SCHILD’S FATHER’S BUSINESS WAS concerned with buttons—well, you know how capitalism works on the petty levels, he neither made them nor used them, but stood in the middle between maker and user, collecting a profit.
Lichenko, however, did not know these things, which was why he asked. He was especially interested in the money: were the earnings large from such a trade?
“He never thought so,” said Schild, “But they were considerably better than working-class wages.” His smile was both bitter and genial—the first towards the distasteful topic; the second for Lichenko, to whose will he was now committed.
“Oh, but the workers, we will not speak of them,” Lichenko said contemptuously. “You surely are of a superior class.” This was the kind of thing he had been saying, in one way or another, for three days, and Schild could not yet gauge the degree of its subtlety.
Lichenko closed his eyes now and breathed profoundly, as if he were falling off. Sometimes he did; sometimes, after the same indications, not. The game hinged on whether or not Schild rose to go: if he did, Lichenko awakened; if he did not, Lichenko slept.
The bed was a chaos of stale sheets decorated with brown blood and streaks of St. George’s iodine salve. Lichenko had not left it since they laid him there on the night of the beating. Not that he had been seriously hurt: his actual wounds—a slash of the cheek, an abrasion of the lower lip—had, after the excitement was done, proved superficial. The rest were bruises, ugly, indigo-and-lavender, but bruises, and had already begun to pale under the application of St. George’s paste. And he had been struck only in the face, so that his body was as sound as ever and could have no special need for this perpetual pillowing.
Yet there he lay, sometimes straight and stiff as a corpse, suppressing breath; sometimes curled like a foetus, in which position he made bubbly noises; sometimes with limbs wanton and torn mouth wearing a wan, roguish smile, as if he had dropped there exhausted from a saturnalia.
Schild felt towards him a strange, new emotion: not, as in the case of Schatzi, loathing compounded of fear and envy, and certainly not the fierce hatred which was the sudden motive for the beating—indeed, the latter had been transformed in his memory to a distant episode involving two strangers who bore no resemblance to the Lichenko and the self he knew. Rather, this strange new feeling was the sad, sour regret of a father towards an offspring he can neither endure nor discard. He would have liked, in a moment when his own back was turned, to have had him obliterated in some bloodless, painless fashion, with no noise.
His blows had pierced the mask. He at last faced that issue he had hitherto obscured with romantic moralizing. Lichenko had originally stayed on at the billet to grovel in comfort like a pig in a slough, although admittedly deserved. But the fact of his second breach of peace indicated not all of him had yet gone soft. The fine, progressive elements in his conscience had rebelled against the ease, not with sufficient force to carry him back to duty, but at least enough to generate a protest, which appropriately had been directed towards the German woman. At that point a deft understanding might have restored him to manhood. Instead, Schild had pushed him back again, perhaps forever beyond redemption.
But in destroying him, he had also cemented Lichenko to himself. If his earlier hosthood, which he recognized as having been too permissive, owed to simple courtesy, it had since the beating become a nurseship, bonded by the obligations of guilt and limited by nothing. He found it ethically impossible even to object when Lichenko, who certainly could walk as well as ever, preferred the bedpan to the bathroom, and that only when transported by Schild—he would not suffer the Hausfrau in the room. Although at other times he showed great facility in bed-positions—the ass mountain, the pretzel, the scissors, the beached fish, the dismembered Osiris, the solipsist ostrich—at mealtime Lichenko would not elevate from absolute supine, so that there was nothing to do but spoon-feed him like an infant. His back itched fiercely every quarter-hour and would admit no cure but the application of Schild’s hairbrush, wielded by Schild, to the trough of his spine.
The problem of washing, which offended Schild most, even more than the bedpan, had been rather more simply resolved: Lichenko left it behind when he took to invalidism. A person, he believed, did not get dirty in bed. With the passing of the days, his decision seemed less fortunate. After three, in a room from which Lichenko also had decided to bar fresh air on the ground that in his weakened condition he might contract a disease of the lungs, Schild had ceased to dread, might even in two more days have come to yearn, the call for soap and water.
Naturally, a man in sickbed needed recreation. Lichenko required an oral reading of each day’s Stars and Stripes, first in the original—so that he could “study English”—and then in German translation. The comics were to be read with full gesture and if possible in voices simulating the spirit and sex of each character, especially the female ones, like Miss Lace and Daisy Mae, to whom it was impossible to give credence if they spoke in baritone. Furthermore, it was cruelly difficult to understand the narrative without a sense of what had gone before—before, that is, Lichenko had come West—synopses must be furnished, and definitions. For example, who really was Skeezix? A typical American? A character to identify with, or one to hold in secret contempt? He insisted grimly on secret: one was not so stupid as to think you could sneer openly at a feature of an official Army publication.
After the reading came the cards—he claimed to be too weak nowadays for chess—which Lichenko scattered across the foul sheets in Russian arrangements, for games that three hours hence Schild would savvy no better than at the outset except to know he was loser and must pay, the fee being invariably fifty marks, arrived at by a computation as exotic as the game.
Nursing his patient of course demanded more time than Schild’s Army duties would allow, and no one was quicker to see this than St. George, as soon as the morning after the beating.
“Oh Nate,” he said, looking away, for he could not have met Schild’s eye with anything but reproach, and he was the soul of tolerance, “Nate, take a few days off to look after the little fellow.”
Conjure with this: a captain of Intelligence, the commanding officer of a unit of the United States Army, a career officer—he still had never inquired why Lichenko was a guest in the first place. One kind of charge placed against the revolutionary by the voices of petrifaction, was arrogance: ‘He asks us to believe that he, and he alone, knows the Way, and if we do not admit this, he will not admit that we are fellow human beings.’ Schild had read that somewhere long ago, had banned its source from his memory—very likely some renegade, they were always eloquent; of course if he wished he read them, too, he was no Catholic with an Index—but afterwards carried its indictment with him, like a pocket rule, speaking to it on occasion: You talk of arrogance, you, in your arrogant assumption that we suppress all doubt; we at least have the humility to abandon our selves.
He asked it now: And what of St. George, l’homme moyen sensual, could there be a more ruthless overbearing than that on which his bovine assurance was fixed? In his mood Schild held it outrageous that St. George had not that first morning after Lovett’s party turned in Lichenko to the MPs as a deserter from the Red Army. Which was his clear duty, the Yalta Agreement standing as witness. Indeed, St. George could be court-martialed for malfeasance of office, were it known, and reduced to his permanent rank of PFC or whatever was the breath-taking altitude to which he had mounted in the fifteen years before Pearl Harbor.
Thus as always, Schild in his deliberations surrendered to irony, the only weapon whose victories were won exclusively from its wielder, the sword with which the Jews, like Samurai, disembowel themselves to spite their enemies. He knew now, in retroactive projection, that he had always known Lichenko was a deserter, even as early as that first rap on Lovett’s door, and in full cognizance encouraged him in the defection. He, Schild, was a traitor; he denounced himself in the dock, took himself to the cellar, shot a revolver into the base of his own skull, and did not weep over the loss of one more counterrevolutionary.
Who wept for a Jew? He derived from the question a brutal, hurting pleasure, of the kind one feels as a child, scratching an itch till it bleeds. And whether it was the pain, the pleasure, or the warmth of blood that gave him courage to press on, on he went with sharp nails through the soft flesh and webbed sinews to the nerve core. In twenty-eight years, among the regiments of shadows which had come and gone, wearing whatever badge of unit—no matter whether Star-of-David or even hammer and sickle; no matter whether in love or hatred, sympathy or suspicion—he had met one man alone who did not treat him as a Jew.
Who would weep for a Jew? Lichenko would not. Deserter, drunkard, schnorrer, leech, to the undeluded eye he was a compound of the baser failings—indeed he was what Schild’s father had always predicted Schild himself would grow up to be—and very likely a liar as well, for when a man is one thing, it is natural to suppose he completes the series, and it seemed appropriate to Schild, perhaps desirable, that Lichenko had not been a valiant warrior, either, but was rather a coward wearing counterfeit or stolen medals. If he would grant him all, he must begin by giving him nothing.
The final solution will have arrived that day on which one man admits to another that he is a Jew and the second neither laughs nor draws his revolver nor melts in feigned, or more dreadful yet, authentic sympathy, but rather collapses in boredom—as Lichenko at the party indicated he might if Schild said another word on the subject. In Lichenko’s egocentric vision he knew now that he had never been more, or less, than a host fat for the parasiting, a mere object, a thing to be used, not comrade nor ally, not even a man—and therefore not a Jew.
Lichenko was the new man who had sprung, unarmed, from the forehead of the Idea, with no chains, no history, and a concern only for himself, the product of a proposition that worked. Never say that new kinds of creation are impossible; if you can build a bridge, you can make a man with the sensibility of a bridge, without debts, incapable of guilt, and lacking all purpose beyond his immediate function—and therefore neither a Jew nor interested in one. It had been worth the effort, was Schild’s thought, and the thought was also new: for not one moment of his service had he sought any manner of payment, any proximate hope.
One day in August 1939, Ribbentrop’s plane descended on Moscow, where the airport building flew the swastika and the band played the Horst Wessel Song, Molotov called fascism a matter of taste, and Stalin signed the pact with Hitler. In New York, Schild straightaway joined the Party. Truth is never literal: he was already a member for some months, and his first response to the Pact was a suicide of all that was not his body.
‘If a universal proposition is true, the particular which stands under it is also true; but if the universal is false, the particular may or may not be true.’ The merciless clarity of the Greek logic; before it, the Hebraic superstitions were quaintly impotent. If you say A, you must also say B. Those who are not with us are against us. What does it matter, said Lenin, how the chicken is carved, so long as it is finally in pieces?
Alternatives to these were the Munich Agreement; Roosevelt in his wheel chair; the furniture of the Seder—roasted egg, bitter herbs, piece of bone, eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, presided over by Schild’s father, an unbeliever; and millions of weak little Jews chanting the Kaddish for the dead. Now they could pray for the latest corpses, those “anti-fascists” who fled this Party and its compact with the devil.
Schild would stay. And he did not simply stay but joined, took that second breath to which all earlier belonging was mere apprenticeship. For a cause, a real cause, a man first forsakes all others to become one; and then, if he has the true vocation, denies the one to become many. First gives up women, if he is a monk, and then gives up the desire for women; if a Nazi, first tolerates the murder of the Jews, and then after that second breath, himself shoots the revolver.
If a Communist... the only virtue Schild would grant himself was that in his internal dialogues he never lied: that was for the liberals. Certainly the NKVD, like the Gestapo, pays its call without warning, in the small hours; surely “we” have our concentration camps, our dictator, our elite, our peculiar truth which denies the witness of the uninstructed eye, and if your métier is opposition to the regime, you did no better to migrate to the Worker’s Homeland than had you tried it with Hitler. We wish to hear no exotic points of view; we will not suffer variety; our conscience, too, is corporate. Now we have entered into a pact with what we so much resemble in our means that the cowards and opportunists can cry: all enemies of “decency” are together in one basket.
We do not cavil: it is precisely your “decency,” a world in chains, that we would destroy, and if Hitler can hasten its end, he will be used until history is ready to fling him aside. The difference between us and you is that we will do anything to prevail; between us and Hitler, that we are right.
Thus had Schild accepted reality. In the destructive element, immerse! To create that future life in which there will be no separations of one man from another, which is to say that time when no one is a Jew real or symbolic, when all the old rises and falls are planed away and men are simply man and he a stranger to passion, one must first, in the now, act upon the reverse of that vision, be separate—be a Jew, that is, in extremis; if necessary, as it was, ally with an anti-Semite.
Schild’s progress had not been easy, or of short duration, and whether the end was serene he did not know, to date not having reached it. In particular, he was corrupted by a special feeling towards the Germans, throughout and in spite of the ideological transformations. With Hitler’s invasion of the USSR the pact of course fell from memory. From then until the final victory was apparent, the eye was shifted from sharp focus on fascism-versus-the-Socialist-ideal to the less demanding Gestalt of Germans-against-humanity, the latter represented most crucially by the Russian people, who incidentally had a government which tried new things but was essentially a Slavic branch of that general democracy now menaced by barbarism.
True, to the professionals Nazism was still finance capital in the last terrible flush before death, and the Western Powers, temporarily useful, were the same thing not yet so far advanced that they themselves knew it. Nazism was fascism and fascism, capitalism; nowhere was the specific quality of Germanness material. And no sooner did the Red Army take Berlin than it erected its billboards: The Hitlers Come and Go, But the German People Remain.
Insofar as the populace had connived with the Nazis they had seriously erred and must not now resent their rightful punishment by the Soviet troops. But more important, what was past was past and the future stretched out bright and grand, offering that great opportunity which so seldom comes to a people: to start out new, from nothing. Crushed and smoking lay everywhere at foot the best evidence of the failure of all hitherto existing societies. The Germans were wrong, and guilty—guilty of following an extreme reactionary in his mad-dog assault on the Socialist homeland—but were neither fundamentally mad-dog themselves (for peoples can be misguided but are never bad) nor in any way hopeless of reclamation; indeed, by so simple a measure as prompt adherence to the correct ideology they could enter immediate partnership with the Soviet Union itself, as magnanimous in victory as it was invincible in war.
A historical crisis, admittedly, capitalism being done in by its inherent contradictions—yet why Germany? No, excuse me, that is of course understood: the most advanced capitalist country of Europe; inevitably the agony would there have its nucleus. But why the one peculiar feature. Why the Jews?
To answer the first question is not to need the second: in its desperation, crumbling capitalism will seek a scapegoat on whom to hang its failure. As simple as that, comrade, nothing Dostoyevskian—unless you will admit that Dostoyevsky, too, was a byproduct of the social decay preceding the Revolution—and above all do not quote me Heine: “It is indeed striking, the deep affinity between these two ethical nations, Jews and old Germans. This affinity has no historical origin... basically the two people are so similar that one might regard the Palestine of the past as an Oriental Germany...”
With full respect to all cultures and races, comrade—after all, it was Lenin who with the brilliant collaboration of Stalin, always the foremost of his colleagues, drew up that system by which for the first time in history Russia’s many and diverse subnational cultures live today in peace and harmony, each with its own autonomous state, including even the Volga Germans (unfortunately the presence of certain fascist agents provocateurs and counterrevolutionaries concealed among the predominantly loyal mass of the latter made necessary certain rearrangements when the area was threatened by the Hitlerite invasion, and the patriotic Volga Germans themselves requested to be transported elsewhere in the Soviet Union, which plea was granted; a far cry from the concentration camps to which the Nisei were sent in America). With full respect to all cultures, comrade, and to their interesting and colorful traditions each of which symbolizes some old socio-economic thesis or antithesis, it is fruitless and perhaps heretical to stagnate with the past. Not what peoples have been but what they will be, is our sole concern.
Hatred of the Germans, therefore, is not valid, and if persisted in might become a dangerous malady. Similarly with the obsession that one is a Jew, which incorrectly puts too much stress on two delusions: (1) that Jews are that important, and (2) that oneself is.
By the Central Committee in his own skull, then, the first, the last, and the most ruthless of the Party’s disciplinary boards, Schild had long before the arrival of Lichenko been granted only one more chance to rectify his errors. Had there been a thousand, he now realized, he would have spoiled them all, because he was not, and could never be, pure, adamant, resolute, unilateral; that is, could not be a Lenin. Lenin was not a Jew.
But Trotsky—yes, regard that classic example, that bright needle of a Jewish mind and its corrosion from pride, which is a Christian sin. And Milton Grossman, who at twenty-five had collected no excess in his passage through the world, who had seemed only a disembodied conscience and a pair of black eyes fixed on a morning horizon. He was to leave for Spain on a tramp merchantman of which he would say no more than that it sailed soon from Halifax. In his room behind the shop he had packed the knapsack which yet bore the symbol of the Boy Scouts of America. The irony of this had been funny, and Schild laughed, but then seeing that Milton did not, he knew it was no irony, which is the tension between the way things are and the way they are imagined, but rather another marker on Milton’s undeviating and dedicated road.
Schild, too, had been a scout, in the same troop. It had of course degenerated by his time—bullying by the patrol leaders, petty thefts in the tents at the Alpine camp, obscene language and practices—Milton, with his thirty-six merit badges, was by then only a distant legend, and it meant nothing to the others that Schild was his friend. Not until years later did Schild come to know that at the arrival of the Miltons, too, the grosse Männer, the troop is always in decay—and falls again upon their passing from the scene, because without a constant image of strength before their eyes men, or boys, see nothing.
At nineteen, Schild was big enough to go to Spain himself, that is, old enough and large enough in size to be in his first year at City College, to sit through purposeless lectures, to sign petitions and stand with a claque at anti-fascist rallies and peace movements and enlist in involved conspiracies to stop the Socialist candidates for student council, to study the terrain of the essential American ground: folk songs, baseball, comic strips—and to report at four o’clock each afternoon to the squalid office which his father kept on Broadway just above the northern boundary of Union Square, there to involve himself for two and a half hours in the commerce of buttons.
But he was not big enough to go to Spain. It was characteristic of his friend that Milton did not suggest it. What we admire in those who stand above us is their assurance that they do, truly, see over our heads. He had similarly never suggested that Schild join the Young Communist League, never indeed that he so much as become intellectually a Marxist. Milton went towards the truth, the true was the necessary, follow if you will. Of the pre-Marxian thinkers Milton’s favorites were the Stoics, whom he had read as a college freshman and shared with Schild, then on the bottom rung of high school and still a simple idolator of athletes and a noisy drinker of cokes at Mrs. Grossman’s counter. “Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling by the neck. But they both go.”
It was the first genuine idea that Schild had ever heard, and its function in his Bildung was that upon its movement he had twice passed from adolescence into maturity. The second time—and not a piece with his second breath of commitment to the Party, because it both pre- and post-dated that event, had really no fixed duration, continued still—his second transformation began when he understood its heresy.
Milton Grossman died in Spain, in July 1937. As to the means of his death there could be no question; this was one of the rare times the fact followed from the simple conditions of time, place, character. He had achieved the herohood for which his progress through twenty-five years, from Washington Heights to a Catalan field, had been apprenticeship. And so it was assumed, without the spelling out, for reports were necessarily fragmentary and cryptic, the Lincoln Brigade was outside the law of the country of its origin, and Spain under its cumulus of gunsmoke lay three thousand miles across the sea.
Another year, and someone was returned, or someone knew someone who had come back, who knew someone in Valencia who had seen Milton in the hospital, felled by tetanus, and since the shortage of serum was notorious. ... Yet the achievement was not diminished; Byron, who had gone to fight for Greek liberty, died of meningitis, and the shorter literary dictionaries, with no space for elaboration, read: “died, for the freedom of Greece, Missolonghi, 1824.”
... but what did those rarer reference books on the shelf of some terrible agency tell of Grossman, Milton? “Found guilty of Trotskyist wrecking. Liquidated.” “Executed after investigation uncovered his role in the conspiracy of the Fascist gang known as P.O.U.M.” “Agent provocateur in the pay of Franco. Sentence carried out, July 1937.” Or perhaps only a sparrow-track of cypher. The world had not become more cruel since Byron, but its truths were more devious, less capable of proof, yet, for all that, truer. The real story of Byron, the concrete one—a term of Milton’s for a quality he always sought beneath the capitalist veil of lies—might be of another order, the mission to Greece a shabby quest of ego, a Trotskyism of that time, and who knew but what the meningitis were some Aesopian code-name for the ‘control of disorderly elements’?
But surely it was unprecedented that at home a friend dare not speak his name. For Schild naturally had gone with his questions to those who returned. The cause had been lost and they were weary and older than their years, but they were also proud and illuminated with what could only be called the sad joy of men who have wet their comradeship in blood. They sang fierce, exuberant songs, were curt, succinct, yet eloquent in a language which was properly half-alien to the beneficiaries of their sacrifice.
But for Milton Grossman not even Spanish idiom would serve. There had not, to their memory, ever been such a person, or if there had, no doubt he was overlooked in the terrible struggle against the open fascists on the other side of no-man’s-land and the fifth columnists behind our own lines.
Of course Schild knew of the wreckers, the anarchists, the hirelings of Trotsky, those worst of all enemies because they are one’s own kind, who extend a hand as comrades and with the other clasp their dagger. The greatness of a cause can be measured by the decadence of its adversaries; we can be proud of the very rottenness of those we have cast out. For all their mumbo-jumbo, and all matters of clerical fascism aside, the Catholics have a valid principle: he who embraces the incorrect faith in ignorance may be saved; only he who knows the true faith and rejects it is certain to be damned. It could never be said that Milton Grossman was ignorant; like Trotsky he was all mind, his mind all blade, and that all edge, the Jewish edge... and behind it, the abysmal weakness.
To continue the inquiry was to make oneself suspect. And needlessly—for Schild asked the questions only to test the answers already in his possession. No doubt the flaw had always been there, waiting for the day when the force of concrete, historical events would burst it wide. But it had been the earlier Milton in whom Schild had seen the Way, who had armed him with the weapons. There was ironical justice, but justice, in turning them now against the too-competent teacher. And his oddest feeling was that in so doing he did Milton an honor greater than he deserved; that in the measure of its being undeserved, Milton would be pleased; that, finally, he deserved to be pleased.
It was then, when he thought of Milton, though dead, though discredited, though renegade, as someone still to be taken into account, that Schild realized his sole defense against insanity was the Party. The acceptance of one’s own complicity in the Party’s crimes was the only escape from knowing oneself a criminal. Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling by the neck: ostensibly Greek, but how much closer to the long, moaning servitude of the Jews, with whom in the end Milton chose to identify.
For he had written Schild one letter from Spain, a strange letter, in the early spring of ’37. Strange even for Milton, who was more talker than writer—“like Sophocles, Jesus of Nazareth, and Hitler,” as he used to say in his Bren-gun voice and then stop to catch breath before throwing it away again, eyes rising through an atmosphere of mixed slyness and purity, “all seekers of oral gratification; you will notice none of us smoked. O vanitas!”—and hence never wrote proper letters but rather short scrawls discontinuous in thought and calligraphy, on whatever surface lay at hand and could be mailed, cigarette packages, cereal boxtops, the reverse of one’s own note to him; and in Spain, until now, no letters at all.
This one was pencil, on an unbleached, glazed strip, serrated across the midsection, of—Spanish toilet paper. “If I should not be at large by next Yom Kippur, read this.” On the religious holidays in New York, Milton’s observance was, dragging Schild along, to go to some lunch counter and stuff himself with pork; his ambition at twenty had been to lay a girl between afternoon and evening prayers on the Day of Atonement; he had never yet done this, he said, because he could not determine which was the greater sin, to screw a Jewish girl or to commit racial shame with a shiksah, for which he used the Nazi term Rassenschande. Once on that day, sitting on a bench in the middle island of Broadway, watching the promenaders in their best clothes, he said: “When at last the Messiah comes, he will be an anti-Semite.”
The letter therefore fell within the known context, had besides the familiar mordant-shading-into-mortuary wit, the Galgenhumorische pun like Mercutio’s: if I should not be at large, that is, if I should not be a gross Mann; he anticipated his death. Then followed a translated quotation from a Hebrew religious poem of the eleventh century. He had returned to God. Small wonder he could not have made that candid.
But an old mutual admiration of theirs had been Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Dupin’s theory of deception, which he explains by a game of puzzles played upon a map. One player requires his opponent to find the name of a certain town. A novice will invariably choose the “most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by being excessively obvious.”
It was a faith that Milton spoke of, but rather one lost than another gained:
... thou didst vouchsafe to give me a perfect creed, to believe that thou art the God of Truth and thy prophets are true, and when thou didst not place my portion among those who rise up and rebel against thee; among the foolish people who blaspheme thy name; who deride thy law; chide thy servants, and deny the truth of thy prophets. They assume innocence, but underneath is deceit; they make a show of a pure and clean soul, whilst the bright spots of the leper are concealed underneath... SOLOMON BEN GABIROL, died Valencia, c. 1057
Lichenko stayed. To keep him was to abet a desertion from the Soviet Union. To turn him in was an admission that the hideous sacrifices which had gone into his making were not finally criminal, but useless. Milton had never been able to forgive a confusion of the two.