A Ripple from the Storm

“Yes, I suppose so.’

‘But man, it takes such a long time to read. I thought this was the whole book but there are two others when I’ve finished this.’

On the open page half a dozen phrases had been underlined in pencil, with definitions scribbled opposite.

‘Your eloquence would have taken the king of Prussia’s consent by storm,’ she read. And in pencil: ‘eloquence: the power of speaking with grace.’

‘I don’t even understand half the words,’ he said.

‘But Tommy, you shouldn’t read books unless you really want to.’

‘I’ve never read books before, except just adventure stories. Jasmine said this book explained why there was a Russian Revolution; she said if I read this I would understand about Russia before the Revolution. But perhaps there’s a shorter book somewhere?’

‘Don’t you enjoy it?’

His eyes lit into enthusiasm. ‘Oh yes, I do. But you don’t see what I’m saying, Matty. I watched Jasmine the other day, reading. I thought about the way she reads books. It was just another book to her, Because she’s read so many books, don’t you see? I asked her about the book she was reading and she said: It’s a useful description of reactionary circles in Paris. Then she said: But it’s a bad book. Don’t you see, I wouldn’t know if it was bad or not. It’s just a book. When I read this stuff here, I mean about all these generals and maids-in-waiting and the courtiers, it makes me feel …’ He hesitated, looking angry and stubborn. ‘What I mean is, I couldn’t say: This is a useful description.’ He was suddenly scarlet with anger. ‘Don’t you see, it’s just snobbish when you and Jasmine say things like that. Well, anyway, that’s what I think. All the time I’m reading this, I feel – mixed up in it. I mean to say, if I were there, I’d be thinking just what all these generals and old ladies think. I’d be the same as them. And that makes me confused. Because they were all a bunch of reactionaries, weren’t they? And this girl, Natasha, I like her.’

‘But why shouldn’t you like her?’

‘She was the daughter of an aristocrat, wasn’t she? So why should I like her?’

‘But, Tommy, suppose someone wrote a novel about you. The Africans might say: Why should I like that reactionary white man, Tommy Brown? But it would help them to understand the way things are, do you see?’

No, I don’t see. That’s it,’ he said, ‘I just don’t see. And sometimes when I tell you and Jasmine and Piet what I’m feeling, you have a smile on your faces, and I know you’re thinking: Tommy’s just a stupid boy.’

‘But I haven’t got a smile on my face,’ said Martha. ‘I don’t know why you think everything’s easy for us either. The thing is, now we’re communists we’ve all got to go on learning for the rest of our lives.’

‘I can’t say what I mean,’ he said. He put up his burned fist and began banging at the top of his head where the tufts of hair stood up. ‘You say: “We’ve got to go on learning,” but I don’t even know half the words I see.’

‘But we’ll all help you, we’ll all help each other.’

‘Do you know what I think, Matty? Well, I know what you are going to say when I tell you. But it’s this. I don’t think any people brought up here, white people, can ever be good communists. It’s different for people like the RAF, because they weren’t living here all their lives, and so everything comes easy to them, but I don’t think we can change ourselves.’

‘But we are changing all the time.’

‘Well, all right. I’ll try.’ He pushed the book towards her. ‘If you tell me what the words mean then I won’t have to look them up in a dictionary.’

They bent together over the book, but almost at once a large sheet of cardboard slid over the print. It was bordered with black an inch thick, and it was headed ‘Homage to Heroes’. Solly Cohen, grinning heavily, stood beyond the piles of pamphlets on the table, hands in his pockets.

A short while before, at a Progressive Club lecture on the necessity for switching support from Michailovitch to Tito, for this was before Michailovitch’s collaboration with the Germans had been officially confirmed, Solly had come with a group of local Yugoslavs and stood at the back of the hall chanting steadily, every time Tito was mentioned: ‘Communist propaganda, communist propaganda.’ At the end of the meeting, when the chairman wound up, Solly had leaped up to shout over and over again: ‘Down with Stalin the Assassin.’

In the interval Allied policy had switched: Tito was now officially principal guerrilla leader in Yugoslavia, and Michailovitch a dubious collaborationist. Martha therefore faced Solly triumphantly.

But he seemed unconscious that she had any right to. He indicated the large black-bordered cardboard and said: ‘I’ve brought this for the exhibition.’

Martha examined it. There were on it the names of a couple of hundred Red Army officers, none of which she had heard of. ‘What are you up to now?’ she asked.

‘Short list of Red Army officers murdered by Stalin,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you hang them up too? They died in a good cause.’

She handed him back the cardboard and said: ‘You mean you’ve gone to all the trouble of printing these names just to come here and be irritating?’ She was genuinely astounded. Solly continued to grin: he was perfectly satisfied, it seemed, with the reaction he was getting. It was the look of satisfied malice, which he wore now whenever he encountered ‘the group’ in public, which made it easy for Martha to dismiss him entirely.

‘You’re so damned childish,’ she said.

He said: ‘You aren’t going to hang that list? You haven’t room?’ He took a rapid glance around the exhibition and said: ‘You could take down one of those six pictures of Father Stalin to make room for it.’

Tommy Brown shouted: ‘Capitalist propaganda,’ and Solly, delighted, roared with laughter. He sobered to say: ‘The truth is what I want. As a Marxist, I want truth.’

‘Such as, that Tito was an invention of the communist party?’

He waved this aside, and said: ‘This is an exhibition of the Red Army, and I want some of the hundreds of Red Army officers murdered by Stalin to get some recognition, that’s all.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Martha. ‘You’re corrupted by capitalist propaganda.’ And now Solly had got what he had come to get, apparently; for he again burst into peals of laughter and went laughing to the door. There he turned and made a low bow towards the picture of Stalin nearest to him: ‘Salaams, Lord, Salaams.’ He went out.

Tommy and Martha dismissed the existence of Solly with a contemptuous shrug. Martha tore up the piece of cardboard and, looking for a place to deposit the pieces, found a large packing-case under the table. It was covered in heavy oiled paper, and full of pamphlets called: ‘Fascist Vipers Crushed Under Stalin’s Heel’. She opened one and read: ‘As the Fascist Scum leave their deposits of filth over the sacred soil of our Russian Motherland, our Heroic Russian Soldiers march on, armed with the unerring faith of true patriots and the inspiration of the Glorious Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its leader Comrade Stalin!’ She grimaced humorously and looked at Tommy who, however, was not humorous.

There you are,’ he said, again in despair. ‘That’s what I mean. All that motherland stuff, it simply makes me want to laugh, that’s all.’

Some people had come in and were handing their money over. Martha unconsciously slid the pamphlet out of sight. Tommy assisted her in covering the packing-case over, and said: ‘Jasmine had them on sale. Everyone who came in saw them and laughed, so she hid them.’ He looked guilty. Martha realized she was feeling guilty too. ‘After all, it stands to reason the Russians feel more strongly about the war than we do,’ she said, weakly.

Tommy said: ‘But they say scum. I mean the Germans are human beings. They’re soldiers.’ He added, hastily: ‘Though of course the Russian communist party knows best, doesn’t it? Comrade Stalin must know what he’s doing.’

‘We’ve got four packing-cases of pamphlets from Russia,’ said Martha. ‘What are we going to do with them? Well, we’ll bring it up at the group meeting and take a formal decision on policy.’

At this point Bill Bluett came in, back in his uniform.

Tommy produced the doubtful pamphlet and showed it to him. He read it, dead-pan, until Martha said: ‘What do you think? I think it’s silly,’ when he reacted instantly with: ‘Naughty naughty Russians, so crude, aren’t they?’

‘It’s no use selling pamphlets that make people laugh.’

‘They’d laugh out of the other side of their mouths if they had the Germans here.’

‘Yes, but we haven’t.’

‘Well, we’ll bring it up at the meeting and Daddy Anton will make a decision for us.’

Martha, confused, for Bill had always seemed to have respect for Anton, said: ‘Why, what’s wrong with Anton?’

Bill said, grinning: ‘But what on earth could be wrong with Daddy Anton?’ There was a personal implication in it, and she demanded: ‘What’s that in aid of?’ He shrugged and said airily: ‘Well, if you’ll move, I’ll take over now. You should be at the meeting, and you’d better be quick because it’s going to rain.’

‘You mean, I might get my feet wet?’

‘That’s right.’ But now, as he usually did, he gave in, and his aggression disappeared in a half-cajoling, half-comradely smile. ‘Run along, Comrade Matty.’

Tommy took up War and Peace and Bill pounced on it. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘why not T. S. Eliot?’

‘What’s the matter with War and Peace?’

‘You are a bourgeois, aren’t you? Why not T. S. Eliot while you’re about it.’ He began reciting: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.’