My Own Revolution (2 page)

Still, even the stupid stuff — getting away with stupid stuff — feels good.

We arrive at our big, blocky school, where the statue of the dictator Vladimir Lenin hovers over everyone. The building is pitch-dark. Even the janitors have gone home.

Long ago, the new moon set, leaving the whole night black. The distant streetlight barely illuminates the English words
LONG LIVE THE USSR!
The initials stand for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They were painted last year when an important guy from England visited. Seeing that slogan, I’ve always imagined cleverly altering those initials. A simple change would do wonders. Now we’re about to make that change.

I unscrew the lid of the paint. The night fills with a turpentiney smell, as if a whole forest has been squeezed into the pot.

Danika dips in the brush and stirs the paint, glancing over her shoulder.

I glance, too. Is someone lurking in the shadows? Could there really be someone? Is there really ever anyone?

After fifteen years of Communist rule, Adam Uherco’s father escaped to America. He had to go, just couldn’t stand this place anymore. Afterward, the party punished Adam’s mother. Even though she was a lawyer, they sent her to do janitorial work at the car factory. Because she worked a long night shift, Adam hardly saw her. Even though he was a few years older than me — a stocky guy with close-cut hair — I remember Adam’s anger well. I remember the way he painted anti-Soviet slogans on the school walls. He wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t. In school he refused to wear his red scarf. He spoke out. He wouldn’t stop speaking out. That is, until he got sent to the insane asylum.

And tonight I’m about to act like Adam. This could all go really wrong. But now that Adam’s locked up, someone has to carry on. This is my own revolution.

“Let’s do it,” I urge Danika. “Get it over with.”

Her hand shaking, she dabs out the
S,
dabs again, then gives the brush to me.

I look around once more. I check in with the drumbeat of my heart. All is well. With a quick swipe, I obliterate the
R.

Danika giggles.

I stand back, the brush dripping. Now the slogan reads:
LONG LIVE THE US !
A big splotch of green replaces the missing letters.

All the closed gates open now. The fences fall. It’s like stepping into a wide green field of freedom. It’s like being Gypsies all over again. Squiggles of joy dance through me.

Stepping farther back, I aim my camera. I focus, holding steady, while the lens gathers the little bit of light.

“Let’s
go
!” Danika says. “Someone’s coming.”

“Just a minute.”

“I hear them — I hear footsteps.”

But I keep calm until the flash bursts and the image is safely inside.

This time, we run, our own footsteps pounding into the night. The camera knocks against my chest, where those squiggles still dance. We’ve left behind the paint, the brush, and our shocking new slogan.

In the morning before school, a crowd mills around the wall. Danika and I pretend to stare like everyone else. Mr. Babicak, our principal, stands nearby, his arms folded, his thick glasses set firmly on his nose.

I glance down at my shoes. There is one tiny drop of green paint on the left toe. Damn. I should have worn the other pair. I sense Danika breathing beside me, giving off a scent of mint and flowery shampoo. I check to see that her shoes are clean.

Mr. Babicak is watching each boy’s face. He thinks a girl would never do such a thing. He’s looking for guilt. I try to look surprised. I try to look outraged.

Behind me, Karel and Emil giggle. One of them pokes me in the ribs.

Just as Miss Komar is writing an equation on the blackboard, someone clomps down the hallway. Pretty Miss Komar stops writing, her hand hovering, the chalk trembling ever so slightly.

Mr. Babicak enters the classroom. He stands for a moment, his eyes roving back and forth.

I slump down, push a pencil up the desk, let it roll back down. I push it . . .

At last Mr. Babicak says, “Comrades, my dear comrades, someone has betrayed the revolution.” He pauses to let the words settle. I peek up to see his eyes landing on one face after another.

Miss Komar sits down behind her desk, sheltering behind a pile of books.

I wonder if Mr. Babicak has visited Danika’s classroom. But then again, he’s not looking for a girl. I stare at the kids in front of me, at the way the Young Pioneer scarves make neat red triangles down their backs. Like it or not, we all have to put up with being Young Pioneers.

I tuck my shoes under the chair. The spot of paint is so small. And yet it’s the exact color. . . . Mr. Babicak’s eyes meet mine. His stare lingers. I hold my eyes steady while my insides riot. For I am Janosik, eternally courageous, hero of the oppressed.

He comes over to my desk, looks under the chair.

Silence. A long moment.

Then he stands, points with his finger like the barrel of a tiny gun. “You,” he says, pointing. “To my office.”

As I walk down the hall behind Mr. Babicak, I try to guess where his invisible footprints are landing. I want to put my own feet exactly there. And only there.

Mr. Babicak slams the door and sits down at his desk. Behind him, the window glows with nice yellow springtime light. Yellow isn’t right for my mood, but the window can’t help it.

I take a seat in the straight-backed chair.

Mr. Babicak’s thick glasses magnify his eyes. He says, “You have betrayed the people.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. When Janosik got caught robbing the rich, he was chained to the wall of a dark cell to await trial.

Mr. Babicak touches his fingertips together, making a steeple with his hands.

I do the same with my own hands. Dust motes swirl in the light falling from the window.

Danika, it seems, will not be brought into this. Blessedly not.

“For the revolution to succeed, Patrik, all of us need to pull together. If one comrade pulls in the opposite direction”— he jerks his hands apart —“the chain breaks.”

I hang my head. For all I know, I’ll be demoted to a lower grade. I’ll be sent away. I’ll become the new Adam Uherco. Or maybe I’ll only get suspended. If I get kicked out, at least I won’t have to do schoolwork.

At least Danika has no paint on her shoes.

Mr. Babicak gets to his feet. Leaning on the knuckles of both hands, he hovers over me. “Just where do you and your family stand, Patrik?” He asks as if he’s genuinely curious, but trouble creeps beneath the words.

The room grows still. Even the dust motes hang suspended. “We’re strong party supporters, sir. I was just playing a prank.”

Mr. Babicak sits back down. He swivels in his chair, twirling a fountain pen between his fingers. He pins me with his gaze.

I swallow hard. My parents are not party supporters. Not at all. Though only close friends know that about them.

“I certainly hope it was just a prank,” Mr. Babicak says, then swivels some more.

“I will never do such a thing again, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Your punishment,” Mr. Babicak says, tossing the pen onto the desk, where it clatters, then reaches a dead stop, “will be to stay after school for a week. Every day you will copy
The Communist Manifesto.
You will start tomorrow.”

Janosik was tortured on the rack.

“Before you go home today,” Mr. Babicak goes on, “come back to pick up a note to your father. You must return it with his signature.”

Janosik was then hanged on the gallows.

Coming out of school, in the shadow of Lenin’s statue, I whisper to Danika, “I got caught.”

Her eyes widen. Eyes as blue as the sky behind them. “Now what?”

“Imprisonment. The Gulag.”

“No . . .”

“Almost. Forced labor. Copying Karl Marx for five days.”

“Oh, you poor thing.”

The
S
and the
R
have both been painted back on, the wet paint shining, the oily smell stinking up the air. Hand drawn, the letters look clumsy.

“The slogan is so stupid now,” Danika says, gazing away as if she has no interest.

In my bedroom, I slit open Mr. Babicak’s letter to Tati. It explains that I vandalized a Communist Party slogan at school. That I am to be punished.

I want to hold a flame to this note. I want to burn it into just a black smudge. Instead, I uncap my fountain pen and forge my father’s signature.

After school the next day, Mr. Babicak leads me to a small, dusty room off his office. On the desk lies
The Communist Manifesto.
He hands me a stack of lined newsprint and a fountain pen, then leaves, banging the door shut.

I pull out the wooden chair, clattering the legs loudly. Then I rock back and forth on the uneven legs. Outside, I can hear the shouts of kids playing soccer.

I uncap the fountain pen and draw a caricature of Mr. Babicak — beady eyes behind the thick glasses. The ink bleeds into the newsprint.

Opening
The Communist Manifesto,
I begin to copy:

When Janosik died, they say that all nature went into mourning. The babbling brooks became silent, and the animals of the forest stilled in a sudden hush.

Out the window, I see the statue of Lenin. Underneath, a plaque reads:
Vladimir Lenin, 1870–1924, Leader of the October 1917 Revolution.
Every now and then, I look up and think of how Lenin symbolizes all that pins us down. How it’s because of him that the heavy boots of the Communist Party trod upon us. Because of him that people like Mrs. Zeman can keep kids from having fun. Because of him that I’m copying this crap.

I daydream about pissing on him.

“Why are you so late?” Mami asks me. Her blond hair — with little strips of gray — is wound back in a bun. She’s hung her nurse’s cap on the peg but still wears the white uniform, the clunky white shoes. “You should have been home hours ago.”

“I’m working on a project. With Mr. Noll. Doing a special report. I’m studying the ancient Greeks.”

“Really?” She lifts her eyebrows.

I nod, then ask, “How was the clinic?”

Immediately, her eyes glow. “A baby came in very sick. But it was a simple matter of dehydration. With some proper fluids, that little thing was as good as new.”

I match her smile. I feel bad about lying to her, but if I tell the truth about my punishment, she’ll tell Tati. The two of them will start up the talk about getting out of here, of finding a way to escape Czechoslovakia.

I kind of like that talk. It sets me daydreaming about living in the West. Tati has an aunt in Pennsylvania who owns a gas station. When I was little, I thought Pennsylvania was
Transylvania,
home of Dracula. But it’s a place in America. Whenever my parents daydream about escaping, it’s always this aunt’s gas station they talk about.

I daydream about wearing blue jeans and drinking Coca-Cola. If I were in America, I could play Beatles music all day long.

But my parents’ escape talk is only frustrating. It never goes anywhere.

Each afternoon, I copy the
Manifesto.

At the end of the day, I stand up and give the finger to Lenin.

Copying this crap makes me yearn to go to America. I’ll even pump gas if I have to. In America people say whatever they want. They even talk bad about President Lyndon B. Johnson, and no one knocks them down for it.

On the last day, I come to the final words:

I lay down my pen, then pick it up again.

Because I’m pretty sure that Mr. Babicak will never read this, I change the words around:
Let Mr. Babicak tremble at the sight of me. . . .

I carry the completed pages to his office. He’s outside the door, locking up. As though he’s planned to go away and leave me forgotten in the empty school.

When I hold out the stack of newsprint with its blots of ink, Mr. Babicak rifles through it. He hands it all back, saying, “I hope you’ve learned from this little exercise, Patrik.”

“Yes, sir.” I hold the paper close, as if it’s precious. I hope my punishment has satisfied him. I hope that now he’ll forget about me.

“You are dismissed,” he says curtly. He says nothing about having a good evening.

There’s a waste bin by the front door. I check to make sure that Babicak isn’t around. Then, as though I am throwing a basketball through the hoop, I jump up and dump in my version of
The Communist Manifesto.