by J. T. Marsh
At last, the troopers attack. In the early morning hour, papers are posted to the doors of each apartment in the block next to Valeri’s, papers announcing the impending eviction of every resident in the building. Mysteriously in the night, that night, a sign is posted along the building’s façade boldly proclaiming the impending construction of some new luxury villa with every section already sold. ‘Thank you,’ the sign seems to cynically say, ‘for making this new community a success.’ But as Valeri watches, the little old ladies living on fixed incomes and the single mothers dressing their children in second-hand clothes must come to grips with what’s been done. The actual evictions take some time; before even half the residents are gone crews have already started tearing out finishings and copper wiring from the walls. It’s a sad irony that these crews should be made up of the same kind of persons as those working men and women so unceremoniously put out of their homes and onto the street. But a grander game’s afoot. This eviction is an attack, part of a broader offensive mounted by the criminals in parliament, working men across Britain finding the same notices posted to their doors. The wealthy man senses the coming revolt; this campaign of evictions is but an attempt to forestall the inevitable. The wealthy man’s folly lies in hastening his own demise.
6. A Dangerous Element
Already the thin wisps of smoke have begun to emanate from the little cracks in the sidewalks, from the storm drains lining the gutters, feeding into a dark cloud that will soon engulf us all. The dark essence that’s watching from above, it slowly gathers strength as it’s been slowly gathering strength for so long as there’s been men like Valeri to bear witness to the pit of despair the working man finds himself in. Soon enough there’ll be a pivotal moment when this dark essence will descend on us, exactly the moment when the working man should rise, the two to meet high above the surface of the earth in a cataclysmic display that will realize our historical inevitability, at last. At the polytechnic, classes are underway, Sean Morrison and his classmates studying through crippling shortages and not-infrequent power failures. But meanwhile, they plan. After the immigration raids have disappeared scores of men from the streets, if only for a short period of time, the students declare their solidarity with the migrants and prepare their counterattack. It’s while they plan that their first, critical error is made. Sean and the others in the students’ union openly declare their intentions, going so far as to publish bold declarations on the screens of the world that the end of the current order is at hand. Meeting in a classroom at the polytechnic with some of his fellow students, he says, “theory urges us to take direct action. We strike to take direct action by seizing the streets and holding them.” Another student, Julia Hall, says, “every moment we can hold the streets is a moment we deny them to the wealthy who control them.” But not all are sympathetic to their cause; one of the students in their group’s a spy.
In the midst of this crisis, Valeri’s true work begins. As news breaks of a trade deal unlike any before signed between countries, it becomes widely known this’ll surely put even more working men out of work. Valeri pledges his life in service of the opposition. But he’s not alone. At the church, there’s an undercurrent running through the pews, a spirit parishioners like Darren Wright can sense but never see. It’s this spirit which compels Darren to pray for guidance in troubled times. He comes to church more often, one weeknight praying silently in the pews when there appears at his side a younger woman. She says, “I hope you’ve found more inspiration lately than I have.” She says her name’s Sheila Roberts, and for a moment Darren thinks she might be a vision in answer to his prayers. “I’m afraid I have to disappoint you,” he says. But she invites him to a meeting of concerned parishioners, the laymen organizing in the face of the church’s inaction. The church may be bride to Christ’s bridegroom, but Darren and Sheila find themselves among they who have come to believe the bride has strayed too far. As it is written in Proverbs 29:2, ‘When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.’ This is a truth all too evident to men like Darren and women like Sheila as their brothers and sisters among the parishioners have come to see wickedness in the halls of power.
Still the conversations meander through the days, idle chatter mixing freely with wistful ideation. “Give me a lift to the station?” one woman asks. “Climb on behind, but mind you hold on fast,” says another. A third interjects, “We’ll meet again someday. Don’t forget me.” It’s an unknown exchange in one apartment block somewhere in the maze of blocks that make up the working class districts, but an unknown exchange with profound meaning. Elsewhere, as their friendship deepens through a series of unlikely coincidences, Valeri and Maria find common ground where neither would’ve before expected it. Over the days that turn quickly into weeks, theirs is a shared cause, which they realize in a mutual struggle against a common enemy. There’s no moment when this takes place; he seeks her out, and at first she rebuffs him, but he persists. Finally, he offers to pay for her time, and she reluctantly, half-suspiciously agrees. Again they sit in her little one-room apartment, alone but for the rage of the streets filtering in through that same broken window, and she looks uncomfortably at the clock every so often. Still she sits on the edge of the bed while he sits on her one chair, the two exchanging small talk until, near the end of his time with her that afternoon he says, “you must join the fight for a new tomorrow.” But the words seem to fall on deaf ears. She’s not ready to commit herself irrevocably to the struggle. Although he can’t see it, nor is Valeri, although they’re drawing closer to commitment with each passing day. Hidden among the criminals, the prostitutes, and the mentally ill addicts there’s an element that lives off the enterprise of the working man’s most degraded and dejected form. It’s a hopeless feeling, to be made unwelcome in your own home, to be made to feel an outcast on the very streets that’d raised you, to be made to seek refuge from deprivation in a world where an abundance exists. After Garrett Walker and his family have found eviction notices posted to their front doors, everything changes. At the dinner table the next time all four gather, Garrett says, “we’ll live with my mother in Surrey for a while.” His wife objects, saying, “she lives in a one-bedroom flat. There’s not enough room for us all.” But Garret says,
“it’ll only be for a little while. Once I’ve found work again, we’ll get our own place, somewhere.” The dining room is silent but for the ticking and rattling of the refrigerator on the fritz. Left unsaid is the understanding there’s little work to be found, none of it paying well enough. It makes Garrett feel helpless and emasculated, powerless to protect and provide for his family in the face of the overwhelming despair of unemployment. But he won’t feel this way for long, as there’re those lurking still in the shadows who would empower him.
At the union hall, out-of-work workers talk. “A skilled worker won’t go under in the villages these days,” says one worker. “There’s as much work to be had as you might want,” says another. Both know it was never for want of work that they’re made to languish at the hall along with many others. There’s plenty of work and there’s plenty of workers; this is the question of our time. After that hour together, Valeri hasn’t the money to pay for another hour, having worked to save such a sum for more than two months. Only later does he realize she has not paid her rent in a long while, the money he gave her being instead put to use paying for a new winter coat in anticipation of the coming season on the street. Never left in the open, we all look like her at one point in our lives, she being the strongest in her weakness, the bravest in her fear, the wisest in her narrow, short-term outlook on life. The next time Valeri sees her, not walking the street but in a shop buying food, he dares not approach her, instead exchanging with her a knowing glance from across the grocery store’s aisle as they pass one another, that little light behind her eyes suggesting she has begun to feel something for him, if not love then something that might well yet blossom into love. But it�
��s all a fraud. It’s a false narrative, framed within the confines of the human heart, made to seem more than what it is. At the armoury, Colonel Cooke puts Craig Thompson and the rest of the brigade through a series of drills and musters, while imposing a strict curfew on the men. Naturally, no reason for the change, leaving the men to come up with their own. “We might be deployed abroad,” says Craig in the bunks after hours. “Where?” asks another. “Who knows? Ukraine maybe,” says Craig. “They’re going to want us to fight the Russians,” says the other. “I won’t go to die for some imperial ambition,” says Craig. And the rest of the brigade share his feelings. But these are young men serving in want of a paycheque. In times of crisis, the war in the streets of their own homes is the war of real concern for ordinary troopers like them.
Over the past several months, Valeri’s been meeting with his neighbours, never sitting down with them and talking at length but running into them in the halls on his way to work or in the laundry room. It’s the little moments that add up over time, the traded glances and the half-serious exchanges that began to tend Valeri towards action. In these radical times, men like Valeri are soon to find themselves at the head of a burgeoning movement which the dark essence may yet choose to use to give itself expression, and with expression, life. But we’re not there yet. While Stanislaw Czerkawski’s ruthless boss never hesitates to fire anyone who looks at him the wrong way, Stanislaw has come to tire of holding his tongue. “I need to stay put,” he says, sharing views with one of the workers on their break, “but sometime my turn will come.” His fellow worker, another Pole, agrees. “It seems so hopeless,” says Stanislaw, “for I have so little. Why do we act as though those with the least to lose are the most afraid to stand?” But soon their break is over and they’re all back cleaning floors and scrubbing toilets. His mind wanders, and he stands tall in a clear picture he has for the future, and once he’s finished cleaning one room but before he moves onto another he looks abroad for his troubles. If he’s afraid of losing his meagre living, then soon he will have no longer any reason to fear. Among the Poles who form this permanent underclass, there’s a grim certainty, and Stanislaw’s wife shares with him a sad, sad perception of gloom.
Still yet evictions put working people out of their own homes, forcing each to find successively more and more creative ways to house themselves. If ever any should look back they’d see another tower, another sleek, glass and steel tower where once a simple, efficient block had stood. Sometimes it seems the same apartment blocks are emptied of the families living inside, made hollow and then torn down, only to reappear the next day again filled with those same families, the act repeating itself in the same time and in the same space for so long as there exists space to be filled. It makes little sense, and if the working man had access to the kind of apparatus that’s at the wealthy man’s disposal then surely, the working man believes, he would use that power to usher in a golden age free of the burden of so much wanton, unbridled greed and waste. The values of the working man, values like chastity, grace, hard work, and ingenuity contrast against the values of the wealthy man, values like vulgarity, indecency, parasitism, and infirmity; it seems, now, impossible to imagine how the wealthy man could’ve ever become so wealthy despite all his weaknesses seemingly making him fit only to lie in bed and wither away into nothing.
As the current spree of evictions and demolitions run their course, the working man sees in the propaganda outlets proclamations of jobs added, of monthly, sometimes weekly increases in the prices of this and that, and daily reports wherein the talking heads gleefully announce the value of their own imagined holdings reaching new heights. The working man sees as none of them stop to spare a word of concern for his own, as he’s always seen, and it inspires in him an instinctive, visceral revulsion he’s become intimately familiar with through his lifetime and which he will never forget even after history turns in his favour. Though emotions run high, this strike peters out over the coming days, its failure laying the groundwork for future victory. The union hall burned, now a smoldering wreck, leaving men like Valeri to think towards their next moves. But the world carries on, and so too must Valeri, returning to find the plant closed, its front gates chained shut with guards standing in front to ward off the small crowd of workers looking on.
After emotions have run high, we may be forgiven for expecting this ad-hoc assembly to explode into violence at any moment, but it never comes. Men like Valeri must focus on their next meal, this recent strike having succeeded, it seems, only in proving on the ability of the way of things to weather this current storm. But in this interlude, this in-between period when working man keeps on working, Valeri keeps these things in the back of his mind even as he tends to affairs closer to the heart. Valeri and Maria don’t see each other for a while after that chance encounter in the market; he stays away from anyplace he’s seen her and she, well, she tends to the simple task of surviving in these increasingly hostile times. Despite it all, there are others, they who would disseminate a forbidden knowledge, forbidden not by force of law and the threat of violence that gives law its force, but by the lifetime each of us has spent being taught on the taboo character this knowledge possesses. Books circulate around the edges of view, in used bookstores barely taking in enough money to pay their rent, and on computer networks that reach around the globe from obscure party web sites disseminating this knowledge for free.
Hidden among the criminals, the prostitutes, and the mentally ill addicts lives a man, neither young nor old, who may yet come to lead us all through the future, through a future wherein we’ll all be made to share in whatever prosperity and poverty should be meted out to the whole lot of us. Clutched tight against this man’s chest is neither a book nor a pad but pieces of crumpled-up paper with the day’s last ramblings written on them in ragged handwriting. As the working man works, he shares, whether he realizes it or not, an unspoken connection with those of his own lying in the streets soaking in a pool of their own urine and sweat, the long summer’s days never so long as to take from either of them that last ounce of dignity either of them possess. In time, when these men learn to put aside their petty differences and unite against their common enemy, the crowds around Victory Monument will assume a new character, surrounding the monument with a single mass. On this early-summer’s evening, the sun sets lazily, leisurely, at just the right moment casting a long shadow from the base of the Victory Monument’s spire, its tip reaching down a street towards some miscellaneous point in front of the nondescript apartment block where Valeri entertains the notion that a woman with a pedigree like Sydney’s might well yet come to sympathize with his budding revolution. As he returns to work with all the others, he looks for her, hoping she’ll have made the choice to do the right thing. But she’s not there.
In finding friendship, Valeri and Maria come to see one another not as compared to those around them but in not yet the same. “Are you going to be free for yourself?” he asks her, almost as an afterthought while they force their way through a lonely night in a burning city. “No one will ever be free,” she replies, turning away from him to lead him down the street. It’s too hot to be wearing jeans and a jacket, too hot to be wearing a mask, in the sweat and the dirt a shared truth emerging. “We still should fight them anyways,” he says. “We should all just stay alive,” she says, “for as long as we can, let the fight run its course.” They see the anger in each other’s eyes, the pain in each other’s breath. Still in these long summer’s days the crowds around Victory Monument never seem to thin, with the crowds of angry workers, students, and parishioners only occasionally occupying this public space. Most days, you see the usual assortment of homeless people sitting quietly, back from the streets with their hats upturned, the odd one standing on a plastic crate while declaring the surely imminent end of the world. (A delicious irony that we should ignore these men who prove to be right in the end, albeit in a way none of them could’ve known). There’s the merchants who never seem to have
any customers but still make good with whatever they have. But on these streets there’s a mounting sense of gloom, as though all know, in one way or another, the ongoing campaign against them, the steadily encroaching glass and steel towers of the wealthy man’s world rising in the distance, threatening to soon cast their shadows on this working man’s redoubt, to soon after invade and conquer this neighbourhood, taking for themselves the spoils of war. It’s a deeply confusing time, a time when each of us is fully aware of what’s happening to us, what’s being done to us, but when none of us seem able to seize the moment and fight back. These evictions sweep across the working man’s neighbourhoods seemingly at random, the lack of any apparent pattern making clear their true purpose. These evictions aren’t meant to clear the working class apartment blocks of their residents so as to, in turn, clear the land for something more, but rather to perpetuate the state of fear the working man lives in, to terrorize those who would contemplate resistance to this oppression. Sometimes it seems the same families are evicted from the same apartment blocks over and over, a cruel joke perpetuated on the working man.
