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Freda was captivated by Lix. Her feelings were not insincere, though she’d deny it for the most part of her life. She was not captivated by his looks. Nor by his questionable energy. But by his fear and reticence, which she mistook for the saintly attribute of patriots and revolutionaries like Nyerere, Cezar, and Mandela, a kind of granite sweetness which showed no malice and no alarm, which never raised its voice without good cause. He had what she would never have, she thought, the Gift of Sympathy.

He loved her, of course, like everybody else, though love like his defied analysis. To contemplate it was to stare into a maze and volunteer to lose yourself. It was uncharted, inexplicable. He loved her with a perseverance and an abandon that would startle anyone who knows him now. He’d take the maddest risks for her, he could persuade himself, eat glass and fire, walk on coals, obey, obey. She was his driving force. This kidnapping would mark the proof and climax of their love.

She tugged his kerchief ears and said again, “Come on then, say. What would you like to do, Comrade Felix Dern? To celebrate our thirty-one days?”

He’d like, he thought, to spend the day in bed with her; he’d like, indeed, to put their madcap plan on hold and, instead, clamber right then, at once, into the metal-ribbed and windowless asylum of the van’s carcass to seek out something fresh and new with her, one of those many deeds he’d heard about and seen in films and read about in American novels and even simulated on the stage but not yet tried.

What shall we do to celebrate? he asked himself. Let’s soixante-neuf. Let’s see what sex is like for colonizing tongues and lips. Let’s snuffle in between each other’s legs.

Or bondage possibly. Some blindfolds and a gag, the ones they’d set aside for Marin Scholla should he prove to be a problem, would be irresistible on Freda. Not that Lix had much appetite for deviations of that kind, and never would, but his four weeks with her had been appallingly frustrating. Sometimes it seemed she loved him with her fingernails and teeth, but little else. And so his imagination had been running wild. They’d not had any intercourse so far in which he had felt free to give expression to himself. Not proper intercourse. If proper is the proper word. Penetration was “for men,” she’d said, and though they’d consummated their relationship in the legal sense, penetration had become either his last and unencouraged port of call, allowed when she’d lost interest anyway, or just a station to the cross of Freda’s pleasure, the cross he had to bear. What bodily encounters they had regularly indulged in — mutual masturbation mostly, and oral sex, unreciprocated — served her “right to orgasm,” she said. She’d not be used by any man. For militants like her, “the front line is the bed.” Lix understood how right she was. He understood and sympathized until those moments when his brains went south and he required and hoped — just once — to be in charge of her.

He’d like to love her standing up, for instance. A memory revisited. Or fuck her on the kitchen floor, for goodness’ sake. Uncomplicated sex. No politics. Or make love to her out on the river in a rowboat when she was wearing something other than black. He’d seen the couples making love in their hired thirty-minute skiffs, in their white summer shirts, lapping at each other in the shadows of the bankside candy trees. He’d like to join the gang. Or him on top, for a change: she’d always straddled him when they’d played almost-sex, when she — climaxed herself — finally permitted him to come into her. She always liked to be the playground bully who had won the fight, her full weight on his shoulders or her hands pressed down against his wrists, inviting penetration but only just allowing it. Submit to me. Defer, defer. Not mainstream cinema at all. Perhaps they’d never truly fornicate in ways he wanted to. Though he could always live in hope. And hope was justified. She’d said she had a treat for him once Scholla was released. At last, she’d promised it. Something for “the man.” As soon as they had finished with the chairman, she’d come back with him to his little room, above those once trod stairs. She’d be his captive for the night, she said.

So Lix had not only rehearsed for Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars, he had also prepared for the Afteract with Freda. He’d cleaned his room, tidied up the scattered careless clues to the compromiser he really was. Binoculars, a German magazine, products from companies that he ought to boycott, postcards from his mother, tubs (unused) of nevus masking cream, pajamas from his teens. What kind of love affair was this, that he felt safer when he hid himself from her? He’d bought new bedclothes, too. Blue sheets. He’d primed the gramophone with music he knew she liked. Not Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter crazy on the sax, but Souta’s Chinese Symphony. He’d purchased decent coffee and a pair of pretty cups. No bread and beans for her. No vagrant’s soup. He’d got fresh Maizies and fruit preserves and joss sticks bunched together in a metal vase. He’d scrubbed his dirty little sink. He’d torn the corner off a pack of contraceptives and slipped them underneath the bed. He wouldn’t want to battle with the cellophane in case his moment passed.

Lix’s moment, actually, was perilously close. Their appointment with the chairman was for three-fifteen. He’d not be late. By five-fifteen, Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars would have been premiered and the charmed and blindfolded captive bundled back into the van. By six, the chairman would be home for tea. Fredalix’s madcap afternoon would soon be in the past. Like 1968.

“What are you thinking about right now?” She broke into his fantasies.

“Umm, 1968. To tell the truth.”

She was startled. “Me, too,” she said. And then, “I’m waiting for your answer, anyway.”

“What answer’s that?”

“Our little anniversary.”

What could they do to celebrate then? He had his answers, but he didn’t dare say He said, “You choose.” There was no point in voicing his desires, he thought. They were too shoddy and infantile, and dangerously mature, to speak out loud. Besides, in twenty-seven days of love, he’d learned that Freda always called the shots.

He’d learned, as well, to his surprise, that in extremis Freda had a timid facet to her character, not that she trembled with alarm when any hazard offered itself — as it was being offered there and then, with Marin Scholla on his way — or would even take a single, compromising side step to avoid a conflict or a test. No, her apprehension took a more reactionary form. She turned into a sort of harebrained girl, a teenager, a chatterer. Perhaps this was the vestige of the privileged daughter she had once been and was frightened of becoming again but needed to hold on to like a child might need its security blanket. This was how she drove off doubt and fear: with chattering.

Small talk was Freda’s way of steadying herself. She’d learned to smother her worries with blankets of trivia. So now — awaiting their heroic moment in the van — she pressed herself against the back of Lix’s driver’s seat, a hand on his shoulder, and babbled on about their “anniversary.”

Lix twisted his mouth toward her hand and kissed the sinews of her multibangled wrist. He kissed her bruising knuckles, too. The sweetest liberty. She smelled of soap and coat and nicotine. Familiar. As were her favorite black wool skirt, her blond meringue of pinioned hair, her walking boots with yellow laces, her smoker’s throat. Nothing she was saying was typical of the Freda that attracted him. In fact, there’d been no evidence all afternoon — not since they’d collected the van from the rental agency in their false names (Alicja Lesniak again, and Smudge), half hidden behind their high, disguising scarves — of her trademark stridency, her usual impatience at any trace of sentimentality (“our anniversary,” indeed!), her absolute conviction that her views were unassailable. Her voice was hesitant. Her hand was shivering — not from his kissing, surely, and not only from the cold. (It was cold, though. Our city always is in mid-December, that Thursday being no exception — and especially throughout that winter of 1981, when storms and wind and multinationals came into this neglected and contented city to fill our empty spaces and all our current troubles started.)