A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman

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face in a pig’s ass. You and your foul race should be exterminated.”

      “I saw red,” my father remembered. “Red and blue and purple, and then I saw nothing as the tears blinded me, and I felt my blood coursing through my body like acid and, even though he was much taller and stronger, I let him have it with a flurry of fists and elbows and feet that stretched him out cold in a pool of his own blood in the gutter near a pile of horse manure.”

      “What happened,” my father asked the little boy. “He was eight or nine and shaking like a leaf. I dusted him off and wiped his face with my handkerchief.”

      “‘I was hurrying home from heder and going over a difficult passage that Rebe Yanku wants me to memorize. I didn’t see domnu (“sir”) and I knocked into him by mistake.”’

      “Well, domnu is out of commission for a while. I don’t think he’ll ever bother you again.”

      “You think so,” asked the boy, looking at my father with awe then glancing at his persecutor with a remnant of terror.

      “I know so. Now run along. By the way, what’s the passage you’re supposed to learn?”

      “Habakkuk, chapter one, verses eight and nine."

      “Their horses also are swifter than the leopards and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat. They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.”

      “I never forgot the incident or the prophecy,” my father told me, “but it took another fifteen years or so to grasp its oracular surrealism, its apocalyptic significance.”

      The next day, the high school principal summoned my father.

      “You nearly killed him, Ari.”

      “He asked for it.”

      “That’s not the point. Meanwhile he’s in the hospital with a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, a busted eardrum and a pair of very swollen balls.”

      “So what.”

      “It so happens he’s the son of Colonel Petrescu, the military governor. He….”

      “Fuck him.”

      “… He claims you attacked his son without provocation. He wants you expelled. I’ve no choice. He’s a powerful man. Please understand I’m doing this with great reluctance and sadness. You’re one of my best students. I’ve arranged a transfer to the high school in Cluj. Petrescu would have my head if he knew. You’ll do fine there, that is, if you learn to manage your temper and stop playing paladins.”

      “But, sir, you don’t understand....”

      Able to convey tenderness and forbearance, my father’s pale blue eyes could also ignite with exasperation. Lies did that to him. Lies or absurd rationalizations, and I knew that few people could withstand his disarming gaze. He would have made a lousy politician. The principal, a decent man, a kind man, according to my father, would not be out-stared.

      “No, Ari. Nothing you say will change my mind. I’m sorry. Vindicating a wrong has a way of creating a fresh injustice. Sometimes, it never ends. It’s better to let go. For your own good. Maybe someday we can both look back at this and laugh. Good luck.”

      They shook hands.

      When my father got home and told his mother what had happened, “she pounded her breast and threw her hands up in the air and looked pleadingly at the ceiling where God can be found when tragedy strikes.”

      “Cluj? Cluj,” she lamented, “it’s a world away.”

      “A very small world measured in mere kilometers,” my father replied. “Now, look mamale, it’s not a big deal. I’ll come to visit once a month or so, you’ll see. Everything will be fine.”

      “But how will you live, where will you live? We don’t know anyone in Cluj. Where will you eat? Who will press your shirts?”

      “The principal said there’s a small room in the school‘s attic and I can have it in exchange for doing chores and tutoring slow students. Supper is included.”

      “What will Tatale think?”

      Tatale, it seems, took the matter with pious fatalism, my father would later claim without a hint of bitterness. “He must have felt relieved to learn that he'd have one fewer mouth to feed.”

      If God allows men to deny his existence he’s either an atheist or a myth.

      *

      Two years later, my father graduated from high school with honors and passed the baccalaureate. He applied and was admitted to Prague’s prestigious School of Medicine. As he had done in high school to support himself, he worked to pay for tuition, books, a closet-like windowless maid’s room that stank of bedbugs, and two skimpy meals a day. The evening collation was generally taken in bed while studying and waiting for sleep to subdue nagging hunger pangs.

      A year later, ill at ease with the school’s curriculum -- taught in German to foreign students -- he obtained a transfer to the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and came home to Sighet for the summer.

      “In the fall, as I boarded the bus for the train station, tatale offered me a new pair of phylacteries, a skullcap and a fresh prayer shawl. ‘It’s not good to start the day without first calling upon the Lord,’ he said, patting my bare head, an air of studied mortification and pity animating his blue eyes. My mother gave me a bag stuffed with sandwiches, cake and fruit. We hugged. She whispered, ‘it’s not good to pray on an empty stomach....’”

      Atheists live in certainty; believers in doubt.

      OYSTERLISH YIDEN (WEIRD JEWS)

      The postcard Paris that my father had fancied as a boy spread open before him like a pair of luscious thighs, baring treasures of rare beauty and promising unimagined delights. Prague had given him a foretaste of big city life, but Prague was grim by comparison, exquisite to look at but Germanic in temperament, stripped of frivolity, incapable of self-parody. Sublime and profane, sophisticated, palpitating with carnality, Paris quickly seduced him. The allure, the love affair -- lustful in his youth, sustained by memory and nostalgia in old age -- lasted a lifetime. He would die “in exile in Babylon,” -- New York -- a city he likened to “a dynamo too engrossed in its own circuitry to foster feelings of quietude or intimacy. It’s a great place if you’re twenty, with acid coursing through your veins and transistors in place of nerves.”

      Pleasure delayed, pleasure enhanced.

      In its implied eroticism, coined by my father, this aphorism also warned against the pitfalls of romanticism. Paris was an irresistible seductress but her siren call, for the good of his medical studies, needed to be temporarily stilled. Having to work to pay for tuition further reduced my father’s leisure time, much of which he devoted to doing odd jobs and earning a few extra francs to send home to his parents. Twice a week he ran the night elevator of a posh 16th arrondissement hotel. In the morning he washed dishes in the hotel kitchen in exchange for breakfast and a hot bath. Once a month or so, he sold his blood. Between classes, he tutored dunces, unloaded trucks at Les Halles, the now-defunct sprawling city-center produce and meat market, and sparred with third-rate pugilists in a gym that reeked of beer, urine and sweat and where youthful dreams of glory were repaid with defeat, disfigurement and early dementia, and turned men into broken souls.

      Answering a call for extras, he was also cast in a period film in which he wore a “soiled costume and a powdered wig so old, mangy and foul-smelling that it may well have belonged to the Sun King himself.

      “I had no speaking part but I was given multiple roles in several action scenes. One of them had

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