David Bezmozgis - The Free World

How do you do do, Mister Brown?

How do you do do, Mister Brown?

How do you do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do, Mee-ster Brown?

Sitting on the bed, Samuil would watch his brother and his cousins, stepping happily and clumsily on the bare floorboards. Across the room, their mother and aunt would be watching as well.

— When the revolution comes, Yaakov asked, will it be permissible for me to listen to “Mister Brown”?

— There’s nothing objectionable about the music, Reuven said. It is the legitimate cultural expression of the downtrodden American Negro.

— But the lyrics are decadent and would have to be changed, Samuil said.

— To “Mister Marx”?

— An improvement, Samuil said. But it would require something more to edify the workers and reflect the social ideals of the revolution.

— And dancing?

— Why not? Reuven said.

— So long as every step is to the left, Yaakov said.

— Naturally, Reuven replied.

In bed with the enemy, Yaakov would joke. But he knew better than to ask sensitive questions, just as they knew well not to inquire into the activities of his Zionist group. Not once could Samuil remember them arguing about politics; at most they made subtle efforts to persuade and reform one another. Samuil recalled once inviting Yaakov to go with them to a Yom Kippur picnic, an event organized by a number of Jewish socialist groups. Yaakov had declined and gone instead with his father to Gutkin’s Minyan on Stabu Street.

Before the picnic, Samuil joined a group of provocateurs who interrupted services by flagrantly eating an apple or a boiled egg in the midst of the congregation. Others, who were yet more audacious, pelted the fasting congregants with raisins and crusts of bread. To the congregants’ cries of Pigs! Heretics! the comrades answered with Hypocrites! Exploiters!

The Yom Kippur picnics, the Red Passovers: he never again saw such unity and purity of doctrine. All the serious, impatient, strident, blustery, desperate Jewish workers. Their need for revolution, their intense, maddening need for change. The endless, demoralizing, profitless toil from morning to night. And the murderous advance of the fascists. Grandiose, strutting Mussolini and his blackshirts. Hitler and his deranged lumpen proletarian thugs. Franco and his gang of reactionaries, confounding the will of the Spanish people. And, in their own country, if not an outright fascist, then the dictator, Ulmanis. They felt their lives, their youth, ticking away minute by minute. How insignificant, how expendable were their pitiful, singular lives. How to describe the nature of that despair? All the times when, for no particular reason, Samuil had been paralyzed by the thought, A life, such a tremendous thing, a life! What right did they have to deny him his life? What made his life, that of a simple worker, less valuable than the life of a factory owner’s son?

Twenty-five years ago the working classes of Russia with the help of peasants searched for chometz in their land.

These were the words of the Red Haggadah. Every Passover, Hirsh Kogan would remove it from its hiding place, under a plank in his floor, and they would recite it together in his room, even as they heard, through the wall, the neighbors chanting the ancient liturgy.

They cleaned away all the traces of landowners and bourgeois bosses in the country and took power into their own hands. They took the land from the landowners, plants and factories from the capitalists; they fought the enemies of the workers on all fronts. In the fire of the great socialist revolution, the workers and peasants burned Kolchak, Yudenich, Vrangel, Denikin, Pilsudskii, Petlyura, Chernov, Khots, Dan, Martov, and Abramovich … This year a revolution in Russia; next year — a world revolution!

And then, three days after the Nazis rolled triumphant and unimpeded into Paris, Samuil, Reuven, and their comrades, waving red rags and banners, rushed to the tracks near the Central Station to welcome the Soviet soldiers and tank drivers.

*What time is it, Reuven?

It is already a quarter after twelve. Why do you ask, Samuil? Are you hungry?

I feel a small hunger, yes.

Would you like to eat something?

To eat a little, yes. I certainly don’t want a big lunch.

Where shall we go then?

The café on the corner? It seems to me that it is inexpensive.

Let’s go there. To tell the truth, I am very hungry!

Riga was two cities the day the Soviets came. Samuil remembered marching and singing along Elizabetes Street while stony faces gazed down from the windows. Come another year, and these people would be in the streets offering bouquets to a different army.

How quickly it all happened, and how astounding it seemed, even when the tide was in your favor.

The morning after the Soviets arrived, posters and handbills appeared across the city. Edicts were announced and meetings convened. In a matter of days, nearly every outward sign of the old regime was eradicated. New names appeared on streets and institutions. Everything that Samuil had considered imposing and intransigent shrank meekly out of sight. The state police, who had for so long pursued and harassed him and his comrades, now themselves scuttled for cover. Usually, to no avail. Measures were taken to eliminate them. The streets were patrolled by new men in new uniforms.

As for him and Reuven, they joined up with the new militia, the Red Guard. Reuven was twenty-nine and Samuil was twenty-seven. Their revolutionary credentials were impeccable. For patrons, they had Schatz-Anin — installed as editor of a Yiddish newspaper — and Eduards, who was appointed to a position within the Gorkom, the municipal government. Among their tasks, they were entrusted with converting Levitan’s workshop, and others like it, into cooperatives. Politely, in measured tones, they explained to the proprietors how their lives and the lives of their workers would be improved. They went from shop to shop, moving purposefully through the streets, aware of the eyes that followed them and the conversations that died at their approach. The vulgar allure of power was very strong, but they did not succumb to its temptations. In all of their dealings, they were mindful of themselves as representatives of the Party. They were encouraged to imagine themselves as physicians, and the revolution as an organism, beset by toxins and contagions. Some toxins the organism could tolerate and neutralize; others were lethal. These had to be purged. And it was up to them, as the physicians, to distinguish between the mildly disruptive and the noxious, and to err on the side of caution.

In the first weeks after the arrival of the Soviets, there were very many physicians like themselves, circulating among the population, issuing diagnoses. Goods wagons were prepared at the railway station to expel the contaminants. Among them was their cousin Yaakov. Reuven had seen his name on a list. This, they both realized, was the test of their revolutionary mettle. Samuil remembered how they had discussed the matter between them. They decided that they would be committing no crime by telling their cousin what he was bound to learn anyway in short order. This way, at least, he would be able to prepare himself for the journey.

That evening, in front of their family, Reuven delivered the news. There were six of them in the apartment then, the girls having married and moved out.

It was hardly unexpected. Conspicuous class enemies like Vasserman had been rounded up. The Zionist organizations had burned their membership rosters — as though, even without the rosters, everything wasn’t abundantly known.

Folding his hands on the kitchen table, their cousin said, What’s the point in making a fuss? This is the nature of our times. Samuil and Reuven bet on one horse. I bet on another. My horse lost.