A black sky hides all motives. A dark room bares all thoughts. At the armoury, things have taken a turn for the worse. All the days spent cleaning the guns can’t make up for the steadily growing dread that’s invaded every moment of every day. For Private Craig Thompson, this means little changes but for the imposing sentence of confinement to the barracks. With the rest of the troops he learns of the unrest despite the strict controls on the flow of information into and out of their base. When Colonel Cooke learns of their subterfuge, he has the base thoroughly searched and every unauthorized screen destroyed. No one knows yet what’s happening, why it’s happening, and as Private Thompson looks over the guns just after the day’s inspection it occurs to him something must be coming, the instinct in him taking over even in the presence of a suffocating information blackout. “Don’t feel too bad for yourself,” says the Colonel, suddenly standing above and behind him, “it’s not for men like you to worry about the grand scheme of things. It’s not even for men like me, to be frank.” Private Thompson snaps to, but takes a half-second too long. Soon, he’s in the stockade. Over the next several weeks, these attacks occur sporadically, leaving the troopers confused and disoriented. On the face of it, there seems to be no motive, no coherent organization to these attacks. Naturally, men like Miguel Figueroa and women like Rose Powell understand; word spreads through the working class apartment blocks and the shantytowns that a resistance is afoot, years of neglect and abuse rendering them a sympathetic caste to the lashing out against the symbols of power. At a meeting of concerned citizens, held in a church not long after these street attacks have begun, Valeri takes the pulpit.
“Brothers and sisters,” he says, “we have stood by and watched the theft of our homes for too long. Some of you might still believe in the power of compromise, but I tell you this: any compromise between right and wrong is a moral fraud. We want only dignity, and they want only to take away our dignity. Do we compromise and offer to surrender to them only half our dignity? No!”
A raised fist prompts shouts of agreement from the audience, in turn a smile on Valeri’s face.
“We are not animals,” he continues, “and we are not objects of theirs to be manipulated, to be traded for the profit of another.”
It’s a rousing speech, but one which fails to command even Valeri’s full attention, thoughts lingering in the back of his mind of the things he’s done to Maria, these thoughts struggling with themselves in a confusing mess of guilt and pride, arrogant pride. You see, Valeri’s a much more complicated figure than our history has chosen to remember, and he’s yet to reach his destiny.
After finishing one set of fortifications Stanislaw Czerkawski can have only one night’s rest before made to head out for the next. He hardly sees his wife. In the night he sleeps patiently, dreaming of the day when he’ll become master of his own destiny. For so long as his half-second of peace endures Stanislaw’s he can count himself among no master’s slave, no bossman’s plaything. In the morning he sees through the brightened darkness of the dawn and into the next day over, imagining only peace where there’s war. But imaginings aren’t enough. Arriving at his worksite, he finds there’s no work for the day, the foreman telling him to beat it. But then the foreman says something that pushes Stanislaw the wrong way; the foreman yells, “you dirty Polacks can find someone else to bother today!” By the time he’s collected himself, Stanislaw’s in cuffs, piled into the back of a police lorry along with the rest of the ne’er-do-wells, trundling along the streets of the working class neighbourhoods heading for a police station to sit in a cell. They don’t know the true purpose of their labour, but soon enough they will find out. After things have begun to fall into place, Valeri steps up his efforts, meeting with his fellow workers at the plant, one at a time, gathering pledges and signing men, in his dreams building a grand coalition that could topple even the mightiest tyrant. But it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. In the union hall that night, no agreement is reached, the skeptics still outnumbering the hawks, for the moment Valeri bitterly accepting their work must continue. Though the vote has turned against action, Valeri knows not to accept this vote, for he has come to appreciate, in the way that he has, that consensus is not measured; it must be forged. “Don’t worry,” says Murray, “we’ll be there.” In the night, it’s always in the night, Valeri arrives home to find Hannah asleep, still in her scrubs, dried blood stains and all. He thinks not to disturb her, and toes gently past the door to her bedroom. But just when he thinks he’s made it, he hears her voice. “Water’s out again,” Hannah says. “You would be better to tell me when it’s on,” Valeri says. “You can’t be serious,” Hannah says. “Why can’t I?” Valeri asks. Hannah sighs. “I wish you would become more cheerful in my company,” she says, “what’s the point of fighting if you don’t take the And Valeri doesn’t reply to that last remark, simply reaching for a bottle of flat beer on a shelf and taking a swig. It’s dark, with only the hall’s dull light to cast a half-illumination on the scene, making it look like they live in a world where up might be down, where right might be wrong, where black might be brighter than the brightest of whites.
As war goes, this is a war as yet lacking in decisive battles, in daring offensives marked by bold, red arrows striking across a map. This is a war familiar to the working man only in some basic, visceral way, the kind of familiarity bred by years of hard living, by scrounging and saving for so many years just to buy a simple jacket, a pair of boots, an ordinary desk fashioned out of ordinary wood. He is confronted every day with made-up images of actors pretending to enjoy the wonders of the modern world, but he has not yet become desensitized to them. Every time the working man’s screen fills with these propaganda advertisements for luxury and opulence he can never have, he is filled with a simmering anger, his thoughts again drifting to the romanticism of the war fifteen years ago, where once the working man had dared to dream. In the days that follow, Valeri looks tired, working to struggle forward, never looking back. “I don’t fight for nothing,” Valeri says, “I always fight for what’s right and fair.” Hannah shrugs and says, “if you don’t stop saying such things I’ll get really annoyed with you.” Valeri laughs. “If you haven’t gotten annoyed with me already then I’ll just have to try harder.”
“I’m serious,” she says. “Me too,” he says. But Valeri relishes, in a perverse way, this kind of antagonism; he likes seeing her frustrated at his attitude.