Red Love (6 page)

Sammy noticed that as he interpreted for the general, the man was getting red in the face and breathing heavily. He suddenly stood up and bellowed in a rage:
“Swallich! What? Goddamn sausage-suckers
—no goddamn sausage-eater is going to tell me that General Pavlov had to be told anything. Maybe he let the little Kraut creep wipe his boots—”

The French commissar shouted,
“Sacrebleu!
I’m not going to listen to this bullshit that a filthy
boche
had anything to do with defeating our great emperor Napoleon!”

“Hey Sammy, what’s going on?” A couple of the Americans were jabbing Sammy on the shoulder. The noise had awakened them.

“Well, actually, guys,” Sammy said, “Krauss’s political line is kind of stale. Where’s the Popular Front in all this? I think he’s gotten himself into a little hot water.”

The Russian and the Frenchman shouted at once until the Russian announced that he was Pashin, commander of the Soviet tank corps. When the French commissar realized who the man was, he shut up.

The commissars bolted to attention, standing on their toes.

General Pashin turned to Sammy. “What’s going on here? This is the most stupid bullshit session I’ve ever heard. Don’t they have anything better to do with their time?”

“Well actually, sir,” Sammy said. “This is not a bullshit session. I’m on trial, and will probably be executed by morning.”

“You
are being tried—by
them?”

Pashin pushed himself to the front of the room, pushed over the table, picked up the five-foot-six Pohoric in his arms and threw him against the wall. Pohoric fell over. “You son of a bitch. You have the nerve to try one of our boys?”

“He’s an American!” Pohoric screamed.

“Don’t tell me. I know one of our boys when I hear him and see him.” Pashin pointed to the commissars and asked Sammy, “Who are these monkeys?”

Sammy answered, “They’re the judges, and the German is the prosecutor.”

Pashin’s face had turned beet red. “I heard what you did today,” he shouted at Pohoric. “You slaughtered a whole battalion
uselessly,
uselessly. And these are the few remnants, huh? And the only thing you can think of is killing them. Don’t you know what you do with demoralized young troops, you asshole? You bathe them, you clothe them, you give them a few drinks, get ‘em all fucked, and then you reorganize them. If you don’t understand these elementary facts of life, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

The Americans were poking Sammy in the shoulder and asking what was going on, but he was too busy to answer.

General Pashin had turned back to Sammy. “And as for you, bastard, this is what you get for associating with foreigners. What’s a nice Russian boy like you doing associating with all these scum?” he said, pointing at the Americans.

The commissars had slunk out of the room, including Krauss. Pohoric was left leaning against the wall. Pashin said to him, “I don’t want to hear anything more about trials or executions for now. If you don’t take my goddamn advice, I’ll have your head.”

Pashin headed for the door. He stopped and turned back to Sammy. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said. “A young man from the motherland, associating himself with these
bastards.”

The day after the trial, Sammy, flea-ridden and filthy, was ordered to report to brigade headquarters. When he arrived, a sidecar scooted up to him and a mousy man with red hair shouted at him to get in. He drove with insane speed to Madrid and deposited Sammy at a bathhouse for the exclusive use of the Russians. No Spaniards, whatever their rank, were permitted to enter. Two women undressed Sammy, put him in a hot tub, sprayed eau de cologne on him, bathed him, and gave him a manicure. The redhead appeared and handed Sammy silk underwear, a polo shirt, a leather jacket, an elegant pair of trousers, a beautiful pair of Russian boots, and a Russian tank uniform. Then Sammy was driven back at the same speed to headquarters and presented to a Major Vorov, who asked him to fill out a biographical form. When Sammy came to “nationality,” he hesitated for a moment and almost wrote “Jew.” Then he made the smartest move of his career in Spain. Sammy wrote, “Russian.”

Vorov asked him, “What did you do when you lived with these foreigners in America?”

“I was a seaman, Comrade Major.”

“First mate, second mate, or captain?” Vorov asked.

“No, just a seaman,” Sammy said.

Vorov looked astonished. “You left the motherland to become a common seaman?”

“Yes, comrade, but I was an organizer of the union,” he replied.

Vorov registered no reaction.

“And I was secretary of the Young Communist League on the waterfront of New York City.”

Vorov beamed. “Ah,
now
I understand.” Then he told Sammy of the high honor in store for him. Sammy was to join the Soviet tank corps. “Well, comrade,” Vorov said, “how does it feel to be back with your own?” “Very good,” Sammy replied.

He was now stationed with the Russians.

Sammy was driven to Alcala de Henares, the secret headquarters for Russian tank operations located behind an eight-foot whitewashed stone wall. Soviet sailors relayed messages to Russia from mobile equipment in the curtained backseat of a Buick with three retractable fifteen-foot antennas.

Vorov called him in for another pep talk. “You’ll get along fine,” he said. “Of course, be careful of the Jews.”

Sammy had a conversation with Vorov about the purges of the Red Army that had taken place in Moscow. He was especially curious about how Vorov felt about the purge of Marshal Tukhachevski, who was after all the commander of the tank corps. Vorov had praised Tukhachevski to Sammy many times.

“Well, there’s a silver lining in this thing,” Vorov said.

“What is it?” Sammy asked.

“I’m not a major in Russia. I’m a captain.
Here
I’m a major. But who knows, now maybe they’ll even skip me over some ranks. Now that they’re getting rid of all these Jews, who knows?”

“Uh huh,” Sammy said.

A new group of Russian soldiers arrived at Alcala de Henares. They talked freely with Sammy, since he was one of them. They marched with the goose step, an innovation. They talked about these aliens, the Jews, constantly. Jokes about the little kike who sold things and robbed things. About the one Russian Jewish officer who always tried to show off and was killed at Brunete.

Vorov liked to drink and talk with Sammy until three in the morning. Vorov was also an orphan, one of the thousands of waifs in the early 1920s—the kids whose parents were killed in the civil war. They lived in the streets, stealing, always running from the cops. Vorov had never known his parents. The Bolsheviks had taken the orphans and made them the proletarian guard of the revolution, used them to put the old Bolsheviks in their place. They were given education and power, and the beauty of it was that they had no morals. They were placed in the NKVD or became guards in the concentration camps.

“Boy,” Vorov told Sammy, “in the old days no one could swipe a wallet as good as me. I was like a wild animal. Sometimes I’d cut and not just the coat; I’d even cut into the asshole of some old broad. One time a regiment of soldiers showed up at a railroad yard where a bunch of us were sleeping. They rounded us up and said, ‘You guys are going to have a punishment worse than death. You’re going to school.’ One day they gave us spoons to eat with. I threw mine away. The next day, the bowl of kasha was on the floor instead of on the table. The teacher said, ‘Get down and eat it.’ He rubbed his foot in it and spit on it and said, ‘Eat it, goddamn it. That will teach you to throw spoons away.’ And I ate it, in front of my friends. I didn’t mind that, but the laughing and snide remarks and humiliation. But I took it like a man, and then I got to do the punishing.

“In the G.P.U. we didn’t have any sympathy for the bastards who didn’t know how to outrun the cops. We had these old blabber-mouths, these damn Jews we arrested who would tell you about the old days: ‘I was a great revolutionary. I went to jail.’ Piss on them if they had served time.

“They cried to us, and I’d say to them, ‘You son of a wolf—how could you be a great revolutionary?’ They’d cry, ‘I fought with Lenin.’ And I’d say, ‘So I was a great pickpocket. So what, asshole?’ “ Vorov roared with laughter, throwing the empty vodka bottle at the wall.

Sammy, the only American tank commander in a Russian unit, served with the Russians for fourteen months in Spain. His rank was second lieutenant. His Soviet B.T.-5 tank weighed twenty tons and could easily jump over a fifteen- to twenty-foot ditch and land smoothly.

In May, the Soviet commander, Lieutenant Colonel Buslov, called Sammy into headquarters and explained his plan to frontally attack Fuentes del Ebro with fifty Russian tanks and head for Saragossa.

“But Comrade Colonel,” Sammy said, “the terrain there is green on your map. In Aragon that means irrigation ditches. We’ll never get across.”

Buslov glared at Sammy. “Second lieutenants in the Red Army are seen and not heard.”

Sammy was silent.

The tanks moved slowly across the rocky stubble field. Sammy’s riflemen clawed to the rear railings. Within fifty feet, Sammy saw they were plowing through a field of high vegetation. The weeds were higher than the turrets. The dust was impenetrable. The only way to orient themselves was to keep in sight of the church steeple in Fuentes del Ebro three thousand feet ahead. Sammy’s tank fell down into a ditch. It was saved by its fluid shock absorbers.

Sammy was able to turn the tank around, but suddenly he heard hail hitting all around. Machine-gun bullets were burning down upon them. Sammy looked around. His infantrymen had disappeared. He would never see them again. The tank cleared an irrigation ditch twelve feet wide. It jumped again, landing in a dry ditch fifteen feet deep. Turning right, Sammy found a breach in the right wall, a shell hole, and climbed back. He passed the burning tanks, their front ends blown open.

Almost all the tank riders died.

Lying beside his tank, Sammy fell asleep. In the morning, he learned that out of fifty-three tanks, twenty-two were lost.

It was the end of the Aragon offensive. Later in the morning, Buslov summoned Sammy and told him that some of the Russians could not be accounted for. No one knew if they were dead or wounded. He asked Sammy to check the local hospitals.

Sammy went first to the warehouse of the Hijar railroad station, which was being used as a hospital. It was a charnel house. Over four thousand wounded were lying on the ground and on stretchers, There were two doctors, four nurses, and one ambulance. The wounded lay with open chests with intestines exposed, moaning and calling out to him for help. The smell was unbearable. He saw the indifference of the staff. Wounded soldiers were no longer useful.

Sammy found a Ukrainian from Canada and two Russians. The three men were taken away in an ambulance which was reserved for the Russians.

The Americans heard Sammy speak in English to the Ukrainian.

“Please, please,” the Americans cried. “You’re an American and you won’t help us.” They cursed him.

He fled, his heart beating fast.

I’m trapped. What do I do?

He lasted for fourteen months, and he got out. Before he had gone with the Russians, he had thought, we’ve got to get their hands off the American Communists. When he got to know them, he decided, we’ve got to fight them, they’re even worse than the Nazis. With the Nazis, you knew where you stood. The language was plain.

When he arrived in New York, he kissed the ground.

Now he is seventy-five years old, retired, living in Florida with his wife. Behind him on the wall perches a small American flag. He hopes that the Israeli Army will allow him to serve as a replacement for a young soldier for a month in the summertime. He has limited funds, and partakes of some of the activities that are offered to retirees at little cost. But watching him at these affairs (obese women in pink bunny suits singing at costume parties) his apartness and dignity are clear.

He takes courses in philosophy at the local college, wears a bracelet for a Soviet Jewish political prisoner, and eagerly accepts a few invitations to speak about Spain. There aren’t many, because of what he has to say. The producer of a film about Spanish Civil War veterans comes to interview him. The producer stops in the middle and says, “I can’t use any of this. I never heard anything like this in my entire life. You’re a cold warrior.”

On the day of the T.W. A. hijacking in which Jews were again the victims of a selection process, he walks on the beach with his wife. He hears the gentle sounds of elderly Yiddish voices singing, the sounds of balalaikas and familiar Russian melodies and songs of the Spanish Civil War. He hears “The Peat Bog Soldiers” and “The House I Live in” and the World Youth Festival Song and “Freiheit.” The old Communists are seated together on the beach in their regular corner. In their seventies and eighties, many of them have the peculiar resilience and strength that ideology provides. They are peacefully sewing P.L.O. flags in anticipation of the upcoming Party dinner in honor of General David Dragunsky, head of the Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee and instructor of P.L.O. troops in Libya. One of them is writing a slogan in crayon: “Condemn American Terrorism.” Some are reading
Soviet Life,
which has on its cover soldiers skipping along in a meadow, grinning and gathering daffodils. He recognizes two Spanish war vets, but they do not see him. He passes by them, shaking his head. Their humming and strumming and singing gradually fade as he moves on.

He remembers the wounded crying out to him at the railroad station in Spain. He remembers going to Spain as if going to an optometrist with blurred vision, and emerging with clear sight.

He remembers.

Street Scenes, 1930

The lollipop salesman.

—G. L.

When he was eleven, Solly Rubell sold lollipops for a penny apiece on the roof garden of an apartment house on Stanton Street.

A skinny boy, he stood on the roof, waiting for customers. Then, dressed up in a black suit and Stetson hat, Solly went to
shul
with his father, mother, sister, and cousins.

It was the thick of the Depression. At night, after work, his father cut lace to make a little extra money. Everyone did it, even though it was against the labor laws. If strangers entered the building, people went running from floor to floor calling out, “Lace inspector!”

Solly and his family lived on the top floor. It was a cold-water flat. Water dripped from the roof, and the toilet in the hall had no light. In winter the wind swept through the rattling windows. But in summer they kept the front door open so a breeze would waft through the apartment, and put bowls of ice in front of the fan.

The candy stores were cool, dark, and dank, with their smells of pretzels, malteds, lime rickeys, and sawdust. Baseball cards with gum, pink candies, and watermelon slices cost a penny. A big chunk of ice surrounded the sodas in a metal box; on the floor around it was a growing puddle.

Solly and the other boys caught fireflies and bottled them. He tried to read
The Motor Boys Under the Sea
by the fireflies’ light.

At ten in the morning, the junk peddler with his horse and wagon rang his cowbell and called: “Old clothes, old rags, old newspapers, old springs, old junk.” Later a singer in a top hat appeared in the courtyard. Pennies fell from windows, rolled in small packets of paper.

When the cool wet sheets hanging on long ropes in the laundry were drying, Solly and his friends ran through and hit their steaming faces against them.