E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

I don’t remember how we got home. There were police sirens, there was groaning and crying on this road through the woods. There was an ambulance. But I remember my father lying on the old couch in the living room. His arm was in splints, the whole top of his head was wrapped in a bandage, like an odd hat. There were scratches on his face. But he looked at me through glasses that were unbroken. He tried to smile through his cracked, swollen mouth. He couldn’t talk. I stared at him and I was frightened. There were tears in his eyes. My mother sat on the floor beside him, looking at the floor, and she held his hand. Their heads were close. They looked so desolate that I began to cry. I had not cried at all before this, but I cried now, and my mother pulled me over to her and sat me on her lap, and held me against her breast, and held my father’s hand and kissed it.

So there were limits to his failure. There were times when this passionately unreliable, naïve childish being found the world perfectly disposed. My mother was right about the Robeson Concert, but my father was headstrong. I began to appreciate the mystery in the dark intercourse of adults. The phone kept ringing — that night, the next day. Everyone said that if Pauly had not done what he had done, the bus would have been turned over and God knows how many crushed to death. It was true that in that whole bus, he was the only man who did anything. Nobody else could move. I thought about it a lot. That was something to be proud of, that he got up to do something. But what he did was mysterious and complicated and not anything like what people were saying. I thought about it for a long time. I decided he was trying to get the attention of the cop because he really thought the cop would help. The Law would arrest the Fascist hoodlums. That is what put him at the door and made him vulnerable.

Long after everyone stopped talking about it, I tried to work out this mystery in my mind. Rochelle was nervous because he wasn’t going to work. It was disturbing to have him around the house all day. No money was coming in. He complained of headaches. The doctor bills were criminally high. My father didn’t go back to the store until the cast on his arm was dirty. But I could not forget the calm ferocity of his decision, folding his glasses against his chest and handing them to Mindish. I could not forget the commitment in his absurdly naked eyes; or in his act, the quality of calmly experienced, planned revolutionary sacrifice—

Bukharin provided the most interesting defense of the Purge Trial of 1938. He pleaded guilty and went out of his way on several occasions to affirm his responsibility for the sum total of crimes committed by the defendant block of “rightists and Trotskyites,” of which he was considered a leader. He vehemently agreed that he was guilty of conspiracy, treason, and counterrevolution. And having agreed, he took exception during the trial to every specific charge brought against him. Under duress to testify on cue, he nevertheless contrived to indicate with the peculiar kind of overtone characteristic of Soviet voices under Stalin, that he and Russia as well were being victimized. And what good did it do him except that he became a hero in a novel and an image of sorrowful nobility to Sovietologists. We may say of Stalin, in turn, that the show trials of 1936 to 1938 as well as the thousands of less structured exterminations carried out under his aegis reflected his determination to make an ally out of Hitler. Kennan says Stalin had to make sure there would be no opposition to fault him in his unpopular move known to the world as the Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939. Bukharin and many of the other defendants were anti-Fascists. Whatever Stalin’s reasons for wanting to make an ally of Hitler — whether in despair of promoting Russian interests with the Western countries, or out of a keen impulse toward a Fascist-Soviet hegemony, or because he needed time to prepare his country for war with Hitler which he knew was imminent (but if this was so, why did he kill his ranking army officers?), it can be said that this, like every major 1930’s policy move of Soviet Russia the Great Socialist Experiment, was predicated on the primacy of the nation-state, the postponement of Marxist dreams, and the expendability of the individual. E. H. Carr suggests that the genius of Stalin was in his recovery of Russian nationalism, dormant under the westernized, internationalist Lenin. “Socialism in one country” was Stalin’s affirmation of his country’s fierce, inferiority-hounded pride in the face of the historic, tragic, western hostility to backwoods Russia.

“International Marxism and international socialism, planted in Russian soil and left to themselves, found their international character exposed to the constant sapping and mining of the Russian national tradition which they had supposedly vanquished in 1917. Ten years later, when Lenin was dead, the leaders who had most conspicuously represented the international and western elements in Bolshevism — Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, not to mention minor figures like Radek, Krasin, and Rakovsky — had all disappeared; the mild and pliable Bukharin was soon to follow. The hidden forces of the Russian past — autocracy, bureaucracy, political and cultural conformity — took their revenge not by destroying the revolution, but by harnessing it to themselves in order to fulfill it in a narrow national framework….”

This insight of Carr’s is useful in understanding such moments of agony to world-wide socialism as the Soviet refusal to support the Communist-left coalition in Germany that might have prevented Hitler’s rise to power; the Soviet betrayal of the Republican cause in Spain (many of the purge victims were veterans of the Spanish campaign); the cynical use of the popular front and collective security as elements in Soviet diplomacy; and the non-aggression pact. Thus, to those critics who see in Stalin the “Genghis Khan” he was called by Bukharin, or the extreme paranoid he is sorrowfully admitted to have been by today’s Soviet leadership, we must say: no revolution is betrayed, only fulfilled.

Thermidor.

Daniel Thermidor found considerable play in the Volvo’s steering

and what about Kronstadt — we mustn’t forget KRONSTADT! And Gorky, too, with his untimely thoughts.

A NOTE TO THE READER

Reader, this is a note to you. If it seems to you elementary, if it seems after all this time elementary … If it is elementary and seems to you at this late date to be pathetically elementary, like picking up some torn bits of cloth and tearing them again … If it is that elementary, then reader, I am reading you. And together we may rend our clothes in mourning.

On Memorial Day in 1967, Daniel Lewin drove his new black Volvo onto the Massachusetts Turnpike and headed east, toward Boston. Sitting beside him was his wife, Phyllis, a throbbingly sad blond flower-child with light blue, Polish eyes that turned grey on days of rain. And behind them, wedged not too comfortably between a large suitcase and some other junk, was their baby son, Paul.

Daniel had never driven this car before, and he passed the first few miles working with the four-speed stick shift and feeling his way with his spine into the springs and with his arms into the steering.

There was a wobble in the wheels, a small thrump-thrump at sixty-five. There was considerable play in the steering. Also a slight pull to the left when he touched the brakes. There were certain loosenesses in the car. It was a less than well-tuned, well-maintained car. It had a leathery smell. Daniel imagined its career in Boston and Cambridge, the collegiate recklessness. His sister Susan had bought it cheap from a guy dropping out of Harvard. And whom had he bought it from? A reckless car. A car in character reckless.