E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

We looked from the porch through the windows. A silver light reflected through our faces the silver sky racing over the schoolyard. The sky of silver raced through our eyes, through our house. The wind came up and pressed us to the windows. Gradually the wind carried over the schoolyard from the soot hills of apartment houses in the west a last few crushed granules of daylight that fused the windowpane to the room: The living room was empty. The walls were stained with crushed grey light. The floorboards were bare. The room was empty. The window lacked curtains. The house was empty. I moved to the other window on the porch. The room was bare. The walls bare, the floor bare. I tried the door. The door was locked. I ran down the porch steps, around to the alley. I knocked on Williams’ cellar door. I put my ear to the door. I hoisted myself up to look through the window of the cellar door. In the darkness I saw the light of my own eyes. The door was locked. I ran around to the back of the house. I ran around to the front of the house. I looked through the porch window. There was no sound from the house. The only sound was the wind. Susan stood like an A in the middle of the porch, a darkening stain spreading under her foot. I was numb with cold. My face stung, my hands stung. We watched the stain expand in all directions around Susan’s shoe on the wooden porch.

According to Evans, observers in New Zealand report that mosquitoes there land on the floating pupae of females, slit them open with their genitals, and mate with the females before they can emerge.

Ascher held each of us under his arm, under a giant hand pressing us into his sides, into the bulky nap of his overcoat. We were walking down Tremont Avenue. My leather hunter’s cap with the earflaps was pushed awry by Ascher’s coat. He never knew his strength. Susan’s face was red with the cold. We looked at each other across Ascher’s girth. “Mamaneu,” Ascher said. He sighed. “If you children knew what you were doing to me. I cannot tell your mother and father. But how can I not tell them? What can I do? What can I do? I’m not going to live long.”

It was Sunday. The traffic on Tremont Avenue was light. Down at the Polo Grounds the Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers. One of the kids in the Shelter had gone to the game with his uncle, but Ascher only came to take us for a walk. The Giants had Charlie Conerly. The Steelers had Bobby Layne.

In our hands were Ascher’s gifts: plastic orange jack-o’-lanterns and black cardboard skeletons with white bones fastened at the knees and the pelvis and at the shoulders with metal grommets.

“What can I tell you,” Ascher said. “Some people are singled out. The world lacks civilization. Men do not respect God. You are only children and you can’t understand — it’s natural, I would run away too. Thank God I knew where to look. Oh, my children. What can I tell you? Soon, soon we will be in court. We shall have our trial.”

Elected silence sing to me.

The guard sees him pace his cell. His arm rises, his finger points. Occasionally a sound escapes his pantomime, some release of anguish whose diction is unclear.

He associates with Big Bill Haywood, and with Debs and with Mooney and Billings. All these fighters. The Scottsboro Boys. Their stars illuminate the walls, burn away the humiliation. Debs’ cell was enormous, as big as the world. That is what the rulers never learn. The properties of steel and stone are subject to moral law.

Nor is death what it seems to be. When the ruling class inflicts death upon those they fear they discover that death itself can live, It is a paradox. Ma Ludlow is alive. Joe Hill is alive. Crispus Attucks is alive. Even Leo Frank, why do I think of Frank swinging from his tree in Georgia, but all right, Frank. The two Italians speak and stir and smile and raise their fists in the mind of history. I am their comrade, they talk to me , Sacco makes his statement to me.

Socrates was tried. He was found guilty. He was forced to drink hemlock. By this act his persecutors raised him to eternal life and consigned themselves to the real death and total obscurity of persecutors everywhere.

Jesus was tried. He was found guilty. He was tortured and executed. If Jesus had not been tried, if he had not been put to death, how would his teachings have endured? The Christians themselves celebrate this fact in their idea of resurrection: He returns and lives with men, in the imaginations of men hundreds of generations later. Of course this doesn’t touch the question of how his ideas, which were completely Jewish, were perverted by institutions which spoke in his name.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one has ever been put to death in Socrates’ name. And that is because Socrates’ ideas were never made law.

Law, in whatever name, protects privilege. I speak of the law of any state that has not achieved socialism. The sole authority of the law is in its capacity to enforce itself. That capacity expresses itself in Trial. There could be no law without trial. Trial is the point of the law. And punishment is the point of the trial — you can’t try someone unless you assume the power to punish him. All the corruption and hypocritical self-service of the law is brought to the point of the point in the verdict of the court. It is a sharp point, an unbelievably sharp point. But there is fascination for the race in the agony of the condemned. That is a law, a real law, that rulers can never overcome — it is fixed and immutable as a law of physics.

Therefore the radical wastes his opportunity if he seriously considers the issues of his trial. If he is found guilty it is the ruling power’s decision that he cannot be tolerated. If he is found innocent it is the ruling power’s decision that he need not be feared. The radical must not argue his innocence, for the trial is not of his making; he must argue his ideas.

His trial is held in a large, shadowed hall. Voices echo. Gestures are solemn, oratorical. In attendance are all the world’s history of dead heroes of the Left,

But a small elevator brings him up from the basement lockup and with one marshal in front of him and one holding his arm, he steps through the door into the courtroom and the raised judge’s bench is off his right eye. He sees a large square room, but a room, not a hall, and the raked jury box has leather chairs of green. The walls are wood-paneled in the same dark wood of the balustrade which separates the trial area from the spectators’ pews. The floors are marble. The back doors look padded, and have porthole windows. As he enters no one seems to notice. He sits and he waits. Ascher touches his arm and speaks quietly into his ear. On the other side of Ascher, Rochelle writes on a pad. He is bewildered, his own visions have made him vulnerable. Ordinary people move about the room on obscure business. There are few spectators. He turns in his chair and cannot tell who is press. Everyone looks the same. Everyone is sallow in the light of the courtroom which is a mixture of daylight and the incandescence of weak bulbs. At the same time voices seem metallic, the acoustics of the room are not good. He is reminded of what — a library, a legitimate theater with the fire curtain down, a doctor’s office, an indoor swimming pool. He feels slightly ill. He recognizes the feeling, a cavern opening inside him, a cavern of fear, and closing his eyes he sees into its darkness and it has no bottom.

When the Judge comes in from his own door on the other side of the bench and quickly takes his seat, Paul, having been gently suffered to stand on his feet, takes a deep breath. It is to seal the cavern of his nauseating fear. Everyone sits and the Judge, like a businessman starting his day, commences the trial in an efficient, quiet, conversational voice. He does not look down at Paul. He addresses only the lawyers. It is Judge Hirsch. Not having known of his existence even a few short months ago, Paul knows a good deal more about him now, including Hirsch’s most intimate professional secret, that he hopes to be appointed to the Supreme Court. All the lawyers in the corridor know this. Hirsch has heard more cases brought by the government in the field of subversive activities than anyone else. He is Jewish. He wears a striped, ivy league tie, the knot of which can be seen under his judicial robe.