when she had spoken three weeks earlier to RoCoCo, seeking its support of her daily vigil outside the Polish trade mission.

“The Lesniaks are ruling class,” was Freda’s view, recognizing Alicja as a rival in more ways than one. “Never trust the daughters of the ruling class! Besides, Walesa is a Catholic.” So Lix (because this blond and slender stem of womanhood was his ideal of womanhood and he only wanted to be well regarded by her) allowed Alicja — his wife-to-be, the mother of his boys — to turn her face away, to take her hand away for almost eight more years.

He’d missed his safest opportunity

He could have stood in line at Alicja’s side in her dull, responsible campaigns, her fleshy hand in his, sensibly dispersing when the police required them to, retreating from the tear gas and the batons, and not provoking rapist conscripts with her looks. She’d still provide the chattering, this plumper girl, but save him from the danger and the fear, preserve the little courage that remained in him — for Lix had realized when he was just a teenager this shaming fact, that courage was a finite commodity, as nonrenewable as fuel, and that he had almost exhausted his own supply. Since he’d been sixteen, seventeen, he’d sensed the timid years ahead. He’d hoped a woman like Alicja was waiting for him in the shadows, with promises of uneventful days.