Jim Crace - Genesis

Instead, Lix had stood in line with Freda and scared himself to death. However, he already had the knack — how else would she be fooled by him? — of dropping all his fear into his toes. An actor’s phrase. An actor’s knack. A breathing exercise. Control the lungs, control the dread, and then step out into the lights to seem unflappable before an audience. Technique and practice.

So you could — as Freda had — mistake this young man with the birthmarked face for the most resolute of activists. As calm and stubborn as a rock. You could expect great things of him. She felt it now, behind him in the rental van. He’d hardly moved when she had rapped him so firmly on the bone behind his ear. He was so still and unperturbed, his hands clasped neatly in his lap, his breathing soft and regular, his comments cool and rational, while she, she knew, was talking like a fool. She thought — and this was genuine — that she and he would be comrades for eternity if only she could stay as unwavering and dispassionate as he was. He’d be a useful foil for her loud ways.

She kissed her fingertips — that resurrected little girl again, that Natalie! — and touched the bone behind his ear. A damp caress and an apology.

“You okay?” she asked, feeling more physically excited as the minutes ticked away.

She felt him smile and nod his head.

“I’m fine,” he said, though had he the choice, he would gladly start the engine of the van and drive away from what they had arranged to do. Lix only had himself to blame. Again. After all, it was his plan, his entertainment, that would go so oddly wrong that afternoon. Three prospects frightened him: the kidnapping, the Street Beat premiere, the lovemaking. He’d need to navigate the city streets for her, then be an impresario, then steer their risky course to bed. He would have to be uncharacteristically calm and strong.

Marin Scholla’s limousine had surely reached the campus gates by now Lix concentrated on settling his nerves by breathing through his nose and focusing on the woman in his rearview mirror, the shrunk and silvered planes and facets of her shaded and reflected face. He was mesmerized by her but almost queasy with misgivings at the certain prospect of the ardor and the kissing that were promised him. He practiced breathing, his feet braced against the floor of the van. He bedded Weather Report into the radio-cassette. He checked the ignition on the van — this must not turn into a farce. The engine turned and purred at once. The gas tank was full.

“Not long now,” Freda said. Again she leaned forward, reached across his shoulder to stroke the side of his cheek. Not long for what? Not long before they’d trade the chairman for an orgasm?

THEY COULD HAVE WAITED there for three more months before the chairman showed his face. His foundation stone was finally laid in March 1982, when the Laxity had ended, the city streets were calmer and predictable, and once again we truly had good cause to demonstrate if only we could demonstrate. But Marin Scholla never crossed the river to the campuses that December afternoon. He did this duty at MeisterCorps’s new central offices and then flew out, in his own jet, ahead of any snow, to Rome.

Lix and Freda concentrated on the exit door for forty minutes. It owed its only movement to the wind. Of course, they feared the worst: kidnappers arrested and a bungled afternoon, their comrades spilling all the beans, their future ruined by their foolishness.

Finally, more than an hour after their appointment and not a sign of Marin Scholla, Freda got out of the van, fiercely angry with herself and everyone, and walked around the campus blocks to hunt for their three accomplices and to check if anything was happening. It was. The Poles.

Alicja Lesniak — so much to answer for — had wrecked RoCoCo’s plans. That very morning in Gdansk, troops had opened fire on demonstrating workers. Seven dead. At General Jaruzelski’s hands. The news had reached the small clutch of demonstrators, plump Alicja included, who gathered every afternoon outside the Polish trade mission opposite the campus gate to protest against their country’s martial law. And some mad Pole, who’d never been to Poland once, as it turned out, had fired a hunting gun and chipped the paintwork on the mission’s door. The streets around the mission were closed at once. Armed police moved in, with snipers, horses, and armored vans. The Pole was shot in the leg and then bitten by a police dog. Military bullets chipped a lot more paint and shattered windows in the mission as police “secured” its safety for the afternoon. Anyone who looked remotely Polish was rounded up, including the building’s employees and the head of mission himself. Alicja Lesniak was shoved into a cell and kept there until midnight, when her father phoned his “good friend” in the ministry and she was chauffeur-driven home in the snow.

The two shaven anarchists and the tidy lesbian, bizarrely dressed and late for their appointment anyway, were trapped behind the barriers, two hundred meters from their Scholla ambush site. What could they do (but thank their lucky stars)? And MeisterCorps (which had considerable shipbuilding interests in Gdansk) had been advised to keep their chairman safely in the quiet parts of the town. The campuses were undisturbed.

“That fat-witted idiot,” Freda said as she and Lix drove off in their rental van in the last light of the day. She held Alicja Lesniak, her bourgeois rival for Lix’s heart, entirely responsible for the failings of the afternoon. She meant to, had to, settle scores immediately, revenge herself on both the woman and the farce. She wanted 1968.

FREDA AND LIX SHOULD, of course, have gone first to the Arts Laboratory on the wharfside where their four edgy and — by now — baffled actor comrades would be killing time waiting for their audience and for the curtain to go up. Lix, unquestionably, should at least have phoned them. He was almost a professional actor himself and a tense one. He must have discovered in his two-plus years of training how intolerable first-night nerves could be, even when the expected audience was only one old man, dragooned and obedient. He must have recognized how jittery they would be feeling, not fearing critics exactly but more the unpredictable attentions of the police, especially when they would have heard the sirens from across the river and the thrumming whir of helicopters, and finally the crack of gunfire.

Yet by the time he and Freda had traversed Navigation Island, in brewing silence, and crossed Deliverance Bridge into the old part of the city, they were focused only on themselves, their personal distress, their unreadiness for admitting yet to anyone — even to each other, indeed — that they had made themselves a laughingstock. They could not, would not, show themselves to the Street Beat Renegades without the chairman in tow. It would be humiliating, for Freda because she would dread acknowledging so farcical a failure, and for Lix because he would not want to expose his immense relief. They’d let their comrades simmer for a while.

Besides, who could guarantee that one of the other three farceurs from RoCoCo had not already made the call or even dropped in at the ArtsLab with their narration of events that afternoon, how seven dead Poles had robbed the chairman of the Fat Man and the Cat, how one plump girl had ruined everything. So Freda and Lix felt if not exactly free , then at least excused to turn their backs on the blemished afternoon and indulge the moment and the still-unblemished prospects for the night.

The chairman had eluded them, but all their other plans and passions were in place. They needed shriving, urgently, spreadeagled like two crosses on the bed, to rid themselves with body sins of all the punctured virtues of their politics. Their blood was up. There were more urgent things to do than hunt a telephone. More urgent than the minor needs of friends.