First Papers (7 page)

“Nobody. I run it alone.”

“And then who takes this pile of lunacy”—here an arm swept the stacked handbills to the floor—“and hands it out to other lunatics?”

“I distribute them myself.”

“Come on, move. Get moving.”

The first crash of pain, as the two armed Cossacks wrenched his arms half out of their sockets and pushed him ahead of them. Fear made his mouth metallic, fear of what was to come when they had him alone, in the privacy of prison.

In later life Stefan Ivarin sometimes wondered why his recurrent nightmares included no bit of this first horror he had experienced, why, like dramas gone mad, they always plunged into the second act. It also puzzled him that his waking memories of his arrest never arose at moments of great stress, but at calmer times, when he felt contemplative, when he found himself considering, perhaps, some incident of the day that seemed remote indeed from that long-ago night in Odessa.

Now, sitting at supper, weary from the unusual exertion of climbing the stepladder to tack down the black bunting, Stefan glanced at the four stony young faces of his daughters and son and daughter-in-law, and found himself thinking of his trip to prison.

Somewhere on that trip, he thought, somewhere along the way when I was yellow with fear, it was resolved how my life was to go. Dragging me off between them, they handed me my first papers for what I have become. If they had not dragged me, I might have outgrown my youthful revolutionary zeal as so many do, and become what? A mathematics teacher, a small businessman, an innocuous writer of poetry or novels, with a mild streak of good will running through, to show that I am a lover of humanity.

Ah, these lovers of humanity! Joseph Fehler is a lover of humanity, such an ardent lover he would assassinate any human who disagrees with him about how to love humanity.

And most of the intoners in the churches and the synagogues are lovers of humanity, dribbling saliva-wet platitudes about being meek and accepting pain and privation.

In poor Russia, the Bolsheviki are lovers of humanity, ready to kill Menshevik and Czar alike; woe to Russia if they, not the moderates, gain control when the time comes.

Would-be tyrants, all. But—irony, irony, they sire rebels. Not tyrants, but rebels. That’s what they never realize. Those two Cossacks didn’t realize it, nor the magistrate after them, nor the guards in the prison flogging with the knout.

All of the small tyrants together sired a larger group of “Free Ones” at the University, sired Drubhinov’s determination to manage my rescue, sired the faked entry permit to America, my thirty-four-dollar trip across the ocean in the steerage.

And so, here I sit some thirty years later, safe in a small American town, a free man in a great free country, listening to my children’s small misery because the house is draped in black.

“Everybody will make fun of me!” In varying versions, each of them had said the same thing. After Fira, Francesca; after Francesca, Eli. Joan, the newcomer, had remained silent but what she felt was clear.

Conformists, Stefan thought; they are all strait-jacketed in the norm. In accord with his or her own nature, each of them sings the song of orthodoxy. The youngest cries out in a baby’s rebellion, her sister withdraws in remote adolescent silence, and Elijah, the adult, takes refuge in that false intellectualism that fools nobody. “The idiom of one’s surroundings,” Eli had said, “A protest should be phrased in the idiom of one’s surroundings.”

Stefan suddenly regretted that it was Friday evening and the office closed. Even upstairs in his room, he would feel the pall in the house; down here the kitchen was choked to the ceiling with it. Alexandra was discoursing on neutral matters—“Twenty-five cents for a pound of butter—two cents for one egg—the poor will starve—” but behind her words fluttered a private agitation, residue of the three separate scenes that had followed the three separate arrivals of the children during the afternoon.

Just as Eli had irritated him the most, so Fran had hurt Alexandra the most, attacking in the most vulnerable spot.

“I’m never going to let another boy come here,” Fran cried out the moment Jack Purney left. “You don’t want me to know anybody nice.” Alexandra’s face went tight with outrage, but Fran raced on. “I nearly died, with Jack right here hearing everything you said.”

“But you insisted on an explanation then and there. You wouldn’t wait.”

“You could have not told me. Not right in front of Jack.”

Stefan Ivarin directed his glance to his older daughter. Every day she became less the child, more the woman, and with her developing beauty she would soon enough give them a new kind of worry. But in her lowered eyes and straightened lips, there was something disagreeable and guarded.

Next to her was Fira, still stormy and rebellious, but openly so. From babyhood on, there had never been anything enigmatic and closed about her; she loved, hated, laughed, cried—all openly and fully. When her friend Trudy had left, there had been another scene about the black bunting; the house had echoed with Fee’s sobs and Alexandra’s attempts to persuade and comfort. Supper had brought only a hiatus—what an evening lay ahead!

On the other side of the table, Eli and Joan were putting up a life-less pretense of responding to Alexandra’s dissertation on high prices. Idiom indeed, Stefan thought now as he glanced at his son. What an argument I could give him! A verbal hiding that his lordly manner asks for. But it would upset Alexandra and ruin my evening.

Again he thought of the office and irritation pinked him. What nonsense, this pious pretense of observing the Sabbath in an office where ninety-five per cent of the staff were agnostic or atheist or at least unorthodox. But even with the office closed, New York might not be such a bad idea. By nine he could be at the café, playing chess or talking over a glass of tea with people who felt no need to instruct him in the niceties of public protest.

“Isn’t it so, Stiva?”

It was Alexandra, a new note in her voice. “Isn’t what so?” he asked warily, sure she had left the safe topic of high prices.

“That the A.F. of L. has more than doubled in ten years?”

“Tripled,” he answered. “In nineteen hundred, it had only half a million members.”

Alexandra looked triumphantly at her son. “You see?”

“Just the same,” Eli said, “you can’t prove they added even one member by doing things like that.” He jerked his thumb toward the front of the house.

“And can
you
prove,” Stefan answered for Alexandra, “that they did not add even one member by doing them?”

“I bet I could prove that thousands were alienated by such farfetched—”

“What is this sudden passion for proving?” Stefan interrupted sharply. “Next, you will be ‘proving’ your point about the ‘idiom of one’s surroundings.’”

“That’s just common sense,” Eli said. “Just an understanding of human nature.”

“And your mother and I,” Stefan replied, leaning forward so that one of his vest buttons clicked against the edge of the table, “have neither common sense nor human understanding. I see.”

“Are we going in for heavy sarcasm,” Eli asked, “or can we stay in the field of reason?” Beside him, Joan put a restraining hand on his arm, but he shook it off.

“Reason,” Stefan said, raising his voice, “is not bandied about so easily. Your ‘idiom of one’s surroundings’ is based on trembling, not on reason.”

“Stiva,” Alexandra said, “please don’t get excited.”

Stefan ignored her. “Let me tell you,” he said to Eli, “that the protest which is made ‘only in the idiom of one’s surroundings’ is so polite and colorless that the surroundings do not suspect the protest exists.”

“On the other hand—”

“On the other hand, the idiom itself may be so vicious that it cries aloud for protest. Why, right now there’s a case in Virginia, a perfect example, I wrote about it. A Roanoke College down there has been using a certain history of the United States—”

“Stefan,” Alexandra murmured, “some other time. Your face is getting red.”

It was as if she hadn’t spoken. Ivarin’s gaze stayed fixed on his son’s. Vaguely he was aware that the girls both looked fearful; he forced his voice down to a quieter tone. But in the next moment he heard it as loud and sonorous as if Eli were seated in the last row of the top gallery of a large lecture hall.

“This history book, mind you,” he went on, “has been in use for years, but suddenly a group of Virginia’s citizens discover they don’t approve of it. Why? The author, it appears, a man named Somebody Elson, not only writes of the bright side of slavery, the
bright
side, remember, but dares also to include the dark side of slavery. This ‘dark side’ admits there were sometimes illicit relations between white masters and black slaves. You follow me?”

“What’s the connection?” Eli asked impatiently.

“Why, need I spell that out?” Stefan sounded baffled, amazed. “Those citizens of Roanoke, speaking only in the ‘idiom of their surroundings,’ mind you, now demand, righteously demand—”

Alexandra said again, “Stiva, please.”

His glasses had begun to steam over. He seemed to see those far-off citizens of Virginia, see the author, so much one of them that he called the Civil War “a slaveholders’ rebellion,” and yet a transgressor they had to punish.

“Righteously and idiomatically,” he continued, “those Roanoke citizens demand that such an unidiomatic history book be banished by the college. Suppressed. Abolished.”

“For God’s sake, Pa, nobody means banishing books.”

“Conformists always mean banishing books, people, ideas, that do not conform to their own special familiar idiom. And if Roanoke College now gives in, no book in any college will be safe from the next group of citizens with its own pet idiom.”

“So one bunch of fools in Virginia,” Eli said, “is enough to make every book in every school unsafe. For God’s sake.”

“You are right; you have a point: this is America, not Russia. And if you thought a little more deeply about what that means, Eli, let me tell you, you would not speak so authoritatively about ‘idioms of one’s surroundings.’ In America,
any
opinion—”

“Oh, Lord,” his son said wearily, “here we go again about the greatness of America.”

Stefan Ivarin banged his fist on the table so that the dishes jumped. “You will not,” he shouted, “not while you live in this house, take that tone of contempt.”

“You want me to knuckle down to everything you say!”

“If you’d knuckle
up,
fork up, stand up, with some thinking one can take seriously. Years ago, I warned your mother, she was letting you grow up into a spineless Adonis.”

“Stefan,” Alexandra cried, springing up from her chair.

“Eli,” Joan said softly. “I don’t feel very well.”

Stefan Ivarin muttered, “I’m sorry, Joan. I get too excited, it’s true.”

“Oh, poor child,” Alexandra said to her. “You look pale. Come, I’ll take you upstairs, and you rest a little.”

“Eli will take me up, Mother Ivarin.” Slowly Joan rose from her chair, smiling as if in regret at leaving a gay party, and they all watched as she and Eli left the room.

The kitchen was silent. Ivarin stared at the oilcloth around his plate, a bright red-and-white-checked pattern, mitered at the corners and tacked on the underside, to keep it taut. His nerves were as stretched as that, nailed down, a crucifix of nerves; he was a fool to argue on these matters with any of them. “America” is not the magic word to them, he thought, that it is to me, liberty is not, freedom not. This, precisely, is where I come closest to Alexandra’s weeping, a gulping in my throat, as hard to control as her tears.

“Poor Joan is not used to our ways,” Alexandra said to no one in particular.

“She must hate it here,” Fran muttered.

“She does not hate it here,” Alexandra said sharply. “She loves it, being a member of our family. She and Eli could live with
her
family, couldn’t they? The Martins keep inviting them.”

“I bet she never heard such fights before,” Fran said.

“An argument,” Alexandra said sternly, “is not a fight.”

“Argument!” Fran let scorn sound in her words. To Fee she said, “Come on, let’s get started,” and began jamming dishes together, scraping each free of food as she did so. Fee carried glasses and silver to the sink and their mother took out dishpan and soap.

Stefan remained motionless. Joan’s device had not deceived him; to her he must have sounded like the czar of the supper table. Not czar; Oliver Wendell Holmes had called it “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.” Delightful, full of wisdom and good humor.

Good humor. Ay, there’s the rub, he thought. Tonight, good humor had been noticeable by its absence, and Joan had known it as had everybody else. He had an impulse to follow her upstairs and beg her to believe that soft-spoken discussion was impossible for him, and that a raised voice meant intensity as often as it meant anger. He sat on, doing nothing except to wonder why and when this vice had begun. Had his own parents habitually raised their voices? He could not remember.

“You’ve helped enough,” Alexandra said to the girls. “I’ll finish.”

Fran threw down her towel and left the room. Fee went on working, and Alexandra said, “Go, go. I’ll finish.” In her voice was the tone that warned Ivarin she wanted to speak to him in private, and he sighed.

“Stefan,” she said tentatively when Fira left.

“Yes?”

“If they all feel so terrible about it—”

“You are going to take the bunting down?”

“They all are so miserable.”

“Do as you like.”

“I’m not ‘doing.’ But perhaps it’s wrong to persist. Can’t we talk it through a little, sensibly?”

“Have you no memory, Alexandra? When I was reluctant about your idea, you accused me of indifference. Now you want to back down, and you demand that I approve. I beg you, decide it yourself.”

“You won’t even talk about it?”

He made a gesture of exhaustion. As she turned abruptly away, he heard the familiar, maddening first sound of her sniffling and then weeping. It is fantastic, he thought, literally a matter of fantasy and dreaming. Even when I give in supinely on something she wishes, we end in anguished tears.