Genesis by Jim Crace Page A

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.

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    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