The next day we met – she, Alexander, and I – and went to Brooklyn. There was still time before the meeting so we stopped at Blimpie's for something to eat. When she was eating, taking a sandwich in her hands, I noticed that Carol's fingernails were rough and broken. One mutilated nail turned down, almost under the finger. But there was nothing unpleasant about her hands, they were the plain hands of a thin little blonde. It was like looking at the mutilated fingers of a carpenter, steadily and calmly, knowing that this is clean, dry, and good, it's from work, it's as it should be.
Near the building where the meeting was supposed to take place, we saw a multitude of police and cars; young people stood here and there in separate little groups, animatedly conversing and discussing something. I sniffed the air with satisfaction. It smelled of alarm. It smelled good.
"Our comrades have been warned that the Jewish Defense League wants to start a riot, they're going to try and break up the meeting," Carol said with a grin, glancing searchingly at Alexander and me. What did I care, I was a rolling stone, a Russian Ukrainian; I had both Ossetian and Tatar blood in me, all I sought was adventure. But Alexander was a Jew; for him to participate in a meeting in support of the Palestinian people was very likely to be considered unnatural. So it seemed to me until we went up to the hall. Among those sitting in the hall were many Jews. I ceased to worry about Alexander.
But before going through the solid wall of police and guards up to the hall, we waited awhile longer, until a young man brought us the leaflets that served as passes to the meeting.
"He's in our party youth organization," Carol said. "He's been helping us since he was sixteen, his father is a member of our party."
We went upstairs and found ourselves in a large room, where, after paying a contribution of a dollar, we took our seats on either side of Carol, so that she could help us if necessary – translate whatever was unclear in the orators' speeches. Since this was the first time I had been to such an event, I looked around curiously.
There were several Arab youths in the hall who were selling leftist literature. There was also a stand with literature. They carried Revolution and other leftist journals as well. There weren't many people.
The meeting gradually got under way. There were six people on the podium, including two blacks, representatives of black organizations. The first to speak was a Lebanese student who talked about the civil war in Lebanon. I remember one place in his speech where he said that the goal of his comrades in the Lebanese leftist groups was not the acquisition of power in Lebanon, not the struggle with Israel, but world revolution! I liked that, I applauded him heartily. In those days I was just finishing "The New York Daily Radio Broadcast," a work in which I described some events of the future world revolution. I took a personal attitude toward the revolution. I did not seek refuge in lofty words. I deduced my love for world revolution naturally from my own personal tragedy – a tragedy in which both countries were involved, both the USSR and America, and in which civilization was to blame. This civilization did not acknowledge me, it ignored my labor, it denied me my legitimate place in the sun, it had destroyed my love, it would have killed me too, but for some reason I stood my ground. And I live on, reeling and taking risks. My craving for revolution, being built on the personal, is far more powerful and natural than any artificial revolutionary principle.
The speaker after the Lebanese was a smallish man of indeterminate nationality. He might have been Mexican or Latin-American. This was a professional orator, his address was concise, polished, clever, and convincing.
"That's Peter, the leader of our regional organization," Carol whispered to me in Russian.
"He's a real pro, has a good rap," I said with envy, wondering when I would be able to speak like him. I very much wanted to get up and say, in the name of present-day Russians, that not all of us were shit for sale, not all of us would go to work for Radio Liberty and support their deceitful regime.
"What does 'rap' mean?" Carol asked.
"Talk," I said. I had forgotten that Carol couldn't know Russian slang.
Peter turned out to be not Latin-American but Jewish, a fact that he also made use of at the end of the meeting, in a very clever and deft reply to some questions from a lad in a yarmulke. The lad appeared to be a very good and honorable Jew, judging by how agitated and fidgety he was in speaking about the Palestinian question. Peter answered him patiently, and, at the end, inflicted the decisive blow lightly and abruptly, by saying suddenly that one should not confuse Zionism and Jews, and that he, Peter, was also a Jew, by the way. I appreciated the elegance of his speech, as did those present, who rewarded Peter with applause.
The speeches by the two blacks were simple, not so elegant and professional as Peter's but weighty and convincing. I liked the blacks very much. Militants. With lads like these I'd join in any venture.
All during the meeting there were suspicious characters hanging around outside the glass walls of the hall. The guards and police made their rounds every few minutes. A sort of whisper of alarm was audible in the air. At the door to the hall there was a constant small group of Jewish young people without identifying marks, of unknown political affiliation. But, finally, the meeting came to an end, apparently a happy one. People did not hurry to break up. A note of alarm echoed afresh in the words of a guard, who said we should use a certain exit because it was guarded by the police, they did not recommend that we use the other exits.
None of this mattered much to me, of course. I had my knife in my boot as usual, I felt like a fight. I had nothing against the members of the JDL, nationalists of all nations are alike. But I was closer to Alexander, and closer to Leib Davidovich Trotsky, than to doubtful nationalistic dogmas.
To my disappointment, however, nothing happened. Criminal Eddie got no chance. On the way back Carol introduced me to her comrades, among whom were several homely young Jewish women in rumpled slacks and an open-faced fellow in khaki work clothes. "He works at our press," Carol said. All of them, each in different degree, spoke Russian. The man was even a translator. Their press was putting out Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, in Russian. Subsequently, a month later, I was to receive this book and be the first Russian to read it. The first, not counting those who had read it in Trotsky's manuscript.
The book was to leave me with mixed emotions. Over certain pages, which described the great armed popular processions, I would sob, and whisper in my little room, "Can it be that I shall never have this!" I would weep in ecstasies of envy and hope over this thick, three-volume history, over our Russian Revolution. "Can it be that I shall never have this!"
Other pages stirred me to malice – especially those where Trotsky writes with indignation about how the Provisional Government, after the February Revolution, herded the workers back to work, demanded that they carry on as usual at the plants and factories. The workers were indignant: "We made the revolution, and they're herding us back to the factories!"
Trotsky the prostitute! I thought. What you forced the workers to do after your October Revolution was just the same: you demanded that the workers return to work. For you – the provincial journalists and half-educated students who, thanks to the revolution, rocketed to leadership in a huge state – the revolution really took place, but what about the workers? For the workers it didn't exist. In every regime the worker is forced to work. You had nothing else to offer them. The class that made the revolution made it not for itself but for you. To this day no one has offered anything else, no one knows how to abolish the very concept of work, make an attempt on the foundation. That will be the real revolution, when the concept of work – I mean work for money, for a living – disappears.