Many people were running, or hurrying as though not to miss something. They were becoming a crowd, rivulets flowing together into a stream and flowing faster. The earth rose up a little there, between the student center and the science building, beyond which lay the central axis of the campus, a broad way starting at the auditorium and lined with the newer buildings. That’s where the crowd was going, following the paths or pouring over the grass and through the leaves. Kit came to the top of the rise and saw what it was: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the other groups were marching, a little band with signs. Kit could just hear, like a plea repeated, the marchers’ voices, and the cries and shouts of the people around them, moving with them and pressing on them, a gauntlet they passed through. There were no more than twenty or thirty of them.
She went down that way, drawn along. There was Saul Greenleaf, in the front, and Rodger in a jacket and tie and his porkpie hat. Max was in back keeping the group together. Black-and-white cars of the University police were pulled up along the route, their lights revolving and their radios emitting staticky communications louder than the protesters’ chants. Up on top of the auditorium Kit could see watchers and the tall tripods of cameras with long lenses, men with binoculars. She thought of Milton Bluhdorn. Jackie had said it would do her no good to be here: did he know it would be like this? Photographers scooted along the march route too, and some of them looked like news photographers, and some of them didn’t.
She felt a tug at her sleeve, and pulled away, threatened. It was Fran.
“Unbelievable,” she said in cold scorn. “Can you believe this?”
It seemed that in a short time the furious crowd would fall on the demonstrators and beat them or worse. Kit and Fran went down the slope, hurrying as everyone hurried.
“You can think what you want,” Fran said. “You can say what you want. But this is ludicrous.”
A sign that read Hands Off Cuba was torn from someone’s hands and ripped to pieces to awful cheering.
“Who are these people?” Fran said. “College students? They’re rednecks.”
“Fran.”
“Well you hear what they’re saying? ‘Commies go back to Russia.’ I mean come on.” She tossed down her cigarette and stepped on it. “Dopes. Know-nothings.”
They pushed through the mass of hecklers and yellers that undulated along the march route until they were at the front of the crowd and keeping pace with the marchers. And without ever exactly choosing to, they became marchers, as though sorted from the crowd by a sorter that recognized only two kinds, if you weren’t one you were the other. Someone she didn’t know linked arms with her. Saul saw her and grinned, amazed, alight, unafraid she thought, or maybe not. A tall athletic guy was bent into his face, speaking curses meant just for him it seemed; on the guy’s crewcut head was a novelty straw hat decorated with church keys and a little sign that said Lets Raise Hell.
“Where’s Jackie?” Kit called, but Saul had to turn away to face his opponent.
It was what Kit had forever most hated and feared, to be pointed at and stared at and mocked. In the Passion story when she was a kid it was this that hurt her most, that the crowds mocked Jesus and spit on him. But she felt none of that now. She could see and assess the crowd around them as though they were etched. Almost all were men, many wearing their fraternity sweatshirts and their varsity jackets, some of them though in blazers and ties, with American-flag pins in their lapels and wolfish grins, not guys who got to be part of a mob very often and seeming to be enjoying it. One guy who bore down on them wore the button that the SANE women had worn, the three white lines on black, but when he came closer to Kit—so close and yelling so loud that she could see the fillings in his teeth—she saw that on his button the white lines were formed into a great swept-wing bomber, and beneath it were small letters that spelled DROP IT.
“Keep the women in the center!” Saul yelled back at his shrinking group. “Keep the women in the center, men on the outside!” The marchers had ceased their chanting, Peace Now and Hands Off Cuba, it was obvious that it just goaded the crowd around them dangerously; but the women who walked with Kit and Fran, arms now more protectively linked than before, started to sing. They sang, amazingly, in Latin: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem.
It was a round: one took up after the other had started, kept on after she ended. Fran laughed aloud, apparently she knew what they were singing, she right away began singing along in a loud hoarse voice perfectly on key, and Kit sang too when after a moment she got the little tune: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem, pacem, the women’s voices cycled.
Then through the marchers and the shifting crowd coming and going, Kit saw Falin.
He was just turning from looking elsewhere, and now his look passed over the marchers and the others with interest and something like delight. It seemed he didn’t recognize Kit in the mass of them, though she felt the instant of his look toward her like a stab of wonder.
“Then it’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“What’s okay?” Fran said.
“It’s him,” Kit said. “Falin.”
He was coming closer to them, it seemed. Kit was about to call out to him when he turned away, looking elsewhere. In a second she couldn’t see him anymore. But just before the crowd closed around him she saw—she thought she saw—that his big pale feet were bare.
No. Where had he gone? There was no way to turn back, no way to leave the little group of marchers now, Kit was carried forward by all of it without a choice. She untangled herself from Fran and the women and stood still while the others passed by her, until the rear guard caught up with her and Max came close, his arms wide to keep them moving, like a shepherd.
“We’ve got to break this up,” he said. “Somebody’ll get hurt.”
“Max.”
“Get up and tell Saul and the people in front. We’ve got to break it up. Go do that.”
She went back up along the edge of the marching group, too tightly and defensively bound together now to pass through. When she came to the front she saw that Saul was less certain too than he had been, and that ahead the opposing crowd was coming together in a wall that wouldn’t let them pass. “Where’s the cops?” she heard him say. “Now where’s the cops? Free speech, people. Free speech. Land of the free.”
In a minute the march would not be a march any longer, it would be a huddle of victims, the ones in the rear were pressing already against the slowing front rank. Almost all their signs were gone. Then, just as their forward progress was about to stop altogether, Saul stepped quickly out ahead and turned to face his group, walking backward like a drum major. With both hands he waved them to the right, off the main way and onto the walks of the campus.
“Okay, quick!” he called out. “Keep on, keep together! We’re going to end this at the library! Everybody hear? Pass that on! At the library steps!” All the while waving them to the right and on. They did go faster too, almost broke into a run, and for the first time Kit felt fear, that they might run, and what might happen to them then. But they didn’t, even though the crowd around gave an awful cry of rage and triumph to see that they had given up and were getting away.