E. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel

The mystery couple of the Grand Concourse, and their two children, walked out of their apartment one Sunday as if for an outing. They carried no luggage. A camera over his shoulder. A tote bag in her hand. Leaving an apartment intact, with dishes in the drain, they were never seen again. This happened soon after my father was arrested. They were later reported to be living under another name in New Zealand. They were reported to be traveling through Britain on Australian passports. They were reported traveling through France on British passports. They were arrested in West Berlin, held for six months without trial, and exchanged for two Englishmen held by the Russians in Moscow. They were last reported living in Leningrad.

When Selig Mindish was called to the stand, my mother sat up in her chair and folded her arms and lifted her head. There he was. He looked shrunken. He was a physically big man but she was shocked now to see how different he had become, all collapsed, all fallen in on himself, with his neck sticking out of his collar and his suit that seemed to slide over him as he moved. But the fat nose was still fat and the little pearl-grey eyes shone their dog intelligence at Feuerman’s assistant, the greasy one, who began to lead him through his testimony.

It was at this moment in the trial that she nearly lost her composure. Jake had told them what to anticipate. Still, to hear the treachery spoken with the emphasis of a nodding head in the familiar accents of their friend of many years was too much to be endured. She felt with her arms folded that she was holding herself together. Tears filled her eyes and flowed down her throat. She did not move a muscle. An electricity of rage flowed into her body. She wanted to leap out of her chair and catch Selig Mindish by the throat and tear out his tongue.

And he would not look at them. Even when he was asked to point them out he did so only with his hand, pointing to their table with his eyes fastened on the prosecutor. He would not look in their direction. Writing on his pad, Jake broke the point of his pencil. Mindish continued to talk, giving names and dates, recalling conversations. She gazed at him fixedly. Her tears passed. Her rage passed. She continued to look at the witness, looking up to the stand, arms folded, in unwavering attention. It had become more important to her than her life to make Selig Mindish recognize her presence in this courtroom. She willed it. She wanted to extract from that miserable deathface an acknowledgment of her real existence. She could reconcile her persecution, her death, but never a delusion so monstrous that it did not grant her the truth of her own life. Look at me, you pig! Look! I will know why you have done this. You cannot dare to ignore me. You owe me a glimpse of your rotting cowardly soul, you murdering Cossack! Pig! Look at me. I defy you to look at me.

At this point in his testimony the dentist was describing how certain drawings were stored in the darkroom lab he’d made out of the closet in his office. The drawings were scaled down and scratched on dental x-ray films. Among the files and sanders and plaster jaws. The little assistant prosecutor went over to his table and came back holding between his thumb and forefinger a dental x-ray mounted as a slide.

“Is this what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Will you please examine it and tell the court what it is.”

Accepting the film and holding it up to the light, Selig Mindish actually began to smile — it was the kind of thing that happens to children, ballooning their cheeks and escaping in snorts through their nose, when the secret is about to come out. The man was an idiot. But before he said the words that put them in their graves he turned and looked for a moment at Rochelle, looking for one fraction of a second into her eyes with the same moronic smile dying on his face and the absurdly significant dental x-ray slide in his spatulate fingers; and in the little grey pig eyes of the dentist was the recognition she sought. A wry acknowledgment of this moment in the courtroom, in their lives, and she was stunned to read in it the message not of a betrayer

the novel as a sequence of analyses. But what of the executioner? A quiet respectable man, now retired. He is in the Yonkers phone book

no not as betrayer begging forgiveness, there was no appeal for forgiveness, nor did she see the rationalized hate that would permit him to do this, and justify it, no, nor the hypnotized stare of a programmed amnesiac, nor the actor’s look for the court’s benefit of a fellow conspirator — none of these: he presented the private faith of a comrade, one to another, complicitors in self-sacrifice, one to another, and I cannot communicate beyond this but by now you must know why and what is happening. She saw the comrade’s life of terrible regret, of sad determination, one to another, and the assumption of their shared knowledge, the sexuality of it. And then she turned to look at her husband. Ascher was hunched over his table writing furiously. Beyond Ascher’s shoulder, a sculpture of the burden of man, her husband Paul sat upright with his eyes closed and pain that had caused the corners of his mouth to turn upward. And they were not on trial but back at the summer camp, at Paine Lodge, Mindish and Paul and Rochelle, lifting their joined hands to the blackberry night of crickets’ fiddle and frogs’ jug band, spinning in intricate devolving patterns, diving through the arches of their own arms, and dazzling the brothers with a folk dance of infinite beauty, of eternal grace. And there swept over her now the horrifying conviction that Paul did not have to return this look of Mindish. That while she had been shielding him from her dread he had withheld from her his one crucial perception. And that what in this moment overwhelmed her was something her husband already knew in himself and for himself.

There is a line in one of her last letters to him. The gambler has no rights. It is a non sequitur. It is a line that makes no other sense. Its context is one of those miserable conversations they were allowed to have through the wire mesh once a week, a marital spat, low-voiced, urgent, full of fever and humiliation and nausea; as he tried to get her approval for what he had done alone, for the complicity he had forced upon them, for the defense they had offered, for the gamble of her life and his. She suspended all communication with him after the third appeal failed. This is usually attributed to her well-known mental problems, the court having supplied a psychologist once a week for therapy. They want me to adjust to the idea of dying , she wrote Ascher. But she would not write Paul the last month of their lives, and it is not clear if they saw each other the night before their execution although it is commonly believed they did. And possibly they did, for a dance before death, a reconciliation in heat and love and terror, while the jailers fled the corridor and the stones groaned and the bars rattled; and they rippled and spasmed and shook and trembled as if electrocution was something people did together.

“You’re out of your mind,” Linda Mindish said. Furiously she stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray. “I feel sorry for you. Is that why you want to see my father?” She laughed. “Oh my God, oh my God.” She stood up and smoothed her blouse and skirt.

“You don’t buy it.”

“You poor tormented boy. I knew that’s what he wanted. Some way of squirming out of it. Can you imagine?” She has turned to Dale. “Have you ever heard such a tenuous, fragile piece of nonsense? My God. Listen Danny, you’ll get no satisfaction from my father. My God, the more I think about it! Let me tell you something, because I’ve got to go. I’ve wasted enough of my time. And keep in mind I’m not afraid of you or what embarrassment you can cause me. We’re established here — you start something and you’ll be sorry. Papa didn’t tell the half of it. They were into all sorts of things that never came up at the trial. They had their hooks into space research and missiles and germ warfare — everything. Your parents were the head of a whole network. They ran the show. They planned things and they paid people off. Lasers — years before anybody heard of lasers. Everything. So don’t come to me with this worm’s-eye view and tell me my father sacrificed them. Or that my father was in a position to sacrifice anybody. You can’t squirm out of it that easily. Your parents were what they were and nothing you can do can change that. Another couple. My God, that’s pathetic.”