by Jim Crace
He’d like to love her standing up, for instance. A memory revisited. Or fuck her on the kitchen floor, for goodness’ sake. Uncomplicated sex. No politics. Or make love to her out on the river in a rowboat when she was wearing something other than black. He’d seen the couples making love in their hired thirty-minute skiffs, in their white summer shirts, lapping at each other in the shadows of the bankside candy trees. He’d like to join the gang. Or him on top, for a change: she’d always straddled him when they’d played almost-sex, when she—climaxed herself—finally permitted him to come into her. She always liked to be the playground bully who had won the fight, her full weight on his shoulders or her hands pressed down against his wrists, inviting penetration but only just allowing it. Submit to me. Defer, defer. Not mainstream cinema at all. Perhaps they’d never truly fornicate in ways he wanted to. Though he could always live in hope. And hope was justified. She’d said she had a treat for him once Scholla was released. At last, she’d promised it. Something for “the man.” As soon as they had finished with the chairman, she’d come back with him to his little room, above those once trod stairs. She’d be his captive for the night, she said.
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.
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.
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.
