The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  “International Marxism and international socialism, planted in Russian soil and left to themselves, found their international character exposed to the constant sapping and mining of the Russian national tradition which they had supposedly vanquished in 1917. Ten years later, when Lenin was dead, the leaders who had most conspicuously represented the international and western elements in Bolshevism—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, not to mention minor figures like Radek, Krasin, and Rakovsky—had all disappeared; the mild and pliable Bukharin was soon to follow. The hidden forces of the Russian past—autocracy, bureaucracy, political and cultural conformity—took their revenge not by destroying the revolution, but by harnessing it to themselves in order to fulfill it in a narrow national framework….”

  This insight of Carr’s is useful in understanding such moments of agony to world-wide socialism as the Soviet refusal to support the Communist-left coalition in Germany that might have prevented Hitler’s rise to power; the Soviet betrayal of the Republican cause in Spain (many of the purge victims were veterans of the Spanish campaign); the cynical use of the popular front and collective security as elements in Soviet diplomacy; and the non-aggression pact. Thus, to those critics who see in Stalin the “Genghis Khan” he was called by Bukharin, or the extreme paranoid he is sorrowfully admitted to have been by today’s Soviet leadership, we must say: no revolution is betrayed, only fulfilled.

  Thermidor.

  Daniel Thermidor found considerable play in the Volvo’s steering

  and what about Kronstadt—we mustn’t forget KRONSTADT! And Gorky, too, with his untimely thoughts.

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Reader, this is a note to you. If it seems to you elementary, if it seems after all this time elementary … If it is elementary and seems to you at this late date to be pathetically elementary, like picking up some torn bits of cloth and tearing them again … If it is that elementary, then reader, I am reading you. And together we may rend our clothes in mourning.

  On Memorial Day in 1967, Daniel Lewin drove his new black Volvo onto the Massachusetts Turnpike and headed east, toward Boston. Sitting beside him was his wife, Phyllis, a throbbingly sad blond flower-child with light blue, Polish eyes that turned grey on days of rain. And behind them, wedged not too comfortably between a large suitcase and some other junk, was their baby son, Paul.

  Daniel had never driven this car before, and he passed the first few miles working with the four-speed stick shift and feeling his way with his spine into the springs and with his arms into the steering.

  There was a wobble in the wheels, a small thrump-thrump at sixty-five. There was considerable play in the steering. Also a slight pull to the left when he touched the brakes. There were certain loosenesses in the car. It was a less than well-tuned, well-maintained car. It had a leathery smell. Daniel imagined its career in Boston and Cambridge, the collegiate recklessness. His sister Susan had bought it cheap from a guy dropping out of Harvard. And whom had he bought it from? A reckless car. A car in character reckless.

  “It’s raining,” Phyllis said. So it was. Shattered raindrops appeared on the windshield. Daniel’s eyes focused on the surface of the windshield, trying to anticipate the small explosions of rain. This was too difficult, so he fixed on one drop and followed its career. The idea was that his attention made it different from the other drops. It arrived, head busted, with one water bead as a nucleus and six or seven clusters in a circle around it. It was like a melted snowflake. Each of the mini-drop clusters combined and became elongated and pulled away in the direction of its own weight. As he accelerated the car, so did they increase their rate of going away from the center.

  “Shouldn’t you put on the wipers?” Phyllis said.

  The sky was darkening rapidly. Headlights of oncoming traffic multiplied in the drops of water on the windshield. The tires hissed on the wet road.

  Daniel groped for the wiper switch. The car veered for a moment, and a horn blew behind them. Then the wipers were thumping away. But Daniel had noticed in the moment of the car’s veering that Phyllis clutched the armrest of the door with her right hand and extended her left back over the seat to protect the baby.

  She glanced at him to see if he had seen.

  “I like the rain,” Daniel said.

  “I love rain,” Phyllis said. “I especially love warm rain in the summer when there’s no lightning or thunder.”

  “No, I mean now, in this car,” Daniel said. “The rain has the effect of a cocoon, it encapsulates us.”

  “Yes,” she said looking ahead. She was unbraiding her hair. Her eyes were fixed on his father’s Chevrolet directly ahead of them with the silhouettes of three heads in the front seat.

  “Oh, Daniel, I wish I could hold Susan and hug her and kiss her and be her friend.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe when she’s better she should come and live with us for a while. We would really love her and make her happy. The baby would love her. Do you think she would?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe she was coming to see us. Do you think she was coming to New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she was coming to visit us?”

  “No.”

  “She’s so beautiful,” Phyllis said, and she sighed.

  I met my wife at a Central Park Be-In. In the Sheep Meadow. She was there with two other girls from her neighborhood who weren’t cool. They gaped at the genuine hippies. They broke down and giggled like Brooklyn high school girls. She was embarrassed by them. She was very lovely. Someone had solemnly offered her a daffodil and solemnly she had accepted it. Solemnly with a spiritual smile, she walked with her flower, taking those too large, slightly awkward strides of hers. She was avid for spiritual experience. I took her home to 115th Street and put on some Bartok. She was amazed by the numbers of books. I suggested to her that fucking was a philosophical act of considerable importance. I knew that in deference to this possibility she would allow herself to be fucked.

  Phyllis’s parents are young and recently into money. Not wealthy, well-off. Her father sells carpet at a discount. He is a partner with another man, a World War II buddy of his, and they have one store in Brooklyn and one in Queens. He is one of the Young Turks in the Brooklyn Reform Jewish Center. He takes Phyllis’s mother to Florida for two weeks every winter. In the afternoon they play golf and in the evening they go to one of the night clubs and listen to a comedian. In their apartment in a new high-rise in Brooklyn are porcelain lamps of nymphs. Over the stuffed, buttoned sofa in the living room is an original imitation Hudson River School painting in an elaborate gilt frame and with its own spotlight.

  There is a younger child, a boy, twelve, Scott. He despises and hates and fears me only a little less than the mother and father do. They are appalled at Phyllis’s marriage, and we see them less and less frequently. They send gifts for the baby. When we were still talking, the father tried to bring himself to ask me about the bruises his wife saw on his daughter’s upper legs; he mumbled and cleared his throat, but I pretended not to understand, and he gave it up. I think they call her during the day.

  This is no day to be in the library. It is too beautiful and warm and you can hear a bird or two. I will go back and take them to the park and well see if there are any boats on the river—

  A few minutes later Phyllis unbuckled her seat belt and turned around to see to the baby, who was stirring fretfully. “I have only one diaper left,” she said. Clumsily she got to her knees and leaned over the back of the seat to change Paul. Her ass wiggled as she moved her arms. Her long hair hung down. The rain was coming down, rattling the roof and streaming over the windshield. Daniel checked his rear-view mirror and swung into the left lane. A moment later with Phyllis still occupied, he passed his father’s car, then another, then another.

  “There,” Phyllis said. “You take a nap now. And soon well be at your grandma and grandpa’s house. All right now, close your eyes.” She turned, and tucking o
ne leg under the other, she slid heavily into a sitting position. “Oh,” she said. “It makes me dizzy to do that.” She opened her window a crack. “It’s very close in here.”

  Daniel said, “Will you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Take your bells off.”

  She looked at him and laughed. Perhaps she was pleased that he could joke this way and come up from being so far down. Perhaps she was cheered by this expression of the Life Force on such a deadening day. “Very funny,” she said. But she was appreciative.

  “I’m not being funny. I mean it.”

  She studied his face.

  “Come on, Phyllis. Right now.”

  “Daniel—”

  “Take them off.”

  “I don’t think that’s right. I don’t want to do that.”

  “But I want you to, Phyllis.”

  She was looking for the lights of the Chevrolet, but the road immediately ahead was empty. She noticed that the car was going faster.

  “Oh, Daniel, why are you doing this? It’s so foolish. It’s so unnecessary.”

  “Move it, Phyllis.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to take your pants off.”

  “And then what? You can’t do anything while you’re driving. All you’ll do is get us crashed,”

  Daniel gently depressed the accelerator and said nothing.

  “This is a kind of sick kidding around, Daniel. It frightens me. You have no right to freak out driving a car with your own baby in it.”

  Daniel pressed down further on the accelerator. Phyllis was sitting straight in the seat now with both feet on the floor and her arms folded across her breasts. Daniel quietly explained to her the mechanical problems of the car: there was considerable play in the steering, the front wheels were unaligned, the brakes were worn and the tires slick. He glanced at the speedometer and informed Phyllis that they were doing eighty-five miles an hour.

  “When we get to Brookline I’ll do whatever you want,” Phyllis said. “I know I bore you, Danny, I know your family thinks you married someone not as good as you. But you gotta gimme credit for trying, don’t you?”

  Daniel said nothing.

  “You’re all such big deals,” Phyllis said. “You’re all such big deals of suffering.”

  Daniel was pleased with this formulation. She wouldn’t have been capable of it six months before. He thought of complimenting her. Instead he leaned forward and turned off the windshield wipers.

  The rain poured down the windshield now in such torrents that the visibility, though slightly distorted, was good. Phyllis, not a driver, was hardly comforted. She was gazing at a light screen with white and red lights enlarging, shrinking, wavering, scattering, and pouring off her sight like water. Her impression was of not being able to see where the car was going. For the first time there was the sound of thunder rumbling over the sounds of the engine and the slick tires creaming the water. The thunder seemed to buffet the car, which swayed gently at the rear, left to right, right to left.

  “You’re going to kill us!” Phyllis screamed.

  “All you have to do is take off your pants.”

  “I’ll do it, I’ll do it, but first slow down!”

  “First do it!”

  Phyllis unbuckled her belt and unzipped her fly and arching her back off the seat pulled her bellbottoms down. “I’m going to tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them what you do to me and they’ll put you right in there with your sister. The both of you!”

  “All the way off, please.”

  Lifting her knees, she put the heels of her boots on the seat, unzippered her boots, pulled them off, dropped them on the floor, and pulled the pants over her ankles, and threw them down on top of the boots. Then she looked at him and pulled her underpants off and threw them into the pile at her feet. Then she held her hands over her ears and closed her eyes and bent her head.

  Daniel took his foot off the gas pedal and turned on the windshield wipers. Phyllis was crying. She ran her fingers up through her hair and held her ears and cried. Daniel moved into the right-hand lane. A clap of thunder struck directly overhead. Daniel instructed Phyllis to kneel on the seat facing her side of the car, and to bend over as far as she could, kneeled and curled up like a penitent, a worshiper, an abject devotionalist. Weeping, she complained that the car was too small and she too big to get comfortable that way. Daniel gently urged her to try.

  “Like this?” she said, her voice muffled by her hair.

  “That’s fine.”

  “Everyone will see me.”

  “No one can see you.”

  “The baby.”

  “The baby is asleep.”

  “Don’t hurt me. Just don’t hurt me, Daniel.”

  He ran his right hand over her buttocks. The small of her back was dewy with sweat. She shivered and the flesh of her backside trembled under his hand. He tracked the cleft downward. Triangulated by her position it yielded a slightly sour smell of excrement. He teased the small hairs of her tiny anus. Then, with the back of his hand, he rubbed her labia lying plump in their nest between the upturned soles of her feet.

  The rain drummed down. The thunder was fierce. Cars were passing on the left. The sky was black. Daniel leaned forward and pressed the cigarette lighter. His hand remained poised. Do you believe it? Shall I continue? Do you want to know the effect of three concentric circles of heating element glowing orange in a black night of rain upon the tender white girlflesh of my wife’s ass? Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred?

  On the other hand the only thing worse than telling what happened is to leave it to the imagination. There is a classic surrealist silent film by Buñuel and Dali. It is a film about a live hand in a box, and a man dragging the carcass of a cow through his living room at the end of a rope; and the cow turns into a grand piano; and the hand is thrown into a sewer, and a crowd gathers and someone driving away from this fear in a taxi finds the hand in its box in the taxi—and if I recall these images inaccurately that is just as good. But the central event of the picture is this: a hefty and darkly handsome man in a tight-fitting ribbed undershirt stands in a room sharpening a straight razor. A lady sits on a wooden chair in the room with him. She too is half-dressed. Her face is controlled. Through the window we see that it is a moonlit night and that there are clouds moving through the bright moonlit sky. The man comes over to the woman, large eyed, bow mouthed, and impassive in her straight-backed chair, and with his thumb and forefinger spreads her eyelids as far apart as they will go. Then he brings his straight razor down toward her face and her eyeball. The film cuts to the night sky outside the window. A thin, knifelike cloud is seen gliding across the bright orb of the moon. And just as you, the audience, have settled for this symbolic mutilation of the woman’s eye, the camera cuts back to the scene, and in close-up, shows the razor slicing into the eyeball.

  They never talked about Paul and Rochelle. While they grew up with the Lewins there was no need to. They had shared an experience so evenly that to have spoken about it would have diminished what they knew and understood. Share and share alike, the cardinal point of justice for children driven home to them with vicious exactitude. (Do not strike, this is rhetorical but true. Only a son of Rochelle’s could say this line. In our house there could be a laying on of words like lightning. Dispensed outrage, the smell of burning in the mouths of our mother and father. Once she said, “Let our death be his bar mitzvah.”) So at the beginning at least, there was no need to talk about it. When the brother and the sister went somewhere, or did something together; when he tightened her skate or helped her with her homework, or took her to the movies; the way they moved, physically moved, in a convalescence of suffering spoke about it. The way he would hold her arm as they ran across the street in front of traffic spoke about it. The way his muscles tensed when she wasn’t where she was supposed to be at any given time of the day, that spoke of it as well
.

  But they grew. He had taught her how to play casino and all the chords he knew on the guitar, he had taught her to ride a two-wheeler and to do the crawl, and one day she appeared to him suddenly past the age of being taught and taken care of. There were certain needs and expectations for life that could not properly be filled by your brother or sister. That was normal. And she must have come to feel, as he did, bored or unfairly burdened by the habits of a relationship that were drying up into sentimental gestures. And added to that was what he supposed was the normal inevitable loathing for the people who look like you and smell the same as you. That experience of total dissatisfaction with the closely related: who are not smart enough, good-looking enough, cool enough, to get through a day without boring you or shaming you. Except with their parents not available for that kind of self-honing, that sharpening of independence, he was the strop; the mother, the father, the brother, the family. And it was painful and they had some terrible fights.