Departure Read online

  How Sidney escaped still cannot be told; Franco still sits like a blood-fatted spider in Spain, and the gentlemen in our Congress still debate. But he escaped, and he made his way to the coast, and a small boat took him to France. He was twenty-four when he came back to America, and his hair was turning gray, and he didn’t care to talk much about how it had been in prison. His main interest was to find out whether he could ever use his right hand again, and when the operation turned out successfully, his whole state of mind became better. He and Janie went away for the three months his hand was in a cast; it was the only time Sidney had anything like that, three months in the country, with nothing to do but sit and read and taste the sweetness of life.

  He could have gotten a job in a good berth; he had friends; he had people who felt a debt. But he was able to talk Janie around to his old dream of organizing in the South, and she went down there with him.

  V

  An epitaph for Sidney should explain as well as tell, but how are you to explain what the movement for freedom means for one human being? The papers, the magazines, the press of the whole nation explain why people like Sidney Greenspan are corrupt, evil, selfish, and enemies of mankind, and to that they devote countless millions of words; so, in return, what can one say about Sidney except to state that there was no rest for him so long as one man was enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by another. He went to the South and joined in the struggle to organize the sharecroppers. He spent fourteen months down there, and that was in the area where three organizers were killed—where they simply disappeared, vanished from the face of the earth.

  And this he did for thirty dollars a week, to live day in and day out with the threat of the Klan hanging over him, to be shot at three times, to win neither glory nor credit nor wealth nor fame. I remember speaking to him when he was back from that, a few months before he managed to enlist. A group of us were in the little place downtown which he and Janie shared, and someone asked why a person like him did what he did.

  “It’s not so much,” Sidney said. “I saw the party people in Spain. They stayed there. I could go home.”

  “But why do you do it?”

  “Why does any man do anything? The factors in him add up. They make a sum total, and he adds to that out of his understanding. Then he does what he has to do.”

  Then someone said, “Suppose you won and suppose you built your brave new world, do you think anyone would remember?”

  “It isn’t important,” Sidney answered slowly. “But they’ll remember.”

  Once before, many years ago, when we were very young, and Sidney and a good many more of us were brought into court during the unemployment demonstrations, a magistrate asked him the same question, why he did what he did; and it was then that I realized, for the first time I imagine, with what zest and joy a person can taste of life, for Sidney, leaning forward on the rail, told the magistrate, his voice level:

  “You don’t question what you do. You do it because you have to—and you’re paid for it. You want me to make you understand why I do what I do—could I make you hear a million voices? I’m paid in my own coin!”—holding out an empty hand.

  Again, not so long ago, I went to call on the old man Greenspan, still alive, more shriveled, more used up, but still working, and after we had spoken about other things, he asked me:

  “Why couldn’t Sidney be satisfied to live quiet?”

  Seeing the old man with his rheumy eyes, his bent back, his poor swollen feet, I was brought back to the time when I first knew Sidney, and I realized that what he had always wanted was to live quiet, as the old man said, to step into the old, generous stream of life, and to taste it deeply and comfortingly for the time that is given to any man; I had it for a moment, the full answer, and then I lost it.

  VI

  After Pearl Harbor, Sidney managed to enlist through a fraud. It doesn’t hurt to say that. Young as he was, he was no good physically, but he knew an army doctor down at Monmouth, and he got in. But because of the inescapable condition of his eyes, and because of headaches—they called them migraine, but they were the result of fascist efficiency—he was placed in the medics and shipped to a camp in Georgia. For a year and a half he remained in that Georgia camp, and three times he tried to be transferred to the infantry. There were long periods when none of us but Janie heard from him; we went in all directions as the war spread over the face of the earth. I had one letter from him in that time, in which he said:

  … It’s not like Spain. Some officers here found out I was in the Brigade—I never could or wanted to keep my mouth shut—and they gave me no peace, day or night. It’s you red bastard this, and you red bastard that, and what did they pay you to go to Spain? I’m trying to get into a combat outfit. In a war, the only safe place, from a mental point of view, is at the front.…

  He went over to England as a combat medic, and from England into North Africa. In North Africa, he ran into Johnny Graham, from the Brigade, who was with the 1st Rangers. Johnny told me about it afterwards; it was one of those crazy coincidences, which happen so often in life. Johnny fell over with a bad splinter in his thigh, and he was lying in the sand and plucking at it, and plucking at it, and swearing because the amount of blood frightened him and unnerved him, when this small medic crawled up and said, “Let me try,” and got the splinter out and put the sulfa on, and was bandaging it when Johnny saw his face and recognized him. That calmed Johnny, and I can understand how he was able to relax, and take the cigarette that was offered to him, and say, “Hullo, Sidney.”

  “I’m in the medics,” Sidney said. “Isn’t that a hell of a note. I’m in the medics.”

  “I’m glad you’re in the medics,” Johnny said. Just that; then some stretcher-bearers came up, and they took him away. But Johnny afterwards remembered that to be there, Sidney must have come through the Straits, and seen those bare, brown hills that make the southern lip of Spain—because to men like Sidney, there’s no end, but always a time when you come back to where you began.

  On and off, in the months which followed, someone who knew Sidney would run into him, first in Sicily, and then in Italy; and then, from that and from those who had never known him before, there grew up a legend about him. There had been no legend from the work he did in Spain and in the States, but now in Italy there was emerging a quality of calm and certainty for men who had no certainty, many of whom didn’t know where they were going or what they were fighting for, who only knew that in sunny Italy it rained like hell, and when you got over one mountain, there was another behind it, and that the Nazi was not someone who threw away his gun and surrendered after the first round of artillery; and for these men, Sidney Greenspan was something out of another world and another struggle. He had an answer that no one else could give them, and a faith in men compounded from different stuff than the Nash-Kelvinator ads. It would be said, more and more often, and by more people, “I met a guy called Greenspan, a medic who was in Spain—I guess he’s a red, but he knows from where—”

  One of them, who had looked up Janie when he came back to the States, said, “You’d be afraid, you’d be so goddamn afraid, and then you’d talk to Sidney, and it would be all right.”

  VII

  He was killed at the beginning of ’44. The United States Army, considering it above and beyond the call of duty, wrote in its citation:

  Private First Class Sidney Greenspan, Medical Department.

  Near Carano, Italy, January 24, 1944, he crawled sixty yards under enemy machine gun fire to administer first aid to a wounded infantryman and then continued forward another fifty yards to care for two more wounded infantrymen. He administered first aid to one of the men and dragged him into a covered position. He then returned to the other man and treated him. While so doing his right hip was shattered by machine gun fire and a second burst splintered his left forearm. Nevertheless, and in spite of severe bleeding which he could not quench, he finished administering aid to the wounded man and dragged him to a place
of cover. He then crawled 60 yards in an effort to regain contact with his unit, but was forced to discontinue from weakness caused by loss of blood. Death resulted from shock and loss of blood.

  I guess the best way to tell such a thing is the way the Army tells it, as a routine job by the T-4 who writes citations as the casualties come in. They are not bothered with reasons or subjective factors, and having a war against fascism to win, they could be more objective about a man like Sidney than certain people who write about such things today. Sidney’s name was brought up for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that was a big-time operation, and they went into his past, and the matter was dropped.

  And that could be left out of an epitaph for Sidney. There will be other awards some day, other citations, and when that time comes the stones and the fields and the broken cities will give tongue and speak of all the nameless. They buried Sidney Greenspan in Italian soil, good soil; and the soil of Spain is good, too, and the soil of America, and the soil of the Soviet Union, and of China—and if he had his choice, I don’t think there is any place he wouldn’t have been at home, fully and completely at home.

  Some of us who knew him, when we heard of his death, thought that we would write down an epitaph for him. Then, in the personal columns of the paper he read and loved, there were many boxes with heavy black lines to bind them in, and whatever the name, there was a reference to the struggle against fascism. That was how we came to put together what we knew and remembered of Sidney; but nothing we could tell and nothing we could compile and no reasons we could give were enough to explain the fabric of him. So we gathered it into a word and wrote: “To the memory of Sidney Greenspan, antifascist, who fell in the people’s struggle—from his comrades.”

  Where Are Your Guns?

  IN THE LAND of the goyim, my father traded with the Indians. We traded for beaver, and my father’s word was as good as his bond, and we never carried a weapon except for our knives. From the lakes in the north to the canebrake in the south and as far west as the great river—there we traded and we never carried a weapon, never a musket or a rifle or a pistol, for these are weapons of death; and if you deal with death, what else can you expect in return? Is it not said in the Book, “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart?” And is it not also said, “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles”?

  Among the Mingoes, we dwelt and traded and among the Delawares, too, and among the Wyandottes and the Shawnees and the Eries and the Miamis and the Kickapoos, and even among the Menomini, where only the French have been, and never did we carry a weapon. “Men do not kill for the sake of killing,” my father answered once to a hunter who could not understand why we didn’t walk in fear of the red savage. “My people walked in fear for too long,” my father said. “I don’t fear what is different.”

  The hunter was one who slew his meat and ate it, even as the red men do, but our law is different. We kept the Law. Would you understand if I told you how we suffered to keep the Law? The Law says that when a beast is slain, it must be with the hand of a holy man, so that the lifeblood will run out as an offering to God rather than as a wanton slaughter of one of His creatures—with God’s will and God’s blessing.

  Long, long, ago, when I was only nine, my father said, “The high holy days are coming, and we have not sat down with our own people since your mother’s death three years ago,” speaking in the old tongue, which he taught me so carefully, being a man of learning. “I would have you pray for your mother’s soul, and I would be with my own people for a little while, there is such a hunger in me.” So we saddled our horses and made the long journey eastward to Philadelphia, where were a handful of our own people. Not that they welcomed us so well, we were two such wild buckskin folk, my father’s great black beard falling to his waist; but we prayed with them and we ate meat with them.

  You would have thought that we were unclean, they were such fine people there in Philadelphia, and when they talked about certain things, politics and who ruled over whom, indeed we sat as silent as the red men in their own woods. What does a man who trades with the Indians know of politics, my father thought? And what is it to a Jew who rules over a land? A Jew is a Jew, whether it be the old world or this new world, where the forest rolls like the sea. But when they talked of the Law and of holy things, then it was different, for my father was a man of learning and when he lifted the meat to his mouth, he pointed out that this was the first meat he or I had eaten in years—and even after that day in Philadelphia, no unclean meat passed our lips.

  I speak of this because I must make you understand my father, the man who traded with the Indians, so you will not judge me too harshly. I am not my father. My father fared forth to a wild land from far-off Poland, and of Poland I know no more than a dream and a legend, nor do I care. With his own hands he buried his wife in the wilderness, and he was mother and father to me, even though he left me with the Indians when I was small, and I lived in their lodges and learned their tongue. I am not like my father. He had a dream, which was to trade with the Indians until there was enough money to buy freedom, peace, security—all those things which, so it goes, only money can buy for a Jew; and because he had that dream, he never knew any comfort and the taste of meat was a strange thing to him. A stream of beaver skins went back to the Company on the donkeys and the flatboats that were owned by the Company, and all of it went to a place called London, and in this place there was a thing called an account.

  Those were names and words and without meaning to me. I cared nothing of the beaver skins and nothing of the acount, but if my father said that these things were of such importance, then indeed they were, even as the Law was. I knew other things; I knew the talk of the Shawnees and Algonquin talk, and I could make palaver with the men of the Six Nations too, if need be. I knew Yankee talk, the talk of those long-boned hunters of the East, and I knew the French talk and the high-pitched nasal talk of the British, who claimed to own the land, but knew nothing of it and stayed huddled in their outposts and stockades. I spoke the old language of the Book and I knew the Law, and I could catch trout with my bare hands and steal the eggs from under the nesting bird never disturbing it. I knew the step and the stride of nineteen moccasins, and where the wild parsnip grows and the wild turnip too, and with only a knife I could live the year round in the dark woods, where never the sky is seen. By heart in the old Hebrew, I knew the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, and I knew forty psalms. And from the time I was thirteen, I prayed twice a day.

  I also knew what it is to be a Jew.

  But not like my father, whom you would have remembered, had you seen him come into Fort Pitt on that day. My father was six feet and two inches tall; fifteen stone he scaled, and never an ounce of fat, but hard as rock, with a black beard that fell to his waist. All through the woods, in those times, were Jews who traded with the Indians and went where no other white man had ever trod, but there was no one like my father, you may believe me. No one so tall or so wide or so heavy—or so sweet of speech and gentle of mien, yet I remember so well a cart and horse mired belly-deep, and my father heaved the horse out and the cart too. Or the time a year before at the company post of Elizabeth, where two Delawares were crazed with drink; they would have been slain, for what is better sport for a redcoat than to slay a drunken Indian? But my father lifted them from the ground like puppies and shook them until the drink went out of them, and instead of going to their deaths they went home to their lodges and were grateful.

  I am not like my father, believe me. No man touches my forehead, unless he kill me first; but when a hunter met my father and saw that he was a Jew and begged to feel for the two horns nestling in his hair, my father would smile and agree, and then kindly commiserate with the man when he discovered that the old wives’ tale was no more than that. Nor did my father sign for surety—ever, be it old MacTavish, who fended for the company in the north, or Ben Zion, who provided trade goods in Philadelphia, or Pontiac, whom my father told me to look at and hee
d, so I would know what was best in my own people in the ancient time when they followed the way of war and not of peace.

  That was my father, who bound the phylacteries on his head faithfully every morning, and kept the Law and did justice to all who knew him. That was my father, who came into Fort Pitt with me on this day. We drove seven donkeys and they carried eleven hundred skins, and for a month I had listened to my father plan how now we would go to New York and demand an accounting for the Company, and there we would live with our own people and roam the woods no more. He was filled with it. A mile from the fort, we had stopped to drink water at the outhouse and mill of McIntyre, and my father told him.

  “No more this way, Angus,” my father said, “but eastward and the boy will wear woven cloth on his back.”

  “Ye been a woodsy man these twenty year,” MacIntyre said somberly.

  “I’ll be woodsy no more. And young Reuben here will make a company of his own, the good Lord willing.”

  “Heed the new commandant. He has no love for Jews, or for Scots either. I am glad to see you safe, because there is war with the Mingoes.”

  My father laughed because we had bought two hundred skins from the Mingoes, and there was no war talk in their cities. But when we came to the fort, there was a new guard at the gate. The doors were closed, and the men on the walls wore yellow facings and shakos I had not seen before. It was a new regiment for the woods.