Free Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser Page B

are to guard the prisoner constantly, we become, in effect, prisoners ourselves; it is an irony my comrades may not appreciate. There is the element of hazard, of course, to spice the days—admittedly, we feel a spasm of apprehension whenever we hear a siren, or whenever some passerby seems to gaze too long at our house—but that order of hazard is so much a commonplace of our lives that, for most of us, it is no longer really a stimulant. We either will, or will not, be captured. As propositions go, that one is hardly sufficient to occupy the mind through these hours of tedium.
    In the group photograph, before we destroyed it, Alex was the third from the left; smiling wickedly, in his outsize sombrero, he could have been the villain in a spaghetti western. (It was our early,
bandito
period, before the purge, before we went underground.) It may be significant that, on the day of our first serious raid, he managed to have urgent business elsewhere. It may be significant, too, that the raid was not a strategic success, that we very quickly found it advisable to abort it. We may have had insufficient discipline, in those days. The issue has never been wholly resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, but it was taken into account—perhaps too much so—in our eventual judgement of Alex. It had not entered our minds, then, that we might be making a mistake, overreacting.
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    There was no coherent intention, at first, to form a cell: it was more as if the cell had always been there, an empty space in history, waiting for us to come along, discover it, take possession of it, fill it. It seemed to exist before we knew what it was, or what it could become … But it may be premature, absurd, to linger on this, to ask: what happened to us all, how did it happen, by what route have we come here, to this dim and barricaded room, these policies? It is not a subject we discuss often among ourselves, having little taste for nostalgia, preferring to speak of more impersonal things, specifics of action, points of theory, our quotidian preoccupations. Introspection is not encouraged, nor should it be. What do I know of my comrades, or they of me?—only everything that matters: who is competent to do what, who can be trusted, whose thinking has evolved to what stage, in which direction. Of the rest, the private histories, there is occasionally a glimpse, no more: a story told for some instructive purpose, a confession, a self-criticism, sometimes—very rarely—an incursion of something like wistfulness, the merest glimmer of sadness, regret. Such moments go by swiftly, driven out by the urgencies we deal in. But the temptation to remember the irrelevant is difficult to resist at times, and the days are long, and in our present isolation it is easier than before to drift carelessly into reminiscence, the old miasma of a life long since renounced, abandoned, almost forgotten, never completely forgotten …
    Somewhere it begins. Somewhere (after you’re already moving, on your way, too late to get off, go back, even if you wanted to) it dawns on you that the journey is not an excursion tour, a holiday, that it’s not a round-trip ticket you have. That can be exhilarating—and dangerous. And it is true that in the early phases of that journey our liberty, the sense of
release,
was always teetering on the edge of hysteria. It was the hysteria encountered, from time to time, on shipboard: a sanctuary into which the Real World may not venture. The wars and punishments go on elsewhere, in other coordinates of time and attention. A treaty is confirmed with one’s ticket, an amnesty for all us shabby travellers—the old women wrapped in furs and Central European dialects, the mothers of yowling infants, the beaten fathers, movie-mag addicts, guileless hippies in happy dopehaze, itinerant workers, eager juicers, seducers and seduced—the whole kit-n-caboodle of us abruptly reprieved, pardoned,