The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx

by Arthur Nersesian

“Good, then he’ll stay in your tent.”

  That night, Paul and Millie made love for the very first time. Over the following weeks, as the band rode east and then south, Millicent introduced him to a variety of zealous young comrades, many of whom had come from abroad to help with this struggle. All seemed to believe that a worldwide revolution was imminent. Paul sat quietly at night around the campfires.

  “Civilization comes to the point,” one Italian volunteer named Carlo struggled to say one evening, “where iz no longer need for the leaders who divide and exploit the work man.”

  Listening to them, Paul found a renewed faith in the American system of government. To Millie’s displeasure, he told her that he had decided to stay out of all combat in Mexico. His sole task would be protecting her.

  “Can’t you see how bad it is here?” she appealed. He replied that he did, but that he just didn’t think these people were ready; the poor seemed to accept their fate and the rich clearly felt entitled to theirs. His noninvolvement soon became an ongoing argument between the two of them.

  It all changed by accident one day, when a young Russian anarchist who was an expert sapper arrived under orders from Pancho Villa. Vladimir Ustinov, who wasn’t much older than Paul, had ample experience with bombs from his time in czarist Russia. He had been sent out to teach various militias, some of whom were filled with foreign fighters, how to build homemade bombs to be used against the local garrisons.

  In the turbulent state of Chihuahua, almost none of the peasant fighters spoke anything besides Spanish. Other than Russian, Vladimir only knew French. It often took him three hours to give a twenty-minute lesson, but that day he was pressed for time. Getting a full demonstration with all the equipment, Paul, who had studied French at Princeton, spent an hour learning from the Russian before the man had to gallop off to his next mission.

  “So should I teach your soldiers?” Paul asked the colonel after the Russian departed.

  “Teach them what?”

  “What Señor Ustinov taught me—how to use the explosives.”

  “You’re our official sapper,” the commander said to him in Spanish. “Just instruct them as you need.”

  “But I’m not a volunteer,” Paul explained. “I’m just here to protect my fiancée.”

  “Congratulations, you’ve officially been conscripted,” the commander replied.

  “Look, I’ll teach your men what Vladimir taught me, but I refuse to kill people in a war that I don’t believe in.”

  The commander pulled an old pistol from his cracked leather holster and pointed it at Paul’s forehead. The young American stared angrily at the older man, refusing to believe that the bastard would pull the trigger.

  “I’ll teach and oversee your men, but I simply can’t kill anyone. If you really are going to execute me, so be it.”

  The commander put the gun down and told him to wait outside the tent. Five minutes later, the man sent for Millicent, who he greatly respected. The two spoke alone for five minutes, then Paul was summoned.

  “Okay, I’ve agreed to your terms. You can instruct Millie here.”

  “Millie?”

  “Yes, she’ll be your hands. Your first mission is tonight.”

  “I’m not going on any mission,” he replied.

  “Fine, then she’ll do it alone. Instruct her as best as you can. She’s going out in a few hours.”

  “What’s the mission?”

  “There’s a supply train passing two hours from here. She’s going out with a detachment of the European volunteers to blow up the track.”

  “Millie can’t do it.”

  Before Paul could opine that most of the European volunteers were criminals who’d sooner rape her than follow her, she spoke up: “I’ve done missions before.”

  Paul finally relented and agreed to be the militia’s official sapper instead of Millie.

  Along with a dozen men, most of them Italian volunteers, they rode out on horseback. From a distance, Paul could see a large regiment of federal soldiers patrolling both sides of the tracks. He had his men tie up their horses at a safe distance, then waited until night. He brought three men with him, proceeding forward on foot. They were almost caught when a passing patrol found their tracks in the moonlight, but they cautiously advanced from tree to tree and rock to rock and reached the target undetected. Paul and Carlo hastily wedged three dynamite sticks under each of the tracks, while the others kept watch. Paul lit a slow-burning fuse and they ran like hell.

  Over the next twenty-eight months, his little group, known as the Italian Brigade, carried out twelve more missions. Complicating matters was the fact that they began running out of supplies. One sweltering afternoon, however, Vladimir Ustinov returned with several large spools of wires and a plunger detonator. Due to the surge of federal troops there, he had been sent back into the region.

  After giving Paul instructions on how to attach the fuses, he explained that with the plunger they could dramatically increase the amount of federales killed. Paul nodded, not revealing that he really didn’t want to be responsible for any casualties.

  That night, passing a bottle of tequila over the large bonfire, the two men chatted. Vladimir explained in French how the food and liquor were killing him here—constant diarrhea—but he greatly enjoyed the work.

  “Since the bloody attack in St. Petersburg by the czar’s army on unarmed citizens a few years ago, Russia is much like Mexico these days,” Vladimir explained. “Right on the verge.”

  “Then why are you here instead of mother Russia?”

  “Waiting for the right moment,” Vladimir answered. “Everything has that moment when you can tip it over with a feather. One day soon America will have its own moment.”

  “I can understand your feeling that way about Russia, but in America we have an elected government.”

  “The United States has the same vast disparity between the rich and poor that every other country has, and its elections are rigged all the time. America just needs a single major event to topple the old apparatchik.”

  “I met Woodrow Wilson and he’s a good man. If anyone can fix things, he will.”

  “He might make some small differences, but he can’t change the many social inequities that divide your country.”

  Paul wasn’t interested in arguing, but Vladimir and the other young radicals in his brigade could talk about little else. Over the ensuing weeks, every time they met, the Russian youth would ask him if he was ready to help start the new American revolution. And every time, Paul would answer that America’s major problems would be settled by Woodrow Wilson.

  Soon it became a running joke. If the weather was bad or the federales had repelled an attack, Vladimir would say to Paul in broken English, “Don’t worry, your Wilson will fix.”

  “We kill Czar Alexander, we kill your McKinley, and we can kill Wilson when iz time,” Carlo declared. Paul sighed and wondered how he’d gotten himself mixed up with all these nuts.

  Paul was able to send a letter home from the small town they were using as a central hub. Six weeks later, Edna wrote him back and explained that when his mother had heard what he was doing, she threw such a fit that his father had to call a doctor to settle her down. Since then, his name had not so much as been mentioned. Robert was still in school and had a new girlfriend named Mary. Paul’s favorite maid, Maria, had also met someone and was falling deeply in love.

  7

  Several months later, Paul received a tightly scripted postcard from his sister informing him that poor Maria had fallen on hard times. She had married that fellow, some Italian-Jewish guy from Rome. He had worked and saved and managed to buy an old house at a good price in a section of the Bronx called East Tremont. No sooner had she moved in with him than he got her pregnant. Then the guy just vanished into thin air. One of his friends claimed he had returned to Italy; allegedly he was connected with the Mafia.

  Please give her five hundred dollars from me, and tell her to take it easy until
she has the kid, Paul wrote back.

  One day, while they were planning a complicated two-site detonation, Vladimir explained that Paul would need a watch in order to coordinate the second explosion. When Paul said that his wristwatch broke long ago, Vladimir gave him his own pocket watch, a beautiful gold piece with a miniature image of a handsome older gentleman glazed on the inside.

  “Is this your father?” Paul asked, staring at the resemblance.

  “It’s the father of a Russian industrialist I executed, which is why I had to flee the country,” Vladimir replied. “But he looks like my father, so I’m very much attached to it. And it keeps perfect time. You’ll give it back to me the next time I see you.”

  Vladimir had to depart quickly to aid with another vital operation further south. Several days after Paul completed his mission, he heard that the young Russian had been caught by the federales and was summarily executed.

  Even so, Paul discovered that over two hundred federal soldiers had been killed during his two-site detonation, he was horrified. While the others in the Italian Brigade celebrated, he went to his tent and began packing.

  “What are you doing?” Millie asked, entering quietly.

  “This has gone on long enough!” he yelled. “Over two hundred men are dead because of me, and I never even joined this cause!”

  “You in it now!” called Carlo drunkenly from outside the tent.

  “Paul, we’re winning. It’s just a matter of time now.”

  “You manipulated me into this. And it’s over. To hell with you, I’m going home.”

  “Octavio’s outside,” she whispered. “If you leave now, he’ll have you shot.”

  “You tricked me into this and now look! You’ve made me into a damn murderer.”

  “Paul, don’t ever say that. You came down here on your own. You knew my loyalties from the start. I never lied to you. Listen to me,” she appealed softly. “You’ve given me everything I want. In return we’ll get married and we’ll have a family and a nice place near the city. We’ll be very happy together.”

  He nodded his head and left the tent.

  Under the two charismatic generals, Zapata and Villa, the tide was clearly turning. Díaz had begun appealing publicly for peace, but Madero flatly rejected his efforts. To try to win back popular support, the tyrant attempted to reinstate land reforms. He even went so far as to dismiss most of his conservative cabinet, but it was to no avail.

  Soon places that were Díaz strongholds like Veracruz, Chiapas, and the Yucatán began seeing heavy insurgency. By spring, the rebels had seized over twenty major cities.

  Finally, when the revolutionaries encircled the city of Juárez, Díaz resigned. Within days, Madero was sworn in as the new president. Victory celebrations blanketed Mexico. The revolution was over.

  “It’s time to go home,” Paul said to Millie upon hearing the latest news.

  She nodded in agreement. But the very next day, the new president, who was expressing reluctance to enact some of the key reforms of the revolution, was suddenly assassinated. Several revolutionary leaders boldly declared themselves the rightful heir to power. Colonel Octavio-Noriega held his brigade together, waiting to see what compromise might be reached, but by the week’s end it was clear that a new struggle for power had begun.

  “They just need us a bit longer,” Millie informed Paul.

  “This isn’t fair,” Paul said with clenched teeth. “I came here to protect you and now a big chunk of my life is gone!”

  A week after the assassination, Colonel Octavio-Noriega led Paul into his tent late one night and explained that the American was an indispensable part of his command.

  “Carlo knows everything I do about explosives,” Paul replied tiredly.

  “It would have a detrimental effect on morale if I were to just discharge you,” Octavio-Noriega said. Then, in a low voice, he added, “However, if you and Millie were to take a mule and leave one night and vanish forever, there would be little I could do.”

  The next morning, Paul hugged Millie tightly to his chest and whispered into her ear, “We’re leaving tonight.”

  “We’ll be shot.”

  “He’s letting us go.”

  “But the fighting isn’t over.”

  Paul explained that he had been given an unofficial discharge.

  “But that wasn’t our agreement,” she said, turning away from him.

  “You said that when we could leave without getting killed, you’d go with me,” he replied sternly. “You promised!”

  She didn’t say a word to him the rest of the day, refusing to even make eye contact.

  Early that evening, after packing a handful of essentials, Paul went out for a final meal with his comrades.

  When he returned to his tent, he found that Millie hadn’t packed her trunk. She was lying facedown on her cot, weeping uncontrollably.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I love you dearly, Paul. Truly, I do. And I know the sacrifice you made coming down here and helping me in this struggle. And if it’s worth anything, these people love you and need you. So, if you want, we can marry and live here. We can even have children and—”

  “You agreed to come back north!”

  “I’m really sorry. I just can’t abandon my country,” she said, embracing him.

  “You betrayed me to get me to kill people for you!”

  “Paul, I love you. I swear it!” She wept aloud as he stormed out.

  Taking one of the regiment’s old burros, he rode and walked nonstop through the night and all the next day. Arriving at the nearest train station, he bought a ticket west that would take him to another train north. Caked in dirt and sweat, utterly exhausted, he had an odd succession of thoughts. Did you abandon your post? Did you abandon a people in crisis, a people in need of you? Did you abandon a situation that you were culpable in creating? He sensed somehow that the thoughts were not entirely related to Millie and Mexico, and that they were coming from somewhere else altogether.

  On the third night of his slow train ride across the dry landscape, he found himself hot and unable to sleep. He frequented the vestibule at the end of the car where he’d open the top half of one of the double windows, allowing in a cool breeze. As he thought of all the bloodshed he had seen during his time in Mexico, tears came to his eyes.

  “You okay, son?” he heard. An older fellow with a bushy mustache and only one arm was leaning against the opposite wall, puffing a corncob pipe.

  “Yeah,” Paul replied, wiping away his tears. “I’m just glad to get away from all the fighting below the Rio Grande.” He didn’t have any more to say.

  “Son, I’m seventy-seven,” the fellow said with a Southern twang. “Fifty years or so yonder, when I was about your age, I was a soldier for the Confederacy, and I don’t mind telling you that this entire area we’re passing through, and all the young men in it, well … you’re passing through the land of the dead. You just couldn’t imagine ever recovering from so much loss, and yet you do.”

  Paul responded politely and excused himself.

  After four more squalid days without even enough money to eat for the final stretch, Paul arrived in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. With a bundle of filthy and torn belongings under his arm, he walked up to his parents’ home on 46th Street. When he rang the bell at 11 o’clock, Maria answered and let out a shriek upon seeing the bearded, wild-eyed scion of the Moses family.

  Bella appeared at the door and immediately started yelling. “Didn’t I warn you! Did I not say that a woman like that is only out for herself? Did I tell you that or not? Answer me!”

  “You told me.”

  “And did you listen?”

  “No, I didn’t listen.”

  “And what happened? Months and months of your life wasted! You might as well have been in prison. Not to mention the fact that you could’ve very easily gotten yourself killed.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t about to share the risks he had taken an
d the murders he had committed.

  “What sense is any of this? A Jewish boy getting himself killed fighting for … for what? Tar babies and jungle heathens? Why?”

  Suddenly, Paul collapsed. Maria and his mother helped him to his feet, then washed him, fed him, and put him to bed.

  The next afternoon, after having slept for more than sixteen hours, Paul came downstairs for a big brunch of matzo ball soup, whitefish salad, fresh bagels, and orange juice. Bella sat with him as he ate.

  “What do you want to do now?”

  “Just finish my degree,” he said quietly.

  His grades, his extracurricular activities, his attendance and conduct had all been excellent—it was August, and with a little luck (and his family’s connections), he could get back into school in time for the fall semester.

  Inspired by Thomas Alva Edison’s breakthroughs in electricity, Paul believed that technology could somehow level society’s playing field and help foster true justice. He had learned that only a tiny percent of the population in Mexico was literate, and he couldn’t help thinking that if all the little villages had access to electricity, groups would be better able to assemble and share ideas. Individuals would be more compelled to learn how to read, and education made people more politically alert.

  That night, in the sumptuous luxury of his parents’ house, as he was drifting off to sleep, he felt once again as though he were drowning.

  Bolting up, he turned to flip on his bedside lamp, only to realize he was naked and floating in warm black water, gasping for air. And he wasn’t Paul; he was someone named Uli. Desperately clawing at some kind of thick fabric wrapped tightly around him. A helmet chin-strapped to his head.

  Feeling about, he found a small hose secured near his mouth. He sucked on it, hoping to draw oxygen … then remembered. Clenching his diaphragm to keep from choking, he nervously fingered the hose into a tiny tank attached to his naked back. He turned the tiny knob on top and a jolt of oxygen shot down his throat like a snake. Awkwardly, he gulped down several deep breaths, then turned the knob off to conserve his air supply. Where the hell am I? And how do I get out? He closed his eyes and tried not to panic. Strangely, the Mnemosyne, the drug he had been injected with to keep him alive in the black water, was still working. His eyes still shut, he took it all in, almost like a song playing in the background: someone named Paul, years ago. He was simply unable to stop the images rushing through his head.