"We're going to have to walk from here," Stefana said, and her mother clutched her imitation-leather handbag
"Oh, but we can't, Fana. Look at that crowd! What are they—Are they—"
"It's Thursday, ma'am," said a large, red-faced, smiling man just behind them in the aisle. Everybody was getting off the bus, pushing and talking.
"Yesterday, I got four blocks closer than this," a woman said crossly. And the red-faced man said, "Ah, but this is Thursday."
"Fifteen thousand last time," said somebody. And somebody else said, "Fifty, fifty thousand today!"
"We can never get near the Square. I don't think we should try," Bruna told her daughter as they squeezed into the crowd outside the bus door.
"You stay with me, don't let go and don't worry," said the student of Early Romantic Poetry, a tall, resolute young woman, and she took her mother's hand in a firm grasp. "It doesn't really matter where we get, but it would be fun if you could see the Square. Let's try. Let's go round behind the post office."
Everybody was trying to go in the same direction. Stefana and Bruna got across one street by dodging and stopping and pushing gently, then turning against the flow, they trotted down a nearly empty alley, cut across the cobbled court in back of the Central Post Office and rejoined an even thicker crowd moving slowly down a wide street and out from between the buildings. "There, there's the palace, see!" said Stefana, who could see it, being taller. "This is as far as we'll get except by osmosis." They practiced osmosis, which necessitated letting go of each other's hands and made Bruna unhappy.
"This is far enough, this is fine here," Bruna kept saying. "I can see everything. There's the roof of the palace. Nothing's going to happen, is it? I mean, will anybody speak?" It was not what she meant, but she did not want to shame her daughter with her fear, her daughter who had not been alive when the stones turned to rubies. And she spoke quietly because although there were so many people pressed and pressing into Roukh Square, they were not noisy. They talked to one another in ordinary, quiet voices. Only now and then, somebody down nearer the palace shouted out a name, and then many other voices would repeat it with a roll and crash like a wave breaking. Then they would be quiet again, murmuring vastly, like the sea between big waves.
The streetlights had come on. Roukh Square was sparsely lighted by tall, old cast-iron standards with double globes that shed a soft light high in the air. Through that serene light, which seemed to darken the sky, came drifting small, dry flecks of snow.
The flecks melted to droplets on Stefana's dark short hair and on the scarf Bruna had tied over her fair short hair to keep her ears warm. When Stefana stopped at last, Bruna stood up as tall as she could, and because they were standing on the highest edge of the Square, in front of the old dispensary, by craning, she could see the great crowd, the faces like snowflakes, countless. She saw the evening darkening, the snow falling, and no way out, and no way home. She was lost in the forest. The palace, whose few lighted windows shone dully above the crowd, was silent. No one came out, no one went in. It was the seat of government; it held the power. It was the powerhouse, the powder magazine, the bomb. Power had been compressed, jammed into those old reddish walls, packed and forced into them over years, over centuries, till if it exploded, it would burst with horrible violence, hurling pointed shards of stone, And out here in the twilight, in the open, there was nothing but soft faces with shining eyes, soft little breasts and stomachs and thighs protected only by bits of cloth. She looked down at her feet on the pavement. They were cold. She would have worn her boots if she had thought it was going to snow, if Fana hadn't hurried her so. She felt cold, lost, lonely to the point of tears. She set her jaw and set her lips and stood firm on her cold feet on the cold stone. There was a sound, sparse, sparkling, faint, like the snow crystals. The crowd had gone quite silent, swept by low laughing murmurs, and through the silence ran that small, discontinuous silvery sound.
"What is that?" asked Bruna, beginning to smile. "Why are they doing that?"
This is a committee meeting. Surely you don't want me to describe a committee meeting? It meets as usual on Friday at I I in the morning in the basement of the Economics Building. At 11 on Friday night, however, it is still meeting, and there are a good many onlookers, several million, in fact, thanks to the foreigner with the camera, a television camera with a long snout, a one-eyed snout that peers and sucks up what it sees. The cameraman focuses for a long time on the tall dark-haired girl who speaks so eloquently in favor of a certain decision concerning bringing a certain man back to the capital. But the millions of onlookers will not understand her argument, which is spoken in her obscure language and is not translated for them. All they will know is how the eye snout of the camera lingered on her young face, sticking it.
This is a love story. Two hours later, the cameraman was long gone, but the committee was still meeting.
"No, listen," she said, "seriously, this is the moment when the betrayal is always made. Free elections, yes; but if we don't look past that now, when will we? And who'll do it? Are we a country or a client state changing patrons?"
"You have to go one step at a time, consolidating—"
"When the dam breaks? You have to shoot the rapids! All at once!"
"It's a matter of choosing direction—"
"Exactly, direction. Not being carried senselessly by events."
"But all the events are sweeping in one direction."
"They always do. Back! You'll see!"
"Sweeping to what, to dependence on the West instead of the East, like Fana said?"
"Dependence is inevitable-realignment, but not occupation—"
"The hell it won't be occupation! Occupation by money, materialism, their markets, their values. You don't think we can hold out against them, do you? What's social justice to a color-TV set? That battle's lost before it's fought. Where do we stand?"