The Pledge (42 page)

“Maybe.” The others were washing up. Bruce and Legerman were last on the line, just the two of them at the sink. “About Fritz Scharnoff,” Legerman said.

“Tell me. You remember Groucho Marx's crack that he wouldn't join an organization that would have him for a member?”

“It takes all kinds. This isn't India, where Majumdar lived on rice grains as payment. Scharnoff has taken in over six hundred grand a year. He's a rich and powerful man on the Coast. What brought him into the Party, I don't know. Maybe he had feeling about some things. But he's no way going to spend a year in this place, so don't trust him any farther than you can throw him. He's going to make a deal and sell us out — no question about it.”

“That's a hell of a thing to say. How do you know?”

“Believe me.”

“He can't sell me out. I never saw the man in my life. And God damn it, I am not a communist. I'm not putting you down, and I don't give a damn who is or who isn't. I'm just saying that I am not one.”

“You don't need the truth to sell a man out,” Legerman said calmly.

Two days later, Bruce's book arrived. As he unwrapped it in the barracks after dinner, a small crowd gathered around, the four newcomers, Lemuel Wood, Jackson Hill, Clem Alsta, Harry O'Brien, and a handful of others. When Bruce unwrapped it, a typographical dust jacket came into view, a pale lemon-yellow background and across it in large black letters:
INVITATION TO THE THEATER.
Someone said, “What is it — a movie book?” Others might have wondered. Bruce was quick to explain, “No, it's a book about World War Two. I use the word
theater
as in theater of operations, European theater, South Pacific theater.”

That was understood. In one way or another, most of them had played some part in the war.

Underneath the title:
One of the most provocative and disturbing books of our time.

His own name,
BRUCE NATHANIEL BACON
, was printed in large black letters across the bottom of the dust wrapper.

It was the most important event in the barracks since an incident two years before, a time when one of the convicts got his hands on eight ounces of pure Acapulco gold. Everyone wanted to see and handle the Professor's book, and even Lemuel Wood put aside his craft work to demand a look at the “motherfucken” book.

Bruce reserved first rights. “Come on,” he begged them. “Give me some privacy. Back off. None of us are going anywhere, and tomorrow you can handle it as much as you want. Meanwhile, give me a little privacy.”

“You'd better make a lending list,” Professor Duprey suggested.

“Give me a little time.” He passed the book around so that everyone could have a close look at it, and then he pulled his legs up on his cot and opened the book lovingly. The jacket flap said: “Here is a book about World War Two that presents a face of war not seen before. It is a thoughtful, compassionate book that treats war and this war not simply as a struggle for freedom and a movement to wipe Nazism from the face of the earth, but as a human tragedy that has afflicted the entire human race and now threatens to destroy the human race. The story of the great Bengal famine of 1944 becomes a thematic component of Bacon's book, together with the Nazi murder of six million Jews and the genocide practiced against the European Gypsies. It is not an easy book to read, and parts of it are both horrifying and shocking, but it is a book that must be read.”

The back flap of the dust jacket dealt with the current residence of the author — a Federal prison.

Bruce began to read it. He had to read it. Too much had happened since he wrote the book, and as he read it, he felt that an entirely different human being had written it. He had the very strange feeling that his purpose on earth was to witness the greatest tragedy in man's time on earth. He was no longer a witness. He worked with his hands eight hours a day in a garage, for which labor he was paid twenty cents an hour, and at the end of that long day, he had to fight to keep his eyes open to read a book, yet he had found a kind of peace. Perhaps if he had gone to a college other than Williams, say to Michigan or New York University, places where there were strong branches of the Young Communist League, his life might have taken a different direction; on the other hand, perhaps he had been more fortunate this way, in his position as an outsider, and perhaps that made his book something more than another account of war. Whatever his life had been, it brought him finally to Molly, and if it also brought him to Mill Bog, that only brought him closer to Molly. He thought a good deal these days about Ashoka Majumdar, and one day he asked Hal Legerman if he ever found out what Majumdar's fate had been.

It was a Sunday. Each Sunday morning, a Methodist parson drove up to the prison from Covington, Virginia, and conducted a sort of nonspecific Christian service — no preaching and many songs. It was well attended because it never lasted more than thirty minutes and the singing was good. Bruce went quite often, partly for the singing and in part for the walk in the woods that the minister conducted afterward, a forty-five-minute stroll through the adjacent forest. While the Federal forest was not virgin timber, it had been established more than a hundred years earlier, and it was a place of tall, splendid trees and somber semidarkness, with here and there a sun-splashed opening of cranberry bog. Bruce had talked Legerman into coming to services with him, and afterward he and Legerman and Professor Duprey trailed along after the minister on the woods walk. There it was that Bruce asked Legerman about Ashoka Majumdar. He explained to Duprey who Majumdar was and the circumstances of their meeting.

“He's dead,” Legerman said.

“How did he die?”

“What's the difference? He's dead.”

“I'd like to know,” Bruce insisted.

“They beat him to death.”

“Who?”

“The British.”

“Then he never lived to see the independence?”

“No.”

“How do you know they beat him to death?” Bruce asked.

“Oh, Jesus Christ — the last thing in the world I want to think about and be reminded of is Majumdar. Why the hell can't you leave it alone?”

“Because I want to know,” Bruce said deliberately.

“OK. I know because they — they, his friends, brought his body to Chatterjee's house. Did you ever see the body of a man who was beaten to death?”

“Almost to death — yes.”

“Then I've told you enough,” Legerman said. “The difference between us, Bruce, is that your Christian leaders, as for example the good minister leading our pack, would say that you are blessed with innocence. I would say you are cursed with it. They would also say that Ashoka Majumdar is a fraud, an educated man and excellent writer taking his worldly pay in a grain of rice from each peasant who listened to him read. Majumdar was a Buddhist, and they don't have saints, only people, but some will say that his life was a pose and a fraud, because there must be an explanation. We live in a world where there must be an explanation for all happenings and there must be a pill for every ailment. Of course, when both fail, you can always kill people. That's the wonderful ultimate solution.”

“Oh, come on,” Professor Duprey interjected. “You're laying a heavy burden on Bruce. I'm not a Party member but I've been around the communist movement for enough years to be able to say that the wonderful communists I have known were blessed with innocence. The scoundrels, who are none too rare, are blessed or cursed with other qualities. This isn't India, Hal, and believe me, we are a society here in America today that could produce neither Saint John of the Cross nor Samuel Adams. Bruce left his book with me at the library, and I've read most of it, and he has a point of view that's new and clean and different — a sense of what murder is in its largest manifestation, which is war and genocide. You have no right to leap at him as you did.”

“I didn't leap at him and I have the right. He is as fallible as any of us.”

“I'm listening,” Bruce said. “Please believe that I'm listening.”

“Why do I have no right?” Legerman demanded of the professor.

“Why? Because you have locked up your brains. It's thirty-five years since Lenin laid out the blueprint for what is called the Communist Party. But then Lenin died and that wretched man Stalin stepped into his place. But since the Communist Party here in the States was organized some thirty years ago, nothing has changed. You made a set of rules and after that you stopped thinking, inquiring, adjusting, and as the years passed you worked the rules into a degree of lunacy. Can you look at the small thing, Bruce's wife being fired from the
Daily Worker
because she had referred to young Negroes as boys and girls, and not specify this as lunacy? And when Oscar Hill, as fine and sensitive a writer as you have in the Party, dared to criticize a book written by your cultural czar on the Coast, he was shredded to pieces by the brainless Party hacks. You learned nothing in all those years, and the only part of you that came to know and understand America were your singers and song writers, but when did a Communist Party leader ever listen to a writer of any kind? And instead of standing alone and proud, you wed yourselves to the Soviet Union, a society so different from ours that every lesson and conclusion you drew from it was absolutely wrong. You still defend that butcher Stalin, and you still try to convince the American people that no wrong was ever done to anyone in Russia. That didn't help Russia any more than it helped us, and when history called upon you to praise the Soviets for their courage and their destruction of the Wermacht and to criticize them as uninhibitedly for their destruction of democratic values like free speech and free movement and freedom from terror, you failed, you welshed, and instead you drove out of your movement every man or woman who dared to do what the Party should have done.”

“Oh, no — no,” Legerman protested. “That's too much, Professor. You're taking a bit from here and a bit from there, and lumping it all together. No, that indictment won't stand up.”

Still, Bruce listened and said nothing. He was totally intrigued. Bit by bit, the maze of his existence was becoming understandable.

“Too much?” Duprey said. “I think not. Your whole leadership was arrested and put on trial in the Federal courthouse in New York City. They were as alone as they would have been on a lifeboat. Sure, your membership supported them — but who else?”

“All the media of this country damned us and the Soviet Union. You know that.”

“Because your Party gave them all the openings. And from that, we suffered. Do you think they would have been able to throw a man like Bruce into jail if you hadn't given them all the openings? And now there's a sickly terror all over the land, and you gave them the weapon. Communism. Instead of giving the name the kind of nobility that Bruce writes about in India, you turned the very word into a criminal indictment. You allowed it to be used against anyone that mad dog, McCarthy, chose to slander.”

“You can't blame us for that,” Legerman protested. “You can't blame murder on the man who is murdered.”

“Do you think Bruce would be here? Do you think I would be here if the Party had not become a symbol of guilt? You know how they defined it. A conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and violence. And the Party let them get away with that, because the Party was dying of its own condition.”

“There were thirteen thousand Party members in the service,” Legerman said.

“And where were they after the war? You started this discussion on the basis of innocence, and you did not like innocence.”

“I still don't like it.”

“But you see, both Bruce and I are innocents. That's why we are here. Bruce saw the evil in war — in all war, and believe me, that is a state of innocence. I saw the evil in the Spanish Civil War, and when the soldiers of the Republic, defeated, broken, came over the Pyrenees to Toulouse and desperately needed medicine and hospital care, I joined a group of people and we made a hospital and opened it to the Spaniards. That was our innocence. We see evil and we believe it can be overcome. We are foolish innocents, and by God, your Party should have protected us and fought for us.”

“There was nothing left to fight with,” Legerman admitted. “We tried to change things in ourselves. It was too late.”

“Then what happens?”

“I don't know,” Legerman admitted. “We failed. The kids will have to work it out, and maybe they'll do it right.”

“If there are kids,” Bruce said. “If the bombs don't fall first.”

Bruce dropped behind, and Legerman and Duprey went on with their argument. Legerman had said something about guts, courage, and Duprey, his voice strangely shrill and very audible, said, “Guts, guts — you ennoble a man because he doesn't have the character to admit to himself that he is afraid — or too stupid to preserve his life — too stupid to preserve his life,” coming back as an echo. Bruce shrugged, turned around, and headed back to the prison. He disliked arguments. He believed that few people were convinced by arguments. It took conditions of life to change a person's thinking. This he believed strongly. If Legerman had backed down, it was out of respect for Duprey; and Duprey, after long years of lecturing, lectured rather than argued. His was the voice of reason, backed by very careful and sensitive insights. Half through with Bruce's book, he had asked whether Bruce had dealt at all with religion.

“In my last chapter,” Bruce had said.

“Are you religious, Bruce?”

“A religion that permits war or justifies it is no religion, and since all religions permit war and justify it, I have no religion.”

“I'm a Quaker,” Duprey said.

“Of course. I owe you an apology. But Richard Nixon sits on the Un-American Committee, and he's a Quaker.”