Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [76]
Kohn again shoved the counterfoil in the box, this time checking that Jordan hadn’t given his address. The smells of frying and grilling had been tormenting him for half an hour.
‘Let’s get some lunch before the rush,’ he said. ‘Good place across the way – we can keep an eye out from there.’
‘Second you on that,’ Janis said. Jordan straightened up from decorating his biker jacket with enamel shuttles and stars, looking less like a refugee from Beulah City if a bit self-conscious in his glade-masked cool. He nodded at Moh.
They walked through the crowd of aging veterans, the Afghantsi and Angolanos, and tough kids with their hammer-and-sickles and red stars (with a sprinkle of the movement’s blue ones among them, as Moh indicated to Janis, who returned him a sceptical smile). They strolled past posters of Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Castro, Honneker and Ceaucescu and the rest, and over crumpled leaflets advertising lectures with titles like ‘The Great Leap Reconsidered’ and ‘Croatia: The West’s Killing Fields’. Moh led them to a first-floor Indian café overlooking the concourse, well away from the bars whose main feature for the day would be rip-off prices and drunk neo-Communists.
Chicken roti and a tall glass of vanilla lassi were what hit the spot for Moh. He ate in a corner seat, leaning against the window while Janis nibbled tikka and Jordan chomped through some kind of potato-in-pastry arrangement, turning over the pages of a prewar Khazakh cosmodrome brochure.
‘You really a communist, Moh?’ he asked. ‘After all that’s happened?’
Moh grunted, still watching out for Bernstein. ‘What’s past is prologue,’ he said. ‘The future is a long time. We ain’t seen nothing yet.’
‘When have we seen enough?’ Janis’s voice had an edge to it. A double edge, Moh guessed: getting uneasy about hanging around here, getting dubious about the connections with the past which had seemed so obvious before.
‘I remember things,’ he said, for her benefit as much as Jordan’s. ‘I’ve seen the working class making days into history, and that’s not something you forget.’ The lost revolution grieved him like a phantom limb. ‘The thing to forget about is the communistans and the states these guys down there think weren’t so bad after all. That ain’t where it’s at.’
Jordan was saying, ‘OK, but that’s where it ended up—’ when Moh raised a hand. He’d spotted a battery-powered vehicle hauling a tiny and overloaded trailer through the crowd.
‘There he is,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he added as the others moved to rise. ‘Take it easy. Give the man time to catch a breath.’
He sucked up the last of the lassi noisily and, just to rub it in, lit a cigarette.
Kohn sometimes wondered idly if Bernstein were the actual genuine Wandering Jew. He wasn’t young, but damned if he ever got any older. When he looked up with a snaggle-toothed grin of recognition he appeared exactly the same as when Moh had first stood alongside impatiently while his father haggled over some new acquisition (Lenin and the End of Politics, Lenin and the Vanguard Party, Lenin as Election-Campaign Manager, Lenin as Philosopher, Lenin’s Childhood, Lenin’s Fight Against Stalinism, Lenin’s Political Thought, Lenin’s Trousers…)
Bernstein clapped Moh’s shoulder and shook hands with Janis and Jordan while Moh introduced them. He chatted with Jordan for a few minutes about the underground book-trade in Beulah City, then turned to Moh.
‘You got through the bomb scare all right, then,’ Moh said.
‘Bomb scare?’ Bernstein sounded startled. ‘All I saw was sodding Kingdom cops doing a sweep in Kentish Town. Had to take the long way round. Didn’t fancy explaining where I got all those old CC minutes.’
Central Committee minutes. That could be revealing.
‘From before –?’ Moh tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.
Bernstein shook his head. ‘Post-war stuff. Split documents.