At the shop Valeri nearly come to blows over the way of things. “I’ve had enough of your provocations,” Valeri says, “I can’t stand one more word from your tongue.” But Ruslan lets Valeri have at it, seeming to enjoy watching Valeri dig his own grave. A couple of other workers watch, Albert Nelson one of them. “I’ve always worked harder than you,” Valeri says, “and I won’t be much good to anyone if I can barely stand on my feet.” Ruslan studies Valeri’s face with a look somewhere between contempt and pity. Finally, Ruslan says, “you don’t look so good. It’s all their fault. They ought to have let you go long before now. They’ve been too busy with all these difficulties to notice. But I notice. I’ve had my eye on you for some time.” With the threat of unemployment and thus starvation hanging over their heads at all times, most working men in this day and age would be fearful of such a threat. But Valeri’s lacking in an instinct for self-preservation combined with his intense passion against injustice lead him to only to give himself over to rebellion.
One man looks at another and says, “they’re clearing out.” Elsewhere, another man looks down the street and says, “it’s all right for them to leave.” Still elsewhere in the city another man looks out his window on the busy street and says, “they’re sure to kick us all out of our own homes and tell us it’s our business to find a place to live. But they’ve already taken the other places from us!” It’s written, somewhere, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In it, we sometimes see murderers put to death under the guise of this fairness. Yet, as some worker is killed at work, he is killed by the choices his wealthy paymasters have made in the name of their own profit, his killing accounted for, marked as another line-item drawn against another expense, the persons who made those choices still free to return to their mansions in their gated communities while a family across town faces a bleak future without their pittance to see them through. Meanwhile, Valeri continues to work for the same basic wage, returning every day as he had. Not yet broken, only battered and bruised he comes home exhausted as ever, still there to see his roommate Hannah come home in bloodstained scrubs from another hard day’s night. At the shop, Valeri’s latest run-in with Ruslan has had some effect. “Stop your noise,” says Ruslan, “or you’ll get more than you bargained for.” But Valeri’s insistent, saying, “I’ll speak my piece no matter what. If the truth earns me a target on my back, then I say let there be a target on my back all the same.” Valeri takes a half-step toward his tormentor and nearly lashes out at him with both fists when the fear of losing his job stops him. But the point is made. This is among Valeri’s glimpse of the bottommost depths of life, the very ugliest of its poverty. It’s like the musty, mouldy stench of swamp rot wafting up to him from some unseen point below, and he reaches so eagerly for it.
Among the men Valeri works with, there’s chatter. “There’s been nobody in authority for two weeks,” says one. “If you know too much you’ll get old too soon,” says another. “Sooner or later we ought to make a stand,” says a third. Whether one man or one thousand men, it makes no difference. All are valued; in the death of one, all die, as the smallest grain of sand may contain all creation. Halfway across the country, the workers who’ve seized their shut-down factory don’t know what to expect; they leave doors unlocked and windows open, daring the police to come in and arrest them, expecting to make their point that way. But the police are more cunning than this. The police sit and wait, manning their post outside the factory’s doors, while the local politicians make a show for the cameras out of negotiating, talking, always talking, drawing out the moment just long enough to let the working man’s passions cool, once cooled his passions allowing in a shade of doubt. Soon, the working man agrees to a pittance, in the heat of the moment their pittance seeming like a fortune. It’s been but a few days, perhaps a week since these workers took control of their yet-shuttered factory, in that time much having happened in the world, treaties signed, laws written on scraps of paper and passed, only to be evaded by those who passed them, loopholes sought, terms creatively interpreted, the essence of law building into itself the very mechanisms used to undermine it. When the workers return to their homes, pittance in hand, they resign themselves to the reality of life after death, and after a night or two of drinking and dancing each of them sets themselves about the task of finding their next sustenance, from wherever it may come. We don’t understand what they’ve done, what they’ve been through, and neither do they.
In the midst of this current crisis, Valeri sits in the dark and thinks of Maria, imagining her caught on the street in this latest blackout, until he can stand it no longer. All have roles to play, he’s slowly realizing, in the darkness of his factory’s cavernous innards the light dawning on him like the rising sun. Still we’re in that uncertain early period, even after the failure of this latest general strike still other strikes and demonstrations carrying on, the streets filled with the working man and his natural allies the student and the parishioner, still seeming to effect no change as the wealthy man continues his work in the background to put up so many glass and steel towers in a fevered bid to wring every last ounce of wealth from the world before the real war begins. An eye for an eye, the real war will call for, every humiliation and every injustice to be paid back in the eruption of an unvarnished rage. While the working man lives in poverty, the wealthy man far away lives in lavish opulence, but it’s a lavish opulence that can never last.
The working man dies, yet still the wealthy man carries on in his wealth, paying not with his own life but with some small amount of time and money, each of which he has in abundance. None will soon be ready to commit themselves to change, stuck as they are in acting out their assigned roles, reading from a yet-unwritten script. After the workers accept their pittance and leave, their factory is shuttered for the last time, to be torn down, the land underneath to be left for the weeds to reclaim. It’s a small episode, otherwise lost in the hurried transition from one stage of history to the next, and in the wealthy man’s world the act of preserving memory of this episode becomes a small act of subversion. Even as there are no laws forbidding talk of what’s happened, nor recording, transmitting, storing any account of it, knowledge becomes overwritten by the endless stream of not-knowledge and soon the whole episode becomes forgotten in the world at large. “If only we had a chance,” says a man in the street out in front of a church after one Sunday service. “I wish the rebels would come back,” says another man, “We’re all going to get something for our troubles,” says a third. These men have been out of work too long, pathetic and hopeless men pushed to the edge of starvation, almost ready to receive the gospel.
But it’s not so simple. As the working man dies, he’s made to suffer the indignities in death he was made to suffer in life, hauled around and thrown out like a diseased and rotting piece of meat, disposed of so that his little box of a living space can be cleared to make room for another, and after that another, then another, then another, human capital collected and expended for nothing but the profit of another. This elderly man, no one knows how he spent his life working for his pittance in the once-bustling mills in the hinterlands of the province far to the north, on the closing of those mills despair chasing him to the city far to the south. Thereupon, this not yet elderly man became as one with the bulk of the working man’s mass, and in so becoming he losing the very essence of his being, becoming alienated from that which he’d been and reducing himself to the level of an object to be manipulated for the profit of his better. In Valeri’s mind, his work comes not from a place of necessity but from a place of courage, in the face of his own survival choosing to disregard his own self and press forward. Still he works behind the scenes, attending meetings held not in secret but in the open, churches standing in for the burnt union halls. It’s at one such meeting when he meets a young pastor who changes his life, forever.