Jim Crace - Genesis

Mouetta was unstoppable, but she was shocked as well, shocked by the suddenness. And possibly she recognized her own opportunity, subconsciously. The chance of pregnancy. She drove her husband forward, hardly wanting him to think. Although Lix was normally the most careful and responsible of men, “with good cause” he always said, given his already proven fertility, he would not on this occasion give much thought to condoms, although he had a packet in his trousers’ back pocket, although there was a single Lubricated Shadow in Freda’s shoulder bag that surely, on this night of incarceration, she could spare. So when Mouetta said, “It’s safe. It’s safe,” he hurtled on. He took the risk. He gambled on the moon and on her honesty.

We are not animals — not simple monkeys, certainly — although, of all the apes, we are the luckiest, if it is good fortune and not a calamity to take such pleasure in the passions of the flesh. We fornicate in private (if we want), and that’s a blessing, isn’t it? We can simply mate for fun, at any time and any season we choose, no matter if the woman’s already pregnant, menstruating, ovulating, or in the middle of her lunch. The lesser apes, of course, don’t suffer from the jealousy and pain or lose control.

Now they were truly clumsy in the car. She had to get her underpants off, his trousers down, the two front seats reclined, while still attending to his kisses and his urgencies and still accommodating seat belts, steering wheels, and the gear shift. Sex in a car is never dignified or comfortable. The cinematic shot would edit out the jump and jerk of it, the gracelessness. There’d be a gently rhythmic car, the rain, the night, the shifting latticework of shadows from the branches of the trees, the heartfelt throbbing of the sound track symphony fast turning music into light, fast turning tear gas smoke (for let us not forget what brought them to the park) into unoffending mist, fast turning darkness into a grainy dawn.

The truth of Lix and Mouetta, this night of riots and anniversaries, was even grainier. Their lovemaking, if that is what it was, was speedy and uncomfortable and somewhat disappointing for them both, though mostly for Mouetta. Human biology is unequal in its distributions and rewards. Haste cannot often satisfy any more than it can dodge the rain. It can impregnate, though. The sperm do not require sincerity before they can proceed. The eggs are not judgmental. They do not even favor love.

A dangerous ejaculation, then, for Lix. Deep in the park. Deliverance Park. Three hundred million tempest-tossed sperm, the wretched refuse of his teeming shore — and no contraception to impede them. Three hundred million! More than the total population of the United States of America, as the Planned Parenthood posters with their Statue of Liberty photograph so often remind us. There has to be a god of mischief to overcater so dramatically. That’s why, of course, an ejaculation is known in this City of Kisses as “a huddled mass.” A tribute to America, the land of opportunity and sex. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” the torch-bearing lady says as she succumbs to suitors. Three hundred million. Oh, what a prospect, all those newcomers, each time a man dares lift his lamp beside her golden door.

It was not long before Mou (as Lix had called her in his throes, rather than the more usual diminutive, ’Etta) and her husband were left to disunite their limbs and clothing, to clean themselves with tissues dampened by rain wiped from the side panels of the car, and to at least pretend that their embraces should and could outlive the sex.

Mouetta turned her back against her husband once again. Lix wrapped himself around his wife. Her mouth was bruised. She had not been compensated with an orgasm. Yet she was contented, unaccountably. Her husband had surprised her for a change. She had surprised herself. “That’s not like you,” she said, not facing him. She’d only meant to tease him, say how glad she was to have him to herself for this third year. Yet it was also an accusation, in a way.

Both of them were too tired to take offense for long and both of them had earned the right to fold up in the cushions of the car and fall asleep. Untroubled dreams. Untroubled by the activist, himself curled up but hardly sleeping underneath the desk in Freda’s office, while down the fourth-floor corridor the caretaker with master keys and soldiers at his heels (tipped off by Lix when he was being questioned by the roadblock volunteers) was heading for the student’s hiding place. They’d flush out all the troublemakers who’d thought they might find refuge in their rooms.

Untroubled, too, by Freda, sharing her strange cell with eleven other women, five blankets, and two beds, already bruised, traduced, and undermined, fearful of the day ahead, determined, though, and proud. And so relieved that her young student lover would be saved and would by now be sleeping on her cousin’s study couch.

Untroubled by those three fresh bodies in the city morgue, the youthful and impatient victims of the truncheons and the gas, the careless armored jeep, the interest rates, the gulf between the ruling and the ruled.

Untroubled, even, by the thought of Lix’s five offspring (yes, five. There’s one who’s undiscovered yet), now sleeping somewhere in the world, produced by the only four women, other than Mouetta, he’d ever slept with. A jackpot of a sort.

So this is our opportunity to welcome Mouetta’s first and Lix’s sixth child into the corridor. Whom should we thank, and what, for this chance winner of the lottery? Those things that made the night so bad for everybody else? The riots possibly. The traffic barriers. The idiotic militiamen who (or so Lix falsely claimed) were not bright enough to recognize the actor in their midst? The rain with its own three hundred million random pellets, the fertile, unforgiving rain that still was beating on their car? The shame Lix felt? These were the settings for this single conception, the only cast and scenery and props that could produce this child. Change anything and you change everything. Another place, another time, produces someone else.

“CHOOSE ONE,” Mouetta said. “Choose one. If you could go to bed with anybody here, which one?”

This was a question she’d posed to Lix a dozen times before, in public places, very often as a postscript — and not, despite her husband’s best endeavors, as a prologue — to their lovemaking.

It was hardly 8:30 in the morning, Friday, not seven hours since their close encounter in the car. The early hours of her undiscovered pregnancy.

That coming night, revitalized by the drier weather, there’d be new disturbances, better organized and more venomous than Thursday’s. Nine dead, this time, including three cadets trapped in a burning transporter. And, dramatically, the firebombing of the Bursary Chambers Club where — wrongly — it was thought some bankers and some military were dining. The wounded victims were, in fact, two waitresses, a cloakroom clerk, a fireman, and fourteen members of an investment club who hadn’t had the lungs or legs to get away from their third-story dining suite.

For the moment everything was quiet. Apart from the parked police vans and the helicopters, the city, still in debt and shock, still riotous at heart, had — physically, at least — returned to normal. Sunshine, traffic jams, shopping and commuter crowds, and floods. Floods are normal here: the usual flooded passages and streets along the riverbanks, the flooded underpasses and the flooded gutters where, as usual, the drains had let us down. The city had been overwhelmed by rain.

Mouetta and Lix had stopped for breakfast at the Palm & Orchid Coffee House on their way back home. She held his arm across the tabletop. She pinched his hand. She wanted to inflict some gentle pain. “Come on,” she said. “The truth.” The coffeehouse — a converted botanic conservatory — was chockablock with unsuspecting women for her husband to choose from.