E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

She has no doubt about the outcome of the trial. But the penalty is unknown and she listens to the testimony, she looks at the faces and listens to the language so as to fathom the penalty. But the way she receives this knowledge is unexpected: she receives it not from what happens in the courtroom but in the light of the increasing intensity of her hatred for them, for the people in this court. Her hatred intensifies day by day and she gradually surmises that the punishment will be measured in comparable intensity, and that what she wishes for them will be given back to her, a sharp and penetrating reflection of her own incandescent hatred.

Only then does she begin to understand, in the light of her instinct, how this punishment shall be justified. It is no mean feat in this highly textured trial with witnesses examined at length whose testimony is incidental, and with legal hassles that take half a morning, and with the recesses, marching back and forth to the elevator, and in the necessity for concentration, so physically demanding that she is exhausted at the end of the day’s session.

At a moment when she can talk to Ascher alone, she asks him what is the precise meaning of treason.

Ascher tells her treason consists of making war against your country or giving aid and comfort to an enemy at war with your country. It is defined in the Constitution.

She hands to Ascher a piece of paper with some words in her own handwriting, and behind each word vertical pencil strokes, crossed diagonally every fifth stroke:

traitors

traitorous

treacherous

treasonous

betrayal

treachery

“You are a very astute person, Rochelle. You have a mind for the law.”

“Why don’t you tell the jury what Feuerman is doing, what they are all doing?”

“I have once recorded my objection, which was overruled. Emotionally I do not think anyone sitting in the jury box is capable in the present atmosphere of understanding such a distinction. The appellate, however, is capable of understanding the abuse of such a distinction.”

Once the pattern is perceived it fulfills itself continually to something in her that is satisfied by the exercise of order, in whatever cause. Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is Justice. In Feuerman’s opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the judge endorses the relevance of the citation. Ascher trusts only a trained judicial mind to understand in the leisure of a study of the transcript, the abuse of due process in trying someone under one law as if he had broken another.

They have been characterized in the press as traitors. While the legal charge of conspiracy deprives them of the safeguards of the ordinary rules of evidence, it will not protect them from the punishment that can be meted out to those convicted of the worst possible crime against their country. It is clear that although she and Paul will be found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, it is for the crime of treason they will be sentenced.

I give this all to her. It is not the radical analysis of the Red visionary; it is the bookkeeper tallying accounts receivable, accounts disbursed.

Now only one question remains, and she needs Mindish for the answer. She has her suspicions, but she has to look at the man’s face. In the meantime she has concurred in a defense worked out by Paul and Ascher, even to the sexual motivation. It is a distasteful defense. It is an exaggeration, and therefore it is not true. It is not true because it makes too much of the truth. But she doesn’t care. It is only ritual. She looks forward to Mindish’s testimony. She finds herself in a state not unlike pleasurable anticipation as she waits for the man to look at her or not when he climbs up in the witness box, like a prize dog who will bark and point and sniff on command and find her in her guilt. Suspense as to her own instinctive response to the sight of Mindish is her only interest. She no longer bothers to condemn him. We have all changed in seven months. All the cells of our brains are changed and our beings are no longer what they were. If by some strange and unforeseen mercy we were to be released, found not guilty and released, our lives would have to begin again and I don’t know if that is possible. Our children are different children. I no longer know what they look like. I no longer remember what it is to lie next to my husband. Our trial brings out in me a self-knowledge that I might never have had to suffer: I am made of stone.

But I have had months to think about him, this erstwhile dentist with hands so lacking in skill that even his low fees could not retain his patients; a butcher in the mouth who could not make a bridge that fit, a filling that would not fall out. With all the delicacy of boxing gloves. You walked out of there and your jaw ached for days. And he was not clean either. Some sore, some kind of mouth ulcer always followed a visit to Dr. Mindish. Yet he was our friend. We laughed about his dentistry and we went to him and he charged next to nothing. A comrade’s discount. It is possible with his practice that he stood in the center of a ring. He was a dentist to all of us. It is possible. He was already in the party the summer we waited table, Paul and I, at Paine Lodge. A dentist lives a public life and sees many people in privacy. At Paine Lodge he pretended with what we thought was his continental charm a paternalism which I thought led only to small privileges — his pleasure in our youth and in our minds, Paul’s especially, his fondness for walking in our door unannounced, his frank admiration once or twice expressed with his hands, of my physical features — and always with his eyes. It was harmless. At its worst it wasn’t even offensive, merely pathetic. He enjoyed us so. He did us favors. He took us to the beach, he drove us where we had to go. Always on hand. A loyal dull man who seemed to want no more than sparks from our life. With his poor graceless innocent wife. A crude mind, lacking in understanding of the finer things. He took his culture from us and his ideas from the meetings. Yet, and yet, he felt entitled to one further privilege beyond all these, in our friendship, and in his clandestine lechery for his friend’s wife, never courageously expressed, an essential sneak in his mentality, he took one more liberty for the low fees and comradeship: he took our lives.

My God how I hate them all, how I despise their pompous little egos and their discussions and resolutions and breast-beating; with their arrogance as they delivered to us each week the truth, the gospel according to nth Street. Always they treated Paul like a child and with his mind! a mind so fine, so superior to theirs except in the grubby self-serving politics of the Party. He was always being censured, he was never quite in step. All he did was slave for them, believe for them. Communists have no respect for people, only for positions. It is as if we never existed. Someone not Mindish, Mindish hasn’t the brain, someone told him to do this. I can’t understand it as anything else. Except that after years he learned in this thick Polisher way the impudence that permits you to use people for your own purposes if you speak in the name of the Party. You blind them with your ideals and while they are looking up you stab them in the belly for the sake of your ideals.

But he is so stupid, they are so stupid, he never properly became a citizen. He is legally vulnerable, sexually frustrated, a spy who saves himself by convicting his friends. This is what Ascher will say. It is possibly true. It is conceivable that all these years a secret spy with his dental x-rays he never managed the practice of dentistry too well because he was not by nature a dentist but a spy. A man with two lives. A man with friends to be used in case of emergency. It is possible. I will know when he walks into the courtroom and I look him in the eyes.