Liberation Movements by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online Page B

of cigarettes and settled in front of his little black-and-white television. That’s when he saw the story. Earlier in the day, members of the Red Army Faction and the Heidelberg Socialist Patients’ Collective took over the West German Embassy in Stockholm. In retaliation for an attempted recovery by Swedish police, they brought the West German military attaché, Baron Andreas von Mirchbach, to a window and put bullets through his head, his leg, and his chest. Police, stripped down to their underwear to show they were unarmed, dragged the body away.
    The newscaster, in order to help clarify the groups’ aims, quoted Red Army Faction founder Ulrike Meinhof from a statement she had made the previous year from Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart:
    Faced with the transnational organization of capital, the military alliances with which U.S. imperialism encompasses the world, the cooperation of the police and secret services, the international organization of the dominant elite within the sphere of power of U.S. imperialism, the response from our side, the side of the proletariat, is the struggle of the revolutionary classes, the liberation movements of the Third World, and the urban guerrilla in the metropoles of imperialism. That is proletarian internationalism.
    Gavra wondered how anyone, after listening to that, could be optimistic about international affairs.

Katja
     
     
    I’ve been three days with as many hours sleep, but only now do I feel it. Climbing out of the taxi, the hot sun makes me momentarily blind, and the airport is suddenly replaced by a field of dizzying sunspots. When I reach back to the taxi for support, it’s already gone, and I stumble into a cloud of hot exhaust.
    I’m trying to focus through the fatigue, clutching my small leather purse and counting its contents in my head: a new external passport, some money, and a roll of audiotape.
    At the TisAir desk I wait behind a young couple who squeeze each other’s hands as they wait for the clerk to stamp their tickets. It seems to take a long time, but I’m not sure. Because time has become strange. Until only a week ago—yes, Wednesday, 23 April—I was faced with the regular minutiae: the sour husband, the paperwork-clogged desk in the militia office, the condescension from my workmates. A frustrating life, being the only woman working homicide, but a simple one to understand.
    Now I’m at the counter, explaining to the pert blonde with a blue TisAir cap that I would like to go to Istanbul on the seven o’clock flight.
    She scans a list on a clipboard. “Will you be bringing luggage?”
    “Just me.”
    She wields a pen. “And you are?”
    “Katja Drdova.” I hand over my crisp passport as evidence.
    The ticket costs more koronas than I expect, but I count out the money without argument, nodding when she explains that I’ll have to also purchase a visa in the Istanbul airport. My skin is beginning to tingle. The exhaustion affects my bones, or it feels that way, as if dirt has wedged its way into my joints. And my senses are becoming acute—an ill woman behind me breathes with the intensity of a tractor engine.
    Ticket in hand, I cross the bright tile floor to a small corridor past the pay phones to the bathrooms. I splash water on my face and look in the mirror, prodding the corners of my eyes with a fingertip.
    Old.
    But I’m only twenty-four.
    Given the heavy lids and shallow creases across my brow, it’s an understandable mistake.
    I consider calling Aron from one of those pay phones. He’ll return to an empty house tonight, and, though it won’t be so strange, after a while he’ll worry. He doesn’t deserve that. But what could I tell him? That I’m going to Turkey unexpectedly? That’s not something people just do. People just don’t do this.
    My hands tremble when I show my ticket to the uniformed border guard, but he doesn’t seem to notice. At the gate, I ask a fat man with a little red star on his lapel for a cigarette. He