Read Revolution for Free Online Page B

over a summit. Nothing. Not a pig scratching around. Not an empty soda sideways in the dust.
    I turned and started walking.
    â€œWhere are you going?” he said.
    â€œHey,” he called. “Where do you think you’re going?”
    I yelled across the flat of field. “Away from YOU!”
    â€œFine!”
    â€œI hate you!” I screamed.
    â€œI hate you too!” he screamed back. He walked off in the other direction.
    I kept walking. I was so upset I could barely see. I hadn’t wanted to go to that stupid orphanage in the first place. It was his idea, always his ideas. I walked on, crying and hiccupping, down one hill and up another. Not even a telephone pole on the horizon. I was angry and ashamed and I hated him with the freshness of wet cement, a new imprint, a hand coming down on my mind and marking it. I shifted my stupid backpack and walked on. Who did he think he was, bringing me to a place like this, the bully? Oh, I’d show him. I imagined myself telling the story to a blurry assemblage of strangers. Defending myself, explaining. “Yes, he just left me there,” I was saying to the strangers. “And that’s when I went off and joined the revolution for real…”
    I turned to send up another shout but I was at the saucepan bottom of a hill. My view was blocked, I couldn’t see him. Tears began tweezing out again. How was I even supposed to get home?
    I kept walking. I came to the top of a hill and looked back. A mat of land. Out along the edge of the sky, a gathering of mountains. Not a town, not a tree in sight. There he was, not moving, a lone coat rack on a hill, the one vertical object. Hot valley air, a windshield’s worth of mosquitoes. He was looking toward me. I kept going, but more slowly now. I increased the distance between us by smaller increments. I looked back again. He was walking in my direction. I slowed more. I strolled past thin white birds standing in the fields. He followed, and in this way we went over the hills. Finally I brushed the dust from my dress and turned to face him. Narrow birds took slim steps along the sidelines. He came closer and closer. He stopped.

LOVE
    We didn’t use the word “love” with each other. We prided ourselves on it. Not for the usual fairy-tale Communist reasons (love is a capitalist prison) (Communists are always so drearily romantic) but for our own fairy-tale reason: we wouldn’t say it unless we knew our love would last forever (this was my thinking, of course, true love is eternal, and so on), and though we secretly believed that our love would last forever, we were too romantic to say it.
    But after the paro, then the orphanage, then my walking away, and then his not abandoning me in the hills, and now the bus that we waited for to carry us away to the capital and the road that we sat on full of bugs, I had my head on my arms. What a selfish, inadequate revolutionary I was. My first civil war job and I’d screwed it up. I felt discardable, disposable. In fact I’d always felt that way, and now that I’d failed so miserably at the orphanage, I felt even worse. And George, meanwhile, had stood up to Mana on my behalf, had defended my right not to wear a bra, had said, “Does she really need one?” and moved his arm toward my chest, even though he thought I shouldn’t fuss about it—and he was right—and when she made me leave, he hadn’t considered staying on without me, not for a moment. He’d packed up and left with me without a word. And he’d been so gentle with the children, he could sit and play quiet games with them, or loud ones. He seemed to slip into any situation with ease, had such simple good looks, a humble manner, and he had his wide silences when he would retreat into himself and I couldn’t share where he was, couldn’t even ask him about it. This also seemed admirable to me, since I had no silent space inside me