‘They have to be introduced to violence,’ Turvey said. ‘Someone has to prepare them. I’m ready for the killing.’
‘Our revolutionary legend’s a bit weak,’ he said, wondering why he should be trying to excuse them and himself.
Turvey went to sleep then, head on his drawn-up knees.
His liver was crushed and he had abdominal perforations; he died during the operation. He had been an inseparable comrade of mine throughout the preceding years. When he fell in combat, he asked that I be given his watch. We carried his body and took it to be buried far from there.
Who is Sylvia?
There had been no politics in her life as a child and no classical music.
There had been, it seemed, years of talk about who was to wash the dishes and who to dry, she or her brother, and about pop stars on the walls of her room, and about what was on at the pictures. The pictures had been the colour of the week. The days between Saturdays were simply spaces between films.
There had been much loud and puzzling talk between her father and mother about her father coming from the club late for dinner now and then, puzzling because as far as she could see this had been his only marital offence. Sometimes he brought home pounds of prawns or lobster, more than they could eat, saying, ‘Always buy more than enough of a good thing.’
Her mother bought gadgets for the kitchen until the kitchen cupboards were a museum of abandoned and superseded gadgets. She bought ornaments for the lounge room until the shelves and recesses of the lounge room sheltered crowds of petrified birds, animals, and nymphs, which had to remain there stiffly posed until freed by accidental breakage.
The newspapers were delivered and her father might say, ‘More taxes,’ and her mother would say, ‘Bread up.’ Sometimes they said things beginning, ‘Remember during the Depression …’ But usually they said, ‘He’s an odd-looking chap,’ and, ‘What a dreadful accident.’
She supposed some of this could be called politics and she supposed the radio was music, but she, of course, meant something different. Her economics teacher in the last year at High School was a socialist. He spoke, she thought, like – milk? He rode a bicycle to school, scorned fashion, advertising, and the ownership of things. She and Carl and a few of the others also came to scorn these things.
She was now buying the things of a young woman – bras, sanitary napkins, deodorant, stockings, eye liner, and pale pearl lipstick. She bought 45s and Penguins.
On Saturday nights she was taken to the pictures by Carl, the son of a rich farmer. The farmer lived with his family in town and each day drove his Humber to the farm. Carl was school captain and pursued her with zeal. He was good at everything, especially history. He set the styles for the group around him – length of hair and where the sleeves of the school uniform were to be rolled to show contempt.
He ran hard long-distance races which she watched hysterically – made hysterical by her screaming girl friends and because of his gasping body and his penis which was so obvious under the silk running shorts, but mainly, she thought, because of her giggling, screaming girl friends. He went home with her after school most afternoons either wheeling his bike or wobbling around her on it.
They would sit on the back step holding hands. They sometimes kissed in the corner of the playground at school, sitting down the embankment out of sight in the knee-high green kikuyu.
They began going to the pictures together, at first secretly, and then he’d told his mother, who’d asked, ‘Is she of good moral standing?’
He lived in a house which was cleaned by a housekeeper and had nothing out of place, except, she thought, herself. Everything in the house was modernised and nothing was broken. He himself seemed, though, to visit rather than live in the house. She’d watch him uncertainly opening cupboards, never sure of where anything from the household was, conscientiously never leaving a mess. There seemed to be guilt about making tea as though he was unrightfully taking something from the household and disturbing its order.
His mother’s housekeeper even made the beds.
He said he was a socialist too and read to her from the Communist Manifesto which was the only personal thing he left lying around the house. He said his father disapproved but didn’t say anything because he thought it might be ‘education’. His mother had found it and cried manipulative tears. Do you still believe in God?
He read to her: ‘On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital and private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But the state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians and in public prostitution.
‘The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.’
She hadn’t understood the economics of it but she’d identified, in a shivering adolescent way, with the sentiment of revolution. The idea of people starving made her mad: capitalism deserved a revolution.
She didn’t, however, dislike her mother and father as much as he disliked his. Although she disliked his mother and father as much as he did. His father was a landowner and a shareholder. Her father simply worked in insurance.
When he read to her at his house they would also kiss and after a while he would move his hand up under her dress and under her pants and into her vagina and she would undo his fly and work her hand in through his underpants on to his penis. He would undo his belt and she would play with him until he came, jerking into her hand.
This was when his parents were out which was just about all the time because they belonged to all the organisations in the town.
The socialist economics teacher gave her Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and once kissed her while his wife was out. With a dreadfully serious face, he had grabbed her wrists and kissed her. She’d thought she respected him and had more or less by reflex pushed him away and he’d gone with her push quite readily, apologising quickly, saying it was really meant more as a friendly kiss. ‘You are a very remarkable girl, Sylvia,’ and so on. She’d said she couldn’t because of Helen (his wife). Couldn’t what? She’d said she had to go, blushing and disconcerted, wanting mostly, though, to appear to have composure.
Carl and she went to university in the city and his mother and father retired to the city. She left her mother and father behind her and really didn’t want to. His came with him although he didn’t want them. A funny irony.
They talked about joining the Communist Party but the Twentieth Congress turned them away. Carl read to her from Khrushchev’s secret speech, ‘Many thousands of honest and innocent communists have died as a result of this monstrous falsification of such “cases”, as a result of the fact that all kinds of slanderous “confessions” were accepted, and as a result of the practice of forcing accusations against oneself and others … In those years repressions on a mass scale were applied which were based on nothing tangible and which resulted in heavy cadre losses to the party.’
They began calling themselves Trotskyists after meeting some Trotskyists.
One Saturday afternoon while her married sister and husband were out (she was living with them) Carl and she had begun kissing as usual but he’d unzipped her skirt and begun to undress her, there on the carpeted floor of the lounge room. There had been no blood and no pain. It hadn’t given her much more pleasure than the kissing because he’d finished so quickly and she’d been unprepared for it and she’d thought she’d become pregnant. But she’d known it would happen sooner or later and was in a way surprised it had taken him so long to get around to it, although they were really rather nervous about sex. Except when talking about abolition of the bourgeois family.
She’d gone on to the Pill. It was still pretty quick on the occasions which followed. They said they now really loved each other, adultly, and made love whenever they could. She’d read of, but wasn’t sure of, female orgasm and he never
discussed it with her. She guessed she didn’t have an orgasm, which she’d read wasn’t uncommon.
Carl had met, with Kim and the others from the Labor Club, an American called Paul Jonson, who said he was a newspaper man but who could have been a CIA agent and this had been discussed. Carl, much more than she and the others, had become friendly, if not downright fascinated, with Jonson, and sometimes saw him when he could have seen her. Although he was the one who always said Americans were the main enemy.
Jonson didn’t even have a political consciousness.
She’d said, ‘Let’s meet downtown and go to a film.’
He’d said, ‘I’ll be at Paul’s,’ or something like that.
She’d thought he’d meant for her to pick him up at Paul’s.
For whatever reason, whether it was his mistake or hers, whether he’d unconsciously meant for her to fall into the ambiguity or whether she’d unconsciously decided to misinterpret it, or whatever, she went to Paul Jonson’s flat that afternoon.
At the door of Paul Jonson’s flat she’d heard low sounds from inside which she could not readily identify, which reached her intimately but which were discoloured, discordant, passing then instantly from the sounds of intimacy to sounds of warning.
The same sounds, she thought, as Carl made when he was running, or no – when he was making love – or more like those noises she made when making love which she’d heard from herself during those seconds of awareness which came to her during their love-making before she closed her eyes and switched into blankness or on occasions almost lost herself.
She heard voices, soft, and could not hear what they were saying, if they were anything more than noises, but recognised now from the sounds that they were from lovers. And for her to beware.
She had at first not understood why those sounds should come from Carl in Jonson’s flat. But the realisation then came through her like cold blood. Carl was using Jonson’s flat to be with another girl. Then why had he asked her to come? Had he?
She meant then to go away but didn’t – knocking. Silence from the flat, whispering, then movement. Jonson answered the door.
‘Sylvia?’ he said, startled, standing in a bathrobe, an envelope in his hand. ‘Oh God, I thought it was a messenger from the office to collect copy.’ A pause. ‘I can’t ask you in. I was just about to take a bath.’ Another pause of confusion. ‘I really can’t be sociable – in a mad rush.’
She looked past him inside. She saw Carl’s brief-case. She saw record covers on the floor near a record player and read them, as her mind tried to comprehend the situation: Haydn, Theresa Mass, The Sturm und Drang, Haydn, Bach Suites Nos 3 and 4, Menuhin. Jonson was embarrassed.
‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘I was looking for Carl, he said to meet him here.’
‘Meet him here? He’s not here. Carl’s not here.’
For an instant she believed. Then back to the brief-case and the noises and she knew Jonson was lying.
Who was the girl? She took his arm away from across the doorway and went into the flat, walking across to the bedroom door.
‘Sylvia, please, don’t,’ Jonson said.
She opened the door and saw Carl in bed, startled, alone. His clothes on the floor.
She was confused. She began to say ‘What,’ when another almost incommunicable realisation came to her. No. It banged her head. No. She backed out of the room, looking at Jonson, his hand in his hair, sick with embarrassment. No. She went from the flat quickly. Nothing was said.
When Carl rang her on another day she told him never to contact her again. He said he felt a hell of a guilt, sick with guilt, and it would never happen again. She hung up.
She saw him from time to time at university and the Labor Club but avoided speaking to him and did not return his uncertain smiles.
Kim talked comfort to her in his steel-ribbed way for what he thought had been some sort of devastating row between Carl and her. She resolved not to tell of the incident. She was not, though, deeply wounded. She cried. Perhaps it was a sort of innocent shock – that Carl who had said he loved her and was from school and her town could be like that.
But it permitted her to know that her ‘affair’ with Carl had been more a habit than anything else. Kim was older and already a teacher, and very much more of a Trotskyist than Carl. He began making love to her and after a while she thought she could at least be sure of him sexually. They had a cool love. They married at a registry office the day after she graduated from Teachers College. Only a single, flashing, schoolday sentiment of Carl came to her during the ceremony – of a football graze on the flesh of his young buttock which she’d dressed – but it was inked out and taken away by a censoring disgust and she returned quickly to the words of the state ceremony.
The Revolutionary Kidney Punch
He stood in the pub as if covered by a sandwich board made from the four bearded folk singers, knowing he was in friction with yet another of the town’s dog-like prejudices. He teaches our children.
‘It’ll get the young people in,’ he said. What young people? Milkbar greasy heads. He saw the beer guts of twenty-year-olds. The young people.
‘You reckon we’ll have an audience then?’ the leader with the beard and the tight striped trousers and waistcoat and riding boots said.
‘Apathy,’ he said, ‘but this is something new – folk-singing – that’s something new.’
‘You reckon Labor’ll win?’
‘Affluence – Labor needs a crisis to win.’
‘In the city we’re packing them in.’
‘Political songs?’
‘Sort of – Dylan and all that.’
He nodded. If the songs could be sung through loudspeaker systems into shops and streets and factories. There were no factories. Into the farms. The farms. He saw the muddy cow bails, heard the suck and release of the pulsator, the flies. Christ, how could you build a socialist society on flies and mud and the smell of milk? Marx wanted grand pianos in the fields. That was right. Music was propaganda. Great propaganda. The workers didn’t sing, though. That was the trouble. Seeger could get them to sing. The workers in Woolworths, the waterside workers, the lot. But he saw the main street of this town, the Greek cafes, the fish-and-chip shops, the rubber stamps in banks and insurance branches – would they sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with Seeger? Hardly. It was all frigging hopeless.
‘Did you hear Seeger when he was out here?’
‘He’s all right,’ said the Leader.
‘Didn’t hear Robeson.’
‘We requested “Joe Hill” – Robeson asked for requests and we wrote it on a piece of paper and passed it down to him. He sang it. You going to sing “Joe Hill”?’
‘Don’t know it.’
‘Don’t know it? I have a record of him singing it to the British dockers. I’ll play it to you.’
‘Like to hear it.’ The folk-singers shuffled around.
‘We’ve booked you at the Memorial Hall – you’ll be staying at the Commercial.’
‘The Commercial – there’s one in every town.’
‘The local radio station will interview you – we’ve got spots for you too.’
‘Great.’
‘Some of the older members of the Party opposed it, you know.’
‘Having folk-singers?’
‘They say it’s too much like show business.’
‘If you’re going to get young people you’ve got to appeal to them.’
‘That’s what I said.’
The hall was nearly empty. A few children, sons and daughters of branch members, the branch stalwarts, a few kids he hadn’t seen. The hall was practically empty.
How could you ask them to join in singing when most of the seats were empty? How could you sing ‘We Shall Overcome’? No one joined in. He and Sylvia did but it was no use. Alan, the CP organiser, did. ‘We Shall Overcome’ was no good unless there was a lot to sing it.
What could you do with a town like this? It would ha
ve to be dragged into line. A few platoons of worker militia would run the town. Perhaps the farm workers. The teachers would be OK. Would the Rotarians have to be eliminated? The Lions?
As he stacked the chairs he thought, well, so much for revolution. Tomorrow the hall would be used for a flower show.
At the party afterwards he said he was sorry there hadn’t been a crowd.
‘That’s show business,’ the Leader of the group said.
‘That’s politics,’ he said, ‘in this country,’ looking around at the few schoolteachers and branch members in their ties and suits.
‘It’s all hopeless,’ Sylvia said.
‘Where are all the birds?’ the young singer Phillip asked.
‘There just aren’t any girls in the branch,’ he said.
‘Except me,’ Sylvia said, poking out her tongue at him, ‘sometimes he forgets I’m a girl.’
Grins.
‘How do you stand it – the town I mean?’
‘Teachers don’t have any choice,’ Sylvia said, ‘we go where we’re told. We came from the city.’
He asked the folk-singers if they knew the song ‘Which Side Are You On?’
‘How’s it go?’
‘Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how the good old union,
Has come in here to dwell,
Which side are you on
Which side are you on?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said the Leader.
‘No,’ said the others.
‘It’s from the Kentucky miners’ battles – against armed deputies – class warfare.’
The folk-singers looked at him with polite attention.
‘Here in the town the Young Liberals don’t even bother to tear down the posters,’ Sylvia said hopelessly.
‘Bloody Harlan –’ he persisted, whether they were interested or not, ‘the miners and deputies fought it out – with guns – they used to go around beating the union leaders up.’
Sylvia said, ‘We’re going to the city to demonstrate against the President, are you?’
The Americans, Baby Page 11
