Red Love Page 17

  It had been warm in Tashkent. Arturo arrived in Moscow on a cold November day. A thick heavy snowfall covered the streets. There was ankle-deep slush that turned to ice. Arturo arrived at their door dressed in white canvas trousers, a jacket, and a cap. His feet were almost frozen to the thin, cloth hospital slippers he had walked away in. It had taken him an hour to walk up the five flights. He entered the apartment and said to his wife, “Well, Maria, we are going to Italy!”

  They bathed and fed him and tried to keep him warm. It was difficult to wash him. His thin layer of skin peeled off at the touch. He could not sit in a chair. They placed two cushions beneath him so that the bones would not pierce the skin. They wanted to call a doctor but he cried out at the suggestion. He was afraid the doctor would turn him in and he would never see Italy.

  A few days later, he complained of a pain in the upper part of his back. It was painful for him to breathe. They consulted a clinic doctor who promised to make an unofficial visit. The doctor examined Arturo and told them that he was suffering from dysentery, malaria, pellagra, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. He was spitting blood now. The doctor doubted he would survive the coming night.

  That night Arturo asked Lucia to bathe him. She gave him a sponge bath, changed the linen, and carried his weightless body to the bed. He asked for a cup of Ovaltine. Then he beckoned with his finger to her and her mother. He asked for forgiveness for bringing them to Soviet Russia and asked them not to forget his last wishes. If they ever got out, they must tell the world the truth so that others would not be misled.

  He squeezed their hands and whispered, “Forgive me … goodbye.”

  They buried him on Thanksgiving Day.

  Antonio was imprisoned again. It began with the arrest of eighty wolves, and was called the Purge of the Repeaters. But torture and slave labor become boring, except for connoisseurs of the subject, and the narrative of this repetition in his life will be limited to a few notes.

  He was placed in a freight car. The prison at Vladimir. More interrogations and beatings. A month in solitary. The bathhouse, delousings. Five minutes a day outside in the kennels. Four hundred grams of bread and a cup of water. Paul Robeson records on the loudspeaker. Sentenced to eternal exile for suspicion of espionage.

  The city of Gorky. Elderly men unloaded from the truck, not running fast enough … trousers falling … wolfhounds tearing at them. Screams.

  March at dusk to Kirov transit prison. Armed convoy guards, through fields and ditches. Long lines of cattle cars, seventy men per car … Krassnoyarsk prison … two hundred men in each cell.

  They gathered at the wharf by the Yenisei River. Representatives from Krassdrev, the lumber trust, inspected the slaves. Up the Yenisei by boat, north to Kazachinsky, farther north to Stryelka, three hundred men and women in barges … to Artugan, a logging settlement.

  Stalin’s death five years later. Amnesty. Riverboat to Krasnoyarsk. Antonio’s tiny mother at the station with a bunch of flowers, and his sister beside her.

  In January 1960, he visited his father for the last time at the Minaevskii cemetery. He was silent for a few minutes. Then he said, “Goodbye, Pa. I wish you could have lived to come with us. … I won’t forget your dying wishes.” In the morning, he flew with his sister and mother to Rome. In a week he was in America.

  He walked the streets of Buffalo again, the West Side streets of his boyhood.

  In his mixed-up dreams, he was always going back to America, to the West Side, to Trenton Avenue where he was raised, to see the old comrades. They would have a big reunion and he would tell them the truth. Yet also in his dreams, just as he was about to reach America, he would wake up. He never reached its shores.

  A few days after his return, he called Sidney Brenner, the brother of George Brenner, who’d slashed his wrists at Razvedchik.

  He asked Brenner, “Did you have a brother in Moscow?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “No. It’s been years.”

  “Do you remember that in 1935 you came to my house with your mother and your father, and that you gave me a message for George?”

  There was a pause. “It’s coming back.”

  They were meeting in a downtown restaurant. “You came to see me on the day before I left for Moscow,” he told Sidney. “Your father was blind. You took me aside in the living room and said, ‘Please, please tell George that he’s got to do everything in his power to get Ma and Pa out of here to live in the workers’ fatherland. There they can be happy.’”

  He told Sidney of the fate of his brother. Sidney cried. “And I often said, me, I said it, You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs,” he said, looking at Antonio, crying, wiping his face and smiling, then burying his face.

  Antonio asked him about the other Young Pioneers and what had become of them. Sidney told him to see Harry Rogers, who had a secondhand furniture store on the main street. Antonio remembered Harry’s daughter Sally. He’d always held hands with her. Once Harry’s son Larry had talked him into running away with him. They bought railroad tickets for California, where they were going to break into the movies. They got as far as Erie, Pennsylvania. When they came back, Harry was so glad to see them he took them both in his arms and fed them vanilla ice cream.

  “Go see Harry,” Sidney said. “He might help you find a job.”

  When he saw Harry, Antonio wanted to grab him, kiss him and hug him.

  Harry stared at him.

  “It’s me—Tony Carelli.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  There was a long silence.

  “How ya been?” Harry said.

  “Harry, I want to tell you what happened. You remember I went to Russia?” he said in a rush. “They killed my father, they killed George—”

  “Oh yeah?” Harry said. “Is that a fact? Why did they do that? Curious.”

  Harry said he had to get back to work.

  The others did not return his calls. Not one of them called him, not even Sidney.

  One day in August of 1972 Antonio set up an exhibit of his drawings near a store whose sign read Rosenbaum’s Furs. An hour later an old white-haired man with wide-rimmed glasses opened the door of the store, looked out, and spotted Antonio’s drawings. He closed the door behind him and walked toward Antonio. He looked at the drawings without speaking. He gazed oddly at Antonio, and walked away. Two hours later he returned, came up to him and said, “So you’re Tony Carelli.”

  “Yes. Do you know me?”

  “Yeah. You don’t remember me, do you? Charlie Rosenbaum.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I heard you were back. So you had a rough time in Russia?”

  Antonio stared at him. “I really don’t remember you.”

  “Let’s say I was involved,” Rosenbaum said. “I was a sympathizer. Never a member of the Party. I remember you. You used to dance with my daughter Bella a lot.”

  “Are you still involved?” Antonio said. “After everything that’s happened, you still believe in that crap?”

  The old man blinked and smiled. “Well, at one time, I have to admit, I believed. The reason I believed and gave a lot of money to the Party was the Jewish question. I believed in a Jewish homeland, and that the Soviet Union was providing a solution with Birobidzhan. I thought the USSR was the answer to all our problems. There was no discrimination, Jews would be free, da da da da.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, it was all a dream. But now there is no more dream, because we found out about the Soviet Union.” He stared at Antonio’s drawings. “But at least now we have Cuba. My granddaughter Prim just came back from there. She was with the Venceremos Brigade. She has wonderful stories. Perhaps there they’ll make the dream come true. In fact, Prim is giving a poetry performance at a rally tonight about her experiences there. Why don’t you come with me?”

  They entered a brown-and-gold school auditorium. The sound system played “Twinkle Twinkle, L
ittle Star.”

  Prim Rosenbaum was a pretty woman in her early twenties with green earrings. She sat at a table at the front of the darkened auditorium, holding a red rose. She began by saying that she had just returned from Cuba. “I’ve been out of the country,” she said. “Life after Cuba is hard, especially if the playback is the U.S… . In Cuba you move safely … listen to the birds sing … so many voices telling me it’s going to be all right … it’s safe to walk and dream … earth is at peace there … without fear, without greed, even the ants. …”

  She punched out a cheer: “Booma Cheeia! Booma Cheeia! Cuba Cuba! Rah rah rah!

  “In Cuba,” Prim went on, “in Lenin Park … allowed to feel so much … we worked the land again … blessed it with our sweat … a pure life … I smoked the pipe with our Native American sisters … we prayed in the sun in front of the healthiest cows I’d ever seen … at the Pioneer Palace the children were making radical discoveries, testing mosquitoes and sugarcane. Discovering how to survive.” Prim whirled around in a circle and said, “Did I tell you how the children smiled and waved goodbye in Lenin Park … how their skirts were red and gold … their eyes were worldwide? … To eat in Lenin Park! … The last day in the fields, we cried, I will be back, red earth of Cuba! I will be back. …”

  Prim’s mood shifted from ecstasy to anger. She was back in the U.S.A. She saw people on cheese lines. “We need peace, y’all … not a flash in the pan, not a one-night stand. We’re talking more than cheese—more hospitals, books, schools, teachers, theaters, museums… . We’re talkin’ world, y’all. Call it. A people organized, galvanized, solarized, socialized, sanctified, computerized, dignified, never again horrified… . Stand on line for that, Jack.

  “Nagasaki is a Birmingham church, call it… . Nagasaki is a Manhattan welfare hotel, call it. … Nagasaki is a drunken man in the street, call it … call it, you better call it, you better call it, you better push it, pull it, grab it, you better call it, call it, peace, y’all.” Her fist was now clenched high in the air. “Call it, call it, call it, b-b-b-better call it, you b-b-b-better push it, pull it, grab it, Venceremos, we will win!” Her voice rose to a howl.

  Charlie Rosenbaum howled beside Antonio. The crowd had risen to its feet and howled with Prim.

  Now Antonio looked around him. He saw Harry Rogers howling, Sidney Brenner howling, he saw dozens of old faces he recognized, the old gang, in their aged bitter faces he saw the guys and girls of his youth. They howled.

  The Last Stalinist

  A stronger rope.

  —G. L.

  Sylvia Pollack would only meet the reporter at Nutburger or at Communist Party headquarters on 23rd Street. A few months before, she had cracked her head at Nutburger. It was three years after her son’s death. She had stood up to put her coat on and fallen backward. The table and chair were on elevated platforms. She hit the back of her head against a stone corner and cracked her skull. Her face went over to one side. Sylvia lost her hearing in the right ear and her speech became slurred. She was eighty-eight years old.

  The reporter came to her from Sophie Siskind, ninety-two years old, who lived on Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side and had a photograph of Paul Robeson on the wall and a little bust of Lenin on her bookshelf. “Sylvia is the only one still alive from my I.L.G. Local 50 from 1922,” Sophie told him. “She is just a few years younger than myself. I called her ‘the youngster from Brownsville.’ She still is active all over.”

  When he called her in January 1985, Sylvia said, “I’d like to meet you. I have no objection whatsoever. But I’m busy. You ought to see my calendar. I have about forty meetings. We can’t meet in my house because it’s a mess. I had a tragedy in my life three years ago. So I lost interest in the whole thing. I won’t let anybody in anymore.

  “The thing is, Sophie is not what she was. She’s so bitter. There is only one Soviet Union in the whole world. These so-called defectors. They get a wonderful education. I used to go to every concert in the city since I was eighteen. When the dissidents started coming here, I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of spending my money. During the Hitler-Stalin pact, they introduced me as ‘Sylvia, the Rock of Gibraltar.’ But I have faith in you, although I don’t know you very well.

  “Now let me tell you something about the Russians. Our country didn’t have a war on its own land since the Civil War. In the Soviet Union they lost twenty million people. I lost a son three years ago, and I’m dying inside of me. My heart is aching every minute. Multiply that by twenty million families. Then you’ll know how it feels to lose so many people.”

  When they first met at Nutburger, she came down the street with her cane, lobbing along, and kissed the reporter on the mouth. “It’s like a blind date when you’re young,” she said, “and you don’t know what’s gonna be.

  “My neighborhood in East New York was like a prairie in 1917,” Sylvia said. “My father took a pail and got milk from a cow on a farm. Right from the cow. There were gas lamps on the streets that Dickens talks about. They had lamplighters. We used to run in the lots where the gypsies would camp. There were no cars. We had four rooms, no bathtub. The kids were bathed in the washtub. We had a landlord with a car. Once, a week he came and took the kids for a ride. A great thing for us.

  “I graduated from junior high school in 1912 and got my first job in a lady’s house. She made tassels and colored buttons; we called it ‘pasimentary.’ I got two dollars a week. My mother was the janitor of the house. My parents couldn’t make a living. Then I went to work in a pocketbook factory. They made pocketbook frames on foot-press machines. And so I shuttled from one shop to another. Then I worked in a white-goods factory: cotton nightgowns. I sewed up the sides of the nightgowns and sewed up the sleeves.

  “I loved to read in those days. In the drawer of my machine in the shop I always had poetry and while I was turning the sleeves, I used to secretly read. And I learned. Oscar Wilde. I learned the Rubáiyát by heart, I learned Shelley.

  “I would buy records with my last penny, taking from food, and come home at night from a concert. I wanted to play the record. I used to take a toothpick, sharpen it off, stick my head in that great big horn and play the record so I didn’t awaken my family. I’d listen to whatever I’d get out of the toothpick.

  “My father would read to my mother the Forward when he came home from work. When I was twelve, I heard my father read an article aloud where a father seduced a daughter. My father didn’t think I heard. He didn’t finish reading the story. I knew I’d never hear the end of that story, ‘cause I didn’t dare to ask him. I remember my father reading the part where they took the daughter into court. She wore a black cape to hide her pregnancy. I had to know what happened. So I told my father that I wanted to learn Yiddish. And that’s how I learned.”

  The reporter met her next at the large Communist Party headquarters on 23rd Street, seven stories of a former courthouse. Young blacks wearing beanies and holding giant radios greeted Sylvia at the door. Little old ladies sat quietly beside pale white young men and women who looked as if they’d come to New York from the prairie. The atmosphere was exactly as the reporter remembered it from thirty years before: cold and antiseptic, like a hospital corridor. Strangers plunked together in the dust, a cold wind seeming to blow between them. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Sylvia said to him, peering up at the barred windows and around the empty shells of rooms. “I love this place. It does my heart good.”

  They sat down in a private room across from each other. “My mother would tell stories about how much people hated the czar,” Sylvia said. “She used to say: ‘He should have been buried before I ever heard of him.’ She always resented the fact she had no education. She’d see these little children go off to school in the morning and she’d be jealous. She’d watch from the window and I’d watch her.

  “When I was seven, we lived in one room in Russia. A young man came to my house and my father covered the windows with blankets and locked the door. My father
made an incision in the boy’s leg so he could call himself crippled instead of going to the army. My grandmother told me many times they’d helped these young people to escape. So I come from a revolutionary family but I’m the only one who retained it.

  “When I was on ‘The Merv Griffin Show’ my family saw me. Merv had seen me when the six o’clock news had me on. The news wanted to show how old people were starving, so they put me in front of a Shopwell supermarket. I looked through the window, see, and developed a hungry look. Anyway, Merv saw me and asked me to do his show. I accepted with pleasure. When I was on, he mentioned that my son was killed and I said I had to use my own money to cremate him. Then I said plenty: that all the money we use for wars and nuclear weapons we should use for housing and college and libraries and food and all kinds of wonderful things. I let Griffin know how I felt about things, believe me, although I didn’t say I was in the Movement. After the show he came over to me and said, ‘I’ll bet you do a lot of reading. Do you read the New York Times?’ I said no, I couldn’t afford it.” Sylvia cackled.

  The reporter called Sylvia for three days after that meeting and got a busy signal. She finally answered the phone on the afternoon of the third day. She had accidentally left it off the hook.

  “My head bothers me,” she said. “I feel … badly … over my son. I don’t go around telling people because each one has his own troubles. But… I was looking over a bunch of pictures. … I can’t accept it. Somebody walks out of the house and that’s it. It’s more than three years now. As I get older, it grows on me more and more. Things quiet down and you live with yourself.”

  For the third meeting they went back to Nutburger. Sylvia was wearing three buttons: Outlaw White Violence, Ban Nuclear Weapons, and People Before Profits.