“You permit that I enter,” he said, entering before I permitted it. And upon entering, having placed his cane against a wall and seated himself in my father’s favorite chair: “I am a direct man, mister René, plainspoken, who has never found a bush worth beating about. So I say to you regarding your loss that it is your loss. Your parents are gone, don’t concern yourself with them, they don’t exist anymore. Concern yourself with yourself. It is not only that you are wounded and must heal. It is also that now your elders no longer stand between you and the grave. This is manhood. Now you are at the front of the line and the grave yawns for you. Therefore, get wisdom; learn to be a man. If you are agreeable, I will offer my assistance.”
This was an impressive oration. If he intended to shake me out of my sadness by irritating me, he succeeded. But before I could speak he raised a peremptory hand. “I see your reaction from your face, where a thundercloud has settled, threatening a storm. Dispel it! Your anger is unnecessary. You are young and I am old. I ask you to learn from me. Your country is young. One thinks differently when one has millennia behind one. You have not even two hundred and fifty years. I say also that I am not yet blind so I am aware of your interest in my house. Because I think you are kind of a good guy I forgive this, my alternative being to have you killed, ha ha. I think that—now that you are a man—you can learn from all of us Goldens, good and bad, what to do and not do. From Petya how to fight against what is not your fault, how to play when the cards give you a bad hand. From Apu, maybe, don’t be like him. It is possible that he has failed to become profound. From Dionysus, my tormented one, learn about ambiguity and pain.”
“And from you?”
“As to myself, mister René: maybe you guessed already that I am not always a saint. I am hard and boastful and used to a certain superior position and what I want I take and what I don’t want I clear out of my way. But when you are facing me you must ask yourself the following question: Is it possible to be both good and evil? Can a man be a good man when he is a bad man? If you believe Spinoza and agree that everything is determined by necessity, can the necessities that drive a man drive him to wrongdoing as well as right? What is a good man in this deterministic world? Does the adjective even mean anything? When you have the answer, tell me. But before all of this happens, tonight, we go out on the town, and drink.”
Later.
“Death, we deal with it, we accept it, we move on,” Nero Golden said. “We are the living, so we must live. Guilt, but, that’s bad. That remains and does us harm.” We were at the Russian Tea Room—his treat—holding shot glasses of ice-cold vodka. He raised his in salute; he drank, I drank. It was why we were here, and the food—blinis and caviar, dumplings, chicken Kiev—we ate only to allow us to drink more.
“If we go home sober,” Nero Golden told me, “then we will have failed. We need to reach a condition in which we will not know how exactly we got home at all.”
I bowed my head gravely. “Agreed.”
Another shot. “My late wife, you take her case,” Nero jabbed a finger at me, “don’t pretend you don’t know the story, I know the loose tongues in my household. Never mind that. As to her death, a great sadness, but not in fact a tragedy, it didn’t rise to the level of tragedy.” Another shot. “I correct myself. A personal tragedy of course. A tragedy to me and my sons. But great tragedy is universal, is it not.”
“It is.”
“So. My point. The destructive aspect for me, the life-altering destructive aspect, was not the fact of death but the fact of responsibility. Mine. My responsibility, this is the issue. This is what haunts me when at night I walk in the Gardens.”
By this stage of the evening I had begun to see it as my task to comfort him even though the purpose of the outing had been vice versa. “You had a quarrel,” I said. “This happens. It does not place upon you the burden of her death. In an ethical universe only the murderer is guilty of the murder. It must be so otherwise the universe would be morally absurd.”
He was silent, drinking, waiters hovering to bring more vodka as needed. “Let me give a different example,” I said, lofty now, finding myself at the heights of thought, feeling truly my parents’ child. “Suppose that I’m an asshole.”
“A total asshole?”
“Complete and total. And stinky.”
“I imagine it, okay.”
“Suppose that every day I stand in front of your house and I abuse you and your family.”
“Are you using bad language?”
“The worst. I abuse yourself and your loved ones in the coarsest terms.”
“This would be intolerable, naturally.”
“So, you have a gun in the house.”
“How do you know this?”
“I am hypothesizing.”
“Ah, a hypothesis. Excellent. Understood. A hypothetical gun.”
“And you take this putative weapon and you know what you do?”
“I shoot you.”
“You shoot me through the heart and I’m dead and guess what that makes you.”
“It makes me happy.”
“It makes you a murderer.”
“It makes me happy and a murderer.”
“You are guilty of murder and in court it is not a defense to say, your honor, he was an asshole.”
“It is not?”
“Even assholes when murdered are not responsible for their deaths. The murderer alone bears the burden of the crime.”
“This is philosophy?”
“I need more vodka. The philosophy is in the bottle.”
“Waiter.”
After another shot he became maudlin. “You’re young,” he said. “You don’t know what responsibility is. You don’t know guilt or shame. You know nothing. It is not important. Your parents are dead. This is the matter in hand.”
“Thank you,” I said, and after that I don’t remember.
Ends.
“In the beginning,” Suchitra said, sitting by my bedside while I groaned that my head hurt, “in the beginning there was the official Communist Party of India—CPI. But India has a population problem and its left parties also ignore birth control. So after the CPI there was the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) a.k.a. CPI(M-L). Enough parties? Babe, the party’s only just getting started. Try to keep up. Now there is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, plus the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Naxalbari, and also the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, and in addition the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star, and let us not forget the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Central Team, or neglect to mention the Revolutionary Communist Center of India (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), to say nothing of the Communist Party of United States of India or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Flag, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Democracy, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Initiative, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Somnath, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Second Central Committee, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Bolshevik. Kindly continue to pay strict attention. There is proliferation among other groupuscules as well. There was the Maoist Communist Center which merged with the People’s War Group to form the Maoist Communist Center of India. Or possibly it was that the Maoist Communist Center of India merged with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and founded the Communist Party of India (Maoist). These distinctions can be hard to make. I tell you all this to explain the decision of my Bengali mother and father, two intrepid capitalistically inclined entrepreneur types trapped in Calcutta among the many-headed Ravanas of the Communist Party of India (Uranium-Plutonium), the nuclear-fission warheads of the left, to run away and settle in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, which is where I was born. This would perhaps have been a good idea, and in fact economically speaking it was a good idea because they succeeded in a wide range of enterprises, beauty salons, clothing stores, a real estate agency, psychic-healing services, so you see they also proliferated. But unfortunately around them the political institutions of the Hindu right were also being fruitful and multiplying on fertile American soil, expatriate branches of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh sprouted up, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad flowered, the Bharatiya Janata Party thrived, as did fund-raising organizations funneling dollars toward the same. My parents escaped from one whirlpool only to be sucked into another and when they started going to RSS gala dinners and speaking admiringly of the barrel-chested person they called NaMo, I had to love them and leave them and make my escape. So I hightailed it to NYC where I am now working my ass off trying to make you laugh and it would be kind of you at this point at least to crack a smile.”