My Own Revolution Read Free Page A

the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!
    I lay down my pen, then pick it up again.
    Because I’m pretty sure that Mr. Babicak will never read this, I change the words around:
Let Mr. Babicak tremble at the sight of me. . . .
    I carry the completed pages to his office. He’s outside the door, locking up. As though he’s planned to go away and leave me forgotten in the empty school.
    When I hold out the stack of newsprint with its blots of ink, Mr. Babicak rifles through it. He hands it all back, saying, “I hope you’ve learned from this little exercise, Patrik.”
    “Yes, sir.” I hold the paper close, as if it’s precious. I hope my punishment has satisfied him. I hope that now he’ll forget about me.
    “You are dismissed,” he says curtly. He says nothing about having a good evening.
    There’s a waste bin by the front door. I check to make sure that Babicak isn’t around. Then, as though I am throwing a basketball through the hoop, I jump up and dump in my version of
The Communist Manifesto.

“You two eat,” Mami says, pacing. “I’ll wait.”
    “Where is Tati?” my little sister, Bela, asks, and Mami swats at the air as if chasing away a fly.
    Whenever our father is even a little bit late, Mami thinks he’s been brought in for questioning, that he’s losing his job, that he’s being sent off to someplace where he’ll never see his friends or family again. But usually he’s late only because the bus is running behind.
    We don’t eat. Not even Bela. Mami opens the door, and we all listen. Maybe she’s right. Maybe this time he’s not coming. Bela grips Mami’s hand.
    At last we hear Tati’s footsteps on the stairs. Two floors up he comes: 97, 98, 99 . . . And we thank our lucky stars that we don’t live on the fourth floor, where Danika lives, or the sixth or the ninth. The food would be stone cold by the time Tati got up.
    Tati comes in and throws his briefcase on the coffee table. He squeezes up his face as he yanks his tie loose. My father’s hair is receding, leaving a soft gray tuft in front. I touch my own hair. It’s short but still nice and thick and growing all over. I don’t ever want just that tuft on my head.
    “What is it?” Mami asks, picking up the tie where it dropped. Tati doesn’t usually throw his things around. “Sit down before you tell me,” she says, pulling out his chair.
    He doesn’t sit, though. Instead he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper, saying, “Look at this.” He places the paper in Mami’s hand.
    Reading, she narrows her eyes.
    “Can I see, too?” I ask, leaning over Mami’s shoulder. It’s a letter headed with the government seal. Black words march across the paper, words about a man named Eduard Bagin. The words say that his diagnosis is mild schizophrenia and that the only work he is capable of performing is working on farm tractors.
    “What does this mean?” I ask Tati, who is now shaking all over, his face as red as the Communist flag. But I don’t really need to ask.
    “It means . . .” he says. “It means . . .” But he can’t go on.
    Bela grabs him around the waist.
“Tati!”
    He puts one arm around her shoulders, but his eyes still dance wildly.
    “What it means,” says Mami slowly, “is that the party is ordering your father to diagnose this man as mentally ill. This poor man probably stood up for something he believed in. He was probably talking against the regime.”
    “And now he’s going to the insane asylum, like Adam Uherco,” I finish. As a psychiatrist, Tati visits the insane asylums. He says people scream and slobber, that they’re tied up in nets.
    “Not this time,” says Mami. “This man will get a job he’s too smart for.”
    “Mr. Bagin is a judge,” says Tati, “at the downtown judicial building. I’m a psychiatrist, not their . . . their . . .” He