Red Love (14 page)

After he returned in despair to Toronto, Maury and Linda were sitting peacefully in their room sipping wine and reading the Bill of Rights and the Constitution when the door was broken open. Four men surrounded Maury with guns. “Don’t shoot,” he pleaded. They picked him up and carried him to a car, where they beat him over the head with truncheons.

They drove around with him for hours, questioning him and slapping him in the face when he refused to answer. At the Canadian border he was handed over to a U.S. agent, handcuffed, placed in jail, then returned to Manhattan. This kidnapping became the basis of Maury’s unsuccessful appeal of his conviction.

His flight had occurred at the height of McCarthyism.

But it just didn’t look right.

At the Rubell-Ballinzweig rallies, there were endless explanations of Maury’s “flight from the fascists.” They said that what had happened “would never be allowed to occur in the Soviet Union.” Progressive historians and dialecticians explained it over and over, and Maury himself called it “the most traumatic event of my life” and said that he had acted irrationally because of the atmosphere of “intimidation and repression” against opponents of the Korean War. The explanation that stuck came from the historian of the Case, Jim Bailer. Only he had read all the intelligence sources, he said. Only he had discovered the wonderful news that the Soviet Union had never once conducted espionage against the United States. The Soviets had told him personally that espionage was forbidden by the Soviet constitution. Then he presented the obvious parallel between Nazi Germany and America.

“Why did Maury flee from the truncheoned fascists, you ask? Should he have just stood there and waited for the knock at the door?

“I had the special privilege after I was wounded in World War II to visit Dachau with the fabulous people’s singer, Paul Robeson, in 1945. In traveling from Munich to Dachau, we asked lots of people where the concentration camp was. Not one of them admitted they knew. This should tell us something about our fellow Americans who pretend not to know what is going on all about us here in America. When we got to the camp, the most significant experience for me was this: seeing the ‘shower rooms’ at the death chambers, where they put so many innocent victims, both politicals and Jews, to their death. There were nozzles on the ceilings. They thought they were going to be given normal showers. Instead gas came from hidden pipes on the ceiling.
Let us not be like those victims in Germany who went to their death not knowing what was happening. Let us be like Maury Ballinzweig”

In a public letter to Linda, Maury later wrote:

I am trying to conjure up memories of that time, yet I can remember the most trifling incidents of my life more easily. Whence the disparity?

The vacation—or “flight”—had many motivations. To see the land, to search out others—these too contributed a taste to the feast.

History entered, as it must: the Korean War, the witch-hunts, fascism’s imminence. Perhaps I was frightened of something, or thought I was.

Why did I apparently decide to opt for the experience of an “assumed” name? Why did I crave this particular experience more than once? Was I trying to hide something, and what could it have been?

Clearly there was some movement on my part toward anonymity. Was I on some level running away, or perhaps toward myself? Perhaps you, my wife, could contribute some wisdom to our understanding of these events.

Was I sympathetically projecting onto Solly’s experience and did I fear the concept of execution?

Put brutally, was there a cause for my behavior? What was it? Can one isolate in the maelstrom of being one simple cause in any case? This reduces life to simplistic levels, and is not my style at all.

The reporter called Maury every Sunday night, trying to get him to agree to a second meeting.

One Sunday in January, Maury told him that his mother had been mugged and that he was proud of her for not identifying the mugger. Then he said perhaps he could see him again in the springtime.

“I haven’t been sleeping well since I saw you,” Maury said.

“Maury, look, I want to see you again. I don’t want to push you—”

“Pal, you don’t have to—you don’t have to! Really! I understand. Let’s put it this way: the only chance I won’t see you—” Maury paused, and out came a stream of laughter, “is if I go down to El Salvador!”

“Oh God.”

“Look, going to these places is my idea of having fun!” “But—”

“
I know, but I’m trying to have fun!”

Linda Ballinzweig had been impressed by Jack Henry Abbott. “These jailers who destroy people: they’re the ones who are guilty for any murders that happen afterward,” she said. “Look at the black people. They’re robbed of everything before they are even born. They don’t even get necessary nourishment in their mothers’ bellies. They’re justified in whatever they do.”

Maury’s early attempt to join the antifascist struggle on a politically mature level took him to Cats Paw, Georgia, on a dusty hot August day in 1941. Dressed in old khakis, sweatshirt, and sneakers, driving his beat-up old Ford, he planned to melt into the local population. He carried two expensive cameras with him.

Several things bothered Maury immediately about the town: the accent of the people, which grated on him, bringing to mind reactionary viewpoints of the worst racists; and the curiosity of the townspeople toward him, which he didn’t understand. Why did they stare at him? They were especially interested in his “German accent.” He told them with a snort of contempt that he did not have one, and “obviously could not have one, since I was born in Brooklyn.”

The young man checked into the Loveheart Tourist Home on Route 5. Then he walked into the Pevear Flour Mill and asked to see Mr. Pevear. He asked Pevear for permission to take pictures of the mill. He photographed the outside and inside of the mill and took close-ups of each piece of machinery. Then he headed for the Harris Lumber Mill and asked the foreman where and how much of the lumber was being shipped. The foreman didn’t reply. Maury asked if he could take pictures. The foreman told him to get permission from the owner. Within a few minutes, the foreman saw Maury snapping away and assumed Maury had gotten permission. When Mr. Harris, the owner, saw Maury taking pictures, he did not know that Maury had been told to ask his permission.

Crowds gathered.

Maury tried to relax them by chatting about matters of general interest on a level they could understand. He asked one worker if there was a shortwave radio set in the town, and the man stammered he didn’t know. “Well, can’t you find out?” Maury said and turned away. He asked a man who looked more enlightened, but the man walked away without replying and called the police. Maury said to a group who were looking at him, “Can you believe those English? Such incredible arrogance? In this day and age, with all those outmoded customs and mores?”

“What do you want here, mister?” one of the men asked.

“Basically, I have a deep interest in studying Tobacco Road country,” Maury replied.

When the town was getting ready to arrest Maury, Pevear took him aside and told him that he was acting in a very peculiar way. Maury took out his navy shipyard card and explained that he was on vacation. “But what does that have to do with your taking pictures of the mills?” Pevear said.

“I’m sorry I can’t seem to satisfy you,” Maury said. “Nobody seems to know anything,” he continued. “The English go on acting like they own the world, and in my estimation they can’t do anything right. Would you want to place your destiny in their hands?”

Maury walked off and entered a radio shop. He again asked about a shortwave radio, explaining he wanted to send a message.

Maury disappeared the next morning. When the F.B.I. arrived, the landlady told them, raising her eyebrows, that the young stranger had received two special delivery letters and that he was carrying
one small bag.

Before meeting Maury, the reporter had spoken to anyone who was close to him: old Communists, a progressive historian, Sylvia Pollack, and Sophie Siskind. He traveled to Washington for the Freedom of Information files. He’d gone to a rally for Nicaragua on a steaming hot Sunday in Tompkins Square Park. Linda had mentioned the rally, and he thought Maury might be there and he could see what he looked like now. And there he was: an old man with a long white ponytail bobbing along with quick little steps, bringing a Coke to the tall young blonde who towered over him.

The progressive historian who knew Maury well had a cheery face. Yet when she spoke agitatedly in the dark room about the Hitler-Stalin pact, the reporter could swear a change took place—her face became redder and redder. Sweat poured down her; her cheeks hollowed out. He saw horns, and smoke.

“Maury was raised in a family of Party people,” she said. “His aunts were in positions of leadership: on the National Committee, chairmen of the Disciplinary Committee. From childhood on, as soon as he walked, as soon as he remembered, he was surrounded by the Party. He still resents to this day the domination of his mother. When he got his first job in Chicago, she brought the dishes and the linen to his new apartment.

“She had a great contempt for her husband. Her family was important in the Party. Her husband didn’t have time, although he was a member, to be active. He ran the pharmacy, and he was there practically twenty hours a day. She played a strong activist role, and felt he wasn’t active enough—that he was a
yeshiva bocher
type, that he allowed himself to be pushed around. She thought Maury was from her side of the family, and that he identified with her.

“She was wrong. He loved his father, he treasured the memories of his father. When his father became ill, his mother put him in a home. Maury never forgave her for letting his father die there while he was in prison.”

Maury was too busy to see the reporter again. He phoned Maury every week. Maury had six, ten projects: to help improve the medical equipment in Vietnam, to attend the farewell dinner for the Vietnamese ambassador, rallies, demonstrations. “I met Abbie Hoffman for the first time at an affair for Nicaragua!” Peals of laughter. Why was this man laughing?

The months passed. On a spring day, a spy was arrested. When the reporter called him that night, he could barely recognize Maury’s voice. It was minute, strangled, terrified. He did not understand why. Had the arrest brought back memories? Was Maury afraid of
him?

Yet that was the night Maury finally agreed to see him again. They agreed on “next Wednesday night.” Maury called back. He was suddenly effervescent again. Was it to be that Wednesday or the following? Maury was delighted with “the ambiguity in the language.” He rocked with laughter, and hung up howling.

On Wednesday night, the reporter walked through Harlem to Maury’s apartment.

He removed his shoes and put on Maury’s slippers.

Maury said he felt upset that night. He looked much older, his hair frazzled. He sat scrunched up, his hands between his legs, peering downward. The reporter suddenly saw him in prison.

Maury talked again about his Social Security; he was afraid he would be getting less than he had expected.

“You said you became a much more social person in prison.”

“There’s a real camaraderie,” Maury said. “There was an escape attempt. Half the joint knew what was going on for months. That’s how tight the thing is … But even if I felt close to someone, for their own sake I kept aloof. It hurt me, especially with black people. One guy wanted to get even with a guy who fired me. But I said no… .

“I had the outside to keep me going. That was a stress inducer and a stress reducer. You go insane digging a ditch in your mind deeper and deeper into events that happened, going over and over them, with no way of breaking out. If it were analysis, okay; but it wasn’t.”

“You seem to be a happy person,” the reporter said.

“I have to make up for those years. That’s why I’m happy. In prison, you develop humanity. You see all these unfortunate people.

“You feel for them. My confreres opened up to me. We walked the yard and talked. I developed a radar. There’s either an open loop when you speak with somebody or there’s a servo loop—engineering terms—and you really listen to what they’re saying. In college I was an open-loop person. I didn’t listen. In prison I listened.”

“But you call yourself primarily a political person.”

“Yes. People unfortunately react with their hearts rather than their heads. The heart betrays. I strictly avoid self-sacrifice. In Argentina the bastards are getting the people’s support. In England they support the bitch. We wouldn’t have wars if people didn’t respond that way.”

Maury stretched his legs out before him. “Before prison I never really had a world view, a long view. It was through the heart, not the head. Linda was very political, even when I met her in 1940. So was Solly.

“In prison the government was testing me, trying to make me a witness. Why did I resist? I didn’t feel pressure. It isn’t in yourself to turn somebody in to save yourself.”

He suddenly said, “You know, I can’t get deeply involved with a ‘personal’ person.”

“I guess that’s me,” the reporter said.

“I once wrote to the Metropolitan Opera radio host asking him to compare Tosca with Leonora: two women trying to help free their men from prison. Tosca uses womanly wiles to try to help her man. Leonora turns into a boy, Fidelio, and succeeds in freeing hers.

“Apropos culture,” Maury said. “I can’t believe you hated
Reds.”

“Did I say that?”

“You said it. On the phone. You’re an effete aesthete,” he snapped. “I’m the radical, you’re the liberal.”

“But you couldn’t tell what John Reed was motivated by.”

“All right!” Maury shouted. “So you couldn’t tell. Maybe Reed didn’t know himself why he was doing what he was doing! So what?”

Maury sprang up and ran water into a glass. He paced around the room. He picked up a book. “Ever see this?” He showed the reporter Linda’s book of poetry:
To My Beloved Prisoner.

“No, I haven’t.”