Ilona Observes The Revolution

Episode two of Mrs Sunderbury And The Gold Earring. Don't get any wrong ideas about structure.. this is fiction in the style of gestural painting.

Ilona sat reading in the window of her small flat in Redhill, waiting for her cousin to arrive. It was mid-morning and she was still not dressed. She was musing about the way self-rule drifts in and out of "legitimacy" as it establishes itself. She had friends in Ramallah, Palestine, and they wrote emails to her describing how the economic stranglehold of the Israelis, now tightened further by the withdrawing of EU and US funds, was making day to day life untenable. Armed robbery was now commonplace even in civilised East Jerusalem.

Like the Irish and South Africans, once seen as terrorists, the PLO had been redeemed, and she supposed, that would eventually be the path of idealistic, immature, uncorrupt Hamas, who had the cheek to have gained power by winning a model election, but who refused to give up their nation's claim to its land, its right to bear arms, and its self-determination. You can have democracy, she observed, as long as the results go our way. It's Henry Ford politics: Any colour you like, so long as it's red, white and blue.

"On the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the BBC News website considers its significance and the electoral attraction of marking it." she read. "Rebels fought against British rule in Ireland Early on Easter Sunday morning in 1916 a motley group of rebels set out through the streets of Dublin to loosen Britain's imperial hold on Ireland by force of arms. They were soon dislodged from the curious assortment of buildings, including a biscuit factory and the General Post Office, which they seized. But the grip they took on the political imagination of the nation too shows no sign of slackening."

Motley group! Only the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation could describe national heroes who died for their country as "motley", she thought, only the British would dare to still be so disparaging about these brave and devoted freedom fighters.

Ilona's grandfather had been in the Hungarian resistance during World War 2 and had carried both physical and mental scars afterwards as a result. He was a passionate, moody man, who had often made it clear that it would have been better if he had not survived, carrying the weight of his appalling experiences through the long years after the war. When she was learning German as a child, he had taught her the phrase, "Wer Hat die Nazi Gold gestollen?" - "Who stole all the Nazi gold?" - to illustrate that even the supposedly "good" nations, like Switzerland, owned their fair share of guilt, and when she had been punished for teaching the phrase to her fellow students, her grandfather had praised her and bought her favourite cake. He had managed to instill in her a deep regard for the process of political change, and a lifelong appreciation of the hypocrisy of vested interests. Odd, then, that before he died, he had arranged for her to come to England, bastion of capitalism, co-creator of the Zionist state she had marched against, and living embodiment of all things bourgois.

She sighed, and closed the lid of the laptop she was browsing. The disk scratched and whined as it spun down. Her cousin Abigail would be here soon, stiff, conventional Abigail, whom she loved in a way reserved for family, but found the gulf between them an effort to cross. A couple of hours on the phone, not a problem; she could simultaneously be channel-hopping, or observing the elegant young husband across the way for some future erotic fantasy; but in person, Abby would demand her rapt attention and be offended if she didn't get it. The price of single life, she reflected, and went upstairs to change into something more presentable than an emerald-green robe and red slippers.

End episode two.