But the streets are eerily quiet, the air free from the chattering tension that should be thriving. As Valeri steels himself against the coming day, he scarcely notices Hannah on her way in. “Are you a heroic figure?” she asks. “Hardly,” he says. “Then what are you?” she asks. “I’m nothing more than a man. And I do only what good men do. Anyone in my place who is good would do what I’m doing.” He stops. “And do you know what’s going on in the world?” he asks, turning to face her. “Who can think of the world? We have to look out for ourselves,” she says. “If everyone only looks out for themselves,” he declares, “then we’ll all have so much pain and suffering, without any hope of relief.” No longer talking just about Valeri’s deepening involvement in the struggle, it seems they’re both determined to have this conversation in the privacy of their own home. “Since we’re both here,” she says, “I want to tell you one thing.” He says nothing, instead letting the weight of the moment invade the space between them. “Valeri,” she says, “this is no time for heroics. You should stay here with me. I need you.” She pauses, then steps at him and rests her hands on his broad shoulders. She says, “I love you.” She kisses him, but he doesn’t respond. His hands remain at his sides, and his lips remain closed. At the polytechnic, the students continue to gather despite the continued cancellation of classes. In the central courtyard Sean Morrison has taken up residence, occupying the open space with tents. Amid the steadily mounting crisis gripping Britain’s streets the occupation of the polytechnic is only a minor episode, but like the other minor episodes it’s emblematic of a larger struggle to wrest control of the public space from private hands. The police watch, standing in a loose circle, waiting for the students to act out. In the distance the fires of liberation burn, their thick columns of smoke reaching for the sky, threatening to blot out the sun and cast darkness over the cityscape. It’s not Sean’s time to speak; with Julia he listens to the student body president declare their occupation as a strike against the criminal order, in seizing and holding this space for so long as they must the students are depriving the criminal order of the control it needs. But there’s more to it than that. While the polytechnic has all but shut down, the students keep on studying, assembling knowledge by their collective experience in asserting their own identity. Now, Sean realizes their true purpose. Now, he sees clearly. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
At their apartment, Valeri and Hannah still argue. “Don’t go,” she says. “I have to,” he says. “If you didn’t have to, would you still go?” she asks. “I would,” he says. “Then go,” she says. As she takes a half-step back and begins to withdraw the embrace, he reaches for her and pulls her back in, kissing her, savouring the taste of her mouth. Finally, he says, “this has been a long time coming.” She says, “it has.” He says, “but it’ll have to end here.” They don’t speak of the kiss, of their shared feelings for one another in the meanwhile, awkwardly dancing around the subject as has come to be their way. Neither can forget, though, the confession of love, and both feel an almost-regret at the knowing perversion of a love that can never be. Somehow, the next time Valeri turns to the streets, he can see anew how many crushed and mangled lives are left behind by the day’s business. In the night, it’s always in the night, it’s easier to destroy men and women; even the jackal prefers the dark hours of gloom. Still Valeri has himself a glimpse of the bottommost depths of life, the very sump of its ugly pit. At a younger age, he might’ve taken the musty, mouldy stench, the smell of swamp rot wafting up to him as a chance to reach for something new and unexplored. Indifferent to all this in the narrow alleys lie the lacerated, tormented, broken bodies of young girls with arms thrown back in convulsive gestures of agony. Only at the very riverfront, in the black, ugly night does Valeri find a respite from the gloom, watching the water’s ripples lap against the hull of a passing grain carrier. He thinks back to his mother and father, to their heroic deaths in the failed war fifteen years ago, and he feels a gnawing shame at having come to see as sexual and romantic a woman like his roommate, as though the temptation exists in him to concede that men and women must develop these attractions to one another when confined to such spaces together for so long. A horn breaks the silence; a train’s light appears in the distance, drawing nearer.
Tomorrow, Valeri will join Murray and hundreds of thousands of workers, students, and parishioners in the streets of lawyers across Britain and throughout Europe, from Barcelona to Bonn, from Liverpool to Lviv, from Paris to Ploesti. In union, each will look to one another for a spiritual support, in solidarity providing one another with that critical part of what it means to be. It’s insidious, and it’s vile, the way the wealthy man sets himself about the task of expelling the working man from his home and then seizing it, without firing a shot, without deploying the truncheon, by force of law taking what should never belong to him and making it his own. In the night, the fires of liberation still burn, only now the flames have been hidden behind the rising clouds of smoke billowing from a thousand and one smokestacks like burning embers lodged at the base of a still-smoldering home. It’s still that between-time, when it still seems possible for us all to pull ourselves back from the ledge, if only we could find the courage to take that necessary step back. This is a tempting line of thought, but it’s foolish as well. History doesn’t work that way.
As we’re all about to discover, as we all should’ve known all along, the way to the future is marked by the blood and tears of they who should’ve known the inevitability of it all. Even as I look ahead to the imminent escalation of this war three centuries in the making, I can’t help but imagine us all, at a much younger age, someday in the future bearing down on this, their past, with all the faded-out weariness of the lost orphan in search of the family he never had. It’s a fraud. Even as this night sees the fires of liberation burning in the distance, colouring the sky a crisp, burnt-orange gold, the working man’s already tired but somehow also filled with an electric energy coursing through his veins and seeping into every movement he makes, every smooth, rhythmic contraction of his muscles as he works through the night.
After all that’s happened in his lifetime, the working man can only convince himself he knows what lies ahead, from experience thatching together a narrative which demands special accommodation, enabling him to account for all his failures and all his successes. Missing the bus home one night, he walks along the side of the road, kicking an empty can of beer ahead of him, the hollow clinking sound of the can bouncing off the sidewalk there to distract him from his own thoughts. At the height of this late-summer’s heat, a restless energy has set into the city, with the days slowly growing noticeably shorter and the evening’s skies turning a burnt, brown colour when the sun dips beneath the skyline to the west. Loose pieces of paper litter the street. A car alarm sounds off. A pair of dogs bark at nothing. All the shops along the street are shuttered, hardly after sundown and already the city sheltering itself from what it’s come to expect the night holds. But not tonight. No, tonight there’s only a subdued quiet, altogether out of character for what we’ve come to expect from the night, where there should be shouting and raised fists and smashed-in windows on this night there’s only that eerie almost-silence that comes from a people brimming with discontent.
The working man knows what the future holds, but only in the sort of primal, instinctive way that he can. Still coming home at the end of the day, he retires to his little box of an apartment and sits at his window, looking out from his vantage point over the alley that runs between apartment blocks in this part of the city. On this night, the city’s in the midst of a heat wave, the unseasonable warmth pushing the temperatures almost to forty degrees. Through the wide-open window a breeze wafts in. Suddenly, the power fails, the whole apartment, the alley outside falling dark in an instant, the city beyond immersed in an unending sea of black. In the distance there’s the sound of sirens wailing and the sound of something thumping hard against the ground. Still the working man sits, watching another sleepless night pass slowly in this, the interlude that always precedes an explosion of hatred and violence. Still the working man leans back against his windowsill as a thousand different thoughts pull his mind in a thousand different directions, events weighing on him so. This place, this city in this country seems in the midst of an identity crisis, outright schizophrenic in its ability to embody all the conflicting truths competing for the minds of the people who live within its vast, sprawling expanse. No more than a few days are left before the inevitable happens, and still there’s so much left at stake, so much left to be said between the whole lot of us, if only we were still talking to each other. In the night, things change, for the night is the working man’s time, under the cover of darkness the alley behind his little apartment coming alive with the deafening sound of silence.