A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I read Das Kapital,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Joaquin said, with amusement. ‘No, you didn’t read the Capital. It doesn’t matter, but you don’t need to say that. You like those others? You like the boy James, James Frinton?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, surprised, adding lamely, ‘He lives in a pub.’ That was the most interesting thing about him.

  ‘He’s a strange one,’ Joaquin said. ‘I don’t know why it’s him who’s the leader of that group you’re in.’

  I looked at him, amazed. ‘He’s not the leader,’ I said. Then I remembered the world as it should be. I said, ‘The group doesn’t have leaders. How should it?’ But of course I had been surprised, not because Joaquin had thought the group had a leader but because he had identified the wrong one. Ogden was the leader, the guiding political spirit.

  ‘He listens to everything,’ Joaquin said. ‘Then maybe he says something. Everyone likes him. I guess I like him. His mother, you’ve met the mother? Kate says she’s crazy, the father bastard only interested in money but can’t make money. He’s on his own, he knows that. Kate goes to see him once, just wants to see. What makes this guy? I tell you. If I am sixteen and woman, twenty, comes to see me, my mother very concerned about it. Those parents they don’t care. He’s on his own. He’s going to make his life his self. It’s like he’s an orphan and, believe me, an orphan sixteen years old, that’s a dangerous thing. Like me, an orphan. We say whatever we need to say.’

  ‘Would you ever go back to Chile?’ I said. I could see Joaquin at the head of an army of widows, orphans, exiles, revolutionaries, standing in a hurtling jeep in the hot sun, hurtling under arches of white bougainvillaea and hibiscus, his arms outspread in acknowledgement and welcome.

  ‘Chile, no,’ Joaquin said, bright with hilarity. ‘That is over for me. Someone else can deal with it. Put it right. What I have to do is here and now. You know what I mean?’

  What astonished me was to discover that Joaquin and I were exactly the same height. He had seemed so big, and so physically substantial with bone and hard flesh. I hardly knew how to place myself in relation to that physical scale. It was only now that I discovered our faces were in the same place, exactly level, six feet above the concrete floor of the balcony where marigolds, scarlet geraniums, marijuana plants, purple, pink, aquamarine and yellow snapdragons sat in pots, one warm evening, within the all-including rich, masculine smell of Joaquin, the revolutionary. Joaquin’s kiss, when it came, was a fact of inevitable nature, like a warm front predicted on the news bulletin and then experienced without surprise, recognized rather, a fact quite external to our characters. I had no idea, or not much, that it was in me to kiss a twenty-two-year-old Chilean Spartacist until it was actually happening, and once it started, I had a moment of shock, almost alarm, that I am a male and I am being kissed by another male before a more certain and individual sense that I was meant to be kissed like this, with the solid arms around my back and shoulders, the thick trunk of the tongue in my mouth, pushing back at my own tongue, the rough rub of Joaquin’s face against mine and, I knew, my right hand gripping the short curly hair on the flat back of Joaquin’s head. His odour was all around me. I closed my eyes and was within it. I had kissed girls before, but I had never, it now seemed, been kissed. Everything in the world that was soft and tentative, pink, blushing and yielding was gone from my life in a moment. I had no idea where I found myself in this new world of definite statements and solid certainty. I had no idea where I was. From now on I resolved to devote my life to the liberation of the urban proletariat.

  Joaquin pulled back for a moment, his arms still around me. His beautiful face was filled with laughter and amused joy.

  ‘The way you were looking at me,’ he said, and he plunged once more at my face.

  Some sign of the alteration in me must have been there when we came back into the flat, and went upstairs again. Those ten minutes changed everything, rerouted my neural pathways, told me where I stood in relation to happiness. Of course I had thought of men in such a way before, in ways that could be ignored or dismissed as a normal part of the development of the adolescent male (I am quoting). But I had not thought of Joaquin in all his detail – the rough texture of the skin on that arc between thumb and forefinger, the surprising pinkness his dark flesh produced at mouth and nipple. It was just Joaquin. He was not there on my mind until he was there in front of me. Then, of course, I should have seen him coming a mile off. The change in me would have been obvious to anyone, a brightening, an opening up, the way I looked around me and (I suppose) the way I was holding my arms as if something large and important had just been taken from them. Certainly, too, there was the more obvious truth that my face must have been rubbed raw and red by Joaquin’s unshaven chin. It is the superficial and apparently insignificant physical facts that are essential in this world, the ones that last in the mind and that matter. Abstract principles, on the other hand, shift, alter and dissolve without anyone thinking twice about them. Joaquin came in off the balcony. Straight away he discarded his flapping yellow flip-flops. He walked in front of me barefoot up the stairs. Nobody in the upper flat could have heard when he stopped walking, barefoot, halfway up, and seized me for one more kiss, just by a poster of a monument. I now know it was of Vladimir Tatlin’s tower for the Soviet revolution, the Monument to the Third Internationale, a tower a thousand feet high that was never built. It never could have been built.

  In the sitting room, too, they were talking about the Soviets.

  ‘We have to give up on Poland,’ Kate was saying, her fingers working – I saw afterwards that she had a roll of Sellotape. She was rolling the end into a kind of ball, an anxiety-solution for her. ‘I don’t see the way forward.’

  ‘There is always a way forward,’ James Frinton said.

  ‘Well,’ Kate said, ‘there’s a choice between this so-called trade unionist, the imperialist-funded guy in Gdansk. And the government. They’ve run out of ideas. They’ve run out of trust. They’ve forgotten what they’re there for. They’re sclerotic. Seized up. Stalinist dinosaurs. Everything okay?’

  ‘Yes, everything just fine,’ Joaquin said. ‘Fine, fine.’

  Kate gave him an inscrutable look. It was the egotism, the solipsism of sixteen that made me believe she could know nothing of what had just happened to me. It is the wisdom of late middle age and my knowledge, extensively acquired through Joaquin’s ribald narratives, of Kate’s character that now makes me say she knew nothing of what had happened because she was not very observant or curious. If an event happened out of sight and it would not bring her to the fore in some substantive way, it hardly touched her. Her notion of love came in literary phrases, ones she had heard before and then chosen to write down to flag up her sensitivity.

  Like an angel, the man on the bus

  looked deeply and passionately into my eyes.

  No bus, no man and nobody said anything. Her eyes passed over Joaquin and over me.

  ‘The thing I wonder about,’ Frinton said, ‘is the Pope.’

  ‘The Pope?’ Ogden said. ‘What’s the Pope got to do with anything? That’s your way forward, is it? Fuck the Pope!’

  ‘The Pope, who’s Polish,’ Frinton said, explaining slowly.

  ‘I know who he is,’ Ogden said, matching him for a patronizing leisureliness of tone. ‘I don’t see what he’s got to do with the Polish problem. He’s essentially a head of state, a foreign state, a sclerotic one.’

  ‘He turns up and he inspires the man from Gdansk,’ Frinton said. ‘He says one sentence and the government in Warsaw is fucked. Do you know what he said? Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘Means Be afraid. Be afraid of me,’ Joaquin said. ‘I know these motherfuckers. They were on the side of Pinochet in Chile.’

  ‘There’s a lot of Poles who call themselves Roman Catholic before anything else,’ Frinton said. He didn’t want to contradict Joaquin directly
. Again I glimpsed the power Joaquin had within his lightness.

  ‘It’s insane,’ Kate said. ‘Why are they hanging on to that? These old fairytales! Lovely, lovely sugar-coated Candy Mountain where you can eat toffee apples for free from the trees forever, waiting for you when you die …’ She was sitting down, but she pranced with her arms and torso, saying for fwee fwom the twees fowever to indicate that this wasn’t her talking. ‘And in the meantime here’s your life – fifteen hours a day down a mine so that the owner can get rich. Most of the world’s forgotten about God and all that. Humanity grows out of it. Not in Poland. Why?’

  ‘Euan is not agreeing with this,’ Joaquin said. ‘Euan thinks—’

  ‘Oh, Euan thinks,’ Kate said, with a flurry of action through her loose hair. A biro tinkled to the linoleum floor as she rummaged over her head. ‘Euan lives in the world as it should be, not the world as it is. The Pope Wojtyła comes to Poland. Two million people come to genuflect before him in Warsaw, another two million in Kraków. You know what Euan says? There weren’t two million. At the most twenty thousand. Black propaganda by the Western media. They were the same people at every stop.’

  ‘What Stalin said,’ Ogden said. ‘“The Pope!” Do you know this? Somebody said something about the Vatican, what will the Vatican do about something. And Stalin said, “The Pope! How many battalions does the Pope have?” He had a point.’

  ‘The Pope doesn’t have battalions,’ Joaquin said. ‘He doesn’t need them. You see – I know. I come from a country that knows about this crap. And we never had a Chilean pope neither.’ By now he had, quite naturally, slipped away from me. He was perching on the arm of the sofa where Kate and Eric rested on each other, somewhat entwined in a comradely way.

  ‘Nobody can say it isn’t a problem,’ Kate said. ‘There must be a solution.’

  ‘Define your question,’ Tracy said.

  ‘And get an answer,’ Mohammed said, in catechistic response. ‘Why doesn’t Moscow act? They’ve acted before.’

  Eric was bursting with laughter, I think unfeignedly. ‘Define your question,’ he was saying. ‘Tracy, I love it when you strike a pose.’

  ‘They think it’s under control,’ Ogden said, ignoring Eric. ‘The general has taken charge. The puppet of imperialism is in jail, isn’t he? Memory of the Pope is going to fade. What is there for the Soviets to do? They’re busy in Afghanistan. They don’t want to open up a second front. Snipers in Kraków? I don’t think they’re keen on that.’

  ‘The imperialist puppet,’ Frinton said, as if throwing Ogden’s words back at him. ‘He’s called Wałęsa. Lech Wałęsa.’ There was a touch of scorn in the precision with which he rendered that middle consonant, the difficult Polish crossed-out l. It would not be for some years that I would realize that, for him, too, this evening would change the world – this evening we were spending in a scruffy flat, its furniture mostly stolen from skips, posters on the greying wall from radical bookshops, stuck up, against the landlord’s explicit prohibition, with Sellotape.

  ‘The thing you need to remember,’ Kate said, in the emollient, understanding tone that was her main means of control, ‘is that it’s Moscow holding the whole thing together. Threats and money. Or, to be precise, it’s Brezhnev doing it.’

  ‘Kate’s a great believer in Brezhnev,’ Joaquin said genially.

  ‘I think I am,’ Kate said bravely. ‘Maybe we all should be. Brezhnev is the only thing holding all this together. He’s not acting when he could act. And the Poles are pretty grateful for that, believe me. Do you know what Polish television was showing all last December? Films about Hungary 1956.’

  ‘Do you know what Polish television was showing all January?’ Joaquin said, trembling with laughter. ‘Sissi. Ten-part film for TV about the life of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria Hungary, the one the anarchist kills in Geneva. Make you cry. They fucking love that, you know.’

  ‘Wałęsa’s in jail,’ Frinton said.

  ‘Criminals in jail shock,’ Kate said. ‘Treasonous felon sent to prison in surprise government move.’ Kate had comic voices. Like all of us, she sometimes spoke in mock tabloid headlines to ridicule the political positions of other people. ‘Maybe he would have been shot a couple of decades back. I tell you one thing – Brezhnev’s being very tolerant but he’s not going to be around for ever. The next generation down in the Kremlin are real hardliners to a man. In ten years’ time, with one of them in charge, you’re not going to see anything like this Polish chaos being permitted by Moscow. One other prediction from me and that’s your lot – a socialist Yugoslavia within the Soviet sphere of influence and control. It’s only Tito keeping them on this whimsical path. They’re going to face up to realities when he dies. What do you think, Spike?’

  I hardly needed to think. I was spilling over. My tongue had no hesitation. I was speaking to Joaquin, and not to the woman Spartacist who had addressed me. ‘I’d send in the troops. To Warsaw,’ I said. ‘Don’t put up with that crap. Set the whole thing in order. If you let one have its way, before long the whole thing is going to fall. We can’t have that.’

  I don’t know what I was expecting – perhaps applause – but not this embarrassed shifting of feet. ‘Well, yes,’ Eric said. He was still chuckling.

  ‘We love your hard-left friend,’ Kate said to Ogden. ‘It’s the sort of thing we like you bringing into our house.’

  And I was their friend. Perhaps my expertise in constructing friendships had never developed. But my friendship with the Ogden lot and even with the Spartacists was progressing along lines that I felt I was in a position to understand. I had felt so secure and confident in its progress because in some ways its development had been defined from the start. It had aspects of fairness and merit about it. This was unlike most friendships. The process I had been experiencing over the last few days, leading me from Urch to Joaquin, had been much more like a job application. I had been auditioned and the possibilities and range of my conversation had been sampled. The only thing that was irregular was the impulsive gesture of Joaquin in kissing me. And then, of course, the whole thing was revealed as irrational, based in inclination and whim like anything else, including the application for jobs. There is always a Joaquin, whose likes and urges everyone knows about and understands. He always changes everything.

  ‘I thought you were going to make us a cup of tea,’ Tracy said.

  ‘I’ll make you some tea,’ Joaquin said. ‘Just for Tracy, though.’ He left the room, something saucy in his walk.

  ‘He’s so sweet,’ Tracy said, but she looked, smiling, only at me. I sat next to her again. ‘You went to James Frinton’s, right? Did you go in?’

  ‘Yes, he came in,’ James Frinton said, from the other side of the room. ‘It’s not so weird. My mum said hi. My brother was doing his homework. Then you lot turned up and we came here.’

  ‘Next time,’ Ogden said, ‘we can pick you up at your place. It wouldn’t make much difference.’

  ‘If—’ James Frinton said, then stopped himself. ‘When’s the next time?’

  ‘Were you going to say if there’s a next time? James? Were you really?’ Tracy Cartwright said, her slow eyes blinking. ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Of course there’s a next time,’ James Frinton said, as if repeating what somebody had just said. ‘We like having Spike around. He can come any time.’

  ‘Spike’s a find,’ Percy Ogden said. These tributes were dutiful, but my eyes were on the door. I was waiting for Joaquin to return. I knew in my bones he would come with a cup of tea for me too. At that moment everything depended on the answer to this question: would Joaquin, in the kitchen, consider that I, Spike, might like something? The world turned on that question, and no other. But Ogden was continuing to talk. ‘What’s the best thing to do? Are we on for that CND rally next Thursday? Is there anything before that? Anything at all?’

  I waited.
In less than a minute Joaquin would come through the door. I would see if he had thought about me, and about what I wanted. Now I see something else about that minute. What would have been started by Ogden’s question, anything before that. Even then it was not an innocent question. Friends did not engage with each other in the timetabled way that the question implied. There was a lack of innocence from my side, too, in wondering whether there would be anything before the agreed disruption of the CND rally in less than a week’s time. I wanted to be with Joaquin. I guessed that the thing shaping the answer to Ogden’s question was whether I could be included, and in what. The activities of the Spartacists were large set-piece movements and gatherings, but also smaller engagements, often in pairs. Those larger gatherings included participation in or, more often, disruption of substantial protests. Organized large-scale suggestions to the authorities, we thought of them, like three thousand signatories to a petition, turning up in the same place. Those would be my next stages of engagement. Beyond that were the paired-up actions, which at this moment I humbly accepted I would not be invited to, still less undertake on my own. I did not grasp the reasons why, however.

  It was not quite clear to me why the others in Ogden’s group did some things but not others. None of them, for instance, stood and sold the Spartacist newspaper outside the library or at football matches, even though I guess Ogden, Eric and perhaps Mohammed would have been happy to. From the Spartacists’ point of view, this was not a moment of retail exchange but an opportunity to express the collective opinion seamlessly and correctly. There was no possibility that an anarcho-syndicalist like Tracy would have done the job, or a bourgeois single-issue obsessive like Frinton. (They liked both of them. They shook their heads over them.) And even for the others it was a lot to ask, insulting the outraged Tories, telling supporters of the parliamentary fucking Labour Party where they should think again, explaining in close detail what the important facts here were – that would be to intelligent, curious, open people with a Trotskyite bent like me, I suppose. Too much to expect.