Letters of Insurgents - Sophia's Seventh Letter

Link https://youtu.be/NCItJFlijSs

Sophia’s seventh letter

Dear Yarostan,

You’ll never guess where I am. Outside there’s a general strike. Everything is out of commission. Literally everything: fact ones, offices, transportation vehicles, even taxis — everything except the telephones, and a radio station that’s been taken over by the police. I ought to be in the council office, or in the research center where Tissie and Sabina are conquering the whole universe, or somewhere in the midst of all the excitement. But I’m sitting at my desk in Luisa’s house, writing you on the ancient typewriter I inherited from George Alberts when he left. I’m surprised it still works; it’s the machine on which I was going to type up my novel about you and Ron Matthews as soon as I organized all my notes. Luisa cleaned the room so thoroughly after Art moved out that there was no trace of anyone’s having been here since I left for college fifteen years ago. The walls are the same walls I stared at day after day twenty years ago, wondering why I had been separated from my Yarostan and from the only friends I had in the world. The bed is the same bed I shared with Ron for a whole week after the night when his father threatened to shoot both of us — that happy week which ended with my thinking Sabina had “stolen” Ron from me. It was the only happy week I spent in this room. Before and after that week I only dreamed of happiness; I spun that whole universe of illusions which you’ve finally succeeded in shattering completely.

“I didn’t pretend Sophia was anyone I had ever loved. I only used her.”

I’ve been staring at those two sentences the way I once stared at the walls of this room. In one of my letters I tried to argue that the reality on which I based my dreams didn’t matter, because my dreams only defined what I sought, not what I had actually lived. Now I know I was wrong, dead wrong. The reality does matter to me. I got both your letters this morning; I read them in the order in which you sent them, and could barely read through the first. I felt empty and hideous inside. I had based my whole life, my daily acts as well as my most distant hopes, on a travesty. You had “only” used me! That matters to me. It matters to every nerve in my brain and to every organ in my body. In your later letter, which I’ve just read, you tell me that our correspondence has been important to all of you; you tell me that Mirna, Yara as well as Jasna have been stimulated by some of the things I’ve written, and even that their very decisions and actions have in some way been affected by me. What if none of what I’d written were true; what if I’d never left this room and had invented ;everything I’ve narrated? Wouldn’t that matter to you, to all of you?

I was in a rage when I read your “confession,” and I spent the entire day squeezing my illusion out of my being, acting without “Yarostan” at the center of my consciousness. Thanks to my rage, an hour ago I achieved something I might call my independence. For once in my life I didn’t try to live up to my “central experience.” I acted on my , own and for myself. I abandoned myself to my wildest desires and I didn’t try to live up to anything except my own passion. If Mirna had been here she would have loved me; Sabina would have too. And contrary to what Mirna suggested about Luisa and me, I’m not running from the consequences. I’m staying right here, eager to face every one of the consequences; Luisa’s hostility, Daman’s hatred, Pat Clesec’s suspicion and even fear, as well as my own newborn, inexperienced and untried independence.

What enraged me even more than your “confession” was the fact that I recognized myself in your description. That passive, fragile, mindless thing who was perfectly willing to do “whatever pleases you, Yarostan,” is the same person who recently begged eighteen-year old Pat Clesec to “show me what to do.” That identical posture, at the beginning and end of two decades of experience, was not a reflection of my weakness, of a moment of dependence in an otherwise independent person. That posture indicated the depth and extent of my. independence. I made each of those statements during a period when I had broken out of passivity and joined a community of independent individuals. Your forcing me to recognize the lies I’ve told myself for the past twenty years enraged me infinitely more than your admission of your desire to shatter a porcelain statue into splinters.

All my life I’ve been surrounded by people I considered independent, people who were in some way rebels. I hardly know what “normal,” submissive people are like — yet I’m one of them. The rebel Nachalo was my life’s hero, but I never rebelled against him. Luisa, the insurgent unionist, was my life’s first model, but I never turned against her; I left her. The day Tina told Sabina and me that we cramped her, I was hurt. Yet Tina did what I’ve never done: she rebelled against her “parents” and took the indispensable step toward independence. I took an easier route. A child of radical parents, I was in the privileged position of being a rebel by birth; all I had to do was conform to my parents; my life’s idols and my parents never clashed; they were the same. Sabina didn’t ever reject her mother either. But Sabina rediscovered the source of Margarita’s rebellion and made it her own; she reacted to the world Margarita had reacted to, and her response was her own authentic response to that world. I never tried to rediscover the source; I only tried to copy my models’ responses, I tried to make my behavior conform to Luisa’s and the mythical Nachalo’s. What was radical to the world at large was the norm to me. That’s why you and Jasna saw such a normal, prim, correct young lady come to the carton plant with Luisa. I had anticipated the coming of the revolution the way a “normal” girl must anticipate the coming of marriage. When the revolution finally came and my mother accompanied me to it, I gave myself to it as dutifully as to the unavoidable, expected husband: “Whatever pleases you, Yarostan ...” It wasn’t a “forced marriage”; I’m not suggesting that. I had seen you at our house. I had listened to you. I hadn’t known it would be with you I’d leave for “the barricades,” although I had wished it. When it was you, nothing could have been more natural. I stepped into a ready-made revolution the way the new bride steps into her assigned husband’s ready-made home: she steps into an alien house, another’s house, eager to learn her tasks: “Show me what to do.” Don’t take all the credit for having used me, Yarostan; some of the credit is mine. I gave myself to you as something to be used, as clay to be shaped — .

Couldn’t I tell you didn’t love me? Oh no, Yarostan, not I, and not then. It wasn’t love that had brought me to you, but “destiny.” I was Nachalo’s daughter; I had been brought up for the revolution, and I had come of age. I was simply being transferred from Luisa’s care to yours. You were to me what Nachalo had always been to me: my model, my idol. It never occurred to me to ask myself whether or not you loved me; it was my “duty” to love you.

(Luisa just came back; it’s long past midnight. I shouted down to ask if she wanted to talk, but she apparently doesn’t. When I asked if she’d mind if I went on typing, she slammed the door of her bedroom. She’s in a fury now. Today it was my turn to shatter a porcelain statue, maybe even several.)

You probably thought your “confession” would shock me. It didn’t. Your description wasn’t exaggerated. I happen to remember the morning when I lay naked on the floor with you right by the carton plant entrance. The reason I remember is that only a year later, by the shore of a pond to which Ron and I had ridden our bikes, I lay awake all night worrying; I was afraid the farmer would open a gate and let the sun shine in on us the way Luisa did. I was afraid because I was ashamed to be seen as a body, as a naked animal. Ashamed because I thought myself the very negation of a body: I was all principle, revolutionary determination, goal. If your desire wasn’t roused by any passion in me except my shame, it’s because that shame was the only passion in me. You don’t exaggerate in the least when you say I turned exactly as I thought I should; the desire to turn differently simply wasn’t in me. I didn’t only turn without passion. I also experienced your embraces without passion, exactly as I had expected to experience them. Nothing surprised me, nothing excited me physically. I said, “I love you, Yarostan”: I’ve said it since; I can say it as easily now, after your “confession,” as I ever could before. I love you, Yarostan. That’s not a description of my passion. It’s something like my life’s principle, my motto; it’s almost my name. When you had your orgasm that morning, between my legs, I was very excited — but not physically. Only intellectually. I was proud of myself, proud to be fulfilling the task I had been brought up for. I would have been equally proud if you’d praised me for coining a perfectly appropriate slogan or for printing a beautiful poster. During all the days and nights we spent together you didn’t rouse me sexually once, even for an instant. You weren’t a body to me but a principle. My feelings toward you were exact inversions of your feelings toward Luisa. You embraced the revolutionary principle with sexual passion, as a body; I embraced your body intellectually, as a principle. I’m not saying any of this out of spite. I’m ashamed of myself. Your letter forced me to come to terms with a self I can’t stand. Isn’t it beyond belief that someone could grow up between Luisa and Sabina Nachalo and remain sexless? I’m ashamed to admit to Yara and to Mirna that I understood perfectly how poor Vesna must have felt in the face of their unbounded animal passion. Shivers went down my back when I learned Mirna had apparently desired her own father physically, sexually, as a body — the same shivers I experienced ten years ago when I learned that my closest friend and comrade desired her own sex physically, the same shivers Vesna must have experienced when the prospect of physical contact with you was thrown in her face. Until today — except for one single period which I tried to erase from my memory — I’ve lived at the opposite end of the world.

Today I made my grand entrance into Mirna’s world. I thank your letter for that. I know I’m scabbing against the postal workers’ strike by having you send your letters across the frontier, but I agree with Mirna and Jasna that it would be awful to stop communicating with you precisely at this moment when everything is possible. Your letters are my only connection with my “likes” elsewhere, and they’re every bit as precious to me, with all your “confessions,” as mine can possibly be to any of you.

This has been an incredible week. Almost everyone is on strike. All major workshops, assembly plants and factories are occupied by workers. For two days Pat and I visited an immense research center which has been transformed into something like a technological playground. Sabina and Tissie gave us fascinating tours. I would have loved to stay, but Pat thought we might be more useful in the council office. He was wrong; nothing much was happening in the council office last night or this morning, but I’m glad we returned, since otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten your letters.

Early this morning I decide to call Luisa. I learned a week ago that her assembly plant is on strike, but I didn’t learn any of the details. I was curious about her response to the strike. The last time I called her I’d gotten furious at her for telling me she was waiting for the union to call the strike. She’s still asleep when I call. “Won’t you be late for work?” I ask sarcastically.

“This happens to be one of the few weekdays in my life when I haven’t set my alarm, Sophia. Couldn’t you’ve called an hour later?”

“I don’t know where I’ll be in an hour, and I’m dying to talk to you.”

“Daman and I did intend to try to get together with you.”

“Why don’t you both come to the council office?” I suggest. “People here would love to hear about your strike.”

Luisa hesitates for a moment and then asks, “Would they? The union called the strike. I’ve been on the picket line every afternoon.”

It’s my turn to hesitate. I didn’t know the union had called any of the strikes. I feel irritated, even angry, at this reminder of the character of Luisa’s insurgency. It’s not Luisa who rebels; it’s her apparatus — that train Zdenek described so straight forwardly. Even that rotten union in her plant is still a union, and a strike not called by a union would be meaningless to her.

I hold my anger in; I don’t want yet another conversation with Luisa to end with her telling me: “Call me when you’re less hysterical.” After my shocked pause, I change the topic. “How’s your romance going?”

“Not so hot. Daman is even more of a puritan than you are. But he does join me at the picket line.”

Suddenly inspired by a plan, I ask her, “Would you mind if I joined you?”

“Seriously, Sophia? A union picket line?”

Giving all my plans away at once, I ask her, “Would you mind if I brought some of my friends?”

“Obviously not!” Luisa exclaims. “Bring your friends and raise all the hell you want with the union bureaucrats! The first day was exciting because some workers tried to go inside to work. But since then it’s been a horrible bore. Do you want us to pick you up?”

I tell her the room where she and Daman can find us. I beg her to have Daman drive across the border to my foreign postbox and also to stop by my house to see if any letters came from you.

I find Pat in the makeshift cafeteria and join him for a quick breakfast. I tell him — in fact I sort of warn him — that I invited a union organizer as well as a professor to the council office.

“I don’t check people’s credentials, you know!” he says with some annoyance.

“I know, but they’re both good friends of mine,” I explain awkwardly; I don’t want him to chase them away with intimidating arguments the moment they walk in. “Luisa is the woman I told you about, the one who took part in that revolution thirty-two years ago.”

“Well, that’s a type of union organizer I would like to meet!”

“I don’t think you’ll find her very different from her colleagues. How would you like to raise hell at a union-run picket line?” I ask him.

Several people are already in the council office when Pat and I get there. The discussion is fascinating, but I’ll just summarize it. People are talking about the strikes that have been breaking out in other cities, and mainly about the fact that one corporation’s productive facilities all over the country are occupied by workers. Everyone’s enthusiasm is dampened by a person who points out that this corporation’s foreign plants have been running at full capacity. “Even if the movement here is victorious, such corporations will shift their operations abroad and continue to determine the content of human activity from there.” People then discuss the prospects for the destruction of international corporations on a world-wide scale. Questions of language barriers, of forms of communication, of travelling delegations are raised and dropped.

About two hours after my call to Luisa, there’s a knock on the door of the council office. Everyone in the room glares with amazement, and a few people laugh. Daman and Luisa back away from the laughter. They probably think I told people two agents of the system were coming — which is in fact what I’d told Pat. I run out and shout, “Good grief, Daman, how many classes have you taught in this very room? This isn’t a private apartment, you know!”

Poor Luisa! She looks terribly intimidated. She’s never been in the “university” before, although she’s always revered it. It’s awful what institutions do to people. To you, to me, to all her friends, Luisa is “the intellectual,” a virtual encyclopedia on unionism and revolution. Yet the minute she walks into the official “intelligence building,” she sees herself through official eyes as a working woman who never finished high school, therefore unschooled, namely ignorant. I know exactly how she feels. I felt the same way the day Tina took me by the hand and accompanied me to the commune; I wasn’t intimidated by the university, but by the “revolution” I imagined to be boiling inside it. Luisa is wearing the same pretty dress she wore the day we visited “Lem’s estate.” (She had expected Daman to call her on that day, but I had called instead.) I take her hand and pull her into the council office. “They all bite here, but none of them has rabies,” I tell her, introducing her to Pat.

Daman remains outside. When I extend my hand to him, he gives me both your letters. He’s not exactly friendly toward me, and I can’t say I don’t know why. The last time I saw him Sabina had insisted he had a phonograph inside his head; he’d tried so desperately to defend himself from Sabina’s attack, and all I’d done to help him was to suggest he call the police to protect him from her. My respect for Daman has been the main casualty of my correspondence with you.

Trying to break the silence I ask him with unintended sarcasm, “Have you been on vacation since you lost your job?”

Daman is offended. “It so happens I’ve been working much harder this past two weeks than I work when school is on.”

“Really? Is that why you haven’t had time to come here, even for a visit? So much has been happening here! What have you been doing?”

“We’ve finally gotten that organization off the ground,” Daman says proudly.

“The people I’ve met here have been getting along perfectly without that kind of organ —”

Daman interrupts me; the professor replaces the intimidated tourist as he asserts authoritatively, “The new society will not be created here, but at the point of production, particularly in the basic industries. It isn’t born in the heads of intellectuals.”

“Is that what your organization is organizing: the new society?” I ask him, this time with intended sarcasm.

Daman answers with a grave tone, “We’ve already gotten out one issue of our paper.”

Unable to curb my sarcasm, I exclaim, “Not that newspaper for workers edited by a professor and his political students!”

Daman’s tone becomes condescending: “It so happens that production workers actually wrote the entire issue. It’s not a paper for workers but a workers’ paper; there’s a world of difference. Its task is not to speak for the workers, but to let the workers speak for themselves.”

“All the workers? It must be an immense newspaper!”

Daman’s face becomes crimson, and I realize I’m doing exactly what I’d hoped Pat wouldn’t do: intimidating him to the point of driving him away. I reword my question. “Did many workers contribute articles?”

“You have to understand there are certain financial difficulties, as well as the problem of time. This issue has two articles, both written by production workers. Luisa happens to have written one of them. I’m now in contact with a third —”

“Luisa wrote an article? I’d like to see your paper!”

Daman beams. “I just happen to have several copies with me.”

“Really? Well let’s take them inside. Everyone in there will want to see them!”

Daman pulls out his handful of “workers’ newspapers” as we walk into the room, and I immediately feel sorry for him. His organization’s achievement looks pathetic in a room filled with beautifully printed leaflets and pamphlets. It’s called The Workers’ Voice and it’s a dirty mimeographed sheet with crooked headlines and barely readable typewritten text. Both articles are unsigned. One is titled, “The Workers Can Do It” and deals with workers who ran a transportation system without any bosses other than union bosses. The other looks, at a glance, like an article on the beneficial effects of higher wages.

“Do you actually give these out to workers occupying their factories?” I ask him.

“They’re going like hot cakes!” Daman tells me. He smiles as he starts giving copies to the people in the room. “We’ve been handing them out at Luisa’s plant and we’re getting rid of at least fifty a day. We only ran off five hundred.”

When Daman hands a copy to Pat, Luisa exclaims, “That’s our workers’ paper!”

Pat glances at both sides briefly, studies the side on wages and lets out a guffaw. “You call this a workers’ paper?”

Daman’s smile leaves his face and his whole body gets rigid as he announces, “What you understand by workers may be very different from what I understand.” With a sweep of his arm he dismisses the roomful of people as well as the stacks of strike announcements and factory occupation accounts. “Students parading as a new working class just don’t cut the ice. The new working class is an invention of petty bourgeois sociologists —”

I interrupt him angrily. “Pat and I and you happen to be the only people in this room who don’t come out of factories!”

A young worker shouts to Daman, “What the hell is the new working class?”

Luisa tries to interpret Daman’s outburst to the people in the room. “He’s referring to workers’ relation to the traditional workers’ movement.”

“I.e... the union,” Pat adds.

But Daman persists. “I’m talking about one’s relation to the means of production, which is the only test of class. People whose function is to manipulate others are best defined as middle class.”

All the people in the room except Luisa and Pat move away from Daman. I move to the corner furthest from Daman and start looking at your first letter, but I continue listening with a certain amount of interest.

Pat says calmly, “Your categories are being superseded by present practice, Pro — mister.” Pat remembers my “warning,” but only to the extent of not calling Daman a professor. Pat points to The Workers’ Voice article on wages. “What you call a workers’ paper is nothing but an instrument of the union bureaucracy; it’s an appendage to capital.”

Daman, unruffled by Pat’s argument, or perhaps missing its point, repeats his ancient argument that, “The most thoroughly unionized and best paid workers in the basic and heavy industries are central to any revolutionary upsurge.”

Pat retorts, “Only when they stop production, only when they stop being unionized and best paid, only when they stop being workers, when they cease to be slaves, when they become masters —”

But Daman insists, “It’s only the fact that they’re workers, the fact that they’re at the point of production, that gives them their revolutionary capacity! It’s their work that teaches them to run production!”

“Their work reproduces capital, and that’s all!” Pat shouts. “You’re an apologist for capital, in other words a shithead!” Several people applaud.

“And you obviously don’t know what capital is,” Daman says with a professorial contempt that infuriates me. “By concentrating workers in the basic industries, capitalism itself creates the organization and discipline of the new society —”

This is greeted by catcalls, whistles, and various shouts like, “Here comes the boss!” and “The new society looks just like the old.” Someone asks, “You a factory owner, mister?”

I can’t resist answering, “No, he’s a professor!”

Various people exclaim, “Oh!”

Daman, leering with hostility at everyone in the room, expresses his understanding of the situation: “It’s obvious that I’ve walked into a meeting of a political sect that adheres to the theory of the backwardness of the working class. Those unionized and well paid workers you sneer at —”

I can’t stand that condescending, self-effacing posture; I interrupt him. “We were sneering at you!”

He ignores me. “Those unionized workers you consider so backward are the ones who continually develop the capacity to create the new society; their work is inherently revolutionary.”

“In other words, work hard and obey the rules!” Pat shouts. “Kiss the boss’s ass, follow the leader, that’s the revolution.”

“Leaders don’t simply impose themselves on the class, they’re products of the class. Workers produce their strongest leaders when they’re themselves strongest —”

And on and on. I’ve heard all of it before. Daman really does have a phonograph in his head instead of a brain. Pat and occasionally some of the other people try in vain to communicate with him. Periodically Luisa tries to “translate” his most unpalatable observations.

I finally lose interest in the argument and start reading the letter Daman picked up at my house; it must have arrived a few days after Sabina and I left with Tina, just before the postal strike began. Daman, Luisa, the argument and the council office vanish as I lose myself in the world you describe. Earlier I came close to suggesting that your “confession” was the only part of your letter I responded to. That isn’t the case at all. I’m amazed to discover the Jasna who speaks through your letter, praising Sabina for having the courage to realize her desires — desires which Jasna never allowed herself to realize. I’m even more amazed by Mirna; your earlier letters had given me a significantly different picture. I’m surprised to discover a Mirna who has a lot in common with Sabina, and even more surprised to learn they knew each other. Mirna is perfectly right about my failure to face any of the consequences caused by that letter I sent you twelve years ago. I didn’t even know there had been any consequences until I learned about them from your letters and from Lem. Of course I realize it was the police, and not my letter, that did the jailing and the killing, but I still feel awful. Obviously nothing I can say now can bring back Mirna’s father or Jan or Vesna. I’m surprised you didn’t learn about that letter for such a long time after your arrest. I’m also puzzled by something in your second letter. Neither you nor Jasna nor, apparently, anyone else had known that Luisa, Sabina and I were released soon after our arrest at the carton plant. Yet I vaguely remember that Titus Zabran was with us when we were released, so at least he must have known about it. I also vaguely remember Luisa telling me years ago that Titus didn’t emigrate with us because he wanted to stay behind to try to have the rest of you released.

Your confession isn’t the only part I respond to, but I admit it’s the part I continue responding to for the rest of the day. As I read about your love for Luisa, the council office comes back into focus, and so does Luisa — nearly a quarter of a century older than the woman in your letter, but just as vigorous, just as youthful, and just as “seductive.” Her seductiveness is novel to me. Either I’m very dense, or else she kept it from me: the truth lies somewhere in between. You’re right: I didn’t know you had slept with Luisa at our house. While I inform myself of that fact, I notice that Daman is no longer arguing with Pat: he’s in a corner of the room, chatting with a woman; she probably expressed interest in his organization. Pat and most of the workers hover around Luisa; apparently they all know her to be the co-author of The Workers’ Voice. Someone points out that the article on wages flatly contradicts her article. But no argument follows. Luisa is an organizer, a politician, a charmer — as well as a diplomat. She agrees that the point is not to have higher wages for slave labor, but to appropriate the productive forces and be free. Yet in the same breath she manages to defend Daman as well as the writer of the other article: the main point is to act, and even someone fighting for higher wages is more of a revolutionary than people who merely sit in a room and talk.

Pat starts to ask, “Are you going to tell us that workers producing weapons for the police are doing more than —”

“Obviously not!” Luisa exclaims, looking uneasily toward Daman. “But I am saying that workers on a picket line they themselves organize, defending their jobs from scabs, are doing infinitely more than what I see being done here.”

“What if some of us went to your picket line to find out if it really is organized by the workers themselves?” Pat asks.

“The more the merrier.” Luisa exclaims. “How many want to check out and if need be challenge the organization of that picket line?” She’s in her milieu.

Someone asks, “Will the union goons actually let us talk to any workers?”

“All you have to do is out-shout the loudspeakers,” she answers.

Pat makes another suggestion. “What if we go with a leaflet explaining who we are? It can start with the question: Why do you let the loudspeakers speak for you?”

Shouting “That’s magnificent; it’s what I’ve always asked myself,” Luisa throws her arms around Pat and I almost fall off my chair, almost scattering your letter all over the room. I, Sophia Nachalo, Queen of the Peasants, prim, correct and well-mannered, perfect for shattering, afraid to hold Pat’s hand because he’s only eighteen, start to boil, and I go on boiling until I make myself the one who carries the revolution to the peasants, until I’m the one who shatters porcelain statues.

The leaflet on loudspeakers is composed in less than fifteen minutes; it consists of a sequence of slogans; almost everyone, including Luisa, contributes one. When it’s done Luisa suggests that it be printed on the mimeograph in the basement of Daman’s house, but Pat objects: “We have access to printing equipment only a few minutes away from here, and I know how to print; someone else with the name of Nachalo taught me.”

Luisa looks quizzically at me. “I didn’t know you could print.”

“It’s Tina,” I tell her.

Daman expresses sudden interest. “Tina is here? And she prints?” He doesn’t seem at all eager to have another run-in with her.

Everyone except the two people who volunteered to spend the day in the council office sets out toward Ted’s cooperative print shop. Pat and Luisa, her arm locked in his, lead the procession of fourteen or so people. Daman and his new friend continue their conversation several feet behind everyone else; I learn that his newest “recruit” is a worker from the office machine plant Pat and I visited during my first week here. I walk right behind Pat and Luisa, with both your letters in my handbag.

On the way to the print shop, Luisa tells Pat, “I agree with you about the other article in The Workers’ Voice. Its author is a union man, and I objected to Daman’s including it The union I fought with was a genuine workers’ union which had nothing in common with this company union. It had no paid functionaries —”

Pat objects, “Yet after the victory, some of the unpaid functionaries became government ministers and factory managers!” I’m continually amazed by how we’ll read he is.

“You have to understand the circumstances,” Luisa pleads. “It was war, and war always destroys everything people fight for.”

Pat doesn’t pursue his argument. Ever since we went to talk to the office machine workers I’ve been aware that Pat isn’t nearly as argumentative with women as he is with men.

Only Pat, Luisa and I go into the print shop; the others wait outside. Pat immediately sits down at an electric typewriter.

As soon as Tina sees Luisa, she exclaims, “Well I’ll be damned! How many years is it since you’ve taken a day off work?”

“I take it that you Nachalos know each other,” Pat ascertains. “May I ask if you’re related?”

Tina, mounting an enormous plate onto the metal cylinder of a press, shouts, “Can’t you see the family resemblance? Sophia and Luisa are sisters; I’m their mother. What else do you want to know?”

Pat mutters, “That’ll teach me to snoop.” He proofreads the leaflet before mounting it in the camera copyboard. Then he takes Luisa’s hand and pulls her toward the darkroom entrance. “Come on; I’ll show you how production can take place without managers or union bureaucrats.”

I’m on the verge of asking, “Can I come too?” I’ve never seen that type of photography, and the thought of Luisa whisking you off to the stockroom of the carton plant flashes through my mind. But I walk toward the large press Tina is adjusting.

“Back so soon?” Tina asks me. concentrating on the press.

“From the research center?” I ask.

Tina turns the press on. “I couldn’t get my fill of it,” she shouts above the noise of the press. “I could have spent my whole life playing with all those tools and gadgets.”

I back away from Tina as she pulls a printed sheet from the press and I almost trip over a box. I feel intimidated by her comments. I stayed at the research center for two days, but it didn’t ever occur to me that I might want to play with the tools and gadgets. The only time I experienced such a desire was in the garage, when I was Tina’s apprentice. It’s not a coincidence that in the garage I also performed my life’s single independent act, the night I threw myself on Jose because I had decided to demonstrate the exact nature of my innermost desires. But my independence began and ended with that act. That night I acted in the spirit of Tina, in the spirit of what the garage stood for. I was my own person; I made myself what I most wanted to be. What I made myself, independently, on my own — what I most wanted to be — was dependent! I wanted to be your shadow, Ron’s shadow, Jose’s shadow, even Tina’s shadow. By that independent act I annihilated my independence. The garage was my one “community” where my role wasn’t predefined, where I had to define the nature of my life and the content of my activity on my own. Unlike seven-year old Tina, I was only able to define myself the same way I had always defined myself: as part of someone else’s project, as Tina’s apprentice and Jose’s woman.

“I’d give you a tour,” Tina shouts, “but these pamphlets have to be done by noon.”

“How did you learn to use all these things so fast?” I ask her.

“I didn’t learn fast,” she shouts. “Now that you know Ted isn’t the beast you thought him, I might as well tell you I’ve been here since the print shop started, over two years ago.”

“You’ve been seeing Ted for the past two years? Did Sabina know?”

“You’re the only one who didn’t know!” she shouts.

My head starts to spin. Didn’t I know about your affair with Luisa, under my very nose, in my own house? I was the only one who didn’t know!

“I’ve been seeing Ted ever since Sabina and I left the garage. Don’t look so glum! You made it perfectly obvious you didn’t want to hear a word about him!” Tina turns the press off and starts to dismount the plate.

I turn to another topic. “Have you known Pat long?”

“He sure is a bird, isn’t he? I’ve never known anyone quite like him,” she says, laughing and sitting down on a box. “I met him a few days before I moved out of our house. I was here when Pat and his whole group of friends came in. They said they’d heard Ted and I often helped students with their print-ing projects. And then they said they were anti-students; they didn’t want either to contract a job or to hire a proletarian; they had come to create a new situation. Ted didn’t know what to make of them. They talked about numerous projects, such as leaflets, pamphlets, even books. They showed me some of the things they’d written: attacks on every imaginable authority, especially revolutionary ones. I loved it. They told me none of them could draw, but when I volunteered to do some of the drawing for them Pat got mad. That’s not the point, he said. We want to break down all those divisions; we all want to draw, write, print.”

I begged Tina not to spoil her schedule because of me.

“The press is running perfectly, so I’m way ahead of my deadline. Anyway, Pat asked me if Ted would be willing to take part in their projects as an equal. I asked if Ted would have to enroll in college to be their equal, and Pat scolded me saying he hadn’t come to be ridiculed, but to establish a direct, transparent, non-capitalist relationship. I understood what he meant, and it appealed to me a lot. I told them I’d take part. ‘You?’ Pat asked with disbelief. ‘Now who’s doing the ridiculing?’ I asked him. He tried to get out of it by asking if I was the printer’s daughter. They invited me to their next meeting and I went. I’m one of them now. But since that day I haven’t let Pat forget that he didn’t want to be the equal of an eighteen-year old girl who’d never been to school. Except for that I think he’s nice — they all are; I’m the only woman in the group, and after that day they’ve all gone out of their way to treat me as an equal.”

Ted walks toward us from the back of the shop. He lives upstairs. Tina shouts to him, “Would you mind giving Sophia a tour? I’d like to finish running this pamphlet.”

I just saw Ted the previous evening, but I rush toward him as if he were an old friend. The previous day he had driven Pat and me back from the research center. I shake his hand eagerly. “I’m really impressed by the size of this place. It’s immense, even when I think of the place we were in yesterday. After all, this is the work of a single individual.”

“Two, not one,” he insists. “Tina did more than half the work.” Accompanying me from the press back toward the darkroom, he adds, “She’s the one who built the darkroom and she got the large press running.”

“Really?” I exclaim. “Where in the world did she learn to do that?”

“You didn’t know? Tina had jobs in every major print shop in this city. She didn’t only learn to run the machines, she also walked off with a bag full of supplies every time she left her job.”

It suddenly occurs to me that the few times I asked her what kind of job she had, she’d told me she was printing. I had rarely asked because to me all jobs were wage labor and therefore the same. “Tina actually stole the supplies you use here?”

“Everything except the machinery and the paper. Until a couple of weeks ago.”

“What happened then?” I ask.

He leads me to a corner of the shop and proudly points to several stacks of paper, mounds of unsorted inks, film boxes and various objects I can’t identify. “Everything started to change. A group of kids came in to learn to print. Then other groups came — lots of them factory workers, some actual printers. They started teaching each other. The presses started running day and night. Leaflets, posters, picture books — beautiful things too. And they all brought things from places on strike: inks, paper, plates; two groups even set up silkscreening in the back. Some of them can print as well as Tina. I thought I might be needed here, but I’m not. I’ll be going back to Sabina and Tissie tomorrow. They’d both be happy if I took you along.”

I tell Ted I’ll try to come. But it looks like I won’t make it. Tomorrow is right now, and I’d rather finish this letter before accumulating yet more experiences to describe to you.

Pat and Luisa are no longer in the darkroom. Pat is running the leaflet off on a small press, and Luisa is outside, proudly showing a copy to Daman. I run out to have a look. Daman holds the copy in his hand and frowns.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Luisa asks Daman. “And it all took less than half an hour, for two thousand copies! Ours took us all of two weeks!”

“Are we ready to go?” Daman asks.

“Well wait for Pat to bring the rest of the leaflets, won’t you? Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss, Daman. It makes the same point ours does: why let the loudspeakers speak for you? Well, doesn’t it?”

Before Daman answers, Pat comes out with the stack of leaflets. Someone observes, “There are eleven of us. We’ll have to go in two cars.” Pat gives half the leaflets to the six people who are to go in the other car; Luisa gives the other driver directions. On the way to the car, Daman continues talking to the woman from the office machine plant, and this seems to irk Luisa. When we reach the car, the woman gets into the front seat next to Daman. She looks slightly older than Luisa, although Luisa, in her girlish skirt and with her hair hanging loose over her shoulders, looks much younger than her age. I slide into the back seat next to Pat; Luisa gets in next to him from the other side.

Daman, apparently continuing his conversation with the woman, makes a comment that seems to be aimed at Pat. “It’s not to become a paper in which professional writers express themselves. They can confine themselves to their usual outlets. This paper is for workers who’ve never written before.”

Pat is about to respond to the comment, but Luisa prevents the resumption of the argument in the council office by resuming her own argument instead. She tells Pat, “Maybe a leaflet can be printed without any type of organization. But I still think the new society is going to need an organization. Of course it has to be the workers’ own organization.”

Pat responds angrily, “In most people’s mouths organization and obedience are synonymous. Do you think this leaflet was printed without organization? My point was that organized activity is possible without order givers and order takers. Your new society sounds like a place where most people work and obey orders, while a few manage and make decisions. There’s nothing new about that.”

“Everything would be different if the workers themselves managed —”

“Why?” Pat asks.

Luisa pauses and then answers, “Because present-day managers serve the interests of capital and the state, whereas workers would serve the interests of their fellow workers. That would transform the nature of all activity and all relations.”

The woman in the front seat turns toward Luisa. “Get off it, dearie! Every union rep I know is a former worker, and every one of them serves the interests of capital and the state. They’ll serve whoever pays their salaries, as they always have.”

Luisa objects, “That’s because these unions are all company unions.”

“Oh yea?” the woman asks. “Well I’m one of those who was around during those good old days when you got busted for talking union, and I know that the stories about union organizers serving the workers’ interests are all bullshit. They were on the make then; that’s why they seemed so gutsy. Today they’ve made it; they’ve got no more reason to be gutsy. And what do you think they were on the make for? For workers’ interests? Forget it! They were on the make for precisely what they’ve got today!”

“Then you don’t believe change is possible,” Luisa concludes.

“Is that what I said?” the woman asks. “Why do you think I’m here, or in that commune? I think it’s possible, but not with unions. I agree with the kid: if you’ve got managers, they’re going to manage, no matter who or what they were before.”

Although Pat squirms when she refers to him as “the kid,” Daman swerves the car and almost side-swipes a car in the next lane when she expresses her agreement with “the kid”: Daman just lost his newest recruit to “the kid.”

The woman continues, unaware of the minor uproar she just caused, “Some people think everything would change if all supervisors were women. That’s the same baloney. I’ve got a woman supervisor. She used to be an ordinary worker. And let me tell you something, dearie: I wouldn’t go out of my way to give her more power than she’s got already.”

“If you reject the very possibility of a genuine workers’ organization, what are you left with?” Luisa asks.

The woman hesitates for a moment. Finally she says, “Just people, I guess. That’s what I hoped to find out in the so-called commune. I thought I’d find people asking the same questions.” She turns to Pat and asks, “What do you think, kid? What’s on the agenda after the unions, according to the younger generation?”

Pat stares at her but doesn’t answer; he’s obviously irked. I poke him gently and whisper, “Tell us, Pat; I’d like to know too.”

But Daman shouts, “How would he know? Has he ever worked in a factory?”

That does it for Pat. He tightens his lips and stares out the window, a victim of age-ism. I lower my hand to the seat and reach for my humiliated comrade’s hand. His fist is clenched. I wrap my hand around it and try to formulate an appropriate answer to the woman’s unintended insults. “I can’t speak for my whole generation — we kids are all different, you know — but I can tell you what at least one kid thinks.” Pat smiles with gratitude and opens his hand into mine. I go on, “I think the printing of this leaflet was a good example of what I’d consider free activity. It wasn’t bossed by capitalist or union or party managers. The people most interested in it made all their own decisions and did their own work. They organized their activity themselves. Isn’t that true, Luisa?”

Luisa hesitantly admits, “That’s true. But printing a leaflet is a simple matter compared to running a transportation system, provisioning a city with food —”

“Luisa!” I shout, “Why can’t you imagine those things being done any other way than they’re done now? At this very moment, in this very city, all kinds of things are being done freely, no longer as wage labor, but as projects, exactly the way this leaflet was done. Complex things, too. I consider street theater an extremely complex art. The entire former university is organized by its present occupants. Some neighborhoods are starting to organize food distribution on their own. I could have shown you any number of pamphlets describing —”

Pat’s enthusiasm suddenly returns; so does his pomposity. “That’s what I call the revolutionary project: the conscious domination of history by the men who make it!”

I let go of his hand abruptly. “The men? You mean the kids!”

The rest of the trip to the assembly plant takes place in silence. Luisa directs Daman to park the car right across the street from the picket line and sound truck. Men wearing perfectly clean overalls walk in a circle carrying signs with the name of the union.

“This is a strike?” Pat asks.

“It’s not very exciting, but it is a strike,” Luisa answers.

Pat objects, “But this is nothing but a ritual! Union bureaucrats are getting fresh air and being paid for it! Did we print these leaflets for them?”

“Of course not,” Luisa assures him. Pulling him out of the car, she says, “Come on, I’ll show you where the workers are.”

Daman gets out of the car and announces, “I’ll stick to the picket line.” He hands the office machine worker a handful of The Workers’ Voice and asks, “You’ll join me?”

She gives the copies back to Daman and asks Luisa, “Where did you say they were?”

Daman walks quietly away from us and starts to give out his paper to the picketing “workers,” and also to passers-by, in a polite, businesslike manner. He seems to have brought about fifty copies, probably the day’s “ration.”

Luisa tells the rest of us, “The main hangouts are the bar and the bowling alley next to it. There are also lots of people in the pinball machine parlor across the street. Basically all the people here, except the bureaucrats, are waiting for something to happen. This is one of the dirtiest and most dangerous plants in the city, and people will be receptive to just about anything. I think the bar is the best place to start a conversation.”

“I used to know that too, dearie, in the good old days. But shouldn’t we wait for the others?” the woman asks, referring to her six friends coming in the other car.

Pat suggests, “They probably got here first, saw what kind of a strike it was, and didn’t bother to stop.”

The woman agrees. “You’re probably right, kid — I mean pal; people sure are thin skinned nowadays. I’m for the bowling alley.”

“I’ll try the bar. How about you?” Pat asks me.

I hesitate for a second and then decide, “I’ve never been to a bowling alley.”

The woman grabs half the leaflets as well as my arm. “Never been bowling? Well come on. honey, you don’t know what you’ve missed!”

Luisa glances across the street and. waves to Daman. Then she shoves her arm through Pat’s and shouts, “Let’s go raise hell in the bar!” You knew Luisa. I never did. I’ve never before seen the woman who made love to you during work hours at the carton plant, nor the woman you saw leaving the carton plant with her arm through Marc Glavni’s. She didn’t let me see her. I used to be her conscience; she recently proclaimed her independence from her conscience.

I shove my arm into the arm of the woman who calls me “Honey” and I shout, “Let’s us go raise hell in the bowling alley!”

As soon as we go in, we notice a stack of the “loudspeaker” leaflets by the entrance; we also see them in people’s hands. The six who came in the other car are bowling. The woman pulls me toward them. None of them believe me when I tell them I don’t even know the point of the game. Apparently you’re supposed to knock down wooden bottles at the end of a channel by rolling a large ball into them. The ball has holes in it and is held like a glove. I don’t succeed in knocking down a single bottle. On my last try, the heavy ball-shaped glove refuses to leave my hand, and I go flying down the alley with it. My comrades seem to enjoy that more than the game itself.

Luisa and Pat enter the bowling alley. I ask them if they lost an argument. “We didn’t even have a chance to start one,” Luisa says; she seems slightly tipsy. “There’s a ball game on and everyone is watching the T.V. We even went across the street, but one of you already gave leaflets out there. And it’s impossible to hear anything above those machines. We should have titled the leaflet, Why do you allow pinball machines to play for you?”

Pat says, “At least Luisa and I had a stimulating conversation.”

“A very stimulating conversation,” Luisa adds. “There’s nothing like a few drinks to loosen tongues and soften tempers. Pat told me all about the real revolution. It’s a festival where everyone does nothing but play, not these capitalist pseudo-games, but living games. It’s the gratification of all desires, a never-ending celebration. Do I have it right?”

“Perfectly,” Pat says, ogling her; apparently he can’t hold his alcohol as well as she can.

“How about all of us going to my house and having such a celebration!” Luisa suggests.

The woman turns down Luisa’s invitation, so the three of us cross the street and find Daman trying to interest a union bureaucrat in The Workers’ Voice. Luisa pulls him toward the car and invites him to her celebration.

“I’d love to come, but I’ve got some work I could do.”

Tugging at Daman’s arm, Luisa hisses, “Only scabs work during a strike.” Inside the car, she slips into the front seat and huddles to him, begging, “Please, Daman; we can discuss the next issue of the paper. There are numerous things I want to suggest.”

I slide into the back seat — and wonder if Pat will get into the front seat next to Luisa. But he slips in next to me. The car starts. Pat’s hand reaches for mine. I don’t move away. His hand slips over mine and squeezes it. My heart pounds; a disorganized array of contradictory feelings surges through me. Contempt and resentment toward Pat combine with pity, and with growing desire — the desire to outdo Luisa, the desire to undo your humiliation of me. If revolution is a festival, then I warm up for it in the back seat of Daman’s car, I get ready to celebrate, to gratify my own desires, to scandalize the union organizer, the professor and the eighteen-year old philosopher who considers men the only history-makers. I pull my hand from under Pat’s and place it over his, sliding my fingers slowly between his. The arrival of your letter couldn’t have been timed better. I’ve been longing to consummate this act, but I lacked the justification, the courage, the setting. Your “confession” provides the perfect justification; Mirna’s stubborn determination gives me a model of courage; Luisa’s “celebration” promises to provide a perfect setting. No one talks on the way to Luisa’s, but if anyone did I wouldn’t hear a sound; I’m deafened by the prospect of dethroning the Queen of Peasants, the prospect of shattering several porcelain statues. If revolution is the gratification of desires, then one of its fires is blazing in the back seat of Daman’s car.

I didn’t understand the perverse character of my desire for Pat until I described it to you in my previous letter, If my desire was perverse then, it’s even more so when I dig my fingers into the palm of his hand in Daman’s car; I’ve lost almost all the admiration I initially felt toward him; the pure genius Who had simultaneously attracted, intimidated and repelled me is no longer such a genius nor so pure to me. But if my desire is even more perverse than it was then, my moral self-restraint is gone now — it’s been driven away by your letter; by your description of Luisa, by Luisa’s insistent confirmation of every one of the traits you described.

* * *

Still a prisoner of the restraints imposed by my eclectic morality after I sent you my previous letter, I stayed away from Pat for over a week. Twice I visited the occupied office machine plant a few blocks from the commune. I stayed away from the council office except on days when I knew Pat wouldn’t be there. During that week I attended meetings of striking postal workers, newspaper printers, taxi drivers. The discussions in which I took part were the most stimulating discussions I’ve experienced. In a historical fraction of a second, people here have appropriated the entire history of revolution. Everything human beings in struggle ever reached for is being sought here and now.

I ran into Pat in the council office, more or less by chance, a week ago. I described to him what I’d been doing. He described meetings he’d been attending; he spoke with contagious enthusiasm.

“It’s just fantastic; the entire so-called intellectual community is committing suicide!” he exclaimed. “In one after another session, the experts themselves are denouncing their own special fields as illegitimate, as cut off from the rest of social life: philosophers, teachers, even medical students, though I haven’t heard any doctors yet.”

I was fascinated and asked when the next such meeting would be held. Pat told me architects were to meet that night. His enthusiasm wasn’t exaggerated. At that meeting, held in a large auditorium, one after another architect, not merely students but practicing architects, described themselves as usurpers and their profession as an illegitimate monopoly over the individual’s and the community’s life activity: the creation of one’s physical surroundings, the shaping of one’s environment.

At the end of the meeting, with an enthusiasm equalling Pat’s, I nudged him and said, “Imagine the experts themselves denouncing their own expertise as a usurpation!”

Pat’s response was: “You really amaze me, Sophia! Very few people grasp the implications of what we’ve just heard.”

My immediate reaction was to smile; I felt flattered! But then something like an electric shock went through me. I remembered his having said, “You’re really good,” the day we had talked to several office machine workers in the restaurant across the street from their plant. He was impressed by the apparent presence of wit and intelligence comparable to his own in a person with breasts! And I was flattered! I swallowed my smile and tried to stare through him, but he was totally unconscious of his arrogance. During the next few days he confirmed my new view of him; he demonstrated beyond a doubt that he’s absolutely convinced he and his friends, all young men until Tina joined them “as an equal,” which I suppose means as a young man, have an absolute monopoly over all human knowledge, wit and insight.

At the end of the architects’ meeting I limited myself to staring at him. We left our seats together and followed the crowd out of the auditorium. The hall outside was lined with literature tables. Every conceivable political sect was displaying all its wares to the intellectual community on the eve of its self-destruction.

Behind one of the tables I recognized a person I hadn’t seen in ages. I ran toward her shouting, “Rhea Morphen!” We embraced as if we had been best friends. Pat ran after me. I introduced Rhea as my roommate during my first year in college.

Pat picked up one of the books on her table and asked, “How much do they pay you to peddle this stuff?” Only then did I glance at the publications on. the table: celebrations of state-worship and glorifications of the most tyrannical dictatorships in history.

Rhea answered politely, “No one pays me, I volunteer my time.”

With a sweeping glance at the table’s contents, Pat asked, “How about the Political Thought of Adolph Hitler? Is it sold out?”

“What do you mean by that?” Rhea asked, growing hostile.

“You’ve got the collected and selected works of all the other Fuehrers! How about —”

Rhea turned her back to Pat and asked me contemptuously, “Is that the type of politics you’re into now, Sophie?”

“That’s the politics I’ve always been into, Rhea. Have you forgotten we didn’t part on the best of terms?”

“Are you referring to your clique’s excluding me from that underground paper?”

“No, Rhea, I’m referring to your voting to evict me from the co-op —”

A customer who looked like a professor interrupted our conversation. He picked out two books: a compilation of the “essential thoughts” of a dictator, and a diatribe on “petty bourgeois deviations in the workers’ movement.”

Pat commented, “Anticipation ends boredom for some. It creates fear in others.”

“Are you talking to me?” the customer asked.

Pat picked up copies of the same two books, leafed through one, and said, “We must see what the authorities say before we take any false steps.”

“Do you have something against these books?” the customer asked.

“I don’t have anything against the books,” Pat said, “I’m just curious about the mentality of those who read them.”

The customer slammed his money down on the table and walked away saying, “These, works are condensations of the historical experience of the international workers’ movement.”

“They’re the ravings of megalomaniacs!” Pat shouted after him.

Rhea turned to me angrily. “Would you mind taking your boyfriend somewhere else?”

Whispering, “Let’s go, Pat,” I wrapped my arm around my “boyfriend,” proudly displaying to Rhea not only my “type of politics” but also my “decadent immorality” — it’s ironic that I wanted to display the latter quality a week before I got your letter.

But Rhea didn’t let us get away; she shouted after us, “Whenever workers regain consciousness and again turn to their organization, petty bourgeois intellectuals try to poison them with their philosophy of despair.”

I rushed back to the table and hissed, “The thought of your party’s goons running the army and the police makes me despair all right! It sends shivers down my back! It gives me the creeps! Don’t you know what they did to Lem?”

It turned out that Rhea did “know”; her organization apparently had a whole “line” about what had happened to her one-time comrade. “Don’t tell me your lies about Lem!” she shouted. “I know your stepfather Alberts and his friends tortured him and then paid him to spy on and poison his former comrades. He turned Debbie Mathews into an alcoholic —” Rhea started whispering because another customer was buying the condensed thoughts of another dictator.

I decided to try my turn. “May I ask why you’re buying this book?”

“I think we’re living in a revolutionary period,” she answered, “and I want to learn what someone experienced in revolution had to say.”

It was fun to go on. “You mean an expert on revolution, on how to fight your own battles and live your own life? Did you attend the meeting?”

“Yes, and I agree with most of what was said. We architects have done nothing but serve the interests of the capitalist class, and that raises the question of the legitimacy —”

“How about the architects who served the interests of the dictator whose work you just picked up? Is that service legitimate?” I shouted.

Rhea told the customer, “She’s being paid to heckle at my table.” The woman paid for the book and walked away.

I turned furiously at Rhea. “All you’re expert in is lying! The rule of your organization is the rule of liars, the reign of the big lies! But the day of your glorious victories is gone! Everyone except a few idiots is on to you now! You’re nothing but a carcass!”

Rhea smiled viciously. “Don’t count us out too soon, Sophie. Half a century ago everyone said we’d never win, and we won! Today we’ve got nearly half the world on our side, and our power is still growing. We sold more literature during the past week than during the previous ten years!”

Pat shouted, “You’re growing all right — like a cancer! All the life-destroying political sects are growing. You’re not growing because you carry life, but because some people have been dead so long they’re afraid of life. You offer them death, that’s why they turn to you! You rescue them from a void that calls for creativity and imagination and you give them back their lost boredom and routine; you save them from the leap into the unknown and channel them back to the known. You’re gravediggers of revolutions and murderers of revolutionaries. You’re the cancer of a revolutionary period!”

Rhea’s grin didn’t leave her face, “Do you think you’ll ever get workers to follow your petty-bourgeois philosophy of despair?”

I shouted, “You can’t even imagine people doing anything other than follow! Free human beings are inconceivable to you!”

Rhea still remained calm. “Workers will be free when they become conscious of their need for their organization and their leaders.”

“Said Hitler!” Pat shouted.

“Who hired you to come here and heckle?” Rhea asked me.

I smiled and answered politely, “No one hired us, Rhea. We volunteered our time.” I took Pat’s hand and we walked away from her. As soon as we were out of the building, I let go of Pat’s hand. I was depressed. I recognized something of myself in Rhea. Not the commitment to the organization or to the state. The life-destroying function of the puppeteers and manipulators is perfectly clear to me now. Maybe it wasn’t that clear to me twenty years ago; I was only fifteen. Your letters have made me extremely sensitive to the self-elected “vanguards,” the petty despots parading as the world’s greatest rebels, sucking blood out of beings who’ve just come to life, the organizers and politicians waiting to pounce on the slaves only just freed from masters. To all of them the mere suggestion that human beings might be free and creative through their own efforts is an expression of despair. It’s Rhea herself who is driven to despair. The possibility that people might do without her bureaucratic organization and its despotic central committee is what makes her despair, just as the possibility that people might do without unions makes Luisa despair: “What are we left with?”

Thanking Pat for telling me about the architects’ meeting, I ran off to my bed in the “dormitory.” I was depressed by Rhea’s lifelong dependence on authority to guide her life’s activity because I recognized a similar dependence in myself. Only instead of taking a ruler, a megalomaniac, to borrow Pat’s word, as my life’s guide, I took Nachalo, Luisa, you. I was wrong some time ago when I wrote you that my activity on the university newspaper staff had nothing in common with Rhea’s. If her articles reflected, not her own practice and thought but her authority’s, so did mine. Whatever I wrote, I kept my “community” and my “models” in front of me as my guides. If Rhea didn’t communicate thoughts but merely transmitted them, I did no more. I transmitted Luisa’s thoughts and what I took to be your thoughts. I didn’t leave any more room for the mutual invention of projects than Rhea did. Only my authorities weren’t among the world’s great rulers, and therefore ray dependence wasn’t noticed, even by me.

I remained depressed for two or three days, although I continued to be stimulated by the activities and unending debates taking place around me. I couldn’t get Rhea out of my mind — nor Pat — and I again avoided contacts with him. It was Tina who knocked me out of my sour mood. One morning she woke me at sunrise and literally pulled me out of bed.

“Nothing here can possibly be more exciting than the place Heft last night, and I’d feel like a criminal if I didn’t push you to go there,” Tina told me. “Last night I returned from the occupied research center. Sabina and Tissie are both part of the new crew, and they’re just dying to show the place off to you. Ted is going back there today and he’ll be glad to take you along.”

I hadn’t seen Ted since I’d left the garage; I had even avoided going into the print shop the day I came to the commune; my first response to the prospect of seeing him again was fright. Ted’s nightly visits to Tina’s room, my desperately violent attempt to pull him out of my bed, his conviction that I had intended to ravage Tina, all flashed through my mind. I told Tina, “I’d love to go — but couldn’t I go whenever you go back there?”

“I just spent a week there; it was fabulous and I intend to go back. But I want to help clean up some of the mess in the print shop, and I’d like to learn to use some of the things people brought. I know what you’re thinking, Sophia. Before you ever left the garage Ted figured out he’d been wrong about you. You were just as wrong about Ted. He’s willing to forget; why aren’t you? Why are you so unfair?”

“Is that why you woke me, Tina? To convince me to make up with Ted?”

“Gosh, Sophia, you’re just like a baby! No, I’m not trying to force you into anything. I genuinely thought you’d want to see that place and to see what Sabina is doing!” Tina started to walk away from me.

“Wait!” I shouted; “I’ll go if Pat agrees to go with me.”

In less than half an hour Tina returned to my dorm room with Pat. “If Tina thinks no one should miss it, then it must really be worth visiting,” Pat said to me. “And on the way there I’ll be able to ask the printer about some problems I’ve been having with the camera.”

Link https://youtu.be/PlHvl_GQZfE

Pat and I went to have a quick breakfast while Tina returned to the print shop to tell Ted to meet us at the corner of the campus. After breakfast I ran up for my purse and toothbrush, and we were off. Pat recognized Ted when he honked the car horn; I didn’t. I ran to the back seat; Pat sat in front. Ted greeted Pat, and then extended his hand to me, looking sadly into my eyes. I put my hand in his, but could think of nothing to say to him. I felt relieved when, soon after we started, Pat asked Ted some technical questions about printing.

Ted took us to a fantasy world I didn’t know existed:, an immense factory building set in landscaped gardens and surrounded by a park. The entrance walls were covered by slogans, similar to those at the former university, but the rest of the environment was an electronic wonderland. Ted told us Tissie and Sabina were working with a crew developing, a vehicle that would transport a person to any part of the world in a few minutes. He led us to a large room, full of computers and electronically operated machine tools; the walls were covered with diagrams and photographs of vehicles. I immediately, saw Sabina with a group of people studying a complex wiring chart. Sabina turned, grinned, and nudged the young woman next to her.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when Tissie jumped and ran toward me. “Hi, sis! I thought I’d never see you again,” she shouted as she threw her arms around me. “You look great! Isn’t this place something?”

“Tissie! You look so happy, so healthy! I, didn’t recognize you!”

Dancing proudly in front of me, Tissie told me, “Three weeks with Sabina plus some new clothes was all it took, sis!”

“Let me look at you, Tissie! You look younger than you did ten years ago! You’re beautiful!” I couldn’t get over her vigor; she wasn’t at all the person I had known in the garage.

Tissie hugged Sabina and shouted proudly, “Hey, listen to the compliments I’m getting, and listen to who’s giving them!” Then she ran to me, turned me around, and exclaimed, “Holy Mary mother of god, Sabina, do you actually keep this jewel all to yourself all year round?”

I blushed and started to cry. “Thank you for being so nice to me, Tissie; I wasn’t very nice to you.”

Tissie returned to me, pressed me tightly against her and whispered, “You were a gem, sis.”

I pecked her lips and whispered, “You’re lying. You’re the gem.”

Tissie pulled Sabina toward me. “How about giving sis a tour of the place? This vehicle won’t go anywhere for a while yet. Hey Ted, come on!”

I remembered Pat. “Wait, Tissie, I haven’t introduced my friend.”

“Did he come with you?” Tissie asked, turning to Pat. “Sorry there, I didn’t see you.”

I pulled Pat’s hand toward Tissie’s. “This is Pat Clesec. He’s helped me understand a great deal of what’s been happening.” Then I introduced Pat to “my two best friends, Sabina Nachalo and Tissie Avis.”

Pat shook Tissie’s hand, then Sabina’s, and asked, “Another Nachalo? Is it the name of a sect, an order or some kind of sorority?”

Tissie tried to help him. “One of them is the other’s aunt, though I can’t remember which. Are you the aunt, Sabina?”

Sabina answered, “I’m my own mother, Tissie, so I can’t very well be the aunt, can I?”

Tissie told Pat, “Just act as if they’re sisters; have you ever seen two more gorgeous sisters?”

Displaying Tissie to Pat, Sabina said, “Look at who’s talking. Would you believe she was released from a prison hospital only three weeks ago?”

Ted added, “When she came out she looked like a corpse. Incurable dope addict, they called her. A week after she was out she was just like a kid, all cured.”

Tissie pulled Ted’s beard. “Sure I got cured, ‘cause I had an old man like you to take care of me.”

I was hypnotized by Tissie. She really was like a child. Her enthusiasm, her energy, her rebirth were every bit as fantastic to me as the strikes and occupations. Maybe what’s happening is that we’re all becoming children again. Our rigid roles and characters are dropping off like dried skin. We’re fascinating to each other because each one of our acts might be a total surprise, at any instant our personalities might change completely. Like children, we’re not exhausted by what we’ve been and are; life is ahead of us; we’re no longer dead.

Tissie announced, “If no one’s got any more compliments, let’s start!, But if anyone has more nice things to say about me, I’ll stay all day! I love it!”

Sabina kneeled in front of Tissie, kissed Tissie’s hand and quoted, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate —”

Tissie danced around Sabina and laughed. “Oh, but my eyes are nothing like the sun,: music makes, a much more pleasing sound, and when I walk I always stay on the: ground.” Raising Sabina off the ground, she asked her gypsy tutor ”if I get it right?”

“Word for word, Tissie. Next week, when the whole world becomes our toy, everyone will speak in verse — their own verse.”

Tissie sandwiched herself between Sabina and me, Pat and Ted trailed behind, and the tour began. Sabina was like a guide to a foreign delegation, and I was as much of a tourist as I had been and had continued to be in the garage. Yet I wasn’t as much of a tourist as Pat. Sabina, Tissie, and the place itself were more than his all-encompassing intellect could absorb. He was completely at sea.

The tour began in the room in which we stood. Sabina pointed at pictures and diagrams and spoke of vehicles that would transform human beings into birds. She described the group’s current project: a vehicle, not much larger than an individual, which would respond to verbal instructions, stand still in the air or fly several times faster than sound. She spoke of houses with entrances on their roofs, all. ground being used up by gardens and fields in which to walk and play. She said such vehicles could almost be built now, but all research on them was being suppressed. “The way they suppress the thing is to hire all so-called geniuses on the verge of designing it and bury them in this room. Here they’re allowed to play out their schemes on paper. Why are they suppressing it? Because this little vehicle lasts a lifetime, uses no steel and little plastic, burns no gas, and can be built by anyone once the principles are known. It would mean the virtual end of assembly lines, road building, oil production.” Then, as if anticipating objections I didn’t dream of making, she explained, “A central computer keeps track of every standing and moving vehicle. At any instant an infinity of positions and paths is available, so there’s never a crash or a bottleneck. Central computer breakdowns are monitored by any number of computers located elsewhere and ready to take over. The sole function of the computers is to prevent crashes and bottlenecks. No one controls the computers. In circumstances where such vehicles would be possible, power over the transportation computers would be as outlandish as power over the world’s supply of air.”

On the way to our next marvel, Sabina walked between Tissie and me. Squeezing me, she said, “You look so lost, Sophia, and so frightened! You’re really something! You have no facade! All your feelings show on your face. I’m all facade. I’m pretending that I love everything that’s happening here. No doubts or reservations will ever show on my face! But half the things that can be done here scare the hell out of me!” We entered a room with subdued light, dark curtains and various strange plastic objects. Sabina continued, “I can understand vehicles, but watch this!” She operated a switch and a cup appeared on a table. “Grab it! Your hand will go right through it. There’s nothing there. This is a way for someone to go anywhere not in minutes, but instantly. Only the person who goes is no more real than this cup. It’s called a hologram. You can stay in your bed while your hologram travels all over the world. You could be standing in front of me looking as real as life until I tried to embrace you — my arms would go through air: you’d be nothing but a projection of light. Isn’t that awful? It’s part of the same package as the vehicles. When you write Yarostan tell him I’m not as sure of myself as I once was.”

Tissie observed, “These things would sure make life in prison more bearable! I could at least think you were right there with me.”

Pat opened his mouth for the first time. “I’d thought they were only into transportation research at; this place.”

“They’re into everything they can turn into merchandise,” Sabina told him. “They’d have an orgasm department if someone invented an orgasm machine that contained a ton of steel and used a barrel of oil every time it got you excited. Next they’d have two such machines getting each other excited while the. rest of us lay in prison hospitals chatting with holograms. I rejected Jan Sedlak’s attitude of technology all my life, Sophia, but I can no longer convince myself —”

“Hey what’s all this?” Tissie shouted. “For three weeks you’ve been teaching me about it, telling me how great it all is!”

Sabina swung Tissie and me around and pulled us out of the hologram room. “You’re right, Tissie. It is great. I was only raising interesting questions. Ted, let’s show off your hangout.”

We entered another computer-filled room. Sabina had me sit. at a desk-and press one of the buttons below the word “Quantity,”’and then told me to speak into a microphone. As soon as I’d spoken three words Ted handed me five slips of paper with the words “I’m completely lost” printed on them. This time. I was the one with doubts and reservations. “I’m enough of an environmentalist to know that with such a gadget every megalomaniac would make millions of copies of his ravings, since he’d no longer have to bother writing them down, and forests would all be depleted in a day.”

“In this department they’ve already moved far beyond that objection, probably because the forests are already depleted,” Sabina told me. “All the world’s writings would exist nowhere except in a computer library. There’d be no more book collections, libraries, bookstores or files. Everyone would have a fairly small computer. Whenever she wants a book or a work of art, the computer produces it for her, in a few seconds. She can study it, take notes on it, keep it around. When she’s through with it, she deposits it into a paper disposal unit instead of a shelf or a drawer. The same small quantity of paper circulates among all the users of all printed works. If she’s devoted to bookshelves, she can have holograms of them along every wall — it’s the only positive use I can think of for holograms — but when she wants a book, she doesn’t reach into the shelf but into the computer. When she’s through she deposits the book in the disposal and its hologram into the shelf. There’s nothing wrong with this department; they would even introduce it into the present system if steel or concrete or oil or some other large interests were involved,”

“But it takes all the fun out of printing,” Ted commented; “the computer does it all.”

“That’s the point of the whole place,” Sabina added. “The computer does it all. But let’s go eat! There’s a good restaurant, and there are no computers to do the eating for you.”

When we sat down to eat I asked Pat what his impressions were. He announced, “The slogans on the walls are fantastic: They reflect the most revolutionary acquisitions of the proletariat to date, anywhere.”

“Slogans?” Tissie asked. “I never noticed them.”

“That’s because you’re not a professor, Tissie,” Sabina told her. “Professors don’t notice anything else.”

Pat was offended. “Slogans are often a concise expression of the theory that informs the proletariat’s practice.”

“You must have been part of the student demonstration that came here the day after the occupation,” Sabina said to him.

Pat grew increasingly offended. “I stay away from demonstrations, that pseudo-activity organized by politicians.”

I asked Sabina about the demonstration. She told me thousands of people had marched toward the newly-occupied research center with flags and placards; “The gates were wide open, and everyone here thought they’d all come inside and turn this place into a popular playground. But would you believe it? All those thousands stopped in front of a sound truck and listened to slogans broadcast to them over loudspeakers. No one and nothing held them there. When the sloganeering ended they all dispersed; the open gate remained an impassable barrier to them.”

“Afraid to touch what they said they wanted,” Tissie added.

Pat tried to explain, “Those people were vendors of political ideologies and their customers. The slogans I liked here aren’t expressions of ideology, but of theory; they subject revolutionary practice to demystifying scrutiny-”

But Sabina insisted, “Slogans, professor, are what that demonstration was about; the renunciation of the world for the sake of the word.”

Pat stuck to his point. “If the proletariat doesn’t regain its revolutionary perspective the revolution will be stillborn and practical needs will find no genuine revolutionary form!”

“Professor —” Sabina began.

“I’m not a professor and I don’t aspire to be one!” Pat shouted.

“Don’t be sore,” Tissie told Pat. “Whenever anyone uses words as big as she does, she calls them a professor.”

But Pat remained sore through the rest of the meal and for the remainder of the evening. I was very tired soon after supper. and Sabina showed Pat and me to “our bedroom,” telling us she and Tissie slept across the hall, in case we needed anything. Our room was a former executive suite; its soft carpet made me think of a room Sabina had once described to me, a room with a wall-to-wall mattress. The carpet seemed clean enough, but I didn’t avail myself of this luxury; I fell on a large couch next to the wall. Pat sulked in a corner of the room, next to a lamp, and read a book he had brought along. I had nothing to say to him. He had been out-argued by a woman, and he couldn’t accept that. In the morning he told me he wanted to return to the occupied university. When I insisted on spending at least one more day in the research center, he told me he wouldn’t accompany me or my “know-nothing friends,” but would tour the place on his own, or with “the printer.”

Tissie knocked when we were about to leave our room. “It’s my turn to give you two a tour.” I told her Pat was intimidated by women and would tour by himself. Tissie excitedly squeezed my hand and whispered, “Good, I want you all to myself, sis. I wanted you for years. Scared?”

As we walked away from Pat’s and my bedroom, I put my arm tightly around Tissie’s waist and told her, “I’m frightened out of my wits!”

“But you’ll come anyway?”

“To the end of the world, Tissie. I’m all yours, all day long.”

It was an unimaginably beautiful summer day. The sky was clear, the air was clean, there was a slight breeze. Tissie, the “incurable dope addict,” led me to Ted’s car. After a five-minute drive, she parked by the entrance of what looked like a vast estate. “I wanted to show you what the other half used to do during their breaks and lunch hours,” she told me. We walked into a fabulous park with covered walks surrounded by thick forest; the morning sun only reached the tops of the trees. “There are several streams, a pool, a large lake. I went wild the first time Sabina and I came here. Imagine me, after spending all those years in prison, and then in that ward!” Suddenly shouting, “Watch this!” she dove right through a seemingly solid hedge. “Come on through!” she shouted. I followed her through the hedge and found myself in a grass-carpeted “room” completely surrounded by trees. Lying on the grass in a sunlit corner of the “room,” Tissie told me, “Sabina and I found this place by accident. Isn’t it great? I’d come here with her every sunny day if she wasn’t so busy with her vehicle.” I lay down alongside her. Tissie rested her head on my stomach and asked, “You mind?”

“No, Tissie. I don’t mind.” Tears came to my eyes as I ran my fingers through her hair. “I’m sorry about what I did to you, Tissie.”

Tissie pulled my hand to her mouth. “You’re not the one that should be sorry, Sophie.” It was the first time she’d called me by my name. “I’m the one that’s sorry.”

“You mean about getting me to your room by telling me you were scared? You knew I wouldn’t have gone if you’d told me what you wanted.”

“About that too but I’m a lot sorrier about other things. I had you all wrong. I had everything all wrong. I thought you were just like Sabina and me. Seth wanted you and Tina in the bar, and I wanted those shots more than I wanted anyone or anything. I tried to get you for myself and for Seth at the same time, and I thought you were just pretending you didn’t want me. I wag sure Jose and Ted had told you I just wanted you for Seth, and I hated both of them; Jose kept me from you and Ted kept me from Tina —”

A shock went through me; we both sat up. “Ted kept you from Tina,?”

“Don’t tell me you still think he wanted Tina for himself!” Tissie exclaimed. “Ted was just like her father!”

“Tina’s father?” I asked stupidly.

“Mine too!” she added. “You sure had him figured out all wrong. Ted’s the only father I ever had; I couldn’t ever stand him but I always loved him ever since I was little. I never had a real father; I hardly even had a mother. The woman who bore me was a drunkard and a prostitute. I Was eight when I had my first sex; it was with one of my mother’s girlfriends. I spent most days and nights on the street. That’s where I met Ted. He was the best car thief in the neighborhood. He let me move into the garage where he lived. One day we were both caught in a stolen car and sent to reform school. That was where I got the rest of my sexual education. One of the girls I met was a prostitute to rich women. That’s what I did when I came out. But I missed Ted. He was the only person I knew who didn’t treat me as a monkey or a rubber doll. He’d always talked to me as if I understood; he’d tried to teach me things. Some neighborhood kids told me he was out of reform school and was running the garage by himself. I asked him if he still had room for me. He couldn’t believe I actually wanted to stay with him. ‘Well I ain’t got no other home,’ I told him. He soon figured out how I made my money, but he didn’t mind. Ted didn’t mind anything until I started taking heroin. That only happened after Seth bought the garage and Sabina and Jose moved in with us and started fixing up the house. I went wild over Sabina the first time I saw her. I know you can’t understand that, sis. Being in the same house with her, day after day, drove me crazy. I wasn’t a monkey to her but a person, the way I was for Ted, but I wanted to be more than that to her. She became my goddess. All I wanted in the world was to become her slave. She wanted the house first, and then all the machines. And above all else she wanted her precious independence. That was why I started taking heroin. That was why I started doing Seth’s bidding. I thought I was showing Sabina what kind of independence I wanted, but I didn’t show anyone anything. I just got all messed up. I started hating everyone. I tried to drag Tina to the bar and once I even tried to get her on heroin; that was the only time Ted ever hit me. When you came I wanted to do the same thing to you.” Tissie was crying. “I wanted you bad, sis, real bad. But I wanted that heroin worse, and there was nothing I wasn’t willing to do for Seth; I thought he was so good tome! I dragged you to the bar; I would have let them take that pretty body of yours and —”

I placed my hand over her mouth and pleaded, “Don’t, Tissie. That’s all over, and we’re both so different now.”

Tissie pushed me down to the ground, placed her lips right above mine and whispered, “I haven’t changed any, Sophie. I still want you as bad as I did then.” Suddenly she burst out laughing. “You haven’t changed either, sis’! You’re shaking!”

“I’m sorry, Tissie!”

“Don’t be sorry! You’re just hungry, that’s all!” She had brought a bag along, and started unpacking sandwiches, a bottle of wine, cake. “After lunch I’ll take you to another gorgeous spot.”

She took me to a sandy beach at a crystal clear lake. She ran into the water naked, perfectly unselfconscious. I followed her. The only previous time I swam in the nude was nineteen years ago, when Ron took me to a lake by a farm. Tissie and I raced, splashed each other, and then lay on the grass in the sun, our bodies touching. Tissie fell asleep. I found myself looking at her as if I were looking into a mirror. Beneath the seeming energy and determination lay the same passivity, the same longing for dependence. She wanted to be Sabina’s slave. What did I want to be to you, to Jose, to Hugh? When she felt rejected and alone, she took heroin; I drifted and stared at blank walls.

It was nearly dark when Tissie drove me back to the research center. We had supper by ourselves in the restaurant. “It was a beautiful day, Tissie, every minute of it. I don’t deserve to be treated so grandly, not by you.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sophie, or on Ted either. I’m the one that messed everything up in the garage. I haven’t told you everything. I don’t even dare tell Sabina; I wouldn’t have any friends left.”

“I’ll be your friend, Tissie, always, even if you don’t ever tell me anything.”

“When you talk like that, sis, you make my insides jump around. If you and Sabina and I were on an island far away from everything ... Come on, I’ll walk you to your room.”

Pat was already in the room, reading. I felt happy . I kissed his forehead and asked if he’d spent the day enjoyably. All he told me was, “I asked the printer if he could give us a ride back tomorrow. He said he’d be glad to.”

I lay down on the couch and fell asleep immediately. I woke up with a weight on my chest. I pushed Pat’s head away from me and sat up. He started to cry. “I’m sorry, Sophia. I didn’t want to take advantage of you like this. I — I think I’m in love with you. Ever since we went to talk to the office machine workers. The second time we went, my hand almost touched yours, I felt something funny, I wanted to be close to you. Then you stayed away from me, I thought you knew I wanted to make advances, and you didn’t want me to. But a few nights ago, after the argument with your former roommate, you squeezed my hand and —”

I felt sorry for him and held his head in my hands; I started to kiss him, but he went on, “Then you wanted me to come here, with you, and we’re alone in the same room at night. I heard you breathing. You were so close, Sophia. You’re so beautiful, so intelligent.”

I dropped my hands from his face and froze. I was so intelligent — for a woman. Sabina was far too intelligent; she intimidated him. But I was just intelligent enough to make him lose his head. I lay back down and turned my back to him. I heard him lie down on the carpet next to the couch. I felt sorry for him again, and tried to stroke his cheek with my hand, but quickly regretted doing that He took my hand in both of his, pressed it to his lips, and apparently intended to spend the night in that position. I quickly got a cramp in my shoulder and pulled my hand away.

When I woke up the next morning, Pat was pacing, impatient to leave. I left our door open, and as soon as I saw Sabina come out of her room I told her I’d go back to the council office with Pat.

“Running out on us so soon?” Sabina asked.

I was stung by the way she put it. “That’s mean, Sabina. I ran out on you and Ron and went to the university. Are you referring to that? Or to the time I ran out on Jose?”

“I’m sorry, Sophia. It was a mean way to put it I thought you’d stay with us. Tissie and I both want you close to us. It was my way of saying I’d feel even better about being here if you were here with me.”

I was crying on Sabina’s shoulder. “I can’t. My mind is all fogged. In the commune and the council, in the midst of leaflets and arguments and news of strikes, I know who I am. But I’m lost here. I don’t know who I am or what I want. Tissie told me about Ted, about herself. I haven’t had time to absorb it, any of it. I’ll come back, maybe even tomorrow, but I’ve got to know why I’m coming back, what I want.”

Just then Tissie came running toward us. “I’m leaving, Tissie, but I promise to come back.”

“Aw, sis, we both thought you were here, to stay! Is it because of me?”

“No, Tissie, please don’t ever think that, Before I came here, I was convinced that what I was doing was very important, very meaningful to me. I’m no longer sure. I’d like to find out before I come back.”

Sabina jumped on Pat as soon as he came out of our room. “So you’ve had your fill of practice and it’s time for theory again.”

Pat said calmly, “I recognize the revolutionary character of the appropriation that took place here, but the point is not to appropriate a single enterprise but the whole world.”

“Is that what you’re going back to do?”

“That’s what I’m going to take part in. Revolution will be made when all, and not just some of the victims of the market’s tyranny throw off their shackles.”

“That’s well put. And just how do you intend to take part in all that?” Sabina asked him.

“By keeping abreast of reality. A radical critique of the modern world must have the totality as its objective.”

Sabina walked away from him and went to look for Ted.

On the return trip I rode in the front seat, between Ted and Pat. I thought of what Tissie had told me about Ted. I didn’t know how to begin undoing my gross misunderstanding, my brutal injustice. I whispered to him awkwardly, “Yesterday Tissie told me, about everything... I’m sorry, Ted, terribly sorry. I was closed-minded and mean.”

He turned a very sad face toward me. “I wasn’t so open either, Sophie, I saw Seth’s hand behind everyone and everything. I made you suspicious of me. And then the day Jose was released you couldn’t, be there to see him because he came to my house, and you, wouldn’t have come there. He might not have gotten killed if you’d been there.’!

“Please don’t tell me that, Ted.”

I was crying. I hadn’t run out on Jose only when I left the garage. I had run out on him again when he was in prison. On my third or fourth visit to the prison, Jose had talked enthusiastically about the books I had brought him. He talked about liberation struggles, about the need for the oppressed to arm themselves. I realized that while I was carrying bags full of books to Jose, books describing wars of liberation and revolutionary uprisings, I was dragging myself to a factory job every day except Sunday. The contradiction between the subjects of those books and my own mindless drift became unbearable to me. I couldn’t face another conversation with Jose. I longed to do something, anything at all, that would associate me in some way with the subjects of those books. On the day I had accompanied Sabina and Tina to Debbie Matthews’ house, Lem Icel had mentioned the peace movement, and I had asked Tina if she knew anything about it. Although Tina had contemptuously dismissed the peace movement, she remembered my question and brought me a leaflet about a demonstration; the bottom of the leaflet said “Volunteers Welcome” and gave an address. On a Sunday (my only day off) I went to the address on the leaflet, ready to “do something.” In the “peace center” I found a room where several people were working at a large table. I asked how I could “join the peace movement.” A woman pulled an empty chair up to the table, and I spent the rest of the day stuffing envelopes. I didn’t get glass in my lungs, but the drudgery was the same as in the fiberglass factory. The activity was what I imagined office work to be: numerous women stuffing, sealing and stamping envelopes, a few important-looking men walking in and out of the room. But this drudgery had a justification: it was service and sacrifice for others. There were eight or nine women at the stuffing table, and one bearded man. The women were all middle-aged; the man was my age. I sat across the table from him. His name was Art Sinich; he introduced himself to me later that day; They stuffed envelopes right through the lunch hour. No one mentioned food. The mailing got done late in the afternoon. No one thanked me, obviously; I hadn’t helped them, I had helped the movement. People started to disperse. They were all going to see each other again at a lecture which I couldn’t attend because of my job. I asked if more work would be done the following Sunday. Art told me he would be there. I returned to the peace center the following Sunday. Art and two or three women were stuffing pamphlets into brown envelopes. The women weren’t the ones who had been there a week earlier. Art introduced me to them; I was already a full-fledged member of the movement. The pamphlet stuffing didn’t take long and everyone except Art and I left. I asked him what was done in the peace center other than envelope stuffing. He took me to the literature room. I leafed absently through some books and pamphlets. All of them dealt with the same subject: death. Death by nuclear holocaust, by chemical warfare, by radiation from atomic tests. Then Art took me to the peace center’s print shop and introduced me to the printer. It was in the basement. A large man my age was operating a small printing machine in a space large enough for one small person; he looked like a giant trapped in a cave. (What a contrast to Ted’s well-lit and spacious print shop! That building should have been called the sacrifice center!) Finally Art took me to the “reception room.” He showed me photographs in the “movement scrapbook,” pointing to himself at a “vigil,” at a chemical warfare plant, in a rowboat “resisting” a nuclear submarine, “sitting in” at a government atomic energy building. He told me proudly that he’d been arrested at every one of those “actions.” I returned again the following week. Announcements of a major demonstration several weeks away were being sent out. The demonstrators were to block the entrance gate of a military base about to receive missiles that could depopulate half the world. I told Art I wouldn’t be able to attend the demonstration because of my job. He looked at me as if I were one of “them,” the wrongdoers, the warmongers. I already knew that behind the modest, self-sacrificing servant of humanity stood a hardened holy man who towered above ordinary mortals. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I only supported myself; I felt guilty for putting my “selfish material interests” above goodness and peace. For Art that selfishness was at the root of all war, all destruction. I stayed away from the envelope stuffing for a week, intimidated by the righteousness. But that only put me back into the situation I had tried to leave behind. I decided to take part in the demonstration and to skip work. I was extremely nervous on the day of the demonstration. I rode with five or six other people to a military sign that said, “No public access beyond this point.” Several other cars were already parked by the sign. People began to sit across the roadway, about twenty in all, with various home-made signs. It was spring, but the temperature was freezing. I couldn’t stop shivering. At last a huge truck approached. I was stupefied by fear; I was sure we’d all be run over. But the truck stopped and one of the demonstrators told the driver he was transporting death in the back of his truck. Other trucks came, and drivers gathered at the side of the road and made various comments to the “nuts” sitting in the roadway. I knew at the time that all the hatred of the people sitting in that roadway was concentrated on the drivers of the trucks. Twenty righteous people were making themselves an example to the murderers who drove trucks and worked in factories. I also knew that all the “peace literature” appealed to the “moral sense” of government officials and the “humanity” of the rich. When I heard sirens I clung to Art with mortal fear. (At the trial I was charged with linking arms to resist arrest.) I was nearly unconscious with fear when I was carried to the police wagon. I had been arrested only once before: at the carton plant. After a day and a half in jail I was released on bail put up by the peace organization. The date of the trial was set. When I got home I called the fiberglass factory and told the foreman I’d been arrested at a peace demonstration. He told me not to bother returning to work. I had succeeded in transforming my situation: I was a full-time political activist. I described my act to Sabina and tried to tell her how “worthwhile” it had been. I described Art to her and tried to tell her how “wonderful and good” he was. Sabina made no effort to hide her disgust. We shared the house, but we no longer shared anything else. I was jobless and alone. I wasn’t able to defend myself from Sabina’s and Tina’s hostility. I couldn’t bear to face Jose’s questions about liberation, armed struggle, revolutionary wars. I knew that my “act” had nothing to do with the subjects of the books I had taken to Jose. I knew that I had joined a tiny group of “God’s witnesses on earth,” sent from heaven to stimulate guilt in workers and move the hearts of rulers. I knew I had joined the martyrs of the age, the saints who stood witness to humanity’s final cannibalistic act and kept their souls pure. When I saw Art again he showed me newspaper clippings about our arrest, and he was proud; the arrest was a sign of his personal worth, if not in the eyes of the “rabble” for whom he only felt contempt, then in the eyes of God and “good” members of the ruling class. I knew that my “act” had no relation to Hugh’s “project house” where the oppressed were to become independent by their own efforts; my new friends found only one quality in the oppressed: guilt. All initiative, all change, had to come from the top, from those who rule. But instead of turning my back on Art and his friends, I turned against Sabina, Tina and Jose. I looked forward to the trial alongside my modest, bearded co-defendant. On the first day of the trial I told Tina not to expect me home that night. The trial wasn’t about missiles or nuclear weapons or wax. It was about whether or not we had locked arms when the police had announced we would be arrested (which they hadn’t actually announced). Afterwards I drifted to Art’s apartment house. He invited me up to his tiny room, part of a subdivided apartment with a common kitchen. The room contained every book and pamphlet I had seen in the peace center; He had apparently read them all; there were notes in all the margins. In addition to the pamphlets there was a single bed, and that was all. He asked if I wanted to stay. I had nothing better to do with myself. For a few nights we both slept in his single bed; then I bought a cot. He insisted on sleeping on the cot; he was determined to bear the greater sacrifice. The trial dragged on for two and a half months. Every session was the same: had we locked arms before the announcement? Had there been an announcement? When Art wasn’t stuffing envelopes or demonstrating, he read. I read four or five of his books and pamphlets; each one of them made the same points in exactly the same way; only the names and dates were different. After a few weeks. I stopped accompanying him to the stuffing sessions. I tidied and swept his room, got book ends for his literature. Art didn’t see the difference; he was neither pleased nor annoyed; it didn’t matter to him: I was a crass materialist for occupying myself with such things. I made up the beds, shopped, cooked, washed the dishes. He didn’t once tell me he’d liked one of the meals I’d prepared. He was a vegetarian; before I had come he had eaten mainly boiled eggs. I learned that he had never worked because his father, who owned a clothing store and whom Art considered a crass materialist, gave him a monthly allowance. When the trial finally ended (we were all let off on “probation,” whatever that meant; I never reported to anyone), I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate. Weeks earlier I had bought a vegetarian cookbook, and I spent several hours preparing a delicacy. I set a cloth on the floor and put candles on it. Art sat down as usual, gulped down my meal as if it were a boiled egg, and turned back to the pamphlet he had been reading. Late that night I tiptoed out of his room. I left him the cot, so as to decrease the discomfort of his next guest. In the kitchen I looked into the phone book and scribbled him a note: “Get yourself a maid. Maid Service phone number: — “ I slipped the note under his door and called a taxi. I didn’t hear from Art again until I saw him, as Well as Luisa, after the riot last year, engaged in envelope stuffing. I was back home with Sabina and Tina — jobless, projectless, aimless. They didn’t ask questions; I couldn’t have answered any. Gradually one of my former interests revived: my interest in reading. I made frequent trips to the library and rummaged through bookstores. I hadn’t read; anything other than a few peace pamphlets since I’d left-the garage. Now I spent most of my days reading. Subjects that had rarely been treated when I was a student were now explored in one study after another. In the bookstores there were entire sections of literature devoted to revolutionary theory, liberation struggles, even philosophical analyses of social and psychological repression. The more I read, the more indignant I became about the narrowness of Art’s interests. Whenever I found a book particularly exciting, I set it on the living room table. Tina read them. I hoped she’d take them to Jose, but she only returned them to the table. One day she told me she was going to visit Jose, but didn’t want to go alone and Sabina didn’t want to accompany her. She trapped me into visiting Jose again. i packed all the books I’d set aside and” went with her. in the visiting room she stood some distance away from Jose and me. He had probably begged her to bring me, one way or another. I gave him the books, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell him about my peace movement “actions” or “friends.” I visited Jose one more time before his release, by myself. It was on that visit I noticed just how much he had been affected by the books I had brought him. I don’t want to exaggerate my share. Probably the solitude in which he read the books, as well as conversations he must have had with fellow prisoners, had also contributed their share. I did know that the intentions he expressed, as well as the words he used, came out of the books, since I had just read them. He talked about his intention to take part in the uprising of the oppressed. I was excited at first; I thought he was describing something like Hugh’s “project house.” But the more he talked, the more frightened I grew. The project house turned into a band of armed guerrillas. Jose lectured to me about the need of the oppressed to arm themselves, to defend themselves with knives, rifles, even machine guns. When I had read the accounts of the guerrilla movements, I had been excited by the knowledge that law and order were collapsing everywhere, that people were responding to arms with arms — elsewhere, far away from me. I hadn’t for a second imagined myself stealing a truck full of weapons, shooting at police, or pulling the ring of a hand grenade. Before leaving Jose I tried to tell him I thought activities appropriate elsewhere might not be so appropriate here, but I don’t think he heard me. I never saw him again. As the day of his release approached my fears grew. It had been so easy to carry books to him. I wasn’t able to live up to those books, to Jose, to his new commitment. On the day of his release Sabina told me he didn’t want us to meet him at the prison. Several days later Sabina burst into my room crying. Jose had been shot in the back. “The police picked him up just like a dog — dead, in the street,” she told me. “If they hadn’t arrested Ted as a suspect, I wouldn’t even have known!” Then she added, “He had wanted to be someone you could admire.” I fell on Sabina wailing. “He was my whole life, everything I loved! I’m nothing compared to him, Sabina; I couldn’t have given him anything, I’d only have dragged him down and made his life ugly! He couldn’t have died because he wanted to live up to me, Sabina. You’re wrong. You have to be wrong!”

I cried during the rest of the trip from the research center to the commune. Ted confirmed what Sabina had told me three years earlier, what I still didn’t want to believe. Jose had wanted to be ready for me, he had wanted to live up to me, he had mistakenly associated me with the fearless revolutionaries described in the books I had taken him. I was completely oblivious to Pat, sitting silently on my right, humiliated by his two encounters with Sabina. All I saw was Ted, the person whose house I wouldn’t have entered, even to be with Jose, because of my “suspicions.” When we reached the corner where Ted had picked us up, he stretched his hand toward me again and said, almost pleading, “When Jose told me you had nothing to do with Seth, I tried to become your Mend, Sophie. But it was too late then. I’d like to try again.” I squeezed his hand and told him, “I’d like to try too, Ted.”

I saw Ted again the following day, when Pat and Luisa used the print shop to print Pat’s leaflet on the loudspeakers; that was the first time I entered Ted’s house. I told him I might accompany him back to the research center when he returned there. But first I had to do what I’d told Sabina and Tissie I wanted to do: I had to find out who I was and what I wanted. Your letter gave me an enormous clue. It convinced me that I no longer wanted to be what I had been; it filled me with a desire to shatter my past self. Luisa, Pat and Daman provided me with a perfect setting. I formulated my strategy while riding next to Pat in the back seat of Daman’s car, on route from the picket, line at Luisa’s assembly plant to the “revolutionary festival” at Luisa’s house.

* * *

I’m aware that Luisa has a “strategy” too. The whole purpose of her “festival” is to celebrate her independence from me for the second time, to conquer Daman right in front of her former conscience, and to use me as well as Pat in her conquest. She’s slightly tipsy from the drinks she’d had with Pat in the bar across from her plant, but her determination shows in every move she makes. Daman and I accompany her to the kitchen to help with the dinner. Pat, who had seemed fairly drunk when we’d entered the house, sits on the living room sofa and; waits, glancing at the “revolutionary acquisitions of the proletariat” in Luisa’s bookshelf; men dominate history from living rooms while “so beautiful and so intelligent” women cook. To Daman’s credit, he’s totally unlike Art or Pat in this respect. Despite his rigid outlooks, when it comes to chores he’s a perfect egalitarian; he doesn’t expect a “comrade” to be his maid. I’m not the only one who appreciates this quality in Daman.

“Very few men I’ve known have followed me into the kitchen,” Luisa tells him.

Daman blushes and says, “I was embarrassed when you had everything ready last time, Luisa; I wanted to help.”

“Oh, have you two celebrated here before?” I ask.

“We certainly have!” Luisa answers vivaciously, “Daman tried to call you more than two weeks ago, when you had already moved into the university commune. He couldn’t reach you and thought you might have been kidnapped again, so he called me. I told him where you were; you had called me two days before he did. And I asked him to explain to me what was happening at the university. You hadn’t been very informative. He started to explain on the phone, but I insisted he come to dinner. It went off marvelously. Daman told me about the new working class, and I agreed to write my article for The Workers Voice. I wanted to help in other ways too, but since I can’t type there wasn’t much for me to do. I did go to Daman’s house once and learned to operate the mimeograph machine in his basement.”

Daman reminds her, “In the car you told me you had some suggestions for the next issue of the paper.”

“Did I?” Luisa asks absentmindedly, but then she apparently remembers how she got Daman into her house. “As a matter of fact, I have several suggestions,” but she doesn’t make any.

Daman doesn’t pursue the subject; he doesn’t want to antagonize his proletarian recruit. I decide to leave them to their game. I ask Luisa if my room is free.

“Yes,” she tells me. “It’s as empty as when you left it. Why?”

“Because I want to see it before taking anyone up there!” I tell her, running into the living room. Pat looks half asleep. I pull him off the sofa. “So I’m beautiful and intelligent too, am I?”

“Yes, Sophia, extremely,” he says sleepily.

“Almost as intelligent as you?”

He wakes up and blushes. I pull him toward the stairway. “Come on, we’re going to occupy this place. I’ll give you a tour.” I pull him all the way up to my room. “This is where I spent my time dreaming when I was in high school — in this very bed.”

“You mean this is your house, and Luisa really is your sister?”

“Couldn’t you guess that from looking at us?”

“No, I couldn’t, Sophia. She looks so much older than you. I thought you and Tina were sisters.”

I push Pat on the bed, slide alongside him, and kiss his lips long and hard. “That’s the nicest thing, you’ve said to me, Pat.” My heart pounds, my limbs are sore from hunger. But I get up. I learned something from Mirna: to wait for the perfect moment, to fan the fire to its highest heat.

Pat begs, “Come back, Sophia, please. I love you. I never loved anyone before.”

I take his hands, pull him to me, and kiss him again. “They’re waiting for us downstairs.”

“Let them wait, Sophia. I can’t.”

I scold him: “How will man dominate history if he can’t even dominate himself? Tell me that.”

He stiffens as if I’d pulled a switch. A woman is dominating the man who would dominate history, turning him on and off like a water tap. I descend victoriously. Pat follows me. I set the table. Daman and Luisa bring out a delicious looking meal, and wine. We start to eat.

Pat returns to the topic he had started discussing with Luisa when we left the council office. He becomes sober and alert. His passion vanishes. He’s pure intellect again: all theory and history. “What did you yourself do after that uprising, Luisa? Earlier you told me people ran everything on their own. What did you run?”

“I operated a tram,” Luisa tells him.

“I gathered that much from your article,” Pat says. “But your article is full of platitudes. I didn’t get any idea of what daily life was like after a so-called takeover by the workers. Was it different than it had been before? Did you drive the tram any differently? Do you understand what I’m asking?”

“Yes, Pat, I understand what you’re asking,” Luisa says, somewhat peeved. “But I’m convinced you don’t really want to know; you just want to start another argument which proves that the union is always wrong.”

“I’d really like to know, Luisa — not for an argument, but for the sake of historical understanding,” Pat insists.

Daman says, “I second Pat’s request. I find your experience extremely interesting.”

Luisa pretends to be reticent. “I don’t want to start our evening off by talking about myself. And in any case, Sophia has already heard everything I have to tell about my experiences.”

“I’d like to gain some historical understanding too, Luisa.” I look at Pat while saying this.

Luisa begins the story you and Jasna must have heard countless times. “In order to understand what it was like to drive a tram in those days, you have to understand what the whole struggle was about. The working people, together with their organizations —”

“You mean the unions!” I interrupt. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve been so sensitive to Luisa’s unionism. I feel as if I were in the presence of the train Zdenek described to you. In the past, Luisa’s story always inspired me; now I realize that Luisa’s life project had never been her own, any more than mine ever was. Luisa took part in a project which the union defined.

“I mean the union,” she says calmly. “It was only thanks to the union that the working population was able to defeat the insurgent generals and the entire rebel army.”

I’ve heard those terms before too — she always used them before, but I suddenly hear them for the first time, probably because we’re in the middle of rebellion and insurrection right now. “Were you on the side of the conservatives fighting against the insurgents?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sophia.”

“Your terms are ridiculous, Luisa. What are insurgents? They’re people opposed to authority, to the state, the ruling class, the status quo. How can you call a general an insurgent? A general is the highest official in the service of the established order. A rebel, an insurgent, is someone who rises against the ruling order. A general who suppresses an insurrection so as to restore the ruling order is no insurgent! As for a rebel army — that’s like saying dry water or full vacuum. There’s no such thing as a rebel army!”

Luisa wins the argument by exclaiming, “How easy it is to play games of logic with the dead! Thousands of working people, including your father, lost their lives defending the cause of the workers —”

“You’re confusing Nachalo with George Alberts,” I shout. “Nachalo didn’t die fighting against insurgents and rebels, but fighting alongside them, against the ruling order, against discipline —”

“Whatever garbage you’ve picked up from Yarostan, I won’t have you slandering people who fought one of the purest struggles in the entire history of the working class. What do you know about it? Was Yarostan there? What would he have done? What about you, Sophia? What would you have done? I’ve seen the type of insurgency you exhibit during revolutionary situations; you couldn’t catch mice with it! Only the rich had time to play games with logic. Such logical contradictions were what the enemy threw into the working class to divide it against itself. Fortunately workers, recognized each other and they recognized the enemy in spite of those who threw sand in their eyes by asking who the insurgents and rebels were. Nachalo knew perfectly well who his comrades and who his enemies were. He hated the status quo passionately. He slept with his rifle. The only bonds he recognized were bonds of solidarity with his comrades — union comrades, Sophia! He was among the first on the barricades, among the first to join the struggle to defeat the fascist army, among the first killed in that struggle.” Luisa turns to Pat; all her reticence has vanished. “I’ll tell you what daily life was like during those days. I was on the barricades alongside Nachalo and his daughter. She was hit in the arm. She died two days later. The day after she died, Nachalo went to the front to defeat the last outposts of the enemy army. I was ready to go with him. Numerous women joined the militia; in that revolution they were treated as equals to men. But I would have had to leave two-year old Sophia as well as the newborn Sabina —”

“The same Sabina I met yesterday?” Pat asks.

Daman comments, “That’s very interesting.”

“I decided to stay away from the front,” Luisa continues. “When I’d first met Nachalo he had believed men were made to do the shooting and women the cooking. After the years he spent with me, he no longer believed that women’s place was in the rear. He didn’t influence my decision; it was my own. The day he left for the front, I went to union headquarters to volunteer to do the work that had to be done in the rear. I had driven a tram earlier. I was urged to join comrades reestablishing the transportation network. The street fighting had completely paralyzed the city’s transit system. There were barricades everywhere, and in many of them trams and busses had served as the basic construction material. This had to be straightened out before life could resume —”

“Resume? Wasn’t everything being transformed?” I ask. I start feeling like the heckler Rhea accused me of being.

Luisa disregards my interruption. “As soon as I reached the department where I had worked before, I became a union delegate and joined a commission charged with inspecting the roadbeds and listing the jobs that had to be done before the trams could run again. The following day, the radio called all the manual and technical transport workers to a meetings The vast majority turned up,, except for a few fascists. Everyone, without exception, placed himself under the orders of the union. And five days after the street combats, more trains were circulating than had ever been on those streets before. To get the additional vehicles, we had to work day and night, in the midst of universal enthusiasm, repairing vehicles which ac-cording to the previous managers were beyond repair. After only five days there were more vehicles, each of which was more efficiently operated —”

“Thanks to which workers could again be transported daily to the factories where they produced the-weapons —” I begin with sarcasm.

But Luisa misses my sarcasm. “The weapons were needed for the victory over the enemy. The spontaneous discipline and organization which made possible the resumption of transportation as well as production would have been impossible without the union.”

“That’s precisely Sophia’s point,” Pat tells her. “You’ve just said it yourself. The union played exactly the same role the managers had played before.”

I add, “I can’t actually believe Nachalo would have put up with the work discipline and organization you’ve been describing. Everything you’ve told me about him makes me visualize him as too much of a rebel —”

“I’ve never heard such comments from you. Sophia. We were all rebels. We were too poor to be anything else. My own mother died of disease and poverty when I was twelve. My father worked on a road-repair crew; it was thanks to him that I met unionized workers, attended the union school; it was through the union that I got my first job. It’s well as good to rebel against everything, but I frankly don’t understand your hostility to the union; it had nothing in common with the so-called union here. When I was sixteen my father was shot by the police; he was taking part in a demonstration protesting the imprisonment of union militants. That happened during my second year at the union free school. My father’s friends took me into their house, but they were too poor to support me. I wanted to support myself; the union found me a job as ticket puncher on a tram. On my first day at work I was trained by a man I thought very old, although he was no older than Sophia or Daman are right now; he had a foreign accent and seemed to be a drunkard. He praised me for overlooking passengers who had no tickets. He told me the authorities would shoot me. I learned he did the same thing, and he didn’t punch the tickets of people who looked poor. He remained my trainer for a week. He raged against the rich. When I told him how my father had died, he told me he kept a rifle in his room to avenge all the workers killed by capitalists. I was fascinated by the raw violence the man exhibited whenever he spoke about the exploiters. Yet he wasn’t in the union. And one of the things he held against the exploiters was what he called the shameful fact that women had to work like men. I decided to give myself my first assignment as union organizer: to channel this man’s energy where it belonged, and to teach him that his view of women was inconsistent with his revolutionary attitudes.”

“Exactly what I thought! It was you who got Nachalo into the union!” I exclaim.

“That’s right. My first assignment was a success. But not right away. After my week of training I got assigned to a different tram. I looked for him after work. I found him several times and followed him to a bar. He held me in a trance with his stories of a vast peasant uprising in which he had taken part. I talked to him about the union. But after a few brief encounters, he disappeared. Several weeks passed, during which I moved out of the house of my father’s friends, and rented a room of my own. I was independent for the first time, as I’ve been ever since. But I couldn’t get Nachalo out of my mind. At union meetings I asked continually if anyone knew the whereabouts of a foreign worker who didn’t punch poor workers’ tickets. At one meeting I learned that precisely such a man had started a brawl with an inspector who went through the tram and discovered three quarters of the tickets unpunched. Nachalo had fought with the inspector, but hadn’t injured him. Police had arrived and arrested him along with half the passengers. He became a minor hero, but was fired from his job. I was one of a delegation that greeted him when he was released. He recognized me. I told him I was now an independent worker like himself. He was bitter. He told me he was unsuitable company for me; he spoke of himself as a broken man; he even called himself an animal. Then he shouted; ‘Men aren’t animals! They can’t allow themselves to be continually harnessed and driven!’ I followed him to the basement hovel in which he and his daughter slept. All the way to his building I argued that an individual can’t overthrow the exploiters with his own physical powers, no matter how great they are; he can only do this through union with his fellow workers, through solidarity. Nachalo told me he knew he couldn’t fight alone, but that the union got on its knees and begged like a cowardly serf instead of the workers’ simply taking what was rightfully their own. ‘My knees don’t bend!’ he shouted when we reached his room. I followed him in and continued arguing. Before long a gypsy girl arrived, a wild thing in rags, quick as a cat, immediately suspicious of me. Keeping her eyes on me as if she thought I’d steal something from her, she started pulling vegetables, meat, liquor and a wad of money out of her large coat. Nachalo whispered to her in their language, but she still didn’t take her eyes off me. I asked her if she had a job; she didn’t look older than ten. She told me furiously she couldn’t get a job that would support two people, which was what she had to do now that Nachalo was fired. Then she told me, with shameless pride, that she’d been a pickpocket since six and a prostitute since eleven; she was twelve. I turned indignantly toward Nachalo and called him a hypocrite for his telling me men ought to work while women stayed at home; a fine principle for a man whose own daughter stooped to the worst form of slavery, prostitution. I called him a parasite and a pimp. The gypsy leaped at me like an enraged animal. She bit my arm and shrieked, ‘You come from the church! We don’t want the church in this room! Get out, priestess!’ As she pushed me out of the room, I started crying. Nachalo reached for her arm and shouted at her until she released me. Then he told me, ‘You’re right. I’m worse than an animal.’ He fell on his knees and begged me, ‘Stay and tell me about your union.’ That powerful, violent man was on his knees begging to learn from me! The gypsy pushed me toward him. I fell on my knees beside him. I told him, “I haven’t come as a judge, but as your comrade.’ Tears flowed down the man’s cheeks. It was the most moving sight in my life. This man who had survived a revolution in which all his comrades had been wiped out, this violent man, ever ready to reach for his rifle, was crying with shame before me. From that moment to this I’ve loved that man more than I’ve loved anyone — since. I pressed his head to my bosom and let him cry. I wanted his comradeship, I wanted him, I wanted his child. I spent that night with him, sleeping on the rags on his floor. I woke early the next morning, bought breakfast for all three of us, and while I was setting their table, the girl walked shyly toward me. She kissed the spot on my arm where she had bitten me, put her head in my bosom just as Nachalo had, and begged, ‘I want to be your comrade too.’”

Most of the details are familiar to me; I’ve always been moved by them. But now I hear something I’ve never heard before. The little gypsy’s initial reaction to Luisa had been identical to that of the other little gypsy — only Sabina didn’t ever change her mind about Luisa. The twelve-year old girl had called Luisa a priestess! The priestess of the train that would take humanity to its salvation: the union. The link between Luisa’s passion and her calling is suddenly so clear to me. She gave herself to the lowest social stratum so as to elevate it to the salvation train. Isn’t that exactly what she did to you? Give to him who hath nothing, like a nun giving a kiss to a leper; save the wretched from exclusion; pull them into the Lord’s train, only thus will the world be saved. Margarita was more perceptive at twelve than I am at thirty-four.

“I convinced them to abandon their hovel and move to my room,” Luisa continues. “It was larger, sunshine and fresh air reached it, and it was clean. The gypsy, like I, remained independent. She paid for her own board and keep. But I insisted she not pay for Nachalo with her prostitution money. I had started driving a tram and could afford to support him as well as myself. She stuck to her trade, willfully, proudly; she always had a knife on her and was the equal of any man, if not in physical strength then in speed. Nachalo quickly learned to respect my independence. He became deeply involved in union activities. It was in the union that he met others like himself, workers who didn’t believe in waiting or in begging. His self-respect and even his pride returned — pride in himself and in his fellow workers, among whom he now included women as equals. He and his friends carried out night-time forays against torturers and killers of working people: police, supervisors, informers. The gypsy frequently took part in those forays — but she didn’t go with a view of a better world; she went solely to draw the blood of the class that exploited her. When Sophia was born the three of us moved out of my room and rented a small apartment. It was large enough for weekly meetings, even when the number of workers who agreed with Nachalo increased. It was at one of those meetings that I met my second lover —”

This is new to me. I ask her, ”Before the uprising? I didn’t’ know. I thought Nachalo —”

“Of course you didn’t know! Think of the scene you’d have made if I’d told you. He was a young physics student from abroad, eager to put his knowledge at the service of the most revolutionary workers. Union Comrades guided him to the meetings held at our apartment —”

“George Alberts? You mean you took up with him before Nachalo left for the front?”

Luisa laughts at me, acting as if both Daman and Pat were in on her joke. But she misgauges them. Daman seems shocked. To Pat it’s all equally exotic. “You are really a phenomenon,” she tells me. “One would think you’d been brought up in a convent. Did I take up with George Alberts, was I his mistress while my husband was still alive? Is that your question? And you have the nerve to lecture to me about insurgents and rebels? In those days a rebel was first of all a free person, not just someone who attended political meetings and verbally attacked the state and capital. A rebel was a person whose political beliefs and personal behavior were consistent. I rejected the family, marriage, parental and marital obligations in theory, like you, and also in practice, unlike you. Lovemaking was an integral part of our rebellion, our development as free individuals. I succeeded in teaching that to Nachalo. Who would have expected you to grow up with conventional notions of family obligations and hypocritical faithfulness?”

“I didn’t mean my question that way,” I insist, although that’s only partly true. “I meant that Alberts was so different from Nachalo.”

“He wasn’t so different then. At the first meeting he attended he enumerated the bombs and explosives his university knowledge enabled him to produce with the cheapest of materials. Everyone loved him; he was witty and he spoke our language perfectly.” Looking at Daman, she continues, “I’ve always been profoundly impressed, I should say moved, when a university person, a member of the intelligentsia, sacrifices the privileges available to him and devotes himself to the workers’ cause. Of course I took up with him. He became a regular participant at our meetings. All our friends respected him for his knowledge and his evident willingness to share it. I had another reason for taking up with him, as you put it. I wanted to learn if Nachalo had really understood what I meant by independence; I wanted to test the depth of his understanding of mutual respect. One night after a meeting, when Nachalo and the gypsy both left with the others on one of their forays, I asked George to stay and tell me about his past.” Luisa stares at Daman; she virtually undresses him with her eyes. “I took up with him as soon as they left. I showed him exactly how grateful I was for his coming from afar to share his knowledge with us. George rushed away before Nachalo returned. I told Nachalo I had gone to bed with George Alberts. His response was: ‘You’re an independent woman, Luisa; you can make love with whomever you please; if my presence ever hinders you —.’ I threw myself at him; I made love for the second time that night. I loved Nachalo more than I would ever love George or anyone else. George stayed away from our next meeting, I found out where he lived and went to look for him after work. Poor George wasn’t only afraid of Nachalo; he thought he had wronged me as well. He awkwardly told me he had fallen in love with the little gypsy, and that he thought he ought to have told me that before having an affair with me. He really was in love with her; he said he’d never met anyone so uninhibited, so vivacious, so completely untamed. And he told me he didn’t know what to do with his passion, since a twenty-two year old student could obviously not make love to an innocent thirteen-year old girl. ‘Innocent!’ I shouted. I called him a blind idiot and told him every man in the union was more innocent than that gypsy!”

“You hated her, didn’t you?” I ask. I’ve known that too, but I never understood why. “Nachalo was a down-and-out whom you were able to pull up to your union train. Alberts, the expert with your ideas, was something like a conductor of the train. But Margarita was neither fish nor fowl to you, was she? She continued to carry on her trade. You were unable to pull her up to where you wanted her —”

“Be that as it may, Sophia, I accepted George’s admission with Nachalo’s open spirit, without a trace of jealousy or resentment. In fact, I invited him to dinner the day after I visited him. He came. After dinner I arranged to leave with Nachalo; we stayed out very late. George and the gypsy were waiting for us; she had asked him to move in with us. He grinned and told us he had learned more from Margarita in a few hours than in all his years at the university. Obviously. After two years in her trade she was an expert in lovemaking. George went on worshipping her although she continued to sell herself in the street, to men as well as women —”

“Talk of narrowmindedness!”

“It was perfectly clear to me that an illiterate girl in her position didn’t have much choice! She didn’t do it as a sport but out of need. And she did change a little as a result of her contact with George. Maybe she even started to dream of a day when she could make love because she wanted to, not because she was paid. If George inspired such dreams in her, then he succeeded where I had failed. When that day finally came, when the city’s workers rose like a giant to stop the attacking army, the gypsy was the first one to run to the barricades with Nachalo’s rifle, nine months pregnant with Sabina. Nachalo ran to a comrade’s basement and returned with rifles; all of us joined her except George. He knew how to produce explosives, but he had never held a gun in his hand; he stayed behind to mind two-year old Sophia. After the first exchange of shots Margarita was hit in the arm. Nachalo and I carried her home, bandaged her arm, and returned to the barricade. I doubt if George slept for five minutes during the two days before Margarita died giving birth to Sabina — an unbelievable replica of herself, a miniature gypsy born with black hair and black eyes. Nachalo left for the front the day after the gypsy died. And I took up with George again. Isn’t that shocking, Sophia? At night George and I were alone in the apartment with two baby girls. Should we have slept at opposite ends of the room? But he was heartbroken, and I wasn’t able to console him. His enthusiasm for the revolution waned. He was consumed by rage and self-hatred for not having been on the barricade instead of her. He started talking about revenge — not the workers’ revenge but his own. It was already then that he started to slip away from his original commitment. He was temporarily saved for the movement by a young man he met, another foreigner who had come to defend the workers from their enemies. George brought him home. He was in uniform. He had something in common with Pat —”

“Are you talking about Titus Zabran?” I ask her. “He had something in common with Pat? Are you kidding?”

Luisa is playing with Daman. “Titus was younger than George. He was a theorist devoted to what he called the historical project of the proletariat. He was completely single-minded. He seemed to know exactly what was revolutionary in every situation, what steps had to be taken, what strategy was appropriate. George was more philosophical; his interests were more universal.”

The suggestion that Daman’s interests are universal strikes me as ludicrous, but I repress my objection.

“His main strategic insight was that all our accomplishments in the rear were meaningless if the enemy was not defeated at the front. He convinced George. They both joined Nachalo at the front. I longed to go with them, but I stayed behind with my job and the two babies. A month after they left, George returned alone. Nachalo was dead. Titus was seriously injured and in the hospital. George himself was completely transformed; he seemed shell shocked. He told horrifying stories about what had happened at the front. He turned his back on the revolution. I went to visit Titus in the hospital —”

Daman and Pat seem to be in a trance. The magnetism Luisa radiates is overwhelming. All my life I’ve been in the same trance, hypnotized by her, uncritically admiring her courage, her devotion, her determination. All my life I negated my own desires for the sake of Luisa’s revolution. If I had become aware of my dependence on Luisa years ago, you would have had a comrade, Yarostan, not just a passive admirer, a frail, pretty thing at your revolutionary beck and call. If I had only felt jealousy toward Luisa then, it would have been you who ran to the stockroom with the sheet wrapped around you. I would have carried Nachalo’s project instead of worshipping it. My love for you would have been an activity instead of a vocation. But I had to experience Jose before I experienced myself as a body, and L had to wait yet another decade to absorb what I learned from Jose.

I get up from my chair, dizzy from all the wine I drank. and walk toward Pat; I take his head in my hands and press it against me. I’m too giddy to listen, but not too giddy to proceed with the strategy I dreamed up. in the car on our way here. “Alberts turned his back on the revolution, so you gave yourself to Titus Zabran, the soldier of the revolution, its theorist, the younger of the two.” I’m burning with desire — jealous, resentful desire. “And why not?” I ask. “The revolution is a festival, the satisfaction of all desires. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be celebrating?”

Daman snaps out of his trance. “Luisa’s account makes it perfectly clear that certain matters, such as social production, transportation, precede the satisfaction of personal desires.”

Pat, almost completely drunk, says weakly, “If production takes precedence over the real desires of concrete individuals, then the organizers of production take precedence over, living individuals and repression takes precedence, over life.”

Daman objects, “I think you both, missed I the point of what Luisa has been telling us. If revolution is nothing but the realization of what you call desires —”

“What do you call them, Daman?” I snap at him, starting to pull Pat out of his chair. “Are you sure you didn’t miss the point of what Luisa has been telling you, Daman? She wants you to give her an orgasm, Daman, right here, right now. She’s trying to tell you why she wants it from you. Because you’re a professor with our ideas, because you’re a driver of the tram she Serves, because of your universal ideas, because you’re the one for whose service she pulled Nachalo out of his hovel, and Yarostan —”

If only I had been giddy that morning I was with you on the floor of the carton plant and if I’d known Luisa was going to open that gate, I would have pulled you into me while she watched! If I had done that, Yarostan, I would never have dreamt of emigrating. I would have waited for you at the prison gate when you were released, you would never have,married Mirna, although you would have spent your life with a person much more like her than I’ve been. If I had nevertheless emigrated, during my first bike trip with Ron I would have spent half the night making love to him by the side of the pond, and I’d have slept the other half, content and happy and unafraid. I’d never have left Ron, he would be alive today, and I might be a successful thief or prostitute. I might have been the one who started the garage; I might have been Ron’s girl and Jose’s and Ted’s, probably Tissie’s and Sabina’s too, each in turn, perhaps all at once. I know I’d never have gone near a university, and I’d never have met Rhea, or Lem, Hugh or Alec, Daman or Minnie. Nor would I’ve written you a letter at the time of the Magarna uprising; I wouldn’t have needed to; you wouldn’t have been arrested because of it; Jan would still be alive, as well as Mirna’s father, and Vesna would have had no reason to play her game-

Do I wish, Yarostan? Yes. Don’t you? I opt for that other life in Luisa’s dining room. I replay my scene in the carton plant — unfortunately twenty years too late to undo the consequences of the life I’ve lived, but not too late to put an end to the Sophia I recognized in your letter, a Sophia toward whom I could feel no admiration, nor even pity, just contempt. Wrapping my arms around Pat’s body I ask Daman, “What does comradeship mean to you, Daman? What do you understand by solidarity?” Then I ask Luisa, “Do you remember Claude Tamnich?”

Luisa puts her hand on Daman’s shoulder and claims, “You know perfectly well Daman means exactly the same thing I do, Sophia.” To prove it, and to dissociate Daman from Claude, she lifts his hand to her mouth, kisses it, and tells him, “This is what I mean by solidarity and friendship, Daman; it’s more; than articles and meetings and picket lines and arguments —”

I persist. I’m obsessed with my project. “Show Luisa, show all of us what you mean by desire, Daman.” I turn to Pat. “And you! Show us what you mean by the real desires of concrete individuals, the unity between theory and practice. Show us how men dominate history!” _ .

Pat tries to pull away from me, “I don’t understand, Sophia. I just told Daman —”

“Never mind what you told him! Show Daman what you wanted to show me before dinner. Not with words, Pat! With your arms, legs,hips, with your body! Let me remind you.” I’m breathing fast. I feel my heartbeats in my head. I’m burning the way Mirna must have burned the day she took her brother the devil to her clearing. And why not? The world is changing all around me. Why wouldn’t I change? I’ve abandoned myself totally only once before in my life — to Jose, in order to show I wasn’t perverse, to show him the nature of my most repressed desires, to show I didn’t want to be Tina’s seducer but Jose’s woman. My determination to prove the existence of my desire itself gave birth to my desire. That was the first time I experienced the abandon of total orgasm. The irony is that in trying to deny my perversity I proved myself unimaginably perverse, bathing my entire body in Jose, writhing in semen. But I had been repressed too long to understand what I had done. Out of a shame and denial of sexuality identical to Vesna’s, I committed suicide in a fiberglass factory and continued murdering my desires until both you and Luisa held up a mirror that reflected a horribly rigid, sexless porcelain statue, taunting me, provoking me until I can’t stand to look at the reflection a second longer. I press my whole body against Pat’s side, sliding slowly against his arm, his hips. “Don’t look away, Daman!” I shout. “Tell him, Luisa! Tell him this is what you mean by comradeship and solidarity!”

Luisa holds on to Daman’s hand and starts to cry. “Did Yarostan tell you about that too?”

“Do you remember what comes next?” I ask her. I pull Pat’s shirt over his head and start undoing his belt buckle.

Pat begs, “Please, Sophia, not here.”

Daman gets up and moves toward the door, announcing, “This is ridiculous.”

Luisa, crying, falls to her knees in front of Daman and embraces his leg; she looks up to him like a begging dog. “Don’t leave me now. Daman.”

Pulling off my own clothes, I push Pat down to the floor. “Desire is ridiculous, Daman. Organization has nothing to do with passion. Solidarity means obedience to the leader’s decisions. Comradeship is nothing but a synonym of membership. For you there’s no contradiction between organization and desire because desire doesn’t exist. It’s expurgated from the revolutionary society. Luisa, do you remember Claude Tamnich?”

Luisa falls to the ground as Daman tries to walk away from her. He shouts to me, “You belong in a mental hospital!” That must be what his friend, the dean who fired me, told him.

Luisa holds on to him and begs, “Please don’t prove her right, Daman!”

Pat and I roll naked on Luisa’s living room carpet as if it were Sabina’s wall-to-wall mattress. Pat, panting with desire, tries to pull me toward the stairway. I laugh at him and remind him, “All the victims of repression have to satisfy their desires, Pat, not just some. Men will never dominate history from bed-rooms. That’s done in living rooms!”

Daman reaches the door, dragging Luisa after him. “At least sit with me in the kitchen. Don’t leave me like this,” she begs.

And then, exactly as Jan expected, all morality bursts into the open and shatters. Pat penetrates and wails, “Oh, no, I didn’t want it to happen like this.”

Daman slaps Luisa and runs out of the house, leaving her lying by the open door exactly as I had once left Tissie, crying hysterically. Luisa comes to herself, looks around furiously, and runs to her room shouting at me, “I’ll never forgive you for this! I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you’re doing it like a sick, wild animal!”

“Like a gypsy!” I shout back.

Pat runs from the open door and grabs the clothes strewn around the living room, exactly as I ran from the street entrance of the carton plant. A porcelain statue is shattered. Pat dresses in a corner of the room and bolts through the door. I bathe in the fresh night air blowing in from the street, immoral to the point of perversity, unashamed, independent. Luisa runs past me without looking at me and slams the door shut. I go up to my room, feeling victorious and free. I wanted, and I took in conditions determined by me. Tell Mirna I’m ready now to face all the consequences, I’m ready to face the world.

I’ve been typing for the past twelve hours. Luisa didn’t invite me to breakfast before she left this morning. I recently finished the bottle of wine I earned up with me. And yes, I read your second letter as soon as I started writing this one. I lost some of my rage, but not my desire to describe my “revolution” to you. Outside there’s a general strike. Everything is out of commission. Tomorrow I’ll be part of it again, though I don’t yet know which part. I may go back to Sabina and Tissie. I’ll try to take Pat with me.

I still love you, Yarostan, and I’ll go on loving you —

Your
Sophia.