by J. T. Marsh
As war goes, this is a war as yet lacking in decisive battles, in daring offensives marked by bold, red arrows striking across a map. This is a war familiar to the working man only in some basic, visceral way, the kind of familiarity bred by years of hard living, by scrounging and saving for so many years just to buy a simple jacket, a pair of boots, an ordinary desk fashioned out of ordinary wood. He is confronted every day with made-up images of actors pretending to enjoy the wonders of the modern world, but he has not yet become desensitized to them. Every time the working man’s screen fills with these propaganda advertisements for luxury and opulence he can never have, he is filled with a simmering anger, his thoughts again drifting to the romanticism of the war fifteen years ago, where once the working man had dared to dream. In the days that follow, Valeri looks tired, working to struggle forward, never looking back. “I don’t fight for nothing,” Valeri says, “I always fight for what’s right and fair.” Hannah shrugs and says, “if you don’t stop saying such things I’ll get really annoyed with you.” Valeri laughs. “If you haven’t gotten annoyed with me already then I’ll just have to try harder.” “I’m serious,” she says. “Me too,” he says. But Valeri relishes, in a perverse way, this kind of antagonism; he likes seeing her frustrated at his attitude.
Keeping an even keel becomes difficult in these trying times. At night, the noise in the street rises and seems to come from all places at once, making it impossible for the working man to rest. But then he’s used to the sleepless nights, just as he’s used to that tired feeling, that aching sensation that twists from the backs of his eyes at all hours of the day and which makes it harder than ever to function. The working man is paid his pittance by the wealthy man who profits from his labour, and then is made to hand over his pittance to the wealthy man again in exchange for the necessities of life sold at vastly inflated prices, the whole of the working man’s production made to be surrendered to his wealthy paymasters, his person, his being becoming a mechanism for the wealthy to use for their own profit and then unceremoniously discarded when he’s too old, frail, or broken to be of further use. Little does Valeri know how close Hannah has come to the breaking point. So consumed he’s become in the coming apocalypse he can hardly see the unraveling of her life even as she unravels right in front of him. “Valeri,” says Hannah, “I love you. Do you hear me? You’re so stubborn. Why did you go away that time? Now you’re coming to us, to me. I can’t go for anything. I can’t let you go. You’re all I need in the world.” Valeri shakes his head. “What if they find me here?” he asks. “Don’t go,” she says. “I have to,” he says. And in the time it takes them to have this conversation, Valeri’s personal life goes up in smoke. But with the strike in the offing, he can devote no further energies to such things, even as he knows full well this isn’t the last he’s heard of his roommate and her love for him.
Still yet the wealthy man continues his campaign aimed at wringing every last ounce of wealth he can from the working man’s world. Announcing the closure of another mill, the wealthy man declares so many livelihoods liquidated, condemning those who’d held them to another lifetime of poverty and neglect. As the workers leave at the end of what would be their last day, they pass alongside banners, electronic banners announcing the limited availability of as-yet unbuilt luxury towers. As the workers make good across the city and into their neighbourhood of working class apartment blocks there’s still that image of gleaming, glass and steel towers put up in place of industry, in place of industriousness to threaten their insecurities and to mock them in their moment of weakness, a mockery that’ll be remembered when once their places switch and their fates inverse. “I know,” says Maria, “but you’ve got to think of what kind of risk you’re taking.” Valeri sucked in his lips and looked out the window. “As I see it,” he says, finally, “I’m sick and tired of running. If it was up to me, I’d be up in there with them, attacking rather than waiting for the signal to march without arms.” “Be patient,” Maria says, “everyone has their role to play. You can’t throw your life away now, because you haven’t realized your true purpose yet. It’s not your time.” “Bah!” Valeri won’t hear it. He can’t hear it. Too caught up in the passion of rebellion, his emotions render him short-sighted and naïve. His mother and father were the same way, just before they died.
Proof enough of the discontent simmering in the streets, a truck rolls past, in the driver’s seat a young man with a lit cigarette hanging precariously between his lips. As he passes an apartment block, one of so many identical such blocks in this city, he catches the sound of a voice shouting, but only for a half-second before he’s out of earshot, the voice’s shouts coming from a woman struck by her husband in the night. He’s out of work, like so many of the working man’s brothers. She’s hardly working, like so many of the working man’s sisters. In the night, these are the moments when the superior character of the working man becomes self-evident; it’s in our weakness, in our avarice and in our inebriation that our moment is come. It’s precisely when we are weak, in character if not always in form, that we must seize the moment and attack the wealthy man who would deem himself our master. It’s an unconventional wisdom, to attack when one is weak and to relent when one is strong, but this is the way of the working man, and it is through his way and never the way of another that he will find victory.
No sooner have we left one crisis do we find ourselves immersed in another, this new crisis seeing the working man put his newfound knowledge to the test. Outside, somewhere across the city not altogether far, the working man makes his way home for the night, his feet sore, his hands dirty, his clothes looking respectable at a distance but up close looking slightly ragged and worn, with small holes in key locations around his waist and sleeves marking the exact places where his body had learned to work through the day without any input from his mind. The sky, still light in a late-summer’s swoon, is thick and hazy, smoke from fires burning hundreds of kilometres away obscuring much of the sun’s light, the city itself shrouded behind a dense smog which makes it all seem to the working man more than a little surreal. A stormy discharge of orange bolts could loose fire under his little rented apartment at any time, and this thought strikes him gently as he climbs the stairs towards his little box of a home waiting for him at the end of a long, hard day. Across the city, the hours had passed, and in those hours the streets had become all but deserted. The streetlights flicker, the trees rustle in a light wind, and every so often an ambulance comes wheeling through, sirens screaming, lights flashing. Four lights emerge from a field dozens of tiny triangular spots, receding in the distance along with the sound of an aircraft’s engine receding along with it. The lights push back like rockets of, the company of aircraft on their way from one landing strip to another, moving unknown cargo, still as they all are in that prelude to something more sinister, something more dangerous. As has become his routine, the working man sets across the day and looks forward to that time when he can be something more than what he is. But with the world careening through its crisis, the working man will yet join with the others, the student, the artist, the pastor, and many more in looking past these meagre attentions and concerns, every mass protest, every strike, every walkout contributing its little bit towards escalating tensions, the inflamed passions to rise until the barriers meant to contain them can contain them no longer, unleashing, then, a violent cataclysm that’ll destroy the old and build in its place a new unlike anything that’s ever been.
A small act of defiance takes place. Some jobless young man spray paints ‘NO SURRENDER’ in black across a wall inside a construction site, deftly stepping out through that same narrow hole in the fence he’d used to step in. No one sees him. They only see his handiwork, when the working man arrives in the morning to continue his work. As the working man is made to paint over this small act of defiance, rewriting history to make it seem as though the act had never taken place, he silently commits it to memory. It’s a subversive act, to store the memo
ry in some hidden part of the mind out of the hope that someday it might become expedient to take it out and expose it to the light. No one but they who found it will ever know what it means, and yet so long as the essence of the act remains carried forward in the spirit of the working man it will always have a way to break free.
15. Apocalypse Rising
During a lull in the action, it seems as though a peaceful interlude has set in. As tends to be the way of things in the time immediately before a crisis explodes, in the streets a tension having set in like the bone-dry underbrush of a forest in the midst of an unusually hot summer, with only a spark needed to set it all aflame. It’ll come. It’s not far off. But there’s still that before-period, when the drama of it all has yet to play itself out and which leaves us all looking ahead in anticipation of what we’re sure should’ve already come. In a world filled with countries, kingdoms, empires beset by internal tensions just like ours, it might seem entirely out of place to look ahead and remark on how quickly things are to fall apart. But for Stanislaw Czerkawski, the next days he spends in jail is time spent off the street, the darkness of his cell shared by the others caught for one crime or another. He looks across the dimly-lit room and he sees not hardened criminals nor dangerous psychopaths but the out-of-work or the soon-to-be, holes in their jeans, dirt and muck on their faces, their hair ragged and tangled. For want of a piece of bread and a roof over their heads, these men have been made to lead lives of addiction, criminality, and despair. It’s a sign of our times that the working man is arrested for some trivial offence while the real criminals, they who loot and plunder the wealth of the world not only go unpunished but are exalted in the realms of power. This is something all working men know, in the basic, instinctive way they can, but which each must learn for himself. It’s taken Stanislaw longer than most, but here he is. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
When next he meets Maria, she hardly looks at him. “I don’t often get the chance to talk to someone like you,” he says, finding her where first they’d met in the street. “You’ve shown no concern for me,” she says, tightening her jacket. It’s later in the year, the summer’s heat having given way to the late-fall’s rain and bitter cold. He says, “I want to turn back the clock to before…” She finally looks him in the eye and says, “I can’t believe that.” He looks aside. In the street there’s ragged, haggard men walking quickly, trucks and buses rolling past belching smoke and grinding gears. But when Valeri looks at Maria she’s starting to turn, as if to make down the sidewalk away from him. In the stockade Private Craig Thompson isn’t alone, with a handful of others awaiting their punishments for their minor crimes. It seems someone up the chain of command has decided the time is now to institute a new crackdown on even the most trivial of offences. They’re not bound to be in the stockade for long, not with crisis in the streets about to explode into war. At the barracks there’s a lingering sympathy for the crowds in the streets, soldiers like Private Craig Thompson already counted among them in spirit if not in fact. Sequestered on base owing to the current troubles, they have little to do but sleep and sit. The troopers in the street have yet to call on the army for help, and when the time comes the won’t use raw recruits like these men, not at first. That’ll come later. Craig will be among those men needed to bring order to chaos and to introduce chaos to order. When once Colonel Cooke comes around, nowadays he seems more involved, looking over the men with a sharper eye and walking among them with a leaner, more purposeful gait. No one dares laugh when now the Colonel exhorts the men to God, country, and King; the Colonel says, “if called upon to make war on his majesty’s enemies, then all you men will give all that you have to give, even your lives if deemed necessary.” And Private Thompson can only look on with a mounting uncertainty, the experience of living under threat of war only succeeding in keeping him awake at night, staring at the underside of the bunk above, wondering what the day will bring. He won’t have to wait long to find out. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
Yet, it seems only yesterday when we were in the midst of a frantic, frenzied boom. New glass and steel towers reach for the sky every week even as the working man struggles to pay his rent. Screens are dominated by talking heads breathlessly proclaiming the release of numbers heralding some impressive new gains in wealth even as half the population patches holes in their jeans and cuts back on the meat in their diet for the doubling, tripling in prices. In front of another block of working class apartments there appears mysteriously in the night a sign boldly proclaiming the coming of a new luxury tower that no one in this neighbourhood will ever be able to afford, while in the night not-homeless men and women pick through dumpsters looking for anything that can be pawned. Still languishing in the prison of listlessness and discontent, Garrett Walker has taken to drowning under a storm of red ink for all the debt notices he’s posted in the mail. It’s a criminal offence, for able-bodied men like Garrett to be cast out of work, discarded like some old, disused piece of machinery, then come after to be torn into pieces and then sold for scrap. Though his wife pledges to stay at his side, Garrett knows his daughters can’t make the same pledge, nor should they. As he listlessly and methodically looks for work where there is no work to be found, Garrett sees on his screen the same news break as everyone else, bold declarations of an impossible feature, the rising in value of the wealthy man’s holdings heralded as progress, prosperity, the talking heads breathlessly announcing the hoarding of wealth as though it were the dawning of a golden age for all. In it Garrett sees only cruel mockery, a celebration of excess while millions try only to fight off hunger for one more day. At some point, and no one, not even Garrett can know when, he gives up hope, some switch inside him flips even as outwardly nothing in his life changes, not immediately. As he looks into the distance and sees the fires of liberation burning deep in the heart of London, he commits himself to breaking out of this prison of the mind called impoverishment. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
If you stop at just the right time of day in just the right part of town and listen, just listen, you’ll hear the voices of the thousands and thousands of workers, students, and parishioners cheering in the streets, their faces and their voices reaching from a future we can only dream of to encourage us, here, in their past, our present. In the night, with this city calm, we wait. Unwilling to let it be, Valeri starts after Maria, but stops a half-step on. “Don’t leave,” he says, “I just need you to come with me for a minute. We must talk.” But Maria doesn’t stop, and Valeri doesn’t pursue her. He watches as she disappears down the sidewalk and into a crowd. “You there!” a Police officer shouts at Valeri, “keep moving along! This is no place for loitering!” The officer advances, but Valeri stands his ground. “This is a public street,” he says, “I can go anywhere I please.” He thinks to pick a fight with the officer, but the better judgement in him wins out. He can see the officer himself is looking for a fight, and he withdraws, muttering something under his breath. “You trash should learn your place,” the officer says, “you’re the wretched scum who’ll all rot in jail.” It’s as though Valeri exudes an energy that attracts all the wrong kind of attention. But still he withdraws from the scene. At the underground church, the rogue priest has nearly finished preparing the congregation for the next step in their salvation by the time he’s taken into the back of a police lorry. Though the congregants, including Darren Wright and his young friend Sheila Roberts have yet to learn all they need about the forbidden gospel, and it’s in their ignorance they’ve become ready to stand. Studying the Bible, the Word of God, Darren happens upon an epiphany which can only come from study. For now, he waits, along with all the others gathering here and in underground churches across England and around the world, waiting for an unmistakable sign from God that their moment is at hand. They won’t have long to wait. This is the moment in which all doubt is passed, when Darren is committed irrevocably to the way forward and is tu
rned away from evil. As Darren closes his Bible and leaves for the night, he casts a look down the street and imagines the fires of liberation burning through the night and long into the coming day. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
But the streets are eerily quiet, the air free from the chattering tension that should be thriving. As Valeri steels himself against the coming day, he scarcely notices Hannah on her way in. “Are you a heroic figure?” she asks. “Hardly,” he says. “Then what are you?” she asks. “I’m nothing more than a man. And I do only what good men do. Anyone in my place who is good would do what I’m doing.” He stops. “And do you know what’s going on in the world?” he asks, turning to face her. “Who can think of the world? We have to look out for ourselves,” she says. “If everyone only looks out for themselves,” he declares, “then we’ll all have so much pain and suffering, without any hope of relief.” No longer talking just about Valeri’s deepening involvement in the struggle, it seems they’re both determined to have this conversation in the privacy of their own home. “Since we’re both here,” she says, “I want to tell you one thing.” He says nothing, instead letting the weight of the moment invade the space between them. “Valeri,” she says, “this is no time for heroics. You should stay here with me. I need you.” She pauses, then steps at him and rests her hands on his broad shoulders. She says, “I love you.” She kisses him, but he doesn’t respond. His hands remain at his sides, and his lips remain closed. At the polytechnic, the students continue to gather despite the continued cancellation of classes. In the central courtyard Sean Morrison has taken up residence, occupying the open space with tents. Amid the steadily mounting crisis gripping Britain’s streets the occupation of the polytechnic is only a minor episode, but like the other minor episodes it’s emblematic of a larger struggle to wrest control of the public space from private hands. The police watch, standing in a loose circle, waiting for the students to act out. In the distance the fires of liberation burn, their thick columns of smoke reaching for the sky, threatening to blot out the sun and cast darkness over the cityscape. It’s not Sean’s time to speak; with Julia he listens to the student body president declare their occupation as a strike against the criminal order, in seizing and holding this space for so long as they must the students are depriving the criminal order of the control it needs. But there’s more to it than that. While the polytechnic has all but shut down, the students keep on studying, assembling knowledge by their collective experience in asserting their own identity. Now, Sean realizes their true purpose. Now, he sees clearly. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
