by Kent Wascom
Each day, while they were shackled, the communists talked politics in various languages so that it didn’t matter if their words were overheard, but when one of them was near breaking they spoke in English of homes, women, food. Someone had told them to eat only the crusts of the bread they were given, saying that the soft center would foul their digestion, so they were scraggly things when Isaac saw them after the first week, when they were all taken to shower and shave. The young Mennonite leaned silently against the tiled wall under the bursts of water. His fellow beside him, waiting to catch him should he slip. These two spoke of God mostly but also of their homes and crops. Iowa. Missouri. Of German dishes whose names gleamed with pork fat. At night they lay on their stone bunks, eaten by bedbugs, hanging one limp arm and then the other over the lip of the bunk to let the blood flow.
On the seventh day an officer came and spoke to them, saying that anyone who agreed to work would leave solitary that day. None stirred, but at roll the following morning three of the communists and the older Mennonite decided they had proven their point and were released. That night the remaining communists sang I.W.W. hymns in French and the young Mennonite took up a psalm Isaac could not recall and which, even if he’d known it, would not have moved him.
On the eighth day he could not stop shaking.
On the ninth day the pain gained its own voice.
Afternoon of the eleventh day a party of officers’ wives, fat things in Sunday dresses and fur mufflers, were ushered by a drunk lieutenant down into the subbasement of the seventh wing and they walked giggling from cell to cell, peering into the cages. They whispered among themselves, saying nothing to the prisoners, not even the young Mennonite, who wished them a blessed day. Their escort carried a lamp, and the light, coming nearer, was blinding, so that Isaac hung from the bar of his cage and could just make out their shapes.
—Well, they said.
—My, my, they said.
His pain was louder than their voices, the lamplight like the sun as they came closer. He turned away to his patch of floor, dazed. Smell of perfume and animal skin and whiskey. These wives, mothers, American furies come to judge him. And now unbidden thoughts of his wife, of his mouth pressed against her hair. Her voice. Telling him that he was all right.
The blaze dimming as the wives and their escorts went back the way they came. A man’s voice saying that, if he could, he’d go through this hall with a shotgun. The women murmuring as if to say, Oh, you know how men are. Isaac thinking, Do it. Then as swiftly as they’d come the party was gone and their light with them.
On the twelfth day he started seeing things in the dark, swirling, and the things spoke. He couldn’t summon his wife’s voice, her face, nor anyone else he’d known. In the evening when they undid his shackles he crumpled to the floor and lay there for a long time. His tin plate and cup came scraping through the slot in the door and he did not move.
That night he woke to a voice calling his name. He sat up in his bunk, limbs drawn close with cold, unsure whether the voice was real or imagined until he heard it speak again.
—You were talking, the young Mennonite said. Are you all right?
Isaac grunted. He clasped his legs and let his forehead rest on his knees. Lately his breathing had been pained and shallow, like his chest was being filled with concrete.
—What are you still doing here? he said.
—I want to be true to myself, the Mennonite said. And true to God.
—You think you’re going to get some reward for this.
—No, the boy said hurriedly. God gets the reward. Suffering … righteous suffering … can bring glory to Him. The Mennonite paused and Isaac imagined him stroking his beard.
—Running low on glory is he?
—I know you don’t believe.
—I’m sorry, Isaac said.
The Mennonite spoke as though he sensed the breaking of Isaac’s spirit was at hand, which it was:
—So, he said. It’s only two more days we have. That’s a good thing, eh?
Isaac sat quietly reckoning this length of time, his mind drifting back to earlier in their talk.
—I’ll tell you what I do believe, Isaac said.
—What.
—I don’t believe there’s a purpose to suffering.
The Mennonite considered this for a moment. Then he said,
—Then why are you here?
Three
In the morning at roll Isaac rose from his bed like always and came forward with his wrists crossed one over the other. But now the way ahead of him took a sudden tilt, like a ship in a crosswave, and he was thrown to the ground. A brightness burning in his skull and something warm and wet spreading across his thighs. He felt more than heard through the walls of the prison a series of explosions, long low rumbles like thunder echoing through the stone. Not strength enough to do much more than claw feebly for a handhold and to groan. Life fleeing him like the light and he without the strength to give it chase.
The room orderly found him this way on the floor of his cell and went to fetch help, and he was carried past the Mennonite and the remaining socialists as the noise from above and all around grew louder. The men in their cages seeing Isaac go by were sure, each in their way, that they were witnessing a preview of their own deaths. Then he was gone and the sound was everywhere. Boilers maybe or the powerhouse gone haywire. Only when the door that led upstairs was flung open by the men carrying Isaac out did they understand the sound was made by human bodies: voices calling out, feet stamping. The sound traveled the walls and they felt the vibrations through their shackled wrists and the bars of their cages. As it happens, none of them would die in Leavenworth. The Mennonite would return to his family’s land and farm it into his old age, his heart giving out one night in bed so that his wife awoke beside a stone. Of the socialists, one became a professor and endured the inquisitions of the next quarter century and the other disappeared from all account, except that he helped a former president of the Industrial Workers of the World escape while out on appeal and make his way to Russia, where the labor leader died of a stroke in a workers’ hospital amid what the writer Isaac Babel would call the stunted life of the starved post-Revolution. It is not difficult to imagine a similar fate for the socialist, though there were no shortage of purges also to claim him.
When Isaac woke again he was sure they’d brought him to the maniacs’ ward. All around him the occupants of the other cots were rising up and cheering, shaking the iron frames of their beds, and those who could stand clasping each other’s hands, bare scrawny knees lifted in dance. He lay back, wrapped himself in the white hospital sheets and tried not to draw attention. Only when a pair of orderlies came by arm in arm, hollering between hissing pulls from a bottle of ethyl alcohol, did Isaac hear that the war was over. This was a celebration. And even then he was so feverish that he couldn’t tell whether this was true or a part of the nightmare he’d been living for so long.
He learned the truth of the armistice that night, when his fever broke and he was able to sit up and take food. Then days of waiting and unease as Christmas came, rumors spreading through the prison and between the objectors most of all. Sentences reduced, pardons coming. Still he waited, not allowing himself too much hope. Letters came from Kemper, and reading her tell it helped him to believe. Not entirely, but enough. So he wrote and read and tried his best to remember the sound of her voice. Weeks later he read his wife’s grim letter of late December that told of her father’s death. Beneath the terse surface of her words, he sensed a frozen sea of doubt and sadness, but when he pressed her to know more she only wanted to talk about him, Isaac, coming home. Which fact Isaac couldn’t bring himself to fully believe, even when, in mid-January of 1919, the quarantine was lifted and the objectors paroled out. Even when he stood in his blue serge suit and military boots on the other side of the gate and could look back at where the clothes had been made, the stacks of the prison sending columns of black smoke up into the winter sky.
> ♦ ♦ ♦
I see him from a distance now and then. Glancing at the shape of a passing man from where I sit at a café table or in the mull of a cinema crowd when the lights are coming up and everyone is dreamily grappling with the real, I see him. Eduard walking away, slipping on his hat, Eduard almost always hurrying somewhere, at the end of some parting, but sometimes he’s pausing, and I notice how people bask in the smallness of life like dogs in the sun, or else he’s doing something he’d never do, like reading at a newsvendor’s rack or lighting a match with his fingernail or slicking back his hair with one hand, then I know it’s not him and the lights are up in the theatre and there’s nothing to do but go out into the world as it is.
The movies were a refuge. A space where we could be together for unbroken lengths of time. Of course we could find a room or he could come to wherever I was staying at the time, all the tedious drama of codes and signals that make life one long conspiracy. To love your own sex makes you the adulterer of the world, and all adulterers are runaways, ever in hiding, ever in flight. But you can’t always be alone together: there’s a part of you that wants to join the greater motion. No better way than sitting together watching dreams unspool on a stark white square set against the darkness. Pathé, Cineo, Edison, Eclipse. Reels of love stories from the north and of gaucho epics from the south, and, increasingly, reels of war. We’d go on weekdays, when there were crowds but not throngs, have a drink in the lobby and watch the other patrons and the ushers in their bright uniforms, then file into the theatre with them and find seats in the back but not too far, preferably against a wall, and wait in the beginnings of music for the theatre to darken and the bolt of silver light to shoot overhead through the clouds of smoke, when suddenly we’d be with people, their laughter, gasps, whispers, their shared lives.
When the poet Rubén Darío died of a punctured spleen in 1916, there was a week of funeral marches and tributes in León. Almost immediately there were calls for sculptors and monuments, even one in Masaya, a bronze, so I’m told. They have even renamed the town where he was born. Can you imagine it, for a writer in the U.S.? He’d lived in Paris in exile for years, then when the war came fled for New York, where he was taken ill. They say he wanted to come home to die. I admire that. I am coming home but not to die. I can’t say what it is I’ll do. I haven’t seen Red in eight years, but I know enough, I’ve heard enough, seen enough men killed who our father would’ve simply bought. So I’m worried for you, sister. In wanting to be like his father and his father before him, Red’s become worse.
During the week of mourning in León the poet’s body lay in state, shrouded on a marble pedestal in the national cathedral. Twice a day an honor guard came to remove the shroud and change the poet’s clothes. In the daylight they would dress him in the robes and laurel of some mishmash Greco-Roman philosopher, and come evening they’d dress him in a statesman’s black tie. I went with Eduard to see the body, but we had to wait outside while the guard made their change. Eduard had already gone with his family, attended some events with his uncles in government, and I’d gone once before alone. But he wanted to go together, so we did. The whole time leading up to it, from the time I’d first gone to see the dead man, I was disgusted. I’d seen the poet alive a few times, heard him speak at the Pan-American Conference years before, and knowing that he was being puppeteered, changed into things neither of which he’d been, made me sick. I said as much to Eduard while we waited, whispering, but he disagreed, said in his strong, clear voice that he liked it and if he could he’d want to be remembered the same way.
“We’re all more than one person,” he said.
I winced. Would you believe me if I told you, after all I’ve written here about Eduard, that in that moment I hated him as much as I’ve hated anything in my life. I thought of his wife, their children, their life. I wanted to shout, wanted to shake him. But there were people everywhere and it was a quiet place.
“Maybe you are,” I said. “You and whoever else you think you are. But I’m not.”
Then I walked ahead as the guard undid the rope to let us all inside. I remember his face—Eduard’s, not the dead man’s. Stunned in his hurt. He hurried after me and he tried to put his hand on my shoulder but I shook it off. He had tears in his eyes, but then so did everyone else there at the foot of the pedestal. Everyone but me. I remember his eyes and how trapped he looked, unable to say what he wanted. I wanted to hurt him, and had. It didn’t last long, these times never did, but still too long for me to forget.
When Eduard died I wasn’t there. The city had been quarantined for months, and he’d gone to his wife and children in Managua. I couldn’t even go to his funeral, as I’d gone to see the dead poet, the body disconnected from the work and the life. I could say it was out of respect for his wife, his family, but it’s because I was afraid. Afraid of myself and what I would do. Were you with our father when he died? Did you speak to him? All I know comes from hearsay, small items in the news. I imagine Red was there. Mother I can’t account for, even in my imaginings. The moon in the sky of my childhood, pale and distant but making regular appearances, close enough to see just how remote she was. I am the firstborn and that means I saw the ones that came after me and before you, the ghost children our parents never spoke of, though they did live, these children, and were loved, in their time. That does something to you, I’m sure. The continual destruction of hope. I am older than you, and this means nothing except that I’ve seen more death.
But I wasn’t there with our father. The last time I saw him … you remember how he looked at me? Revolted and betrayed. My whole life was bound up in that look for an instant, and then destroyed. I’ve felt that look come over my own face and the feeling is almost as bad as the memory. I loved him, as I know you loved him. Even in better times he could be meaner than anyone I’ve known. I remember more than once him bringing you to tears. But then he was capable of shocking kindness too. All those days where it was only me and him, traveling, working, feeling myself filled with all his hopes. He had that way that some men have, of being so cruel that when his praise, his attention, finally came, it was the best thing you’d ever felt.
And I wasn’t there for Eduard. The last time I saw him was in October of 1918. I’d just returned from an errand in Guatemala, and we arranged to meet in León. We were leaving a restaurant in the city center where we’d been drinking with friends; we’d sat for hours, talking—the first few influenza cases had come on a ship in September and nobody knew how bad it was going to be—easing back into the game of living in plain sight. It was a good time, among men we knew, but we left when the first chance came, dashing out into the rain and a hired car. We sat in the back, separated from the driver by a screen with a little portico of glass that could be opened by a latch, and when darkness filled the car from the unlit streets past the Parque Central, we were close and together and I felt as whole as one person can be. The next day he would go back to Managua, and a month later he’d be dead.
I hope this finds you, sister. I hope you’ll see me, and when you do, please, don’t ask me why I’ve come after all this time. There’s never one answer to anything. I’m coming home the same way we keep on living, without knowing why.
♦ ♦ ♦
PART 7
Este viajero que ves, es tu hermano errante
1919
One
—Who the hell are you?
Isaac’s voice weak as dead leaves on the frost-struck air. He’d dropped his cardboard suitcase and was leaning against the unfamiliar car parked in front of his house. Looking up at the porch, he searched the face of the man who stood there wearing a cream-colored suit and an expression that was eerily familiar. He was dark-skinned for a blonde man, and there was something in his look that made Isaac’s chest go tight.
Angel Woolsack came down a step and paused when the man asked again who the hell he was. There were many ways to take such a question and Angel gave the best answer he could. Said his
name.
—Kemper said you were dead.
It was then Angel realized who this man was, and for a moment they stood looking at one another across a distance of years and experience, each trying to see the other as she had.
—Do you know where she is? Angel said.
—She isn’t here?
—No.
Isaac’s voice was a thin string that snapped when Angel spoke. Angel watched as he began to tremble. Before he could say anything else, the man had doubled over, hands over his ears, as though he were holding his skull together.
Isaac stood again, panting, went past Angel and inside, saw the bags had been taken, along with some other things of hers, and the sight of this broke him.
Angel studied him, a suited phantom stalking through the trees and outbuildings, lashing his way through the high grass. At the edge of the marsh he screamed, cursed, bent double, and spit. Farther out the water lay in a sheet of gold, untroubled as if to rebuke his frenzy. Somewhere offshore a gull cried, its call no more sensible to the man than his to it.
What saved him was that he went into his studio, intending perhaps to burn the place down, but before doing so looked past the studies and sketches she’d kept hanging, untouched for so long, the otherworldly animals now staring back at him, and saw there in the corner the old couch wrapped in its paint-flecked blankets. He went closer and saw that the dust that covered everything else, the yellow tinge of age, hadn’t claimed this place. A pillow dented by a head, blankets sunken by a body that had curled here not long before. Hers. He sunk to the floor, one arm draped over the lip of the couch. And from there he could see the folded paper wedged beneath the pillow.
He came out holding in his hand the note that told him why she’d gone and where she was going, where to find her. He went to Angel, spoke the word which in his mind was all curling shoots and blossoms reaching for the sun.
