The Porcupine by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

for party members? Did they conform to the will of the majority?’
    Petkanov threw down the newspaper. ‘Journalists are whores. I prefer my own whores.’
    The Prosecutor General found these exchanges frustrating but useful. He needed to learn his opponent, to feel him, to discover how to predict his unpredictabilities. So he continued, in a pedantically reasonable tone, ‘Thereare differences of category, you know. Perhaps you should read Free Times on your trial. It does not take the obvious position.’
    ‘I could spare myself the trouble and pour a bucket of shit over my head instead.’
    ‘You don’t want to understand, do you?’
    ‘Solinsky, you have no idea how this discussion wearies me. We considered all this decades ago and came to the correct conclusions. Even your father agreed, after spinning like a top for several months. You have given him my warm greetings?’
    ‘The term “free newspaper” doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?’
    Petkanov sighed melodramatically, as if the Prosecutor General were arguing flat-earth theory. ‘It’s a contradiction. All newspapers belong to some party, some interest. Either the capitalists or the people. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.’
    ‘There are newspapers which are owned by the journalists who write them.’
    ‘Then the party they represent is the worst of all, the party of egoism. A pure expression of bourgeois individualism.’
    ‘And there are even journalists, it may surprise you to learn, who change their opinions on subjects. Who have the freedom to come to their own conclusions, then to examine them, to re-examine them, and alter their views.’
    ‘Unreliable whores, you mean,’ said Petkanov. ‘Neurotic whores.’

    There had been a Revolution, of that there was no doubt; but the word was never used, not even in a qualified form, preceded by Velvet or Gentle. This country had the fullest sense of history, but also a great wariness of rhetoric. The high expectations of the last years refused to declare themselves in tall words. So instead of Revolution, people here spoke only of the Changes, and history was now divided into three quiet parts: before the Changes, during the Changes, after the Changes. Look what had happened throughout history: Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Revolution, Counter-Revolution, Fascism, Anti-Fascism, Communism, Anti-Communism. Great movements, as by some law of physics, seemed to provoke an equal and opposite force. So people talked cautiously of the Changes, and this slight evasion made them feel a little safer: it was difficult to imagine something called the Counter-Changes or the Anti-Changes, and therefore such a reality might be avoidable too.
    Meanwhile, slowly, discreetly, the monuments were coming down all over the city. There had been partial removals before, of course. One year, bronze Stalins had been purged at a whisper from Moscow. They had been taken from their plinths in the night and delivered to a patch of waste ground near the central marshalling yard, where they were lined up against a high wall as if awaiting the firing squad. For a few weeks two militiamen had guarded them, until it became clear that there was little popular desire to desecrate these effigies. So they were surrounded with barbed wire and left to fend for themselves, kept awake through the night by the hoot and moan of goods trains. Each spring the nettles grew a little higher, and bindweed made a fresh curling run up the inside leg of the booted war-leader. Occasionally an intruder with hammer and chisel would climb one ofthe shorter monuments and attempt to chip off a souvenir half-moustache; but drink or the inadequacy of the chisel always brought failure. The statues lingered on beside the marshalling yard, shiny in the rain and as undefeated as a memory.
    Now Stalin had company. Brezhnev, who favoured bronze and granite postures in life, and now happily continued his existence as a statue. Lenin, with worker’s