“Here comes Fran, up the hill,” Trudy called to her. “Who do you think’s with her?”
“Who?”
A vast unwillingness swept through her as she went back to the kitchen. If Fran was bringing that awful Jack Purney home, it would spoil the last chance to get back to the happy feeling she had had walking up the hill before she saw the black house. Jack’s forehead was all little tight pimples, like cut velvet, and once when Franny and he were dancing in the parlor and thought nobody could see, he slid his hand all over Fran’s chest, and she giggled and said “Don’t,” but you could tell she liked it.
Fee glanced out of the window. Fran was laughing and looking up at Jack Purney and Fee said, “She flirts, that’s what’s so icky about her.” But the old wonder came, about whether she would be pretty too, and she was almost relieved when Fran’s face suddenly went shocked and angry, as she saw the porch.
“Oh, Trudy,” Fee whispered, “it’s going to be just awful around here tonight. When my brother Eli gets home too, it’s going to be just terrible.”
THREE
AS A SMALL CHILD, Stefan Ossipovitch Ivarin had heard many times that he was descended from a famous man, the great Lev Isaacovitch Ivarin who, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, had been Rabbi of All the Southern Russias.
As a man, when he thought of it all, Stefan could still remember the solemnity with which the statement was made; a note of awe would sound in his father’s voice, and a sly conspiratorial gleam would brighten his eye.
It was usually his father who reminded him of his heritage, not, as might have been expected, his mother, and it seemed to Stefan that his father’s impulse to speak of the great Lev Isaacovitch was always attached to some indignity or failure the driven man had suffered himself. Ossip Petyacovitch Ivarin was a hatmaker, with a clientele of nobles and army officers, earning barely enough to keep his four children and wife, Miriam Solomonovna, supplied with clothing and food.
At the time of Stefan’s birth, the family lived in a small town on the outskirts of Odessa. When he was about six, the town had had what the police called “a riot” and what everybody else called a pogrom; the following month a local ukase declared the town “beyond the pale,” and with one exception its Jewish families were forced to move. The exception, ordered by the ruling nobleman himself, Count Kyril Cronchev, was made because he was too vain to change hatmakers when at last he had one whose talents suited him to perfection, and too lazy to contemplate the long, annoying carriage trip to the city.
Stefan was never sure whether his memory of the ensuing days was only the memory of what he had heard a hundred times over, or a direct primary memory, so vivid and intact were the sights, sounds, faces, words he carried on through life from that single week. The harrowing images of his mother and father were clearer and more strongly defined than at any other moment of his childhood, particularly on the night when his father announced that they would not remain behind.
“To be like a pet animal,” he had suddenly said, “is no good.” Not for the great-great-great-how-many-times-great-grandson of the Rabbi of All the Southern Russias. If all honest God-fearing Jews could not remain, then the descendant of Lev Isaacovitch most surely would not remain, as a fawning pet of Czar Nicholas himself. If they tried to chain him there, he would still move.
Move they did. In later life, every time a moving van came, Stefan would remember again that collecting of possessions, that packing of crates and boxes, that halting of the clockwork of daily pattern and then the empty stretching-out of time and strangeness before one could feel familiar and at home once more.
To this day, he hated moving. Whenever he and Alexandra had decided to move, at first from one tenement flat to a slightly better one, in New York, then out to one or another of their rented houses in Barnett, and at last to their own house—each time, he had felt an inner trembling of excitement at the sight of the packed boxes and crates, a secret melancholy, deep and hidden.
And always, as if ordered to by some armed sentinel, his thoughts would halt for an instant of time, captives of memory, and he was once more a small boy, the descendant of the great Lev Isaacovitch Ivarin, seeing the sly gleam in his father’s eye, hearing the catch in his mother’s voice, hearing, somewhere beyond, the sad religious chanting of prayers said for farewell.
Prayers and the grief of farewell had always been linked in his mind, Stefan knew, and had known since he had begun to question his belief in his religion, in any religion.
For all his father’s talk about God-fearing Jews, for all the awed reminders of his illustrious ancestor, Stefan knew that his father could not really have been a deeply religious man.
The candles were lit, the Sabbath honored, the orthodoxies followed, but as Stefan came to see later, there was no unwavering passion behind any of it. Otherwise it would not have been possible to persuade his father that his son Stefan Ossipovitch had no true calling for the usual Talmudic or Rabbinical schooling, and would be far better fitted for life if he were permitted to attend the Odessa school of commerce.
And with that much concession granted, the next step had been fairly simple, gently and persistently to nudge his father’s mind still further, to accept the astonishing idea of the University itself. It was in the “period of liberalism” when a few Jews were permitted in the gymnasia and universities of Russia, when the leaders among them spoke Russian instead of Yiddish or Hebrew, though they were often accused of being too “Russified” for their own good.
“If it will bring you joy,” his father said at last. It had taken longer to win over his mother, but in the end she had agreed, although a nameless apprehension shone in her eyes as she said her last goodbye to him.
And it was at the University that his life exploded into new vigor, new fire and new beauty. For it was there that he had become inflamed with the ideals of every young intellectual of the day, the hot longing to free Russia from Czar and nobles, free her from the degradation of fear as much as the degradation of poverty.
Young Drubhinov had been his first friend in his new life, Pyotr Drubhinov, the first Christian he had ever known enough to love; ex-Christian, rather, since Drubhinov was an atheist. Fair-haired, handsome, son of a noble, Drubhinov spoke out fearlessly against tyranny and oppression, and Stefan found it very moving that it should be such a youth speaking, not as a Jew nor as a serf nor as a dirt-poor worker in the city, but as an idealist, as a young man who, but for the yeasty bubbling of his good heart, might have remained forever within the pleasant circles of acceptance and silence.
It was Drubhinov who had induced Stefan to join the secret group at the University, “The Free Ones of Russia.” Sixteen students were members; when Drubhinov introduced him to them, they looked him over with curiosity and some doubt, but also with a certain willingness because Drubhinov was his sponsor. The doubts fled soon enough; a leaflet had to be written and Stefan volunteered to write it that very evening.
Never would he forget the pride that had leaped in his heart when he read it aloud at the next meeting, and his listeners shouted approval. The leaflet was an exhortation to other students to join with them in printing and distributing handbills among the citizens of Odessa, and a day later, Stefan Ivarin, for the first time, had seen words he had written transformed by the majesty of type.
“The Free Ones” did their own printing, on a small handpress they had bought from a junk dealer and installed in the cellar of a private house near the University. In two weeks Stefan had become a slow but reliable operator of the press; in two months he had become adept.
By the beginning of his second year at the University, he, with Drubhinov, headed the policy-making committee of “The Free Ones,” and had their first ardent quarrels over ideas. Already Stefan had begun to shape the conviction that extremism, even within a revolutionary movement, was a potential danger, a proposal to exchange an old tyranny for a new. Drubhinov brushed aside his plea for patience, for the education and persuasion of vas
t numbers of people.
“Will you persuade the Czar and the Cossacks and the landowners, Stiva?”
“Always the Czar and the Cossacks and the landowners! What of our millions and millions of serf-stupid peasants? Must they not be taught to read and reason first? And if not, won’t you have to impose a worse terrorism, if you try pure socialism now?”
“You belong in England or France or America, Stiva, with such lofty patience. Not here.”
“Perhaps, Petya. Maybe you’re right.”
It was during a night in May of ’78 that Stefan Ivarin met terrorism head on. Working alone in the secret cellar, his eardrums suddenly tore with the sound of smashing wood; his heart caked with fear.
In the next moments, a thousand imagined and whispered-about horrors became real: the booted tread, the shouting voices, the door battered in, the uniformed giants, the questioning from peasant-rude mouths, the glare of hate from zealot eyes.
Name? Address? Occupation? Religion—?
“I have no religion. My father is a Jew.”
Sweeping arms gathering up printed pages, eyes glancing, hands flinging them to the floor.
“Who writes this—this pig dung?”
“I do.”
“Who else with you?”
“Nobody.”
“Who makes it be printed on that—that—” He waved to the handpress, at a loss for a name to fit the machine.
“I do.”
“And who helps you?”
“Nobody.”
“A wise one! And how many are you protecting with your lies?”
“Nobody. I run it alone.”
“And then who takes this pile of lunacy”—here an arm swept the stacked handbills to the floor—“and hands it out to other lunatics?”
“I distribute them myself.”
“Come on, move. Get moving.”
The first crash of pain, as the two armed Cossacks wrenched his arms half out of their sockets and pushed him ahead of them. Fear made his mouth metallic, fear of what was to come when they had him alone, in the privacy of prison.
In later life Stefan Ivarin sometimes wondered why his recurrent nightmares included no bit of this first horror he had experienced, why, like dramas gone mad, they always plunged into the second act. It also puzzled him that his waking memories of his arrest never arose at moments of great stress, but at calmer times, when he felt contemplative, when he found himself considering, perhaps, some incident of the day that seemed remote indeed from that long-ago night in Odessa.
Now, sitting at supper, weary from the unusual exertion of climbing the stepladder to tack down the black bunting, Stefan glanced at the four stony young faces of his daughters and son and daughter-in-law, and found himself thinking of his trip to prison.
Somewhere on that trip, he thought, somewhere along the way when I was yellow with fear, it was resolved how my life was to go. Dragging me off between them, they handed me my first papers for what I have become. If they had not dragged me, I might have outgrown my youthful revolutionary zeal as so many do, and become what? A mathematics teacher, a small businessman, an innocuous writer of poetry or novels, with a mild streak of good will running through, to show that I am a lover of humanity.
Ah, these lovers of humanity! Joseph Fehler is a lover of humanity, such an ardent lover he would assassinate any human who disagrees with him about how to love humanity.
And most of the intoners in the churches and the synagogues are lovers of humanity, dribbling saliva-wet platitudes about being meek and accepting pain and privation.
In poor Russia, the Bolsheviki are lovers of humanity, ready to kill Menshevik and Czar alike; woe to Russia if they, not the moderates, gain control when the time comes.
Would-be tyrants, all. But—irony, irony, they sire rebels. Not tyrants, but rebels. That’s what they never realize. Those two Cossacks didn’t realize it, nor the magistrate after them, nor the guards in the prison flogging with the knout.
All of the small tyrants together sired a larger group of “Free Ones” at the University, sired Drubhinov’s determination to manage my rescue, sired the faked entry permit to America, my thirty-four-dollar trip across the ocean in the steerage.
And so, here I sit some thirty years later, safe in a small American town, a free man in a great free country, listening to my children’s small misery because the house is draped in black.
“Everybody will make fun of me!” In varying versions, each of them had said the same thing. After Fira, Francesca; after Francesca, Eli. Joan, the newcomer, had remained silent but what she felt was clear.
Conformists, Stefan thought; they are all strait-jacketed in the norm. In accord with his or her own nature, each of them sings the song of orthodoxy. The youngest cries out in a baby’s rebellion, her sister withdraws in remote adolescent silence, and Elijah, the adult, takes refuge in that false intellectualism that fools nobody. “The idiom of one’s surroundings,” Eli had said, “A protest should be phrased in the idiom of one’s surroundings.”
Stefan suddenly regretted that it was Friday evening and the office closed. Even upstairs in his room, he would feel the pall in the house; down here the kitchen was choked to the ceiling with it. Alexandra was discoursing on neutral matters—“Twenty-five cents for a pound of butter—two cents for one egg—the poor will starve—” but behind her words fluttered a private agitation, residue of the three separate scenes that had followed the three separate arrivals of the children during the afternoon.
Just as Eli had irritated him the most, so Fran had hurt Alexandra the most, attacking in the most vulnerable spot.
“I’m never going to let another boy come here,” Fran cried out the moment Jack Purney left. “You don’t want me to know anybody nice.” Alexandra’s face went tight with outrage, but Fran raced on. “I nearly died, with Jack right here hearing everything you said.”
“But you insisted on an explanation then and there. You wouldn’t wait.”
“You could have not told me. Not right in front of Jack.”
Stefan Ivarin directed his glance to his older daughter. Every day she became less the child, more the woman, and with her developing beauty she would soon enough give them a new kind of worry. But in her lowered eyes and straightened lips, there was something disagreeable and guarded.
Next to her was Fira, still stormy and rebellious, but openly so. From babyhood on, there had never been anything enigmatic and closed about her; she loved, hated, laughed, cried—all openly and fully. When her friend Trudy had left, there had been another scene about the black bunting; the house had echoed with Fee’s sobs and Alexandra’s attempts to persuade and comfort. Supper had brought only a hiatus—what an evening lay ahead!
On the other side of the table, Eli and Joan were putting up a life-less pretense of responding to Alexandra’s dissertation on high prices. Idiom indeed, Stefan thought now as he glanced at his son. What an argument I could give him! A verbal hiding that his lordly manner asks for. But it would upset Alexandra and ruin my evening.
Again he thought of the office and irritation pinked him. What nonsense, this pious pretense of observing the Sabbath in an office where ninety-five per cent of the staff were agnostic or atheist or at least unorthodox. But even with the office closed, New York might not be such a bad idea. By nine he could be at the café, playing chess or talking over a glass of tea with people who felt no need to instruct him in the niceties of public protest.
“Isn’t it so, Stiva?”
It was Alexandra, a new note in her voice. “Isn’t what so?” he asked warily, sure she had left the safe topic of high prices.
“That the A.F. of L. has more than doubled in ten years?”
“Tripled,” he answered. “In nineteen hundred, it had only half a million members.”
Alexandra looked triumphantly at her son. “You see?”
“Just the same,” Eli said, “you can’t prove they added even one member by doing things like that.” He jerked his th
umb toward the front of the house.
“And can you prove,” Stefan answered for Alexandra, “that they did not add even one member by doing them?”
“I bet I could prove that thousands were alienated by such farfetched—”
“What is this sudden passion for proving?” Stefan interrupted sharply. “Next, you will be ‘proving’ your point about the ‘idiom of one’s surroundings.’”
“That’s just common sense,” Eli said. “Just an understanding of human nature.”
“And your mother and I,” Stefan replied, leaning forward so that one of his vest buttons clicked against the edge of the table, “have neither common sense nor human understanding. I see.”
“Are we going in for heavy sarcasm,” Eli asked, “or can we stay in the field of reason?” Beside him, Joan put a restraining hand on his arm, but he shook it off.
“Reason,” Stefan said, raising his voice, “is not bandied about so easily. Your ‘idiom of one’s surroundings’ is based on trembling, not on reason.”
“Stiva,” Alexandra said, “please don’t get excited.”
Stefan ignored her. “Let me tell you,” he said to Eli, “that the protest which is made ‘only in the idiom of one’s surroundings’ is so polite and colorless that the surroundings do not suspect the protest exists.”
“On the other hand—”
“On the other hand, the idiom itself may be so vicious that it cries aloud for protest. Why, right now there’s a case in Virginia, a perfect example, I wrote about it. A Roanoke College down there has been using a certain history of the United States—”
First Papers Page 5
