Workers to Attention Please

HE WAS A SMALL MAN standing on a large box. One percent of the population owned forty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, he cried. I held my father’s hand and we moved forward through the falling snow. Did we know about the six hundred families? The six hundred families controlled everything that controlled us: railroads, coal, gas, electrical power, movies, newspapers, radio, banks.

Below us subway trains thundered through warm tunnels. In the Soviet Union, the man proclaimed, a new world was dawning, where men and women were not wage slaves—where men and women worked side by side and owned the means of production! The man’s hands moved through the snow as if he were already dismembered—as if pieces of him were flying here and there like clumsy pigeons.

I have seen the future, my father said, and it is bloody. Come, darling. We moved closer, to the outer edge of the circle of listeners.

Evening to you, Mr. Krinsky, Officer Kelly said.

Good evening, Mike, my father said, and he tipped his hat.

My father lifted me onto his shoulders. I could see the sign for S. Klein on the Square blinking faintly through the snow.

The man turned to the side and I saw half his face, his eye glowing blue like the pilot light on our gas stove at home. The workers of America had to be educated to the fact that their true enemy lived in Washington! I thought of trains rumbling high above us in the heavens, knocking loose huge pieces of snow from the sky as if they were chunks of ceiling plaster. The man looked directly at me and spoke about children of nine and ten years old who worked in subhuman conditions at subhuman pay—in coal mines and paper mills, in factories and sweatshops right here in New York City.

My father set me down and kissed me. Watch this, he said.

Even though he walked through snow, below the level of the man’s box, my father was taller than the man. My father was taller than everyone, including Officer Kelly. My father was so large he could carry small pianos on his back. Six days a week he worked for the Santini Brothers Moving and Storage Company. On the Sabbath he rested. When I visited him, after school and on holidays, to watch him load trucks and move furniture in and out of storage, the Italians bragged that my father was the strongest man in New York.

Sir, my father said.

The man stopped talking.

Your Mr. Stalin is a gangster worse than Mussolini. Your Mr. Stalin cleans out Hitler’s ass with the undergarments of poor Jews like you and me.

The man gaped. My father smiled. Officer Kelly moved forward, slapping his billy club against his black-gloved hand. I moved with him. We had seen my father like this before. The man reached to one side and grabbed a pole that held the American flag. He lifted the flag high above his head, but the flag did not stop the terror in his eyes. My father took the pole from the man’s hand, and set it upright. Then my father drove his fist into the middle of the man’s face so that blood spurted and spread, like a rose flowering in snow.

My father turned, lifted me in his arms. Come, son.

The man screamed for help, but people moved away quickly. The man shouted for Officer Kelly to arrest my father, to do something. He had a right to give speeches! He had a right not to be abused by capitalist thugs.

Yes, my father said. Because this is a free country. But since you don’t like it here I want to help you. Since it is better in Russia, I want to help you to get there. I want to help you fly.

My father set me down and lifted the man bodily, one hand between the man’s legs, the other around the man’s chest. The man thrashed in the air like a small boy trying to swim.

That’s enough for now, don’t you think, Mr. Krinsky?

My father threw the man forward as if tossing a log into a fire. The man’s head cracked against a lamppost. The man rolled over and lay on his back.

An old woman slapped at my father with a large paper bag. The bag split open and the leaflets tumbled into the air. On the top of each page were the words WORKERS TO ATTENTION PLEASE. My father tipped his hat and smiled at the woman.

Is he your son? my father asked.

The woman cursed my father. She said that someday men like him would be lined up in front of firing squads.

I already been, my father said. So what I am trying to do now is to knock some sense into people’s heads when I am given the chance. This is a wonderful country we live in, with abundant opportunities. This country has been very good to people like you and me. Here we can pray without being arrested. Here if you work hard, people pay you enough so you can feed your family.

The woman dropped to her knees and packed snow onto the small man’s face.

I couldn’t sleep because of how loud my mother was yelling at my father for what he had done. No, she wasn’t proud of him. No, she did not believe that might made right. I got out of bed and opened the door, to see. The angrier my mother became, the happier my father seemed.

I love you, he declared. I love you when you yell at me.

My father grabbed my mother and pulled her to him, so that she sat on his lap. He lifted her hair from the back of her neck and kissed her there.

She shivered, then pounded against his chest. You’re a child, she said. You’re such a child.

I’m sorry I hit the man. But he was saying very stupid things. Will you promise you won’t do it again? I promise.

She rested her head against his chest.

I worry about you, she said. All day I worry.

Don’t.

I closed the door. My brother was snoring. I lifted the board from the side of his bed and kissed his cheek. He woke up and bellowed like a cow, then rolled over and fell onto the floor. My mother rushed into the room. I moved back. My brother was as tall and strong as my father, except that he did not understand how to read or to work. Sometimes my father brought him to the warehouse, to try to teach him to use his size and strength, but my mother always ended by bringing my brother home early. Then she put my brother in his bed and sat in my room and cursed my father for making her love him.

Get the rope, my mother said. Quickly.

I brought the rope and while my mother talked to my brother, my father tied up his hands and legs.

In Russia and in Germany they would have killed him, my father said. In many nations of the globe he would already be dead. Here they let him live.

When my brother snapped his teeth sideways, so he could chew the skin from his own shoulder, my father took out his handkerchief and began to bind my brother’s mouth.

Then blood spurted from my brother’s mouth in a quick stream, like red tobacco juice. My brother stopped howling. Between his teeth, he held onto two of my father’s fingers.

My father closed his eyes but he didn’t scream.

I told you, my mother said. Someday. I warned you.

Do something, my father said. Please.

Because you don’t want to hurt him?

Please.

I stared at my brother’s teeth, and listened to a sound that came from them, like wind trying to move through water.

My mother left the room and returned with a hammer.

She looked at my father and again he said please. She banged my brother on the head, between his eyes. My brother’s eyes closed. My father’s eyes opened.

I’ll get the police, my mother said. God willing, maybe this time he’s dead.

My father tried, but he could not open my brother’s jaw. My mother told me to leave the room, but I held on to my father’s arm, and when my mother pulled she could not break me loose.