Still the working man ventures beyond his own quarters, leaving the simple, staid, stout apartment blocks lined along the road and entering those quarters where once his kind had lived. After all that’s happened it might seem the working man lives a life filled with terror and lawlessness, but it’s not so. There are those little moments of peace even in a violent world. Overhead, a plane traces a white slash across the deep azure sky, a plane full of people headed somewhere, anywhere in the world but here. At the centre of a vast network of treaties, each backed by the full force of law, the working man seems lost, with none of these exigencies fitting in with one another but made to be compatible anyways. Still the working man ventures beyond his own quarters, the search for wages leading places he’d never thought he’d go. In an old industrial quarter, he looks to a small shut-down factory repurposed as a recycling centre. This isn’t the life he was promised. This isn’t the life he was sold on. As the working man returns home after another fruitless day, he withdraws into an isolation, a bottle of cheap liquor dulling his senses and fogging his mind. These thoughts, he knows, are subversive, even criminal. They should be pushed from his mind, but so long as he keeps them to himself then he can’t be implicated by them. As he shuts off the light and goes to bed, he spares himself the trauma of contemplating the consequences of these subversive thoughts, choosing instead to joy in surrender to the thought of a new tomorrow. Meanwhile, across the way an unemployed youth spray paints on the side of a bus, ‘NO SURRENDER,’ in black lettering, an act of defiance unchallenged in the night.
After what’s transpired here tonight, none of us will ever be able to forget the courses of our disparate histories joining together like all the little tributaries merging into a single river. But then none of us should ever want to forget, even as we all know we someday will. This might be the only reason I’m writing this, to give an account of these events so that, wherever this leads, we’ll have some way of thatching together some kind of narrative, even if all this turns out to be wrong. With the decaying hulks of industry long abandoned still littering the country like tombstones and with long lines for welfare cheques like a funeral procession reaching down crowded sidewalks along the city’s streets, we have seen what has happened to the working man’s livelihood, in this wondrous age of unprecedented freedoms and ever-fading lines on the map how yet the working man may find his deliverance in a new tomorrow. It’s strange, in a roundabout sort of way, that we arrive at the same place as if we’d gone right at it.
13. Nor the Traveller to the Path
Along the streets sometimes come gleaming white tour buses, filled with travellers from halfway across the world. These buses stop and unload their passengers who stand around in a gaggle and take pictures all at once; then the gaggle pile back into their bus and speed off to some restaurant where the servers speak only some language from halfway around the world. The working man rarely sees these travellers, working as he does in some dark little corner of the city, only occasionally permitted by happenstance to venture to parts beyond. Though the working man knows those very travellers may not know what they’re doing, he sees them and he has a visceral reaction to them, knowing as he does that the working man transcends all national boundaries but that so, too, do the working man’s enemies, the very people who would seek to take what rightfully belongs to him and hoard it all for themselves. If not building fortifications at police stations then it’s hastily assembling ad hoc jails on empty plots of land across England that Stanislaw Czerkawski’s been mustered into service for. In the hot and humid early summertime, he sweats to excess, returning home tired and sore. Though he’s never told the purpose given to his labour it becomes evident to him by way of his working class intuition, the instinctive sense he has that the fruits of his labour shall be used against people exactly like him. Though men like Stanislaw don’t know it, the wealthy man has learned the lessons of the failed revolution fifteen years ago, and puts those learnings to use not to ward off the next rising but to prepare himself to withstand it. Still Stanislaw sees it when ordered home at the end of the day, his wife there to welcome him back into the little sanctuary they call a home. For the migrant, Stanislaw, his is a place caught between two worlds, two identities, learning, over time, to bleed himself into the space between them, subsuming himself within the greater struggle, and in so subsuming making peace with the greater good.
Despite an excess the wealthy men continue to order production, then withhold the things produced from us by way of elaborate schemes to drive prices higher still. Valeri is confronted every day with the wealthy man’s apparatchiks on the screens gleefully declaring the rise in prices of fuel, food, and homes; a sea of green arrows pointing up represent, to Valeri, an act of thievery long escalating. “If I’d only gone over when she’d called,” he says, half-mindedly thinking of Sydney. “If you do this, you’ll be dead to me,” says Murray, the man responsible for organizing their shop’s role in the coming general strike. His voice had never sounded so cold and forbidding. But cloaked within Murray’s sudden distance, Valeri detects the slightest hint of concern. He stares hard at the table as he tries to recall his attacker, but can recall only the lifting of his head and the darkness of the alley in the dead of night. “Now,” says Murray, “it’s time to go to work.” Despite this excess in production, morale among the troops at Private Craig Thompson’s brigade is something of a valley, gently sloping downwards but forever on the verge of plummeting into an abyss. But whenever the troops muster on the armoury’s parade grounds the guns can be seen, barrels stabbing at the sky proudly. No longer have they been standing in formation for an hour when the officers arrive, Colonel Cooke not among them. In the address to the troops, the mounting unrest in the streets isn’t mentioned, instead much time devoted to praising loyalty and faithfulness to the rich and illustrious tradition which these troops are said to have inherited when once they enlisted. The thought offers Private Thompson no comfort, and he succeeds only in forcing a blank, straight-faced look. But no prepared speech can obscure the fires of liberation burning in the distance, the columns of still-invisible smoke rising from the city in the distance. These streets, they’re engulfed in chaos, but they have yet to see through their purpose. In the life of the soldier, we’ve yet to broach his true purpose, his reason for being, but the time is almost at hand when men like Private Craig Thompson will be called upon to make the choice to serve a higher purpose or to live down to the ideals of men laid out before them. The guns arrayed on the parade ground, they’re old, they’re obsolete, and they’re worth nothing on the battlefields of some distant nation against the guns of a foreign power. But this is not their true purpose. The guns, they’re made to be turned against they who would seek to oppress. And that night, as Private Thompson lies in his bunk and thinks on all that’s happened not only on this day but on all the days since he can remember he accomplishes with the passing of the day at least some small part of his own personal journey towards joining the working class struggle. His day is almost come.