Kohn looked at him, his mind suddenly thrown into chaos. Until now it had not seemed quite real. He’d seen it as a ghost returned to haunt him but that was less unsettling than the thought that these people from the past were real and alive and walking the earth and that you could just go and fucking ask.
He opened his mouth and said, sounding stupid even to himself, ‘What kind of a meeting?’
‘A public meeting, space-head!’
Kohn nutted Stone, hard enough to hurt a little. ‘Gimme that.’
He dragged the paper back, looked at the boxed ad for the meeting at the bottom of the middle pages. ‘“Unionize the space rigs! No victimizations!” Right, with you there one hundred per cent, bros and sis…Ah here we are, the small print: “North London Town Red Star Forum.” Knew it. Build the fucking party, forward to the fucking revolution, workers of the world and off the world unite! Well count me out.’
He felt Annie’s gloved fingers on his cheek. ‘Nobody’s asking you to count yourself in, Moh,’ she said in a reasonable voice. The kind that meant: don’t push it, mate. He turned his head to her, letting the hand slip down to his throat, and gazed at her for a moment. Her wavy black hair, her sharp and slender features, made her (he secretly thought) look like a smaller, more elegant version of himself. Next year’s model.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. Tomorrow night. Do you want to come?’
‘To a communist meeting? You must be joking, I’ve got better things to do. Isn’t that right, Lyn?’
Lynette tossed her hair and announced an intention to wash it the next evening.
As soon as he walked into the tiny hired hall, an upstairs room of a freshly redecorated pub called the Lord Carrington, Moh was smitten with the emotional backwash of wondering what age he’d been when he first sat at the back of just such a room, sometimes reading or playing on a game, sometimes listening. There was a table at the far end with two chairs behind it; at the near end was another table, this one stacked with copies of Red Star, hot off the press, and spread with pamphlets whose covers were frayed and furred with age. The rest of the room was optimistically filled with maybe forty stackable plastic chairs.
About twenty people came to hear the space-rigger, a stocky, long-limbed man called Logan with a severe case of sunburn. Stone listened engrossed, clenching his fists, and stood up at the end and made wild promises to raise money, spread the word. (He kept them.) Kohn listened for subtexts and structures, and sussed after about two minutes that this man wasn’t just a militant on a Party platform, but a Party militant. It didn’t seem possible he was in the same league as the old man up there beside him and the old woman who sat behind the literature table. They really did look like ghosts, wispy-haired, the paper of their pamphlets as yellow as their teeth.
The ghost of the Fourth International…The old man talked about solidarity, and Solidarity, and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 which had first opened his eyes to the reality of capitalism…Ghosts. And yet this phantom apparatus, this coelacanth of an organization, had convinced a young man to risk his livelihood and possibly his life to take its message into space. In its own way it was as impressive a feat as that of the Soviet degenerated workers’ state getting into space first. (After they’d scraped Sergei Korolev and his colleagues out of the camps where they’d been sent for…Trotskyism. Kohn smiled to himself. Suppose it had been true, and it was the Fourth International that had put Gagarin into orbit!)
He realized with a shock the exact reason for the generation-gap represented on the platform: old enough to be his grandparents, young enough to be his brother; none of an age to have been his parents. It was the classic population profile of annihilating defeat.
Cars racing through the streets, men with guns sitting half in and half out, yelling and shooting. The cars that came around later, and the men getting out, and shooting. The plastic that bit the wrists, and stumbling feet, and blood trickling thickly down a drain. And the people, our people, our side, our class, who stood and watched and did nothing.
Before he knew it the meeting was finished. People were milling around, getting drinks in, clustering at the literature table, shoving chairs out of rows and into circles…Moh was wondering how to get talking to someone when the space-rigger walked over.
‘Fancy a pint, lads?’
Moh spun a couple of chairs into position. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s out of work.’
Logan laughed. ‘I’m still one of the orbital labour aristocracy,’ he said, ‘and you’ve just been on strike, jes? So – what you having?’
He came back from the bar a few minutes later and started talking, mostly with Stone but including Moh in the conversation with quick glances and remarks. He’d obviously noted Stone’s contribution and picked him out as a good militant and potential recruit. Moh, who had assimilated the Dale Carnegie school of Trotskyist party-building from the age of about eight, gave the conversation half his attention. At some point Logan would get some commitment out of Stone – a meeting arranged, phone numbers exchanged, a subscription bought – and then switch his main attention to Moh.
He looked around for anyone he might recognize, sadly thinking the old comrades hadn’t been such old comrades after all, and saw an unchanged, familiar face frowning down at the now-deserted table of pamphlets. Moh bounded over.
‘Bernstein!’ The face that turned to him, though lined and leathery, hadn’t gained a line in the six years since Moh had last seen it. The receding shock of white hair hadn’t receded further. For a moment Moh was puzzled that Bernstein didn’t recognize him; then he remembered that the last time he’d looked at this face he’d been looking up.
‘I’m Moh Kohn,’ he said.
Bernstein stared at him, then shook his hand vigorously. ‘Amazing!’ he said. ‘I would never have known you.’
‘You haven’t changed.’
Bernstein nodded absently. ‘What brings you here?’ He patted the stack of books and pamphlets he was about to buy, and added, ‘You know what brings me here. Real collector’s pieces, this lot.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Bernstein had fallen out with (and from) the Fourth International as a result of some split that he was by now the only living person able to explain, and had embarked on the sisyphean project of writing the movement’s definitive history. An indefatigable archivist in his own right, he made some kind of living by trading in rare items of every conceivable persuasion of radical literature. Moh’s father had been one of his regular customers.
Moh wasn’t sure how to answer his question. What had brought him here?
He shrugged. ‘Curiosity,’ he said.
Bernstein looked past him and said, ‘Let’s join your friends.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Thought you’d never ask. Guinness, please.’
When Moh returned from the bar he found Stone, Bernstein, Logan and the old man and woman around the table in an animated discussion. After a few minutes Logan turned to him and said, ‘And you’re Moh Kohn, right?’
‘Hi.’ Moh raised his glass. ‘Pleased to meet you, too.’
They talked for a bit about working in space and about their respective unions. Moh found himself beginning to relax. Then Logan shot him an awkward glance.
‘You’re Josh Kohn’s son?’
‘Yes,’ Moh said. ‘If it matters.’
Logan looked back at him calmly, then leaned closer. ‘Something I wanted to ask you,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about the Star Fraction?’