At that time most of their contemporaries, boys as well as girls, had started wearing hand-made shoes, flared corduroy trousers and blue Chinese denim shirts. Clumping footwear and denim shirts had even sneaked into the sixth form college they attended, where she was a year ahead of him. It was a private school with a glorious past, teachers in ties and sea-green walls. The spherical lamps and plaster cast of a Greek hero in the vestibule, the nationalistic sentiments and the smell of wax polish held sway while the world outside grew ever more rebellious and shoddy. By an unpredictable coincidence Ana, with her old-fashioned, well-brought-up air, was better suited than many other pupils to the school’s atmosphere of discipline and good manners.
Seen from the street the heavy red-brick façade with its deep window recesses resembled a fortress intended to shield and sound-proof the classrooms from the subversive slogans blaring from megaphones and fluttering from banners above the processions of protesters marching past outside. Robert had bought himself a pair of sloppy shoes and a blue denim shirt and had just finished reading Chairman Mao’s selected works. He had not only read them as an antidote to the head’s admonitions at morning assembly, he had also, it later occurred to him, made himself familiar with the chairman’s ideas in unconscious solidarity with his mother, who slaved in a factory canteen until her hands were rough and cracked. In contrast to the mothers of his school friends whose hands were smooth, cared-for and indolent when they were stretched out to bid the polite plebeian boy into their warmth.
She smiled at him absently, his hard-working mother, when he tried, over the rissoles or fried plaice fillets, to make her understand why the dictatorship of the proletariat was inevitable, or talked about The Long March as if he had walked the whole way himself. She was too tired to follow his train of thought, her feet hurt, and when he made the coffee she was already ensconced on the sofa with Dostoievski or Flaubert. Once he made an attempt at Ana’s dinner table. He depicted the liberation of intellectual resources in the classless society and did not notice until it was too late that she cleared her throat and tried to catch his eye, as the clarinettist just looked at him out of his horn-rimmed spectacles. The thick lenses made his eyes seem smaller, simultaneously defenceless and resigned, as they regarded the young man sitting there eagerly proclaiming. He seemed to be looking at him from some far-off place. Later, when his revolutionary fervour had burned itself out, he always saw that distant look behind the clarinettist’s spectacles when the conversation centred on class war.
For a long time he had watched Ana’s serious face during morning assembly or going up or downstairs past the dusty plaster hero. He thought about her when he lay awake at night. She was often by herself, which made things more difficult for him, because her solitude increased her air of inviolable aloofness. He did not know how to approach her, nor what he would hit on to say. She did not seem to notice him. To her, no doubt, he was merely an overgrown child.
It was Ana who spoke first, one day after school. She caught him up on the pavement and passed him a newspaper. He had dropped it. It was a Trotskyist pamphlet with a red star in the heading. He had walked along with the red star sticking out of his pocket, for the effect. She held it out in front of her between two fingers and he asked if she was afraid it was infectious. It flew out of him, to his own astonishment. Maybe it was to compensate for all the times he had followed her at a distance and thought about her when he was alone, without her knowledge. She smiled. He had never seen her smile before.
They took walks together after school, in the parks, and she lent him books, mostly poetry. She wanted to know what he thought of them. Gradually the poetry collections replaced the subversive material on his shelves, not because he had suddenly exchanged his revolutionary world view for a lyrical one but because he was interested in everything that could tell him something more about her and bring them into closer contact. If she had guessed he was in love with her she made no sign, nor did she apparently notice how others gossiped about the odd couple they made, the fiery agitator and the eastern European loner from their respective forms. He only pretended to be bothered by the gossip. It was to be the two of them against the rest of the world.
She looked at him attentively when he dutifully explained what he had got out of reading some poet or other. He felt stupid, he wanted to kiss her, he suffered and rejoiced at the same time when they sat on a park bench watching the swans and talking about life. She drew him into a serious, intense atmosphere where the shadows were darker and the colours glowed more deeply. If Robert thought he was a fierce social critic, in Ana he found a still more implacable and uncompromising spirit. On the whole, everything that issued from the radio and the television or was shown on cinema screens, in Ana’s opinion was just pop. She could not have hit on a more derogatory expression, and when she pronounced the word she wrinkled her nose which creased the skin around her nose and nostrils into little folds, making her look like a fastidious rabbit.
It looked sweet and Robert couldn’t wait for her to say the word. He provoked her to utter it by talking about films he knew she would hate. But she did not think, like Robert, that everything labelled pop betokened false consciousness, capitalist society’s calculated method of brain-washing the working class and preventing it from developing a necessary class consciousness. Deep down she felt the populace was pop-minded, and she tacitly let him understand that she herself belonged to a persecuted but superior elite of intellectual aristocrats, of artistic people, as she said. That was her favourite word and it signified the absolute opposite of pop. It brought them to the verge of quarrelling, but it was obvious that she enjoyed their discussions, and while he argued in favour of the proletarian view, secretly he dreamed of getting a place in the select circles of artistic people, preferably a place beside hers.
She began to invite him home. He took it as a promising sign, but nothing happened. They sat in the living room, never in her room, sometimes her father was with them. They drank tea. Robert had not imagined there could be people who sat drinking tea in the afternoon like that, talking of poets or composers, as if the world revolution was not smouldering just round the corner, ready to burst into flames any day. He sat there in his denim shirt listening to records with Ana and her father, different recordings of the same pieces, and the father conducted with both hands as the music played. He gave a commentary on how various conductors interpreted the same score. That was how Robert became captured by music, like a detour to Ana, to the moment he was waiting for. He continued to love the great symphonies long after his love for her had died out along with his faith in the permanent revolution. The works of Brahms and Mahler were the inadvertent remains she left behind her when she vanished from his life, but at least that was something. Trotsky left no more in his memory than the unsuccessful attempt to picture what it must be like to have an ice pick in the head.
One afternoon when they were alone his eyes fell on a little gold star of David hanging in a chain around her neck. He had not noticed it before and asked if he could look at it, stretching out his hand so his fingertips almost brushed her collar bone. They had never been so close to touching each other. She took off the chain and let it fall onto his palm with the star uppermost, observing him with her dark eyes as he weighed it in his hand. Was she Jewish? Her paternal grandmother had been. The star of David had belonged to her, so her father was Jewish too, according to tradition at least, although her grandfather had been a Christian and her father was an atheist. She herself must be half Jewish, she said, taking back the star.