Sophia’s Eighth Letter

Sophia’s eighth letter

Dear Yarostan,

I don’t know how to begin. I can’t bring myself to tell you what happened here, i can’t even make myself believe it.

It’s over! Everything is over. The sun we saw on the horizon didn’t rise! It’s as if everything that happened during the past few weeks was a dream, as if nothing at all had happened. It’s worse than that. It’s as if we were all dead and had come to life only long enough to dream we were alive.

I’m home with Sabina in a world that hasn’t changed. We haven’t been able to find Tina. Pat or Tissie. Ted is in jail. And I can’t continue writing this letter because my eyes are so full of tears I can’t see.

I’m trying again a day later. Your letter has been with us for a week. Sabina and I discussed everything in it several times. But i simply couldn’t bring myself to tell you what we’ve experienced since I last wrote you. I even asked Sabina to write you, and to tell you I was too sick to write. She told me she couldn’t possibly replace me because “your letters are love letters, Sophia; I’d like very much to communicate with Mirna again, but not by letter.” So would I. Yarostan — with you and Mirna and Yara and all of you. During the whole past week I wished I were among you instead of here.

I’m afraid Mirna’s excursions can no longer include all the areas where human beings live. This area is back to “normal.” The destruction of limits, the birth of possibilities — are no longer taking place here. People have returned to the labors that restrict their frontiers and destroy their possibilities. The police arrested hundreds of people at Luisa’s factory and occupied the plant. At other plants the union announced a “victory” and workers returned to their jobs. The police attacked the occupied university. Ted’s print shop was attacked by the police when it was being used day and night by hundreds of people. Postal and transportation workers returned to their jobs after their unions announced “victories.” At one large assembly plant the union had workers vote on a list of demands before “calling off” the strike. I had a hard time taking it all in, and I still can’t believe so much activity could have been repressed so quickly. I don’t have any explanations. I don’t want to be the “genius” who now “understands” that so many people failed to realize their desires because of “One, two, three, Bang — the key, which happens to be right here in my pocket.” I now know that the political strategists who “understand” why so many people didn’t realize their variegated; contradictory and unpredictable desires, in reality understand nothing except their own miserable desire to “lead.”

A week of discussions with Sabina have convinced me that I don’t have any “keys.” I have less of a right than anyone to make a critique of others’ practice. You and Sabina may have fallen into traps. I was never out of a trap. Except for an instant which I failed to prolong, my only desire has been to be led by the nose. There was never any reason to repress anything I was doing. I’ve never been free. Free human beings can’t be repressed; they have to be destroyed.

Sabina and I didn’t spend all week discussing me. We mainly talked about your letters. Not only the letter that came a week ago, but also the two Daman had brought to the so-called “council office,” which seems so unreal now. It was only a week ago that Sabina learned about the strike at Mirna’s plant, and about your “confession.” Of course the first thing I asked her was if she had known you and Luisa had been lovers.

“Did I know! Yarostan wagged as if he were Luisa’s tail! How can Yarostan describe that affair so naively? He was being shaped, like dough —” Sabina even remembers the day when Titus first brought you to our house soon after the war. “Zabran was as proud as if he were displaying a princess he’d saved from dragons. And Luisa introduced her new fellow worker to us as someone who’d been a thief and had slept in alleys until Titus recruited him to the resistance organization and transformed him into the most admirable of killers. Luisa wanted him on that very day. ‘A second Nachalo!’ she told us. ‘Right off the streets! Isn’t he beautiful?’ Luisa was determined to do with Yarostan what she’d failed to do with Nachalo. She was determined to shape him into a servant of a project that wasn’t his own. She tried to make him an organizer, a magnet. But although she put all of her mind as well as her body into her task, she failed miserably. Apparently he did become something of a magnet to Jasna and some of the others, but the project he carried wasn’t Luisa’s; it was Jan’s. Yarostan could no more be made to serve the organization than Nachalo. Luisa tried to teach him what she’d tried to teach Nachalo. But thanks to his friendship with Jan, Yarostan didn’t learn what she’d tried to teach Nachalo but what she’d learned from him. He did become a little bit of a second Nachalo. That’s why Luisa abandoned him in the heat of the struggle for a hunk of more flexible dough.”

I remind her, “Yarostan had the impression Luisa succeeded in communicating her political ideas to him. He says he didn’t reject Luisa’s positions until his second prison term.”

“Yarostan also had the impression that Luisa’s house embodied ‘Sabina’s outlook’,” she continues sarcastically; “he had the impression that all relations were open, nothing was left unsaid, there were no taboos, nothing was forbidden, and while he was having that impression he was being manipulated, shaped into something he was going to hate: a politician, a so-called rank-and-file leader. His whole training was underhanded. Nothing was said. Yarostan thinks he treated you as a toy! If so, he learned from her, because he was her toy, and everyone knew except you and he. Yarostan was a hoodlum to her, and he never became anything more.”

I object to that. “You’re exaggerating. Luisa didn’t share George Alberts’ prejudices until after we emigrated; she’d never called anyone a hoodlum until I brought Ron home —”

“The prejudices were there already then,” Sabina insists, “and she didn’t get those prejudices from Alberts. It’s obvious where Alberts got them. During the war he had associated with an altogether different class of people from the proletarians and organizers he’d known before. When he returned to his ‘family’ after the war, he was a successful physicist, and Luisa’s friends seemed like so much ‘trash’ to him. I know Luisa couldn’t stomach him. She paraded Yarostan in and out of the bedroom so as to infuriate Alberts. And she knew Alberts would be furious precisely because Yarostan was ‘trash’ to him. She understood Alberts’ social ‘tastes’ because her own were already very similar to his. Luisa was no longer the organizer who had picked Nachalo up in the street. Since that day she had associated with officers in the ‘popular army,’ with union functionaries who became government officials, she had moved in circles of eminently respectable people. They were the ‘comrades’ she had in mind when she spoke of downtrodden proletarians; it was to this level of respectability that she wanted to raise Yarostan. And until she raised him, he was trash to her. But you’re right. She didn’t express this contempt for her lover directly. She did use the word hoodlum already then, but not to characterize Yarostan. Don’t you even remember a fragment of the conversations Luisa had with Titus Zabran?”

“Not one fragment, Sabina! That was over twenty years ago! You’re the one who is odd for remembering, not I for forgetting!”

“I wouldn’t feel bad for having a bad memory, Sophia, but for having to take Someone else’s word about an event I had experienced. How can you let everything in your head just lie where it falls, without ever moving it around? There’s no such thing as a bad memory; you’re just lazy! Luisa used the word ‘hoodlum’ daily. But you’re right, she didn’t call Yarostan a hoodlum — not directly. She reserved the term for Yarostan’s best friend. Every time Zabran came over they’d groan to each other about Jan Sedlak’s ‘deplorable’ influence on Yarostan, about Jan’s total lack of self-discipline, about the incoherence of Jan’s political outlook. They called him a lumpen element, a hooligan, a hoodlum — all of which was taboo, forbidden in Luisa’s house. They said such horrible things about Jan that I couldn’t wait to meet him. I didn’t get my chance until the first day of the strike. On that day I watched their protege, Yarostan, mess up all their plans. I didn’t understand the politics then; I still don’t. But I knew from Zabran’s and Luisa’s faces that something had fallen apart for them, and during the day I learned that it was their Pygmalion, Yarostan. Actually the scheme was simple enough, and I think I understood it even then. In theory the workers were supposed to be seizing power over the productive forces, but in practice, as Yarostan told us in his second letter, the ‘workers’ organization’ was going to replace the capitalist class as the manager of production. Workers were supposed to experience this feat as their victory, the way they did here last week. The task of Yarostan, the rank-and-file militant, was to pretend he desired such a ‘victory,’ and to parade this desire in front of other workers who didn’t yet know this was what all workers wanted. The ‘deepest layers of the proletariat itself’ had to be the ones who defined the ‘historical tasks of the proletariat.’ But Yarostan sat and daydreamed. Luisa and Zabran, at the risk of being called manipulators, had to define the historical tasks; Vera and Marc immediately backed them up. But then Jan threw a wrench into their apparatus. He started shouting that the workers real struggle wouldn’t begin until workers tore down the factories, dismantled the machines and burned the productive forces. I shouted bravo, Jasna applauded. And Yarostan laughed! Luisa and Zabran were furious.”

“Why were you so enthusiastic about what Jan said?” I ask her. “That enthusiasm seems to conflict with your whole life’s commitment. Yarostan referred to that contradiction in his newest letter —”

“Because I was a schizophrenic already then!” Sabina exclaims. “Or maybe that was when my schizophrenia began. I applauded because Jan had thrown a wrench into Luisa’s and Zabran’s machinery, and also because what he said made a lot of sense to me, and still does. I even understood some of the implications of what he said. During the days that followed he told me that as a boy he had lived among streams, forests and fields and had loved to explore their secrets; ever since he’d become a worker he’d been reduced to an appendage of a machine. He told me if revolution and freedom meant anything, they certainly couldn’t mean a struggle for the freedom to stand at the very same machine every living day. To Jan revolution meant a new start. It meant taking up again where he’d left off in his boyhood. I thought I agreed with him, but I didn’t understand his position as a rejection of technology. I combined Alberts’ position with Jan’s and got what I thought was a perfect synthesis. What I had in mind was the dispersal of the technology in the forests and fields, and I thought people would relate to it the same way they related to the trees and the streams, not for mutilation and enslavement, but for adventure, exploration, travel and enjoyment. My synthesis was overstretched; it didn’t work. But I didn’t find that out until last week. In the carton plant I wasn’t even aware of a contradiction, and in my guts I supported every stand Jan took. I suppose you don’t remember the discussion of the slogans either. That took place on the second day of the strike. I didn’t understand the political significance of the discussion, but I helped Jan mess up the united front Luisa and Zabran had looked forward to. The carton plant was to contribute to the general effort by printing slogans on posters which were to be used in demonstrations. Luisa and Zabran had minor disagreements about the slogans that should go on the posters. Suddenly Jan objected to the very idea of demonstrations with posters. He said we should talk to our fellow workers with our mouths, not with posters blocking us from each other. I caught on right away and asked what our discussions would be like if each of us sat behind a placard with a slogan on it, and if we waited for the placards to talk to each other. That’s when everything went haywire. Yarostan was supposed to guide the group back to the tasks at hand, but he only nodded at Jan’s and my comments. The united front fell apart. Jasna considered Jan’s comments as reasonable as Luisa’s. Zabran and Luisa were almost isolated; only Claude Tamnich and Marc Glavni stood by them. Even Vera Neis vacillated. Jasna is right about Vera; she was an opportunist. She became Luisa’s disciple because she wanted to be what Yarostan was supposed to have become: the tribune, the rank-and-file leader. But as soon as Luisa was isolated, Vera abandoned her, and of course she took Adrian, her flunky, with her.”

“You make them all sound so petty and manipulative. Are you sure you’re not describing Vera in the light of what Yarostan told us she became much later?” I ask Sabina. I’m still trying to defend the integrity of my “original community.”

“I’m describing them in the light of what they did, Sophia,” she insists. “In fact, what Vera did later doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense to me. Her antics with that husband and lover don’t quite fit with the Vera I knew twenty years ago. I might as well tell you about my experience with Vera Neis. You figure out how it fits with what she became later. She didn’t switch sides only because Luisa was isolated but also because of me.”

“You mean you convinced her Jan was right?”

“You can put it that way, but I didn’t convince her with words. Vera couldn’t stand Jan, and she’d never have switched sides if I hadn’t been there. It was my presence that convinced her. The first time I spoke she took me aside and told me, ‘What a witty, intelligent, fiery girl you are!’ She couldn’t believe I was only thirteen. ‘You’re a siren, she told me, ‘pretending to be a gypsy girl!’ That was what convinced her. I didn’t know it right then, but she was courting me as openly as the circumstances and her own inhibitions would allow. She found the same treasure behind the long black hair that Zabran had found in Yarostan: a gem buried in sand. I sensed her passion and was excited by it without understanding it. I played with it. I sat by her, whispered in her ear, laughed with her, touched her. I wasn’t aware that the pale, pretty woman whose chest heaved and whose face grew red whenever I touched her wanted to fling me to the floor then and there, in the midst of the meeting. I didn’t know what a fire I was stirring up in her whenever I whispered to her; until then I had played in the park behind the school and had taken friends home with me, but I had never had contact with pure lust, with blind desire. It was only on the following day, the third day of the strike, that I realized what was happening. Zabran opened that day’s meeting by groaning about the fact that nothing had gotten done during the first two days of the strike. Then he said the presence of outsiders who were not production workers, disruptive individualistic elements, was responsible for this. Vera knew he was referring to my presence. She slipped her hand over my fist, as if to let me know she’d keep me from being thrown out. Gradually she tightened her hold, dug her fingernails into the palm of my hand. I could see her eyes were red from lack of sleep, her teeth bit her lips. I whispered that she was hurting me, but her grip only tightened. I became afraid of something I didn’t then understand. I was about to be overpowered and maybe even destroyed by something I couldn’t control or restrain. Vera was driven by a blind desire to dominate me, to own me, to enthralled me, without any trace of love or mutuality or equality.”

“Gosh, Sabina, I never imagined —”

“I don’t think anyone else did either, Sophia, because nothing actually happened. It was Yarostan who saved me from being ravaged by Vera and also from being thrown out by Zabran. Yarostan dreamily proposed an “action’ somewhere between printing posters and destroying machines — he too was good at making syntheses between diametrical opposites. When Zabran brought up the presence of outsiders, Yarostan brought up the presence of the owner, Mr. Zagad. Yarostan is excessively modest. It’s true that Claude made the action concrete by suggesting Zagad be ousted, but that suggestion was nothing but the logical step that followed from Yarostan’s observation. Jan jumped up, ready to implement the suggestion on the spot, and I leaped out of the fire I had unintentionally fed and threw my arms around Jan and Yarostan. The whole plan was Yarostan’s —”

“That was what I thought too, but Yarostan wrote that Claude didn’t only make his suggestion concrete, but was also the one who finally implemented, it.”

“Yarostan is wrong,” Sabina says emphatically. “Today he’d like to make himself believe he didn’t have anything to do with those events. Claude added nothing but his usual contributions: we should oust Zagad with clubs and guns, like the police would do it. Yarostan asked why we couldn’t just ask Zagad to leave. And in the end it was Claude who implemented Yarostan’s ‘strategy’. We went peacefully to Zagad’s office and Claude asked him to leave. That event was important to me. I thought it was the beginning of Jan’s revolution. I thought the first step would be followed by others, workers would start tearing down factory walls and pushing machines into fields and forests. I was overjoyed when Zagad left his office. I threw my arms around Jan, and he asked me to spend the night with him. That was when my revolution began. Jan was the only man I gave myself to completely. He was my twin. He rejected all constraints, he was open to every conceivable experience, he refused to be stunted. He was Margarita Nachalo in the shape of a man.”

“Why did Jan take you to Yarostan’s room instead of his own?” I ask her. “Yarostan said they exchanged keys —”

“Yarostan started that letter by telling you how honest and complete he was going to be. He’s a hypocrite. He still doesn’t approve of his best friend’s morals. Maybe he doesn’t want Mirna to know. I’d think she’d be flattered. I asked Jan the same question and he told me he didn’t want to take me to his room because he shared his bed with his sister.”

“You mean Mirna lived in his room?” I ask.

“That was what I thought,” Sabina goes on. “I was fascinated beyond words. He told me his sister was two years younger than I was. He was surprised I wasn’t shocked. But my whole body filled with curiosity. I longed to meet the eleven-year old girl who shared her bed with her brother. I insisted on going to his room instead of Yarostan’s. I flew into a rage when he refused to take me there. He told me his sister was wildly jealous and would scratch my eyes out, but that only aroused my curiousity all the more. I threatened to leave him if he didn’t take me to her, so he finally told me the girl in his room was his sister only in age. He told me he did love his real sister, but had been separated from her by a religious vampire who had policed their love. The girl in his room was a homeless urchin; she had run to Jan in the street and begged him to hide her from the police, who were chasing her for stealing. He had hidden her, and she had stayed on with him; he considered her his make-believe sister. Yarostan was apparently shocked. I stopped insisting on going to Jan’s room, but I couldn’t stop being fascinated by his real sister. I asked him her name, what she looked like, and what she had done with her brother under the very nose of morality and the church. When he pulled me to bed, I refused to undress until he agreed to pretend to be his sister and to show me how his sister made love to her brother. Jan agreed. Mirna underestimates him. He was full of pranks. For Jan liberated life was; going to be a game, a love game, played intensely, with every limb and pore. He agreed to be Mirna for me. And while he performed, I made love to the sister he was pretending to be, I fell in love with her, I lost myself in an ecstasy matched by only one other experience in my life, the following night’s experience with the real Mirna: Jan’s enjoyment was as great as mine; he continually told me, ‘All life should consist of moments like these, interrupted only by periods of rest.’ It was out of gratitude that, early the following morning, he told me he’d take me to meet his sister that very day. But first we had to think of a way of getting the religious mother out of the house. Jan knew I had fallen in love, not with him but with his sister, and he understood my passion, he fanned it, he loved me for it. The guardians of the social order had to kill Jan; there was no way for them and him to coexist; in his heart Jan carried the dissolution of every order; he’d always break through it with acts of passion unimaginable until then. Yarostan returned to his room at daybreak. He obviously hadn’t slept a wink. He didn’t describe his night with Jan’s roommate. We didn’t ask. His night hadn’t been a happy one. He seemed absolutely worn out, miserable, lonely, perhaps ashamed. Both of us knew he was pining for Luisa. Mirna is wrong about the plot to seduce the Queen of the Peasants. It was Jan’s idea from beginning to end. As soon as Yarostan knocked at sunrise, Jan knew what to do with the old vampire. If only Yarostan would resume with Jan’s mother where he’d left off with Luisa, Mirna would be free and Jan and I would outdo each other courting her without any rules or time limits, without any standards of right and wrong; the revolution would begin when all of us started doing what we pleased. But Yarostan didn’t want to contribute any more to our plan than he’d contributed to Zabran’s and Luisa’s. We barely succeeded in getting him to go with us. As soon as he saw the queen, the object of his passion, he yawned. Next time he saw her he vomited. He spent the entire afternoon and night sound asleep. We might as well have thrown a dead animal at the old woman.”

“Would you like him better if he’d become your tool?”

“No, Sophia, I would have liked him less. And in any case, it wasn’t my fun he spoiled but Jan’s. The old woman concentrated all her energy on keeping Jan out of the game. With fabulous results! Those results were summarized for us by the untouched virgin herself, twenty years later! I suspect the old woman even had an inkling of why Jan had brought Yarostan. Her endless crosses and wails and prayers suggested she had trouble keeping the thought from passing through her own mind. The devil must have tried to slip into her consciousness while the rest of us were out picking berries. What she didn’t have any inkling about was the infinity of forms the devil could take. That night she thought the devils were all safely put away in Jan’s bedroom at the other end of the house; she expected to hear the first step the devil took toward the room containing the two chaste virgins. Meanwhile all of her worst fears were being acted out by the virgins themselves, unaided by any visiting demons.”

“In one of their discussions, Mirna told Yarostan she thought you hadn’t been honest with her.” I remind her.

“I know, and she hurt me by saying that. She didn’t describe to Yarostan the game we actually played. She transformed it, and I can’t understand why. Is she ashamed of the role she played? I doubt it; Mirna had no shame, not then.”

“You’re twins in that respect, aren’t you?”

“More than twins, Sophia; we’re permanently embedded in each other’s hearts. That’s why I was hurt when Mirna inverted a key detail and made me seem so manipulative. Don’t look at me so strangely, Sophia! Don’t forget I wasn’t thirty-two then! Mirna and I were only two years apart, and I didn’t play the dominant role. The seduction was as mutual as the most reciprocal love depicted in any poetry. The mutuality of our love condemned the ugliness of all the brutalizing one-sided relationships in the midst of which it took place, and first of all Luisa’s relationship to Yarostan, which was nothing but sheer manipulation; next Yarostan’s relationship with you, Vera’s toward Adrian and me, Zabran’s toward Yarostan, Alberts’ toward Luisa, and finally Jasna’s pathetic and unrecognized desire for Zabran and Yarostan. Our love had nothing in common with any of those. It had no blemishes. The detail Mirna changed is precisely what made that night so incomparably beautiful, so unique in my whole life’s experience.”

“Well, what did she change?” I ask impatiently. “She was angry at you for pretending to be her brother and rousing her passion for your own selfish gratification. Don’t tell me you did it for her; I know you too well —”

“I’m not denying my selfishness, Sophia. Nor Mirna’s. She’s right about why I did it, but she’s wrong about what I did. I didn’t pretend to be Jan that night. I’m disappointed that Mirna forgot that. It was a rare, unforgettable night. Moonlight streamed in through the window; It was quieter in that country house than anywhere I’d been before. Mirna asked me if I was Yarostan’s girl or Jan’s. I remembered Jan’s telling me she’d scratch my eyes out from jealousy arid I tried to provoke that jealousy. I told her Jan and I were passionately in love with each other, that our love knew no bounds. But that had been Jan’s inversion. There was no jealousy in Mirna. She put her hand on my face and told me, ‘If I were Jan I’d love you passionately and without bounds; you’re beautiful.’ I almost cried. I told her, ‘Jan says he loves me only because I remind him of the one person he really loves in the whole world.’ Mirna insisted I fell her that person’s name. I told her, ‘He didn’t love me at all until he taught me to act like her and be like her, because he doesn’t really love me at all, he loves only her; and her name is Mirna.’ She was quiet for a long time. I reached for her face and felt tears running down her cheeks. I asked if I had offended her. Then she asked me, ‘Did he show you how he spent his nights With Mirna, how he slept with her?’ I told her he showed me everything. She said, ‘This Was the bed in which he slept with Mirna until mother made him leave.’ She sobbed and kissed my hand, telling me, ‘I still cry sometimes when I remember. I was so happy every! night, and I was happy during the day because I waited’ for night to dome.’ Why did Mirna invert what happened next when she told Yarostan about it? I did not ask her, ‘Would you like me to pretend to be Jan.’ How terribly banal, and how manipulative! Yet she works herself into a fury twenty years later, indignant at the creature she’s invented during the intervening years. The fact is that my initiative ended with my telling her Jan loved her. From that point on the initiative was hers, and it remained hers until the end of that glorious night. It was Mirna who asked me, ‘Show me what Jan showed you. Please be Mirna for me, just for an instant.’ I agreed to be Mirna. I lay quietly next to her; our sides touched. She said, ‘First Jan took Mirna’s hand to his lips and whispered, I love you, my little sister, more than I’ll ever love anyone else in the whole wide world.’ That was how it began. And it was Mirna herself who went on, step by step, to an ecstatic climax, slowly uncovering every inch of one body and matching it with every inch of the other, ever so carefully, ever so gently, ever so passionately. Every motion, every gesture, every position she had ever dreamed of taking with Jan she took with me; every caress, every embrace, every kiss she had ever dreamed of receiving from her brother she gave to me.”

“And all that time you pretended to be Mirna?”

“It was the easiest thing in the world to pretend to be Mirna and to accept all the love and passion she wanted Jan to give her. That was what made that night so incomparable, so monumental to me. And you should have seen her mother’s face the next morning when she found her virgin sleeping in the devil’s arms! Tissie told me what you looked like when you woke up in her embrace. Your look must have been compassionate compared to that woman’s. All her life’s pent-up desire, inverted into hatred, was concentrated in her look. She immediately rushed for the broom. Yarostan remembered the rest of it vividly enough: The rest is hardly worth remembering. Nothing else happened during the next two weeks. After the old woman chased us away we went back to the carton plant. I kept expecting next steps to be taken, but there weren’t any. After those stupid discussions about slogans on posters everyone except Jan went back to work to print those posters. Jan and I boycotted the work as well as the rest of the meetings. We wandered throughout the city, among crowds, into factories, among students. We kept looking for those who were taking the next step, and we discovered what Yarostan described to you in his second letter: a vast puppet show, thousands of manikins acting on orders pretending to be acting on their own. We did find a few free spirits, but they were isolated, disoriented and frustrated. Jan knew it was all going to end very badly. It was all too repetitious, too serious, and Jan knew that a revolution couldn’t be serious. So at least the two of us stopped being serious, we played at revolution, we played at being free; we challenged, provoked and sabotaged. But no one responded. We might as well have been alone.”

I remind her, “In the research center you continued to expect everything to happen. How could you have known during those events twenty years ago that nothing else was going to happen?”

“I’m not sure I can explain that, Sophia. Maybe for the same reason that I’ve tried to realize contradictory projects. I’m half Nachalo and half Alberts. Twenty years ago my two halves told me the same thing; two weeks ago they told me opposite things.”

“I don’t understand,” I tell her. “I know you were in the midst of a contradiction in the research center. Yarostan saw that right away, and you yourself were aware of it. But I don’t see why you were so single-minded twenty years ago. What did your Alberts-half tell you then?”

“It wasn’t my Alberts-half, Sophia, but Alberts himself, in person, who told me exactly the same thing Jan told me. Jan knew right away that all the strike activity was staged and had no other aim but to replace one set of rulers with another. Alberts said almost the same thing to me a week before we were arrested. He told me we were going to emigrate as soon as he got all the papers and other arrangements in order; if we didn’t emigrate we’d spend years in jail, maybe even the rest of our lives. I was indignant at first. I wanted Jan and Mirna and all the others to go with us. He told me it wasn’t the whole group that would be jailed, but only the foreigners. He said foreigners were being used as scapegoats to explain why there was opposition to the revolutionary apparatus, so-called. It’s so easy to single out foreigners. I told Jan what Alberts had told me and he said he was relieved to learn we would be allowed to emigrate; he had started to worry when he heard the rumors that were being circulated about Luisa. He didn’t even imagine he would be arrested too, and didn’t dream of emigrating; he had no reason to. Alberts made it all very attractive to me by promising me a whole world of technology as my plaything; he even told me he’d build me a laboratory. Jan and I knew our friendship would end as suddenly; as it began; at least we had pretended a revolution was taking place.”

“Then you don’t know why the others were imprisoned for such a long time?” I ask her.

“I haven’t the slightest idea, Sophia. Yarostan keeps asking why the three of us were released after spending only two days in jail. That’s not. what surprises me. I had known we were going to be allowed to emigrate. What surprises me is what happened to the others. No one, not even,Alberts, imagined that the isolation of scapegoats would be carried to the point of imprisoning the entire production crew of the carton plant. I didn’t have a hint of that fact until Yarostan’s first letter came, and I don’t understand it. What happened was exactly what Alberts had made me think would happen; I had no reason to be suspicious. We were all arrested; we spent two days in jail; we were released and the police apologized for their ‘mistake’. Luisa’s and Alberts friend Zabran was there at the parting. Zdenek’s claim that Zabran was in jail at that time is puzzling; Zdenek must have had another period in mind when he told them that, or another man. I knew who Zabran was, and the man who saw us off was Titus Zabran. He had been arrested too, but only for a day. He told us the entire crew had been arrested ‘by mistake.’ I thought that apparently someone in the police thought the entire crew were foreigners. Yarostan keeps pointing out how bizarre it is that the ‘Alberts Ring’ were released while the so-called accomplices of the ring were left in jail. That certainly is bizarre, but that wasn’t the impression I had at the time. Zabran, not the Alberts Ring, was released first, a day before us, and I was sure the others had been released too. In any case we weren’t given a grand opportunity to find out what had happened to the others. The police accompanied the ‘celebrated physicist and his family’ to our house, waited while we packed, and escorted us to the train station for the first tram out.”

During the past week Sabina answered several other questions you raised in your newest letter, as well as in the two letters that arrived when she was in the research center. And in answering your questions, she completely demolished the “original community” I had glorified in my first letters to you. If I still retained some illusions after you tried to knock them out of me, Sabina has finally convinced me that no such community ever existed. In the process of convincing me, she made me doubt the reality of my most recent experiences as well. Were the commune and the council office hallucinations? Did I invent them? Were they dreams on which I can base another lifetime’s hopes? If I correspond with Pat twenty years from now, will he write me that the events I remember never happened?

As you can see, I’m not too eager to tell you how I happen to be home discussing your letters with Sabina. I don’t even want to think about it. Sabina is right; I’d rather let everything in my head just lie where it fell, without moving around. I may later have to take someone else’s word about what happened, but at least I’ll have spared myself the pain of living through a horrid experience more than once. I’ll try to relive it — I was going to say for your sake, but I can’t imagine what good it’ll do you to know. I really do wish Sabina had written you; all I feel like telling you are the things she told me.

I was slightly drunk, comfortably exhausted and very happy when I finished my previous letter to you. The day before, with Pat’s grudging help, I had given Luisa and Daman a tour of the continent I had discovered that day. I slept soundly for at least twelve hours after I finished that letter, got up at noon, and attacked Luisa’s refrigerator. She had returned and left again while I had been asleep. I sealed the letter and walked across the border with it. It was a gorgeous summer day, I let my hair blow in the wind, and I experienced myself as a heroine. I felt victorious. I had realized one of my life’s few, maybe only two, independent projects. I had projected it and carried it through all by myself. I felt that I had at last come of age to take part in a real revolution.

I was still in that mood when I walked to the commune. I was eager to learn what other strikes had broken out, where else the movement had spread. When I reached the entrance of the former university building two tough-looking young men tried to stop me from going in.

“Who are you?” I asked them.

“Security,” one of them answered.

“Who the hell put you there?” I asked.

The answer was, “The building is full of informers and spies.”

“Well go join the police force if you’re interested in informers and spies!” I shouted, pushing my way past them.

The council office was almost the same as I’d left it three days earlier. If I hadn’t just run into the security guards I wouldn’t have noticed the differences as quickly as I did. Most of the stacks of pamphlets and leaflets were the same, but there were a few new stacks of leaflets, and these were very distinct from everything else in the room. They were the diatribes of political sects. None of the people in the room were familiar to me. As I listened to their arguments I became aware that they were all politicians with esoteric axes to grind. I was shocked. I ran upstairs and downstairs looking for familiar faces: for Pat, for workers who had visited the council office, for people I had met at the office-machine plant. But all I saw was the hostile, suspicious faces of dedicated professional radicals. The mood in which I had walked across the birdge was gone. I ran to the print shop. It was full of people who were strangers to me, almost all of them men. Suspicious glances followed me as I walked around and looked at the things being printed. All of it looked drab, repetitious and terribly repressive; “must not” and “should not” appeared in every sentence. In the garbage bin I found a crumpled leaflet, colorful, well laid-out and illustrated, satirizing the self-elected police hysterically trying to “recuperate” the revolutionary struggle. I supposed that leaflet had been done by Pat’s group; I saw no other evidence of the presence of Pat’s group in the print shop. I went up the back staircase and knocked on the door, but Ted wasn’t there. None of the people in the print shop had ever heard of Tina. Wherever I had left friends I found only strangers; wherever I had left a community with a project I found only hostile politicians.

I was in a daze. I dragged myself out of the print shop and drifted across the campus looking for my lifelong companion and guide, Yarostan, in all his varied forms. I wanted him to take my hand again and show me what had to be done next. I was me again.

I did find a guide. Someone handed me a leaflet announcing a “militant demonstration” against the occupation of an assembly plant by the police. I wondered if it was Luisa’s plant. I went to the gathering place two hours before the scheduled beginning of the demonstration. Other drifters like myself joined me. Finally an authority arrived, someone wearing an armband, and obviously a member of a political group. After listening to several minutes of his rigid rhetoric, I learned that it was in fact Luisa’s plant that had been occupied by the police. On the previous day members of various political groups had joined the union picket line (I wondered if they had felt threatened by competition from Daman and had run to sell their political commodities at a lower price). A fight had broken out between union picketers and the so-called “subversive outsiders.” Then a rumor was spread (apparently by union bureaucrats) that “subversive saboteurs” had seized the plant. This had been an ample pretext for the police to occupy the plant. And right after the police occupied it, the union called on workers to defend their plant from the police — in other words, after calling in the police, the union bureaucrats pretended to be the greatest opponents of the police. The leaflet quoted a union bureaucrat saying, “The government is fomenting disorder and is being helped by groups of revolutionists, adventurists and punks ...” From the armbanded “leader” of the demonstration I also learned that the purpose of the “militant demonstration” was to “offer solidarity to the fighting workers” by joining them in the struggle to oust the police from “their plant.” I obviously couldn’t have gotten him to explain to me in what sense the plant was “their plant,” nor why the workers would want to go back into it. It didn’t occur to me to suggest that everyone might be a lot happier if the police were left inside the plant and everyone else went off to do other things. I joined the “struggle,” and I was extremely nervous. The only other time I took part in a “militant demonstration” in which I knew I was going to be physically injured was six years ago, when I sat in the street to block trucks carrying weapons. But the “struggle” at Luisa’s plant was more in tune with my upbringing than the peace demonstration had been. I imagined that Luisa and Daman might be behind barricades; I’ve always thought of her earlier barricades with nostalgia; I’ve always wanted to have barricades in my own life. I also wanted to get away from the loved places that had suddenly become so alien to me.

Several hundred people gathered. It was announced that the demonstrators were to break up into groups of six and to ride to the plant in cars. I found a group of five students with a car and clung to them. For once in my life I was the least hysterical member of the group. They were completely paranoid. During the entire trip they talked about police and even army units surrounding the plant with machine guns and even tanks. I told them I doubted that war had been declared, but my own fears increased considerably. Several days later I learned that their paranoia had been grounded in solid reality; if I had known that at the time, I would have collapsed long before reaching Luisa’s plant. It turned out that I was the only one of the six who knew the way to the plant, and since I had only been there once I got lost. I did manage to get them to the right part of the city. They insisted on parking their car miles away from the plant. After walking for what seemed like hours, and after asking several people where it was, we reached a fence inside of which there was an immense parking lot. We decided we had approached the plant from the rear. So much the better, we thought; the police wouldn’t be expecting us to come from that direction. We helped each other climb over the fence. We were inside the plant! Before we had a chance to congratulate each other about that fact we saw two busses rushing toward us. We didn’t have the time to climb back over the fence, and there was no place to hide; we were on a completely empty parking lot. Both busses were full of police, all of them armed to the teeth! I don’t have the words to tell you how terrified I was. Before they got out of their busses they threw a canister of gas at us. Then they came out of the busses wearing masks and pointing their rifles at us. And they kept coming out of those busses. Now that I’m putting it on paper that whole scene seems so ludicrous. Three studious-looking, clean shaven young men, two girls who hardly looked older than high school students, and I — we couldn’t have managed a slingshot between us. Yet there we were, being beaten up by at least a hundred masked policemen, all armed with rifles and clubs! None of us offered the slightest resistance; the sight of those two busses had killed every trace of rebellion in all of us. Yet the police continued beating us. Finally they separated us into groups of three and carried us into the busses. The fright was infinitely worse than all the blows I received. Inside the bus the police spoke of us as if we were foreigners, even as if we had come here from another planet. I had no idea where the bus was taking us. but I had yet another fright when the bus stopped in an empty lot that looked like a garbage dump. We were pushed out of the bus. I was sure we were going to be shot and abandoned in the dump. But we were transferred to the back of a regular police wagon. Apparently the “counter-insurgent” police in the busses had to go back to the plant to hunt down more “guerrillas.”

I was trembling and nauseated when the police wagon finally stopped. I didn’t know what part of the world I was in when I was ordered to get out. I vomited as soon as I reached the ground. The six of us were pushed into a waiting room lit by one of those eternally bare bulbs. I was sick from the beatings; my lungs felt hollow from the gas; I thought my insides had been injured. I had felt that way every single day when I’d worked in the fiberglass factory. I was fingerprinted. I had to give my name repeatedly. And then, while I was being marched through a hallway with my five companions, I saw another group of “guerrillas” arriving, and Luisa was among them! I smiled weakly to her, but she glared at me with unforgiving hostility; the scene I had made with Pat had spoiled her love affair with Daman.

This time I didn’t try to call Sabina or Daman to try to get me out of jail. I remembered what Mirna had said about our “running out” on the rest of you, and I was determined to practice solidarity with my “combative” comrades.

But I was in for a big surprise. It happened during my second day in jail. I was told that my lawyer wanted to talk to me. I was escorted to a furnished room, and there I recognized Minnie Vach! Minnie, the college friend with whom I had tried to expose the militarization of the university, with whom I had almost been arrested for littering public property with copies of Omissions. As soon as the guard was gone I threw my arms around her as if I were embracing my best friend.

“How in the world did you get in as my lawyer?” I asked her.

Minnie quickly told me that she was in fact a lawyer. She works with a group of lawyers who she referred to as a “radical lawyers’ collective.” Daman had called her. She told me we’d have time to talk after the trial; she was in a hurry to explain her “strategy” to me. She told me I was to pretend that I was nothing more than an innocent bystander.

“But they arrested me inside the plant!” I reminded her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me. “You were doing research on the student movement. You’re Professor Hesper’s assistant. Where you choose to do your field work is none of their business.”

I was intensely disappointed; I regretted having embraced her so warmly. I told her I couldn’t go through with her “strategy.” I didn’t want to run out on comrades one more time; I had done that often enough.

“Suit yourself, Sophie,” she told me. “But you should know that all your co-defendants are getting lawyers, and not free ones either; they’ve all got parents who can afford the best that money can buy. Anyway, I’ll be at your trial.”

I was terribly depressed during my last days in jail. Everything I had lived for seemed to have collapsed.

In one of your letters you had told me that my “world” of journalistic friends consisted of people who aspired to roles within the ruling bureaucracy. I had indignantly denied that. At that time I had thought Professor Daman Hesper was the only one who really fitted your description. I could never have imagined Minnie as a lawyer. When I knew her on the news-paper staff I couldn’t have imagined she would compromise everything she stood for to the point of joining the profession that practices “the law.” Inside that prison I could understand perfectly, what Sabina told me later about Luisa’s change of “social tastes.” While I lay inside my jail cell, Minnie was treated as an equal by prison authorities who regarded me as nothing but so much “trash.” Of course in retrospect I can “see” that Minnie wasn’t as uncompromising as I would have liked to think her, but it’s always easy to see such things in retrospect. I remembered the day when Omissions was launched and Rhea, Minnie and I were excluded from it Minnie was the angriest of the three; she slapped Daman so hard I thought she’d made a permanent mark on his face. Yet only a few days later she compromised her solidarity with the other two excluded women and joined the Omissions group. But that’s still a far cry from joining the legal profession. Of all the people on the newspaper staff, Minnie had been the most opposed to the idea of working within the system to accomplish anything significant; she had been the very antithesis of the managing editor, Bess.

But as I lay in my cell thinking about Minnie’s “compromises,” I couldn’t keep myself from remembering my own. At the time when you wrote me about ray university friends’ “opportunism” I wasn’t lying in a jail cell; I was teaching a university-level course. I was a member of the “academic community,” not because of conviction or ambition, but because I had drifted there. I thought maybe Minnie had done no more to reach her present situation. I drifted back into the academic world when I learned how Jose had died. When Sabina told me Jose had been picked up in the street like a dead dog, I couldn’t do anything but drift. Learning that he had died trying to become someone I could admire sent a terrible shock through me. I fell into Sabina’s arms like a baby. I cried hysterically that I wasn’t anyone to admire; I had nothing to give Jose because I had become nothing. I was completely alone again. If Sabina hadn’t helped me through that crisis I think I would have disintegrated altogether and permanently. After my miserable experience with Art and the peace movement, Jose had become my whole life. I dated my life in terms of his release, simultaneously looking forward to it and fearing it, and at no time feeling able to face it. Jose’s release was going to be the test of my capacities. His death put an end to all my prospects. I think it’s only the fact that Sabina felt as devastated as I that kept me going during the weeks after we learned Jose was dead. I had never seen her cry before; I had thought those black eyes that perpetually sparkled with mischief or the desire for adventure were incapable of tears. When I saw tears under those long black eyelashes I felt an emotion I can’t describe with words like friendship and love. Sabina hadn’t ever been “Jose’s girl,” she hadn’t ever shared his bed, she hadn’t ever desired him physically, yet she loved him; I understood her love for him only because I thought it must be similar to what I felt toward Sabina when I saw her tears. We propped each other up. We talked to each other as we had only once before, during one of my first days in the garage. We didn’t talk about lose or about the past but only about ourselves. Sabina fought against my self-rejection by telling me we were perfectly matched friends, our personalities were each other’s perfect complements: my lack of self-assurance was a counter-weight to her blind self-confidence; my constant self-evaluations were a counterweight to her uncritical acceptance of herself. I tried to tell her she had far less reason to be self-critical than I did. She knew five languages, was as well versed in all the sciences as most academics I had met, had seen half the world, had experienced every imaginable form of human relationship, had launched projects and grown with them; she had in some sense achieved the fullness of life. But she told me she had never done what I did all the time; she had never examined the meaning of all her life’s accomplishments. It was during those weeks that Sabina launched the project in which she’s, still engaged; she began a systematic evaluation of the key events of her life. And being Sabina,. she threw herself into that project with the same single-mindedness and determination with which she did everything she set out to do. I, on the other hand, set out with my, usual lack of self-assurance and determination, I got over my shock, but I continued to drift. We remained each other’s “complements.” I wandered through familiar and unfamiliar, neighborhoods; I wandered in and out of bookstores. I wandered to the university campus and found myself reading the catalog of university courses. And while wandering through the catalog I found Daman Hesper’s name listed as the instructor of a course on political philosophy. I couldn’t imagine Daman philosophizing on his own; the last time I had seen him he had only been able to parrot his political group’s philosophy, and then only with Minnie’s help. I think it was curiosity that drove me to enroll in Daman’s course. Once I enrolled in his course, I added the other courses I needed to complete my requirements for the “bachelor’s” degree. And once I was a student again, I convinced myself that something I had always wanted existed, at least in embryo, among that generation of students: something like a radical community. I started to look forward to activities which I thought would be similar to those I had experienced in the carton plant. I thought I’d find friends with significant projects. I had prospects again; the gap left by Jose’s death started to be filled. This was three years ago; the student movement was just starting to take on the characteristics of a generalized movement, the characteristics which three years later made possible the complete occupation of the university and the formation of the commune. I was in the presence of something I hadn’t experienced since my emigration. Everything had changed since the day when a tiny group of radicals published a school newspaper in the midst of an almost unanimously hostile student population. Nor did this movement have anything in common with my activity with Art and the peace movement, where a dozen “saints” had demonstrated their “goodness” in the midst of an “evil world.” The student movement was no longer an “enlightened” minority; it was a substantial section of the student population. Opposition to the war had led students to begin opposing all the institutions that stood behind the war, including the university itself. What attracted me was not the university itself, nor the possibility it offered for rising in the academic hierarchy, but rather the opposition to the institution. I hadn’t found anything that was so significant to me since the day when I had tried to find Hugh’s “Project House.” I wanted to be part of it. but in my own characteristic way. As always I wanted to walk into a ready-made “radical community”: I wanted to submit to the tasks at hand instead of defining and creating them myself. As always I looked for a guide, and I found one, though not among my fellow students. Professor Daman Hesper became not only my teacher, but also something like my tour guide to the student movement. The first day I attended his class he was completely distracted by my presence. He avoided looking at me, as if he were afraid of me. I stayed after the class; we shook hands stiffly; he smiled dryly. “I suppose you’ve come to judge me,” he said; “I’ve become a lackey of the ruling class and all that.” He almost apologized to me. The professor, the highest university authority, had an inferiority complex in front of me. I beamed when I told him, “I’m your student, Daman; I’m enrolled in your course.” He couldn’t believe it and looked at his list of students to confirm the fact. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said; “the last time I saw you was when I was chased out of the garage at gunpoint. Alec told me you had moved in with your mother but had then disappeared again; I assumed you had rejoined your friends.” We didn’t say much more than that to each other during the entire semester. Daman was very rigid about not mixing his categories. The student-teacher relationship excluded the possibility of companionship. His course was an absolute bore; my curiosity about that died’ the second day I attended his class. Daman without Minnie was the same as Daman with Minnie, He still repeated the same slogans with the same emphases and the same tone. His reading list consisted of standard academic books which had nothing at all to do with his lectures, and he made no effort to relate the books to his comments. He didn’t treat me as a former friend until the last day of classes, when I technically became a college graduate. He told me some students were organizing a “teach-in” about the war and invited me to attend with him. I was enchanted. I hadn’t done anything “political” since the peace demonstration. After that day, during my year in graduate school I attended student “actions” with Daman at least once a week, always as a passive observer. Daman was curious, but hostile. He told me he had spent some time working in a factory since I had last seen him. And he continually repeated his favorite refrain: the real organization wasn’t going to be organized by students but by industrial workers. I even listened to him lecture on this subject twice, when he was invited to speak at student teach-ins; both times he was introduced as “factory worker Daman Hesper.” From the scraps of conversations I had with Daman before and after student meetings during my year in graduate school, I pieced together enough of his life to figure out how the “factory worker” had become a university professor. Daman had been the only one of the Omissions group who had enrolled in graduate school as soon as he finished his undergraduate study. After Alec visited me in the garage for the first time, he told Hugh, Daman and Minnie that I had turned my back on the academic bureaucracy and joined the working class. According to Daman, this was what influenced Hugh to quit his studies and throw himself into an altogether different activity. Alec joined the garage group, Minnie got a job teaching in a high school, and both called Daman a hypocrite for enrolling in graduate school. That was when he and Minnie broke up, although Daman continued to attend the meetings of Minnie’s organization. When Daman told me about this episode, he said, “I soon realized that your activity in the garage had nothing to do with the revolutionary potentiality of the working class, and by trying to imitate you, Hugh and Alec only got themselves in a bind. I understood that the revolution was going to be made at the point of production, not in marginal semi-criminal gang activities.” So he went on to get the “doctor’s degree” in philosophy. But he didn’t start teaching right away. He got a job in a factory and continued to attend the organization’s meetings; he even took “a worker or two” to some of the meetings. While he had the factory job he convinced himself that “Minnie’s commitment had never been to a real workers’ organization, but only to an organization of intellectuals completely separate from the working class.” That “realization” brought on his final break with Minnie as well as her organization. He told me that in the factory he started to “make contact with the class, particularly with one worker,” apparently a worker who seemed to show interest for Daman’s “workers’ newspaper.” Suddenly Daman’s factory career ended; he told me, “That worker turned out to be a cop or an informer because one day I was fired, without explanation, and the only thing I had done that was in any way out of the ordinary had been to engage in political exchanges with this worker.” Luckily there happened to be an opening in the philosophy department at the university, specifically in his “specialty,” political philosophy. The first signs of student dissatisfaction were just appearing, and the administrators were looking for a person with Daman’s qualifications, they were looking for a “revolutionary factory worker” with a doctor’s degree in philosophy. I saw through Daman, but my own situation didn’t give me an ideal vantage point from which to criticize him.

My own drift back to academia also didn’t give me a very solid basis from which to criticize Minnie’s acceptance of her new profession. Minnie had reconciled herself to the status quo when she had joined the Omissions staff. But so had I. Although I had refused to write for that paper, I had taken part in its production as well as its distribution. Once her anger had passed, Minnie had thrown herself into it wholeheartedly. I had merely let it happen to me. And that was exactly what I did at the trial that took place last week. I ran out on my young comrades the same way I had run out on Rhea, the same way I had rim out On you twenty years ago. I ran last week the same way I’ve always run: passively, without conviction, without reasons or rationalizations. I had let Daman and Minnie “take me” to the Omissions meetings. I had let Luisa “take me” on a trip across the ocean, away from those I regarded as my only friends. And I let Minnie ”take me” out of jail. I didn’t contribute to her “defense” strategy, but I didn’t resist it. I simply let it happen tome. I moved where others pulled me. My whole life has been like that trial: it’s been something that merely “happened” to me. Even when I found the communities I was looking for, I was taken there by others, and when I got there I was shown what to do and how to proceed.

Minnie’s “defense strategy” was ingeniously simple. It wasn’t based on fact, but on plausibility: She confronted one authority, the judge, with another, ‘the professor. The professor said I was in fact his research assistant and had in fact been doing “field research” on the student movement. I was the only one who could deny it, and my denial would have been extremely embarrassing to both Daman and Minnie. I liked Minnie much better when I realized she was risking her reputation on my behavior; Daman as well as Minnie knew perfectly well that reliability and predictability were; not among my most prominent qualities. Daman took the stand and described the research; the judge frowned but didn’t express his views of “left-wing professors”; hiring or firing such professors wasn’t within his field of jurisdiction. I took the stand and nodded. When the judge asked me to speak louder, I shouted, “Yes I am, Yes I did!” It was the easiest thing in the world to lie to the State. And by lying I ran out on my comrades. Minnie had told me they had already run out on me. I didn’t know their names; I wasn’t able to find out what happened to them, just as twenty years ago I hadn’t been able to find out what had happened to you. I took Minnie’s word. I also told myself that by the time the trial took place, solidarity with them conflicted with the solidarity I owed to Daman and Minnie, friends who had taken so much time and trouble for me. The judge told me he hoped my research would contribute toward the task of “keeping those young vandals in line,” and stormed out of the courtroom.

As soon as the judge left, I embraced Minnie warmly and thanked her. I told her I was able to pay all the “lawyer’s fees” that were involved. Minnie said she’d feel terribly insulted to be paid by “one of my best friends.” I almost cried when she said that. The last time l had seen her,i on the day when Hugh had carried me out of the garage, I hadn’t treated her as one of my best friends; I had angrily asked Minnie and Daman, “What are you two staring at?”

I asked her how she had become a “radical lawyer,” and asked if that was something like being a “radical general.”

Minnie smiled and told me she’d like to discuss that “with you more than with anyone I know, Sophie.” But she said she had to rush off to another case, and promised to visit me. I gave her my address and phone number.

Daman waited for. me outside the courtroom. “Well, at least that’s over and done with,” he said. “I told Sabina you probably wouldn’t be released until this afternoon.”

I asked him, “How often can you be beaten before you cry out with pain, Daman?”

“You don’t look well at all, Sophie,” he told me.

“The last time I saw you I was certain you’d hate me for the rest of my life, Daman!”

“I don’t claim to understand you, Sophie, but I have no reason to hate you.”

He again expressed concern for my health and acted as if he’d forgotten about the scene I made with Pat and Luisa. The amazing thing is that he probably has! Twelve years ago, when Minnie had slapped his face after the formation of the Omissions “staff,” he had walked away, and a few days later he had simply driven to Minnie’s house to pick her up to attend the newspaper’s production meeting — as if nothing had happened! He seems to take nothing personally. Two years ago he helped me get my first teaching job; when I was fired I showered him with insults; yet when he heard of another opening he called me again. And three weeks ago, at Luisa’s, he ran away from what must have seemed to him like a psychopath and a nymphomaniac. Yet here he was again, helping get me out of jail; he’ll probably call me in a few days to tell me about another teaching job. In some ways he’s insupportable, in other ways he’s the nicest person I know. I told him, “I don’t understand you either, Daman, and I don’t hate you.” I kissed his lips gently as soon as we were in the car.

Since Sabina wasn’t expecting us before noon, I asked if he’d mind giving me a ride across the border to see if another letter from you had come to my box. Your newest letter was there. I canceled the postbox. I won’t be needing it any more. I tore the envelope open right there and started reading — but I got no further than the middle of the first paragraph: “More is breaking down and more is rising up than I’m able to take in.” The tears that filled my eyes kept me from seeing the following sentence.

On the way home I asked Daman how Luisa had been arrested. I had already learned some of the things he told me. The picket line at Luisa’s plant had become a battleground for various ideological groups. No, the competition between the groups wasn’t set off by Daman’s modest leaflet. Members of three or four political groups had created “radical caucuses” in the plant’s union organization, and each group had come to the picket line to support the program of its caucus. The official union apparatus publicly labeled all these politicians “outside agitators,” and union goons tried to remove them from the picket line. At that point the picket line became a battleground between entrenched and aspiring union functionaries. The political groups summoned their followers to the picket line to struggle for the right of radical politicians to join picket lines and peddle their programs without being stigmatized and abused. Of course Luisa was on that picket line from morning to night. She had been waiting for something like that to happen; she had hoped Pat and the people from the council office would set it off. The political groups won. Their members and sympathizers far outnumbered the union functionaries. At that point the union bureaucrats withdrew from the picket line, and the central union apparatus started circulating the rumor that professional saboteurs had taken over the plant. Busses loaded with armed police as well as an army unit with machine guns and a tank attacked the assembly plant. All the picketers, Luisa among them, were arrested. They were taken to a high school gymnasium where they were supposedly going to be “processed.” The “agitators” were going to be separated from the people who actually worked in the plant and therefore had a legal right to be on the picket line. The identification cards of all the workers were taken, and they weren’t returned, nor were the workers released! At that point all the people at the gymnasium were carted off to jail; the workers could no longer prove they worked at the plant. That was the union’s way of punishing workers who had stood by the “agitators.” Daman told me he would have been arrested too if he weren’t in the habit of getting up at noon; by the time he reached the plant it was already occupied by the police and surrounded by soldiers. He went directly to the jail where the arrested picketers had supposedly been taken and arrived there before they did! He called the “radical lawyers’ collective” and Minnie succeeded in getting Luisa released the very next day, at which time Luisa told them she had seen me in jail. I asked him if the people who couldn’t prove they worked in the plant, namely the “outside agitators,” were left in jail.

“What were we to do?” he asked me. “Leave Luisa in jail? A civil rights lawyer interceded for the workers whose cards had been taken away, and each political group engaged its own lawyer to release its own militants.”

When we reached my house. I tried awkwardly to ask Daman to forgive me for having been so mean to him, but he really did act as if he’d forgotten about it so I didn’t try very hard. I asked if he wanted to come in, but he didn’t.

Sabina heard me close his car door and came out of the house shouting after his car, “Hey Professor! Thank you!” She pulled me inside the house and hugged me tightly. “I felt like the last survivor,” she told me. “Ted and Tina disappeared, Tissie is gone, you didn’t come back — my whole universe vanished.” Then she looked at my bruised face and shouted, “What did those bastards do to you?”

Disregarding her concern for my injuries,. I asked her, “How did it all end, Sabina? Why?”

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me that! You’re the sociologist of revolution, not I. Look,” she said, pointing to the walls, “I’ve thoughtfully decorated the house with research documents, so that you can tell me how and why. Are you well enough to look at them?”

“I’m well enough, Sabina, but help me! I don’t think I can stand to look at them by myself.”

Sabina escorted me to her “exhibits.” I read until I collapsed in her arms completely nauseated. She had decorated all our walls with articles, headlines, pictures. All of them told, in a distorted, intimidating manner, the story of the death of the hopes of thousands of people. One after another story described in detail the “raises” the union had “won” for the workers, after which the workers had “victoriously” returned to work. Other stories described all sorts of “vandals” and “outside agitators” ousted from factories by “union officials assisted by law-enforcement agencies.” I paused at an article which, was headed, “Liberation of the University.” My head swam as I read it. Several paragraphs described “guerrillas and terrorists” who had forcibly established “fighting bases” in all of the university buildings. The article went on to say that real students called the police to protect them from terrorists who were beating and threatening them. But the article didn’t explain what the “real” students were doing there; presumably they were trying to attend their classes. The university administration then demanded forceful and decisive action to put an end to the anarchy and terrorism, at which point the police could no longer “simply stand by while the lives of students are being threatened.” The concluding paragraph said the police did not receive orders to intervene until “responsible student groups” within the university itself called for the ”liberation of the university” from the vandals, guerrillas and terrorists. It was after reading this that I collapsed. I couldn’t read any more. I told Sabina what had happened at Luisa’s plant and asked if the defeat had been similar everywhere.

Pointing to other clippings, she told me, “The pattern was similar at the research center and in several other plants. But the police only attacked places where the union’s authority was challenged, which was the case at Luisa’s plant and at the research center, or where there was no union, as in the university. In more than half the plants the police didn’t have to intervene. The union herded workers hack to their posts much more effectively and with much less friction than the police could possibly have done. When you feel better study some of the pictures, the ones of workers returning to their jobs after their victories, smiling and waving their arms!”

Sabina pulled me to the kitchen. She had prepared a rice casserole for my homecoming! On the table there was a bottle of wine as well as a bottle of champagne. I cried from gratitude and told her, “At least we still have each other.” I asked if she was willing to tell me how she’d gotten separated from Tissie.

“Two or three days after you left, one of the women in the group I was working with discovered a miscalculation. I and several others threw ourselves into the problem. I was sure the vehicle would run if we solved that problem. Tissie wasn’t with me. She was upset that neither Ted nor you had returned, and she wandered around the center thinking she’d run into one of you; she even waited for both of you at the gate. She wasn’t able to interpret what she saw there, so she came to toll me about it. People who seemed to be workers were stopping cars at the gate and asking their drivers for documents. She was extremely nervous about it and begged me to abandon the center. ‘Let’s go elsewhere,’ she begged; ‘let’s go far away from the city, near a pond; let’s first find Ted and Sophia and Tina —.’ I was angry. She had dreamed of an island empire before, in the garage; I wrongly thought she was reviving that suggestion. I told her not to worry about the new guards at the gate because they were probably people who had always wanted to be cops and had never before had a chance. And I told her not to worry about you or Ted or Tina; if the whole world was opening up, you were all having the time of your lives elsewhere. I returned to the transportation problem. By the time I realized Tissie had been right about the change of climate, it was too late. A fight broke out in one of the laboratories. A self-constituted ‘Research Workers’ Council’ of four vigilantes confronted the lab workers because they were ‘harboring two outsiders.’ The whole group stood by the ‘outsiders,’ just as ray group would have stood by Tissie and me. But the vigilantes started pulling the ‘outsiders’ out by force, several lab workers tried to stop them, and some instruments were damaged. At that point the union spread the rumor that vandals were destroying the equipment and that a worker had been killed. The people guarding the gate, I later learned, were union goons. They let in several cops to ‘investigate’ the supposed sabotage and killing. The vigilantes of the ‘Council’ immediately showed them the equipment damaged in the fight they had themselves provoked. Union loudspeakers announced that the investigators had found ‘wanton wreckage’ of equipment, and that the body of the murdered man had disappeared! I looked frantically for Tissie but couldn’t find her. The police got the order to clear the vandals out of the center, which obviously meant everyone since they couldn’t tell from looks. Swinging their clubs and pointing their rifles at us, they herded us out as if we were cattle. Those who didn’t have cars were forced into busses until the whole area was ‘clean.’ The center was surrounded by police as well as soldiers, and they all looked ready to shoot at the slightest provocation. All that mattered was the precious equipment; the people were replaceable. I came home and sat by the telephone, but not a single one of you called. This house was like a prison. Two days after our eviction from the center I took a taxi to Ted’s print shop and saw police outside and inside it; I went to the research center. There was obviously no sign of Tissie. What I saw was caravans of police cars, busloads of national guard, and police barricades that kept the taxi from getting closer than a “block away from the gate, and even at that distance I was ordered not to get out of the taxi. I saw a large red banner above the gate but couldn’t read what it said. I asked the cop who had ordered me not to leave my seat. ‘It says; United we stand, divided we fall,’ he told me. I shouted, ‘The police and the union! How appropriate!’ I rode back to my prison. Something inside me started to boil. I knew I had made a horrible mistake by throwing myself into that vehicle research. That mistake is thirty-two years old —”

“Don’t, Sabina, please! I haven’t seen you cry since Jose died. I can’t take it, not now, not yet; I won’t be able to swallow your wonderful meal —”

“You’re right, Sophia. We do still have each other. I went wild with joy last week when Daman called. At least you had been found. And Ted called on the following day. He told me he had tried to return to the research center two days after he had left you with your friend Pat; he had stayed an extra day thinking you might want to go back with him. But Pat returned to the print shop by himself; he told Tina and Ted about some trouble starting in the university; Pat and Tina printed a leaflet and ran off with it; Ted didn’t know what happened to them after that. So Ted headed back to the center by himself —”

“I wanted to go back with him, Sabina —”

“But you were busy evaluating who you really were and what you really wanted —”

“That’s in fact exactly what I was doing, and I was writing Yarostan about it. Didn’t Ted get back to the center?”

“The self-appointed guards stopped him at the gate, and he didn’t have an identification card so they didn’t let him in. He parked his car nearby, hoping he’d see someone he recognized who might let Tissie and me know what had happened to him. But the union guards saw him and got suspicious. Two police cars drove up to him. They asked him to explain his presence there. He told them his friends were inside the plant. They asked him to name those friends, but he refused. They beat him and then arrested him. When I told him Tissie had disappeared, he said, ‘It figures.’ I suppose it does. I know as well as Ted what she does whenever she’s intensely disappointed and frustrated.”

“Heroin?”

“Yes, Sophia. And her disappointment and frustration began when I refused to leave with her. Like the police, like Alberts, I valued the technology higher than Tissie’s love —”

I interrupted her again. I was too weak to listen to Sabina’s self-accusations on my first night home. I told her, “I have a surprise for you.” I gave her all three of your letters. She read all three of them that night. I didn’t read your most recent letter until the next morning. I couldn’t, for the same reason that I couldn’t bear to see Sabina tear herself inside out — not that night.

“Yarostan is right!” was the first thing Sabina shouted to me the following day. “We should have wrecked everything in that research center instead of just damaging a couple of instruments! None of that is for us, for our desires and capacities.” Frustration and anger stayed with Sabina all week long. Your letters didn’t set off her fury, but they did fan it; at the same time they helped her focus on the contradiction at the heart of her life. “What I tried to do to Tissie was exactly what Alberts and Luisa tried to do to Margarita, and what Luisa tried to do to Yarostan,” she told me. “Tissie wanted only to swim in a pond, to lie on the banks in the sun, to walk through a forest. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to eliminate ponds and forests. I wanted to replace them with, something I helped create. I wanted an immense crystal palace with artificial suns, artificial ponds, artificial forests, all products of science and technology.”

“You did have reservations when I talked to you at the research center,” I reminded her.

“It’s easy to have reservations, Sophia. I didn’t act on them, and that’s all that counts. I remained Sabina Alberts to the very end. I’ve lied to myself all my life. I always thought I had created such a perfect synthesis between Margarita Nachalo’s and George Alberts commitments. I was wrong. What confused me was that Alberts had also been a rebel once. His rebellion was the diametrical opposite of Margarita’s. She rebelled against the constraints imposed by social institutions. Alberts rebelled against nature. It wasn’t when he became reactionary that he negated Margarita’s rebellion. It was his rebellion itself that negated Margarita. He gave himself completely to science and technology. His rebellion was the rebellion of the brain against the rest of the natural environment. He was committed to destroy everything that wasn’t science and technology, to destroy the very environment in which human life can take place. Whatever wasn’t the brain’s creation had to be destroyed, everything we call nature, the human being included. It’s a horrible obsession. A puny part of nature, the brain, suddenly started destroying everything else, consuming the conditions for its own health and survival. It’s as if mosquitoes started to consume the rest of nature, as if water attacked all the other elements and transformed them into water, as if fire suddenly attacked and consumed everything that wasn’t burning. Alberts inverted Margarita’s rebellion. She affirmed life, first of all her own life; she rebelled against everything that constrained the living. Alberts affirmed technology; he rebelled against everything that constrained the further development of productive forces. That’s why he ended up considering human beings reactionary. Human beings constrain the development of productive forces; human beings have to be overcome. The beings who would inhabit the crystal palace wouldn’t be human beings. They’d have to be progressive beings, beings which, like the suns and the ponds, were products of science and technology. Alberts tried to channel Margarita into a rebellion against herself. He failed with Margarita. She died fighting her own struggle. It was me that he succeeded in channeling. And all the time I thought I was channeling myself. I thought he was helping me realize my own desires, which I thought identical to Margarita’s desires. Before we emigrated I made him promise to build me a lab. He kept his promise. He built the lab; he let me pull out of him everything he knew: chemistry, physics, engineering; he brought all kinds of books home: textbooks, theoretical works; he satisfied every desire he had himself created in me. Something crucial was still missing. I missed Jan Sedlak, the playful, independent peasant with whom I had spent the two wonderful weeks before we emigrated. And I missed his sister. I dreamed about the forbidden night we’d spent in each other’s arms. The first gap was filled when you brought Ron Matthews home —”

“You were drawn to him like a magnet, Sabina. I thought the two of you were in love the moment you saw each other.”

“I knew you thought that, and I resented your jealousy. Ron was just like Jan. After he’d stayed in your room for a week the three of us rode to a forest. That night I tried to pretend you were a little bit like his sister. But you were like a cube of ice. A few days later Ron came for us with his father’s car. I hungered for adventure. I didn’t know you, Sophia, any better than you knew me. You were mean, suspicious and freezing cold —”

“I thought you and Ron —”

“ — had fucked in the water or on the beach, and I hated you for thinking that. I purposely made no effort to deny it.”

“Is that why you called me a coward, just like my mother?”

“I thought you were trying to do to Ron what Luisa had done to Nachalo and Margarita: picked them up in the street and shaped them into becoming cannon fodder for her organization. I was wrong about you, Sophia, and I’m sorry I said that. I wasn’t wrong only about you. I was wrong about myself. I was wrong about Alberts. At that time I still thought Alberts, Nachalo and Margarita stood for the same things. I thought Alberts would recognize Ron as another Margarita. All my bubbles burst when Alberts and I moved into our house and Ron moved in with us. Alberts couldn’t stand Ron. He called Ron a hoodlum, an adventurist, a petty criminal. He called Ron exactly the same names with which he had described the ‘reactionaries’ who had fought against his ‘popular army.’ That was when I started to suspect Alberts hadn’t fought alongside people like Ron, people like Nachalo and Margarita, but against them. My suspicions were all confirmed when I learned the role Alberts played in having Debbie Matthews fired from the high school. Ron was furious; he wanted to destroy Alberts’ house, but I was too attached to my lab. Ron responded exactly as Jan would have: destroy the technology. For my sake he compromised; we decided to incapacitate the brand new projector the school had just acquired. It was a perfect theft. Nothing was ever proved. That bastard father of his got Ron jailed because he was a hoodlum and Debbie Matthews’ son, not because they proved he had stolen the lens. He was sent to reform school and I was left alone with Alberts. I had to get out of there. I knew then that Alberts hadn’t been Margarita’s ally; he wasn’t even Luisa’s; he was as vicious a reactionary as Tom Matthews. I had met Jose at Ron’s trial. He hated Matthews even more than I hated Alberts. He and Ron were almost brothers, you know, like you and I —”

I asked Sabina to tell me about the time when Ron and Jose had been “almost brothers.”

“They weren’t really like you and me, Sophia; they weren’t as different from each other. Jose had been adopted by the Matthews during the depression; his father was unknown and his mother had died giving birth to him. Tom and Debbie both had jobs; they were also political militants. When Ron was born, neither of them had time to bring him up; Jose was Ron’s nurse, teacher, mother and father. He taught Ron everything, including stealing. Once, sometime after the war, the police came to their house and investigated the stolen bikes they kept in their basement. Jose acted very professional and told them he and Ron repaired bikes; then he challenged the cops to prove the bikes in the basement were stolen; the first thing he always did was to change the color and registration number and to switch parts around different bikes. The police left, but by then Tom Matthews was no longer a political militant; during the war he’d become a staunch law and order man; he started to dream about buying his own store. He chased Jose out of the house and accused him of having turned Ron into a punk. Jose hated him after that. He got a factory job and a room. Suddenly he got drafted. He was sure Tom Matthews had called the draft board. Jose quit his job, left his room, and went into hiding. He looked up Seth, who was wealthy by then because he’d gotten into dealing heroin. Jose and Ron had stolen bikes with Seth. Jose dropped the name Matthews and became Siriso. Seth gave him a job. not selling heroin but making contacts. Jose had just started working for Seth when Debbie Matthews reached him and told him about Ron’s trial. I was really impressed when I met Jose. Nothing appealed to me more than the idea of joining the hoodlums and adventurers Alberts despised. I saw Jose regularly; we talked about getting a project off the ground as soon as Ron was released. I couldn’t wait. Ron took me to Ted’s garage the day he was released. I knew then I had found everything I’d ever looked for. Ron and Jose were like Jan Sedlak’s brothers; Ted provided the technology; Tissie was a perfect Mirna and Margarita. I thought everything would be perfect if I could only keep them all together. But that wasn’t going to be easy. First of all Ted was hostile to me from the very first moment we met. Secondly, Ron pined for you; he lost interest in everything else. And you were beyond anyone’s reach by then. I couldn’t hang on to him. I became desperate. I didn’t want to lose anyone else. Seth had money. The only way to combine Jose with Ted and Tissie was for all of us to buy the garage with Seth’s money. To Ted that was heroin money —”

“But not to Jose?” I asked.

“Jose worked for Seth but didn’t get directly involved in the heroin; he thought none of the rest of us would get involved either. Don’t forget Jose didn’t have that many alternatives. After being chased out by Matthews he’d gotten a factory job, and every time he’d seen Ron he’d told him, ‘What a grind that is! There must be other ways to stay alive!’ Don’t you remember how passionately Ron hated the very idea of getting a job? And then that draft call made Jose furious. ‘Those bastards don’t just want you to slave for them; they want you to die for them too,’ he told me. That was why he’d looked up Seth, and he’d been very impressed with the way Seth had ‘made it’ without letting himself be put through ‘the grinder.’ At that time he didn’t care a whole lot just how Seth had made it. And neither did I. If everything was allowed and nothing was banned then Seth could !make it’ any way he pleased. But Ted didn’t go along with any of that. He didn’t say a whole lot that first night, but I could read on his face that he didn’t like what Jose and I were telling him. What intrigued him was mastery over things, and he thought already then that heroin meant mastery over people. He made it a point of stealing only rich people’s cars because he thought everyone ought to have access to what he or she needed, and stealing from the poor deprived them of their access. He and Ron had shared that attitude; that was what had drawn them to each other in reform school. I understood Ted’s objections, but I dismissed them. I thought he was too limited; his attitudes conflicted with nothing is banned.’ I told him he was a hundred percent right, and then I proceeded to do to him what Luisa had done to Nachalo and Margarita. I dragged him into a project that negated his own. I was set on combining George Alberts with Jan Sedlak; Ted and Jose were perfect for that combination. I had rejected Alberts the man, but not his world view. I tried to convince Ted by telling him others didn’t treat him the way he treated them. He was Tissie’s brother and guardian; he stole only from the rich; he thought he sold the cars to others like himself, to people who needed the cars to make life possible for other Teds and other Tissies. I told him he was blind: the people he sold the cars to resold them for a huge profit, and they exploited him as well as those they sold them to; they were no different from the garage owner to whom he paid enormous rents. Ted gave in, not because I convinced him but because I saw through him. We bought the garage with Seth’s money and transformed it into the technological play-land I had wanted. Ted was simultaneously attracted and repelled by me. He loved to show me how to steal cars, and I quickly became almost as good as he was. I, in turn, demonstrated to him the theoretical principles behind the mechanical operations he had learned from practice. He was grateful beyond words. Bat everything else about me repelled him. He was afraid of my philosophizing; it was all lies to Ted, lies with which I had covered up the fact that heroin destroyed the lives of people like ourselves. He thought me a hypocrite. I had often repeated that any of us could leave at any time and start again elsewhere. But Ted didn’t want to leave Jose or me or Tissie or the garage; he just wanted to exclude Seth and the heroin from the garage. Telling him you can leave any time’ was equivalent to telling him, ‘Thanks for Tissie and the garage, Ted; see you around.’ And Ted knew that if we failed to distinguish people from things outside the garage, we’d soon fail to distinguish them inside as well; if we turned strangers into instruments, we’d soon turn each other and even ourselves into instruments. And he was right. It was Tissie who became the first instrument. Though not right away. It all took place in small, gradual steps, so gradual that I failed to notice them until they had all been taken. We were all full of enthusiasm when we fixed up the house behind the garage. I knew Tissie wanted me as much as I wanted her; we had known this since the night of Ron’s release. But when the house was done, Jose and I each moved into separate rooms, Tissie moved in with Ted, Vic with Seth —”

“Where was Tina at that time?” I asked.

“I had left her with Alberts; he hired a nurse to take care of her. Tissie wanted to move into my room, but I didn’t want her to; I thought that would drive a final wedge between Ted and me. I didn’t know Ted had long been familiar with the nature of Tissie’s passion. I exerted myself to stay away from someone I loved; that was a very bad mistake. Tissie was frustrated and felt rejected. She fixed up another room and moved into it by herself. And then she started taking heroin shots from Seth. She did that only to spite me, as well as Ted; she convinced herself Ted was responsible for my unwillingness to let her move in with me. It all became extremely complex when Jose started courting me. I assured him I had never been Ron’s girl or any man’s, but he wouldn’t believe me. It was only then that I asked Tissie to move in with me. But it was already too late. I did get Jose to accept me as I was; a warm, mutual friendship replaced his initial unbelieving shock. But I couldn’t get Tissie to drop the heroin. She had been so pretty; she became sickly and mean. She started to blackmail me with the heroin —”

“Tissie blackmailed you?”

“Yes, Sophia. All of Ted’s initial fears started to be realized. We were turning each other into instruments. Debbie Matthews visited the garage and told us Ron had been killed. Debbie blamed me for his death, and in her drunken state she considered Alberts responsible for it. So did I. To me Alberts symbolized the entire reactionary apparatus he had decided to serve when he had Debbie fired from the school. I rushed to Alberts’ house and kidnapped Tina when the nurse went shopping. I left him a note telling him I had become a dope pusher and could therefore take better care of Tina than he could. And before I left I destroyed the upstairs lab. Tina was four and I couldn’t stand her; she was so dumb; I only took her to spite Alberts. Jose felt the same way about her as I did, but both Ted and Tissie loved her as soon as they set eyes on her, and each wanted to keep the other away from her. Ted thought that in her condition Tissie would harm the child, and Tissie’s resentment of Ted grew into passionate hatred; she started considering him her jailer. And that was when she started blackmailing me. She talked about moving to a deserted island with no one on it but Tissie, Tina and me. Gradually the island became the garage itself. She told me she wouldn’t stop taking heroin unless I got rid of all the men. If I didn’t get rid of them, then I was the one responsible for her taking heroin, I was the one who made her Seth’s slave, because I kept her chained to Seth. I thought Tissie was hallucinating, both about the island and about my responsibility for her condition. I didn’t want to believe a single word of her accusation. I had her move back to her own room; I wanted to be on my own. A few weeks later Ted told me he had decided to leave the garage. He didn’t tell me his reasons; I knew them; I also knew he held me responsible for everything, just as Tissie did. Ted also thought Tissie’s heroin addiction was a direct result of Seth’s presence, and I was the one who had brought Seth as well as Jose to the garage. Ted had probably been convinced all along that we could have bought the garage and the building without Seth’s money; I had doubted it; the sum had seemed impossibly large to me, and I had been in a tremendous rush to get out of Alberts’ house. In other words, both Ted and Tissie were right; I was the one responsible for forcing Seth and Vic on them. Ted also blamed me for the impoverishment of the activity itself. When I had first moved in, he and I had stolen the cars, transformed them, repaired them. But gradually the garage became a fence, a depot for cars that younger kids stole; all we did was to pay the kids and transform the stolen cars; we were something like bosses to them, what Ted’s boss had once been to him. And of course what Ted liked least of all was the fact that the garage served mainly as a front for Seth’s heroin, that Ted’s own activity served to cover up something he hated.”

“I remember he hated the garage when I was there; it was Ted who turned Alec against all of you. Why didn’t Ted leave? Because of Tina?”

“Don’t keep reducing him to that, Sophia. Ted didn’t leave because of all of us. Believe it or not, he also loved me and Tissie and Jose; all he ever wanted was the exclusion of Seth and Vic. But there was no way to get rid of Seth. He was the owner, and he acted more like an owner every day. If Ted had merely hated the garage he would have left. But his attitude was ambiguous, like his attitude to me. He was simultaneously repelled and attracted. And the things that attracted him went together with those that repelled him; they weren’t really so separable. When Ted told me he wanted to leave, I already knew Seth was going to buy the bar. And although the bar added yet more things that repelled Ted, it also added several that attracted him enough to convince him to stay. I saw the bar as an adventure, as an enrichment of our activity. It was in fact Tissie who made me look forward to it. As soon as Seth had told her about the bar, she had boasted to me that she wouldn’t need me or Ted any more. ‘I’ll be every bit as independent as my Goddess Sabina,’ she told me. ‘I’ll be a high-class prostitute; I’ll be able to buy my own deserted island.’ I have to admit I too looked forward to that activity. Margarita had been a prostitute; I didn’t want to exclude that from my life. And at that point Ted’s prediction was fulfilled. After turning each other into instruments, we turned ourselves, our own bodies, into instruments. Tissie and I both became high-class prostitutes. Jose made the arrangements —”

“You mean Jose was a pimp? That’s what Alec accused him of being!”

“No, Sophia, those weren’t the arrangements he made. There were no pimps; or if you prefer, each of us did her own pimping. Jose related to the bar as he’d related to Seth’s heroin; he made contacts, paid off certain people, threatened others. He had nothing to do with the prostitutes or the customers; the fact is that he disliked the bar as much as Ted did. Or I for that matter. I could have killed some of those important bastards!”

“Then why in the world did any of you stay with it?”

“I tried to tell you then, Sophia. We didn’t create the circumstances. We found ourselves in them, and tried to change them. At least I thought we were changing them. It wasn’t the prostitution that drew me to the bar. After the first night I hated that. It was what the bar made possible that drew me there. Do you know how much money we took in every night? Everything that was taken in was split equally among all of us. Seth got ten times his share because a lot of the women, including Tissie, as well as many of the customers were on heroin. Tissie paid Seth most of what she got. But what I alone made paid for the house, the garage, the workshop in the basement, both art studios, my lab, and all the materials and machines we could dream of wanting —”

“But then it was just a business —”

“I didn’t want to think that, Sophia. I still don’t. Ted didn’t like where the money came from, but for a while he acted as if he didn’t know. Once the bar started going he no longer needed to be a boss. He helped the kids set up their own garages and he only worked on the really difficult jobs. He spent the rest of his time in the workshop or upstairs painting. No one could ever have dreamed what a creative person that car thief would turn out to be. And Tina became a wonder. She took to everything he taught her; she was a painter and a machinist at six. Ted and Tina weren’t the only ones either. I wish I’d showed you the workshops and studios and apartments set up by some of the women. I don’t think it was just a business, Sophia. Most of those women were like Ted and Tissie; they’d come right off the street; if it hadn’t been for the bar they’d have been turned into garbage. And there was no reason the thing couldn’t spread. At least I didn’t think there was. It was for Seth that the whole thing was just a business. The more money he took in, the more of a capitalist he became and the greedier he got. He couldn’t stand Ted because none of Ted’s activity contributed anything to Seth. He saw all of Jose’s and my money and some of Tissie’s go into the house and the garage, and he didn’t like it. He thought all of it went to support Ted and Tina and their projects, projects which in his eyes didn’t produce anything. So he tried to force Tissie to get me hooked on heroin; when that didn’t work he tried to get Tissie to take Tina to the bar. Ted stopped Tissie and when you came he thought Seth had recruited you as well —”

“That’s what Tissie told me at the research center. But couldn’t you have told Ted how wrong he was about me? That would have cleared up so many misunderstandings!”

“If I had only known, Sophia! I didn’t learn a thing about that until Ted told me the details several years later! I was in euphoria when you came to the garage. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. I had no idea what was boiling underneath. I loved you for coming exactly when you did. I was at the peak of my life’s accomplishments. During the months before you came my new Mends had introduced me to experiences I had never before imagined. The bar gave me insights into the power structure of the entire city, insights which I thought I’d use against that power structure some day. The house and the garage had just been transformed into a technological Utopia. I was completely independent, and I was surrounded by people who resembled Jan as well as Mirna as well as the best side of Alberts. You couldn’t have come at a better time. I thought that a few months’ contact with us would transform you —”

“Into what, Sabina?”

“I thought you’d become a little like you are now: reserved and introspective, but warm and interested and lively —”

“And I disappointed you?”

“No you didn’t! You became Jose’s best friend; you seemed to enjoy your work with Tina so much; I was sure we’d gradually become good friends. You seemed irrationally afraid of Ted, but I was sure that would pass. I was totally blind to all the problems you experienced. I knew that Tissie was wildly jealous of you — but I knew that only because I fanned her jealousy; I tried to ‘blackmail’ her the way she’d blackmailed me; I told her I’d replace her with you and wouldn’t take her back until she dropped the heroin. That was another mistake. Tissie tried to get back at me by taking you from me. It was only in the research center I learned about that night, Sophia. I suppose it’s ridiculous to apologize now —”

“Weren’t you even slightly angry at me for not having known or even suspected anything until then, for being so naive, so stupid?”

Sabina laughed and threw her arms around me. “On the contrary! I loved you for that! It was so characteristic of you!”

I was embarrassed by myself, but I couldn’t help laughing with her. Our conversation took place about two days after she read your letters. It rained all day long, and it felt wonderful to spend the entire day indoors with Sabina listening to stories that helped me forget everything that had happened the previous week. After supper that night there was a violent thunderstorm; we turned out the lights and spent about an hour looking out the window at a frightening display of lightning. When the thunderstorm moved away, I reminded her that during all these years I had never learned why she and Tina had finally left the garage.

“I think the presence of your friends in the garage made Seth hysterical. After Alec moved in Seth threatened me: ‘If you don’t get him out of there, I’ll close up the garage and Ted and Alec and Sophia go out on the street.’ I obviously told him to go to hell; he didn’t pay the bills at the garage, he no longer lived in the house. But the fact is that he did own it. What I didn’t know was that he actually became paranoid. On the day when your other friends came, Seth thought you and Ted had hatched a plan to get rid of Seth and Vic, though I still can’t imagine how he thought you’d do that. And on that day I made yet another mistake. I thought Seth was offended by your friends for the same reason I was: because they had come to judge and to condemn activity which was organized by those with least access to self-organized activity. They had no right to judge us. I was actually glad when Seth pulled his gun on them, and I gagged with frustration when you took their side and left with them. After your friends left, Jose convinced himself all of us were becoming Seth’s employes, his tools, as Tissie had already become. He as well as Ted tried to tell me that, but I wouldn’t listen to Jose any more than I had ever listened to Ted. I was completely blind. I told Jose he was dead wrong; I talked about expanding the activity yet further, about helping set up bars and workshops elsewhere. I imagined that the crystal palace I had dreamed of was about to be built, from the ground up, by the people themselves, the lowest layers among them. Jose grew increasingly frustrated by his inability to communicate with me. We never learned why he got arrested, but I suppose he got careless with one of his contacts. It was only after Jose’s arrest that I started to become aware of my mistake. Soon after the arrest, Tissie confronted me with a proposition that at first seemed like another one of her attempts to blackmail me. ‘Get rid of the men’ she told me again; ‘Take over the bar, and I’ll stop taking heroin and stick by you; we’ll make it our empire. If you don’t, Ted goes out on the street, the house and garage get closed down, and Tina comes to the bar.’ It seemed like the same proposition Tissie had made earlier, except that I recognized Seth’s threat behind Tissie’s. And at that point I knew Jose had been right and Ted had been right since the beginning. Seth had pulled his gun on your friends; I knew he’d pull it on Ted as well, and on me if necessary. Seth somehow convinced himself I actually wanted to turn the bar into Tissie’s and my ‘empire’ and my eviction was very simple; with his gun pointing, he told me, ‘Clear out and take the kid with you’. Yet Ted stayed on until Jose’s release! He couldn’t abandon Tissie to Seth, and he even agreed to do some of Jose’s contact work as a condition for his staying. If Ted had left too, the bar would have closed down when I left.”

The following day was clear and sunny. After lunch Sabina and I went for a walk to the riverbank near our house. As we sat and watched boats pass by us, Sabina drew conclusions from all she had told me about her experiences in the garage, experiences which were so completely different from mine. “I tried to combine elements that couldn’t be combined. Yarostan sees a contradiction between my commitments; I’m only starting to see that contradiction now. By the time I left the garage I knew we had all become tools, not only Seth’s tools; we had also become tools to each other and to ourselves: in Seth’s view we were nothing but costs in a capitalist enterprise. It’s not the contradiction between Seth and the rest of us that’s becoming clear to me now; that was clear to me by the time I left the garage. What I’m starting to see now is that the two parts of my own project were contradictory. I wanted to rebuild George Alberts’ crystal palace with people like Margarita, people like Jan and Mirna and Yara. But that wasn’t possible, Sophia. I didn’t understand that until now. In order to do that I had to destroy them. None of them, not Ron or Jose or Tissie or even Ted could carry Alberts’ project as their own. Ted was the only one who even came close to having some of Alberts’ interests, but Ted never had a mania to destroy the environment; all he wanted to do was decorate it. I tried to be a bridge between land and water. I don’t like to admit this to you, but I now see that my project had a lot in common with Luisa’s. She picked up Nachalo and Margarita and gave them to Alberts and Zabran —”

“I don’t see that, Sabina. Luisa told me Alberts came to them and offered them his services; apparently he knew how to make bombs. And she didn’t even know Titus Zabran then —”

“You’re right, Sophia. I’m thinking out loud. I’m not referring to actual situations, but to symbols. The question I’m asking is: who stole whose soul, and for whom? I know Alberts went to them; I also know he initially went to them in order to serve their project, not his own. But the initial affirmation of their project turned into a negation of their project, gradually, step by step, so gradually one couldn’t see what was happening, as in the garage. Luisa got Nachalo into the union, but she didn’t thereby transform Nachalo; she transformed the union instead. Nachalo and Margarita caused a split in the union local. Instead of bending to the apparatus, they made it bend. They formed something like a terrorist gang inside the union. Their goal remained what it had been before: to remove the obstacles to human life, to destroy everything that turned people into tools. You’re right; Alberts introduced his knowledge into their framework; his explosives were to be used against the obstacles to their development. But this was the extent to which they were interested in his technology. Alberts was able to tell me that Margarita dreamed of industrializing the world from the ground up only because she died. Don’t you see that? For Alberts the production of explosives was to be the first step; for Margarita it would have been the last. For Alberts that production was itself the goal; for Margarita it was nothing but a means. If Margarita was anything at all like Tissie or Mirna, and that’s how I now visualize her, then she didn’t dream of going on from the production of explosives to the production of artificial ponds, artificial sunshine and supersonic vehicles. Alberts read this Into her, and he made me read it into her, because she seemed to have died for that, but only in his eyes. Alberts couldn’t understand why else she’d have fought on those barricades, and neither could I. Now I’m starting to understand why; Mirna and Yara help me understand. Yarostan told us why else Margarita would have fought. To clear away the obstacles to their enjoyment, not to clear away fetters to the development of productive forces. It was that ‘popular army’ Alberts joined that fought to remove the fetters to the construction of his crystal palace, and Margarita as well as Nachalo were among those fetters! That was the struggle Luisa tried to channel them into! She and Alberts were able to present them as forerunners of that struggle only because they were dead! Luisa tried to turn them into agents of their own repression and failed. They both had to die before they could become that. Only their corpses could be made to serve that struggle. She stole their souls and gave them to Alberts and Zabran. How else would you put it? She told you Zabran and Alberts fought alongside Nachalo. Only Nachalo’s corpse fought alongside Zabran and Alberts; only Margarita’s corpse fought Alberts’ revolution! Yarostan speculates that Zabran couldn’t have fought in the ‘popular army.’ Yarostan is very lucid about some things; he’s wrong about Zabran. The very first time Alberts told me about those events, he described his recruitment into the ‘popular army’ by none other than Titus Zabran, who was indeed in uniform at the time; the ‘popular army’s’ uniform. Zabran was one of the first recruits to that organization. Zabran and Alberts served in the same unit, on the same front; they experienced the same defeat, they retreated together, they were demobilized at the same time. Yarostan is right about the ambiguity of Luisa’s claim that ‘Titus and George joined Nachalo at the front.’ He’s right because they couldn’t possibly have ‘joined’ Nachalo! I too would like to know what Alberts told Luisa when he returned from the front completely transformed.’ What surprises me in Luisa’s claim isn’t that Zabran fought alongside Alberts, but that the two joined Nachalo. I didn’t know anything about the militia until Yarostan,told us what he’d learned from Manuel; I’d thought what Luisa still thinks, that all of them fought the same struggle. That’s why I was able to synthesize Nachalo with Alberts. But that unity didn’t exist at its very origin. When Nachalo left for the front, a few days after the barricades, there was no ‘popular army.’ Nachalo joined a militia unit like the one Manuel described; he might even have been in Manuel’s own unit. Alberts and Zabran ‘joined’ Nachalo the same way they joined Manuel: as mortal enemies.”

We sat on a bench by the river until dark. On several earlier occasions Sabina had told me fragments of what she’d learned from Alberts about that revolution. I had always felt somewhat proud of the fact that my life was in some way connected with those events. But as I listened to her a few days ago I didn’t feel proud; I felt uneasy, almost ashamed. During my entire life I had identified with everything Luisa had praised. Suddenly you and then Sabina started to undermine it all. I’m only now starting to understand the “reappraisal” you carried out during your second prison term, when you reexamined everything you’d learned from Luisa in the light of what you’d learned from Manuel. I’m starting to understand the significance of the “revolutionary tasks” Luisa accomplished “in the rear.” She never hid the fact that the final aim of the efficient transportation, vehicle production, food distribution was military, nor the fact that the production was war production, nor the fact that it was devoted to the ‘popular army’s’ military victory, Luisa gathered Nachalo and Margarita off the street and gave them to Alberts and Zabran. That’s such a strange way to put it, but I couldn’t tell Sabina I didn’t know what she meant. I learned only recently that Luisa never really imagined daily activity as other than what it is, as ‘joyless drudgery’ for the sake of an apparatus whose goals we don’t understand, whose reasons aren’t our reasons. To Luisa that drudgery was meaningful, she even found joy in it, because she was always so sure that the people who directed the apparatus understood its goals and knew its reasons, people like Alberts and Zabran and Daman Hesper. I can see why Luisa insists Alberts and Zabran joined Nachalo on the same front. It’s because her “front” isn’t the actual field or village where the battles took place. Luisa’s “front” is the train Zdenek described to you. It’s the union. She was the one who took Nachalo aboard that train. Everyone on that train was part of the same struggle. But the content of the struggle, the destination, wasn’t defined by the people on the train. It was defined by the train’s conductors, the “professors devoted to our movement.”

The reason I feel uneasy, even ashamed, is that I can’t convince myself I ever wanted to do anything other than board that tram.

Please give all my love to those comrades of yours who are intent on defining their own aims and on fighting their own struggle.

Your
Sophia.

P.S. Don’t forget to address your next letter to my house, since the postal strike is over. I almost forgot to ask you something that’s been bothering me. You told me Titus Zabran was the first person who visited you after your arrest at the time of the Magama rising. I think it really strange that he didn’t mention my letter to you, especially in view of the fact that Mirna already then considered my letter responsible for all those arrests. The other thing that bothers me is that Titus apparently wasn’t arrested at that time. I gather that Mirna looked for him and found him shortly after the arrests took place. But I had thought all the people I had written to had been arrested, including Titus.