No coward soul is mine; no trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere, she always murmured. Before every protest, every demonstration, she would chant this mantra, words that she’d repeated to herself since her teens, the only balm to her incessant disquiet.
And Angel had faced disquiet for decades. She once said she was fearful each time she faced a riot squad, each time she resisted the foe, the establishment. Yet it never stopped her. Not in the eighties when she opposed corruption and exploitation and fought for nuclear disarmament. When she condemned Reagan, Thatcher, the Iraq war. When she defended Aboriginal land rights, refugees, immigrants and sufferers of domestic violence. When she marched at Palm Sunday rallies for socialism, free speech, abortion rights and clean earth. And always, always, she sang for the starving, the poor, the downtrodden, the war-torn. An Angel against a world of hell.
On television I’d seen her arrested for burning the flag; battered with bruising water spray in lines of demonstrators; tearing down the Berlin wall. Each time she was jubilant, her sky-blue eyes flashed from her freckled brow, her devotion paramount. Always a zealot, our Angel.
We’d kept in contact. For years I received postcards from Ethiopia, Palestine, Kabul. Then, as the twenty-first century ripened, then rapidly soured, she emailed me weekly with passionate articles, devastating photos.
After a while my replies began to dwindle; my enthusiasm waned. I only found time to skim her tales. As I battled my way to partnership in the law firm, got a mortgage, bought a house and had a baby, my Sydney seemed even further from Angel’s white realm of selfless dogma, noble quests.
But sometimes, as I fought through traffic on my way home, a song would play on the radio that would whirl me back to our youth: to Angel and I sharing determined dreams of changing the planet, reading De Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, asserting our goth-socialist sensibilities. I’d known Angel since high school. We were both appalled at the way the world was turning – and that was only the eighties! A time of growing liberalism, with more minds opening, like sunflowers in a French summer, than ever before in history. And over the twentieth century’s last three decades of blossoming enlightenment Angel had never resiled, never backed down: her beliefs were unbending, like shining swords.
I failed to maintain the rage. At university, surrounded by fellow students thirsting for jobs with privileged firms, I submerged under a sea of career ambition. I had no time to change humanity; it was, I told myself, the reverie of the naïve.
The knife of shame did twist — but not enough.
On the rare occasions when we met, her sapphire irises would sparkle as she raged. At first I would listen, nodding – secretly concerned that her unsettled hands would smash the teapot – but quickly I would tire of her rants, unimpressed that she’d shown little interest in my work stress and household crises. She’d interrupt, remark on how closed I was in my sequestered life, how I feigned concern at situations I couldn’t see. I would keep feigning, of course, suppressing my annoyance. And go on sipping tea.
Our meetings grew further apart. I almost forgot her. Then one night I saw her again. I’d just turned on the TV, and although I craved a sit-com after a long day in the office I was still uneasy about a fleeting article I’d read about Turkey’s emerging dictatorship. All afternoon I’d found it difficult to concentrate on deals and contracts; memories of wandering the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia, the long tendrils of Istanbul’s grand bazaar, preoccupied me, made it near-impossible to focus on exchanges and settlements. And so a shiraz in hand I switched to the news. And there she was.
Angel, her fist closed and her mouth wide. Angel, that wild curly hair tangled in untidy tendrils. Angel, who I hadn’t seen for years. Holding a banner high, singing, she marched in a huge protest in Taksim Square.
I rewound the screen, then paused it on Angel’s face gleaming in the mass of demonstrators. Still campaigning after all these years, even now, in the dusk of our Age of Reason.
It left me unnerved for weeks.
She soon appeared before me again, monumental in a youtube sent by a mutual friend. I stared at my laptop, bewildered by Angel’s thin blotched face, bones sharp and protruding; her soiled, torn t-shirt; her eyes clammy, tarnished, yet still a fervent blue. My Chanel suit prickled as I noticed her teeth were chalky-brown and ragged, her voice scratched. At first I was stunned, unable to focus; then the knife twisted.
Hunger strike. Until Turkey had disposed of its tyrant, until it had accepted the Kurds, liberals, and true disciples of Atatürk, she would not eat. Amazingly, Amnesty International had accessed the prison holding her and recorded and released the video. She was in chains, and had refused food for three weeks.
I refused dinner that night, lay awake crying to my husband. But over the days life returned to its prosaic grind and although I trembled for her, and tried hard to discover how she fared, eventually the distraction of organising school vacations pulled my mind away from her. She joined the faraway, fiction-like events that belonged to the other side of the equator, that dark velvet other-world.
*
The glass wall of distance crashed last week in a late-night broadcast. Angel was dead. She’d starved to death in that Turkish prison. A federal Minister expressed his regret; Amnesty demanded a petition be signed to release her fellow hunger-strikers; an investigation was promised.
I turned up the heater, pulled on a warm sweater. Cleared the table of dinner plates and stacked the dishwasher. Changed the channel and began watching a film. But Angel’s maxim echoed through my head like a hymn, and I remembered when she’d triumphantly sent me a bookmark from the Brontë parsonage in Haworth. On it I’d read Emily’s poem, and for a swift painful moment had wished that her words could be my mantra, too. But it was never to be.
Unlike Angel’s, mine is a coward soul.
Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash
