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Immigrant, Montana

Page 8

by Amitava Kumar


  *3 If the reader in indiscriminate haste has rushed past the epigraph from Abraham Verghese on this page, this would be a fine occasion to return to it. Even strong and genuine emotions can have their start in pure fantasy. Nina was a site of fantasy, yes, but she was also her own person, passionate and daring.

  *4 I’m grateful to that professor for the useful advice she gave me later. I was ignorant of all conventions of academic paper writing. At the end of the semester, after giving me a C, she pointed out very gently that I should buy an instruction manual. Many years later, when I was older and wiser, or at least more experienced, I came across a parody of the original writing guide by Strunk and White, written by a duo called Baker and Hansen. I thought their examples would have stuck with me if I had read them in college. Here were their own examples for what Strunk and White had provided under the rule “Omit needless words”:

  Used for the purpose of sexual pleasure. (wrong)

  Used for sexual pleasure. (right)

  His penis is a misshapen and uncircumcised one. (wrong)

  His penis is misshapen and uncircumcised. (right)

  She removed her clothes in a hasty manner. (wrong)

  She removed her clothes hastily. (right)

  *5 We had read E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Patricia Limerick, Assia Djebar, C. L. R. James, and others. Ehsaan’s one-paragraph description on the course syllabus read: This course views Western expansion into the Americas, Asia, and Africa as a development which shaped world history and civilization more decisively than any phenomenon other than capitalism. Beyond broadly surveying the course of Western expansion, our purpose is to explore its legacies to our time and modern civilization. Our focus is primarily on the outlook, cultures and mores, the ways of being and doing that, despite their enormous variety, colonial encounters spawned. Given this concern, the course shall rely primarily on historical narrative, literature, criticism, and cinema. Independently interested students are urged to inquire into art, an area we have not formally included.

  *6 There was such emphatic poetry present in the account of everyday reality. Let’s read this letter that Kala Khan wrote to Iltaf Hussain in Patiala—You enquire about the cold? At present I can only say that the earth is white, the sky is white, the trees are white, the stones are white, the mud is white, the water is white, one’s spittle freezes into a solid white lump, the water is as hard as stones or bricks, the water in the rivers and canals is like thick plate glass. We are each provided with two pairs of strong, expensive boots. We have whale oil to rub in our feet, and for food we are provided with live Spanish sheep.

  *7 The book that Nina and I were to have the most fun with was one that claimed to help women achieve orgasm. The book wasn’t Nina’s. We found it in a café in Gardiner, Montana. Hippies, white people with their hair in dreadlocks, ran the café. The book sat on a shelf next to Catch-22, a guide to Antarctica, and if I remember right, a new-looking copy of Blood Meridian, and several other novels whose spines are now blurred in my memory. The books were there for customers to peruse while they waited for their avocado sandwiches with homemade goat cheese and alfalfa sprouts. In the book on orgasms, Nina found a passage to her liking and showed it to me. I whipped out my notebook, as sensitive and artistic men are supposed to do on such occasions, but then decided to steal the book instead. Tempo is important during sexual activity, the author had noted, before citing the kind of anthropological knowledge that fascinated Nina: according to Dr. Sofie Lazarsfeld in Woman’s Experience of the Male, We are reminded of the popular custom in Thuringia. There a couple will not marry until the boy and girl have sawn through a log together. If the rhythm of their movements agrees, the marriage takes place; otherwise the association is broken off.

  *8 Not very sophisticated as a system of notation, I know. Unlike Victor Hugo, who concealed his many sexual activities from his longtime mistress, Juliette Drouet, by adopting a varied system in his notebook. Here is James Salter on Hugo: Along with a woman’s name or initials, he might mark an N that stood for naked; something else for caresses; Suisses, for breasts; and so forth, a kind of ascending order. For everything, the full act, he wrote toda, all. There was something noted for almost every day. James Salter, The Art of Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

  Part III

  Laura and Francis

  The above clipping in my notebook is, I believe, from 2008. I don’t know, or no longer remember, the individuals involved. I must’ve read it, and liked it, as a startling statement about the meeting of art and desire.

  Also, in a child’s hand, on a piece of paper torn from a sheet: Happy Fact: Otters hold hands when they sleep, so they don’t float away from each other.

  Mr. Kissinger, you’re under arrest.

  This was to be said after dessert. Everything would be calm. Nothing out of the ordinary. Ehsaan believed that because they were academics, and had friends in common, they could get invited to a dinner where Kissinger was also a guest. People sipped cognac in such circles. Ehsaan would choose the moment to speak. He was articulate: his words commanded attention. He would get up and make the announcement about the arrest, addressing Kissinger directly.

  Then Kissinger was to be taken to a meeting of antiwar activists. He would be questioned about war policies. The police by then would have started a massive manhunt, of course. The accused was to be moved from one hiding place to another, and within a day or two, a statement would be issued that he had been arrested for the crimes of war. The point was to educate the public. Put the war back on the front pages instead of endless stories about the breakup of the Beatles or Jim Morrison’s allegedly lewd and lascivious behavior. They would be clear about their aims. Kissinger was to be released if the government stopped B-52 raids in North Vietnam.

  They had been sitting around in a borrowed house in Weston, Connecticut. A white single-story house with a large screened porch in the front. It belonged to Ehsaan’s in-laws, who were away in Europe at that time. He had cooked rice pulao and chicken curry. Everyone was drinking chilled vin rosé and, when that was gone, gin and tonic. Out of the ease of the evening, the lingering light of the summer, and the flow of the conversation among friends had come the talk about making a citizen’s arrest.

  Mr. Kissinger, you’re under arrest. This statement was noted more than once in the indictment.

  Ehsaan just laughed when I asked him about the Kissinger trial. So many years had passed. But he had a purple mimeographed article, pale with age, from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Noam Chomsky had given it to him, or maybe Howard Zinn, he couldn’t remember. At some point during the public trial of Kissinger a member of their group would inform the American public that the B-52 bombings had turned the rice fields of Vietnam into a lunar landscape. The countryside was now useless for crops, gouged by craters, some as large as forty-five feet across and thirty feet deep. Placed end to end, these craters would form a ditch thirty thousand miles long, a distance greater than the circumference of the earth. Unforeseen medical problems now ravaged the population there. That people were living underground day and night, and children were suffering from many disorders, including rickets from living without sunlight.

  Ehsaan said that the idea first emerged at an antiwar rally at St. Gregory’s Church in New York City. Yes, Your Honor, ordinary Americans had committed themselves to a plan of administering justice because they felt that their government was acting in a lawless manner. At any large gathering a person would simply get up and say: We hereby take into custody, in a citizen’s arrest, such-and-such people who are government leaders. Then “subpoenas” would be “issued.” It was all symbolic, and involved no concrete action. The goal was education.

  The idea of arresting Kissinger was an escalation in the war on war, a step-up from earlier actions, like the burning of draft records or the dumping of two buckets of human waste into the Selective Service filing cabinet. But the idea didn’t go any further because how wo
uld you get to detain somebody like Henry Kissinger without using some form of coercion? It seemed implausible. Ehsaan and his guests spent twenty minutes discussing this plan that evening but abandoned it even before the ice had melted in the glasses from which they were drinking.

  Except that a few months later, in November 1970, when J. Edgar Hoover spoke in a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, he mentioned this conspiracy and, for good measure, a plan to blow up underground electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington, D.C., area. It was pure fabrication, Ehsaan would say later. Along with Ehsaan, the others named by Hoover were two Catholic priests and two nuns who had been active in the peace movement. After having made the public accusation, Hoover threw hundreds of his agents into the investigation of antiwar activities. A little over a month later, FBI agents knocked on doors to serve federal grand jury subpoenas to scores of people. There was going to be a trial.

  For his part, after Hoover’s announcement, Kissinger speculated that “sex starved nuns” were behind the plot to kidnap him. President Nixon gave the go-ahead by saying that he would let the Justice Department carry out its prosecution unimpeded. Ehsaan said that they phoned William Kunstler, and after a hurried meeting, the famed counselor released a statement on their behalf: Mr. Hoover is overgenerous. We have neither the facilities nor personnel to conduct such an enterprise. Nor do we have access to unallocated funds like the government does…Their struggle was to impart a sense of reality into a scenario made feverish by Hoover’s paranoid imagination. That is why the lead defense counsel, Ramsey Clark, in his opening statement on the first day of the trial, reminded the jury, Of course we know that Henry Kissinger wasn’t kidnapped. He is alive and well in Peking today.

  The trial was held in Harrisburg, during the first three months of 1972. Your Honor, there would have been no indictment, and no trial, had it not been for a letter that was written after that summer meeting in Weston, Connecticut. A love letter, no less. This is the juncture where I wish to note, once and for all, that the plot of history advances through the acts of lovers. Oh, the wisdom of love. The superiority of love and its many follies. I also wish to add that these details were later to be faithfully communicated to Nina when she and I fell in love. The discovery of these details I think was a part of the excitement of being in love with her. Do you understand what I am getting at here, Your Honor? I beg for the Court’s forbearance.

  Present at that planning dinner in Weston, Connecticut, on the night of August 17, 1970, had been a young woman named Laura Campbell. Laura had just started teaching art history at a Catholic college in New York. She was also a nun. And she was falling in love with a man to whom she wrote letters each week in prison. He was a priest who had waited for the police to come and arrest him after he had poured blood on draft records to protest the war.

  The priest’s name was Francis Hull. He was serving a six-year sentence in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for his antiwar activities; he was also a participant in the civil rights movement and a critic of the isolated stance of the church in black communities. I looked at the black-and-white photographs of him. Hull had been a baseball player in his youth, and even in his fifties, he seemed to radiate a youthful energy. Strong face, open smile. In one of the newspaper reports, his photograph was accompanied by a quote: I have faith in the Almighty who will save our souls. I am just trying to save the lives of the young blacks being sent to Vietnam.

  Father Hull also had faith in a fellow convict, Douglas Adams. Adams was on a student release program and would go each day to Bucknell University to take classes. While on campus, he would hand over to a librarian named Mary any letters from Hull that he had smuggled out in his notebooks. The letters were for Campbell mostly but also, on occasion, for other activists. Mary, in turn, gave Adams the letters she had received in the mail from Laura. Neither Francis Hull nor Laura Campbell knew that Adams would carefully open each letter and make a photocopy that he would take back with him to prison in a manila envelope. This was because after he had read the first letter from Laura to Francis, and dutifully made a copy, he had approached the FBI and become an informant.

  Ehsaan hadn’t even laid eyes on Adams till the trial began and Adams, flanked by U.S. marshals, stepped into the courtroom. He was a thickset man in a lavender shirt standing stiffly on the sea of green slime that was the court carpet. He was the main witness for the government. Adams would not look at any of the defendants. In his deposition, he made the claim that Ehsaan had called him twice, at a Laundromat, to discuss plans to kidnap Kissinger. Ehsaan told the press that this was “a complete falsehood.” Admittedly, Adams didn’t have any qualities that would have incited Ehsaan’s interest or trust. Adams had served for a short time in the U.S. military in Korea, and then passed bad checks and stolen a car. Back in America, after escaping from a military stockade, he had once again used forged checks in Las Vegas and then Atlantic City. His father, in conversation with a journalist, said that his son had not spoken the truth even once in his life.

  Yet, Adams was kind of a charmer. At Bucknell, he told the young women he befriended that he was very active in the antiwar movement and was probably under surveillance by the authorities. He claimed close friendship with Francis Hull, the mention of whose name stirred people’s curiosity and admiration. Adams started dating two female students. He proposed to one of them, a blonde named Jane, but she had doubts about marrying him. To put her in a better frame of mind, Adams went ahead and bought her a bus ticket so that she could travel to New York City for the first time in her life, where she was to meet Sister Laura and open her heart to her. En route, Jane read a letter from Adams that he had said she should wait to take out of the envelope till she was on the bus. The greeting he had used as well as the words he had employed to sign off had been borrowed from what he had seen in Laura’s letters to Francis. He had also written that if he sometimes appeared distant in his manner it was because someone close to him had once ratted him out to the FBI. Adams told Jane in the letter that he had proposed to her because he had cancer and he wanted her to give him six months of happiness.

  Let us pause here for a moment. The contempt that Ehsaan and others felt toward Adams, that feeling, slightly exaggerated, is in my heart too: in a memory that is not mine, I see Adams stepping into the courtroom flanked by armed marshals, who tower protectively above him, and I hiss in anger. Adams looks nervous because in all the stories we have read liars look around apprehensively while still managing to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes. Ehsaan will not even look at him, but I do. My interest in Adams borders on sympathy. He claimed that he was close to Hull, he thought the women he wanted to date would be impressed; I was to do the same with Nina, bringing back to her stories of my encounters with Ehsaan. Adams stole words from Hull and Laura, and used them in the letters he wrote to Jane. I don’t want to be Adams in his plaid shirt and oversize glasses, and I don’t want to sweat like him, but I am him. Let me explain with an example, Your Honor. In Ehsaan’s class the previous semester I had read Stuart Hall, who had been born in Jamaica and spent most of his life in England, where he gained a following as an enormously influential cultural theorist. In his essay, Hall said that people like him who came to England in the fifties had actually been there for centuries. He was talking about slavery and sugar plantations. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.*1 Symbolically, Hall was saying, the people from the darker nations had a long history in the West. The symbol of English identity was the cup of tea, but where did the tea come from? There were no tea plantations in England. And there was no English history without that other history. Powerful stuff and delivered in Hall’s inimitable way. In a poem I was to write for Nina a few months later, I shamelessly put as my closing line: I’m the sugar at the bottom of your coffee, I’m the color in your cup of tea. End of pause.

  Francis Hull and Laura Campbell had hit upon a strategy in their letters. They were afraid that a guard could discover their letters if he checked the
pages of the notebooks where Adams used to hide them. So, they would always begin as if they were putting together a college essay. Laura Campbell titled the letter that formed the basis for the indictment “Reflections on Technological Advancement—On the Anniversary of Man’s First Landing on the Moon.” The first paragraph read:

 

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