Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  “Now there’s a fashion statement.” The house lights were up for intermission when Lois appeared beside me. Gray was smiling over her shoulder.

  “Lois, hi. Hi, Gray.” I slipped back into my shoes.

  My father leaned around to see who was speaking. “Going to introduce us?”

  “Lois, Gray, my father: Mr. Eisenstein.”

  “Then you are Noah’s father as well,” said Gray, while they shook hands.

  “You know my son....”

  “Through a union meeting, Dad. They know Noah and Yorgos from a meeting.”

  I knew what he was thinking: How do they know Marta? Marta’s never been to a union meeting. I do not know why I felt safe to lie about them, but I did. And wiser.

  “We visited your island a few weeks ago, Mr. Eisenstein,” said Lois, who was much wiser than me. Better to be in charge of the facts than let my father hear gossip.

  “Then you must know my brother-in-law, David....”

  Would you believe that I was literally saved by the bell? Crazy, yes? But sometimes things really work that way. A bell chimed for the next act and Lois and Gray, after quick good-byes, hurried to their seats. It was a great little flash of feeling lucky.

  It was hard now to keep my attention forward and not on the backs of Lois and Gray’s heads. Who were these people? How did they have the money for the best seats at the Met and fancy London gin? What did they want with Noah and Yorgos? What would knowing them mean for Noah?

  The stage filled and the story moved forward. Thinking about the opera was the same as thinking about anyone: it was about who wanted what and why. How could Tosca doubt the devotion of Mario, the artist who loves her? How could she believe the empty promises of the brutal Police Chief Scarpa? When she sings that she “lives for art,” is she refusing the burden of seeing what is happening around her? Was there something that Noah was not seeing? Were Gray and Lois sincere or was there something that they wanted?

  “You’ve had your big day,” said my father when the curtain fell. He removed his glasses and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Your first opera.” The rest of the audience was now on its feet applauding. The curtain rose again and the supporting singers returned to the stage. The principal singers came on stage followed by the conductor, who signaled the orchestra to rise. The applause of the audience grew wilder. I could see Lois and Gray clapping like mad.

  It was hard letting go of the opera just because the singers, restored to life again, were gathered on stage. I wanted to believe for a while longer in what was unbelievable. I was having my day. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Lois and Gray were gone.

  Back at Union Square, hundreds of policemen now circled what had grown into an enormous rally, leaving only two breaks in the line where people could enter or exit. Those openings were flanked on either side by dozens more police on horseback. The moment that one horse shifted its weight from one set hooves to the other, a rippling effect went down the row. Another would shift and then another until it reached the end and they stopped. Then a different horse would shift its weight and the rippling would begin anew. The rippling effect spilled into the crowd, with people pushing away from being trapped.

  “This isn’t good,” said my father. He craned his neck, rocking up and down on his toes to see better. “Noah,” he called into the crowd. “Noah!” Pointless yelling like that, but what else could he do?

  The person at the podium had just invoked the Scottsboro Boys, the very mention of whom whipped up the crowd. Not that there were a lot of black people in the crowd, but everyone knew that those young men were railroaded by the all-white Alabama juries. On the other hand, you know how they liked their lynching parties down there, so the jurors went disappointed too.

  My father waited for the crowd to settle before calling Noah’s name again.

  “Hold it down,” shouted a woman. “This ain’t a racetrack.”

  “Is that Tresca up there?” my father asked, ignoring her scolding. “Who’s speaking?”

  “No Tresca. This one’s from the Y.C.L. Or maybe the Y.S.L.”

  “You don’t know which?” asked the man next to her. He was holding a tattered 8 Hour Work Day sign.

  “Oh, what’s the difference,” said the woman, waving him off.

  “Young Communist League or Young Socialist League: it’s all the difference in the world,” said the man, who must have been her husband.

  “At least to them it is,” said the woman.

  “Don’t be such a know-it-all,” said the man. “I was here on Unemployment Day 1930. The Y.C.L. people, they should have been happy with the turnout, but no: they had to march to City Hall. Made a mess of everything. The police started swinging, people got hurt. You think the party organizers care that we got busted up? Forget it: they were happy!”

  They must have had this argument a hundred times before.

  The woman rolled her eyes. “If you would’ve....”

  My father pulled me past the couple. “Come on. We’ve gotta find the boys.” We weaved through the crowd, me holding onto the hem of his jacket. People were packed even tighter closer to the platform. My father kept asking them to let us through, but he pretty much elbowed us forward.

  “Take it easy,” said a large man with a red face and sweat-dampened hair, who reminded me of Mr. Boyle.

  “I’ve got to find my son,” said my father, pushing past him.

  “That’s what you get for bringing children where they don’t belong.”

  “He’s not a child,” my father replied, elbowing his way ahead.

  “Then he’s old enough to find his own way home,” called the red-faced man.

  Sure enough we spotted Noah approaching the podium, of all things, looking gawky and handsome in his newsboy hat and loose jacket. A man at the microphone described how the protesters would now hear from “some young people already learning to carry the weight of the movement.” The crowd kept pushing closer and now the police were moving in too. Someone started singing “The Internationale” and others joined in. Something exploded. Pop, pop, pop. The police were swinging their nightsticks, batting people on their shoulders and backs until they fell to the ground.

  People were shouting, panic-pushing to get away from wherever they were standing, slamming against one another from all directions in a desperate attempt to get to the street. Others were pointing to the roofs of the office buildings at the north end of the square, to a row of policemen resting the barrels of their rifles on the parapet walls. Others still were pointing deeper into the crowd where a loud fight broke out at the same time as the gunshots fired overhead. The people pushing to get out of the square were colliding with some men pushing to get closer to the fight, some of whom were pulling sticks and clubs from under their coats. All sorts of metal objects—knives and chains and pistols—caught the sunlight before they disappeared into the brawl. More pop, pop, pops triggered a different kind of screaming, the kind that comes with pain. I knew the difference. I never forgot my mother screaming in horror while Helen was shrieking in agony. All it takes is a child screaming for me to hear that moment all over again, the same way the stink of a passing garbage truck lands me right back on Barren Shoal. I know my senses are tricking me, but it is like phantom pains in a missing limb. And who would tell an amputee that what they feel does not hurt?

  Whatever was peaceful about the rally vanished, changing a well-behaved crowd into an unpredictable mob. It made not a bit of difference who was honorable or who was corrupt or who had the highfalutin cause, at least not in that moment when anyone’s gun killed as good as the next one. Would I feel any better if Noah or my father were killed by a protester’s pistol instead of a cop’s? I should think not. And who could tell who was who? Maybe the men with the knives and clubs were demonstrators or maybe they were agitators sent in to stir up trouble. Or maybe they were undercover cops. We will never know.

  From the tight little circle where the men were fighting came something small a
nd dark, soaring into the air trailed by a thin, broken streak of fire. It rose a few feet over the mob before landing and exploding right where a band of anarchists were holding up a banner. The bang of the explosion was followed by the shrieks and moaning of the people hit by the blast and by the pop, pop, pop of more gunfire.

  The injured who could walk stumbled about like drunks, wiping debris off their faces with their bloodied hands and torn shirtsleeves. Some were crawling away on their hands and knees and others stayed where they were, crying for help, crying for their mothers, crying for God. A woman holding a baby stood frozen while the crowd swarmed around her. Blood was running from her lips over her chin and down her neck. She wiped her fingers across her bottom teeth, some of which fell to the ground. A man covered in dust and dirt approached her and dabbed the blood from her lip with his thumb. It was the same man who had been standing next to us a few minutes earlier, the one with the 8 Hour Work Week sign. He wrapped one arm around her shoulder and other behind her knees, lifted her off the ground, and walked away slowly as the crowds pushed around them. His wife walked ahead of them, clearing the path as best she could by swinging the sign from left to right. “Just like 1930,” he shouted to my father as they passed us. I held onto my father’s arm, scared that we would be separated. “Except now it’s my daughter that’s bloody, not my wife.”

  The mounted policemen were now walking their horses into the crowd. This triggered a new wave of shouting and screaming. A protester lunged at one of the horses, reaching for its bridle and causing the horse to rear on its hind legs. This was following by more shrieking from the crowd, neighing and rearing by the horse, and a bone-shattering scream from the protester when the horse came down on his foot. The policeman, who must have been one hell of a horseman the way he stayed on that horse, you should pardon me, added his two cents by using his billy club to crack open the protester’s head. Literally. I cannot say for certain if what I saw spilling from his skull was blood or brains or something else. The inside of a horse head I knew about, but not a man’s. A gang of the trampled man’s friends pulled the policeman down from the horse and threw him into the crowd, which obliged by kicking the policeman to the ground, where he disappeared.

  Another man grabbed the horse’s reigns and pulled him away. Most everyone made room for the horse the way crowds always do, the few exceptions shoved aside by the horse itself as it followed the man leading him. People were as afraid of those horses as they were of guns, and for good reason. Look at all the years of hell, you should pardon me, that Flat Sammy lived through on account of the horse that kicked Aunt Sara. The only horses that could not hurt us were the ones going to Barren Shoal.

  Thank goodness there were no police dogs at Union Square, the way those sheriffs used them on the marchers in the ’60s, ripping them apart like rags. You would think that people would have learned after seeing the way those Germans used the poor Shepherds and Dobermans in the death camps. I say poor because people teach them to be terrible, these dumb creatures that our ancestors went through all that trouble to tame. I am still waiting for humanity to improve. We can make everything better except ourselves.

  The man leading the horse handed up the reins to another mounted officer, after which he disappeared back into the crowd. Like I say: there was no way to know who was who. And since one agitated horse leads to another, the other horses were now stomping and rearing up and landing hard while the policemen on foot grabbed whoever was close by and beat them. Not just the young men, who were at least strong enough to fight back, but women and old folks, too. Instead of things quieting down, they got worse. People were shoving so hard to get to the streets that they were trampling the others who had been whacked to the ground or who stumbled and fell. A short man wearing a stained newsboy cap just like Noah’s bumped against me, sending me skidding as if the ground was ice. Someone had left a mess of blood down there.

  The man in the dirty newsboy cap—I do not know who he was or why he did it—threw a punch that landed on my father’s chin. My father grunted when he knocked the cap off the man’s head. Then he shoved the man out of his way and climbed onto the stage. My father threw another punch, this one at Noah, who was standing still with his arms wrapped around himself, despite the noisy chaos of the gunshots and the Molotov cocktails and the stampede. My father punched Noah, it seemed, so that no one else would climb up there and punch him or worse. My father’s fist landed squarely on Noah’s jaw and I, in that instant, remembered the old story about my father getting the job on Barren Shoal from the man with the scrap cart in the garment district. My father had punched that man too after the man told my father to steal a bolt of cloth from under Uncle David’s nose. It is not lost on me that my father went from punching a stranger to protect a family member to punching a family member to protect him from strangers. Punching a stranger over an insult sounds pretty foolish, if you ask me. As for punching Noah, well who could blame him: if that is what it took to save Noah’s life during a riot, then so be it. I wish I could be a pacifist, but I am not. It is a luxury that I cannot afford.

  My father pulled Noah from the podium by his jacket collar, leaving Noah’s hands free now to punch the policeman, who slammed his billy club across Noah’s shoulders and into his gut. Noah doubled over and vomited on the policeman’s legs. The policeman tried jumping away, but there were too many people crowding the stage. He and Noah were tumbling to the ground in a vomit-covered pile when my father grabbed Noah by the collar again and pulled him to his feet. There was blood soaking through his jacket sleeve. I landed between two Chinese men with signs I could not read, which they were swinging to keep the policeman at bay as he staggered back up. When the policeman reached for his gun, one of the Chinese men knocked it from his hands. The gun went off, followed by more screams. A bullet pierced the sign and struck the Chinese man’s cheek. Blood spit from his mouth in red clots.

  My father dragged Noah and me out of there like we were puppies. The Chinese man and his friend were right behind us. If I could have closed my eyes I would have. I am not a person who gets thrills from seeing other people hurt or scared. Nor have I learned any better why some people do. People do terrible things because that is what people do.

  My father did not let go until we were out of the park and all the way over by the Automat, where Joey and Yorgos had been watching the riot the whole time. When I looked behind me, the Chinese men were gone. There were no police in sight.

  “What the hell is going on?” cried Yorgos, pulling Noah out of my father’s grip. Noah looked green in the face and was holding his stomach. His lip was split and his coat sleeve was stained with blood.

  “Get Noah out of here,” said my father.

  The five of us walked in a huddle surrounding Noah: Yorgos and Joey on either side of him and my father and me right behind. Noah was crying. He told them about the explosion and the police and the gunshots. He told them he had been about to address the crowd.

  The doors were still open at the shops we had passed hours before. The injured and the just plain scared found safety among the merchants selling hats, the merchants selling shirts, the merchants selling shoes. Some looters found what they wanted as well. So what else is new?

  “Where were you guys?” my father demanded. “You were supposed to stick together.”

  “We were gone a minute,” said Joey, still working on a half-eaten sandwich.

  The only shuttered doors were at the shop selling cheese and dried fruits. Through the glass I could see two men with bats and a third with a wide, long knife—the kind used for cutting those big wheels of cheese. People were banging their fists on the doors in outrage or desperation or who-knows-what as they passed by, but no one threw any bricks or tried to break the doors open. People were still running from a fight, not looking for one.

  “Why’d you hit me, Dad,” cried Noah, wiping his bloodied lip on his shirtsleeve.

  “What the hell were you doing up there?” My father was shouting so
loud that other people, even the ones rushing away from the police, looked over.

  “You should be proud of me,” said Noah. “They asked me to. They got my name from Mike Sierra. They asked me to speak.”

  My father passed him his handkerchief. “Are you some kind of jerk? Are you trying to be arrested? Thrown in jail? Thrown out of the country? Is that what you’re going for?” He was still shepherding us away from Union Square, farther south on Broadway, back in the direction toward HIAS, toward the quieter subway station we had used that morning to go uptown.

  “They can’t throw me out of the country,” said Noah. He was bragging in a foolish, hurtful way, as if this somehow made him better. “I was born here.”

  “Here? Where? Exactly what do you think ‘here’ means?”

  “I’m a citizen. It’s my birthright.”

  “You can get that out of your head fast.” He grabbed Noah’s arm. Noah moaned and turned pale and then green, like he was going to be sick again. “What?” my father barked, like he was giving an order, not asking a question.

  Noah pulled his jacket away. The bloody fabric had a tear in it, beneath which there was a tear in Noah’s shirtsleeve, beneath which there was a tear in his skin. It must have been his adrenaline racing around in all that chaos that kept him from feeling the wound. He was damned lucky, you should pardon me, that he was only grazed by the bullet and not killed by it. It was his left arm, so close to the heart.

  My father tore off the ruined shirtsleeve and tied it into a tourniquet. You might think it would be hard to rip a sleeve off a shirt, but Noah was not wearing the kind of good shirt that Uncle David cut. The cheap shirts that Noah made do with would have fallen apart had he yawned wide enough.