Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary by Sonja Larsen

Author:Sonja Larsen [Larsen, Sonja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-81529-3
Publisher: Random House Canada
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

Polly called me to her desk. She had a message for me: my mother had gone AWOL. She’d left the Party in the middle of the day, possessions thrown into the back of a relative’s car. She’d left a note saying she needed to take care of her father, who was dying of cancer. But her new boyfriend, another Party member, was gone too. “I’m sorry,” Polly said. “I’m sure your mother will try and contact you. We can talk about that when it happens.” After she told me I went back down to the office supply room. Gemini came over, her tail in a submissive wag as though my tears were something she’d done wrong.

As I stacked paper I found myself remembering a day back at Live Oak commune, after I’d moved to California. Sitting at the kitchen table, carefully cutting out paper flower petals. We were making construction paper posters that said “Dust Is Our Enemy.” If China could wipe out the housefly, my mother said, then our commune could live in a dust-free house. Next she showed me how to sweep. She said, “Pretend you are painting a canvas.” These were my first memories of her since we’d first joined the communes, since I’d left Lennoxville with Dale. How she re-entered my field of vision, although I had no way of telling how far away she’d been, only that she was back, not just one adult among many, but my mother, holding the broom steady in my hand.

And now she had disappeared again.

Polly was right—a week or two after my mother left, I received a letter from her. She wrote that her dying father asked her to come and stay with him, and she’d promised him she would. In her next letter she wrote that even Lenin knew that not everyone was cut out to be cadre.

I turned over all of my mother’s letters—pleading, explanatory, tidy—to Polly. As the head of Politburo she was charged with our political education and morale. My first few responses to my mother were rejected—too angry, too emotional—and over the next few months I wrote so many letters, I could not remember which were the few I’d actually tried to send, and which I simply kept to myself. On watch duty, or just before I fell asleep, but especially alone in the storeroom, I composed and re-composed the things I wanted to say to her.

I remembered walking picket lines with her, falling asleep against her during political education classes. The tone of her voice when she described what life would be like after the revolution. My comrade-in-arms. After she left Karl, she told me they were only comrades. My mother who had always understood the pleasure of a new pen, or the importance of lines on a page spaced just right. Dear Mommy. Dear Jesse. Dear Comrade. I ran my fingers along the edges of the smooth white paper, and wondered how I was ever going to forgive her.

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