The Laws of our Fathers (21 page)

    'I believe this decision is unwarranted,' he said at last, when I told him I had no choice now about Canada. 'There are alternatives.'

    'Such as?'

    ‘I have the name of a doctor. He is conversant apparently with all the regulations.'

    'Oh great. I'm going to bribe some MD to find something wrong with me. Is that the idea?'

    'The idea is this man feels as you do and will assist you.'

    'Oh sure. What other ideas have you got?' I imagined that my mother had rushed him straight to the phone as soon as he came in from work, still in his heavy wool suit. Beside him stood his briefcase, which, as a child, I had improbably associated with a cowboy's saddle bags.

    'I have talked with Harold Blossman. He tells me his son has joined the Naval Reserve. There is some period of training, then you are free to go on your way. Write movies, whatever.'

    'And what happens if you get called up?'

    'Called up?'

    'You know, they activate your unit. Then when you run away they call it treason.' 'Apparently that is rare.' 'And if it happens?'

    'Then you confront the matter at that time, Seth. Dear God, you cannot make plans for the rest of your life concerning a matter of this sort.'

    This talk of compromise, difficult to counter, tended to terrify me. In my passionate disapproval of the war, I had found one thing - perhaps the only thing - which I knew to be right and which was thoroughly mine. To believe so strongly and not to act on it, to capitulate to my parents' needs, was to condemn myself to a murk in which I'd never find my own outline.

    'I'm against this. You don't understand. I'm against this war machine. I
want
to resist. I don't want to just skate through so that some Puerto Rican kid from the North End can go die for me. I don't want to pretend I'll serve and let them torture me in basic training and then run away if they're going to ship me out to Nam. It's another form of involuntary servitude, to go fight the war that the defense contractors want. There is one alternative.'

    'This is not an alternative.'

    'Dad, this is the kind of thing that has to be fought. I would think you'd understand that.' I knew this was a vain argument. My father and I agreed that there were lessons in history, but not about who was who. He scoffed at the parallels I drew between our national government and Germany in the thirties. It was the students at Columbia whom my father compared to the beer-hall
putsch;
the Panthers, in his eyes, were the brownshirts with berets.

    'Your mother would feel that her life had come to nothing,' he finally said. 'You should have some feeling for her. I do not need to remind you.' As I had gotten older, my conflicts with my father were all supposedly conducted for her sake. What he wanted, did not want, was never purportedly in his own behalf. He was her spokesman, her defender.
I
begged him not to start with that.

    'And Hobie?' my father asked. 'What will he do? Will he run away with you?' My father and Hobie always had a peculiar kinship, on some weird wavelength of their own. My father had the usual Viennese snob's appreciation for high intellect, and he listened to Hobie's smart remarks with a dry, approving smile he never found for me. When I told him that Hobie had pulled a high number, he sounded relieved. 'So you will take this step alone,' he pointed out. 'And when is that?'

    
'I
don't know. Not for a while.'

    
'I
see. We can hope then for your better senses, can we not?'

    
I
did not answer. Sonny had come in by then and she stood tensely listening to the conclusion of my conversation. I looked to her as
I
cradled the phone.

    ' "Zere are alternatifs," ' I said, mocking my father's accent. I had made fun of both my parents this way all my life, even to their faces, never quite focusing on why this teasing was acceptable to them. Yet it was always vital to my parents that I be genuinely American, fully at home here - and secure. They spoke English whenever I was around, and had even given me a name which to my enduring puzzlement neither of them could correctly pronounce. I was 'Set' in my mother's Czech accent, 'Sess' to my father. This passionate desire of theirs that I fit in was my sole avenue of escape in a home where my father's humorless correctness and my mother's anxieties left me little other refuge. My claim that something was 'American' - cap guns, when I was six; watching too much TV; my irregular sense of humor - almost invariably caused them to yield. Which, in large part, was why so much seemed to be at stake in my decision to leave the United States.

    'Did he have any new ideas?' Sonny asked.

    'Zip,' I responded. In truth, there were other courses that fit my moral regimen. I could go underground. False IDs - especially a social security number - were needed, but it was really life on the run, with the constant anxiety of apprehension, that seemed impossible to me. There was also the more noble alternative of accepting prosecution. Brad Kolaric, a fellow I knew at Easton, had done it and was now in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute. But the prison butt-fuck stories kept me up at night, and I didn't feel my government should be imprisoning me for its errors. Exile seemed my only alternative.

    'Maybe I can trade myself for Juanita Rice. Maybe the Gypsies would kidnap me. Carry me away with them. My mother always told me how they snatch children.'

    Sonny had heard the same from her Aunt Hen.

    'You think they have an age limit?' I asked.

    'They might.'

    'Shit. I thought I had the solution.
They
could take me to Canada.' I looked at Sonny. 'It's such a down,' I told her. 'There's no answer, baby.' 'Kidnapping,' I said.

    Sonny gave me a melancholy smile. 'I don't think so.'

    'Hey, look, I know what bothers me. It's not Canada really. It's deserting them. That's the way they see it. If they knew I was safe in a real nice country but being held against my will -' I shot out a hand: smooth sailing. More than the government, what I needed to escape was my parents' unspoken condemnation -that I would dare forget what was never to be forgotten.

    No doubt, that night I dreamt about the numbers. Frail figures, they turned up in my dreams throughout my childhood, usually appearing to my horror somewhere on my body: under a trouser cufF, in the center of my forehead when I caught sight of myself in a mirror. Unlike my father, who wore long sleeves on all occasions, even in the mug of summer, who, so far as I can recall, never swam in public - unlike him, my mother made no exceptional efforts to hide the blue-green characters tattooed on her forearm, a few inches above her wrist. The marks, so distinct, were always remarkable to me - ineradicable and vaguely disfiguring, but dear and special because they were so identifiably hers. I can recall more than one occasion when I was very young when I wet a finger from my mouth and with no objection from her tried to wipe the numerals away. When I asked what they were, she said simply - always - 'Those? Those are numbers.' And when I wrote numbers - scribbles, really - on myself in pen, she walked me to the sink at once.

    As I learned to read, I remember noticing that the figures were peculiarly formed - hand-drawn in a style that struck me as foreign. There were tails of some sort on the fives and a dash across the middle of the seven. And around this age I began, at last, in some awful unspeaking way, to associate the numbers with that large, indescribable horror, that dark fog that lay somewhere in the past which was always the subject of silent allusion in my parents' home.

    My father never allowed any talk about the camps. If something appeared on TV, he watched it with unwavering silent attention. But he made no mention on his own and would discourage my mother with stark looks. And yet the few images I saw - of the naked skeletal bodies, the cyanotic corpses stacked and so profoundly without life - endured as specters. They lived with me inalterably, part of the high tension of my household, which had an atmosphere at all times like a tautened instrument string waiting to be plucked.

    Much of what I knew came from what I'd read - almost unconsciously - or what my mother eventually told me. I learned the few details I was allowed in my teens and largely in answer to my own ceaseless question to her: What was wrong with him, this man, my father? The stories I was told, in the barest strokes, were so alien to the secure envelope of University Park - its streets canopied by elderly elms, its confident persistent values and enduring social ethos of calm, intellectual debate - that I was truly years in absorbing them, some kind of titration of my own experience that took place in infinitesimal measure like medication being dripped by IV, tear by tear, into the blood. And even so they remain to me the very quintessence of horror: how my mother's husband had disappeared from her for good, as they were sorted by gender in one of Birkenau's lines. How my father's six-year-old boy was shot dead right before him at Buchenwald. The inhuman work. Meals of boiled grass. The unfathomable nature of what it means to have survived this utter blackness.

    I rigidly avoided any conscious thought of my parents as the victims of any of those barbarities, and never took account of the mark their experience had made on me. Sonny had shipped literally hundreds of books from home. I had taken only four or five:
The Diary of Anne Frank; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Talcott Parsons; Alan Bullock's biography of Hitler. A few lonely volumes, they stood together on the lee end of one shelf amid the board-and-cinder-block bookcases erected along every free wall of our flat in Damon. Even seeing them side by side, I had absolutely no sense of what connected them. They were simply great books to me, consumed in college in hours of isolated reprieve from life's furies. I did not see any relationship between my parents' past and my political passions. I didn't recognize the futile deal I'd silently negotiated with myself: that if the world could be reformed, made right, if I
knew
there could never be another Holocaust, I would be free of the burdens they had placed upon me. It was all invisible to me. Instead, during those years, I had an unexplained phobia which filled me with so much racing panic that I was always forced to leave the room whenever I saw scenes in cowboy movies of cattle being branded.

    

    In the aftermath of the melee at the ARC, demonstrators -consistently reported to be wearing the red arm sash of One Hundred Flowers members - had rampaged on campus. Windows in most of the buildings on the main quadrangle were smashed and glass vials of sheep's blood were splashed on the buff bricks. A smoke bomb was hurled through a basement window into Ryerson, the main undergraduate library. It was closed for four days and hundreds of thousands of volumes were removed to protect them from the lingering stench. Another bomb had been dropped down the chimney of the headquarters of the Damon Security Corps. According to reports, the bomber had slipped in his haste and cascaded off the tile roof, thudding to the ground, feet first, right outside the police station windows. The cops claimed he had been gathered up by other arm-banded rads, who carried him away, his foot, or ankle, or lower leg severely injured. Emergency rooms throughout the Bay Area had been combed, but the bomber was not identified.

    On campus and on the Boul the talk for days afterwards focused on how it all went wrong. The campus police announced that Eddgar was under investigation for inciting to riot and claimed that his boisterous, singing quotation from
The Little Red Book
was the cue for the rocks to fly. But I spoke to dozens of people who had been at the head of the crowd and were certain the cops had struck first, clubbing a woman whose dog had innocently approached the police line. Pressed, most of these witnesses admitted they had merely seen her bloodied face. No one seemed to recall the batons falling on her. Some said she wore a One Hundred Flowers sash, and others were clear she hadn't. The woman could not be found. Eddgar calmly denied any role in the provocation.

    'How foolish do you think I am, Seth?' he asked when I finally attempted to talk to him about it the following week. 'Do you really believe the faculty apparatchiks? The administration's theories -why, they're actually amusing. I'm not fooling. They paint me as the arch manipulator, the grand schemer with control over scores of lumpen rebels. And yet they want to claim I would stand in public and issue signals to a mob? Does that sound like a well-conceived attempt to subvert anyone but myself?'

    I knew that this speech was rehearsed, that it had been given a dozen times already. Only last week, I had heard Eddgar quote Sun-tzu to June. 'War is deception,' he had said. Eddgar never explained - nor did I dare ask - how the smoke bomber, with his broken leg, arrived under our stairwell. But I wanted to believe him when he denied orchestrating violence.

    Sonny was far more skeptical. We quarreled about Eddgar all the time.

    'At least he's not like the head cases out on Campus Boul saying, "How can I make the world better for me?" ' I explained to her one night. 'He doesn't say, "Let's change everything, but make sure there's still plenty of LSD and lots of cool James Bond movies and someone to do my cleaning." What I think is that he's said to himself, "If I was poor, if I was dispossessed, if I was, you know, like Fanon says, one of the wretched of the earth, how would I react? If I had these smarts, what would I do? Would I put up with this crap for an instant?" And he's being honest when he says the answer is no. He'd want to smash everything that kept him from being equal and free.'

    'And you agree with him?'

    ' "Agree?" No. Not completely. But I mean, I'm more with him than against him. "Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary." Right?' I smiled puckishly and Sonny made a face. 'Christ,' I said, 'why do I have to explain this to you. You're the one who was raised as a Commie.'