Red Love (8 page)

With his new friends and engulfing work, Sid pondered the course of his life up to this point. He was embarrassed that he had spent so much time writing to Betty Grable in Hollywood, telling her of his hopes and dreams and what her legs meant to him. He had expressed this feeling to her in so many ways, in so many letters, it must have bored her to tears. He blushed. She must have thought, What a lonely man Sid Smorg must be. And this wasn’t really true, at least not any more. He thought up a letter telling her to forget those other letters, but he never sent it. The truth was, he just didn’t want to nibble at her toes any more.

Sid’s two new Soviet friends, whom he knew only as Dmitri and Alexei, were among the most interesting men he had ever known. Dmitri had a swarthy complexion, black dancing eyes, and a warm smile. He had read widely in English literature, and discussed Browning’s “My Last Duchess” with Sid. He called Sandburg “a mediocrity and a bit of a faker,” but liked Dickens, Edgar Lee Masters, and Wordsworth. “My life is drudgery, Sid,” Dmitri confided. “It’s a succession of days of waiting apprehensively on street corners in all sorts of weather; sometimes the people don’t show up. Having to cajole and plead and threaten. Eating in cheap, out-of-the-way restaurants.” Sid wished he could do something to cheer his friend up. Dmitri often went to the ice hockey games at Madison Square Garden and joined in the free ice skating afterwards. Sid would watch Dmitri and his red-and-gold muffler fly around the rink, happy to see him freeing himself from his everyday cares. Dmitri would wave at Sid. Once, to Sid’s delight, he executed a somersault.

One day Dmitri exploded with anger at Sid. Sid had traveled to New York four times in a single week in a fruitless effort to obtain a report that Dmitri wanted on synthetic rubber from a gull named Herman. Dmitri shouted at Sid, his face livid: “Just look at you, my boy. You not only look like a ghost, you are one. You’re dead on your feet. What will your mother think? You goddamn fool. You’re not coming to New York again for two weeks. Go home. Spend time with your family. That’s an order. I’ll bet you that asshole Herman hasn’t even begun that report. The hell with it for now. Even if Moscow were to fall tomorrow (and it won’t—ever) I forbid you to come to New York again for two weeks.” After that outburst, Dmitri calmed down. Gently, he said, “Come, Sidney. We’ll zip over to the Ferris Wheel Bar, have a few double Canadian Clubs and some sandwiches. Then I’ll put you in a cab and personally buy you some Corona Corona cigars and a parlor-car seat for the train.”

So it was.

Sid settled down in his parlor-car seat in a haze of holy contentment.

Sid was busy day and night writing reports (grieving over his deficiencies in grammar), stealing blueprints, copying and returning them, seeing Dmitri and Alexei in New York, Cincinnati, or Buffalo, raising money for his trips (since he hated to take it from the Soviet people) by working weekends on his job for time and a half, telling lies at home.

Sid’s mother was certain he was carrying on a series of cheap, clandestine love affairs. Sid worried about not living up to her code of ethics. She often said that a thief “could not look God in the eye nor at himself with respect.”

Sid had fallen in love once, on Monday, August 30, 1937. A girl in the laboratory. Her unassuming manner, her snub nose captivated him. He courted her for a month and told her he loved her. One day as they walked by the river, she told him she did not believe his love, and cited his “lack of ardor” as the reason.

He drank heavily. He thought of making a clean breast of it. Having seen a lot of Bing Crosby movies, he was tempted to confess to the Jesuit priests in the neighborhood, especially the dazzling Father Mahoo, or the erudite tall parish priest at St. Ambrose’s, Father Culligan.

Whenever Sid was down, Dmitri’s concern picked him up. Dmitri said over drinks, “I realize it’s because of this work that you have no wife and family of your own. But this is not natural. You are a normal man with normal instincts and desires. We must find a solution, Sidney. As soon as possible you must get out of this lousy business. Forget it. Then you can run around with girls every night in the week.” Blushing at all this, Sid said he wasn’t that kind of guy.

“Secret work won’t always be necessary,” Dmitri said. “You’ll see. After the war we’ll give peace a chance. It will be a wonderful era for mankind. There will be open borders; nations will hold hands. You’ll come openly to Moscow and you’ll meet all your old friends again. Oh, they will be so glad to see you, Sidney. We’ll have a great party and we’ll paint the town red. Oh, we’ll have a marvelous time.”

Sid had begun to tell his American contacts that he was married to a redheaded woman with freckles and that he was the Father of twins. Perhaps, he thought, in doing this, he was affirming the fine old family values he believed in.

In October 1943 Sid received a gold medal: “The Order of the Red Star.” In December, he was asked if he would accept the most important assignment any agent had ever had.

In January 1944 he met Herman Rolle, and from then on traveled to meet him to transmit stolen documents on a regular basis. Sid liked this tall, thin, somewhat austere man, a noble genius in his estimation. Those huge horn-rimmed glasses!

At their last meeting in the hills between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, Rolle told Sid of his impending transfer back to England. Rolle raised a toast: “I hope that sometime in the not too distant future, we shall be able to meet openly as friends in Great Britain.”

“I would love that,” Sid said. “I hope you won’t think I’m being presumptuous in saying that it would be a thrill for me to visit such famous landmarks as where Walter Scott, Bobby Burns, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare worked, with you by my side, Herman.”

“That’s certainly a visit I will look forward to,” said Rolle.

Sid entered the apartment on Perry Street as if going into a darkened theater and having the stage light up on his fondest dreams and hopes… . Josh Moroze sang “This Land Is Your Land,” “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and the “Starvation Blues.” Bobby Metzger had taken out his guitar and Joe Klein his harmonica and paper comb and they accompanied Josh, stomping their feet.

Sid saw men and women with warm Jewish East Side faces, red shawls, moustaches, suspenders, black silk stockings, garter belts, Professor Myron Wooman, the tap-dancing magician, Hershel the horn player leading the musicale, in a corner two microfilm machines blazing away, people scurrying to and fro in a fire of happy activity, Jews stroking, hugging, nipping at each other’s faces, nibbling… . “Sid, Sid,” they called his name; as soon as they heard it, he was one of them, their breaths were his. … A fat man on two chairs fluttered his eyelids and said, “Is that the kind of thing you kiss me? A little sick kiss?” Sid gazed upon them, and as his face swept around the room, he spotted a tall, moustached, cigar-smoking young man sprouting a beaver coat, a gift from the Soviets; the young man lifted a wad of documents from the pile on the floor beside the microfilm machines, and gleefully handed them to Sid.

A few hours after F.B.I. agents began to interview Sid, he broke down and said, “Yes, I am the man to whom Herman Rolle gave the information on atomic energy.”

He said he wanted a lawyer who was not a “pinko” or a “bleeding heart.”

“Punish me and punish me well,” Sid said.

As Sid was admitted to prison, he noticed that the admitting sergeant was struggling to spell the word “espionage.” The word was strange to the policeman.

The virgin hermit Sid Smorg thought, “Why did I do it?”

Awake and Sing

How to understand everything once and for all.

—G. L.

He knew the score, and he could never go back to what he had been.

Shortly after his bar mitzvah in Alabama, Solly returned to New York with his father. The price of cotton, which had been thirty-six cents a pound, dropped overnight to six cents. Solly’s father had paid for his stock with cash. He was wiped out. Solly’s mother Sarah and sister Ruth, who had been living with relatives on Pitt Street, rejoined Solly and his father at a flat on Delancey Street.

When he was in his junior year of high school, Solly’s father wanted him to return to yeshiva study afternoons after school. He told his father he could not go back. Society was collapsing all around him, and at the yeshiva they discussed what happened when you cut open a pregnant cow: was the baby a dairy or a meat product?

He could not consider the 613 laws of the
Halakhah
while capitalism was reaching its final stage: fascism. One day on Rivington Street, a man in a red beret had handed him a Communist Party pamphlet. Solly stayed up all night reading and rereading it. So this was why there was so much suffering all around him in the face of so much plenty. He had always been moved by the idea of the prophet Elijah coming and the hearts of the fathers returning to the sons and the sons’ hearts returning to the fathers: the time when there would be love in the world, when people would be compassionate and their hearts would turn toward one another. And here was the way to reach that reality.

He would help to smash the legacy of endless wars, racism, and white chauvinism. He understood, he understood everything; he shouted down his father at the dinner table as a Jew who buried his head in the sand.

In Harlan, Kentucky, the coal miners were shot down in cold blood by the capitalist pirates because they struck for a few more pennies. When his father cursed the Communists, Solly told him, “Look what’s happening in Kentucky. All the miners want is to live, Papa. What happens? They’re shot down by the ruling class in cold blood. Do you really think the workers can take over the means of production without a violent revolution when even for pennies they’re dropping blood?”

Solly could quote a certain pamphlet, a transcription of one of Stalin’s speeches,
The Soviet and the Individual,
by heart: “Of all the valuable capital the world possesses, the most valuable and most decisive is people,” and the intriguing passage: “We pushed forward still more vigorously on the Leninist road, brushing aside every obstacle from our path. It is true that in our course we were obliged to handle some of these comrades roughly. But you cannot help that. I must confess that I too took a hand in this business. …”

He learned about deviationists and social fascists and Trotskyite vermin. He stood up and shouted, “Comrades, let’s not be bashful about the trials of the Trotskyite and Bukharinite wreckers and spies. Let’s hail the death of the twenty-one traitors and the findings of Soviet workers’ justice with gusto and joy. Hurrah! Hurrah! Let’s eradicate this scum and smooth the grid for the coming advance of peace and solidarity.” Standing on a soapbox at City College, it was Solly who answered a Jewish heckler by declaring, “Stalin brought Russia into the twentieth century. He is the new Moses of the Jews.”

Solly’s face was aglow, sitting in Madison Square Garden, watching Earl Browder, the quiet man from Kansas, mumble, “We’re living in the rapids of history and a lot of folks are afraid of being dashed on the rocks. But not us, comrades!” After the cheering, Browder mumbled, “Our ideological struggle has to be conducted as a concrete struggle arising from unfolding events. We demand that it be carried out in a fresh language. We will defeat those who spread pessimism and despair, confusionism and obscurantism, adventurism and recklessness, and thus establish unshakable ideological ties with the workers and the peasants. As the great, the wondrous Stalin says, ‘We will abolish underripe fruit and overripe fruit and quench our spirits with fresh fruit forever!’ All hail to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first land of Socialism! All hail! May Stalin’s example be a fresh banana forever!”

Since revolution should be fun too, Comrade Stalin had designated a little laugh that the comrades could insert into their daily speech. It went like this: “Hey
huh!
Hey
huh!”
and it could be correctly expressed with a snicker or a snort.

And so as Comrade Browder spoke, he was interrupted after each lofty phrase with the audience of twenty thousand snorting, “Hey
huh!
Hey
huh!”

“We will root out petit bourgeois influences, eliminating the final vestiges of right-opportunism and left-adventurism, never adopting a middle-of-the-road policy, steering a firm course at this critical crossroads. At this juncture we must particularly stress the next immediate stage of progress for the people, which is inseparably bound up with, and requires the crystallization of, a broad democratic front coalition.”

Browder drew a breath, smiled, and finished reading: “Comrades, it’s no accident that we are here today. It is no accident, furthermore, that ours is the party that combats left-sectarianism, right-opportunism, and philistinism of all sorts. We shall continue to develop correct tactics adopted to the concrete situation.”

The crowd stood and shouted, “Hey
huh!
Hey
huh!”

29 Perry Street

Combining espionage and rich cultural evenings.

—G. L.

In the late fall of 1954, three months after Solly and Dolly Rubell had been executed for espionage, some of the gang assembled for a musicale at 29 Perry Street.

It wasn’t easy to talk: walls had ears. They confined their conversation to certain topics and what might be inferred between the lines, and they played the radio loudly. Josh Moroze, the People’s Songbird, tuned his guitar in a corner.

Sophie Rich, Dolly’s best friend, said, “This happened in Florida a year before the arrest. It was a family vacation. Dolly’s father, Sammy, was getting senile. His wife Ruth would treat him like shit. He came out of the cabana with his penis hanging out of his pants. Dolly went up to him and told him very gently so he shouldn’t be embarrassed, and he put it back in. She loved her father to the very end.”

Hermie, Sophie’s husband, said, “And how that witch Ruth tormented Dolly.” Dolly’s mother Ruth had come to the death house only to put pressure on Dolly to confess, was buddy-buddy with the F.B.I., and didn’t even go to the funeral. “I don’t go to political rallies,” she said.

They were the children of Seward Park High School, CCNY’s engineering school, the Y.C.L. and the Steinmetz Society, old pals. Who says children cannot kill?

They had escaped the net. They didn’t know whether to laugh or cry: Solly, Dolly burned to death, unimaginable suffering; Maury Ballinzweig caught in Toronto after fleeing from New York; Bobby Metzger in jail for five years on a perjury conviction (only Wilfred Fuller and Joe Klein escaped to the Soviet Union)—and here they were, guffawing with relief, sucking candies, afraid to speak out loud, but free: “Ain’t this an amazing bitch?” said Max Finger in a half-whisper. He’d been in it up to his eyeballs.

“Look, I don’t know what they got,” Renée Finger said, “but I do know what they could have had when they went through my stuff.”

“Darling,” whispered Sophie Rich, “I had a camera that was no bigger than my garter.”

They had done the microfilming in this room. Once they had spent seventeen hours in a row photographing classified aerodynamics stuff Bobby Metzger had filched overnight from his Columbia University physics prof—he’d been entrusted with the combination to his personal safe. Then they’d collapsed in nine sleeping bags on the floor.

There had been drama in this room, soirees, good fucking, lectures on child rearing and string quartets that Solly had hired. Bobby Metzger had learned to play the guitar here. Dolly had sung arias here; they had celebrated Rosh Hashanah here by singing Christmas carols and roasting delicious suckling pigs and candied apples, rinsing them down with Riesling wines and Soviet vodka. Then they had watched porno movies, a thing they did only on Jewish holidays. There were glory days to reflect on; nobody could take them away from them.

The great Negro tenor Radford had been flown in from Holland one beautiful night; that booming voice, those eyes that were worldwide: “THE LIGHTS OF WALL STREET BURN BRIGHT ALL NIGHT LONG, COMRADES: WE MUST KEEP OUR LIGHTS BURNING TOO.”

Josh Moroze began softly strumming “The Peat Bog Soldiers.” Sure enough, Hermie’s lips moved and he was singing not the original words to the concentration camp song, but the words that Dolly had penned in her cell:

“We’re on our way, death house defiers

To remove you from their midst, those fascist liars.

Up and down we hear them marching

Millions, millions by our side
—

Those who live and those they buried

Shall no longer be denied.

“Until at last the death house defiers

Wait not in terror for that dark and lonely chair.”

Renée Finger ran from the room, weeping.