Keeping an even keel becomes difficult in these trying times. At night, the noise in the street rises and seems to come from all places at once, making it impossible for the working man to rest. But then he’s used to the sleepless nights, just as he’s used to that tired feeling, that aching sensation that twists from the backs of his eyes at all hours of the day and which makes it harder than ever to function. The working man is paid his pittance by the wealthy man who profits from his labour, and then is made to hand over his pittance to the wealthy man again in exchange for the necessities of life sold at vastly inflated prices, the whole of the working man’s production made to be surrendered to his wealthy paymasters, his person, his being becoming a mechanism for the wealthy to use for their own profit and then unceremoniously discarded when he’s too old, frail, or broken to be of further use. Little does Valeri know how close Hannah has come to the breaking point. So consumed he’s become in the coming apocalypse he can hardly see the unraveling of her life even as she unravels right in front of him. “Valeri,” says Hannah, “I love you. Do you hear me? You’re so stubborn. Why did you go away that time? Now you’re coming to us, to me. I can’t go for anything. I can’t let you go. You’re all I need in the world.” Valeri shakes his head. “What if they find me here?” he asks. “Don’t go,” she says. “I have to,” he says. And in the time it takes them to have this conversation, Valeri’s personal life goes up in smoke. But with the strike in the offing, he can devote no further energies to such things, even as he knows full well this isn’t the last he’s heard of his roommate and her love for him.
Still yet the wealthy man continues his campaign aimed at wringing every last ounce of wealth he can from the working man’s world. Announcing the closure of another mill, the wealthy man declares so many livelihoods liquidated, condemning those who’d held them to another lifetime of poverty and neglect. As the workers leave at the end of what would be their last day, they pass alongside banners, electronic banners announcing the limited availability of as-yet unbuilt luxury towers. As the workers make good across the city and into their neighbourhood of working class apartment blocks there’s still that image of gleaming, glass and steel towers put up in place of industry, in place of industriousness to threaten their insecurities and to mock them in their moment of weakness, a mockery that’ll be remembered when once their places switch and their fates inverse. “I know,” says Maria, “but you’ve got to think of what kind of risk you’re taking.” Valeri sucked in his lips and looked out the window. “As I see it,” he says, finally, “I’m sick and tired of running. If it was up to me, I’d be up in there with them, attacking rather than waiting for the signal to march without arms.”
“Be patient,” Maria says, “everyone has their role to play. You can’t throw your life away now, because you haven’t realized your true purpose yet. It’s not your time.”
“Bah!” Valeri won’t hear it. He can’t hear it. Too caught up in the passion of rebellion, his emotions render him short-sighted and naïve. His mother and father were the same way, just before they died.
Proof enough of the discontent simmering in the streets, a truck rolls past, in the driver’s seat a young man with a lit cigarette hanging precariously between his lips. As he passes an apartment block, one of so many identical such blocks in this city, he catches the sound of a voice shouting, but only for a half-second before he’s out of earshot, the voice’s shouts coming from a woman struck by her husband in the night. He’s out of work, like so many of the working man’s brothers. She’s hardly working, like so many of the working man’s sisters. In the night, these are the moments when the superior character of the working man becomes self-evident; it’s in our weakness, in our avarice and in our inebriation that our moment is come. It’s precisely when we are weak, in character if not always in form, that we must seize the moment and attack the wealthy man who would deem himself our master. It’s an unconventional wisdom, to attack when one is weak and to relent when one is strong, but this is the way of the working man, and it is through his way and never the way of another that he will find victory.
No sooner have we left one crisis do we find ourselves immersed in another, this new crisis seeing the working man put his newfound knowledge to the test. Outside, somewhere across the city not altogether far, the working man makes his way home for the night, his feet sore, his hands dirty, his clothes looking respectable at a distance but up close looking slightly ragged and worn, with small holes in key locations around his waist and sleeves marking the exact places where his body had learned to work through the day without any input from his mind. The sky, still light in a late-summer’s swoon, is thick and hazy, smoke from fires burning hundreds of kilometres away obscuring much of the sun’s light, the city itself shrouded behind a dense smog which makes it all seem to the working man more than a little surreal. A stormy discharge of orange bolts could loose fire under his little rented apartment at any time, and this thought strikes him gently as he climbs the stairs towards his little box of a home waiting for him at the end of a long, hard day. Across the city, the hours had passed, and in those hours the streets had become all but deserted. The streetlights flicker, the trees rustle in a light wind, and every so often an ambulance comes wheeling through, sirens screaming, lights flashing. Four lights emerge from a field dozens of tiny triangular spots, receding in the distance along with the sound of an aircraft’s engine receding along with it. The lights push back like rockets of, the company of aircraft on their way from one landing strip to another, moving unknown cargo, still as they all are in that prelude to something more sinister, something more dangerous. As has become his routine, the working man sets across the day and looks forward to that time when he can be something more than what he is. But with the world careening through its crisis, the working man will yet join with the others, the student, the artist, the pastor, and many more in looking past these meagre attentions and concerns, every mass protest, every strike, every walkout contributing its little bit towards escalating tensions, the inflamed passions to rise until the barriers meant to contain them can contain them no longer, unleashing, then, a violent cataclysm that’ll destroy the old and build in its place a new unlike anything that’s ever been.
A small act of defiance takes place. Some jobless young man spray paints ‘NO SURRENDER’ in black across a wall inside a construction site, deftly stepping out through that same narrow hole in the fence he’d used to step in. No one sees him. They only see his handiwork, when the working man arrives in the morning to continue his work. As the working man is made to paint over this small act of defiance, rewriting history to make it seem as though the act had never taken place, he silently commits it to memory. It’s a subversive act, to store the memory in some hidden part of the mind out of the hope that someday it might become expedient to take it out and expose it to the light. No one but they who found it will ever know what it means, and yet so long as the essence of the act remains carried forward in the spirit of the working man it will always have a way to break free.
15. Apocalypse Rising
During a lull in the action, it seems as though a peaceful interlude has set in. As tends to be the way of things in the time immediately before a crisis explodes, in the streets a tension having set in like the bone-dry underbrush of a forest in the midst of an unusually hot summer, with only a spark needed to set it all aflame. It’ll come. It’s not far off. But there’s still that before-period, when the drama of it all has yet to play itself out and which leaves us all looking ahead in anticipation of what we’re sure should’ve already come. In a world filled with countries, kingdoms, empires beset by internal tensions just like ours, it might seem entirely out of place to look ahead and remark on how quickly things are to fall apart. But for Stanislaw Czerkawski, the next days he spends in jail is time spent off the street, the darkness of his cell shared by the others caught for one crime or another. He looks across the dimly-lit room and he sees not hardened criminals nor dangerous psychopaths but the out-of-work or the soon-to-be, holes in their jeans, dirt and muck on their faces, their hair ragged and tangled. For want of a piece of bread and a roof over their heads, these men have been made to lead lives of addiction, criminality, and despair. It’s a sign of our times that the working man is arrested for some trivial offence while the real criminals, they who loot and plunder the wealth of the world not only go unpunished but are exalted in the realms of power. This is something all working men know, in the basic, instinctive way they can, but which each must learn for himself. It’s taken Stanislaw longer than most, but here he is. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”