The Book of Daniel (34 page)

A MESSAGE OF CONSOLATION TO GREEK BROTHERS IN THEIR PRISON CAMPS, AND TO MY HAITIAN BROTHERS AND NICARAGUAN BROTHERS AND DOMINICAN BROTHERS
AND SOUTH AFRICAN BROTHERS AND SPANISH BROTHERS AND TO MY BROTHERS IN SOUTH VIETNAM, ALL IN THEIR PRISON CAMPS: YOU ARE IN THE FREE WORLD!

    The Russians are portrayed as aggressive, devious, untrustworthy, and brutally single-minded. Yet according to Williams in
THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY
, as late as 1946 Russian postwar policy has not been decided. Russia has backed down on many issues and has shown indecision in many others. In Moscow a conflict has existed between those who subscribe to friendly relations with the U.S. and those who don’t. There is evidence that Stalin favors the former view particularly as expressed by the economist Eugene Varga, who argues that Russia can recover from the war by concentrating internally on domestic problems rather than by expansionist policies. Varga also calls for a reassessment of American capitalism. Not until 1947 do Varga and his mush-headed gang disappear and the hard-liners under Molotov take over. This happens about the time Henry Wallace is fired from the Truman cabinet for making this statement: “We should be prepared to judge Russia’s requirements against the background of what we ourselves and the British have insisted upon as essential to our respective security.”

    A Congressional Committee in 1947 reports on the unprecedented volume of anti-Soviet propaganda coming out of the U.S. Government. It turns out to be absolutely necessary. On the one hand America considers itself the strongest nation, the first and only nuclear nation, the wealthiest, the most powerful nation in the world. On the other hand it must live in fear of the Russian. Secretary of State Acheson will testify some years afterward that never in the counsels of the Truman cabinet did anyone seriously regard Russia as a military threat—even after they got their bomb. Bipartisan Senator-Statesman Vandenberg
tells how the trick is done: “We’ve got to scare hell out of the American people,” he says.

    The Truman Doctrine will not be announced as a policy of providing military security for the foreign governments who accept our investments, but as a means of protecting freedom-loving nations from Communism. The Marshall Plan will be advertised not as a way of ensuring markets abroad for American goods but as a means of helping the countries of Europe recover from the war. Russia has had the effrontery not to collapse. We are faced with an international atheistic Communist conspiracy of satanic dimension. Which side are you on? Russia moves into Rumania, Bulgaria, East Germany. Russia rolls over Czechoslovakia. Here is NATO. Here is the Berlin Blockade. And behold, it came to pass, just the kind of world we said it was—

I don’t remember who drove the car. It was not Ascher, Ascher was sitting next to me in the back seat. I was in the middle. Susan was on my right—I had given her the window. I could see over her head anyway. We were going up the Saw Mill River Parkway. The road was dry but snow lay in banks along the side. It was old snow covered with soot and dirt. This was the same way, I knew, that you went to Peekskill. The wheels hummed on the road. The hills were turning green.

“What?” said Ascher. “What is it?”

“The gas fumes. I want to open the window.”

“Fumes? There are no fumes.”

“Just a little.” I was having trouble breathing.

I can’t remember who drove. Ascher sat in the back with us, I was between Ascher and Susan. My stomach hurt. My fingers ached. I held a package wrapped in brown paper, a gift for my father. I had made a pair of book ends in school in the woodworking shop—they were slabs of wood nailed together at right angles, with the edges beveled and the surfaces sanded. Then we carved designs with the woodburning tool and then stained the whole thing walnut. For my design I had burned a large “I” into the vertical face of each book end.

Susan’s gift was for our mother—a sheaf of her crayon drawings tied together with a hank of yarn in a bow.

Susan kept shifting and squirming. She wouldn’t stop even after I asked her nicely. I punched her in the arm and she tried to scratch my face.

“Children,” Ascher said. “Please, children, no nonsense.”

It was a long trip. We had left just after lunch. When you are traveling to see people the sense of them fills your mind. Their voices and their attitudes. But I couldn’t see them clearly—only their shadows. I was not feeling well. I was afraid to be going to see them. It was a long trip. I didn’t know what they would say. I wasn’t sure they would be glad to see me.

“Is this the right day?” I asked Ascher, not for the first time.

“Yes, Daniel.”

“Do they know we’re coming?”

“I told you yes.”

“They expect us this very afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“They’re dead,” Susan said.

“No, my little girl, that is not true. They are alive.”

“They’re not alive anymore, they were killed,” Susan said. “It was in the newspaper.”

“How do you know, you can’t read,” Daniel said.

“I can, I have learned how to read.”

“You’re a liar,” Daniel said.

“Please,” Ascher said.

“I’m a good reader,” Susan said. “I can read everything.”

“What newspaper?”

“In my class.”

“And what did it say?”

“It said that my mother and father were killed. Bugs killed them.”

“Please, children, enough.”

“What kind of bugs?”

“Bugs and death.”

“You’re a dope,” Daniel said. But it bothered me that she sounded so sure of herself.

We got to the prison in the middle of the afternoon. It was
cold although the sun was shining. I was glad to be out of the car. We had parked beside a wall of yellow brick. The windows in this wall were enormous—arched, like cathedral windows, but striped with bars. I stepped back for a better view. It was a big building. Rising from the corner of the building was a hexagonal tower topped with glass, like a lighthouse, and a roof of its own, like a Chinese hat. At the far end of the building was another tower.

We walked along a fence like the kind around the schoolyard, except that along the top of it were three parallel strands of barbed wire.

I heard a whirring sound and turned to see a man shooting me with a multi-turreted movie camera. Another man appeared who ran backward in front of us, popping flashbulbs at our feet. We held up our hands. I can’t describe this. I am tired of describing things. We are clients of a new law firm, Voltani, Ampere, and Ohm. If you’ve seen one prison you’ve seen them all. We had to give up our packages, over Ascher’s protest. We were in this office and the man was dressed like a policeman. Ascher grabbed my book ends and tore off the paper. “Gifts from children to their parents!”

“Can’t take ’em,” the man said.

“The things of children!”

“Sorry, Counselor.”

Ascher argued vehemently, and then suddenly stopped and pretended to us that it meant nothing. “It’s all right,” he confided to us, “I’ll speak to someone.”

We went to the Death House, a place that lacked the hum of the rest of the prison city. Elsewhere you could hear voices, or the rumble of machinery under your feet. Here, it was absolutely still. We were in a room bare of everything except a wooden table and some chairs. The bottom half of the walls were painted brown. The top half of the walls were painted yellow. No one was in the room. Everything was quiet.

“They have to bring them now,” Ascher said in a lowered voice. “First your mother, then afterwards your father,”

We waited and no one came. We stood in our coats and waited. I went to the window and looked out between the bars. We were high up. I could see the Hudson River. Ascher sat
down at the end of the table, pushed his homburg back on his head, put his hands on his knees, and sighed. I heard the door open. I turned but it was a guard. He stepped inside the door, closed it softly, and stood against the wall with his arms folded. I went over to him and raised my hands.

“What are you doing, Daniel?”

“He has to frisk me,” I explained without lowering my hands.

“’At’s all right, kid,” the guard said. He cleared his throat. He had terrible acne, great red eruptions all over his face.

“No, go ahead, search me, I might have a gun.”

The guard looked at Ascher. He cleared his throat again.

“’At’s OK, kid, I’m satisfied you don’t have a gun,” he said.

“How do you know if you don’t search me.”

“Me too,” Susan said.

“All right, children,” Ascher said. “They haven’t seen their parents in over a year,” he explained to the guard.

“Yeah, well they’re here,” the guard said.

“Search me,” Daniel insisted, his voice louder now.

“OK, kid, I said it was OK,” the guard said. He acted as if he was afraid I’d wake someone.

“SEARCH ME!” I screamed. I could feel my face turning red.

The guard looked at Ascher, who had stood and walked up behind me. Ascher must have nodded, because he quickly leaned over and patted the pockets of my mackinaw.

“Now her.”

He lightly touched the hem of Susan’s coat, and then stood up straight against the wall and folded his arms and ignored us.

Still nobody came. Susan began to walk around the edges of the room, measuring each wall with her footsteps. When she came to the guard she merely went around him as if he were part of the wall. I took up my vigil at the window. I wondered why they built this prison within sight of the river, since it would only want to make people escape. If I had long enough time here I’d find a way to get or make a rope long enough and to saw the bars so that no one would know, and to climb the fence. I’d learn all these things with enough time. I would let myself down the wall and climb the barbed-wire fence and run down to the river. Once I reached the river they’d never
catch me. I could hear my own breathing as I ran. I could feel the cold water rising around me as I waded into the river, and then warming as I set out downriver with powerful strokes made more powerful by the current. The chill of late afternoon was touching the hills. The sky was growing imperceptibly darker. I would swim to New York. The river had turned black. The scene through this barred window was absolutely still. Nothing moved. It was frozen in the absolute stillness of the dirt-crusted window.

For some time I had been observed by my mother who had quietly come into the room. She had been as noiseless as the Death House stones. She did not speak but watched Susan in her walk and me in my revery. I have the letters between them—how for a week they wrote back and forth in anticipation of the visit and constructed the proper way of presenting themselves. They would be calm, composed, cheerful, matter-of-fact. They would answer our questions honestly and with no alarm. They would teach us, by example, how one lived in the Death House.

What happened was that Susan ran over to me and took my hand. Then I saw her too. We stood near the window and looked at our mother.

She was smaller. She had on a grey sack dress and house slippers. Her hair looked shorter. She was thin, and she was very pale, almost waxen. She stared at us with an expression on her face either of joy or terrible pain, I don’t know which, but of such intensity that I couldn’t meet her gaze. My eyes squeezed shut and when I could open them again I saw that she had pressed her fingers to her temples and applied such pressure that the corners of her eyes had slanted.