The Persian Price by Evelyn Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

martyrs. There was a national scandal and world condemnation of the massacre at Kent State. Peters said nothing. He spent ten days in hospital and then returned to the campus. It was not the same and never would be. The limping figure, his head thrust a little forward as he tried to match the quicker walk of his students, was no longer part of Peters’s life.
    There would be no more evenings spent debating, no suppers eaten in Barnes’s house where the talk went on into the night. When the press talked of martyrdom it was a cliché which Peters dismissed with contempt. They hadn’t known Barnes or loved him. Only Peters and the group which had been close to Andrew Barnes knew the extent of the crime that capitalism had committed. For most of the students at Kent that day in June would leave a scar, mental or physical. But most would go out into the world and be absorbed into the society they hadn’t been able to change.
    This was not for Peters. If Andrew Barnes had shown him the meaning of warmth and disinterested love for his fellows, the National Guardsman who took aim at him and fired had taught Peters what it meant to hate. And to hate with a single-minded, pitiless intensity that gravitated naturally to the ultimate extreme of which the gentle Barnes would never have approved. Only violence could hope to overcome the organized violence of modern society. Absolute ruthlessness and total dedication to the cause were the requisites of revolutionaries if they were to be effective in the struggle.
    By the time Peters graduated he was a leading member of the extremist Marxist cell that existed within the student organization. He was a marked agitator. Without saying goodbye to his parents, he took a plane down to Mexico. After that he shut his mind to them completely. He never felt an exile. He lived and moved among people like himself; dedicated, efficient, perfecting themselves for the work in hand. He learned to kill, to use explosives, to travel long distances under rough conditions. He was sent to Chile where he did valuable work, organizing sabotage and leading a brief guerilla expedition against an army camp. He stayed long enough to see Allende triumph and he was in Germany when he heard that the brief Marxist reign was over and the oppressors had gained power. In Bonn he and Madeleine Labouchère hi-jacked a Lufthansa 707, killing a steward and injuring three of the passengers. As a result of negotiations, four Palestinian terrorists were released from jail and he and the girl were given a safe conduct to Syria.
    He stood by the apartment window for a moment; the sun was setting fire to the roofs of Tehran. There was no view but the streets and the blocks of buildings. An ugly city, built on a barren plain.
    He had grown to love the real Iran, with its infinite variety; the lush northern slopes of the Elburz mountains leading down to the Caspian shore; the incredible carpet of spring flowers round Kerman, which had inspired the carpet weavers for a thousand years; the aridity of the Zagros mountains, broken by little green valleys and clear streams, which contrast had fired the poetic soul of ancient Persia and produced immortal verse; the brutal heat of the yellow deserts and the almost spiritual uplift occasioned by the beauty of the mosques at Isphahan; the marvels at Persepolis the city of the great Darius where he had helped with excavations. This was the land that drew pilgrims from the Western world, eager to sample the fruits of the ancient culture and exquisite visual arts of the great Aryan race that had been both conqueror and civilizing influence in the Eastern world. As a people they were proud, treacherous, cunning and deeply hospitable; the inequality of life between the rich and the poor was as harsh as anything he had witnessed even in Central America. He had thought himself immune to misery and disease after seeing the plight of the Indians; it was the gross display of wealth in