Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  She awakened suddenly and struck a match to look at her watch. It was half-past three in the morning. She was tired, her stomach was sour, and her whole body was covered with a film of sweat. For a little while she lay in bed, trying to ignore the dampness of the sheet under her body. She was afraid to close her eyes for fear that she would drift back into sleep. Finally, she gave up and crawled out of bed and drew the blackout curtains, shutting out the slight coolness of the night air. To add to the general discomfort, she had her menstrual period, and she felt heavy and bloated and longed for a cool, leisurely bath. She poured water from the pitcher into the basin on the washstand, thinking how odd it was that they should have the same washing facilities here that she had had in her dormitory at Sarah Lawrence, and splashed the water over her face. A cardboard sign over the washstand warned that the water was not to be drunk under any circumstances. She put on her uniform, thinking wistfully of how comfortable a light blouse and a pair of cotton shorts would be. Each day, she disliked the uniform more, and among her fantasies was a shopping trip with Jean, where they bought endless numbers of dresses, each more gossamer than the last—a peculiar fantasy because she had never cared deeply about clothes or paid very much attention to them.

  Then she went downstairs, circling the roofless indoor court of the building, with its pool of stagnant water and its tile court where once, as rumor had it, the many wives of the rajah had disported themselves. It was still very dark, the only light coming from the moon and the stars, fitful, reflected in the murky pool. She felt her way through the stygian lobby and stood outside, in front of the building, blessing the light breeze that always came just before dawn. A half a dozen bearers were asleep alongside the building, curled up on the hard brick paving that rimmed it. Barbara was used to the sight of men and women and children sleeping here and there on the streets of the city. Calcutta was enormous but too small for the millions who lived there, and with the famine, hundreds of thousands of peasants had flocked into the city from the countryside.

  She had been waiting only about five minutes when she heard the pad and squeak of a rickshaw, and then it came out of the night, with Chatterjee sitting in it. He was a small, skinny man with black skin, a gentle mouth, and large, dark, luminous eyes. He was very neat, his dhoti snow white, but he himself was always barefoot. He leaped out of the rickshaw and nodded with pleasure.

  “How fine, Miss Lavette, to give up a night’s sleep for this. You are responsible, very responsible.”

  “I did sleep a little. But must we ride in a rickshaw? I hate them. The indignity of being drawn by a man as a beast of burden.”

  “But if the man is a beast of burden,” Chatterjee said gently, “he must still live and eat. And if we do not ride in his rickshaw, how will he live?” He said something to the rickshaw man in Bengali. The rickshaw man wore only a loincloth. His body was very thin and hard. Now he looked at Barbara, smiled, and nodded.

  Reluctantly, Barbara climbed into the rickshaw, followed by Chatterjee. “But don’t make him run,” she protested feebly.

  “I don’t tell him, Miss Lavette. He takes the pace that is best for him.”

  Barbara sighed, “I suppose that our guilts puzzle you?”

  “Ah, yes, certainly. You must have guilts—otherwise the world would be even more obscene than it is. But the guilts of our conquerors are so selective.”

  “I am not one of your conquerors,” Barbara reminded him.

  “Oh, no. No, indeed. I fall into generalizations, a bad habit. But you know, Miss Lavette, the Americans have two million troops in India now, many more than the British ever had here, and we are still very much the conquered.”

  “I know.”

  For a while they moved in silence through the dark, empty streets of the city. Then Chatterjee said, “I must say, if you will forgive me, that I admire you very much because you are not afraid. To get up in the middle of the night and come with me this way would frighten most women. A city at night like this, blacked out, is very frightening.”

  “Other things frighten me more.”

  “The rickshaw man is twenty-three years old. He will be dead before he is forty. I am not trying to be morbid or impress you with our misery, but simply to say that I am aware of his position. But there is no other work for him. He has a wife and children, and they must eat.”

  “Why will he be dead before he is forty?” Barbara asked slowly. “Is he sick?”

  “No. But his heart will give out.”

  “I see.”

  The darkness of night was changing in the predawn; the city was coming alive, and the people who lived and slept on the sidewalks were picking themselves up and making their way toward the pools of stagnant water that dotted the city, where they would bathe and perform their rituals of cleanliness. A streetcar clanged past on the first run of the morning, already crowded with riders. The rickshaw man threaded his way among a cluster of sacred white cows that wandered, free to go where they would, through the streets of the city.

  “We will be there in a few minutes,” Chatterjee told her. “You have seen so many people sleeping in the streets, but they are city dwellers. The streets are their home, the only home they have. Where we are going is another thing. You see, the famine has existed for some time now, and when there is no rice in the countryside, the peasants come here in desperation. So many thousands of them came that the government had to set aside certain streets for them to sleep on. The government is very thoughtful.”

  “Yes, I know. When I was in Old Delhi, I saw a man trying to teach children to read under a lamppost. The light was very dim. I met the governor-general at a reception, and I mentioned it to him. He said he would do something. Do you know what he did?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, no. He had a larger light bulb put in the lamppost.”

  “Ah, how thoughtful. But here we are. Look!” Then he spoke to the rickshaw man, who stopped.

  They were at a spot where the street on which they had been traveling intersected with a broad avenue, as wide as the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Now, in the gray dawn light, Barbara could see far down the avenue, and as far as she could see, from one side of the avenue to the other, it was carpeted with the bodies of sleeping people. The sight was so unexpected—in spite of Chatterjee’s preparing her for it—so incredible, so unlike anything she had ever seen or dreamed of before, that it rendered her speechless. She simply stared, and inside of her, a wave of mingled horror and compassion made her feel totally sick and empty. She could not respond; her universe, badly in need of repair, crumbled around her, and every belief, every hope, every dream of a just and equitable world where God is in His heaven and all’s right on earth, came crumbling down along with the universe.

  “The sleeping street,” Chatterjee said.

  Minutes passed while the three of them stood there in a motionless tableau. Finally, Barbara was able to say, “It doesn’t hurt you to see this?”

  “If I let such things hurt me, Miss Lavette, then there would be nothing left of me, and I would not be able to do my work.”

  “What is your work?”

  “I am a journalist, like yourself. We have a small newspaper, a single sheet printed on both sides, and we issue it once a week. Its only virtue is that it tells the truth about many things that no other newspaper writes about. When it is printed, I and others take it around to the villages and the factories. They are illiterate in most villages, so I read it aloud. Then each villager pays for the reading with a single grain of rice. Of course, it is illegal, and recently its publication has been suspended. That is why I would like to have this story in an American newspaper.”

  “I see. Can we go now?”

  “Please, a few minutes more. As you see, they are awakening already. Don’t be afraid. They are very gentle people.”

  “I’m not afraid. I just don’t know how long I can stand to
see this.”

  “I do understand. But in another moment the sun will be up. The moment the sunlight strikes the street, they will begin to leave. They will leave quickly. I want you to see why.”

  “I have enough for my story.”

  “No, no, please, madam, please. You only have half of the story.”

  “Very well,” Barbara said. In Burma she had seen the dead brought out of the jungle, bodies stacked on trucks like cordwood. Why should this be more disturbing?

  A single broad shaft of sunlight struck the street now, and the mass of humanity began to move; the whole thing undulated, as if the thousands of people there comprised a single entity. Fascinated, unable to turn her eyes away, Barbara watched. The street was bedroom, bathroom, and sewer, and suddenly the mass of people were emptying out, flowing past the rickshaw, glancing at Barbara and Chatterjee, and then moving past, men, women children, infants sucking dry, flat breasts, a slow, sad, silent river of people.

  But not all had awakened. All over the broad avenue and stretching into the distance were people still asleep, hundreds and hundreds of them, and here and there around those apparently asleep was a cluster awake, and now began a keening dirge of woe.

  “What is happening there?” Barbara asked Chatterjee. “Why are they still sleeping?”

  “They are not sleeping. They’re dead. Each morning a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, have died during the night. There will be six million dead before this famine is over. Millions died in Hitler’s gas ovens, but the world knows. Six million of my people will die here, and the world doesn’t know.” He spoke in Bengali to the rickshaw man, his voice harsh for the first time, and they started away. Barbara fought to keep her stomach down, her sense of desolation interrupted by the needs of her own body. She did not have the courage to ask Chatterjee to stop the rickshaw, that she might get out and vomit. Anyway, the city was awake, and they were moving through an ever-increasing flow of people, automobiles, and rickshaws, and if one is a woman and wearing the uniform of an American warrant officer, one does not vomit on a busy street. She fought her body and conquered it, and finally she was able to say to the still silent Chatterjee, “I know what I’ve seen, and you are right. But this is an act of God or the weather. You can’t compare the two.”

  “God—ah, yes. But there has been hunger in the past, and there was rice put by. This time, the British were afraid that the Japanese would penetrate to Assam, and the peasants would go over to them and welcome them as liberators. So they entered into a pact with the Muslim rice merchants and cornered the market. Millions of people will die, but there are warehouses stuffed with millions of pounds of rice.”

  “That’s a terrible accusation,” Barbara said.

  “Will you write that story?”

  “About the famine and the sleeping street, yes, and my paper will print it. But the other part of it—”

  “Your paper will not print.”

  “Without proof. How can they? You accuse the British of millions of deaths, but as you say, there have been famines before when millions died. Even if your accusation is true, the British did not make the famine. Perhaps the dealers are holding rice. That makes the price go up, and it’s a filthy, evil thing, but unless you can gave me documented proof of collusion, I cannot make the accusation.”

  “Miss Lavette, where can I find such proof? I only know what I have heard and that there is reason to believe it. I know there is rice. Why isn’t it distributed? Why must so many people die?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Barbara said forlornly. “I don’t know. But I can only write what I have seen.”

  That evening, back at the Press Club, they gave Barbara a cocktail party. They had heard that she was on her way out, that she had had enough of the China-Burma-India theater, and the American correspondents had organized a farewell celebration. There were correspondents, British and American officers, some nurses from the nearby general hospital, and some Red Cross ladies. Barbara was one of the few people there who did not get drunk; the very thought of liquor on her queasy stomach was utterly revolting, and after her experience of the morning, eating was almost as unbearable. There was a long table in the lounge groaning with food, piles of sandwiches, a great, steaming pot of curry, and mounds of white rice. They toasted her in drunkenly poetic terms. As one wire-service man put it, “Beauty has gone out of our lives.” She received at least half a dozen fervent pleas to become a bed partner, and when at last she pleaded total fatigue, explaining that she had not slept the night before, she was mournfully accused of being an unfeeling party-pooper.

  Alone in her room, she said to herself, I must get out of here, or I will surely lose my mind. It surprised her that she had not wept all day, but then she realized that she had not shed tears in over a year. She had lost that habit.

  ***

  Dan Lavette did not sell the house in Westwood until three years after May Ling’s death. He slept there only intermittently, having constructed an apartment for himself with the few facilities he required in the old office building on Terminal Island. But since he knew that Chinese lore had it that the spirit of the deceased remained in the dwelling of the deceased for three years, he held on to the little house. Not that he believed in Chinese superstition, not that May Ling had believed in it, but she had held to the practice, so he would too. At first he told himself that it was Joe’s home, which was a reason to hold it, but in June 1942, Joe was shipped out to a base hospital in Honolulu. He tried to explain to Joe why he wanted to get rid of the house, and he thought Joe understood. In any case, Joe tried to understand the grim-faced man who would not let go of his grief. When the three years were over, Dan sold the house and put the money in a bank account for his son. His years there with May Ling had been good years, the best in his life, but to be constantly reminded of them was more than he could endure. When he finally sold the house, he felt the first break in his depression.

  He made his life on Terminal Island. Curiously enough, he had no hatred for the Japanese. He could not personalize the thing that came out of the sky and murdered his wife, and his dedication to the shipyard had nothing to do with any complex chain of revenge. He went back to the shipyard because he had nowhere else to go, and he went back to work because otherwise he would have gone mad. At that point he had no future, no dream, no ambition, and in his mind he characterized life as a filthy, senseless, and aimless fraud. While she was alive, he had never actually contemplated May Ling’s death. In a society where most women outlived their husbands, he had simply taken for granted that he would die before she did. She had been more than a part of his life; she had shaped his life. With gentle patience and with infinite tact, she had educated him, been his teacher and guide, lived for him, adored him without reproach for anything he had done. He had never dwelled on how much he loved her, yet he had always known that life without her would be untenable.

  In June 1944, Dan Lavette still owned the house in Westwood, but he had not been there for seven weeks. As a matter of fact, he had not left Terminal Island during those seven weeks, and when Admiral Land came there to see him, he finally found him, in blue workshirt and Levi’s, prowling across the deck of an almost completed Liberty ship. “Lavette,” he shouted at him, “will you stand still for one damn moment!”

  Dan stood still and waited for Land without enthusiasm, and Land, regarding the heavyset, gray-haired man who stood scowling at him, said almost tentatively, “We have to talk.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “You are the most ill-natured sonofabitch I ever knew.”

  “Thank you. I happen to be inspecting this hunk of tin.”

  “You’ve got more damn inspectors than you know what to do with.”

  “When a ship leaves this yard, I look at it. That’s my responsibility. What in hell is yours? To come here and bug my ass off?”

  “Sort of,” Land said calmly. “What number is
this?”

  “Two hundred and eighty-one, in the Liberty class.” He condescended to shake hands with the admiral.

  “I will be damned,” Land said slowly and with respect. “I knew it was high. Two hundred and eighty-one. You are one strange, ill-tempered, incredible sonofabitch.”

  Dan unbent to a slight smile, a mere twitch of his lips, the most he had permitted himself in a long time. He nodded at the ship on which they stood. “How do you like it?”

  “It appears all right.”

  “What in hell does that mean—it appears all right? I don’t hold any brief for the Liberty ships. They are a lousy design to begin with, but given the design, we build the best ships in the world.”

  “Why?” Land wondered.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t give a damn about the war or the country or anything else, as far as I can see. The accounting office tells me that as of now you’ve grossed six hundred million. You’re a millionaire many times over, but you never leave this place. Do you own a suit, or do you sleep in those jeans of yours?”

  “I sleep in the raw,” Dan said. “Come on over to the office. I’ll buy you a drink. We’re launching a tanker this afternoon—number twenty-three. I’ve altered the design, and I’d like you to look at it before we have a congressional investigation.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  Dan led the way over the side of the ship. “Watch your step, Admiral.” They made their way through a jungle of scaffolding, power lifts, cranes, steel plates, beams, and skeletal hulls of ships. “You don’t want an answer,” Dan said to the admiral. “You want to convert me to this mound of horseshit you call patriotism. Now I’ll tell you something, mister. Fourteen years ago, I was sitting over there on the dock at San Pedro. I hadn’t eaten in three days. Neither had anyone else within sight of me. I would have worked for a dollar a day—damn it, for fifty cents a day. Now look around you. How many men do you think I got working here right now?”