A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  Introductions were made. Kate kissed each of us, including me. (But she had only just met me, I remember thinking, with a bourgeois stuffiness about intimacy rituals that I tried to suppress.) ‘Welcome, Spike,’ Kate said formally. Now it is clear that she was a doctor’s daughter, only twenty years old, just as uncertain as any of us, trying to make up her mind how to live and how to improve the lives of people she would never meet, subject like any of us to vulgar complaints like love. She seemed immeasurably wise and experienced, like Goldberry in Tolkien. Her poetry, when I came to read it, was quite wonderful.

  Magic can happen on a bus

  To anyone.

  On the window the mud was like filigree.

  And the man sitting next to me

  On the magical bus

  Which was red

  Said in a stagey way that he was struck with love.

  Like an angel he looked deeply and passionately into my eyes.

  She would show me this poem, and twenty or thirty more, in another week’s time. Joaquin was beyond anything my experience held, but even Kate was extraordinarily mature and thoughtful and impressive. I was not the only one who felt this. The others had gone silent since Joaquin had met us, walking up the seven flights of stairs in a quiet that could only have been awestruck. They were only four or five years older than us. They were separated from us by the lifespan of a pair of Y-fronts. But the awe was there, hanging in the air like the smoke-hung echo after an explosion.

  We’d just missed Euan. He was out, Kate said, doing whatever he had to be doing – it was early in the evening to be painting on walls, so I guess he was at some meeting or men’s group or an ecological action. ‘We ought to hear about it when Euan’s here,’ she said. ‘But I’m too excited. I want to hear about your guy the other day ‒ the military guy?’

  ‘The major who came to speak?’ I said. ‘The one who came to our school?’ I was surprised by Kate’s breadth of interest.

  ‘Percy was going to smash up that guy,’ Joaquin said. ‘We talked about it. You used the numbers we gave you, yes?’

  ‘The guy from the army, he didn’t know what hit him,’ Eric said. I felt an unexpected pressure in the side of my thigh. I was sitting on an old brown sofa, ragged and stained, though not exactly dirty, a pile of paperbacks on the arm. Next to me Tracy had taken off her shoes and drawn her feet up. It was her bare feet that were pumping and pressing against my thigh. Her attention was apparently all on Ogden and his story.

  ‘He just saw a kid in a school uniform with his hand up,’ Tracy said. Her voice was husky, almost seductive in its hoarseness. No one seemed to think her bare feet in my side at all odd or wrong. I wondered if she did it to everyone.

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Kate said. ‘You don’t dress to stand out if you’ve got an action in mind, and with a bit of luck you slide under the radar. The other day – no, last month – Joaquin comes in and he sees me and Euan and I’m wearing a jumper and skirt and pearls, fake pearls from Woolworth’s, and Euan’s wearing a tweed jacket he found in Oxfam. And you said, didn’t you—’

  ‘I said what the hell, Kate,’ Joaquin said happily. ‘And they are going they tell me to a meeting, to this Fascist group, the Monday Club, is it? At the university. Euan he had a bottle of piss, he throws it at the speaker they got, it smashes, they run. I wish I go there too. But no suit, no jacket, no tie. No me.’

  ‘And I guess they’d remember three people but two – it’s just a bloke and his girlfriend,’ I said. I surprised myself. ‘They won’t recognize you if they see you the next day. Different clothes.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Kate said. ‘And I brushed my hair. This one gets the point. We like you. You can come again. So you ask the question. Did you get it all in?’

  Ogden gave a quick grin, like a chimpanzee baring its teeth, a warlike gesture. He started to give the main points of his question, but it was easier to perform it, word for word. I guess they had recited it together, practising it, here and in the houses of the group all over the rest of the city. Occasionally Kate or Joaquin said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ or ‘That’s what I said you should say’, particularly when it came to the figures Ogden had brought out. Whoever had come up with the summary of the cost of an education had been through an education that had been charged for. I wouldn’t enquire, just yet, whether that had been Kate or Euan. The text of the question had been agreed in committee, as it were. Even in the context of a careers visit to a suburban comprehensive school, it was important to them to get the agreed version out. Fission, division, denunciation can follow a speaker who decides to get it more or less right, to leave space for what he himself might think. The early Church divided, after all, when one faction decided to say homoousios and another homoiousios. Ogden went through what it had been agreed that he would say with care, strictly, and without embellishment.

  When it was done Kate gave an audible outward breath. ‘So that was it,’ she said. ‘Did he give any kind of answer?’

  ‘No,’ James Frinton said. ‘He didn’t give any answer. The headmaster shut him down and they went away.’

  Frinton had been quiet since we had left his parents’ pub. Now he spoke emphatically, his eyes cast down. I could not see what he was angry about. It was unusual, I see that now, for Frinton ever to reveal that he was angry, even if he did so, as now, by restraining himself. I think in the future I was to understand that Frinton had, on a particular occasion, been angry or contemptuous, but most people would have been struck on the same occasion by his charm and likeability, turned up a notch or two. This moment of cold, closed dismissal was a rare one. It was something that (obviously) Frinton grew out of. Kate looked at him with a touch of surprise. She gave a kindly sort of smile.

  ‘That’s always the way, isn’t it?’ she said. She made me think what an unlikely revolutionary she was, an implausible and unsuspected hurler of bottles of piss, an innocuous painter of walls, a smooth-faced smasher of windows. ‘They only very occasionally fail and let another voice be heard. But if it ever happens, they pretend nobody said anything. They really are cunts.’

  It was only that last word that made me see Kate as she wanted to be seen. It made me see that she and not Joaquin was the destructive presence there, the presence utterly focused on herself and her own voice and deeds. All her energy was spent presenting herself. Her interest in those around her was a performance, made to cloak her with a sympathetic air. But at first she was not interesting. She was only sympathetic. I reached out to this sympathy. Like most men, I wanted my voice to be heard above all things.

  ‘It wasn’t the whole thing, though,’ I said. ‘The headmaster’ ‒ I wasn’t going to say José with Joaquin there – ‘cut Percy off, saying, “That’s quite enough,” and then he turns round to the major, this soldier, and the major says this one word – I guess he thinks this is going to put Percy in his place or something. He just goes, “Well, yes – mean to say – perfectly honest – harrumph – yes, well – Trotskyite!” And then that’s it.’

  The others had, some time ago, been very clear that this had not happened. But now they did not make any kind of comment. Tracy’s feet in the side of my thigh paused where they were, not removing themselves but holding still. They wanted to know what the Spartacists thought of this anecdote, its plausibility in their eyes. Again I think, with consternation: Those people were only twenty-two, at most.

  ‘I tell you,’ Joaquin said drily. ‘They got that one right.’

  ‘They don’t know, though,’ Eric said. With that, my authority and standing were confirmed. Eric going along with the story of Major Urch saying Trotskyite had the same force as the group starting to echo my word of commensurate. They had agreed that these were words that proved a point that would have been made anyway. ‘He just said Trotskyite like you would say scum. How was he to know that the term was the right one? It was a lucky hit.’

  ‘I don’
t know,’ Joaquin said. ‘I think about it. I don’t know what we’re going to do with all the army. It has, you know, a purpose, real purpose. Close down the army because I mean that major, he is like an idiot, an asshole, and then what do you do with all the working-class men, all those proletariat? They leave school, no learning, they can’t read. You say to me in our society, the one we build, everyone read, everyone education, but I tell you, always some violent men. They don’t like to read or think or paint watercolour painting. Poems. No. It’s a good solution, the army. Not this, not the army of imperialist fighting for territory, but you attack the idea of army, you know what you end up having, excuse me, end up being? Bourgeois pacifist, no army, no nuclear weapons, your friends in Campaign Nuclear Disarm, your friends, Percy, you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘They’re not my friends,’ Percy said. ‘I haven’t agreed with them for years.’

  ‘Well, you lose the nuclear and you leave the Soviet revolution without defence,’ Joaquin said. ‘Hey, I tell you what …’

  Kate got up. Handling it delicately, she extracted a flyer from a red folder on top of the dusty old TV. It was advertising a CND rally at City Hall the following week. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It’s a sign of those long-gone times that an organization like the CND could, in the early 1980s, command a space holding several thousand people. There was a general feeling of doom and despair, I remember, and quite unexpected people had signed up to the proposal that these weapons should be removed from the Earth through a process of disarmament. It was even a bone of contention between my friends Matthew and Simon, the joggers. One wanted abolition, the other believing in a balance of awesome forces to maintain a tranquillity of existence. The point of view, like the Spartacists’, that believed the most important point was that the Soviets not only had a nuclear arsenal but should use it at some point was, I believe, an unusual one even at the time. It didn’t take long for Kate to persuade us that a good thing to do would be to go along to the CND rally the following week and fuck it up. There wouldn’t be that much dressing up to do.

  ‘Cunts,’ Kate said, of the bourgeois pacifists, her eyes shining.

  Somehow I found myself with Joaquin on the flat’s small open space, a little enclosed balcony. I don’t know how we got there. There was no alcohol along the line. I didn’t feel drunk, just open to the possibility of intoxication. Joaquin must have got up in his big, confident way, carrying his mug of tea. Like a duckling, I must have got up too. I would have followed his flapping flip-flops out. I think what it must have looked like. Tracy’s bare feet all at once kneading away at the space where I had been sitting. I don’t think I gave it a moment’s consideration back then in 1982. The world was changing.

  ‘Have you seen the view that we have?’ Joaquin said. His dark eyes were full of pleasure. He was being funny. For some reason to do with design, the balcony we stood on faced away from the city and the lights and what money could produce, and towards the steeply rising black hill that had always been there. A spottily inhabited final block intervened. Then darkness.

  ‘You can see everything,’ I said, trying to be funny. ‘Grass. The other building.’

  ‘It’s interesting, you know? The fifth floor up, seven windows from the left – Spike, count, I show you, three, five, seven, okay? – there’s an old man. Lives there. Very fat. Sunday afternoon, every Sunday afternoon this happens. He takes off all his clothes, walks round, one hour. Then he puts his clothes back on. Sits down again. I forget the important part, sorry, excuse me. Lives there with big fat old lady too, his wife, I guess. Sunday afternoon she goes out. She puts on hat and coat, goes out, shuts the front door, okay, then it is he takes off all his clothes, walks around, very pleased, very happy, one hour, puts back on, sits down, wife comes home. What the fuck, what, why, don’t know. Can’t say. Interesting, I guess. You know?’

  ‘Maybe he just wants to have something that his wife doesn’t know anything about. His naked hour once a week.’

  ‘I guess,’ Joaquin said. Then he brightened. ‘Strange thing, though. Everyone knows about it. Just not his wife. We see him every Sunday, know he’s gonna do this. Same with everyone in this block. They all know the fat old man naked over there, Sunday two thirty three thirty. We like it. Kate and Euan and me, Sunday lunch, whole Spartacist family, finish eating, come down and sit here on this balcony and watch the performance. Very, very nice.’

  ‘Does he wank?’

  ‘Does he – excuse me? Does he – oh, no. Nothing like that. Just a big pink fat baby, only that. How old are you, Spike – Spike, yes? I never heard your name before.’

  ‘I’m sixteen,’ I said.

  ‘I see,’ Joaquin said. ‘And you just now start to think about things ‒ is that the fact of things? When you are sixteen you start to think the world, it is not how I want it. How it must be. And one day you say to a man, a friend, a stranger like me, the world it can change and that friend or stranger he says …’

  He was lost for a moment. I caught a whiff again of Joaquin’s smell – rich, toffee-like, a sour metallic edge to it. He bared his teeth at me, a grin in the dark.

  ‘What’s Chile like?’ I said boldly.

  ‘Oh, you have discovered it,’ Joaquin said. ‘My English is not good because I was in England for ten years even. You have to know – my mother she kept us at home for three years after we came. They only found out I was there and must go to school when I was fourteen and then I spoke English for the first time. So, yes. I am Chilean and my English is not good.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I honestly only meant to ask what Chile is like.’

  ‘Okay, I don’t understand,’ Joaquin said. ‘But they told you about me, I see! So Chile it is a shithole now. There is no future there, it’s all gone. My father he had friends, and now they are in Canada or Australia, Spain, maybe one in Nicaragua. Another shithole. Portugal, here in England. I don’t know where they all go in the end. When I am a kid, they meet every week, twice a week, your house, my house, his house. Ten-minute walk from where you are living, two minutes in the car, or you ask your driver to stay where he is and finish his dinner, you are happy to walk. That kind of life. But now they are never going to see each other ever again. Those are the lucky ones.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘The lucky ones are still alive, you know. My father was not so lucky. He is buried – his body is buried, excuse me – behind a police station somewhere. I guess. Maybe most of his body, not all the finger bones. They cut those off earlier. The usual story. He must have suffered before he died. My mother, she brings us to England.

  ‘That was strange to me. The only time I go out of Chile before that was when I was eight. My father he is invited to East Germany. He is a hero of the German Democratic Republic and they ask him to come and bring his family, two weeks’ holiday and an award for international friendship. I remember that very well. And then we are in England, everything very strange, with my mother in this house in London. All the time she is saying that he escaped, he is fine, he is in Guatemala or in the ‒ I don’t know ‒ Seychelles maybe. She thinks he doesn’t phone us because then, ring-ring, the Chilean government guys they are listening in and then they know where to find him. I have a sister. To her, too, she says that when we are safe your father comes and finds us. I don’t know that she believes what she says. She says that all the time we are in the flat, three years, just us in London, Camden Town ‒ you know Camden Town?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, sorry? Sorry is still to come,’ Joaquin said. He was quite calm, even with the appearance of enjoyment. He was fixing me with a look of real concentration. From inside the flat came a yell of disappointment – I think it was Percy Ogden, groaning over some false or implausible move in an argument. He hated to lose an argument, and he pretended to hate an inadequate challenge in argument. Joaquin must have heard this sound
many times before, probably more often than I had. He went on with his own familiar story. ‘What happened, okay, is that a guy comes one day to our house in Camden Town. I know this guy, I see his face from the old days, and he comes in and sits with my mother for two hours. Me I get told, go away, take your sister Rosa, nothing to hear. Then he goes. What I think now is that this guy he shows my mother something, tells her something that afterwards she doesn’t think ‒ no, she knows that there is no husband in Guatemala or Seychelles. Hiding until the time is safe. Then she understands, no question, he is no longer living, not writing because he is beyond all that. So the little family goes on. It has to. I don’t know how my mother goes on. I guess if you have son, twelve, thirteen, and little girl too, then you have to, you must go on. So there it is. What happened to you?’

  Joaquin’s tone was guileless, apparently a real question. It was what people said when they noticed that a stranger had injured his face, for example, or torn his clothes, nothing more than that. In a moment I understood what he meant, perhaps enquiring about what series of injustices had set me off on the radical path, to be standing with a South American revolutionary on a balcony so small that, if either of us moved, our bodies briefly brushed against each other. But there was no injustice. The injustices were yet to come. Everything had been comfort, indulgence, opportunity, and the usual comment of the sixteen-year-old that none of this was fair. It wasn’t fair, but that, I felt, would not keep me on the balcony with Joaquin. I said something absurd. It had worked before.