by J. T. Marsh
At their apartment, Valeri and Hannah still argue. “Don’t go,” she says. “I have to,” he says. “If you didn’t have to, would you still go?” she asks. “I would,” he says. “Then go,” she says. As she takes a half-step back and begins to withdraw the embrace, he reaches for her and pulls her back in, kissing her, savouring the taste of her mouth. Finally, he says, “this has been a long time coming.” She says, “it has.” He says, “but it’ll have to end here.” They don’t speak of the kiss, of their shared feelings for one another in the meanwhile, awkwardly dancing around the subject as has come to be their way. Neither can forget, though, the confession of love, and both feel an almost-regret at the knowing perversion of a love that can never be. Somehow, the next time Valeri turns to the streets, he can see anew how many crushed and mangled lives are left behind by the day’s business. In the night, it’s always in the night, it’s easier to destroy men and women; even the jackal prefers the dark hours of gloom. Still Valeri has himself a glimpse of the bottommost depths of life, the very sump of its ugly pit. At a younger age, he might’ve taken the musty, mouldy stench, the smell of swamp rot wafting up to him as a chance to reach for something new and unexplored. Indifferent to all this in the narrow alleys lie the lacerated, tormented, broken bodies of young girls with arms thrown back in convulsive gestures of agony. Only at the very riverfront, in the black, ugly night does Valeri find a respite from the gloom, watching the water’s ripples lap against the hull of a passing grain carrier. He thinks back to his mother and father, to their heroic deaths in the failed war fifteen years ago, and he feels a gnawing shame at having come to see as sexual and romantic a woman like his roommate, as though the temptation exists in him to concede that men and women must develop these attractions to one another when confined to such spaces together for so long. A horn breaks the silence; a train’s light appears in the distance, drawing nearer.
Tomorrow, Valeri will join Murray and hundreds of thousands of workers, students, and parishioners in the streets of lawyers across Britain and throughout Europe, from Barcelona to Bonn, from Liverpool to Lviv, from Paris to Ploesti. In union, each will look to one another for a spiritual support, in solidarity providing one another with that critical part of what it means to be. It’s insidious, and it’s vile, the way the wealthy man sets himself about the task of expelling the working man from his home and then seizing it, without firing a shot, without deploying the truncheon, by force of law taking what should never belong to him and making it his own. In the night, the fires of liberation still burn, only now the flames have been hidden behind the rising clouds of smoke billowing from a thousand and one smokestacks like burning embers lodged at the base of a still-smoldering home. It’s still that between-time, when it still seems possible for us all to pull ourselves back from the ledge, if only we could find the courage to take that necessary step back. This is a tempting line of thought, but it’s foolish as well. History doesn’t work that way.
As we’re all about to discover, as we all should’ve known all along, the way to the future is marked by the blood and tears of they who should’ve known the inevitability of it all. Even as I look ahead to the imminent escalation of this war three centuries in the making, I can’t help but imagine us all, at a much younger age, someday in the future bearing down on this, their past, with all the faded-out weariness of the lost orphan in search of the family he never had. It’s a fraud. Even as this night sees the fires of liberation burning in the distance, colouring the sky a crisp, burnt-orange gold, the working man’s already tired but somehow also filled with an electric energy coursing through his veins and seeping into every movement he makes, every smooth, rhythmic contraction of his muscles as he works through the night.
After all that’s happened in his lifetime, the working man can only convince himself he knows what lies ahead, from experience thatching together a narrative which demands special accommodation, enabling him to account for all his failures and all his successes. Missing the bus home one night, he walks along the side of the road, kicking an empty can of beer ahead of him, the hollow clinking sound of the can bouncing off the sidewalk there to distract him from his own thoughts. At the height of this late-summer’s heat, a restless energy has set into the city, with the days slowly growing noticeably shorter and the evening’s skies turning a burnt, brown colour when the sun dips beneath the skyline to the west. Loose pieces of paper litter the street. A car alarm sounds off. A pair of dogs bark at nothing. All the shops along the street are shuttered, hardly after sundown and already the city sheltering itself from what it’s come to expect the night holds. But not tonight. No, tonight there’s only a subdued quiet, altogether out of character for what we’ve come to expect from the night, where there should be shouting and raised fists and smashed-in windows on this night there’s only that eerie almost-silence that comes from a people brimming with discontent.
The working man knows what the future holds, but only in the sort of primal, instinctive way that he can. Still coming home at the end of the day, he retires to his little box of an apartment and sits at his window, looking out from his vantage point over the alley that runs between apartment blocks in this part of the city. On this night, the city’s in the midst of a heat wave, the unseasonable warmth pushing the temperatures almost to forty degrees. Through the wide-open window a breeze wafts in. Suddenly, the power fails, the whole apartment, the alley outside falling dark in an instant, the city beyond immersed in an unending sea of black. In the distance there’s the sound of sirens wailing and the sound of something thumping hard against the ground. Still the working man sits, watching another sleepless night pass slowly in this, the interlude that always precedes an explosion of hatred and violence. Still the working man leans back against his windowsill as a thousand different thoughts pull his mind in a thousand different directions, events weighing on him so. This place, this city in this country seems in the midst of an identity crisis, outright schizophrenic in its ability to embody all the conflicting truths competing for the minds of the people who live within its vast, sprawling expanse. No more than a few days are left before the inevitable happens, and still there’s so much left at stake, so much left to be said between the whole lot of us, if only we were still talking to each other. In the night, things change, for the night is the working man’s time, under the cover of darkness the alley behind his little apartment coming alive with the deafening sound of silence.
At some point, events seem to take on a life of their own, defying any attempt to rein them in by any party to the unfolding conflict. At some point, one can only read so many headlines, so many stories of the working man deprived of his livelihood and evicted from his home before one becomes numb to the working man’s plight. It’s the way history changes. History is like an impersonal force; it finds whatever it needs to advance. We often think of our history as being led by great men, as being made by dramatic events, and without them the future we live in would’ve turned out radically different. And in some ways this is true. No matter who steps forward to make themselves into the icons of men, history will find a way to achieve its inexorable advance. In the working man’s quarters, there comes a moment when he changes irrevocably. It’s as though a switch has been flipped, in an instant his awareness graduating to a higher plane. No longer aware of himself only as one of many, the working man suddenly conceives of himself as many of one. It doesn’t matter what happens to prompt this in him; if you ask him, he’ll swear with absolute certainty that he’s seen himself this way all along. It’s like this, it’s always been like this, as the night passes slowly and the sirens wail in the distance it’s as though by some divine influence the working man has come to silently accept what must be done only days before circumstances align to allow change we’ve never seen before.
Before we proceed any further, I have to warn you of what lies ahead. Though we’ve seen much misfortune meted out by man against man, what comes next will make every life lost, every livelihood
deprived until now seem not a tragedy by comparison but mere happenstance. As men are wont to do, the working man has his own idols, even if most of his brothers do not recognize his idols as such. Right now, the working man’s leaderless, like a ship without a rudder, cast adrift, at the mercy of the currents. Right now, the working man is decided on throwing his lot in with the rising tides of history, but without a steady hand to guide him he may find himself hurled against the rocky shores at the base of an imposing cliff. In the night, the sirens in the distance never stop wailing, instead fading in and out, warbling and whooping while the city lurches and lumbers through another night of disarray.
At last, dawn breaks. A new day promises the arrival of a new era, one in which all accounts shall be settled and all debts shall be forgiven. A future lays itself out before us like a road reaching across the desert landscape towards the horizon, offering itself as the way forward. But it’s not for the faint of heart. Before the day is out, Valeri will join in the fires of liberation burning brighter and hotter than ever before, in this, our apocalypse rising.
16. The Die is Cast
After so many years of neglect, it’s all come to this. In the streets, the day has come, across the United Kingdom ordinary workers, students, and parishioners take to the streets of cities large and small, among them Valeri Kovalenko in with a crowd on a street somewhere not far from Westminster itself. Although their stated reason for gathering is to protest the government’s austerity measures, events soon degenerate into the venting of rage. The crowd advances towards a line of troopers standing across the street with their arms at the ready. We’ll never know the reason why it happened, what happens next. A thrown rock or bottle, someone trooper’s jostled elbow, or just plain panic. A gunshot cracks through the air, then silence. Another gunshot cracks, then another, then another, soon the rattling of indiscriminate gunfire chattering in the air, tearing holes in the sound of so many people screaming, this time screams of raw terror. The black-clad troopers move forward in a ragged, jagged line, shepherding the crowd down the street with a wave of death, leaving behind blood-soaked asphalt and a scattering of broken, lifeless bodies. It’s a sight that recalls memories of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry more than fifty years ago, for those old enough to remember such acts of cold-blooded murder. At the polytechnic, news breaks of the massacre moments after the first bodies hit the pavement, and the students riot. Sean Morrison’s one of the first to pick up a stone and hurl it through a nearby window, soon the whole crowd seemingly ten times larger as they rampage across the polytechnic’s grounds, setting fires, overturning cars, and smashing glass.
Hearing the crack of gunfire and the screaming of voices in terror, Valeri makes for the side of the street, seeking cover. But he trips over the curb and finds himself set upon by a young trooper, shielding his face with his hands as the trooper rains blows on him with a nightstick. In the chaos, this exchange becomes lost, the two men struggling against one another drawing the attention of Valeri’s friend Murray. In two strides, Murray’s alongside them, his iron fist describing an arc in the air and landing on the trooper’s head; a second later Murray tosses the trooper aside, the trooper’s body sagging under the impact of two leaden blows to the face. Murray reaches for Valeri, grabs him by the shoulders, and sets him on his feet. “Let’s go,” Murray says, “we should leave.” Valeri nods. They make off down an alley. At the underground church, the parishioners cut off from their rogue priest emerge into the street, clutching Bibles, chanting in time with one another, demanding justice for the fallen. As Darren Wright is among them, he feels not afraid of the policeman’s bullets but emboldened by their use in massacring the demonstrators, at the centre of his chest an anger rising that should guide his steps along the street and never lead him astray.
In the working class blocks, the mood strikes immediately. “They’re murderers,” says one man. In the days to come, everything changes. “You don’t know two hundred were killed fighting for our homes!” insists another. “They gave up their lives gladly for our happiness,” still another says. “And for our cause!” says one more. At the union halls, in the classrooms, in the pews these views are angrily shared among men. Workers stage massive strikes. Students walk out of classes. Churches hold sermons where pastors and preachers alike deliver moving eulogies for the dead and call the faithful to action. Video screens replay the carnage from every conceivable angle, slowing down the footage, breaking the furious action into a series of lifeless stills, at once seeming to magnify the gravity of what’s happened even as they transform it into a caricature of itself. But for men like Garrett Walker this massacre strikes home, Garrett sees the carnage played over and over on his screens, shown from every conceivable angle, slowed until one can see the blood spilled frame-by-frame. He imagines his daughters among those killed, not by choice, as if the dark essence has seized his thoughts and taken them places he’d never go on his own. Soon he’s in the streets with all the other unemployed men, so emasculated by their forcible unemployment, mobbing the nearest police station, hurling stones and voices over the fortifications until nothing seems as it was.
The furious and confusing turn of events isn’t lost on Valeri, who feels in his blood a heat rising with his heart’s every beat. With each breath he gulps down air. It’s an impossible moment, but necessary and transformative. It’s as though a switch has flipped and the common interest given rise anew like a surge of raw electricity through a long-dead circuit. Still, he thinks of Hannah. Still he wishes for her safety. Meanwhile, amid the bloodshed across the city and around the country people like Rose Powell and Miguel Figueroa wait with their fingers on the trigger, sensing their moment is almost at hand. It’s an incredible time, with war in the offing and for more men and women than not it will see us through our destiny. “We must not waver in our commitment to law and order,” says a uniformed man in on the screens, “we must not give in to terror and lawlessness.” But he says these things even as his voice is drowned out by a chorus of voices all crying out in anger, fear, and sorrow, his words emanating under the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, seeping through the streets while people like Valeri draw every breath as though it’s their last. After his release from the stockade, Private Craig Thompson hears of the massacre, the whole barracks waiting for news of their loved ones in the area. Though they know the odds anyone they know is killed are minimal, still they fear. For a little while Craig considers this might be the worst, that the next day will see order arise out of the chaos. But it’s not to be. They’re given orders, the Colonel says, to be ready to deploy immediately, and the troops assume this must mean to the streets of Britain. In time, their future mission will lead each of them to do things they never thought they’d do.
In the streets, Valeri and Murray become separated; for Valeri, the day is ended by limping back to his apartment to find Hannah gone. But outside, word has already spread of the massacre, leaving more questions than answers. “You’ve wasted your time talking,” says one woman in the working class slums that reach across the countryside. “There can be no more talk,” agrees another. “It’s time for action!” insists a third. The fourth, a younger woman, on the cusp of realizing her place, says, “surely the answer to killing doesn’t lie in more killing.” You see, we’re not there yet. At Valeri’s apartment, the halls are abuzz with energy, and the wailing of distant sirens invades through every open window. Still Hannah has not returned; he’ll later learn she’s at the hospital tending to the dead and dying, working twenty hours and sleeping four. He fears she’s died in the violence. “You must be crazy,” says Graham Russell, Valeri running into him in the stairwell on the way back out, “going out in a time like this.” “No, I’m not crazy,” says Valeri, stepping past the old man, “I’m mad.” Still in jail when the massacre shocks the world, Stanislaw Czerkawski pushes with the other prisoners right up against the bars of their cells, banging, rattling, all at once shouting for the loved ones in the streets who could be
fighting and dying at this very moment. Somehow, one of the cells is burst open, then another, then another, soon Stanislaw running with a mob down a corridor, each of them wielding a makeshift club as they charge the jail’s guards. There’s the cracking of gunshots and the spilling of blood, but the guards are too few and the prisoners too many, too angry. Soon the inmates have seized control, ejected the guards, and set fire to parts of the building, none of them guided by anything other than the passions of the degraded so released.
