Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [35]
“Long March, baloney,” I said, lighting a Montecristo. “That was a hike, kid. A Sunday picnic. I’ll tell you a long march. Forty years, trudging through the desert, without egg rolls or Peking duck, your ancestors and mine —”
“You think everything’s a joke. The pigs are filming all our rallies.”
“Saul, my boy, abi gezunt.”
The lanky black girl in bra and panties curled up on a mattress on the floor began to stir. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“It’s a saying of our forefathers. You know, the slumlords of Canaan. It means ‘so long as you’re groovy.’ ”
“Oh, why don’t you just fuck off,” she said, rising, and slouching out of the room.
“What an enchanting young lady. Why don’t you bring her home to dinner one night?”
Another girl — dumpy, sleepy-eyed, nude — blundered in from a room and drifted into the kitchen, wiggling her ass at me. “May I ask, which one of these delectable creatures is your girlfriend?”
“We don’t go in for property rights here.”
Another young revolutionary, his greasy hair caught in a ponytail, sailed in from the kitchen, sipping coffee out of a jam jar. “Who’s the old prick?” he asked.
“Don’t talk to my father like that,” said Saul. Then, pulling me aside, he whispered, “I don’t want you or Mum to worry, but they might come for me.”
“The health department?”
“The RCMP. My activities are not unknown.”
He had a point. A year earlier Saul, putting in a catch-up term at Wellington College, had discovered that it had investments in American branch plants, one of which manufactured spark plugs used in Israeli tanks. Outraged, Saul’s bunch had risen as one and barricaded themselves in the faculty club. They immediately alienated certain professors who, although disposed to be of the New Left, suddenly found themselves cut off from booze on credit. The manifesto of The 18th of November Fifteen was dropped out of a faculty-club window and broadcast between helicopter traffic reports on Pepper Logan’s CYAD morning call-in talk show. It set out the following demands:
That Wellington divest itself of investments in companies that serve fascist or racist states.
That in recognition of the past exploitation of the Québécois collectivity, the White Niggers of North America, fifty per cent of Wellington courses should now be taught in French.
That if studies of the disposable past are to continue, they should no longer go by the appellation “history” but, instead, “his and herstory.”
Police barricades went up outside Wellington, but no siege guns were put in place. Bed sheets with slogans daubed on them were draped from windows. DEATH TO THE PIGS. VIVE LE QUéBEC LIBRE. REPATRIATE THE FLQ FREEDOM FIGHTERS. The electricity was cut off on the third day, which meant that The 18th of November Fifteen could no longer watch themselves on TV. When furniture was broken up and burned in various fireplaces, it aggravated Judy Frishman’s asthma. Then, once they ran out of usable wood, Marty Holtzman caught cold. He could see his mother camped on the far side of the barricades, armed with his cashmere sweater and sheepskin-lined coat, but at that tantalizing distance this only fed his sneezing fits. A chocolate-bar diet was adequate for some, but it made Martha Ryan’s skin break out, so she refused to pose bare-chested at the window any more for cameramen, putting vanity before the cause. Not surprisingly, she was denounced as a bourgeois cunt at that night’s cell meeting.
Inevitably, the close quarters, the dark, and the freezing temperatures made for dissension in the ranks. Greta Pincus ran out