Red Love

by David Evanier

  Winfield held up his hand. “Your attention please, boys and girls. Now let’s get on with the fun part of our day: let the parade begin!”

  From the back of the garden the musicians came down the aisle playing kazoos, paper and comb instruments, and drums. Winfield shouted, “And now, some of the products of the system!”

  Young Pioneers dressed up as caricatures—with cigars and daisies in their mouths and roses and lilies in their ears—of priests, rabbis, soldiers, policemen, politicians, and Italian gangsters danced down the aisles, rubbing their private parts and farting at the delighted audience.

  The curtains opened. A Revolutionary Christmas tree stood there on which was a cartoon likeness of Herbert Hoover with an apple instead of a head and placards against war, the police, and capitalism. A large dollar sign took the place of the star at the top of the tree.

  A boxing match took place between Science and Religion. The referee was dressed in purple polka-dot tights. After seven rounds, during which the contestants punched the referee as well as each other, Science knocked out both Religion and the referee.

  A poster showed a crystal gazer watching a large fire in her crystal ball. The fire singed and burned up an insect that fell in its way. Many other insects were also being consumed. The fire was labeled The Soviet Union and the insects were labeled The Capitalist Nations.

  An animal trainer whipped beasts into submission. The beasts included a lion (“High Society”), tiger (“Capitalist Parties”), elephant (“The Boy Scouts and Militarism”), mongrel dog (“The Socialist Party and Social Democrats”) and a bear (“Religion”).

  The Revolutionary Christmas tree was wheeled onto the center of the stage. God, dressed in a business suit flecked with cigar ashes and dripping blood, danced around the tree with a Harem of Angels, including priests, rabbis, capitalists, and other Dope Peddlers.

  George Winfield grabbed the microphone and said, “Boys and girls, this is our answer to the bunk called religion and the capitalist Christmas. I wish you all a very revolutionary Christmas. We must all be in constant readiness to meet the opposition of our enemies. Are you ready?” Antonio and hundreds of other children in his section arose instantly and with raised, clenched fists shouted in perfect union, “Always ready.”

  As the Depression deepened, the Party’s slogan, Work or Wages, made headway. The Unemployed Council was organized in Buffalo, with Arturo Carelli as district organizer. The Party rented a large hall above a Chinese restaurant. Unemployed men, sitting on benches or gathered around the potbellied stove, talked and spat into spittoons. Antonio listened to the World War I vets, Great Lakes sailors, and longshoremen talk for hours.

  In the afternoons after school, Antonio went directly to the Party hall. He cut stencils for leaflets, painted signs, worked the mimeograph, and distributed Party literature house to house.

  The Party was in motion. There was the Italian-American Workers’ Club on Seneca Street and the Russian Workers’ Club on the East Side. The Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish-Lithuanian, and Latvian clubs were located in the Black Rock and Riverside sections.

  Organizers came from New York and Chicago: the field Y.C.L. women, the Agitprop, the Marine Workers Industrial Union comrade, the Negro field organizer from Harlem, one of the Gastonia prisoners out on bail. On Sunday nights, Antonio’s father invited them for spaghetti dinners with homemade Italian wine and espresso. They discussed tactics, strategy, and theory. It was time to raise the level of the struggle.

  The Party and the Unemployed Council called on the unemployed to congregate on the streets on March 6, 1930, and march on government buildings. Antonio distributed leaflets to the workers at the plants and factories: “Drop Your Tools! Solidarity With Your Unemployed Brothers!”

  The organizers instructed the rank and file to fight the police. The comrades stuffed their hats with newspapers to soften the blows of billy clubs and blackjacks. Women were told to scream and claw at the police.

  On March 6th, placards nailed to wooden sticks were handed out. A long column, four abreast, was formed and marched up Broadway chanting, “Starve or Fight.”

  When they reached City Hall, the mounted police and riot squad charged. The police swung their clubs. The workers fought back, screaming and shouting, trying to keep from being trampled.

  The demonstration made headlines. Arturo Carelli was arrested as a leader of the demonstration. At school, the kids stared at Antonio and whispered about him. He was no longer ashamed.

  Arturo Carelli was released in two days. He was now a full-time functionary for the Party. Antonio proudly watched his father in his red velvet vest standing on a frail wooden platform near the steel factory. “Look at my hand!” Arturo boomed, holding his hand high above his head. “When a hand is like this, all five fingers separated, each finger can easily be broken by snapping it backward. All five fingers can be smashed, just like that. Why, fellow workers? Because they are alone, separated! Now—look—look—what happens when I make a fist? The fingers are united. You would need a sledgehammer to break them.

  “Just look at yourselves. Is it your fault you’re unemployed? You’re out of work because you produced too much and the result is overproduction. Who suffers? The bosses? No, the working class! You suffer.”

  The crowd nodded and applauded.

  “In Great Britain, when a worker is laid off, he gets unemployment relief. How come the British workers get help, and here in America the workers get nothing? Is it because the English bosses are overflowing with the milk of human kindness? Heck no! Over there the workers organized themselves into a fist and demanded relief! They demonstrated, fought, got their heads broken, but they made themselves into a fist and they won.

  “So fellow workers, join us—join the Unemployed Council. Join the fight for unemployment insurance. If the British could do it, so can we!”

  The first summer vacation Antonio and his sister ever had was spent at the Spellman cottage. He was fourteen. The Spellmans were affluent Communists. Millard Spellman was a radio technician. His wife had a horse face and a beautiful body. Antonio noticed comrades going into Anna Spellman’s room at night: sailors, Dutchmen from South Africa, Comintern reps, Mush Snitkin, longshoremen, lumberjacks. Millard seemed to have no objection, even when drunken fights broke out between the men over Anna.

  Antonio slept on the porch. One night a car drove up in the middle of the night and seven men got out. There was a lot of noise. Anna Spellman made Antonio go upstairs to sleep in his sister’s room. Antonio listened. It sounded like she had sex with every one of them.

  On the following two nights, he listened to the conversations of these men for hours. They were especially interested in visiting Niagara Falls because of the chemical plants along the river. In case of war, these plants could be converted into weapons factories within twenty-four hours. Two of the men were chemists planning to apply for jobs in the plants.

  He learned what a hit squad was. The five other men traveled all over the U.S. “The Flying Squad,” Anna called them proudly.

  After the March 6th demonstration, Antonio saw less and less of his father. Arturo Carelli was sent to Jamestown, Binghamton, Syracuse, and Rochester on Party work. He served short jail terms in many cities.

  Several of the comrades were sent to Moscow to study at the Lenin School, although this was supposed to be a secret. Almost all of the functionaries had at least two names. Antonio liked the romance of it.

  Antonio had also joined the Workers’ Shortwave Club. Every second Thursday, lessons were given in Morse code for comrades who were building small shortwave receivers. Party organs carried notices about Moscow programming on short wave broadcast from 8:00 to 11:15 P.M. every night. Antonio knew what was going on in Moscow every day of the week and could vicariously take part in the building of socialism. One day it was announced that tree houses were being built for honeymooners; another that in their spare hours Red Army soldiers were studying Yiddish, Italian, and Greek.

 
Antonio became a constant speaker on soapboxes. Some people said he would someday be the Lenin of America. One day while on the soapbox, he was asked by a young worker about forced conscription in the Soviet Union. “How do you explain that?” the boy asked. “People come to the United States to avoid being drafted.”

  Antonio didn’t know how to answer this truthfully and went to see the new district organizer, A. W. Weber. Weber explained: “Even though sometimes you will be asked questions by proletarians, you must keep in mind that they are not yet class conscious. They don’t understand. We understand.” Antonio looked at Weber through the haze of smoke from Weber’s pipe. “Therefore,” Weber said, “in such a situation, objectivism is a danger. As Lenin said, ‘Marxism is a solid block of steel.’ Hence, comrade, you must put it this way: there is no one in the Soviet Union who does not want to join the Red Army. It’s a great privilege, and there are no deserters.”

  Antonio’s next role in the struggle came on May 30th—Memorial Day—in Youngstown, Ohio. The Young Communist League called it National Youth Day. Memorial Day was capitalist demagoguery— honoring the heroes of imperialist war and those who were preparing to attack the Soviet Union. Y.C.L.ers and Young Pioneers came to Youngstown from all over the country for the demonstration against war, poverty, and unemployment. It was a great ride on the truck for Antonio, staying up all night with the other kids, talking, and singing “Solidarity Forever.”

  They were denied a permit to march. The American Legion was scheduled to march on the same route at the same time. The Buffalo contingent was surrounded by cordons of police and the mounties of the riot squad. Antonio held hands with the other kids. Someone brought a soapbox and a Y.C.L. banner. The police chief walked over to them and told them not to disobey the law. The Pioneers booed and jeered him. A Party organizer from New York, Damien Petitt, jumped up on the soapbox and screamed, “Down with police brutality!”

  The police charged, swinging their clubs on the heads of adult demonstrators. The comrades threw rocks and empty bottles. The police ordered the adult comrades to take the children away from the scene. Antonio ran, clutching the hand of a pretty comrade, Suzie Abersoll. They sat down on a bench, exhausted and excited.

  Suzie wore a shiny brass badge on her blouse. Antonio had never seen one like it. “A Komsomol badge from the Soviet Union!” she said.

  “Wow! Let me hold it,” he said, looking at the badge, her bosom.

  He placed it carefully on his fingertips: the red star in the center, the rays extending from it, and the three letters, KCM. It shone in the sunlight.

  There was a mass meeting that night in Youngstown. They sang:

  “I’m spending my nights in the flophouse

  1’m spending my days on the street

  I’m looking for work but I find none

  I wish I had something to eat.”

  After the meeting, policemen and detectives stood outside with searchlights, looking for the leaders of the demonstration. They grabbed them and pushed them to the side, where they were clubbed and blackjacked. Antonio heard their screams.

  He was taken to a comrade’s home, where he fell asleep on the floor. Deep in the night, a boy beside him tugged at his arm. He whispered, “Look. Look over there. That boy and girl are making love.” Instantly alert, Antonio looked over in that direction, and heard the sounds of love.

  In the morning, walking toward him from that corner, her blouse very ruffled looking, was Suzie.

  They were all put on the truck and driven back to Buffalo, where they ate a hot breakfast and were greeted by the comrades at the Unemployed Council headquarters.

  When he was fourteen, Antonio moved from the Young Pioneers to the Young Communist League. The minimum age was sixteen, but an exception was made in his case. He had been arrested twice, he was a public speaker, and he worked at Party headquarters until midnight after school. If someone was being evicted, he would take the lead among the youths in helping to push the furniture back into the house.

  In 1932 Arturo Carelli led a delegation to City Hall. The City Council was about to pass an ordinance preventing meetings and demonstrations that “disturbed the peace.”

  Antonio joined a group of Y.C.L.ers on the steps of City Hall. He carried in his pocket a razzer—a small wooden mouthpiece with a rubber tube attached to it.

  Arturo Carelli was refused permission to address the council. The comrades shouted, “Free speech! Free speech! Let him speak!” Antonio blew his razzer. A comrade slugged a policeman. The police ran toward the crowd and pounced. Antonio’s father was beaten, and the police would not let the boy near him.

  Antonio and the others screamed and shouted.

  Arturo Carelli was sentenced to a year in prison followed by deportation to Italy.

  His father would be imprisoned or executed by Mussolini. The Party, working through the International Labor Defense, obtained a court procedure for Carelli’s asylum in the Soviet Union.

  The family waited while Arturo Carelli served his prison sentence. When it was completed, he was deported to the Soviet Union.

  In August 1935, Antonio, his mother, and sister boarded the SS Bremen. They left New York City on a silver midnight.

  He looked up at the stars and lights of the city and bade them goodbye.

  Antonio climbed down a steep embankment into an oblong excavation pit. A drainage ditch ran through the center. Mounds of soil fifty feet high lined both sides of the pit. He was standing with the other prisoners of the Yurkov work brigade on gold-bearing sands. It was raining.

  Only the highest officials at the site wore rubber boots and raincoats.

  He had arrived the previous night at the Razvedchik camp. The searchlights had shone on the prisoners’ faces. Below the gates of Kolyma’s gold mines was a poster that said: Labor In The USSR Is a Matter of Honor, Valor, and Heroism!

  He was on the night shift.

  They were divided into groups of three. Their heads and shoulders were covered with mosquito nets. The two other men picked and shoveled the soil into a wooden wheelbarrow that Antonio pushed on wooden rails to a bunker.

  Horses worked eight-hour days. Prisoners had twelve-hour workdays.

  At 5:00 A.M. the inspector measured the work site with a tape measure to determine how many cubic meters of gold sand the prisoners had dug and carried away. Twelve hours had passed.

  When Antonio saw the inspector, he thought it was over at last. The overseer shouted to them, “Grab a shovel,” and led the men to the drainage ditches. They bent down, dipped their shovels in the water, and scooped wet soil onto the banks of the ditch. They worked for two more hours. Then they were marched back to the camp, where they were given a bowl of hot soup with three grains of cereal floating in it.

  A guard laughed. “By the way, one of your party has already left us. Slashed his wrists with a razor blade. An American named Brenner.”

  Antonio knew him. George Brenner. He’d known his brother Sidney in Buffalo. When he’d first arrived in Moscow, Antonio heard Brenner sing at the Foreign Workers Club. Brenner sang American progressive songs. Antonio remembered him singing, “Got the blues, got the blues, got the starvation, no ration blue-hoo-hooss …” with a captivated smile on his face. The comrades sang along, “Woo … woo … woos. …”

  On the second night, Antonio had just fallen asleep when the guards stomped in and woke the men up and told them to stand at attention. They called out the names of those who had fulfilled less than forty percent of their work quota. Antonio’s name was called. He and two others were led back to the gold fields for ten more hours of work.

  Ravzedchik was a clearing about one hundred yards long and seventy-five yards wide, enclosed by a tall split-rail fence entwined with barbed wire. Two watchtowers stood diagonally opposite each other at the corners of the camp.

  There were worse camps, prisoners said. Camps where they slept in tents instead of barracks, without electricity, where they received their portions of gruel in their caps
.

  His hands ached. A throbbing pain hammered down his arms. He could not open his swollen fingers when he woke. He could think of nothing but eating a large piece of black bread.

  On the third day, an old man, one of the group, fell on the ground from exhaustion during a march. A guard hit him with his whip, but the man did not move. The guard said, “We’ll finish you off quick, you old fart.” The group was told to move on. Antonio heard the snarls of the wolfhounds, their frenzied breathing; he heard them tearing at the old man’s rags, the sound of bone cracking. He heard screams.

  The guard’s Komsomol badge shone in the sun. Antonio thought of Suzie Abersoll’s white blouse.

  In October, the nights became longer and colder. Snow fell. Antonio was transferred to the day shift. He was sent in his summer clothes to drag timber down the slopes. He pushed the logs down the slope and carried them on his shoulders to the construction site.

  Eight more men died.

  They were divided into groups of three. They picked up a long heavy log and placed it on their shoulders. They carried it half a mile to a precipice which dropped about fifty feet. Below were holes in the side of the cliff, entrances to the gold mines. They shoved the log off their shoulders.

  Antonio was transferred to another brigade working at the gold-washing barracks. They pushed the wheelbarrows full of already washed, heavy, wet sand covered with a quilted rag through a doorway outside into the chilly frost.

  When he returned to the barracks, he could not sleep. He was too hungry.

  The gold-washing season came to an end. Razvedchik had fulfilled its annual gold output quota. A prisoners’ brass band played “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  The temperature reached seventy degrees below zero. The officials boasted that Kolyma had the coldest climate in the world.

  Antonio was becoming a fitil, a dokhodyaga. The fitil is the wick of the candle. The dokhodyaga is taken from the verb “dokhodit”: to arrive or to reach. Dokhodyagas had arrived at the state of socialism. They were the perfect citizens of Socialist society.