The Book of Daniel

by E. L. Doctorow

  A foundation. I desire a Foundation.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I take you will you be a big girl and do what I say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because we have to do it so that no one sees us. And so you have to listen to me and do what I tell you to do. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “OK, now, that’s a promise.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say I promise, Daniel.”

  “I promise, Daniel.”

  “All right. Now today is Thursday. We’re going to escape Saturday. That’s not today and that’s not tomorrow, but the next day.”

  “I want to escape now.”

  “Susan, you just made a promise. You better listen to me or we won’t do it at all. If we escape before then it will be easier for them to catch us. You don’t want them to catch us, do you?”

  “No.”

  “All right. All you have to do in the meantime is what they tell you. Go to sleep when they tell you and eat when they tell you. I’m not going to wait for you if you’re tired so you better not be tired. And if you eat something you won’t be hungry when we go. Once we escape I don’t know when we’ll eat. So you’ve got to eat all your food and go to sleep. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And on Saturday we’ll go.”

  “Yes.”

  “And listen, you can’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t. I hate them.”

  Saturday the discipline relaxed. Some of the kids were taken home for the weekend. There was no school. There was more free time. After breakfast there was a free period in the yard. There were a lot of kids in the yard all running around. On Saturday no one would stop you in the street to ask why you weren’t in school.

  It was a chilly morning. I looked up into the grey sky of swiftly moving clouds and my heart turned over. I was wearing my mackinaw and my leather hunter’s cap. Susan had on her snow jacket with the hood. I had my sneakers but she only had her shiny black ankle-strap shoes. “All right now, sit down here at the fence. That’s it. Now when I say you lie down. I’ll lift up the fence and you roll under it.”

  “All right.”

  “Then I’ll crawl under. Then run. Run as fast as you can.”

  I had this idea that if we went home to Williams, somehow that would have the effect of getting our mother and father home too. I felt that as long as we were in the Shelter, they would be in jail. I felt that they would have no chance of reaching home unless we were there. I wanted to put it all back together. My reasoning seemed logical at the time. I had no sense of faith or belief. It merely seemed logical that if Susan and I went home, it would be restored. Paul and Rochelle might even precede us. We would meet them.

  “All right now, get ready. Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know where to find any bathroom, so you better go now if you have to. I’ll wait for you.”

  “I don’t.”

  Alone in the Cold War, Daniel and Susan run down Tremont Avenue. It is a busy, curving cobblestone avenue lined with stores and delicatessens, movies and automobile showrooms and bars and Chinese restaurants. From west to east it snakes over the hills of the Bronx, a major artery. Trolley tracks, no longer used, flow down its center. It bleats with traffic. Daniel has some knowledge: he knows that the Shelter is in the East Bronx and that his home is in the West Bronx. But he doesn’t know which way is west. He looks for signs on the front of the buses nosing past. He looks for the sun but there is no sun. They scurry along, the little girl pulled by her brother, hurrying along the storefronts, darting past doorways, weaving through the people walking, shopping, waiting for lights at corners. Daniel’s side hurts. Each step brings him pain. He is sweating. “No so fast,” his sister whines. “You’re going to make me fall.”

  Every few minutes she has to stop and pull her socks off her heels; her white cotton socks slip down into her shoes, and she has to tug them up.

  Ahead the Third Avenue El crosses over Tremont Avenue, leaving a tunnel of shadow, a premonition of long distances. In this darkness of black steel beams that shimmy when the trains roar overhead, the green traffic light shines cool and bright. A newsstand nestles under the stairs leading up to the trains. The smell of hot dogs and juicy fruit gum and popcorn. The suggestion of being lost in the city.

  You can’t ask anyone the way because nobody gets more sympathy than a child who has lost his way. People don’t forget that. That is like leaving a trail of bread crumbs. Worse, they take you in hand, you are captured. So you walk in dumb panic, hoping to be right, looking for signs, prodding your intuition, walking as if you knew where you were going. Decisively, you cross the street and turn left.

  “How much more? Are we going to be there soon?”

  “Be quiet.”

  “Is it soon?”

  “Soon. Just be quiet.”

  The small warm hand in my hand. The imprint is permanent. The small warm hand in my hand. It is given to me and not withdrawn. The small warm hand in my hand. Every few steps I hear in the traffic and movement of the city a soft hiss hiss, like a signal from a doorway, like static from a secret radio. I am ever on the alert for secret signals. But it is Susan sniffing in the privacy of my ear, measuring our progress with intakes from her runny nose. Occasionally she draws a sleeve across her face.

  “What are you crying about?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Am I going too fast?”

  “Yes.”

  I check to see if anyone is following. We are off the rumbling avenue and walking down a tenement street of the East Bronx. It’s a poor neighborhood. Occasionally we pass small porch houses with asphalt shingles just like ours. No one appears to be following. I slow up but we won’t stop. Kids stare at us from their stoops and doorways. I can’t pretend to be doing anything but passing through. There rises in me a feeling for the Shelter. I think of the lunch hour, the Saturday noon frankfurters. Nostalgia. A slight smear of homesick in the chest. Is that possible? Is it possible for feelings to be that indiscriminate?

  Behind us is my vision of the Inertia Kid lying on his bunk. I am sorry for my routines. They were a failure. He knew I made fun of him. He knew what I was doing. I feel terrible. I feel the sickness of someone who has sold out. Occasionally in certain lights the idiocy of his expression was momentarily erased. His face was comely. I knew he was handsome and wise. I was afraid to look at him. I adored him. If I had stayed at the Shelter I could have taken care of him and protected him from impersonations. Could Roy hit a ball, jump as high?

  In the afternoon Daniel and Susan had come to the section of Bathgate Avenue between 173rd Street and Claremont Parkway that was an open market of fruit and vegetable stalls and peddlers’ pushcarts at the curbs. The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers and the merchants in their full-length white aprons over their coats cried out their prices to passersby. Pyramids of apples and dark grapes, oranges and pumpkins, rose from the stalls. Prices written on brown paper bags impaled on wooden slats. Two pounds for nineteen cents! Six for thirty-three! Fresh! Sweet! Juicy! Bushels of green peppers. Boxes of carrots in bunches, and the green topping is wrung off upon purchase. Dates poured into a bag from a metal scoop. Indian nuts. Rock candy. They stood in front of an open Appetizing store magnetized by the slabs of lox, and the pickle barrels and the nut trays and the herring in cream. Who’s next! How much, lady! The women elbowed past, their shopping bags crammed. The smell of warm fresh bread floated out of a white bakery. The butcher’s freezer door slammed shut with a great clank. And here, with sawdust on the floor, was a store just like Irving’s Fish Market, with the live fish swimming in a tank and waiting for Irving’s rolling pin to stun them just before the knife sliced off their heads. How much, lady! And along the curbs were the pushcarts of notions and buttons and thread, of a selection of ladies’ panties, of factory-second shoes and sneakers tied by the laces, of
bananas, just bananas, a pushcart piled with bananas, the peddler a specialist in bananas. With all those bananas he had to move them cheaper than the next guy. How much, lady! They’re rotten, a lady tells her friend. And everywhere were the cries of life and commerce, and the smells of the oranges and warm bread and fish and cheap new shoes. Cars inched through the narrow street. Mothers and children shouted back and forth from the street to the fire escapes. With Susan in tow Daniel slowly drifted in the eddying currents of shoppers. Loaded shopping bags swung into him. Old men pushed him out of the way. It was a dangerous passage but his heart was lifted because he had recognized Bathgate Avenue and knew it. Bathgate was spoken of with approval by his mother and father, who regretted only that it was too far to go to shop every day. But the food was best there, and the prices cheapest, and on special occasions, like with Mindish driving them in his old Chrysler, the Isaacsons would stock up from the rich markets of Bathgate Avenue. Shopping on Bathgate was a skill. One took satisfaction from one’s judgments and one’s purchases. Daniel also knew that when he came to Claremont Avenue he would be able to see the hills of Claremont Park, and that by climbing up the steps from Webster Avenue into Claremont Park he would inevitably come to Weeks Avenue not two blocks from his home.

  “We’ll be there soon, Susan.”

  He knew she was hungry. He considered stealing something; he had already seen two different kids filching fruit, but he was afraid. He didn’t mind getting shoved around in the street because he felt virtually invisible. Who could tell that he and Susan didn’t belong to someone walking right in front of them or right behind them? But if he stole something and was caught he would no longer be invisible. “We’ll be home soon,” he said over his shoulder.

  And then tell of that last leg of the journey, the most frightening and dangerous. Claremont Avenue was a wide, dangerous street of traffic. Then you had to cross Webster, a confusing, doubly wide street of tracks and buses and cars going two ways, and lights that didn’t seem to allow the opportunity to cross. It didn’t seem like a street that was meant to be crossed. Also with the steep walls of the park on the other side this was an area open under the sky. One’s head and shoulders were vulnerable in the open spaces of the city. Crossing Webster and climbing the steep stone flights to the park, I became sensitive to the extreme danger of what I was doing. We were becoming exhausted. Also, now that we were leaving the depths of the East Bronx for the heights of Claremont, I remembered the Brookies, a gang of East Bronx terrorists who came up off Brook Avenue like a wind and raided the softer, barely better-off neighborhoods around this park and beat up the little kids and cut them and took their money. The closer we got to our neighborhood the more frightened we became. Susan began to cry. The tears flowed, the snot flowed. She wanted to sit down on a bench and rest. She wanted to pull up her socks which had disappeared into her shoes. Her shoes were blistering the backs of her heels.

  The park was empty. A bitter wind was blowing through the bare trees, and piles of leaves whirled around our feet and stuck to our knees. Dirt stung my eyes. We turned our backs to the wind, and with our hands to our eyes, whirled and turned and spun our way toward home.

  Here are the names of some traitors. Benedict Arnold, of course, along with his wife Peggy; General Charles Lee, a trusted aide of Washington’s; Burr, Burr’s daughter and son-in-law, the double traitor Wilkerson. The names also of Federalists too prominent to mention who secretly gave the British aid and comfort and entered negotiations with them that looked to a Federalist coup after a British victory. Robert E. Lee fits the definition, and also the Mormons who mounted war against the U.S. Govt. Examples abound. But historians of early America fail to mention the archetype traitor, the master subversive Poe, who wore a hole into the parchment and let the darkness pour through. This is how he did it: First he spilled a few drops of whiskey just below the Preamble. To this he added the blood of his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he had married and who hemorrhaged from the throat. He stirred these fluids in a small, elliptically stressed circle with the extracted tooth of the dead Ligeia. Then added some raven droppings. A small powerful odor arose from the Constitution; there was a wisp of smoke which exploded and quickly turned mustard yellow in color. When Poe blew this away through the resulting aperture in the parchment the darkness of the depths rose, and rises still from that small hole all these years incessantly pouring its dark hellish gases like soot, like smog, like the poisonous effulgence of combustion engines over Thrift and Virtue and Reason and Natural Law and the Rights of Man. It’s Poe, not those other guys. He and he alone. It’s Poe who ruined us, that scream from the smiling face of America.

  We looked from the porch through the windows. A silver light reflected through our faces the silver sky racing over the schoolyard. The sky of silver raced through our eyes, through our house. The wind came up and pressed us to the windows. Gradually the wind carried over the schoolyard from the soot hills of apartment houses in the west a last few crushed granules of daylight that fused the windowpane to the room: The living room was empty. The walls were stained with crushed grey light. The floorboards were bare. The room was empty. The window lacked curtains. The house was empty. I moved to the other window on the porch. The room was bare. The walls bare, the floor bare. I tried the door. The door was locked. I ran down the porch steps, around to the alley. I knocked on Williams’ cellar door. I put my ear to the door. I hoisted myself up to look through the window of the cellar door. In the darkness I saw the light of my own eyes. The door was locked. I ran around to the back of the house. I ran around to the front of the house. I looked through the porch window. There was no sound from the house. The only sound was the wind. Susan stood like an A in the middle of the porch, a darkening stain spreading under her foot. I was numb with cold. My face stung, my hands stung. We watched the stain expand in all directions around Susan’s shoe on the wooden porch.

  According to Evans, observers in New Zealand report that mosquitoes there land on the floating pupae of females, slit them open with their genitals, and mate with the females before they can emerge.

  Ascher held each of us under his arm, under a giant hand pressing us into his sides, into the bulky nap of his overcoat. We were walking down Tremont Avenue. My leather hunter’s cap with the earflaps was pushed awry by Ascher’s coat. He never knew his strength. Susan’s face was red with the cold. We looked at each other across Ascher’s girth. “Mamaneu,” Ascher said. He sighed. “If you children knew what you were doing to me. I cannot tell your mother and father. But how can I not tell them? What can I do? What can I do? I’m not going to live long.”

  It was Sunday. The traffic on Tremont Avenue was light. Down at the Polo Grounds the Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers. One of the kids in the Shelter had gone to the game with his uncle, but Ascher only came to take us for a walk. The Giants had Charlie Conerly. The Steelers had Bobby Layne.

  In our hands were Ascher’s gifts: plastic orange jack-o’-lanterns and black cardboard skeletons with white bones fastened at the knees and the pelvis and at the shoulders with metal grommets.

  “What can I tell you,” Ascher said. “Some people are singled out. The world lacks civilization. Men do not respect God. You are only children and you can’t understand—it’s natural, I would run away too. Thank God I knew where to look. Oh, my children. What can I tell you? Soon, soon we will be in court. We shall have our trial.”

  Elected silence sing to me.

  The guard sees him pace his cell. His arm rises, his finger points. Occasionally a sound escapes his pantomime, some release of anguish whose diction is unclear.

  He associates with Big Bill Haywood, and with Debs and with Mooney and Billings. All these fighters. The Scottsboro Boys. Their stars illuminate the walls, burn away the humiliation. Debs’ cell was enormous, as big as the world. That is what the rulers never learn. The properties of steel and stone are subject to moral law.

  Nor is death what it seems to be. When the ruli
ng class inflicts death upon those they fear they discover that death itself can live, It is a paradox. Ma Ludlow is alive. Joe Hill is alive. Crispus Attucks is alive. Even Leo Frank, why do I think of Frank swinging from his tree in Georgia, but all right, Frank. The two Italians speak and stir and smile and raise their fists in the mind of history. I am their comrade, they talk to me, Sacco makes his statement to me.

  Socrates was tried. He was found guilty. He was forced to drink hemlock. By this act his persecutors raised him to eternal life and consigned themselves to the real death and total obscurity of persecutors everywhere.

  Jesus was tried. He was found guilty. He was tortured and executed. If Jesus had not been tried, if he had not been put to death, how would his teachings have endured? The Christians themselves celebrate this fact in their idea of resurrection: He returns and lives with men, in the imaginations of men hundreds of generations later. Of course this doesn’t touch the question of how his ideas, which were completely Jewish, were perverted by institutions which spoke in his name.

  The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one has ever been put to death in Socrates’ name. And that is because Socrates’ ideas were never made law.

  Law, in whatever name, protects privilege. I speak of the law of any state that has not achieved socialism. The sole authority of the law is in its capacity to enforce itself. That capacity expresses itself in Trial. There could be no law without trial. Trial is the point of the law. And punishment is the point of the trial—you can’t try someone unless you assume the power to punish him. All the corruption and hypocritical self-service of the law is brought to the point of the point in the verdict of the court. It is a sharp point, an unbelievably sharp point. But there is fascination for the race in the agony of the condemned. That is a law, a real law, that rulers can never overcome—it is fixed and immutable as a law of physics.

  Therefore the radical wastes his opportunity if he seriously considers the issues of his trial. If he is found guilty it is the ruling power’s decision that he cannot be tolerated. If he is found innocent it is the ruling power’s decision that he need not be feared. The radical must not argue his innocence, for the trial is not of his making; he must argue his ideas.