Movement (5 page)

Out in the vestibule, portable bookstores were assembled. The Vanguard man peddled inspirations from Marx, Che, Engels, Trotsky. Friends greeted each other after long holiday absences. She recognized several feminists, a
Guerilla
reporter, the lawyer for a political refugee, a friend of a friend who wrote Young Socialist articles, a Cabbagetown teacher, the editor of an American exile magazine and several still nameless people she always saw at demonstrations.

Susan thought how her mother would cringe at all this “Communism,” would worry for her daughter. Mother had finally become reconciled that she and Guy were draft dodgers. She had stopped calling them “deserters.” She just wanted them to come home.

Ranks formed outside the church. The January winds were a cold shock. She wanted to walk with the women's contingent, so she headed for the banner reading, “In Solidarity with Our Vietnamese Sisters.”

“Did you hear the woman's speech?” grinned Hilary. “She got the biggest applause.”

“Yeah, it was the best one,” said Elizabeth. “She spoke English instead of rhetoric. She actually brought up some facts.”

They talked about the sameness. Not just the same people, but the same worn signs, “End Canadian Complicity.” The same destination, the U.S. Consulate. The same chants, “Stop the bombing; stop the war.” But the litany changed somewhat today, abridging the latest headlines, “One point peace plan; no Canadian troops.” And when three men started, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh …,” the women interrupted with, “Madame, Madame, Madame Binh, Madame Binh is going to win.”

Lesbians, Susan noticed, a lot of these feminists were lesbians. She felt the same around lesbians as she used to feel around political people. “Not tough enough.” A little scared. Did you have to be a lesbian to be a feminist? Could they tell she wasn't a lesbian?

They all crashed the Saturday afternoon shopping scene with their chants and leaflets and posters. More of the shoppers were with them than against them. Most of these good citizens just wanted to walk from Eaton's department store to Simpson's department store without a hassle. One aging wino, who had been following since the Fred Victor Mission, picked up a placard, “End U.S. Aggression,” and joined the march. By the time they reached Queen and Yonge Streets, the contingents had lost all definition. The women's group was jostled into the Evangelicals for Social Action, the NDP and the Harbord Collegiate Student Council. Susan recognized one woman and asked her where the rest of the feminist crew had gone. She shrugged her shoulders, “Who knows? It's always like this.”

“Oh, you have an American accent,” Susan said, trying to start a conversation.

“Yes, I'm afraid so. It's not a very pleasant thing to be an American.” Emily was a social worker. Her shiny white hair was pulled back into a pony tail. She had brought her teenage kids north last year. Not the stereotyped expatriate, Susan thought.

“Canada gives us much more of a chance at life,” Emily was saying. “You just can't live in the States any more. I've tried to change things. I remember marching in a Korean War protest twenty years ago.…”

“But don't you ever regret coming?” asked Susan. “Don't you miss your friends, your relatives back there?”

“Yes, but I don't regret coming. Not one bit.”

Susan wanted to tell her that she, too, was an American. That she, too, was glad she left the States. But that she did have some regrets. Before this voice would surface, the crowd surged ahead of them, onto the street.

“Good,” shouted Emily huskily, “We're taking the streets.”

She and Susan moved off the sidewalk, remaining close to the curb, wending their way through the stalled traffic on Yonge Street. People in the cars looked startled at first. Some of them began to wave.

“This must be like a three-D drive-in movie for them,” said Susan, smiling at the amused faces behind the windshields.

“See how they're smiling,” said Emily. “If this happened in the States, they'd be scowling and cursing. See, there's a difference in the countries for you, right there.”

They didn't have the streets for long before policemen and their horses ushered everyone back on the sidewalk. Susan noticed no tear gas or helicopters or bayonets. No real confrontation. However, the marchers did keep careful watch on the horses' hooves.

Some of the feminists were talking about the aggressiveness of Americans in Canada. Susan observed that many radical Americans were just as jingoistic as Republican businessmen.

“You're absolutely right,” said one arm of the Women's Place banner. “A lot of lefties think they know everything because they've struggled in America. They try to take over the Canadian Movement. I know, I'm an American, myself.”

Susan didn't divulge her nationality, wanting to leave the illusion that there were at least some Canadians in the procession.

As they walked by the cluster of stereo and camera shops near Dundas Street, a young man shouted at them, “So what do Canadians have to do with the bloody war?”

Emily instructed him that over 400 Canadian companies made parts for the U.S. Defense Department.

“Well, you gotta have a job, somehow.”

As he argued, his Newfoundland accent thickened. Susan saw that he was missing five front teeth.

“Sure,” Susan shouted, “but there are better ways to make money.” Later, all she could remember about him was his missing teeth.

“Stop the bombing; stop the war. Stop the bombing; stop the war.” A sound truck proceeded them, an electronic cheerleader. “Stop the bombing; stop the war.”

Susan felt an odd loneliness in all this community spirit. Once she lost her friends in the crowd, she had walked for blocks in silent solidarity. Slightly disconnected. Maybe that's why she had started talking with Emily. But after a while, after they had exchanged enough impressions about the war and expatriation and Canadians and Americans, Susan needed to move away from the echo. She began to listen to the other conversations around her.

An old man in a dark suit was arguing with a scraggly graduate student.

“Don't you think you're a little presumptuous, telling the North Vietnamese how to negotiate—all this one point peace plan stuff?”

“But listen, a negotiated settlement with peace keeping forces is just a stall for Thieu. The only way for the country to be run by its citizens is for the U.S. to get the hell out of there.”

In front of Susan, a two-year old cried in her mother's arms.

“Why don't you take her for a while, Steve?”

He exchanged his placard for his kid. “OK Sugar, you wanta come to Daddy?”

A small boy carried a homemade sign, “Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution.” His mother held her mink hat down against the winds.

Two freaks were filming the march from a car near Queen's Park. “It looks great,” one of them shouted. “The march must be a mile long.”

Emily had found another companion. “You know, I did this stupid thing. I wore tennis shoes and my feet are absolutely freezing. You'd think I'd know better after all these years. I've been marching since the Korean War.”

A small, red-faced man was talking about Belfast bombings with a young woman. As Susan moved closer to listen, the women stared at her suspiciously. She warned the man to lower his voice, mumbling something about CIA agents. So much for solidarity.

The procession was approaching the American Consulate. Their litany grew louder. “One point peace plan; U.S. out now.” The signs rocked above their heads. “End Canadian Complicity.” “Stop Phallic Imperialism.”

The big, white Consulate building was guarded by fifteen pallid policemen. Four cops in a row with regulation small moustaches. Susan thought of her brother Bill's toy soldiers in their slim, dashing patriotism. A small crowd, including Emily, marched in a circle between the toy soldiers and the TV cameras. They all raised their fists each time they passed the cameras. The rest of the demonstrators waited. (Later, Susan recalled a man watching from an upstairs window in the Consulate. Perhaps that was another time, another place. Her memory for marches wasn't as clear as Emily's.) The sound truck arrived with giant amplifiers. The MC explained that the march had been a cooperative effort and that representatives of ten different groups would be speaking.

Susan checked her watch and decided to leave quietly. She didn't seek out Emily or her other feminist friends to say goodbye. She might have to explain that she was going home to cook supper. She walked briskly to the subway as the Evangelical for Social Action was shouting, “Nixon may have postponed the bombing of North Vietnam, but the South is experiencing more bombing.…” Susan knew, everybody knew, that the fires in Cambodia and Laos would rage long after any Vietnam treaty. This was just like the last march and the one before that.

Meanwhile, in the faraway land of power, Richard Nixon prepared for his million dollar inaugural ball. And in the faraway land of bombings, Indochinese women watched their children being ripped to shreds. Here in the land of official observers, Susan pretended to serve in the last peace march.

Dark Midnight

Damn organization won't pay your expenses to rent a car, so you have to wait 20 minutes in the drizzling dark for the Greyhound, penniless because the ticket clerk won't accept personal checks. Besides which, you have lost your tape recorder and you are surrounded in line by crew cuts on their way back to Fort Lewis. It will take hours to get to Olympia. It will take all the patience you have. You scramble for a seat up front, pull out your book and discover that the front seat has no reading lamp.

“So as not to blind the driver,” says the woman next to you who is herself actually blind. Can you complain to a blind woman that you can't read in the dark? Learn braille, gringa.

“Travelling is such an opportunity,” she is saying. “You can learn something from everyone.” A business student, married to another blind business student.

You are listening.

“It's an apprenticeship program for IBM with almost guaranteed job placement. You don't know what that means for a blind person.”

How does she know you are listening?

“It pays well, and we have a nice little apartment. Maybe we'll be able to have kids in a few years.”

You want to ask her how she opens cans and fixes soup, let alone how she plans to raise children.

She reads your mind, skilled without lamps as she is. “Go ahead, ask questions if you like.”

But you have run out of questions, even for the Governor tomorrow. Dreadful, leachy job, this lobbying.

“A lobbyist, how interesting,” she says with polite curiosity as though she were talking to someone as fascinating as a repossessor of television sets.

“For what are you lobbying? That is the correct term, ‘lobbying,' isn't it?”

You are silent, paralyzed by her voice. High-pitched. The key of a bottle bobbing against a buoy in the night sea.

“He's doing a fine job, I hear,” she says to fill the void.

You know by this that she is a much nicer person than you, more considerate. But you're annoyed by her political naïveté. Doesn't she know about the cutbacks in social services?

“Oh, yes, that's very interesting,” she says.

Interesting, shit lady, you think. It's crucial. The Governor is a practicing fundamentalist American. Taking money from social services and giving tax concessions to businesses like IBM. Why is she working for IBM? Just because she's blind, does that make it OK? Don't patronize her. Argue. You know you should argue, but you are too tired to find anything that will make sense.

You tell her, “yes, it's interesting.”

The crew cuts have left and it's only twenty minutes to Olympia. Just enough time to make it to the hotel bar before it closes at 1:00 a.m. Just enough time to order a gin and tonic, take it up to your room and phone the Greyhound in Seattle to see if they've found your tape recorder at the fucking ticket counter. Thirty more minutes of conversation. Only seven years in this business and already you've run dry. To think that you chose this job because you liked talking to people.

“Thanks for the chat,” she says sincerely. “If you don't mind, I'll just rest a while.” She leans back on the headrest, her eyes wide open to the darkness.

“Yes,” you say. “Sure.”

Maybe you'll make it a double martini. The Governor's secretary better not cut the interview short. You pray, like you haven't prayed for anything in ages, that you make it to the hotel bar before 1:00 a.m.

IV

The Right Hand on the
Day of Judgment

“What do you think of the piece from Zaragoza?” Susan asked. “Will you give me the OK? Can we count on Tony to keep his mouth shut?”

Harry shook his head, “I've been trying to decide just that, all morning.”

Susan could never tell which was misshapen—Harry or his old gabardine suits. A proper Charlie Chaplin, he was, with manila envelopes and foolscap carbon sheets hanging out of his cracked brown leather briefcase. No, more like James Stewart playing the absent-minded diplomat, bumbling through social banalities, but driven by political commitment. He hadn't bothered to comb the grey wisps over his baldness this morning. She didn't know exactly how old Harry was. Somewhere in his late fifties, if he had fought in Spain.

“Remember Tony's antics in Uruguay,” said Susan, “flaunting his press card. He was lucky to escape intact. We may be spending a lot of money for him to holiday in prison.”

“Yes, yes,” nodded Harry. “We probably should call him home now.”

She played with the coffee bean beads hanging to the waist of her black pullover. The bean beads—being cheap, a tribute to the Brazilian Liberation Fund and still stylish—were among her more successful compromises to fashion. She concentrated on Harry's careful words.