The Porcupine Read Online Free PDF Page B

when there wasn’t a war? Why were there so many apricot trees in the countryside but never apricots in the shops? Why is there fog over the city in the summer? Why do all those people live on that waste ground beyond the eastern boulevards? The questions were not dangerous, and Peter had answered easily enough. Because they are there to protect us. Because we sell them abroad for hard currency that we need. Because there aremany factories working at full capacity. Because gypsies choose to live that way.
    Angelina was always content with the answers. That was the shock. He hadn’t been a father prodded into doubt by an innocent child’s potent questions; what stirred him was the innocent child’s passive satisfaction with responses he knew to be at best plausible evasions. Her blithe acceptance troubled him profoundly. As he lay awake, fretting in the dark, Angelina’s condition expanded until it became symptomatic of the whole country. Could a nation lose its capacity for scepticism, for useful doubt? What if the muscle of contradiction simply atrophied from lack of exercise?
    A year or so later, Peter Solinsky discovered that such fears were over-pessimistic. Sceptics and oppositionists were tactically quiet in his presence because they were roundly suspicious of him. But people did exist who wanted to try again from the beginning, who preferred facts to ideology, who wanted to establish small truths before proceeding to the larger ones. When Peter realised that there were enough such people to encourage the timid majority to stir, he felt as if the smog was lifting from his soul.
    It had all begun in a medium-sized town on the northern border with their nearest socialist ally. A river ran between the two states here, a river from which no fish had been taken for years. The trees above the town grew twisted and low, rarely putting out leaves. Prevailing winds blew a greasy, dun-coloured air across the river from another medium-sized town on the southern border of the nearest socialist ally. Children developed chest ailments from infancy; women wrapped scarves round their faces before going out to shop; doctors’ surgeries were full of burnt lungs and tortured eyes. Until one day a group of women sent aprotest to the capital. And since by chance the nearest socialist ally was passingly in disfavour for being less than fraternal towards one of its ethnic minorities, the letter to the Minister of Health turned into a small paragraph in Truth , which the next day was alluded to sympathetically by a member of the Politburo.
    So a small protest became a local movement and then a Green Party, which was permitted to exist as a sop to Gorbachev while severely instructed to concern itself with nothing but environmental matters, and preferably those which might embarrass the nearest socialist ally. Whereupon three hundred thousand people joined the new movement and started tugging at the nettle-roots of political cause and effect: from regional secretary to provincial secretary to Central Committee Department to deputy minister to minister to Politburo to presidential whim; from dead tree to living five-year plan. By the time the Central Committee realised the danger and declared membership of the Greens incompatible with Socialism and Communism, Peter Solinsky and thousands like him cared far more about their new party card than their old one. It was too late then for a purge; too late to stop Ilia Banov, that slyly telegenic ex-Communist turned leader of the Greens, from grabbing national popularity; too late to avoid the elections forced upon the socialist countries by Gorbachev; too late, as Stoyo Petkanov told the eleven-man Politburo in emergency session, to prevent the whole fucking lid from blowing off.
    Maria Solinska’s private opinion – and increasingly her opinions tended to be private – was that the Green Party was a collection of cretinous foresters, hooligan anarchists, and fascist sympathisers; that Ilia