“Am I late?” he says with concern. Then he pulls back his sleeve and checks his watch. “No, Sidsky,” he says, “I am on time.”
It doesn’t matter anymore. All that has come before recedes into faint outlines and I put my arms out to hug him, to greet him properly, but as I do I can see him stiffen slightly, like an ironing board put upright, and he extends his hand for me to shake. I have no choice but to take it. My hand is thin and his hand is permanently puffy, swollen, the hand of marshmallows. “From those Tehran winters,” he will say, “when I was too poor to buy gloves.” We shake firmly like acquaintances, acquaintances who are friendly toward each other.
If my father has aged since the last time I saw him, it is imperceptible. He has neither lost nor gained weight, and he is dressed as he is always dressed, which is to say in the attire of a mathematics professor: a blue tie, a white shirt—his big belly straining against the buttons—a pen in his pocket, a small notepad behind the pen, black slacks, black shoes. He looks somewhere between rich and poor and he smells faintly of BO, affecting without being repellent. My father has a round, pleasant face, and he looks at me from behind round, wire-rimmed glasses. “Ask me a question,” his face seems to say, “and I will tell you an answer.” I wish there was a question I could think of, because there is something truly inviting about him, like a bear, hearty, robust, comforting. Every time I see him he seems to be full of energy and zest. He stays up late, he wakes up early, he doesn’t complain. He seems never worried, anxious, ill at ease, plagued by the thought of things to come. He believes that the world is quickly spiraling downward, of course, that poverty is unresolvable, that wars are constant, but these thoughts do not distress him in the way they distressed my mother and me. Instead, he is invigorated by them. The revolution will come, certainly, and when it does, all will be well. Until then there is work to be done, food to be eaten, wine to be drunk, and sex to be had. I am sure my father will live to be a hundred.
The only thing that unhinges his outward appearance as a scholar is that sitting atop his bald head is a black baseball cap with white lettering that reads International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. I have never seen my father wearing a baseball cap before, and I find its presence disquieting. It stands out in such sharp relief from the rest of his attire that it may as well be lit by neon lights. It is well worn and cocked just slightly to the side, giving him a rakish quality that undermines his obvious intellectual demeanor, like he is an urchin from another era who has come out of an alleyway to beg for food. Perhaps he was given this cap by a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers when he was selling copies of The Militant on their picket line. “It was given to me as an act of solidarity,” my father might say. Or for that matter he might say that he refused the worker’s gift and instead paid for it with his own money, and that this act was an act of solidarity. That is a question I suppose I could ask, but I know that we are in for a long evening of politics and it does not make sense to begin any sooner than we need to. Besides, I am concerned that if I draw attention to the cap he will think the cap is resonant and proudly leave it on in the restaurant, which to my way of thinking would be highly inappropriate. And if I were to say this aloud to him, “Pop, I think you should take the hat off,” he would then most likely perceive this as a direct attack on the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and on unionism in general. It is best to hold my tongue.
Lenin also wore a cap of a strikingly similar nature, rough and floppy and somewhat whimsical. His cap, though, was purchased when he was in Stockholm on the eve of the revolution and was favored not by the proletariat but by painters of the early twentieth century. He can be seen wearing the hat in a photo from 1919 where he converses amiably with Trotsky and Kamenev. It is also there, squeezed in his right hand, while he leans over the podium in Sverdlov Square in Moscow, exhorting the soldiers of the Red Army before they depart for the Polish front. Or there it is, back on his head when he is at Gorki, sitting in a wheelchair, his health rapidly failing, the end near, Stalin waiting in the wings. Lenin’s cap contradicted his suit and tie, contradicted his appearance as an intellectual, and set him apart from other revolutionaries of the time, in much the same way that my father’s cap sets him apart. I believe that this is the point. Look at me, I am a math professor, yes, but my allegiance is with those who labor with their hands, those who organize, those who struggle, those who toil. Look at me, I am not the man you think I am but something else, something in the space between professor and electrical worker—a third thing altogether. Ask me a question.
Easier to ignore, but no less disconcerting, is that hanging from one of my father’s shoulders is the strap of a blue knapsack. They are ubiquitous accoutrements for comrades in the Socialist Workers Party, these knapsacks. My mother carried hers every time she left home. Contained inside were all the tools necessary for revolutionary action: the latest copies of The Militant, leaflets for upcoming forums or demonstrations, a roll of tape, a stapler, a box of staples, another roll of tape. We were like hikers, she and I, ascending the mountain of revolution. Often on the way to somewhere my mother would stop abruptly in front of a lamppost or telephone pole, kneel on the concrete, unzip her knapsack, and remove a leaflet that might say something like: U.S. out of El Salvador! March on Washington! on such and such date, with a paragraph or so summarizing the road that lay ahead for working people living under an imperialist government that was squeezing them tighter and tighter. I would stop beside my mother and stand to the side, observing the simple sequence of her stooping over her knapsack on the sidewalk, nearly wrestling with it, digging around for the leaflet, righting herself, pounding the stapler into the telephone pole—bang, bang, bang. It must be pressed with great force so the wind did not take it away. People passing by would glance at my mother, then at the leaflet, then at me. I was always deathly embarrassed by this. I felt as if my clothes had been removed. No one ever stopped to read what the leaflet said, no one ever said, “I agree, tell me more,” no one ever even said, “I disagree.” What was of great consequence to us was of no consequence to them.
“Let’s eat,” my father says. “Shall we eat? I’m getting hungry.”
“Sure, Pop,” I say. “I’m hungry too.”
The two of us enter the restaurant and stand waiting for the man in the tie while he seats another table, bowing before them, smiling, thanking. Then he comes toward us.
“Hello,” he says. I do not think he remembers me. “Two for dinner?”
“Yes,” my father says.
“Please,” he says, and he bows slightly and my father bows slightly, and then he ushers us to a table near the back.
The restaurant is carpeted and has low romantic lighting and white linen tablecloths. On each table there is a tiny vase with a single daisy so precise in its detail that it is impossible to discern whether it is real or fake. The door has been propped open to allow a breeze to blow over the patrons. The sounds of the Garment District drift in from the street. A busboy arrives at our table and lights the votive candle. My father smiles and waves his finger over the flame. In the darkness of the restaurant, his black cap seems to have disappeared, but the white words of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers look like they are floating and dancing above his head.
“Hey, Pop,” I offer tentatively, “maybe you should take the cap off.”
“What?” he says with alarm. And then: “Oh, yes!” And he removes it from his head and stuffs it into his blue knapsack. Just like that the matter is settled.
The waitress appears at our table. She does not look Iranian. I think she may be Chinese. She is young and pretty, though her skin seems nearly drained of pigment from too many nocturnal shifts shepherding food. She speaks shyly and with an accent, forcing us to lean in to decipher her words.
“May I start you off with something to drink?” she asks.
“May I start you off with something to drink,” my father repeats to himself, mull
ing over the sentence for a moment like he wasn’t expecting the question but appreciates its grammatical construction. Then he asks proudly, “What kind of house wine do you have?”
“We have chardonnay,” the waitress begins. “We have—”
“Chardonnay! Chardonnay sounds good!” He looks at me. “Does chardonnay sound good, Sidsky? If I order some chardonnay, will you have a glass with me?”
“Sure, Pop,” I say.
“Do you hear that? The birthday boy will have a glass of chardonnay with me. Therefore, I think we are going to need more than just a single wineglass.” My father smiles at the waitress as if he has said something clever. The waitress smiles back, but it’s apparent she doesn’t know what she’s smiling about, and it’s apparent my father doesn’t know that she doesn’t know. His smile widens.
“Let us begin,” he says, “with a carafe of chardonnay.”
And the waitress disappears.
My father looks at me. I look back. He says nothing. I say nothing. We could be sitting at a cafeteria table in Oberlin twenty-five years ago.
“How have you been, Sidsky?” he says eventually.
“Oh, pretty good, Pop.”
“How’s the acting career?”
“Not so good.”
“Little by little, Sidsky.”
“Thanks, Pop.”
“And how is Martha Stewart doing?” The name Martha bounces from wall to wall, but we both ignore this.
“Not bad,” I say. I think about my soft swivel chair. “She’s still a billionaire.”
He snickers. Then he broods.
“How about you, Pop? How have you been?”
He’s been waiting for this. Without answering, he bends and removes the troubling blue knapsack from beneath his chair and places it on his lap. Then he looks at me sharply to see if I am watching him. I assume he is going to give me a gift for my birthday, and I look away and then down at my hands, because to look directly at someone when he is preparing to give you a gift is coarse, unmannered, and above all presumptuous. He unzips the knapsack, a delicate operation, but there is some confusion over which zipper belongs to which compartment, first this way and then that, and I return to watching him like he is a magician at work and if I blink I will miss the trick. Finally, thankfully, the thing opens and he puts his hand inside, rustles around, and pulls out something and lays it on the table in front of me. I look down and The Militant looks up.
I see that my father has circled or underlined things in red pen, and he has written notes in the margins—layer of peasants aligning with proletariat; effect of Stalinist decay. There is something touching about this, something about a bright schoolboy, one with interests and aspirations, who can be seen running home with the thing he has discovered that day. My father was a smart boy, at least the way he tells it, far advanced from other children his age. I have no reason to disbelieve this one clear detail in what remains a mysterious childhood. He once described to me how, when he was a six-year-old in Tabriz, his mother would greet his playmates at the door by saying “I’m sorry, but Mahmoud cannot come out to play right now, he’s reading Hafiz,” referring to the fourteenth-century Persian poet and mystic. According to my father, the Western equivalent of this would be “I’m sorry, but Mahmoud cannot come out to play right now, he’s reading Shakespeare.” When he recounts this anecdote, he does not recount it with arrogance but with disappointment and regret, a boy looking out the bedroom window on a sunny day. He understands the pretension involved and the damaging effects of that pretension on a young person. But the legend of an exceptional mind has done nothing but grow greater with time, until it has become accepted by all who know him. And for the briefest of moments I am with my mother again, it is morning, she is making breakfast, I am playing on the floor near her, and she is saying to me regarding some conversation that is taking place inside her: “If only I could have kept up with Mahmoud’s politics. I think then things might have turned out differently for me.”
The waitress places a carafe of chardonnay in front of us. My father looks at her ass as she walks away. Then he looks at the carafe of chardonnay. Then he looks at me.
“This is white,” he says to me.
“It’s chardonnay.”
“I wanted red.”
“Chardonnay isn’t red.”
“Never?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Shit,” he says to himself.
There’s a difficult interlude while we both contemplate the ramifications. Then my father perks up. “Sidsky, have you been following the coal miners’ strike?”
“No, Pop,” I say, wishing I had been following it. “Actually, I haven’t even heard about it.”
My father nods. “The capitalist media is trying to keep it out of the news, of course,” he says, remarkably without bitterness. “Very interesting the way things have developed.” His accent causes him to stress the wrong syllable, so rather than develOPED, it comes out as develOPED.
He points to The Militant.
NATO BOMBS KILL SERB AND ALBANIAN WORKERS. the headline announces, RIFTS GROW BETWEEN WASHINGTON, IMPERIALIST ALLIES. A photo shows a group of Chinese men and women holding a banner that reads in both Chinese and English, Stop Murderous Bombing, and beneath that photo is a second photo, a smaller one, of a bomb exploding spectacularly, like fireworks, on a pleasant sidewalk lined with potted pants.
“No, Sidsky, look here,” and he unfolds The Militant and smooths it out, and sure enough, just as he has said, there is an article reporting on the coal miners’ strike.
“This is the only publication where you’ll be able to find out the truth,” he says, as if this might be the first time I’ve ever seen a copy of The Militant. Then he says nothing. The silence makes the implication clear.
“I guess I should buy this,” I say. “How much does it cost?” It’s a calculated question, of course. I know how much it costs. I ask because I want him to say: “Oh, Sidsky, come on, you don’t need to pay me for it. Just take it.”
“A dollar fifty,” my father says. There is an undercurrent of ruthlessness in his voice that makes me certain that if I came up one dime short he would refuse me the sale.
In the penultimate apartment I lived in with my mother, we were lucky enough to have been given access to a storage bin in the basement. Nevertheless, my mother chose to keep all the hundreds of disorganized Militants in a closet by the front door. It was a deep closet, deeper than any we had had before, but it was our great misfortune that the architect, whether through oversight or malice, had designed the door to open into the closet rather than out of it, which meant that the tenant was deprived of about fifty percent of the storage space. In order, therefore, to make full use of the closet, my mother simply kept the door open at all times. The first thing someone paying us a visit observed upon entering our apartment was my mother’s plaid wool coat hanging from the coat hook and beneath it piles of Militants running all the way to the very edge of the closet, pinning the door wide open.
I take out my wallet and withdraw some money.
“Now your perspective will be broadened,” my father says happily. And I am happy too. This evening I have endeared myself to him. “The coal strike is in an anthracite region, Sidsky. Do you know what an anthracite region is?”
“No, Pop,” I say. “What’s an anthracite region?”
He lowers his voice and leans toward me conspiratorially. “On the surface this strike is about wages and the right to organize, but what is it really about?”
“I don’t know, Pop.”
He takes a breath and says with great conviction, “It is about human dignity.” Each word is emphasized. Then he looks me dead in the eye like he is anticipating that human dignity will be a concept of some controversy for me and he is prepared to defend it with all he has. I think briefly about responding, just for fun, “I’m actually opposed to human dignity, Pop.”
“We’re having our subscription fund drive now, Sidsky.
Maybe you want to think about buying a subscription. We have a twelve-issue introductory rate for ten dollars.”
“I guess I should buy that.” I remove more money from my wallet. My father takes it from me and places it into an empty white envelope, which he scribbles something on. Then he puts it into his blue knapsack and zips it closed.
The waitress returns to us. “Would you like to hear tonight’s specials?” she asks.
My father looks up at her apologetically. “I’m very sorry,” he says, “there seems to have been a mistake.” His gaze moves to the carafe of chardonnay, hoping she will intuit the problem. “What I really meant to ask for, you see,” he laughs shyly, “what I really wanted, you see, was red wine.”
“Oh?”
“I am very sorry,” my father says again. “Would you by any chance have zinfandel?”
And without continuing with the specials, the waitress swiftly removes the carafe of chardonnay and departs.
In a year or so, the Socialist Workers Party national office will be sold and relocated to just a few blocks from where we now sit in the Garment District. The idea is that it should be closer to the garment workers whom the party has identified to be central players in the upcoming working-class struggles. Meatpackers, coal miners, and airline workers are also believed to be central players. Now, however, the national office is on Charles Street in the remote West Village, where it’s been since I was a little boy, both headquarters and printing press, housed in a six-story building that is, coincidentally, just five blocks from my studio apartment on Jane Street. When I ride my bicycle down the West Side Highway to Battery Park City I will pass it, sitting there facing the Hudson River next to million-dollar condos as it churns out Militants and Pathfinder books. It is as plain and unadorned as every comrade’s apartment. But in the late eighties the party managed to raise the impressive sum of one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars and commissioned eighty artists from twenty countries to paint a giant mural covering the entire side of the building, seventy feet high and eighty-five feet wide. There were colorful portraits of all the major players in the struggle, from Marx to Lenin to Trotsky to Che to César Chávez; every revolutionary imaginable was depicted (except Stalin and Mao), all floating around an enormous printing press that was in the midst of dispensing flowing rolls of newsprint with Castro’s cumbersome maxim, “The truth must not only be the truth, it must also be told.”
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