Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [199]
‘Probably an old ILP’er or something,’ Reid muttered, pouncing on a blue Charles H. Kerr & Co. volume of Dietzgen. He blew dust off it and sneezed.
‘One pound fifty!’ he said in a low voice, so that Rousseau couldn’t overhear his delight and guess what a bargain they’d let slip. He twisted back to his search, a read-head moving along the memory-tape of shelves.
‘You know,’ he went on, ‘it makes me sick sometimes to think of all those old militants selling off their libraries to eke out their pensions. Or dying, and their kids – God, I can just imagine them, middle-aged, middle-class wankers who’ve always been a bit ashamed of the bodach’s rambling reminiscences – rummaging through his pathetic stuff and finding a shelf of socialist classics and about to heave them on the tip when suddenly the little gleam of a few quid lights up their greedy eyes!’
‘Just as well for us that it does,’ I said, wedging my fingers between two books to ease out a lurking pamphlet. ‘It’s the ones that end up on the tip that I – hey, look at this!’
I didn’t care who overheard. This was almost certainly unique, a living fossil: a wartime Russia Today Society pamphlet called Soviet Millionaires. It hadn’t stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist facade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners.
‘I’ve heard about it from my father,’ I told Reid. ‘But even he’d never had a copy. I’ll send it to him.’
‘Told you!’ Reid grinned down at me from a step-ladder. ‘You’re such an unselfish bastard! That’s what the old bloke saw in you! You’re a hereditary socialist!’
‘Ideology is hereditary?’ I scoffed. ‘And what does that make you?’
‘A grasping kulak, I guess,’ he said happily. ‘Ah, now what about this?’ He opened a book and studied the fly-leaf. ‘Stirner, The Ego and His Own, property of the Glasgow Anarchist Workers’ Circle, 1943. Five pounds.’
I stared up at him, open-mouthed. I didn’t realise I was reaching for it until he pulled it away. ‘Uh-uh. Finders keepers.’
‘It’s of no interest to you,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Reid stepped down the ladder, holding the book like a black Grail in front of my eyes. ‘Young Hegelians, German Ideology and all that. Marxist scholarship.’
‘You’re having me on!’
‘Yes, I am,’ Reid said. ‘But I do have a use for it. I’m going to buy it, and as soon as we get outside I’m going to sell it to you for a tenner.’
No lunches for a fortnight, and back to roll-ups. I could manage that.
‘It’s a deal!’ I almost shouted.
Reid stepped back and scrutinised me.
‘Just testing,’ he said. He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You passed.’
In the grey leaded light of the Union smoking-room, the air thick with the unappetising smell of over-percolated coffee-grounds, we sat in worn leather armchairs and flipped through our acquisitions. I smiled at the twisted dialectics of the wartime apologist, frowned over the laboured wit of the great amoralist. Fascism, communism and anarchism traced their ancestry back to the same Piltdown, the Berlin bars of the 1840s. Give me turn-of-the-century Vienna any day, I thought, its Ringstrasse a particle-accelerator of ideas.
We both sat back at the same moment. Reid toyed with the bamboo holder of the previous day’s Guardian. The MPLA had taken Huambo, not for the last time.
‘How’s Annette?’ I asked with guarded casualness.
‘Fine, as far as I know,’ Reid said. He turned over a page.
‘Not seen her for a bit?’
Reid laid down the paper and leaned forward, looking at me intently. ‘We’ve kind of…I don’t know…fallen out, drifted apart.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘How did that happen?’
Reid spread his hands.