Genesis

2

THEY WERE in love, the blemished student actor and the swan-necked girl. Theirs was a clumsy love, admittedly, rushed and bodily and bruising, as first loves often are. It was (to use the country phrase) “a jug thrown by the potter’s toes,” ill formed.

We excuse the lovers for their gaucherie. They were scarcely adults then. This was only 1981, the first — and only — year of what we called at the time (depending on our politics and age) either the Big Melt or the Laxity, when, having practiced kissing for twenty months or so — life after Life—and having benefited from the unexpected tourist revenues and the unforeseen attention of some foreign capital, our city governors withdrew into their meeting rooms and chambers, their dining clubs, to concentrate on getting rich and getting laid. Thus letting all the rest of us get on with life.

Remember it, how brief it was, the melting of the civic snows, the urban thaw? Remember how for not-quite-long-enough even the policemen let their sideburns grow and let their patience lengthen also, how foreign books, LPs, and films came in, uncut, unmarked, the shock of glamour magazines, how we Last Tangoed and Deep Throated amongst ourselves as if the untried ardors of the cinema could light the way to paradise?

It’s hard to credit now our absurd lightheartedness, our determined disregard for any law and regulation (the pettier the better), our contempt for grammar, and proprieties, and common sense, and modesty. All the things our parents should have cared about (if they’d not been melted by the Melt themselves) were flouted on the street, without a care, with appetite.

It was possible, without much fear of being challenged, to walk around without IDs, to pilfer food in the spirit of democracy and beg for cigarettes, to make a din at night and hang out in the squares all day, to ride the streetcars without a ticket, to park our parents’ cars on prohibited sidewalks, and to boulevard ourselves as brashly as we wanted to, as drunk, as stoned, as underdressed.

How effortlessly modern and valiant it seemed, after all those years of being sensible and neat, just to dress badly. An hour of impulse shopping at the new black-market gutter stalls that sprang up everywhere that year equipped you for the revolution. The streets were full of gypsy partisans, denim clerks with hairstyles from the L.A. seventies, wiry Bolsheviks in fat-man overcoats, white aboriginals in T-shirts with slogans calling for the replacement of God with punk and government with Panarchy, and women in skirts of every cut and cloth and color, displaying lengths of flesh or tights that previously had only been approved for foreign visitors and imported magazines. Even Navigation Island was prized free from its wardens for a while and turned into a nonstop festival of music, drugs, and picnicking. Woodstock Nation — finally. Our city had some catching up to do.

Remember all the litter and the buskers in the streets, the open windows and the jaywalking, the sudden obligation to sample newly tolerated taboos in bed, the suicides, the debts, the pregnancies, the jazz, the reggae, and the rock, the blissful loss of self-control, the arguments, the endless, carefree jousting with the couldn’t-care-less police? Ah yes, the laxity that only lasted, only could be tolerated, for a year, but which briefly made us Free at Last, free to speak our minds, free to organize and demonstrate and not be “disappeared.”

We understood and we forgave the lovers, then. Forgave them for their arrogance and foolishness, the risks they took when risks were safe to take. They were only the excited products of their time, no more responsible for how they were than lungs are guilty for the air.

That December Thursday was their twenty-seventh day together, the high point of their reckless, infinitely short affair. A day of intercourse and action. Never in their lives again would Fredalix, these two guileless doctrinaires, feel so apprehensive and elated, so nauseous with fear, so poised, so eager, and so licensed to escape into the refuges of flesh once they had done their foolish duty for the world.

LIX CAN’T BE SURE even to this day whether it was his shared infatuation with this lofty campus beauty (shared by anyone who laid eyes on her) or merely a desire to prove himself a decent partisan before both the Laxity and his student days were over, that had prompted him to stand up at the November meeting of the Roesenthaler Comrades Cooperative (so named mostly to achieve the acronym RoCoCo) and suggest, as if he were proposing nothing more perilous than leafleting, that they kidnap Marin Scholla.

His idea had been a crudely simple one, and only mischievous. That was the Spirit of the Times, his public contribution to the Big and Famous Melt. He’d meant to draw attention to himself, to say what he had guessed the firebrand Freda would like to hear. He’d not intended to be taken quite so seriously.

The Arts Academy where Lix was in his final year of Theater and Stagecraft Studies had been endowed the semester before with nearly $7 million by MeisterCorps, the electronics and engineering giant from Milan, Berlin, Boston, and Hong Kong, to pay for a new cafe, a theater, a concert hall, a gallery, and a cinema on the campus, all in one custom-built star-shaped complex. A pentacle of creativity.

These were tainted millions, actually — or so the more progressive of the students judged. They’d not be seduced by the prospect of new facilities and subsidized alcohol, especially as their own studies would be over by the time the pentacle was built. These dirty dollars, they claimed in the student newsletter, had been made from low wages in the Far East, “the blanket marketing of shoddy and environmentally damaging products in dishonest packaging,” arms-for-timber deals in Africa, and from stock market trickery (which many of their parents had fallen victim to).

Now, on Thursday the seventeenth of the coming month, just as the students would be going home for their winter vacations, MeisterCorps’s American chairman, Marin Scholla, would be visiting the city to open the company’s new central offices in the tower block that we have known since then as Marin’s Finger and to pass on (or so the rumormongers claimed) his yellow envelopes of thanks in thousand-dollar bills to our finest councillors and planning commissars. He was a worthy target, certainly.

Lix stood before the nineteen students in RoCoCo, then, with something safely moderate in mind at first. It’s always best to stand, if you are tall enough, to concentrate an audience. He held a photocopy of a news report he thought would interest them. He read it out in his trained voice, reducing to a whisper almost when he reached the part about the chairman’s final appointment of the day.

Lix knew, of course, that he was being watched by everybody in the meeting room (stagecraft again) — and that included Famous Freda Dressed in Black, the campus beauty with the sculptor’s head who could have been a model had she chosen, who could have slept with anybody there, then dined on them, and still had volunteers, who could have been in films or (on our newsstands finally) stapled into Playboy magazine. At 5 p.m. or thereabouts, Lix read, Scholla planned to “drop in” at the campuses to lay the first stone of what is still the MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts, or MeCCA. (Though MeisterCorps itself, of course, is no longer with us. It finally buckled to its creditors in the Labor Day Free Fall, “the Wall Street Dive of Two Thousand and Five.”)

“We’ll have to organize a vigil,” someone said. Exactly Lix’s thought.

Then Freda spoke, not bothering to stand, not bothering to raise her voice. A typical riposte, uncompromising and seductively extreme: “Pickets are a waste of time. You know they are. The police just box you in.”

“A moving picket, then!”

“A picket or a vigil, what’s the difference? Somebody, please, suggest a petition. Or a delegation! Or a letter-writing campaign. Just as ineffectual.” Freda had discovered that she could say exactly what she felt. Her beauty licensed her. Nobody dared to take offense, especially if she spoke as softly as a kindergarten teacher or a nurse. “A line of little placards or a bit of paper with some signatures isn’t going to trouble MonsterCorps, is it? Correct-me-if-I’m-wrong.” A little singsong phrase. She raised her eyebrows, waited for a moment, looked around the room. “No, we need to give Marin Scholla a surprise. And shake him up a bit. Something memorable. If what we do doesn’t put us on the evening news, then what’s the point?”

Her unruffled escalation shut the meeting up, or almost did — for out of somewhere, wide of script, entirely unrehearsed, ad lib, Lix saw an opportunity, a rash and sexual opportunity. He said, to her, “Why don’t we grab him? Lock him up. Give Meister Scholla a chance to …” To what? Lix hesitated for the words. He wanted to seem breezy and ironic. He’d almost blurted out, too solemnly, “We give him the chance to quantify his crimes.” Surely Freda would approve of that. Instead, he said, in the perfect accent of a tenth-generation Bostonian, “You’ve dined, old man — and now it’s time to face the waiter and the bill.” Rescued, flattered even, by a legendary movie line. Burt Lancaster.

He noticed Freda leaning forward as he spoke. She’d had to twist her madly lengthy neck to stare at him along the row of student radicals. Her earrings hung as heavily as pears. Her bangles clacked as she pushed back her hair to clear her view and show her throat. Lix was, for once, pretty certain that she was not staring at the blemish on his face. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were bright. She was admiring him. She’d hardly even noticed him before.

“Then what?” somebody asked. “It’s risky, isn’t it? Kidnapping millionaires is only officially authorized in Italy. What do we do with him, anyway?”

“You grab the millionaire. You grab the headlines, too. That’s it.” Lix was performing like a lovestruck teenager, unable to restrain himself. “And then you have to let him go, of course. Eventually.” He hardly recognized himself. He’d transformed for her. Picasso syndrome, it was called: the artist’s style of painting changed for every woman in his studio or bed.

“We let him go, but only when he’s signed an Admission of Responsibility, an Admission of Liability,” said Freda, not bothered by whether or not she sounded breezy and ironic. “That would look good in the newspapers. That’d be front page.”

“He won’t do that. He wouldn’t even sign the Seven Principles. Even GlobeOil signed the Seven Principles.”

“Even Nescafé.”

“We keep him till he does.” She craned her neck again and smiled at Lix. His neck rushed red for her. He came out in a sudden sweating blush which seemed to fill his eyes and drench his hair. His pulse had quickened, and his mouth was dry. Men fall in love more speedily and much more bodily than women. It was for Lix a joyful new experience, this unexpected triumphing of self. How brave he must appear to her — and must continue to appear. And how he wished he’d never said a word.

So it began, the kidnapping, the love affair, the making love, the life of Lix’s second child.

AS IT HAPPENED, theirs was little more than flirting talk at this stage. RoCoCo was not truly dangerous, any more than the Laxity was truly a revolution. It was only striking poses in the names of Liberty and Love, with no more consciousness of the consequences than a T-shirt has for its silk-screened slogans. RoCoCo’s members were soft and inoffensive youngsters, essentially, freshly baked survivors of their teens, trying to sound less mild and dreary than they really were, and only wanting to be a part of this great city’s quest for romance and advancement. They could alarm nobody but themselves. RoCoCo walking down the street, all nineteen of them in a gang, despite their voices and hair, their leather belts and wallet chains, would not cause anyone to step aside. A bunch is no more chilling than a single grape.

Theirs was the sort of reckless moment, then, that could not hope to flourish in maturer company. A wiser group would quickly audit all the pros and cons and realize that kidnapping could only backfire on the kidnappers. The headlines would be roasting. Their protest would bear bitter fruit. The only lasting victims would be themselves. So the prudent ones at the meeting sank into their chairs, voted to support the “action,” but did not volunteer themselves. They sat with faces like a Chinese Monday hoping not to catch sweet Freda’s eye. They knew how prevailing she was, and how seductive just a glance from her could be. And dangerous. A kidnapping, even if it were short-lived and justified, could put them all in jail, despite the Melt, or jeopardize their academic grades or disappoint their lecturers. Their parents would not sympathize. Not all their parents could afford to buy them out. Their job prospects would be undermined. Travel visas would be denied them, long after the events. Anyway, they were not sure (though silent on this matter in such company) if kidnapping was “right.”

So in the end, in this most skittish time, there were just four from RoCoCo prepared to spread their wings beyond a picket line and stand with Freda: a glumly cute gay woman from the Language School (who wanted more than anything to disappoint her lecturers and undermine her job prospects), two tall and overweight post-Maoist anarchists from Freda’s science faculty, and Lix, all of whom it was soon apparent aspired to more than comradely contact with their dazzling colleague. They were the four comrades most unhinged by her and most ardent for her approval. The heart controls the head and makes us mad and brave and radical. The revolution rides the lustiest of mares.

Five volunteers would never be enough for the swarming ambush that Freda had in mind at first, her show of force, her mighty kick against the pricks. She’d seen the glorious newsreels from 1968, the year of barricades, with the columns of police rebuffed by mobs of students, armed only with their banners and some cobblestones. Never by as few as five. Again the city had let her down, she felt. Only thirteen years previously, Peking, Paris, Prague, Chicago, Santiago, Rome had all been pulled apart by people less than thirty years of age. It must have seemed to Freda that Youth could be truly powerful in every corner of the world, excepting ours. She kept a press photo from 1968 in her wallet: a Czech, wild-haired and young and biblically beautiful, his jacket pushed back on his shoulders, his shirt pulled open, was baring his chest, his rack of ribs, a centimeter from the barrel of a Russian gun in a gesture that, for Freda, was sensual and thrilling. It always made her think of The Fox’s Lament, “Stop me, shoot me, if you dare / For I’m too far and fast to care.”

She wondered sometimes if he was still alive, this seminaked man. Was he still a radical? He looked, she thought, a bit like Lix. She’d noticed it when he’d been standing up so pompously and so theatrically at the RoCoCo meeting. That birthmark, certainly, made his face seem challenging. She’d wondered what his ribs were like and how his hair would look if ruffled up a bit by her. Would it look more like the Czech’s? What could she do to make him look more Czech?

IT WAS at that moment, peering across the room at Lix, his eagerness to please, she decided she’d accept him as a lover for a while and even that she would allow herself a period of being in love. She had not flushed like he had flushed for her. Her pulse had not increased for him. Her feelings were not bodily She was calmly concentrated on the chance that Lix had offered her of pushing back the jacket, pulling open the shirt, and making politics with kisses on a comrade’s rack of ribs. Freda always needed someone in her bed when the optimistic ghost of 1968 invaded her. Her body and her spirit demanded company But not just yet. She’d let his role intensify as all the action of the coming weeks intensified, as they prepared to pull the cobbles loose and press their chests against the police and MeisterCorps. She’d save their best encounter for the aftermath of Marin Scholla’s kidnapping. She would defeat him on his bed. That was her long-term urgency.

Time to begin. Freda followed blushing Lix out of the meeting room and made him talk to her as they walked across the campus to their almost neighboring Academies of Human Science and Theater Studies for their evening lectures. She was, she said, again in her soft, fiercely reasonable voice, “irretrievably disillusioned” with RoCoCo. Marin Scholla was being virtually delivered into their hands. And they could only muster five. “Some throng.” They’d need twenty-five at the very least to rush the chairman off his feet, she said. They could not expect the head of a leviathan like MeisterCorps to stride into their university unaccompanied, like some delivery boy There would be the usual dignitaries and luminaries surrounding him, men and women in their best clothes who would be easy to intimidate. There’d be private guards as well. Americans were paranoid whenever they left home. They moved around in skittish flocks, “like trigger finches,” never trusting anyone. “Americans are terrified of streets,” she said. And there’d be armed police, perhaps, despite the recent ruling that the campuses were off limits to any unauthorized civic forces. There’d be the television and the press, of course, and beefy businessmen from MeisterCorps who maybe, emboldened by their lunch and their genetic hatred of the young and studious, would be quick and eager to deploy their shoes and fists.

Besides, even if RoCoCo had volunteered en masse and were a hundred strong, Scholla would avoid a crowd. He’d steer clear of anybody seeming faintly aggressive. Anyone approaching him would have to look absolutely safe. He had his share of enemies who would be glad to land a punch on his old Yankee chin, or splash an egg across his suit. (Making “garbage that didn’t last and enemies that did,” she joked, was MeisterCorps’s contribution to the world.) She’d heard that men like Scholla never walked closer than five meters to a building in case some demonstrator on the seventh floor was standing by an open window on a chair, ready to spit or urinate. “Or dump,” suggested Lix. They laughed together for their first time.

“We need,” Lix said, already seeking ways of reining in his Mad Idea, but reining in, as well, the female of his dreams, “a strategy that’s more in keeping with the Melt.”

She snorted in reply and stretched her neck and shook her hair. A frisky thoroughbred. “The Melt’s a cheap diversion. They’ll let you change your clothes, but just you try changing anything that matters.”

“Well, then, something smaller-scale at least. You can’t beat men like Scholla with force, anyway. There’s five of us. And three of them can’t run. No, you have to beat a man like that with weapons that he hasn’t got.”

Lix was not speaking from experience. Nor was he speaking in a voice he recognized from his wide repertoire. He was someone new and unrehearsed, the overcheerful, overcareful supplicant who wanted desperately to keep this woman at his side. His voice had softened, matching hers. He tried and didn’t quite manage to sound as uncompromisingly logical. He could feel his body change, just from being close to her, within her odor range. Close enough already to have brushed her hand with his and for their shoulders to have collided several times. He might risk a friendly parting kiss, he thought, like comrades do, but that was far more daunting than the kidnapping even. He found that he was almost dancing as he walked. He must have seemed childishly exuberant to her, to anyone who spotted him, but he’d never experienced such escalating changes in his mood and did not know how to restrain himself. His stride had lengthened and his arms were swinging loosely He let his knuckles brush her skirt, her fabric and his skin producing startling ecstasies. She didn’t seem to mind.

“Like what? What hasn’t Scholla got?” she asked. “The man’s got everything.”

“He hasn’t got a sense of humor. And he isn’t young,” Lix said. “We have. We are.”

Again, he’d earned some smiles from Freda — though he was too besotted and disarmed to glimpse in these approving and addictive smiles something he would only be able to articulate once their affair had ended and was in jagged pieces, that he could never be exactly the irresistible, magnetic target of her desires. She was the target of her own desire. She was entirely dazzled by herself. Who wouldn’t be if they were her? The most successful people are most dazzled by themselves. In seeking love, accepting it, she was polishing a mirror, all the better to see herself. The best that Lix could hope for was the opportunity to provide Freda’s arm — and her reputation for flying in the face of convention — with a compliant accessory. There were, he would have thought, less satisfying roles in life.

WHAT FREDA AND her four admirers planned over the next few weeks (once Lix had been installed on Freda’s arm, her new man-friend, her latest cobelligerent) was eventually, as Lix had hoped and engineered, far removed from honest kidnapping and shows of force. Little more than just a prank. This was not 1968. It was instead the playful year of Laxity. They were not Baader-Meinhof or the Red Brigades. Still, they could pretend they were. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To truly play the part, to cast themselves as dangerous, but then, if it backfired, to declare themselves little more than kids, excited students overstepping the mark. Only Youth and Humor attempting politics.

They met in different bars each night, swathed by secrecy and smoke, huddled around their glasses and their cups like five improbable bullion robbers, to finalize their tactics, fired up by cigarettes and alcohol. They were as furtive as possible and theatrically well behaved in public. They never spoke about their “mission” on the phone. They had code words: “the posse” and “the prey.” They took no notes. They kept no minutes of their meetings. They had to memorize their allocated roles, their spoken lines, their stage directions. They were the antiheroes in a film and like the antiheroes in a film they felt adorable. Excitement made them better-looking than they’d ever been before, and better students, actually

The language student’s task, in this unlikely plot, was to “look absolutely safe” in her disguise (which meant, in her case, no boots and jeans, no hand-rolled cigarettes, no sappho-sappho shirt, but the camouflage of glasses, makeup, and a stage wig) and then to stop the chairman as he passed the rank of recessed external elevators in the narrowest part of the campus concourse on his way to his foundation stone and his brief duty with a trowel. All dignitaries walked that route; it was the only one not begging for repairs, the only one with winter flower beds and murals, and — perfectly, for RoCoCo’s purposes — the only one where visitors would have to walk in single file.

Now for the simple sting. The vanity hook. She’d ask Marin Scholla to sign a copy of his “inspirational” autobiography, Trade Winds, with its front jacket photograph of the chairman on the deck of his ostentatious sloop, also called Trade Winds. Her line was this: “Fantastic book, Mr. Scholla! Truly fascinating. Can you sign it for me?”

It was easy to disarm such men with unwarranted flattery. If a young woman praises a businessman for his creativity, applauds a writer for his cooking or his sporting skills, congratulates a politician for his sense of humor or a banker for his figure, then she has immediate command of his attention. It seldom fails. The chairman would be charmed and startled. (None of the reviews had praised his book, after all. They’d judged it dull and self serving — and overpriced.) The chairman’s open hand would flick up by his cheek. He’d wave his fingers until an acolyte produced a fancy pen. And the language student would request a timestalling dedication to a person with a name not easy to spell. “For Alicja Lesniak,” Freda had suggested. Her private joke. A recent foe.

The two heavy anarchists from Human Biology (also disguised and “absolutely safe”—they’d even promised to sacrifice their beards and put on the jackets they’d reserved for Graduation Day) would then join the sycophantic line of book lovers, holding further copies of Trade Winds (which as a matter of principle, they said, they’d steal, not buy, from the academic store). When their turn came for signatures, while they fumbled with pages and their pens, their cameras even, toadying to the chairman with their thanks for his insights and his philanthropy, the linguist would step back to call the service elevator — not already in use, knock wood — and hold open the door.

A simple plan: The posse makes its understated contact with the prey.

Now came the part that nearly always works with startling simplicity in films but where they’d most likely fail, where Lix at least was hoping they would fail. The flattered chairman, concentrating on the frontispiece of his own book, would be a meter from the open elevator. Two steps, two shoulders, two liters of good luck, and he’d be bundled into the metal box by his weighty, grateful readers. Every author’s fantasy. His retinue of beefy businessmen and handlers might well have time to see they had been tricked and thrust their polished boots between the closing doors. The elevator might not oblige and come when summoned. The chairman might be nimbler than he looked. If he was, if they could not persuade him through the elevator doors, then all RoCoCo had to do was shrug the whole thing off. Exuberance. Misplaced excitement at the man’s philanthropy, the prospect of his palace of the arts. An author should expect the rough-and-tumble of his fans, et cetera. They’d only meant to take the great man for a drink. A student stunt, that’s all.

If the doors were quicker than the boots, then Marin Scholla would be safely theirs. There were no basement stairs on that side of the building. So no one could give chase. One floor down, five seconds later, and they’d be in the utility corridor, amongst the heating pipes and generator leads, the cobwebs and the underpowered bulbs, the cleaning trolleys and the laundry rolls, the smell of leakages and paint. Film noir.

The kidnappers had timed and measured their escape. A foretaste of the fun they’d have. Rehearsals are more fun than true performances. Forty paces to the right, past storage and the boiler room, the ground staff’s kitchen, would lead them to an exit door. They’d pin a careful statement to the door, signed by their noms de guerre, Lix’s adolescent sobriquet of “Smudge” and once again the name “Alicja,” which outlined their grievances against MeisterCorps but guaranteed safekeeping for the missing millionaire and promised his release once he’d been “entertained.” “You’ll have him back in time for dinner,” they’d write in the hope that this would be enough to dissuade his handlers from calling in the police.

Beyond the doorway, in the parking bay, the latest lovers in their hired van would be waiting for delivery.

LIX AND FREDA WANTED Scholla to themselves, of course, a private accessory to their new affair and its total consummation later on that day. It would not be wise, they argued, she insisted, for their three and by now (despite the wigs and graduation suits) possibly identified accomplices to join them in the van for their escape once the chairman was in their hands, no matter how “absolutely safe” they looked. If the police were summoned and they were quick enough and had the gumption to search vehicles for the city’s newly missing guest, then they’d be looking first for two large students and an unassuming shorthaired girl (and one, with any luck, they believed was called Alicja).

Freda and Lix, however, were unknown faces so far, and could more safely complete the last leg of the kidnapping on their own, an innocent young couple, not short, not overweight, with nothing odd about their van except (as you’d expect) the blaring music on their radio-cassette. They’d chosen Weather Report for their escape. A stylish touch, for what kidnapper ever draws attention to himself with raucous, horny jazz? This was during the year of the Melt, remember. In a recent immoderation meant to make the streets more jubilant, many drivers keen to prove their solidarity played their music loud through open windows. Something for pedestrians. Freedom was Amplification in those expressive days. Noise could hide a multitude of sins.

They’d blindfold Marin Scholla as soon as they had slammed the van’s rear doors and sent their three comrades off on foot, in three directions. They’d tape his mouth if it was necessary. Be practical, they told themselves. A man like that was bound to make a noise if given half a chance. He’d call for help, perhaps, but not be heard. The panels of the van were triple-clad, metal, wood, and fabric lining. Weather Report would drown him out. If he struggled while Lix was driving off, then Freda would cope. She was a tall and healthy woman after all, and Marin Scholla was a man in his late seventies and as weak as a blown egg, by all accounts. He wore a hearing aid. He used a walking stick. He’d had a minor stroke. His bones would be like breadsticks. Freda could probably knock him over with her earrings.

Within a moment of accepting their delivery, the lovers would be circling the park with its yearlong revelers on Navigation Island, driving sensibly once they had crossed the river (by the perfectly named Deliverance Bridge) into the old city, their music slowly muted, just one more unremarkable vehicle in the mid-afternoon rush-hour lines. Then they could proceed on the quieter bankside roads until they reached the little Arts Laboratory on the wharf.

Lix had arranged an exclusive matinee performance for his elderly charge. An outing to the theater was never wasted time, especially for a man who, two years previously, had bought the Boston Playhouse, demolished it, and built an arcade. The four surviving and determined members of the Street Beat Renegades, the agitprop group that had so consumed him during his first terms at the academy, would be waiting with their stilts, their light and smoke machines, and their accordions, and with a tripod camera, ready to begin the old man’s entertainment: Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars, their hurriedly improvised morality play in the medieval style, based on the fable of the Fat Man and the Cat, with Sin and Virtue unambiguously portrayed for their dullwitted audience of one, and dollars denoted by a bowl of cream (and cream represented on the stage by half a liter of white distemper). They’d give him Music, Tumbling, and Dance. Stiltwalking and Puppetry by “members of the cast.” The script? By Felix Dern himself. Forty minutes (mostly mimed, as Scholla only spoke American). No interval.

Theirs would be an alliance, then, of stage and campus, the intellect and the imagination, politics and pleasure, hope and desire. “Silence for the comrades, please!” RoCoCo Renegades.

How could the chairman not be charmed? Marin Scholla would not truly be their “captive,” after all, and not their “prey,” but just their involuntary guest and only for the afternoon. Was that unreasonable? They’d turn him loose as soon as it was dark, outside the zoo where city vagrants gathered for their soup each night — another clever touch, they thought. They’d make him eat some soup. They’d take a photograph for the press and for their own scrapbooks: the animals, the dispossessed, the humbled businessman, the steaming bowls. Then he could get a taxi back to his ostentatious hotel in time for dinner. No damage done — except perhaps the blunting of his appetite for soup, and bruises on his backside from forty minutes on a wooden chair. Otherwise no harm could come of it.

The RoCoCo Renegades hung on, then, to this colossal self delusion and the courage it provided them: Marin Scholla would be charmed by them, their nerve, their play, their youth, their sincerity, and he would shrug the matter off as he might shrug off the peccadilloes of his own three sons, none of them (according to the gossip press) exactly beyond reproach. Better he’d had children who engaged in politics, who had their say, than those three party animals with their unfastened ways.

The nine conspirators could imagine him, back home in Boston in a week or two, recounting his experiences on a television talk show: “These young people taught me something valuable that I might never have realized otherwise. And I am grateful to them for it.” Studio applause.

So Marin Scholla had been transformed in their imaginations before they’d even laid an eye or hand on him. The more they pictured him, delivered into their brief care, the more they redefined him as a sort of willing guest, an eager volunteer in their debate about the future of their city and the world. At best, they were the sons and daughters he’d never have. They were his natural heirs. At worst, RoCoCo and the Renegades would have provided him an interesting and an improving interlude that he would want to think about, digest, and not dismiss completely. No worse than that. No need for police or any prosecutions, then. He was endowing an arts complex, after all. And what was this but art? A happening. An offspring of the Melt. They’d make him understand before release, before they delivered him into the backseat of his taxi, that theirs had only been a bit of heartfelt fun. Where would we be without the creeds and dogmas of the young?

“FOUR MORE DAYS until our first anniversary,” Freda reminded Lix, reaching forward from the back of their hired van to rub the side of his best cheek. “A month! I haven’t stayed with anyone this long before. What shall we do to celebrate? What would you like to do?” She beat out the remaining days, with playful toughness and her knuckles, on the bony lump behind his ear. “One. Two. Three. And then you’re in my record book.”

“That can only hurt.”

“I like to hurt you.” She pressed her face against Lix’s and blew into his ear. He’d suffered her lips, her knuckles, and her fingertips that day, bruising indicators — or so he’d found in those four weeks — that Freda was feeling anxious rather than amorous, despite the promise of her words.

For once she liked the way he’d dressed. He’d dressed for the occasion. The linen scarf tied at the throat had been her choice, her first and only gift for him. It made him look a touch more dangerous and jaunty than usual, more like the Czech she’d so often fantasized about, more like the kidnapper he’d prove to be within the hour. An ear of cloth stuck out beneath his chin like the blue touch paper of a firework, hoping to be lit. If things went well with Scholla, she’d light this lover up herself later, release the chairman at the zoo, and then release her lover’s linen scarf, release him from his trousers and his shirt, release herself from all the prospects and the tensions of the day, with kiss and punch and stroke.

Freda was captivated by Lix. Her feelings were not insincere, though she’d deny it for the most part of her life. She was not captivated by his looks. Nor by his questionable energy. But by his fear and reticence, which she mistook for the saintly attribute of patriots and revolutionaries like Nyerere, Cezar, and Mandela, a kind of granite sweetness which showed no malice and no alarm, which never raised its voice without good cause. He had what she would never have, she thought, the Gift of Sympathy.

He loved her, of course, like everybody else, though love like his defied analysis. To contemplate it was to stare into a maze and volunteer to lose yourself. It was uncharted, inexplicable. He loved her with a perseverance and an abandon that would startle anyone who knows him now. He’d take the maddest risks for her, he could persuade himself, eat glass and fire, walk on coals, obey, obey. She was his driving force. This kidnapping would mark the proof and climax of their love.

She tugged his kerchief ears and said again, “Come on then, say. What would you like to do, Comrade Felix Dern? To celebrate our thirty-one days?”

He’d like, he thought, to spend the day in bed with her; he’d like, indeed, to put their madcap plan on hold and, instead, clamber right then, at once, into the metal-ribbed and windowless asylum of the van’s carcass to seek out something fresh and new with her, one of those many deeds he’d heard about and seen in films and read about in American novels and even simulated on the stage but not yet tried.

What shall we do to celebrate? he asked himself. Let’s soixante-neuf. Let’s see what sex is like for colonizing tongues and lips. Let’s snuffle in between each other’s legs.

Or bondage possibly. Some blindfolds and a gag, the ones they’d set aside for Marin Scholla should he prove to be a problem, would be irresistible on Freda. Not that Lix had much appetite for deviations of that kind, and never would, but his four weeks with her had been appallingly frustrating. Sometimes it seemed she loved him with her fingernails and teeth, but little else. And so his imagination had been running wild. They’d not had any intercourse so far in which he had felt free to give expression to himself. Not proper intercourse. If proper is the proper word. Penetration was “for men,” she’d said, and though they’d consummated their relationship in the legal sense, penetration had become either his last and unencouraged port of call, allowed when she’d lost interest anyway, or just a station to the cross of Freda’s pleasure, the cross he had to bear. What bodily encounters they had regularly indulged in — mutual masturbation mostly, and oral sex, unreciprocated — served her “right to orgasm,” she said. She’d not be used by any man. For militants like her, “the front line is the bed.” Lix understood how right she was. He understood and sympathized until those moments when his brains went south and he required and hoped — just once — to be in charge of her.

He’d like to love her standing up, for instance. A memory revisited. Or fuck her on the kitchen floor, for goodness’ sake. Uncomplicated sex. No politics. Or make love to her out on the river in a rowboat when she was wearing something other than black. He’d seen the couples making love in their hired thirty-minute skiffs, in their white summer shirts, lapping at each other in the shadows of the bankside candy trees. He’d like to join the gang. Or him on top, for a change: she’d always straddled him when they’d played almost-sex, when she — climaxed herself — finally permitted him to come into her. She always liked to be the playground bully who had won the fight, her full weight on his shoulders or her hands pressed down against his wrists, inviting penetration but only just allowing it. Submit to me. Defer, defer. Not mainstream cinema at all. Perhaps they’d never truly fornicate in ways he wanted to. Though he could always live in hope. And hope was justified. She’d said she had a treat for him once Scholla was released. At last, she’d promised it. Something for “the man.” As soon as they had finished with the chairman, she’d come back with him to his little room, above those once trod stairs. She’d be his captive for the night, she said.

So Lix had not only rehearsed for Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars, he had also prepared for the Afteract with Freda. He’d cleaned his room, tidied up the scattered careless clues to the compromiser he really was. Binoculars, a German magazine, products from companies that he ought to boycott, postcards from his mother, tubs (unused) of nevus masking cream, pajamas from his teens. What kind of love affair was this, that he felt safer when he hid himself from her? He’d bought new bedclothes, too. Blue sheets. He’d primed the gramophone with music he knew she liked. Not Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter crazy on the sax, but Souta’s Chinese Symphony. He’d purchased decent coffee and a pair of pretty cups. No bread and beans for her. No vagrant’s soup. He’d got fresh Maizies and fruit preserves and joss sticks bunched together in a metal vase. He’d scrubbed his dirty little sink. He’d torn the corner off a pack of contraceptives and slipped them underneath the bed. He wouldn’t want to battle with the cellophane in case his moment passed.

Lix’s moment, actually, was perilously close. Their appointment with the chairman was for three-fifteen. He’d not be late. By five-fifteen, Meister Scholla’s Dirty Dollars would have been premiered and the charmed and blindfolded captive bundled back into the van. By six, the chairman would be home for tea. Fredalix’s madcap afternoon would soon be in the past. Like 1968.

“What are you thinking about right now?” She broke into his fantasies.

“Umm, 1968. To tell the truth.”

She was startled. “Me, too,” she said. And then, “I’m waiting for your answer, anyway.”

“What answer’s that?”

“Our little anniversary.”

What could they do to celebrate then? He had his answers, but he didn’t dare say He said, “You choose.” There was no point in voicing his desires, he thought. They were too shoddy and infantile, and dangerously mature, to speak out loud. Besides, in twenty-seven days of love, he’d learned that Freda always called the shots.

He’d learned, as well, to his surprise, that in extremis Freda had a timid facet to her character, not that she trembled with alarm when any hazard offered itself — as it was being offered there and then, with Marin Scholla on his way — or would even take a single, compromising side step to avoid a conflict or a test. No, her apprehension took a more reactionary form. She turned into a sort of harebrained girl, a teenager, a chatterer. Perhaps this was the vestige of the privileged daughter she had once been and was frightened of becoming again but needed to hold on to like a child might need its security blanket. This was how she drove off doubt and fear: with chattering.

Small talk was Freda’s way of steadying herself. She’d learned to smother her worries with blankets of trivia. So now — awaiting their heroic moment in the van — she pressed herself against the back of Lix’s driver’s seat, a hand on his shoulder, and babbled on about their “anniversary.”

Lix twisted his mouth toward her hand and kissed the sinews of her multibangled wrist. He kissed her bruising knuckles, too. The sweetest liberty. She smelled of soap and coat and nicotine. Familiar. As were her favorite black wool skirt, her blond meringue of pinioned hair, her walking boots with yellow laces, her smoker’s throat. Nothing she was saying was typical of the Freda that attracted him. In fact, there’d been no evidence all afternoon — not since they’d collected the van from the rental agency in their false names (Alicja Lesniak again, and Smudge), half hidden behind their high, disguising scarves — of her trademark stridency, her usual impatience at any trace of sentimentality (“our anniversary,” indeed!), her absolute conviction that her views were unassailable. Her voice was hesitant. Her hand was shivering — not from his kissing, surely, and not only from the cold. (It was cold, though. Our city always is in mid-December, that Thursday being no exception — and especially throughout that winter of 1981, when storms and wind and multinationals came into this neglected and contented city to fill our empty spaces and all our current troubles started.)

No, it was the prospect of their perilous adventures that shook her usual confidence, that dried her throat, that raised her pulse into the nineties in ways that her love for Lix never could, that made her want to urinate as often as a dog. “We ought to celebrate,” she said. “We must. What can we do that’s big enough?”

Lix was by now familiar with this single vulnerability, the self-inflicted comfort of her prattling. After all, they had been passionate and inseparable comrades in almost a month of politics. He’d stood beside her on the picket lines supporting Sakharov and Bonner, two Russian intellectuals he’d only heard of when she mentioned them but who were on a hunger strike and were worthy of support for reasons he had not dared to ask. She and Lix (on their first date as Fredalix) had joined the unlicensed procession to the Soviet consulate. The closer the police lines had got with their reverberating shields and their billy clubs, clearly forgetting for the moment, despite their sideburns, that they were in the middle of the Big Melt, the less Freda had sloganized and the more she’d talked about a holiday she planned in Greece, if only she could bribe a visa for herself. She had not ceded a centimeter to the policemen’s clubs. Instead, she’d switched the danger off, relit her thoughts with Adriatic sun and chattering — and, surely, that was valiant. And worthy of support.

He’d wept with her in clouds of tear gas and mace when police had tried to break up the “Geneva Solidarity” disarmament march on the Combined Defense Consulates. This time she’d taken blubbering comfort from recalling, word for word, a conversation she’d had that afternoon with her Natural Sciences tutor. It seemed that they had parents from adjacent villages. Lix, the novice at so many things, had been one of the first to flee that demonstration. His eyes, stomach, and lungs had not been trained to cope with nausea, blistering, and pulmonary edema. So he’d abandoned his first love on a traffic island and had only rejoined her twenty minutes later when he rediscovered her in exactly the same spot, standing almost alone, enveloped in the fog. The gas had dispersed but she had not. She’d taken comfort from “adjacent villages.”

He’d held her shaking hand when they had paraded by the barracks jail with their lit candles in the midnight vigil for detainees — and conscripts coming off their shifts (for laxity can cut both ways) had dealt out kicks and punches to the men and shouted in the faces of the women: bitch and cow and whore and bitch again.

Freda was not used to being anything but loved by men. Nor was she used to tolerating raised voices other than her own. She’d treated the loudest and the crudest conscript to one of her dismissive routines. She’d invited him to go home to mommy and not come back to town until he’d learned to tie his own laces and to button up his own shirt and to zip up his own mouth. He’d responded with some shocking, vulgar menaces. She’d trembled then, a mixture of theatrical distaste for vile and vicious men and some honest, justified distress for herself. Soldiers raped in every corner of the world, and would ever do so, with impunity. Our city was no different. You only had to see the porn magazines that had so recently arrived along with the Laxity. You only had to watch the men in bars. You only had to hear the venom in the conscript’s voice. She felt that, finally, she’d become a citizen, she’d said — and let us not forget her age, her admirable naïveté—of the Commonwealth of Universal Womanhood, the Femetariat. She was truly horrified for all the sisters in the world, the bitches and the cows and whores, the wives, who soaked the bruises up.

That brutal night of menaces, only two days after their romance had begun, had been the first time Freda and Lix had shared a bed. A significant moment for any lovers: admission to a woman’s bed, in those uncomplicated times, was an admission that her privacies were ready to be breached. Sex in the car or on the settee was for irregulars and opportunists. But to share your pillow and your nightie with a man, the body-worn sheets ornamented with your own dead hairs, the linen batiked with your saliva, sweat, skin cream, and makeup, was to offer up a tender invitation to be loved again, again, again.

They had not shared many privacies that night. They’d simply hugged like camping pals, like cousins, in fact, with Freda wanting nothing more than the solaces of touch and only Lix expecting greater things. It was a pity to leave such an opportunity unused, he had thought. Well, unexploited was a truer word. To share a bed, to share a pillow even. To be so close to her and yet disarmed. Yet he was wise enough by then (despite so far having only that single — or was it double? — full experience of binocular sex two years previously) to know that a woman who’d been spooked by threats of rape and had only recently joined the ranks of Universal Womanhood would not be in the mood for happy-go-lucky sex. He’d had to bide his time, resist the impulses to push his hands beneath her clothes or tug her buttons and her zippers. He’d had to treat the cousinly hugging as an opportunity to show his finer love for her, to be diffuse and not display his physical desires too obviously.

So Lix had hugged his lover in her rented room as anodynely as he could, as indirectly as he could, his body arched to shield his treacherous tumescence. And he had listened to his Freda handling her fears by chattering about — bizarrely — the American actress Natalie Wood, who’d drowned a few weeks previously and who — together with the bare-chested Czech and Che Guevara — had been “a sort of icon” for teenage Freda, the biddable and dutiful family girl she’d once been.

Lix had held her in her wrap of shawls, curled up around her on her bed, until his lover’s body had dropped asleep and she’d been free to wake again as certain of herself as ever. And they had masturbated each other for the first time and then shared breakfast on her sunlit dormitory bed.

SO HERE THEY WERE in place, RoCoCo and the Street Beat Renegades, waiting with their Trade Winds and their flattery, their blindfold and their charm, their instruments and their circus skills, their well-intentioned thoughtlessness, for Marin Scholla to arrive and lay his foundation stone. Their day of heartfelt fun had come. The chairman’s limousine would any minute now come curling around the campus service road, past the Masters Lawn with its bad statues and its frosted beds toward the university president’s official residence. There’d be official handshakes and smiling faces from the reception party, naturally. A $7 million gift would brighten anybody’s face.

At most, it would take ten minutes for the chairman and his group to reach the elevator doors. A rich old man never wants to hang about, particularly on days like this when every breath he’d take would carry a chill. In fifteen minutes then, or less, the exit door beyond the service corridor would open on the wind-torn parking bay, where Fredalix, as tense as athletes in their blocks attending on the discharge of the pistol shot, were waiting, and planning their evening out — such innocence — their anniversary, where they might dance (for Lix was quite the hero of the discotheque. The darkness suited him), where they might eat, what play or film they could investigate to mark their love’s longevity. No talk of making love.

The vehicle was shaking, not as it might seem to Lix from Freda’s shuddering, but partly from the wind which slapped and pressed their van’s high sides and partly from the fast and heavy traffic speeding past their parking spot on the highway ramp behind the campuses. It was a biting afternoon, with gelid blueness, spiteful gusts, and forecasts of snow Disruptive snow, intent on injury. The City of Balconies did its buttons up.

You might have thought if you had encountered Fredalix for the first time that afternoon that it was Freda who, for once, on this occasion, would prove to be the quitter and that Lix must be the braver of the two. Of course, that was not just. Nor likely. For all her trembling, for all her trivia, Freda was fully resolute. They’d go ahead with their madcap plan because she said they would.

No turning back. They’d take the risk. They’d face the consequences. Talk of their coming anniversary was only Freda’s way of saying, “We will be free next week. We’ll not get caught. We’ll not be robbed of our certificates. Our parents will not be informed. In just a couple of days, exactly as we’ve planned, we will have earned our little place in folklore, campus history. Our hidden faces will be on the front of newspapers.” Her constant naive mantra was (would always be) “I am in charge.”

Lix, deceiving Lix, deceiving both himself and anyone he met, the master of disguises and of masquerades, despite his outward calm, his steady hand and voice, his best attempts to remind himself that what they were attempting was not so revolutionary, was intensely apprehensive. Just twenty-two years old, and already he was in the tightening grip of his major flaw, his main regret, his saving grace — timidity.

He should — and could — have kept the company of gentler souls than Freda. Alicja for one. She’d also set her heart on him. Yes, Alicja Lesniak, the unsuspecting and innocent dedicatee of Marin Scholla’s Trade Winds, the girl who’d be (so Freda hoped) the prime and named suspect in his kidnapping. She was that year’s plump but clever president of the student caucus. Indeed,

Lix had a few months previously, against his better judgment, accepted an embarrassing approach from her, an innocent invitation to a film but made while she was touching the back of his hand with a single finger. Only their shoulders had touched in the cinema. On another occasion, she had held Lix by the elbow in the campus bar, on some pretext, and turned her unpretentious face too readily to his.

Alicja was Polish by descent. The Lesniaks were one of our city’s richer families, and she was keen to prove her political independence from her inheritance. She was, of course, active that year in Poles Abroad for Solidarity, and Lix had last met her when she had spoken three weeks earlier to RoCoCo, seeking its support of her daily vigil outside the Polish trade mission.

“The Lesniaks are ruling class,” was Freda’s view, recognizing Alicja as a rival in more ways than one. “Never trust the daughters of the ruling class! Besides, Walesa is a Catholic.” So Lix (because this blond and slender stem of womanhood was his ideal of womanhood and he only wanted to be well regarded by her) allowed Alicja — his wife-to-be, the mother of his boys — to turn her face away, to take her hand away for almost eight more years.

He’d missed his safest opportunity

He could have stood in line at Alicja’s side in her dull, responsible campaigns, her fleshy hand in his, sensibly dispersing when the police required them to, retreating from the tear gas and the batons, and not provoking rapist conscripts with her looks. She’d still provide the chattering, this plumper girl, but save him from the danger and the fear, preserve the little courage that remained in him — for Lix had realized when he was just a teenager this shaming fact, that courage was a finite commodity, as nonrenewable as fuel, and that he had almost exhausted his own supply. Since he’d been sixteen, seventeen, he’d sensed the timid years ahead. He’d hoped a woman like Alicja was waiting for him in the shadows, with promises of uneventful days.

Instead, Lix had stood in line with Freda and scared himself to death. However, he already had the knack — how else would she be fooled by him? — of dropping all his fear into his toes. An actor’s phrase. An actor’s knack. A breathing exercise. Control the lungs, control the dread, and then step out into the lights to seem unflappable before an audience. Technique and practice.

So you could — as Freda had — mistake this young man with the birthmarked face for the most resolute of activists. As calm and stubborn as a rock. You could expect great things of him. She felt it now, behind him in the rental van. He’d hardly moved when she had rapped him so firmly on the bone behind his ear. He was so still and unperturbed, his hands clasped neatly in his lap, his breathing soft and regular, his comments cool and rational, while she, she knew, was talking like a fool. She thought — and this was genuine — that she and he would be comrades for eternity if only she could stay as unwavering and dispassionate as he was. He’d be a useful foil for her loud ways.

She kissed her fingertips — that resurrected little girl again, that Natalie! — and touched the bone behind his ear. A damp caress and an apology.

“You okay?” she asked, feeling more physically excited as the minutes ticked away.

She felt him smile and nod his head.

“I’m fine,” he said, though had he the choice, he would gladly start the engine of the van and drive away from what they had arranged to do. Lix only had himself to blame. Again. After all, it was his plan, his entertainment, that would go so oddly wrong that afternoon. Three prospects frightened him: the kidnapping, the Street Beat premiere, the lovemaking. He’d need to navigate the city streets for her, then be an impresario, then steer their risky course to bed. He would have to be uncharacteristically calm and strong.

Marin Scholla’s limousine had surely reached the campus gates by now Lix concentrated on settling his nerves by breathing through his nose and focusing on the woman in his rearview mirror, the shrunk and silvered planes and facets of her shaded and reflected face. He was mesmerized by her but almost queasy with misgivings at the certain prospect of the ardor and the kissing that were promised him. He practiced breathing, his feet braced against the floor of the van. He bedded Weather Report into the radio-cassette. He checked the ignition on the van — this must not turn into a farce. The engine turned and purred at once. The gas tank was full.

“Not long now,” Freda said. Again she leaned forward, reached across his shoulder to stroke the side of his cheek. Not long for what? Not long before they’d trade the chairman for an orgasm?

THEY COULD HAVE WAITED there for three more months before the chairman showed his face. His foundation stone was finally laid in March 1982, when the Laxity had ended, the city streets were calmer and predictable, and once again we truly had good cause to demonstrate if only we could demonstrate. But Marin Scholla never crossed the river to the campuses that December afternoon. He did this duty at MeisterCorps’s new central offices and then flew out, in his own jet, ahead of any snow, to Rome.

Lix and Freda concentrated on the exit door for forty minutes. It owed its only movement to the wind. Of course, they feared the worst: kidnappers arrested and a bungled afternoon, their comrades spilling all the beans, their future ruined by their foolishness.

Finally, more than an hour after their appointment and not a sign of Marin Scholla, Freda got out of the van, fiercely angry with herself and everyone, and walked around the campus blocks to hunt for their three accomplices and to check if anything was happening. It was. The Poles.

Alicja Lesniak — so much to answer for — had wrecked RoCoCo’s plans. That very morning in Gdansk, troops had opened fire on demonstrating workers. Seven dead. At General Jaruzelski’s hands. The news had reached the small clutch of demonstrators, plump Alicja included, who gathered every afternoon outside the Polish trade mission opposite the campus gate to protest against their country’s martial law. And some mad Pole, who’d never been to Poland once, as it turned out, had fired a hunting gun and chipped the paintwork on the mission’s door. The streets around the mission were closed at once. Armed police moved in, with snipers, horses, and armored vans. The Pole was shot in the leg and then bitten by a police dog. Military bullets chipped a lot more paint and shattered windows in the mission as police “secured” its safety for the afternoon. Anyone who looked remotely Polish was rounded up, including the building’s employees and the head of mission himself. Alicja Lesniak was shoved into a cell and kept there until midnight, when her father phoned his “good friend” in the ministry and she was chauffeur-driven home in the snow.

The two shaven anarchists and the tidy lesbian, bizarrely dressed and late for their appointment anyway, were trapped behind the barriers, two hundred meters from their Scholla ambush site. What could they do (but thank their lucky stars)? And MeisterCorps (which had considerable shipbuilding interests in Gdansk) had been advised to keep their chairman safely in the quiet parts of the town. The campuses were undisturbed.

“That fat-witted idiot,” Freda said as she and Lix drove off in their rental van in the last light of the day. She held Alicja Lesniak, her bourgeois rival for Lix’s heart, entirely responsible for the failings of the afternoon. She meant to, had to, settle scores immediately, revenge herself on both the woman and the farce. She wanted 1968.

FREDA AND LIX SHOULD, of course, have gone first to the Arts Laboratory on the wharfside where their four edgy and — by now — baffled actor comrades would be killing time waiting for their audience and for the curtain to go up. Lix, unquestionably, should at least have phoned them. He was almost a professional actor himself and a tense one. He must have discovered in his two-plus years of training how intolerable first-night nerves could be, even when the expected audience was only one old man, dragooned and obedient. He must have recognized how jittery they would be feeling, not fearing critics exactly but more the unpredictable attentions of the police, especially when they would have heard the sirens from across the river and the thrumming whir of helicopters, and finally the crack of gunfire.

Yet by the time he and Freda had traversed Navigation Island, in brewing silence, and crossed Deliverance Bridge into the old part of the city, they were focused only on themselves, their personal distress, their unreadiness for admitting yet to anyone — even to each other, indeed — that they had made themselves a laughingstock. They could not, would not, show themselves to the Street Beat Renegades without the chairman in tow. It would be humiliating, for Freda because she would dread acknowledging so farcical a failure, and for Lix because he would not want to expose his immense relief. They’d let their comrades simmer for a while.

Besides, who could guarantee that one of the other three farceurs from RoCoCo had not already made the call or even dropped in at the ArtsLab with their narration of events that afternoon, how seven dead Poles had robbed the chairman of the Fat Man and the Cat, how one plump girl had ruined everything. So Freda and Lix felt if not exactly free, then at least excused to turn their backs on the blemished afternoon and indulge the moment and the still-unblemished prospects for the night.

The chairman had eluded them, but all their other plans and passions were in place. They needed shriving, urgently, spreadeagled like two crosses on the bed, to rid themselves with body sins of all the punctured virtues of their politics. Their blood was up. There were more urgent things to do than hunt a telephone. More urgent than the minor needs of friends.

They hardly spoke, of course. The vibration of the van, the parabolic headlights of the passing cars, the blare of people going home, the very first snowflakes provided all the commentary and all the stimulation they required. Everything’s symphonic and arousing when the object of your journey is a body and a bed. Sometimes in matters of the heart words are not required. Are ill advised, in fact. A misjudged word deflates. She’d only had to say, “Take me somewhere,” and push her fingers underneath his linen kerchief and touch his earlobe once for Lix to be in no doubt what was required of him. These were the clearest stage directions he could hope for.

So let the acting comrades wait. The lovers had to hurry first to Lix’s rooms — and then when they were finished with each other, they could perhaps drive down to the theater with their disappointing news but fortified and rescued from humiliation by their lovemaking.

Not telling their comrades sooner about the shambles on the campuses, having them waiting with their stilts and their accordions, was part of the excitement. For Freda anyway It made her irresponsible and negligent when her more public attempts at being irresponsible had so recently been aborted by “that idiotic Pole.” She liked to keep men waiting and men guessing, anyway. She liked to see their lungs dilate, their nostrils flare, their vocabularies shrink just because she’d passed extremely close to them.

It showed their weakness and her strength. How mystified and paralyzed they seemed to be by her. Perhaps that’s why she’d chosen harmless Lix in the first place, because her choice would mystify the waiting men, the self-satisfied, better-looking ones who’d done their best for the past seven terms to sleep with her — and failed.

By choosing slightly blemished Lix she had confounded all the rules. She was declaring what she truly felt about the mass confusion that seemed to value looks above the hidden virtues. Of course, she’d been a victim but also, she knew, a beneficiary of the confusion. Still, it was satisfying to think that when she’d make love to Lix that afternoon, she’d not be making love to all the other suitors in her life, the other handsomer men whom she’d imagined making love to her, whom she’d rebuffed in dreams. She’d wanted them, but they’d been turned away. The corridor was crowded with these men. Only she and unexpected Lix were in the room. Not making love to many men was what made making love to one so flavorsome.

By the time they had finally found a place to park their empty, unproductive van and walked — not even holding hands — the half a kilometer against the homeward-rushing crowd and chilly winds through narrowing streets and climbed the stairs to Lix’s rented room, Freda had already formed a plan for their lovemaking. Her nerves were shot by all the waiting in the parking bay behind the campuses, but not so shot that the sexual subtext that had always underscored their plans to kidnap Marin Scholla had been wiped out. Embracing tension as she did in politics was her pathway to arousal. To be so purposeful and incorruptible on the picket line or in the ruck of demonstrators or up against the chests and chins of police was to dance the tango of pressure and release.

By now — they’d reached the shabby, postered door to Lix’s room — it seemed as if the kidnapping was history, successful history, airbrushed, rewritten, and perfected. They’d caught / released the chairman, nudged the tiller of the world, and now could celebrate amongst and with themselves. Their fear and bravery had only been a prelude, an act of preparation, for the sex. Passion of the soul, and passion of the genitals.

Therefore, a frigid woman (“fat-witted” Alicja Lesniak) could never make a true and unbowed revolutionary, in Freda’s view, any more than a timid leafleteer (“that idiotic Pole” again) could prove to be convincing in the sack. You had to feel it big to give it big, in other words.

So then she had decided, by the time her Lix’s shaking hand had got the key into the lock, that their lovemaking would be a little reassuring drama of a sort, two comrades pumping courage into each other once they had pumped some courage into the world. Her usual mantra, then? “I am in charge.” She knew exactly what she wanted from her comrade on the far side of the door. He must not change his clothes, undress, when they got into the room, for a start. He must not take his kerchief off. She’d break his fingers if he tried to loosen it. The jaunty knot was part of what she wanted from the man. Nor must he slip into some open-throated bourgeois sentimentality, dutifully whispering sweet platitudes, proclaiming love instead of solidarity. She wanted camaraderie of spirit, not romance of the soul. Romance was for life. Romance was too soft and feeble to truly satisfy. She wanted the drama of the streets relocated in between the sheets. They’d be two partisans and they’d be making love between the detonation and the bomb. It didn’t matter what he wanted out of her. She was in charge. This was her needy afternoon.

His room was tidier than she remembered it, a disappointment of a sort. The sort of tidiness to mark a mother’s visit or an inspection by the concierge. The bed was made up like a dormitory bed. Lix tried to put the light on, but Freda held his hand. “We have to hurry up,” she said. “Come on.” She fantasized the clatter of militia boots, fast running up the stairs. “I want you now.” The you was not quite Lix and not quite nobody. The Czech was trapped between her legs, wild-haired and beautiful. She straddled him, and pushed his shoulders back onto the bed and pushed his shirt up onto his shoulders, and kissed the bare and perfect rack of ribs, her lips as urgent as a Russian gun.

She was too fast for him. He held her head and tried to kiss her on the lips. She turned away. Too intimate. It was not intimacy that she required. The opposite. She wanted urgency and alienation, the meeting of two strangers united only by a single cause. For once his instant penetration was required, allowed, demanded. She put her hand between his legs and felt through the cloth for that part of him that could convey the whole of him. “No kissing, Comrade Lix. It’s counterrevolutionary.” A joke of sorts, of course, but one intended to inform her lover what her desires truly were. He was quick to understand. He was an actor, after all, well versed and trained in improvisation and picking up on what a partner hinted at with her ad-libs. He said, “The Rebel and the Mutineer,” the title of a film he’d long admired. “Too insubordinate to kiss.”

He tried to pull her coat off her arms but she shoved back his hands. “Today,” she said, “the woman is in charge.”

Again, he let her be in charge.

WHERE HAD IT all gone wrong, this briefest love affair? It had gone wrong that afternoon. He knew that much. Marin Scholla flew with it to Rome. General Jaruzelski gunned it down. It couldn’t last beyond that afternoon. It was as if that afternoon had been the only destination for their love. Thereafter, they were in decline.

Lix often spooled it through his memory, that hour in that little room. He could not identify the point of separation. Nor specify his guilt. He’d let her be in charge, despite his fantasies. He’d let her hurry him. He had not tried to hurry her — for he well knew that Freda was a young woman who dismissed that underpinning law of physics, that an action of any energy or force should only result in a reaction of equal energy or force. Anything mildly unwelcome, the breeziest of pressures, she would greet with the fury of the seven spinster winds. So, certainly, she would not tolerate an overzealous lover, too keen to dominate her on a bed, too eager to have his way. She’d called the shots, the modern woman making up for all quiescent females in the past. There’d been benefits in that for him, of course. Uncomplicated penetration for a start, though under her and not on top. She’d been audacious and abandoned because the politics and history said she could.

In fact he had been glad, aroused, that she had pushed him back and held his wrists. Like that, he was too trapped and too engrossed by her urgent passion to make his own mistakes. As she hovered over him, directing him — how would he ever come with her on top demanding that he come? — he had not seen much evidence of romantic love in Freda, nor in her sudden interest in his ribs, his kerchief, and his shirt. She hadn’t spoken his name. Or even looked him in the eye. Yet her passion was all too evidently real. Passion’s something that truly can’t be faked, not even on the stage or in the films. An actor never quite captures the randomness, the disarray. So there can be nothing more honest and reassuring — in the short term — than a partner’s lust. These are the moments in your life that are sincere. You mean it, absolutely mean it, until the moment’s absolutely gone.

Lix absolutely meant it, too. Some cultures claim that when lovemaking has reached perfection, the earth has moved, or the yolk has separated from the albumen, or the clocks have chimed in unison, or the lovers’ bodies have dissolved. Here we say “the bed grew roots.” The bed grew roots that afternoon for Lix.

The universe was suddenly minute: its all-consuming detail pressed against his face, snagged at his toes, the linen and her skin almost impossible to tell apart. If anything or anybody but this long-necked girl, her breasts and earrings swinging like a hypnotist’s watch, had crossed his mind that snowy evening, then it was only briefly and diffusely. A car horn from the street below, perhaps. The tock of high heels on the wooden stairs, as someone else came home. The clink of cups and bottles from the sidewalk cafe below. And possibly, but only for an instant, the aging memory of that little information clerk, their bruising minutes at the kitchen windowsill — and then her tears illuminated by the cruel and sudden timer lights as she, that troubled stranger, fled. And now, the rattle of his bedroom window frames as what was forecast — wind and snow — announced itself across the city in gusts of frozen air.

WE LEAVE THEM lying on his bed, intimately awake, relieved from their desires, engaging with the calm that only sated fervor can provide, and looking forward to some time alone. Not quite tranquillity, but self-possession. The farce of MeisterCorps had ended without too much embarrassment, without too many tears or bruises. They could forget it easily or portray their happy failure as something heroic. Nobody from RoCoCo had been shot or dragged away. Nobody had been compromised. They were the victims only of bad luck and bad timing. Finally, though, they’d got it right: exactly as they’d hoped and planned, Lix and Freda had honed and blunted all the sexual edges of their day. Now was the time to disengage. Withdraw.

Let’s not forget, though, that this bed on Cargo Street was cursed. This narrow student’s cot with its new sheets and its cheap coverlet had played its ancient trick on Fredalix. The roots it had grown were tougher, deeper, than they’d bargained for. Some mischievous coincidence had made this little room high above the wharfside district dangerously fertile, an efficacious city version of the Vacuum Cave in fairy tales where couples spent the night to guarantee a pregnancy (and risk pneumonia). Lix had already produced a child in it, a girl — and now that he’d been mad enough to take a second woman there, another child had been implied, a son, a George, an heir.

The explanation is mundane. The contraceptive Lix had readied and slipped beneath the bed had let the lovers down and either Lix had spilled his semen or Lix had pulled on the sheath too late. Or their lovemaking might have dragged the contraceptive loose, shortened it and buckled it, like ankle socks, cold and corrugated on his shrinking penis end. Or they had stayed with it just half in place for far too long after he’d ejaculated, allowing his emissions to leak and seep and fertilize.

So Lix and Freda might imagine that their day of lunacy and passion had let them off scot-free, no police, no blame, no aftermath. Except? Except that Freda had become some moments earlier the unexpecting mother of his child. It was a pregnant woman now who slumped down on Lix’s chest and concentrated only on the pumping of the once loved lover’s lungs. It was a pregnant woman, too, who hugged the actor to her chest and whispered that she had to wash and dress, who peeled herself away from him, separating their adhering clothes, despite the vents and furrows of their skin clinging on with semen glue and sweat. It was a woman quick with child who was already imagining the pulling over of the sheets, her journey home, the getting on with life and no regrets. It was a mother who pulled aside the window blind in Lix’s room and looked down on the office workers, overworked, as they made muffled progress to their streetcars and took on the trembling rearrangements of the weather-laden wind, the scrim of falling snow which seemed to make our city both lighter and darker at once.

Cargo Street was full as ever at that time of the evening on a weekday, but more tentative than usual. The fallen and impacted snow had made the sidewalks treacherous. So everyone was concentrating on their balance, their collars up, and either heading home where it was safe or making for a bar or restaurant where it was dry and welcoming and full of other weather refugees. Nobody was aware of Freda watching them, four stories up above their heads and hats.

This was a night of pregnancies, and not just Freda’s pregnancy The snow is sexier than sun. The cold encourages us to get to bed and hug the person we love. Our folklore says it’s so. As does demography. The snow is consummate. Fine weather brings the birth rate down. So this was only one of many rooms that benefited from fertility that night, and Fredalix was only one of many pairs. None of them as yet was counting on the cost, the cost of lovemaking, the cost that lasts for threescore years and ten. Nobody thought, when all the hugs and kisses had been finished with, to tell themselves, Things never end. They only stretch ahead from here. We have to thank our lucky stars for that.