"No."
"Do you believe in God?"
"Of course."
"Want to live--still?"
_Still_, he had said. He could see--what I could only feel.
"Yes."
"Then--fight."
That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and
fought. But I was a kid then--and kids are brave if they have brave
parents.
In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others,
a coward. Who's different?
Who's different without being more coward?
There was the time in Warsaw.
My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come
shaken across the Polish frontier--like two unconvinced readers of
Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry
and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good
journalist.
In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where
the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your
crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your
feet at them--in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street,
Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has
poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to
conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia--in purple-walled
Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of
the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled
deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths--in Tiflis where
Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called
snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes--we talked too much.
We drank too much and talked too much--to a dozen tourists who sat
about the big table, waiting for their late dinner--waiting an hour or
two, as you do in Russia. Tourists who, for the most part, had come
from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced
with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so
self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing
some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not
being blind--being noncommittal at the outset--we had seen better.
Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.
We'll put the truth in America's magazines.
Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror.
Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture
to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.
The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.
We'll tell them.
It began, after that.
The GPU men everywhere we went--pretending they spoke no English and
reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing.
The trip to the tea plantation in Batum--on a bus that deposited its
other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns--with a
driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide--the driver jumping out.
Ted and I jumped, too--but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely
caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it
failed to go over--or because we jumped also--or because he had steered
so incompetently? How could you tell?)
Odessa.
The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch--the first we'd seen in the
long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away.
And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that
we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.
There was no water on the train.
All night, we turned on the hard boards.
In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red
Army soldiers--its only other occupants--marched away. Nothing was in
sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We
waited--with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally
picked up our car and we went on--at the galling pace of communist
transportation.
I found the carafe of water in the toilet--where no water had been
before. Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it--equally dividing the
thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the
border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom
of Poland.
It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I
woke with the cramps in my belly and legs. With a climbing fever.
Time spun--hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew
belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up
against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and
there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my
skin turned purple.
Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of
me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I
was briefly better.
That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd
fallen sick.
He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober--for he talked awhile
with the concierge. He went to his room--beside the one where I lay
ill--and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw
in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors
below--dead.
When the consul came to see me, and the pleasant young men from the
embassy, we were unable to make out what had happened. Had he stepped
too far out? Climbed up on the roof for a better view? Had the
concierge mistaken his condition and had he lost his balance? Jumped?
Or had he been pushed--in the fashion of political assassins who pursue
their foes into other nations so as to conceal their bloody reach?
We can never know.
The embassy and the consulate thought he was murdered.
And when I told Tom, my friend and doctor, the step-by-step progress of
the first phase of my sudden sickness--when I remembered the thirst and
the miraculous appearance of a carafe of water--Tom said, "I think you
had cholera. It could have been in the water. Some people are immune to
it. Maybe Ted was."
Maybe.
He was not immune to a five-story fall onto a cement sidewalk.
What matter?
Ted was dead.