“He knows someone has to fight,” she told me. “That’s what makes him unforgivable. He’s just too finicky to do it himself.”
Later, I saw a picture of her father, a gaunt man in an old-fashioned woollen waistcoat, staring defiantly at the camera as he defended his dead terrorist daughter to a magazine journalist. He’d taken her on demonstrations, taught her that it was sometimes
necessary to exercise dissent if one wanted to have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward men. The journalist described him as a religious zealot.
Anna remembered playing at the back of meeting halls during lectures, whispering to her doll. She looked so lonely, as she told me that; I reached for her instinctively. I was hurt when she started to speak to me in the jargon of Criticism-Self-Criticism, reproaching me for allowing myself to get distracted. “What about pleasure?” I asked, trying to sound sarcastic. She told me flatly that our pleasure wasn’t relevant to the struggle. It was only through the struggle that we could materialize ourselves in a meaningful way. If I wanted to fuck, she said, we could fuck; but politically she was sick of fucking.
I was so angry that I couldn’t speak. Was that what she thought? That I only wanted to fuck? She walked a few feet away, looking down at the line of headstones.
“Here’s one,” she said.
And there it was, in gold letters on a little white marble slab.
MICHAEL DAVID FRAME
4.10.48–1.12.50
“RESTING WHERE NO SHADOWS FALL”
“That could do for you.” She got out a notebook and started taking down the details.
In the car on the way back to London she told me, almost casually, that she’d been approached, through one of her Paris friends, by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP had offered us funds and training. She was going to Paris to meet one of their representatives.
I was stunned. Why hadn’t I been told? This was the most important news imaginable and she hadn’t even discussed it with the rest of us before agreeing to a meeting. There were a thousand political questions. There were security issues. I started to argue with her but she brought me up short by telling me that the others
had already agreed. She and Sean had discussed it in some detail, she said. Sean thought it was the right move. Leo and Jay were in agreement too.
“The revolutionary is a doomed man,” wrote Nechayev. “He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no belongings, not even a name.” The monks at Wat Tham Nok would recognize that, I think. If to be a revolutionary is to be nameless, without attachments, then a revolutionary is simply a person who has understood the first three of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. He sees suffering, sees that its cause lies in greed and craving; he also sees that it could potentially come to an end. But what’s the right way to end suffering? The revolution, giving yourself up to history? Or Nibbana, giving yourself up to transcendence? Phra Anan, whose English was good enough to discuss such things with me, had no time for history. “Too much history in Indochina,” he’d say, shaking his stubbly head. “Less history needed, not more.”
After so long living as Mike Frame, it’s sometimes hard to find my way back to Chris Carver, to remember why he made the choices he did. There seems such an obvious split between how I wanted things to be and how they actually were, not just in the world but in our group, our little cell. We were supposed to be a band of equals, committed to abolishing every trace of power in our relationships with one another. But once Anna and Sean started taking decisions on their own, that was self-evidently no longer true. I was twenty-three by then. Not so young. Old enough to know that taking your desires for reality wasn’t a straightforward answer to anything.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that Anna and Sean had always been in front, daring one another to go further out onto the ledge. In a way it seems extraordinary that they took so long to fuse together, to start acting in concert. When they did, they ran the rest of us off our feet. The PFLP contact was the first incontrovertible sign that I was no longer in control of my life. I should have seen I was heading into the darkness. I should have gotten off the bus.
At the time I got bogged down in detail. I knew very little about the Middle East and, unlike a lot of my friends, I had an instinctive sympathy with the Israelis. After the concentration camps, who could deny them a home? On the other hand, the cruelties inflicted on the Palestinians were undeniable. Anna poured scorn on my confusion. The PFLP were Marxist-Leninists. They were fighting Imperialism. That should be enough. It wasn’t necessary to get into the intricacies of their political position, or to agree with everything they did. It would be a pragmatic alliance. Their contact in Paris would pay us three thousand U.S. dollars a month, which would solve our money worries at a stroke. Our people could go out to Lebanon and receive proper weapons and explosives training. We’d become an effective fighting force. What was there to discuss?
So Anna disappeared to Paris and stayed away for weeks. Sean organized his disastrous bank raid. I sent off for a birth certificate in the name of Michael Frame and used it to apply for a passport. We were all doing the same thing, developing aliases, preparing to go underground.
* * *
Finally I turn off the main road and start to pick my way up the pass toward Sainte-Anne-de-la-Garrigue. It’s after midnight and the petrol gauge has dipped into the red. I drive very slowly; my tired eyes are producing phantoms, shadows that race across the road and flicker in the rearview mirror.
I crest the col and see that the tower is illuminated, its blocky form like a lighthouse guiding me in. I bump my way over the cobbles into the main square, where I park in front of the church, on the spot where the righteous Christian knights burned the heretics on their pyre. Miranda: Why should I care what happened here?. . It’s just a pretty little village square on a very hot day. Well, it’s cold now, the air whipping round me in icy gusts as I get out of the car and stretch, trying to work the cramp of two days’ driving out of my body. Though there’s a light in the Bar des Sports, the door is locked and no one answers when I knock. I had some idea of getting a drink, perhaps a sandwich. Now that I’m here I don’t know what to do. I fish a sweater out of my bag and walk around, feeling the blood gradually returning to my legs. I peer up at the looming frontage of the church, with its massive bolted wooden doors; I run my hands over the cold lip of the drinking fountain, a carved stone bowl with a copper spout, dribbling away in front of the mairie. Finally I force myself to head up the steep street that leads to the tower. The houses are mute, shuttered; there’s not a radio, not a chink of light to indicate occupation. I can’t remember which of the line of identical doors is Anna’s and something in me recoils from the idea of knocking. When I see her, it ought to be in daylight, so there can be no mistake, no misrecognition. As I hesitate, a cat emerges from the shadows. I watch it stalk down the hill, the only sign of life in a
scene as desolate and hermetic as a de Chirico piazza. Inevitably, I end up climbing toward the tower, wreathed in a jaundiced yellow glow at the summit of the hill.
After my trip to London I didn’t hear from Miles for a long time. It seemed that Pat Ellis had decided to comply with the demands of her “stakeholders,” whoever they were.
At home things had reached a new low. I’d given up hiding my drinking and sometimes brought home bottles of wine to nurse in the study or in front of the TV. Miranda didn’t comment; she’d more or less stopped speaking to me. We moved around the house in a strange silent dance, trying as far as possible to stay in separate rooms. At God’s, I leafed through old pamphlets and thought with increasing regularity about heroin. I’d noticed a drop-in center near the leisure park, a nondescript building where the county Drug and Alcohol Services ran a methadone clinic. Two or three shell-suited men were always leaning against the wall outside, slouching in the unmistakable lizard posture of dealers. It would take half an hour at most to score and make it back to God’s. I could sit and smoke and think without having to care about what I was thinking. If the dealers at the drop-in center couldn’t help me, Portsmouth, a few miles away, was teeming with junkies. You saw heroin faces everywhere, shuffling about behind shopping centers, sitting disconsolately on garden walls. No problem scoring in Portsmouth. It was Oblivion-on-Sea.