After emotions have run high, we may be forgiven for expecting this ad-hoc assembly to explode into violence at any moment, but it never comes. Men like Valeri must focus on their next meal, this recent strike having succeeded, it seems, only in proving on the ability of the way of things to weather this current storm. But in this interlude, this in-between period when working man keeps on working, Valeri keeps these things in the back of his mind even as he tends to affairs closer to the heart. Valeri and Maria don’t see each other for a while after that chance encounter in the market; he stays away from anyplace he’s seen her and she, well, she tends to the simple task of surviving in these increasingly hostile times. Despite it all, there are others, they who would disseminate a forbidden knowledge, forbidden not by force of law and the threat of violence that gives law its force, but by the lifetime each of us has spent being taught on the taboo character this knowledge possesses. Books circulate around the edges of view, in used bookstores barely taking in enough money to pay their rent, and on computer networks that reach around the globe from obscure party web sites disseminating this knowledge for free.
Hidden among the criminals, the prostitutes, and the mentally ill addicts lives a man, neither young nor old, who may yet come to lead us all through the future, through a future wherein we’ll all be made to share in whatever prosperity and poverty should be meted out to the whole lot of us. Clutched tight against this man’s chest is neither a book nor a pad but pieces of crumpled-up paper with the day’s last ramblings written on them in ragged handwriting. As the working man works, he shares, whether he realizes it or not, an unspoken connection with those of his own lying in the streets soaking in a pool of their own urine and sweat, the long summer’s days never so long as to take from either of them that last ounce of dignity either of them possess. In time, when these men learn to put aside their petty differences and unite against their common enemy, the crowds around Victory Monument will assume a new character, surrounding the monument with a single mass. On this early-summer’s evening, the sun sets lazily, leisurely, at just the right moment casting a long shadow from the base of the Victory Monument’s spire, its tip reaching down a street towards some miscellaneous point in front of the nondescript apartment block where Valeri entertains the notion that a woman with a pedigree like Sydney’s might well yet come to sympathize with his budding revolution. As he returns to work with all the others, he looks for her, hoping she’ll have made the choice to do the right thing. But she’s not there.
In finding friendship, Valeri and Maria come to see one another not as compared to those around them but in not yet the same. “Are you going to be free for yourself?” he asks her, almost as an afterthought while they force their way through a lonely night in a burning city. “No one will ever be free,” she replies, turning away from him to lead him down the street. It’s too hot to be wearing jeans and a jacket, too hot to be wearing a mask, in the sweat and the dirt a shared truth emerging. “We still should fight them anyways,” he says. “We should all just stay alive,” she says, “for as long as we can, let the fight run its course.” They see the anger in each other’s eyes, the pain in each other’s breath. Still in these long summer’s days the crowds around Victory Monument never seem to thin, with the crowds of angry workers, students, and parishioners only occasionally occupying this public space. Most days, you see the usual assortment of homeless people sitting quietly, back from the streets with their hats upturned, the odd one standing on a plastic crate while declaring the surely imminent end of the world. (A delicious irony that we should ignore these men who prove to be right in the end, albeit in a way none of them could’ve known). There’s the merchants who never seem to have any customers but still make good with whatever they have. But on these streets there’s a mounting sense of gloom, as though all know, in one way or another, the ongoing campaign against them, the steadily encroaching glass and steel towers of the wealthy man’s world rising in the distance, threatening to soon cast their shadows on this working man’s redoubt, to soon after invade and conquer this neighbourhood, taking for themselves the spoils of war. It’s a deeply confusing time, a time when each of us is fully aware of what’s happening to us, what’s being done to us, but when none of us seem able to seize the moment and fight back. These evictions sweep across the working man’s neighbourhoods seemingly at random, the lack of any apparent pattern making clear their true purpose. These evictions aren’t meant to clear the working class apartment blocks of their residents so as to, in turn, clear the land for something more, but rather to perpetuate the state of fear the working man lives in, to terrorize those who would contemplate resistance to this oppression. Sometimes it seems the same families are evicted from the same apartment blocks over and over, a cruel joke perpetuated on the working man.
“You’re not the man you think you are,” Maria says. “What does that even mean?” Valeri asks, “we work all our lives for this meagre sum and when we become all used up we’re discarded like some broken tool. And they kick us out of our homes to tear them down and build their palaces, their great monuments to nothing at all. It’s not right! It’s not fair!” But once set alight, the working man’s passions cannot be contained, the current wave of demonstrations seeming to encompass all grievances in the aspirations of one man to realize his own destiny. In times like these, with the wealthy man and his managerial apparatchiks seem invincible, but men like Valeri can instinctively sense weakness in the strong and strength in the weak. Led by his instincts, Valeri already thinks to the future when he’ll become part of something more. In the world there’s a mounting tension, between countries and among them. All working men know it, but few have the wherewithal to talk about it, not in ways that might help reveal the critical truth. You see, Britain is a fallen power, and like so many other fallen powers she still dreams herself strong. As countries build up their military strength while beset by internal strife, they willingly set on a path towards a collision of powers. But the war in the offing will be unlike any the world has ever seen.
“When the war comes, what will you do?” asks Maria. “I won’t give my support to the war effort,” says Valeri. “You may not have a choice.”
“No one can force me to war.”
“You’ll be arrested for sedition.” A pause. “Why all this talk of war?” asks Valeri. And Maria doesn’t reply, not right away, letting a silence settle in the room. This meeting, this conversation is a forbidden act, forbidden not by law but by something far more sinister and far more powerful, the power of a taboo handed down from generation to generation long enough to become almost as instinct. But, Valeri knows, each such conversation, each word uttered amounts to an attack on the power of this taboo, in this and in every other conversation held across the country and around the world. Six months have passed since we’ve started following Valeri and the revolution simmering in the working class and winter’s almost on us.
For free, we look through this time and imagine ourselves not unlike our mothers and our fathers, whether living or dead. In the distance, a burst of gunfire rattles off, sounding like a firecracker. All England seems cast under permanent overcast skies, the temperate heat of the summer having given way to the pattering of a constant rain. It’s dark, it’s always dark, and in the darkness it sometimes seems, even to men as limited in their worldview as Valeri, that this is a darkness never to be brightened by hope. But there’s always hope.