Solidarity

Part I

The grey-haired woman had been watching the little girl with the black hair for a few minutes now. Standing a few meters away from her, the trained eyes of the woman had unveiled in the fraction of a second what the child had been learning to hide for as long as she could think, had the woman only a few short decades ago been in the exact same position. Despite the girl’s face being turned away from the silent observer and towards the counter both of them were waiting in line for, the woman felt a strange sense of intimacy, of familiarity and connectedness towards the child, who was oblivious of the undisclosed ally just an arm’s length away from her. Never would the girl have suspected that someone other than herself noticed the way other people acted around her, how they tried to conceal the extra inches of distance they kept from her and how their grip on the hands of their blue-eyed children tightened with the inches between them shrinking.

As the line in front of the counter grew shorter, the woman could not help but notice how the posture of the girl tightened, and how the pennies in her hand were covered in a fine layer of sweat, emitting the aggressive odour that forms when skin and metal meet. In a few minutes it would be the girl’s turn – minutes that to her would simultaneously feel like a split second and a lifetime.

The encounter forcibly caused the grey-haired woman to travel back in time. Images she had told herself were long forgotten and forgiven resurfaced and found their way through the pitiless alleys of the woman’s memory. A ball of emotions started to roar inside of her and was once more restrained, the only signs of this inner turmoil to the world being a sudden stiffening of her back. Half a lifetime repressed in a split second.

The man sitting at the counter had since served the customer in front of the girl, and was staring bluntly and expectantly in the face of the child. A moment passed, and it was still uncertain whether the child would dare to raise her voice or would retreat in defeat, hiding behind a veil of black hair and keeping her body perpendicular to the counter. It was in this moment that the eyes of the grey-haired woman and the eyes of the black-haired girl met, and although the full magnitude of sympathy the woman felt towards the child could not have possibly been communicated in this short glance, there seemed to be silent mutual understanding.

The grey-haired woman gave the black-haired little girl a smile. The child seemed surprised at first, her dark eyes widening at the sight of something so rare and precious as a genuine smile. Slowly, almost invisibly to most unconcerned observers, the girl smiled back. She turned to the man behind the counter, looked him in the eyes, and spoke.

Part II

The air in the room was stale from all the people who had breathed it in, filtered out all the hope and exhaled a mixture of fatigue, depletion and carbon dioxide. The atmosphere was tense, fingers anxiously drumming previously unheard rhythms on cheap plastic tables and feet pacing nervously across uncleaned tiles, spreading more dirt throughout the room. The workers had been waiting hours for an announcement from the negotiations with the board of the factory.  Since the early afternoon, when two of their representatives disappeared onto the hostile lands of the company owner’s office, they had not received any news.

The fact that they had even gotten as far as having the company’s chairmen listen to them instead of choosing the more cost-efficient path of suspending every outspoken dissenter was the result of year-long collaboration and reinforcement between the workers and various external institutions and individuals. It was challenging, nowadays, to advocate for workers’ rights, when unemployment peaked and labour force was readily available and cheap. Labourers were handled just as the goods they were producing, being deemed as disposable, replaceable and judged by their efficiency. A consumerist society cared little about the individual behind the very items making up their physical world, choosing to ignore the bitter truths and celebrating their beneficiaries. Considering this, reaching the point of negotiations between workers’ representatives and company executives already exceeded the expectations of most parties involved. However, mutual understanding and collaboration within the workforce and the aid from company-foreign activists and politicians had amounted to a huge wave of protest. A tsunami that the fragile dams of the company board were not able to withstand.

After all this laborious groundwork and month long preparation, waiting for the end of the negotiations was made torturous by the dim lighting of the building the company was set in, not allowing any hint of how much time had passed into the room. Occasionally, a few workers would leave to the courtyard to anxiously nibble on a cigarette, just to be surprised that the altitude of the sun had hardly changed since their last smoke. In an estranged way, despite mutual verbal affirmations to the contrary, waiting in oblivion gave all of them a safe space, a vacuum from reality. As long as they had not received bad news, there was still hope, regardless of oxygen levels being critically low.

In the moment when they were expecting it the least, all having found a certain comfort and rhythm in the strenuous act of waiting, the door to the office opened. Light flooded the room, and the silhouettes of two emerging bodies blinded the waiting crowd. Fingers that had been drumming rhythms on tables for hours on end had gone limp on the lap of their owners; restless feet were tied to one place as if they had grown roots. It took a few seconds for the workers to grow accustomed to the new brightness in the room, but once they could see they remarked the smiles on the faces of their messengers. “We did it”, one of them whispered, and the tension was exhaled at once.