The revolutionist, p.3
The Revolutionist, page 3
Zander's thoughts drifted to Leon. The last time he had seen him, which was months ago, the conversation had been strained. Leon was being drawn deeper and deeper into the Zionist movement; he had even talked about emigrating to Palestine in the hope of creating a Jewish homeland. When Zander had asked sarcastically what the Zionists planned to do with the Arabs already living there, Leon had exploded. "The land was ours two thousand years ago. It will be ours again. The Arabs who want to stay will live alongside us in peace and prosperity, which is more than the rest of the world does for us,"
Leon, Zander thought as he turned down Essex Street toward the delicatessen and his room over it, was putting his eggs in the wrong basket. The Jews had as much chance of . . .
Zander suddenly felt someone tugging at his sleeve. "Mister! Mister!" A small boy wearing suspenders and smelling of kerosene was peering up at him. "These books belong to you."
He handed Zander the books he had left behind in the room off the air shaft on Hester Street.
"You came all the way for this.'*"
THE REVOLUTIONIST
"My father sent me to warn you. Two men with badges came around looking for you."
"Did your father tell them where they could find me.?" "They asked, but he said he didn't know."
Zander smiled. "Your father is a good man." He dug into his pocket for a nickel. "This is for you."
The boy shook his head. "It is the Sabbath," he said with a seriousness beyond his years. "I am not permitted to touch money." "I'd like to give you something for your trouble," Zander insisted. "You can tell me something," the boy suggested. "Tell you what.?"
"The men who were looking for you called you a revolutionist. What does that mean, a revolutionist.?"
"I had a grandfather who was a famous revolutionist," Zander said. "It was in Russia, many years ago. He belonged to a movement called Narodnaya Volya—the Will of the People. He wanted to change the lives of the masses who lived in poverty and ignorance. He believed in this so strongly that he abandoned his wife and son and moved to a small village. He organized classes. He tried to teach the peasants to read."
"And what happened to your grandfather.?"
"The peasants, who were very suspicious of strangers, treated him like dirt. One by one he and his comrades gave up and left the villages. The lesson my grandfather learned from his experience was this: that history moves slowly, that you have to give it a push." "So a revolutionist is someone who gives history a push." "That's a good working definition," Zander agreed. "Did your grandfather give history a push.?"
"He tried to. He and several others attempted to assassinate the tsar. Do you understand the word 'assassinate'.?"
The boy's eyes widened. "Kill!" he breathed in disbelief. "They were betrayed and arrested before they could succeed," Zander continued.
"What happened to them.?"
Zander recounted the story the way it had been told to him by his father, who was the son who had been abandoned. "Their ankles were fettered," he said, "their heads were shaved, and they were put on trial. When my grandfather's turn came to speak, he told the judges his blood would serve as fertilizer from which the seed of socialism would sprout." "And then.?"
"And then they convicted him and sentenced him and the others to death, and executed them. The hangman put a rope around my grandfather's neck and a black hood over his head and dropped him
ROBERT LITTELL
through a trap door in the scaffold, and an assistant hung on his ankles until he strangled to death."
The boy swallowed. "And did socialism sprout as he said it would?"
Zander thought of the headlines in the Times. "It is sprouting," he assured the boy.
Still under the spell of the story, the boy backed slowly away down Essex Street. Zander let himself into the entrance of number twenty-seven, next to the delicatessen, and started up the stairs toward his room on the fifth floor. At one landing he was almost overcome by the odor of urine. On the fifth floor he felt along the wall until he came to the second door on the right. He inserted his skeleton key in the lock and heard it click open. He pushed the door and entered the room.
In the fading light that filtered through the single, grimy window that looked out onto Essex Street five floors below, Zander could make out two shadowy figures standing near the bed. As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw that the two men were wearing identical hats and belted topcoats and pointing revolvers at him.
"Like I was saying," one of the figures remarked to the other, "all good things come to those who wait."
"Patience," the second figure said, "is what is next to cleanliness."
"Alexander Til," the first figure intoned, "I have a legal warrant for your arrest duly signed and attested to by officers of the Justice Department in Washington."
"You're making a mistake," Zander told them. "My name is Rosenstein."
"That's not what your friend Ortona told us," the first voice said. "Now be a good boy, walk over to the table and light the lamp so we can have us a look at the scar over your left ear. And keep your hands where we can see them. We get mighty nervous if we do not see your hands, isn't that correct, Henry.'"'
"We certainly do," agreed the other figure.
"I have papers to prove who I am," Zander insisted.
"Well, light up that there lamp and let's take a look at them."
Zander moved to the table, set down his books, and felt around for the box of wooden matches he always left next to the lamp. He found it and struck a match and touched it to the wick. Then he fitted the glass chimney over the wick and picked up the lamp to adjust the flame.
Zander imagined, more than he saw, the two pistol barrels boring in on his chest and he remembered Abner commenting, as the police were forming up to charge the picketers during the 1912 garment strike, "One man dies of fear, another is brought to life by it." With a snap of his wrist he threw the lamp at the feet of the two figures. It
THE REVOLUTIONIST
shattered, splashing kerosene onto the shoes of one of them. In a flash flames skidded along the spilled kerosene.
"Son of a—" cried the other agent, ducking to one side, flexing his knees and snapping off tw^o quick shots through the flames. Zander, leaping for the door, felt a burning sensation on the skin of his left forearm, as if he had been stung by a wasp. Behind him the agent with his shoes on fire beat furiously at the flames with his soft-brimmed hat. "For Christ's sake, help—" he screamed at his companion. The other agent didn't know whether to attack the flames or to pursue Zander, who was disappearing through the door. His hesitation gave Zander the seconds he needed.
Zander had scouted the escape route when he first moved in—up two flights, through the unlocked door, across the roof to the next tenement, down a fire escape to a lower roof, across four roofs to an unlocked door, then down six flights to Hester and the safety of the streets.
"Well, I'll be damned," the agent who had raced up the steps after Zander exclaimed in frustration. Darkness was settling over the Lower East Side like a cushion of soot. Breathing heavily, his revolver cocked, he peered across the rooftops looking for the slightest movement at which to shoot.
Below, on Hester Street, Zander stuffed a handkerchief up his jacket sleeve to staunch the flow of blood and, counting his blessings, started east in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge—and Maud's.
Except for the gentleman walking his bulldog, Pierrepont Street was deserted. Zander waited until he had disappeared around the corner before he mounted the steps of the brownstone and pulled on the bell. After a moment he pulled it a second time. An electric light came on upstairs. A moment later the downstairs lights flashed on and Maud, wrapped in a man's bathrobe, appeared in the vestibule. She parted the curtain on the narrow window next to the door and looked out. She obviously didn't recognize the bearded figure on her doorstep. "Go away or I'll scream for the police," she cried in a frightened voice.
"It's me," Zander said.
"Zander!" she exclaimed. She struggled with the lock and flung open the door. Then she remembered she was angry at him. "You think you can walk out of my life for a year and then turn up on my doorstep as if nothing had—" She noticed the dried blood on his forearm. "Oh, my God!" she gasped. "You and those childish picket lines of yours." She pulled him inside.
To Maud fell the distinction of being the first woman Zander had ever slept with who didn't wear dirtv' underwear. He had once been wildly, albeit briefly, in love with a nearsighted actress in Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, but she didn't count because, being something of a bohemian, she didn't wear underwear. Before her there had been a series of girls, all of them anarchists or Wobblies or garment union organizers or Marxists of one stripe or another, all of them dirt poor, all of them in the habit of undressing hurriedly in the dark to hide their underwear.
22
THE REVOLUTIONIST
Maud was another story. Zander had first met her on Christmas Day, 1915, at one of Professor Baldwin's legendary Wednesday organ concerts in the Great Hall at City College. Sitting in a back row, his good ear cocked toward the Bach arpeggios echoing from the rafters, Zander had been introduced to an older woman with bobbed hair, a blue band across her forehead, and noticeably tired eyes that conveyed the impression that they had seen more of life than they could cope with. "Mr. Til, Mrs. Pruett," a friend had whispered. They had nodded at each other without smiling. Later, in a Greenwich Village bar. Zander had gotten his first good look at her. In her mid-thirties, she had a quick laugh and a nervous habit of dispatching her bony fingers over her tight skirt in search of offending pleats.
It turned out that Maud was a divorcee; a lapsed Catholic who would have abandoned the church even without the divorce (she could live with the crucifixion, but she couldn't swallow the resurrection); the mother of a brilliant fifteen-year-old named Kermit who had a deformed arm; independently wealthy; the owner of a town house on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan; and an eager lover who believed that an unimaginative bed partner opened a man to fantasy rather than limiting him to fantasies about her. Her principal advantages from Zander's point of view were that she had incredibly smooth skin and a soft womanly body and was willing to share both with him; that she was not known in leftist circles and thus could offer him a house that he could retreat to when the streets became too dangerous for him. Her principal drawbacks, on the other hand, were, first, that she lived in Brooklyn, which was difficult to get to, and second, that she was hopelessly immature when it came to politics. She considered, to give only one example, that the biggest disadvantage to industrialization was the fact that it had brought with it noise.
Zander, by then a professional revolutionist working for the tiny Bolshevik Party, had devoted long, tedious hours to Maud's education. Stifling yawns, her eyes glazing over in boredom, she had pretended to pay attention. But one night, while he was reading aloud a section from Das Kapital, he had caught her humming a popular jazz song called "You Can Always Come Down My Rain Barrel." "If all this bores you silly," he had blurted out, "say so and I'll shut up."
Maud had plucked up her courage. "It does bore me silly," she had admitted, elevating her chin in defiance. "If you want my opinion, sexual centers are every bit as important as moral centers. Oh, Zander, come on, loosen up. Why don't we catch a trolley up to the Hippodrome and listen to Sousa and his band. Or go see Florence Reed in The Eternal Sin on Broadway. Talking about sexual centers, I hear she's a knockout."
ROBERT LITTELL
Maud's callousness toward things he cared passionately about had been too much for Zander. They had argued: over Maud's desire for a more permanent arrangement between them; over Zander's involvement in various labor conflicts in New Jersey and Connecticut ("Every time you hear the word 'strike' you race off like a chicken without a head," she had complained); over food, which Maud considered, after sex, one of the main reasons for living, whereas Zander treated it merely as fuel; over his table manners (he used a fork as if he had come to it late in life); and finally over her underwear, which he had come to think of as symbolic of her unrelenting, indestructible bourgeoisie-ness.
When Zander had left that morning almost a year before, he had taken his copy of Das Kapital wkh him. Maud had noticed it under his arm. "So you are not coming back," she had observed coldly from the door. She had cocked her head to one side and had smiled bitterly. "I suppose it's better this way. I mean, you can't really live with a man who doesn't understand that my underwear is my underwear, can you.'"'
Now, mesmerized by the dried blood on Zander's arm, Maud forgot about her underwear and his table manners. She raced down to the basement and threw several shovels full of coal into the furnace. When the water had heated, she ran Zander a hot bath. As he soaked in it, she cleaned his wound with cotton and alcohol. "I'm sorry," she said when she noticed him wincing. "God, it's ugly. What caused this.?"
"I caught my arm on some barbed wire climbing over a fence," Zander explained tiredly.
From the hallway Maud's son, Kermit, called, "What's going on.'* Who's here.?"
"It's only Zander."
"Zander's back!"
"You'll see him in the morning." To Zander she whispered, "If you were climbing over a fence, it was probably because they were after you again for picketing."
"They were trying to arrest me, and I was trying not to be arrested," Zander admitted.
"One of these days they're going to do more than chase you. They're going to actually shoot at you." Maud eyed Zander's beard. "God knows what vermin live in there," she groaned. Wielding a sewing scissors with unexpected dexterity, she trimmed his mustache and beard, then pressed a hot towel to his face to soften the hair. She lathered his face with the delicate brush and the shaving soap she used for her legs, supplied Zander with one of those new Gillette safety razors, and sitting on the edge of the tub, held a mirror for him while
THE REVOLUTIONIST
he shaved. When he finished, Zander rinsed his face with cold water from the tap and took a good long look at himself in the mirror. He had nearly forgotten what his face looked like.
He had started growing the beard and mustache as a result of a talk with Trotsky late one night about the practical side of being a revolutionist. The conversation had taken place in the kitchen of Trotsky's apartment on 164th Street in the Bronx. Trotsky had been oiling the Browning automatic he always carried in his pocket. The scratchy sound of a Puccini opera could be heard coming from the living room; Trotsky's wife would rewind the gramophone and replace the disc with the next one in the series. "You have to hone your revolutionary instinct," Trotsky had advised Zander. "If you are following someone, for instance, walk with a limp; people never suspect someone who limps of following them. If the authorities become too interested in you, grow a beard. For one thing, it makes court identification difficult; a good lawyer can make a case that a witness is identifying the beard and not the man behind it." Trotsky had smiled at a particularly beautiful aria. "Ah, that Galli-Curci is a witch," he had said, shaking his head in admiration. "It is hard to believe she is not actually in the next room." A faraway look had come into Trotsky's eyes. "Where were we.^"
"You were talking about the advantage of beards," Zander had reminded him.
"Just so. The other advantage it offers is the possibility of making yourself instantly unrecognizable by the simple expedient of shaving it off. People will have become accustomed to you with your mask and won't recognize you without it."
Emerging from Maud's bathtub, Zander realized Trotsky had been right; if he barely recognized his own face, others certainly wouldn't recognize it. The thought lifted his spirits enormously. All that remained was to find the money to pay for his voyage to the revolution.
Tucked into Maud's clean sheets, Zander slept fitfully. He dreamed about a man aflame plunging with a sinister hiss into a frozen river. He began sweating profusely and moaned in pain when he turned onto his wounded arm. Maud bathed his brow and his limbs with a damp towel. The fever abated and he settled into a profound sleep. When he finally woke up, Maud was sitting on the edge of the bed obsendng him with her tired eyes. She had opened the shutters, and the daylight streaming through the windows behind her seemed to bathe her body in an almost surgical light, which turned her silk nightdress transparent. He could see, as he was meant to, the outlines of her heavy breasts against the fabric. When she saw that he was awake she slid a cool hand under the blanket. Zander worked her nightdress so
ROBERT LITTELL
that it rode up over her hips. Kicking off the blanket, he guided her down on top of him.
"Where's Kermit.'"' he asked into the hair that fell across his face.
"I sent him off to play on the docks," Maud murmured.
She lifted herself and lowered herself in measured movements, riding the troughs and crests like a buoy. "Not yet," she warned, whispering her instructions with the part of her head that navigated. "Wait," she ordered him a few moments later—and then she moaned "Now," and sank onto him from a great height.
"Ah, I did that nicely," she laughed, collapsing across his body, shivering with pleasure, and Zander reinforced the self-compliment with one of his own. "You choreograph the best lays in Brooklyn," he told her.
She served him breakfast in the top-floor room crowded with straw furniture and plants in wicker stands. Filling an empty milk bottle from the tap, she watered her white geraniums as he took his tea, Russian style, from a glass, stirring in a spoonful of jam as he sipped. Without turning her head, keeping her voice casual, she asked him how long he thought he would be staying with her. When he didn't immediately respond, she said she was inquiring only out of curiosity. As far as she was concerned, he could come and go as he pleased. She had no intention of trying to pin him down to something permanent. Zander thanked her, and asked if she had seen Friday's Times and the stories about the revolution in Russia. She elevated her chin in defiance again. "Revolutions don't fascinate me the way they fascinate you," she said. Then, as if her words had suddenly planted a terrible idea in her head, she burst out, "You're not thinking of . . . oh, Zander, you are, aren't you.^ You've just come back and you're going off again. Only this time it's to Russia."
