Red Love Page 6

  Sammy was able to turn the tank around, but suddenly he heard hail hitting all around. Machine-gun bullets were burning down upon them. Sammy looked around. His infantrymen had disappeared. He would never see them again. The tank cleared an irrigation ditch twelve feet wide. It jumped again, landing in a dry ditch fifteen feet deep. Turning right, Sammy found a breach in the right wall, a shell hole, and climbed back. He passed the burning tanks, their front ends blown open.

  Almost all the tank riders died.

  Lying beside his tank, Sammy fell asleep. In the morning, he learned that out of fifty-three tanks, twenty-two were lost.

  It was the end of the Aragon offensive. Later in the morning, Buslov summoned Sammy and told him that some of the Russians could not be accounted for. No one knew if they were dead or wounded. He asked Sammy to check the local hospitals.

  Sammy went first to the warehouse of the Hijar railroad station, which was being used as a hospital. It was a charnel house. Over four thousand wounded were lying on the ground and on stretchers, There were two doctors, four nurses, and one ambulance. The wounded lay with open chests with intestines exposed, moaning and calling out to him for help. The smell was unbearable. He saw the indifference of the staff. Wounded soldiers were no longer useful.

  Sammy found a Ukrainian from Canada and two Russians. The three men were taken away in an ambulance which was reserved for the Russians.

  The Americans heard Sammy speak in English to the Ukrainian.

  “Please, please,” the Americans cried. “You’re an American and you won’t help us.” They cursed him.

  He fled, his heart beating fast.

  I’m trapped. What do I do?

  He lasted for fourteen months, and he got out. Before he had gone with the Russians, he had thought, we’ve got to get their hands off the American Communists. When he got to know them, he decided, we’ve got to fight them, they’re even worse than the Nazis. With the Nazis, you knew where you stood. The language was plain.

  When he arrived in New York, he kissed the ground.

  Now he is seventy-five years old, retired, living in Florida with his wife. Behind him on the wall perches a small American flag. He hopes that the Israeli Army will allow him to serve as a replacement for a young soldier for a month in the summertime. He has limited funds, and partakes of some of the activities that are offered to retirees at little cost. But watching him at these affairs (obese women in pink bunny suits singing at costume parties) his apartness and dignity are clear.

  He takes courses in philosophy at the local college, wears a bracelet for a Soviet Jewish political prisoner, and eagerly accepts a few invitations to speak about Spain. There aren’t many, because of what he has to say. The producer of a film about Spanish Civil War veterans comes to interview him. The producer stops in the middle and says, “I can’t use any of this. I never heard anything like this in my entire life. You’re a cold warrior.”

  On the day of the T.W. A. hijacking in which Jews were again the victims of a selection process, he walks on the beach with his wife. He hears the gentle sounds of elderly Yiddish voices singing, the sounds of balalaikas and familiar Russian melodies and songs of the Spanish Civil War. He hears “The Peat Bog Soldiers” and “The House I Live in” and the World Youth Festival Song and “Freiheit.” The old Communists are seated together on the beach in their regular corner. In their seventies and eighties, many of them have the peculiar resilience and strength that ideology provides. They are peacefully sewing P.L.O. flags in anticipation of the upcoming Party dinner in honor of General David Dragunsky, head of the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee and instructor of P.L.O. troops in Libya. One of them is writing a slogan in crayon: “Condemn American Terrorism.” Some are reading Soviet Life, which has on its cover soldiers skipping along in a meadow, grinning and gathering daffodils. He recognizes two Spanish war vets, but they do not see him. He passes by them, shaking his head. Their humming and strumming and singing gradually fade as he moves on.

  He remembers the wounded crying out to him at the railroad station in Spain. He remembers going to Spain as if going to an optometrist with blurred vision, and emerging with clear sight.

  He remembers.

  Street Scenes, 1930

  The lollipop salesman.

  —G. L.

  When he was eleven, Solly Rubell sold lollipops for a penny apiece on the roof garden of an apartment house on Stanton Street.

  A skinny boy, he stood on the roof, waiting for customers. Then, dressed up in a black suit and Stetson hat, Solly went to shul with his father, mother, sister, and cousins.

  It was the thick of the Depression. At night, after work, his father cut lace to make a little extra money. Everyone did it, even though it was against the labor laws. If strangers entered the building, people went running from floor to floor calling out, “Lace inspector!”

  Solly and his family lived on the top floor. It was a cold-water flat. Water dripped from the roof, and the toilet in the hall had no light. In winter the wind swept through the rattling windows. But in summer they kept the front door open so a breeze would waft through the apartment, and put bowls of ice in front of the fan.

  The candy stores were cool, dark, and dank, with their smells of pretzels, malteds, lime rickeys, and sawdust. Baseball cards with gum, pink candies, and watermelon slices cost a penny. A big chunk of ice surrounded the sodas in a metal box; on the floor around it was a growing puddle.

  Solly and the other boys caught fireflies and bottled them. He tried to read The Motor Boys Under the Sea by the fireflies’ light.

  At ten in the morning, the junk peddler with his horse and wagon rang his cowbell and called: “Old clothes, old rags, old newspapers, old springs, old junk.” Later a singer in a top hat appeared in the courtyard. Pennies fell from windows, rolled in small packets of paper.

  When the cool wet sheets hanging on long ropes in the laundry were drying, Solly and his friends ran through and hit their steaming faces against them.

  Solly’s Sister, 1986

  Solly was blowing his top.

  —G. L.

  Solly moved to Alabama with my father. Solly was eleven. He loved our father so much. Mama and I stayed with a relative on Pitt Street while they tried to make ends meet. Then, two years later, our father’s business failed and they came back to the Lower East Side. Something happened to Solly. He became a radical. It was a wrench for our father. Solly went to an extreme. He kept shouting against any unjust factor; he came right out with it. He was just blowing his top about it. In the yeshiva—he went afternoons after school—he had been a hundred percent religious. Took a keen interest in Hebrew. Put his whole heart into it. When Solly did something, he did it with a full feeling. He was a prone leader, a brilliant boy.

  Solly had faith in everything at ten, just like young girls who haven’t reached maturity or gone out into the world yet. But he lost all his faith after a while. I think Dolly was his first girl friend. He was her first and she was his first. These boys were so pure, these Yiddish boyeles.

  We had culture from my father. He was a self-educated man. He educated himself to read the Forward. My mother didn’t have an education, she couldn’t read, but she knew to daven, which amazed me. In shul, the way she davenned! You’d think she was reading from the book, but she knew it by heart.

  My father told us stories about his childhood. His parents died from hunger in Bialystok. They had eleven children. Eight died.

  The three survivors were sent to America, my father and his two brothers. He told us stories, how they discriminated against Jews, the hardships they went through. I couldn’t believe these things; I was American-born. We didn’t see this in America.

  Welfare came to investigate us when my father was out of a job. They refused us. But we got along. My mother used to make a hard-boiled egg, divide it, and we’d share.

  We lived first on Stanton, then Pitt, and then Delancey. A step upward—you had hot water and steam. The radicalism was so commo
n among the poor children.

  Solly’s children. After the arrest, I took them to the park, bought them candy, ice cream. When I’d leave, the little one—she was afraid, you could see the fear—she’d jump up at me. With her little ruffled pants. She was only four years old.

  Dolly was a super-duper person. She won’t talk against anyone. I was with her when a man undercharged her for some merchandise. She said, Mister, you didn’t charge me enough. She couldn’t afford to pay that extra two or three cents, but she paid it. That was Dolly. And they were so in love with each other.

  I would come into her cell. Her apple would be on the metal window, a round of toilet paper, pictures of the children. She was short. Without shoes, she was even shorter. Everybody said they were supposed to have money from the Russians. But my brother and Dolly were so poor. If our mother didn’t give Solly money to fix his soles, he would go without shoes. They ate dinner at our mother’s house and he took a roll from my father to take home. They didn’t have anything. I mean, they were schleppers.

  Imagine, the very last day, I went to see Dolly, then I went to see Solly. The stay had come through. They were so happy. She had a little can of chicken she had set aside to celebrate; they shared it. But we didn’t know the stay had been suddenly overturned that day. Solly evidently got wind of it over the radio. I was with Solly. Mama was with Dolly. And Solly said to me, “Take Mama home, take Mama home.” He cut it short. He didn’t want to see his mother, because he would break down. But I didn’t know what was happening. “Just take Mama home,” he kept saying. “I don’t want Mama to come here this afternoon.” That’s all he said to me. So I took our mother home. When I got home, I heard the news.

  This here was my brother’s Hebrew book from the yeshiva. June 12th. Twelve o’clock. Four o’clock. Room seven. Five o’clock. He was a little boy then. Written by Sol. That’s his handwriting. Upside down. Why did he write it upside down? No, wait, Sol’s right. This is the way to hold it. I forgot, this is the way it goes, he was right! My brother’s Hebrew book … held in my brother’s hands.

  I had envelopes addressed by him to their friends. I kept them. Where did I put them? Goddamnit. I’ll find them … I’ll find them. …

  Saturday-Afternoon Parade, 1930

  Solly was strange fruit.

  —G. L.

  Solly and his father moved to Mitchell’s Dam, Alabama, when Solly was eleven. Solly’s father opened a work-clothes store on the railroad track from Red Mountain. His father had done everything from loading pig iron on railway cars to selling tombstone insurance. They lived in one big room behind the store. The mountain was thirty miles long, with solid iron ore. The track from the steel plant went straight on a level past the highway crossing where they lived.

  Behind the store was the large shanty area called Niggertown. The store became the Jewtown corner of Niggertown. The white community lived on the other side of the tracks.

  Most of Solly’s new friends were black: Ray, Louie, Smitty, and Ronnie. Their mothers fed him at lunchtime. They called him their honey. A little Jewish boy. He could not insult them by refusing and telling them he was kosher.

  At a crossing point of the tracks, Solly would hop the freights from the steel mill with the other kids. They fished and swam in a rock quarry. They shot marbles. Pitched horseshoes. Chased water moccasins, cottonhead rattlers, down the creek together in the running rapids. At the base of the mill, where the water came through the sluice, there were huge rocks. The water moccasins lay under the rocks. Solly and his friends would run barefoot on the rocks, holding clubs in their hands.

  Solly’s friend Ray was always writing (his mother had taught him). Ray wrote out a sheet in pencil which he distributed weekly to the other kids: The Journal of the Sleeping Hollow Home for Blind Mice. The journal dealt with the problems of the blind mice trying to cope with life in a civilized world, trying to get attention for their special problems.

  At night, when the mill was closed, the slag that had been poured into the huge slag pots all day had to be emptied. It was still red hot. The slag pots were on enormous hangers. When the six pots were tipped over, the hot slag would light up the sky like a volcano. Solly loved to watch it at night from his bedroom window.

  In school, the first exercise was to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. About everyone being equal. The words were odd to him. His black friends were not starting school. Then the teacher asked each student to tell the class about himself or herself. Solly didn’t say very much. The teacher asked him who his friends were. He said, Smitty, Louie, Ray, and Ronnie.

  At recess, the kids formed a tight little circle around him in the yard. The tallest of them took him by the shirt and said, “Hey Slopbucket, Slopfuckit, your friends ain’t Smitty, Louie, and Ray. Your friends ain’t got no names. Your friends is Niggerbaby, Tarbaby, and Smokerack. They’re dirty and stupid and they smell of rat shit. That’s why there’s no school for ‘em. We’re gonna beat you up, nigger lover.”

  They knocked Solly to the ground and jumped all over him. They rolled him over and jumped on his back. They kicked him and spat on him. When the class bell rang, they ran back to the schoolroom, laughing and shouting.

  Solly’s teacher, a pretty young woman named Bessie Stuart, came out looking for him and saw what had happened. She touched him and said, “Now you know, Solly: niggers are just dirty and ignorant and stupid. That’s why there’s no school for them, and that’s why you got no business playing with them.” She put her arm around him and walked him back to school. She said, “I’m sure the boys and girls are sorry for what they did to you. But now you know why they did it.”

  A month later, some of the kids followed him home. One boy told him to knock the chip off his shoulder. Solly refused. Another boy said, “Well, I’ll show him what we do with cowards.” He twisted Solly’s arm and threw him into a ditch.

  The next day, Solly went back to the school, smiling. He was scared, but he smiled. He didn’t tattletale, but he didn’t play up to them, either.

  In the afternoon, he still played a little with his black buddies.

  And on the Sabbath, he didn’t play with anyone.

  The work week in the town stretched until Saturday noon. Saturday was payday. There was drinking, whoring, blackjack, and poker, and a movie house for whites. Gambling was off limits for blacks.

  On Saturday afternoon, the sheriff would pick a half-dozen cronies, appoint them deputy sheriffs, give them revolvers, which they jammed in their pockets, pin badges on them, and head with them for Niggertown.

  In Niggertown, the men fanned out, looking for a crap game. Every crap game had a pot on the ground with a large sum of money in it. The sheriff would spot a big pot among a bunch of blacks and shout, “All right! Fan out. Get away from there.” He confiscated the money, which he shared with his deputies, and aimed his revolver at the blacks. “Now march,” he shouted.

  The Saturday-afternoon parade had begun. The sheriff and his men marched the blacks who had been involved in the game—men, women, and children—down the railroad tracks, to the crossing, down a rampway in the dirt road, into a large open enclosure beside the jailhouse. It had a barbed-wire fence around it and a locked gate.

  They opened the gate and herded the blacks inside. They locked the gate.

  The blacks would remain there until they could get a dollar somehow and buy their way out. They huddled in the heat, without sanitation.

  The Saturday-afternoon parade took place year-round.

  The Declaration of Independence was celebrated in Brightwood Park on July 4th. It didn’t take place in Niggertown.

  There were many contests, including watermelon eating. The white participants wore aprons. The watermelon was sliced for them.

  The nigger show came next. Blacks were hired for the day. In the Watermelon-eating contest, the black men would have to bury their faces in half a melon and scoop it out. No aprons were provided. Their hands were tied behind their backs.

  Foot
races were held. Whites were tied at the feet and had to hop. Blacks were tied hands and feet.

  The next contest was never engaged in by whites. It took place in the creek. Two blacks would have a boxing match with bare fists in a barrel. They could hardly fit in it together. The barrel would tip over in the water. The two men would have to keep beating each other to a pulp until the whites said it was enough. Then the two bleeding men were rescued.

  In Mitchell’s Dam, blacks were permitted to walk only on the dirt road, not on the paved sidewalks. They were allowed to cross the sidewalk only to enter a store. The saying went, “The color of their money is the only good thing about them.”

  But if blacks were in one store and wanted to go to the store next door, they had to go out, cross the sidewalk, walk down the dirt road, and cross the sidewalk again. They were not to walk across the sidewalk.

  One Saturday, Solly was standing in the movie line, waiting for the theater to open.

  From the line, he watched the black people shopping for groceries. They were jammed into the narrow dirt roadway.

  The pressure of the crowd suddenly pushed two black men up onto the sidewalk. By chance, they jostled the sheriff, who was standing by Solly.

  “What are you, a couple of smart niggers?” the sheriff said.

  They did not say a word.

  He took his revolver out, aimed it at each man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

  Their bodies lay in a red puddle in the ditch.

  He aimed his revolver at two black men in the dirt roadway. “You two niggers,” he said, “come over here.”

  The shaking men approached him. He pointed to the two bodies in the ditch. “Drag them over there and leave them there all day. This will show you niggers your place.”

  The Hermit Smorg