by Neil Gordon
This is what Jason Sinai was thinking, at first, as he watched the ancient Veterans rise and begin to make their way, through the audience, to the stage. Then, as he became aware of who it was he was watching, he stopped thinking, for a bit, altogether.
Aware not just of the Veterans themselves, although they were noteworthy, but of the rest of the audience. The many other veterans there, perhaps not of Spain but of the long, hard service in Europe or the Pacific. Others, of course, would be Dies Committee army rejects, “premature antifascists”—blacklisted for opposing Germany in Spain rather than in the US Army after the so tardy American declaration of war—Party members, Fellow Travelers. Some were in suits, others out of the mainstream. Berets abounded, some worn at a rakish tilt, many also sporting buttons referring to Vieques, or the Bush–Gore election, or—there must have been some union contest going on locally, because these were common—“You Can’t Scare Me,” and “I’m Sticking to the Union.” An occasional magnificent head of white hair stood out among the bald heads. The women, in general, were dressed for an outing, some in clothes that looked as if they had not been out of the cedar chest since the year before—and thus the occasional whiff of camphor.
But contrary to his expectations, there were not exclusively old folk here. There was also a whole other dimension of the audience that was coming clear to him: the middle-aged, in fact, his peers. There were bald men of his own age, nearly comically resembling their bald fathers, women sitting shoulder to shoulder with their aged mothers, a few couples whom he thought he could recognize from Woodstock, or perhaps they just looked like the Sunday afternoon crowds crowding those streets. Now, as he became aware of them, he saw people of his own age everywhere.
And slowly it was dawning on Jason that that inventory of the audience, still, was incomplete. Because some of these middle-aged men and women were not there with their ancient parents, or even if they were, they were also there with their children. And their children ranged from infants to adolescents, even—and this dimension of the audience, as he watched closer now, was also coming clear to him—college students, many college students, some dressed in clothes, in fact, that would not have been particularly out of place at the University of Michigan in 1968.
Looking closer now—nearly squirming in his seat to do so—he was able to derive two important facts from the audience. First, that there were more middle-aged people there than could be attributed to sons and daughters of the old folk, and secondly, that there were more college students than could be attributed to the middle-aged parents. The conclusion of this estimation made his jaw drop: this event had drawn a crowd of people with no personal connection to the Veterans.
There were, Jason slowly realized to his astonishment, four full generations present here, from Veterans born in the first decade of the century to children born in the last.
To pay homage to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? To honor his father?
True, there were only—perhaps—five hundred people here.
But—and here Jason mentally vowed to question this feeling more carefully later, perhaps with Molly’s help—that was five hundred people.
Did that not constitute a community?
And now the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in attendance today—most helped by children, many on canes, and some still amazingly spry—had made their way from the audience to the foot of the stage and Moe Fishman was at the podium with his black mustache, white curly hair, nodding and smiling happily and modestly before the applause, the movements—it seemed to those who did not know him—of a slightly addled old man, an impression that lasted just until Moe began to speak. We are very proud of what we did in Spain, and equally, we are proud of all the activities we’ve engaged in ever since we came back from Spain. The lights dimmed and Jason, listening, turned his attention from surveillance of the audience to the stage, watching his father’s peers, realizing that, from his perch in the darkness, he would soon be watching his father, in the flesh, for the first time in twenty-five years.
2.
As the lights went down Walt Arden took his seat stage right, the last seat in the first row. Michael was in back, as close as he could get to the last row, stage left, and Richard stood up in the projection booth, empty today, watching out. Like this they had the audience within a huge triangle.
Walt’s position, though, was key: only he, turning in his chair, or—when the lights dimmed—standing up and against the wall, could survey the faces of the audience. Which he did as soon as the lights went down and some old fool with a mustache climbed onto the stage and began to talk. We are very proud of what we did in Spain, and equally, we are proud of all the activities we’ve engaged in ever since we came back from Spain . . . lifelong commitment . . . that we hope to pass on to future generations is the idea of commitment and activism.
Walt tried not to listen. Proud of what the fuck, was his view, their role in the triumph of Stalinism? But that didn’t matter. A good police officer was above his own involvement. These strange people, they only looked like they came from a different country. In fact, they were Americans, and in fact his role there was instrumental, not ideological: he was there to enforce a law and apprehend a criminal, if that criminal was stupid enough to show up. His eyes had adjusted to the dark; he began to divide the audience in quarters and conduct a first inventory of the faces, counting the areas where there were possibilities—middle-aged men—and beginning to draw a mental map.
Really, if this old fool was proud of a lifetime spent undermining his democratically elected government, of opposing his fellow citizens as they fought for their lives on foreign soil, of subverting the very constitutional processes which guaranteed him his freedom of speech and assembly so that he could wear his goddamned moustache and talk his goddamned bullshit, well, that was his prerogative. Walt’s prerogative, however, was to catch Jason Sinai, and it was with a view to this, and only this, that he settled further back against the wall next to the edge of the stage, deep in shadow, and quartered the audience, and inventoried the middle-aged men in each quarter, and then, one face after the other, watched, and watched, and watched.
3.
This is what they were here for. Listening to Moe’s introduction from his seat, center stage in the last row, clutching his daughter’s hand, Bradford Flanagan, old Billy Flanagan’s son, felt the old man’s voice, clarion and believable, penetrate in his chest. This—this—is what we came for. And for the first time in this horrible year since his father had died, he felt something like okay.
This is what they had come for. To celebrate these men who, alone on the globe, during the few years that politicians maneuvered Europe closer and closer to war, were the only ones doing something rather than—like the powerless populations from New York to Paris, from Los Angeles to Peking, from Moscow to Miami, the whole world—watching with powerless fascination.
Brad closed his eyes. Since the winter in which his father died, he had felt only the dead. Now he put an arm around his daughter, felt her small shoulder against his chest wall, shut his eyes, breathed deep, in, out, and quietly, in the back of his throat, began to cry. His father’s death had taken a massive toll on everything he cared about: his marriage, his finances, his friends, his health. He had been unable to work for a serious period, nearly three months, in which his wife supported the family and his daughter stayed with a babysitter. Finally he came at least part way out on Zoloft, which in turn left him nearly unbearably sleepy and fat. But even post-depression, this certainty that nothing good would ever happen again was proof to drugs. As if it were more than even a certainty. As if it were a mathematical conclusion. Until now. Now, sitting high up in the audience, for the first time in a year, that certainty began to shift. Brad pulled his baseball cap down an inch, and his daughter closer, and opened his heart, opened his heart, to the people in front of him.
Moe was finishing now—there are fewer of us this year than last, but those that there are a
re strong of heart and hale of spirit, still on the barricades against fascism and inequality, and so like every year, please join me in welcoming my colleagues to the stage for the 60th Annual Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade commemoration. And as they did every year the brigadistas, a dozen and a half of them, stood to accept the huge, sustained applause from the audience, and none more enthusiastically than Brad Flanagan, cheering for these men in front of him and for the gift they possessed, the gift of having once, purely, completely, done something of which they would never be ashamed.
4.
A gift, Jack Sinai thought, watching these men from the wings, he had never been able to share with his children, perhaps the only such gift. Used to the potent narcotic of applause, out of sight in the wings, even as the house rose for his comrades, he could think with clarity. This gift they all had, this gift that was about to die. Money, property, beliefs; all of these you could give to your children. But not this kind of moral surety. And not only could it could not be inherited, it could no longer be created. “The good fight” was an ethical category that died in ’39. The World War? Jan Karski spoke to Churchill and Roosevelt in ’43, eye witness to the Warsaw Ghetto and the camp at Belzec, and Churchill and Roosevelt did nothing. What else was there after the Nazis? Abba Kovner, his scheme to poison Germany? Stalin? Now, what was it they were supposed to pass onto their children?
He rose now and moved into the folds of the stage-left wings, just out of sight, and searched out his family in row G. There he was, Danny, his handsome face with its natural authority exposed under a broad, bare forehead, in a white shirt and black sports jacket, with Laura on his lap. Next to Danny, Laura’s seat empty, and then Maggalah herself, her shocking red hair standing out like a beacon in the audience, her distance from her husband somehow emblematic of the slight remove at which they, each busy with their own achievements, lived together. Or of something else. Jack knew a bit of what had happened between Danny and Klara, when they were growing up together, at Yale in the ’80s, and their walk on Hammonasset Beach, but only a bit—a suspicion more than anything else, and a suspicion—he had to admit—that he let lie because at heart, whatever had happened was his fault. Now Maggalah, his daughter-in-law, whom sometimes he was afraid that he and Eleanor loved more than Danny, was all grown up, a mother herself, and as an adult, she was hurt. She wore neither makeup nor jewelry; her skin was nearly alabaster under a fine sprinkling of freckles, and unless she was succumbing to middle-aged drift of her weight, which Jack much doubted, she was in the first couple months of her second pregnancy, still unannounced. Right now she was leaning toward Eleanor, clearly reassuring her mother-in-law. It was a role the young, strong woman took on more and more often, as if she sensed the family trauma that preceded her marriage to Danny which, Jack was reasonably sure, Maggie in fact knew nothing about. And why should she know what a surprise their marriage had been? That was, as Danny would say, a “no-brainer.”
On stage, Jack knew, the microphone would pass down the line of the perhaps sixteen veterans present, each of whom would have the chance to say a word or two. Normally he would be one of them; today, his moment was held apart. First came Martin Balzer—“I’m glad to see all of you folks thinking the way that we did.” Then Abe Verodin, taking the microphone from Martin, began what seemed to be a mid-length lecture on the history of the fight against fascism and Jack let his eye wander back into the audience. When the veterans were done, it would be his turn, and he needed to turn his attention toward what he would say.
But was he to say? After this morning? His eye rested on a middle-aged woman, handsome, sitting alone, next to an empty seat. What did he want to say? I have a son your age. I haven’t seen him in twenty-five years. I believe he’s alive. I don’t know where. You could be his wife, for all I know. I miss him so much.
God damn it, he couldn’t say that.
For one thing, he was determined to be short.
The problem was, Jack thought to himself, they—all of them out there—they needed it to be sweet.
5.
The wave of applause rolled over the audience when the veterans stood and, the audience rising in ovation, Jason Sinai found himself cut off from the stage, seated in a little hollow of standing people. Thinking of the irony of being here, a ceremony for which he would, twenty-five years ago, have had utter contempt.
He could remember it as far back as his adolescence, lying on his bed in the Bedford Street townhouse, listening to his father’s voice, and those of his friends, arguing Israel, or Marxism, or Guatemala, or Czechoslovakia, out in the garden. It had enraged him then. The falsity of this need to feel that they had done something other than participate in a moment of history—a moment, furthermore, of a rank failure. They had failed to defeat fascism in Spain. They had failed to have the antifascist agenda even on the table in the greater field of World War II, in which they had been, most of them, promptly sidelined in any serious way. Even worse was the truth that no one dared pronounce: that they had been duped by the Soviets, used not only against their own government but worse yet by the Soviets against their own internal dissidents. The good fight. Fuck the good fight.
Now he smiled.
How easily he was able to feel the anger of his adolescence.
He stopped smiling.
It scared him sometimes.
6.
Which was, near as I can determine, precisely the minute that Walt Arden recognized Jason Sinai.
Not even he can tell you how it happened—how he accomplished, that day, what every best effort of every law-enforcement agency in the country had failed to do for twenty-five years.
See, Jason Sinai—like Mimi Lurie and Sharon Solarz—had built his phony identity in a time when birth and death records, both kept on paper, were not reconciled. You could assume what was known as a “dead baby” identity with virtually total certainty that the child’s death would never be discovered. Everyone is always carrying on about how the FBI couldn’t catch these college students, but how could they possibly? For Jason Sinai and his friends, it was like taking candy from a baby: all you had to do was go somewhere and search the town-hall records for the death certificate of someone born close to your own birthday, preferably in a distant location. Then you go to that location and copy their birth certificate, which was freely available to the public. From here? Driver’s license, Social Security number, even passport—you could get any document you wanted. To catch Jason Sinai through a paper trail you’d have had to take every birth certificate in the country—he had picked James Grant’s in Bakersfield, California, where he hadn’t the slightest tie—within five years either way of his own birth, and then do a paper match up with every death certificate in the country.
Now, of course, it’s all different. Then, without a paper trail, surveillance—of family, friends, known contacts—was the only option. But Jason—like Mimi Lurie, like Sharon Solarz—had never again, not one single time, ever contacted anyone he had ever known. Never. As for being recognized, to alter his appearance sufficiently to avoid recognition was a discipline, but one that he only needed until he had lost all his hair; that and a minor nose job had been more than sufficient. Friends? Not a single one from before the Bank of Michigan. Family? But Jason, at nineteen, was not just willing to give up his family. He was determined to.
To catch Jason Sinai, after twenty-five years, required the simple, dumb coincidence of the one mistake in his career as a fugitive being combined with Walt Arden’s extraordinary luck.
Walt, standing in the shadows of the stage, quartering and surveilling the audience while the brigadistas took turns with the microphone, realized two things. First was that he was not going to make a positive ID in this light. Second was that he didn’t need to.
Why was because the shadow in which he stood was deep enough that he could literally not be seen.
And therefore he could, unobserved, mount the three steps leading into the stage-right wings which, because the l
ectern was all the way over on stage left, were entirely empty.
Moving very slowly, watching the audience for tell-tale moves of the head that would reveal that someone had noticed him, he stepped gingerly backward up the steps one by one until he was hidden, effectively invisible, in the stage wings.
Then he took out a night-vision scope.
Brilliantly included in his kit, this morning.
He mouthed the words Thank you, Lord and then, moving slowly, took out four computer printouts: the four artist’s projections of what Jason Sinai might look like in his mid-forties. He lined them up at his feet and scanned them through the scope, then raised the scope to the first row of the orchestra, stage left, and scanned right.
Repeated row by row for the entire first quadrant, then second, then third, and then fourth.
And he would have repeated again for the balcony had he not, last row, stage right, next to the emergency exit, found him.
Really, it was incredible luck. Only the third artist’s projection had any value, in that it showed Jason Sinai, aged twenty-five years, bald, and because he was bald, in a baseball cap.
Walt Arden’s heart leapt into life. For a long moment he stared hard at the green image in the lens. Then he forced himself to look away. His heart was pounding nearly unendurably. It was a long suite of seconds before he could bring his attention back under control.
He gave himself a second look, very quickly. He wasn’t looking for an absolute identification: he was looking for probable cause to question the man. It was a careful look though, and after it he decided to move. If he hesitated, he knew, he’d over-think the ID, doubt his own eyesight. If he was wrong, then he’d take the consequences.
But he wasn’t wrong.
He was right.
