Endless Politics

Bodyguard…. bodyguard, one of the older men at the big table repeated, a former journalist, Abdul Razak later revealed. There was no word in Tiggrinyah for the term. Back home the leaders must have had them on all sides, making themselves impregnable. Opposition cells were many, especially in the émigré communities. Haile the handyman led one here that met monthly. For meetings with his brothers Khartoum was the place for Haile; there could be no return to Eritrea under the current regime. In his mid-forties, Djamel had recently embarked on a migration agent course. Among the other motivations, he needed to get himself away from the ceaseless politics at the café tables, Djamel said. One recalled the old royalists in the neighbourhood in early days, the sober men sitting close in the kitchen chairs, carved features and speech sharp as a knife-blade. Chika Radivojsa with the photograph of young King Petar on his wall. A Croat was not permitted to cross the threshold at Chika Rad’s, all in the neighbourhood knew; the second wave of immigrants raised by the communists were highly suspicious too; callow youth ignorant and brainwashed. What a fate it would be in that house to have a daughter abandoned by a gay Orthodox priest; they could never have told old man Radivojsa. Reading Svetlana in the window seat of the café among that congenial company an extended segment arrived of an old Soviet mother’s grief at her teen son’s suicide. The boy had imbibed a death and transcendence wish from the Russian soul of the era; at one point the bereaved mother blaming her own mother for it. – You Tolstoyan monster…. you raised us to be freaks just like you…. At one point through the reading two young women either side of the street passed with half-sized blankets wrapped around their shoulders and heads like peasants used going up the hill with the herd. Never mind a scarf, you needed better in the biting iron cold. Since beginning on this third volume of Alexievich she goes in the bag each day a constant companion. Startling voices orchestrated from a recent past that has been left far behind in this remarkable acceleration. During the morning there had been a new London lit. zine briefly investigated, the most recent piece opening with an erection: – a bureaucrat at his desk interviewing a woman…. From the opening line the reader’s attention seized in the way editors favoured and writing classes taught now.

NB. Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich, p. 145.

Lenin had termed Tolstoy “the mirror of the Russian Revolution,” p. 146