By the time the sun rises on a new day, this government has fallen, leaving the state’s apparatus in place but adrift, rudderless, in search of a new authority to take the place of the old. An election’s called, thirty days from now, and much will happen in so short a time. I know what you might be thinking, but it’s not yet time for that. Instead, we look to the shadows where the working man withstands the mounting unrest, his anger at those who would seek to govern him balanced by the uncertainty obscuring his personal road through the future. “I will not wait for the time to come,” Valeri insists, speaking with neither Hannah nor Murray but his one-time lover Sydney Harrington. She’s found Valeri after a long absence, and she knows, in the intuitive way she does, that he’s caught up in this somehow. “I don’t ask you to wait,” says Sydney, “but I would ask you to come with my family and take refuge in our home in the country. It’s near a small town in the highlands. We’ll be save there, together.” But by now, Valeri has come to reject private life altogether, going so far as to turn against so natural and so fulfilling an experience as love. And he finds in his self-denial a lofty ideal which gives him something he’s never known before, a vital urge to take part in something that could change everything.
“There’s no place for me here anymore,” says Maria, the last time she and Valeri are to see one another for the current crisis. “There’s never been much of a place for you here,” Valeri says. “So you finally understand me,” says Maria. “I’m beginning to,” Valeri says, “good luck.” As the working man tries in vain to make sense of all that’s happening, still yet he’s distracted from the wealthy man’s mad rush to extract every last bit of wealth he can in the wake of this turmoil that threatens to consume all. As the working man tries, so, too, tries the wealthy man, the working man’s turn to the rebel giving rise to the wealthy man’s reactionary, each provoking the other, neither coming about but in response to one another. It means little now, the whole lot of them still in their confused, primordial state, but as you and I watch this elaborate theatre play itself out, you must know, perhaps on instinct by now, it’s all the same crazy, deranged mess repeating with a slightly different flavour each and every time.
Once you come to realize that all these actors have a role to play and so must play their role no matter what’s transpired, as I’ve long since realized, you may yet gain the ability to sense the flow of history as it reaches for its next phase. Three men gather and make for a church. “They’ll gun us down if they see us,” says one man. “We’ll keep out of sight,” says another. “We can’t miss this sermon,” says a third. Like most working men, they’ve thrown their sympathies in with the guerrillas already staging raids on police stations, government houses, and freight train yards. Like most working men, they’ve not yet brought themselves to terms with what must be done. They haven’t decided whether to vote in the coming elections, and it’s up to the guerrillas of the popular front to dissuade them. The same flag flutters from atop the same government buildings, from spires atop domes and from poles on tall buildings; in the time it takes the caretaker government to arrange for its own replacement, events will transpire here and around the world that’ll make everything we do and everything we say in the meanwhile assume a new meaning few could’ve ever seen coming.
Having come this far, we’ve already cast ourselves off the precipice and can only hope we survive the plummet. But it matters little who’s in power. In the streets, the working man and his allies the student and the parishioner form a single mob, braving the storm troopers’ guns to march on Victory Monument as once they had so often. As the decades of importing slaves from all corners of the Earth have finally caught up to the wealthy man, there’s now that mass of people, pathetic and lacking in dignity as they are, unencumbered by fear of loss and free to hurl themselves once more at the black-clad men who man the barricade up ahead. “We strike against our enemies!” declares one man. “We stand up for the dead!” screams another. “We fight for ourselves!” yells a third. These are the names and the voices of the neglected, maligned working men, and this is their time.
“All power to the people!” shouts one woman. “All power to the people!” shouts another woman. “All power to the people!” shouts a third woman. Even before the massacre these were times when radicalism had long gained an alluring appeal, memories of the failed rising of fifteen years ago inhabiting these streets like ghostly visages, there, yet not there. Confused and leaderless, the storm troopers who only a short time earlier had patrolled the streets with confidence, almost arrogance are now reduced to a dishevelled mess, some firing their arms at anything that moves, at the shadows in the night, others locking themselves in their stations, still others abandoning their uniforms altogether and melting into the crowd as the working man takes to the streets. At the polytechnic, news of the government’s collapse is met with disbelief mixed with despair. Sean Morrison and the other students in occupation emphatically reject the call for elections, agreeing to stand on principle alone. But principles cannot feed the hungry nor heal the sick, and with food supplies running low and medical care needed for some the students have no choice but to end their occupation, for now, and head home to try and make good on their own survival. Sean’s one of the last to leave, taking one last stand on the roof of the main hall. He wants one last moment with the makeshift flag they’ve flown. He says, “we’ll be back,” while looking up at the flag fluttering in the summer’s breeze, “and next time it’ll be for good.” He leaves the flag flying, leaving it as a declaration to the school’s masters of the way things have changed.
But here, now, they point their guns down the road at the steadily advancing mob, their grip quivering, wavering, finally withdrawing, surrendering the moment to that very mob. No longer can they confidently, even arrogantly enter the working man’s home and remove him, as the wealthy man’s profiteering has come to a screeching halt. In the midst of all this disorder, I’d invite you to look on the smoldering fires of liberation, after they’ve burned themselves out the charred husks of men blackened as the shadows of history come to life. “In the name of the dead!” shouts one man. “We rise in anger!” shouts another. “All power to the people!” shouts still another. This is the rallying cry against which the forces at work shall assail themselves, the moment of crisis again reaching for the skies like a tsunami cresting at exactly the moment it strikes the shore. But Valeri is not there. His is thrown in with the rebels of the popular front, in spirit if not yet in fact, and with the rebels biding their time, he waits for the inevitable opportunity to present itself. But he chomps at the bit, hardly fighting the urge to take to the streets and go out in a blaze of glory. Through a complicated and entirely ad hoc network, instructions of sorts have filtered down, changing with each set of ears they pass through until hardly resembling the original order. By the time Valeri hears what’s needed to be done, he hears not instructions issued by authority but the call of the moment resounding through the streets and the alleys here, across the country, and around the world. After their ministry in the streets, parishioners who follow the forbidden gospel yield to the police. They hear news of the government’s collapse and the impending election, and for a time it seems their efforts might’ve finally born fruit. Nevermore assured, they return to their homes, Darren Wright among they who look suspiciously on the coming day. All the wealthy men who live in opulent luxury seem to have absconded with their wealth; but for the screens filled with talking heads delivering their screeds against disorder and banditry, there’s little evidence the wealthy men remain in Britain at all. For the parishioner, the path forward has become more uncertain than ever, obscured as it is behind a rapidly-darkening cloud gathering on the horizon. Still, when he carries on with his life, Darren feels the calling of the revolution, as though it were near to him. He says to his friend Julia, the day after they’ve vacated their occupation of the streets, “I can’t help but feel the worst is yet to come.” She nods, and says, “we’ll be ready when we’re called on to receive the Holy Spirit, and we’ll survive through any troubles.” Amid the burnt-out shopfronts and upturned cars, the broken glass and the shattered dreams, there’s hope.