A Late Divorce (18 page)

But as usual they haven't. The pens stop moving. Outside the wind howls in the sudden silence. Their eyes avoid mine breaking off contact. What do they care about treatises? I should be grateful that they're willing to listen to me at all. You tell us about it. Whatever you say. But unless I get a discussion going now I'll have to eat into my next lesson. There are still fifteen minutes to go. If only that old fusspot had come today: he doesn't bother with the reading list either but he always has something to say and knows the oddest details and old books. He's the only one here with some vague idea of what I'm getting at even if he is always protesting in the name of his absurd sense of values. I can always kill some time with him. Shadowbox with him in a corner. But he didn't come to class this morning and he wasn't here last week either. Sick? Dead? Dropped the course? Neither did those old women auditors show up today because of the holiday. I have a small audience and that always annoys me, I've gotten used to standing room only.

“Can somebody please tell me then what Heinsen's basic thesis is? Who'll sum it up for us?”

A scraping of chairs.

“Who read it?”

They avoid my glance leafing through their notebooks looking out the windows deep in thought.

“Perhaps I'd better ask who hasn't read it.”

A limp hand goes up. Several others hesitantly follow it. They grin at each other.

“The book wasn't in the library because you have it,” calls a voice from the corner.

Relieved laughter.

“But there are two other copies. I put them on the reserved shelf myself at the beginning of the year.”

They frown bewilderedly.

“I really did look for it but it wasn't there.”

In her dreams.

Yes, a student announces, they were once on reserve but they're gone. The librarian can't understand it herself.

“Gone where?”

“Who knows? They're gone.”

The relief is general now. As long as the books aren't there.

“But why didn't you let me know? I asked you to read those selections a month ago. Why didn't you say something then? This is a discussion class, not a lecture...”

The door opens silently and Dina's curly head peeks in. “May we?” she whispers amiably and without waiting for an answer turns and says in a clear voice that echoes down the corridor, “It's here!” She glides to the last row and slips silently into a seat while father tiptoes in behind her head down as though entering a low tunnel careful not to meet my eyes his little valise clutched to his chest and picks his way through the jumble of empty chairs to the last one in the corner. Everyone turns to look at them. Several students recognize her and start whispering to each other while giving me doting looks. The blood goes to my head. Goddamn her. Why did she have to come in now? The room buzzes irritatingly.

“Karl Heinsen's essay
Der Mord, Murder,
is considered the most important ideological document of the early terrorist movement. Reprinted several times and widely quoted from, it first appeared in 1849 in a newspaper put out by a German political exile in Switzerland. In it Heinsen, who was exiled himself, seeks a moral justification for terror. He himself was not a socialist but a radical bourgeois, for which both Marx and Engels attacked him; it was his rejection of socialism rather than his espousal of terror that offended them. In later life Heinsen emigrated to America, where he edited several German newspapers. He died in 1880 in Boston, a city that he considered the one refuge of culture in the United States.”

A faint smile darts over father's tense face when I relate Heinsen's opinion of Boston but at once he starts and stares down.

Dina isn't listening. She's still beaming with dumb pleasure. She had no time to put on makeup this morning and her face looks all splotchy. She has an old childish blue dress on. She peeks at the notebook of the student sitting next to her who offers her his notes right away. They exchange whispers. Is she going to make a public nuisance of herself?

“Heinsen begins by reviewing several historical cases of primitive terrorism in which individuals sought to strike down tyrants on their own initiative. He describes the respect and admiration we feel for such figures as Harmodius and Aristogiton, who murdered the tyrant Hipparchus...”

I've learned their names by heart and don't even have to sneak a look at my notes. Father bends marvelingly forward. I'm taut as a spring driven by an intellectual anger.

“He demonstrates that, historically, terror in itself has never been repudiated as long as the wickedness of the tyrant or regime it is aimed at has been acknowledged. On the contrary, terrorists throughout history have earned our approbation. If the young German named Stacz who tried to kill Napoleon, asks Heinsen, had succeeded and not been caught at the last minute, would not he be a world-famous figure today?”

Again you can hear a pin drop. I pace back and forth looking down at the floor tiles.

“Heinsen develops his theory further by arguing that the difference between state and individual terror is to the moral advantage of the latter. The state employs weapons of destruction that indiscriminately kill people by the hundreds, whereas the terrorist strikes only at a specified target. The moral contrast between an artillery shell and a pistol shot is entirely in the pistol shot's favor.”

They're bent over their notes. They'll write down whatever I tell them.

“Indeed, a well-aimed pistol shot ...”

I stand facing them. I raise one arm and make a pistol with my thumb and forefinger. The silence deepens.

“In those days care was still taken to avoid injuring the innocent bystander. When the final touches were being put to the planned assassination of Admiral Dubasov, the terrorist Vinarovsky declared: ‘If Dubasov's wife is there with him, I won't throw the bomb.' Karl Heinsen makes his own position clear. You'll read it for yourselves. Tomorrow the vacation begins and you'll have plenty of time. I'll return my copy of the book to the library.”

“But put it on the reserved shelf before it disappears too ...”

The familiar ripple of laughter. Only the technicalities concern them. Their pettily practical souls.

“All right. But I want you to read two more selections in the anthology. One by Sergei Nichaev and the other by Morozov.”

I angrily write their names on the blackboard.

“Is that clear? Those two selections too, and I'm warning you that you'll be tested on them. I've had enough of this monkey business. If you don't read everything you'll never understand the intellectual background of young Vera Zasulich, the daughter of aristocrats, who served two years in jail even before she decided that she was honor-bound to make Tarpov pay for his bestiality. She loaded her pistol, stuck it in her coat pocket, and gained admission to Tarpov's suite on the pretext that she had an appointment with him...''

The bell. At last. Father looks pale. He props his head on one hand while holding the valise on his knees with the other.

“She waited quietly in the vestibule outside his office. She knew him well—in fact, she had visited his house many times with her parents as a small girl. I've mentioned that she was of aristocratic stock, and relations among the terrorists between children of nobility and children of commoners were deep and fraught with consequences. As soon as he stepped out of his office surrounded by his assistants she rose and shot him in the chest. She didn't kill him, though; he was only wounded. She made no attempt to escape. She threw her pistol on the floor and calmly let herself be arrested.”

Dina stops whispering. All eyes are on me in the sweetly deepening silence. They want adventure stories not history.

“The government did not try Zasulich before a regular court but rather before a special jury of magistrates that was appointed to give her sentence moral standing. To everyone's amazement, however, this jury acquitted and freed her. And when afterwards the police sought to arrest her administratively in the street, a crowd of admirers rescued her from their hands. Eventually she illegally left Russia and became a leading figure among Russian revolutionary exiles abroad. Vera Zasulich's pistol shot and dramatic acquittal paved the way for many more assassinations. A wave of terror swept over Russia. That same year Krabchinsky, a strange but talented man about whom we shall yet have much to say, laid still another tier in the growing edifice of terror with the publication of a small pamphlet entitled
A Death for a Death.
”

Father's eyes shut. The valise almost slips off his knees. The door opens. The next class's students are trying to get in.

He shuts his folder with a flourish. He takes out the cigarette prepared in advance and lights it with the ritual gesture that marks the end of the lesson. A cloud of smoke envelops him as the dry tension slowly eases. The students rise to go. Two of them ask him for the book. He hands it to them in silence, answering their questions distantly, laconically, almost brutally. He throws his papers and other books one by one into his briefcase, bristling as new students fill the room.
Already I'm making my way out through the crowd bead down careful to touch no one passing without a glance by Dina who stands giggling by the door with two students. Neither do I look at father who leans uncertainly against the wall unable to find a place for his valise. Gingerly I lay my hand on him: “Come, we'll be late.” And without looking back I hurry down the corridor and skip quickly down the stairs. He feels my anger as he hurries after me.

“I hope we didn't disturb you,” he murmurs. “Dina insisted that we drop in to watch you teach. I myself didn't want to ...”

“It's all right.”

He smells faintly of eau de cologne. What's gotten into the man?

“You're so intense that you scared me. But I'm glad to have seen you lecture. Marvelous! You're a real orator. And with those dramatic hand gestures ... I thought you were really going to shoot Bravo! Go on being tough with them. Give them exams. That's the only way they'll respect you. What was the subject of today's lesson, terrorism? How interesting. Are you lecturing on that all year long?”

“No. The course is on late-nineteenth-century Russia.”

“Of course. That's what your doctorate's about.”

“No, it's about the 1820s. I sent it to you ... but I don't suppose you ever looked at it ...”

I weave in and out lightly fending off bodies like a submarine in a busy harbor.

“But I did. Of course I read it ... that is, the parts that I could understand ... it's just that ...”

Now he's trying to stammer his way out of it. But then I didn't hear a single word from him. We stand facing a strong dry wind in the plaza outside. Dina rushes to catch up with us. She clings to me hugging and kissing me for all the students to see.

“It was such a lovely class!”

“But you kept disturbing me.”

She giggles.

“He started up with me. It wasn't my fault. He's one of those eternal students. He was once even in a class of mine. But we talked in a whisper.”

“Forget it.” I take a step back from her. “Were your parents happy to see you?”

“At least now they're sure that you weren't immaculately conceived ... even if you would have liked to be.”

Father laughs.

“I'm glad Dina made me go. It was a must. They were so happy to see me. It was a short but successful visit, wasn't it, Dina? They're very likable people.”

“That's good, father, but we have to move. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

Again I feel the sting of the lost day. My precious time ... and it almost Passover and the library soon to be closed...

“Yes, let's go,” says Dina animatedly.

“You're coming too?”

“Of course.”

“But how can you? Aren't you going to work today?''

“I'm taking the day off. I'm coming with you.”

My wife the playgirl.

“Absolutely not. There's no reason for you to be there.”

“Then I'll wait outside ”

“But what on earth for? I don't get it. You haven't gone to work for several days. In the end you'll be fired, you do know that, don't you?”

“Don't worry about me.”

The selfishness to keep taking off from work and coming home at the end of the month with hardly any paycheck. If it weren't for what we get from her parents...

“Then I'm coming.” She turns beseechingly to father who says nothing.

“You are not!”

“I haven't seen your mother for so long.”

“You'll have plenty of time to see her. She's not going anywhere. And neither are you today.”

I squeeze her arm hard to show her I mean it. She has new little pimples on her face. Brackish blue eyes. Cheekbones that protrude as though about to puncture her thin skin. How did I ever get stuck with her? A stubborn Mongoloid child.

“Why don't you go to work.”

She retracts her arm from me.

“I don't want to. And you can't make me.”

Father turns away smiling faintly half listening to our enjoyable little spat.

“Of course I can't. Who can make you do anything? Come, father, we'll be late.”

She stands there stunned flushed with rage. Students stare at us as they pass. Father lays a light hand on her.

“So we'll see you on the holiday? You'll come to say goodbye ... we'll be in touch...”

She doesn't hear him though. Doesn't look at him. She stares at me floored by my refusal.

“Then give me some money, Asa.”

“What for?”

“I need some.”

“But just yesterday...”

“It's all gone.”

“Do you two need money?”

“No, father, it's all right.'' I take out my wallet and give her five hundred pounds.