The Revolutionist Read online

  ROBERT LITTELL

  *

  BANTAM BOOKS TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

  For Maridou

  fijMJ

  Deserves death, but, thank God,

  we have no capital punishment,

  and it is not for me to introduce

  it. Make him run the gauntlet

  of a thousand men twelve times.

  —Tsar Nicholas I ordering the punishment of a student who attacked his professor, in Nicholas Tolstoy's story, Hadji Murad

  Let not God see the Russian

  rebellion—the rebellion without

  mind and without mercy.

  —Alexander Pushkin, writing one hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution

  TO PUT IT INTO TIME . .

  One Saturday in March, 1911, a boy canne hurtling down down the narrow staircase of the Asch Building in Manhattan screaming incoherently. Alexander Til, working in an airless loft off the stairwell, looked up from his sewing machine. "What's going on?" he called.

  "There's a fire," a girl shouted from the door. "Upstairs. In the Triangle loft."

  Alexander, who was one week short of his seventeenth birthday, bolted for the stairs. "My father works for the Triangle Company," he cried. "My brother too."

  Hundreds of girls were stampeding for the street. Struggling against the current, Alexander tned to fight his way up the stairs but he was carried back on the tide. At the ground floor the mass of bodies piling up made it impossible to force the door, which opened inward. Smoke began drifting down from the upper floors. The screams grew louder. Alexander tripped and scrambled to get up and couldn't. Covering his head with his arms, gasping to keep from suffocating, he heard, over the screams, the firemen outside smashing the hinges with their axes. The door was pushed in over the heads of the workers and a spotlight stabbed through the smoke. Alexander caught a glimpse of light and clawed his way to his feet and stumbled out, his eyes stinging, into the street, into the air.

  Alexander's stepbrother, Leon, who worked in a loft on the next block, had come running over when he heard the sirens. He grabbed Alexander. "Where's your father? Where's Abner?" Leon shouted.

  Alexander looked up. The three top floors of the building were an inferno. Water from the pumpers couldn't reach the flames. Dozens of hysterical girls had climbed onto a fire escape. The firemen were shrieking for them to go back, that it couldn't support their weight, but the girls didn't hear—they were screaming too—and then the fire escape collapsed and they plummeted through the air like shot birds.

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  At every window girls were crawling onto ledges to escape the heat and the flannes, and pitching themselves into space. The firemen, their faces streaked with tears, spread safety nets, but the girls were leaping from too high and crashing through them to the sidewalk.

  Alexander spotted his brother, Abner, crouching in an open window on the ninth floor. He helped a girl crawl from the sill onto the ledge, then held her away from the building and let her drop. He did the same for a second girl. And a third. Later, the newspapers would describe what Abner had done as a "terrible chivalry." He guided a fourth girl onto the ledge. It must have been his steady girl, Nora, because she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  In the street, people became silent. With incredible gentleness Abner held Nora into space and dropped her to her death. And then he jumped too.

  They found the broken body of Alexander's father at the bottom of the elevator shaft the next day. He still had his portable sewing machine strapped to his back.

  Inside Alexander something stopped dead, like an overwound clock—he stopped talking, he stopped thinking, he stopped feeling. For weeks Leon never left his side. When they went anywhere, he kept one arm clasped tightly over Alexander's shoulder. Watching his stepbrother's lifeless eyes drift aimlessly over the peeling walls of their apartment, Leon wondered if he would ever be the same again.

  Then one morning toward the end of April, a spark of life appeared in Alexander's eyes. His lips worked. A word emerged. "Justice," he whispered hoarsely.

  Leon leaned toward him. "What about justice?"

  "Justice," Alexander said, "is what's missing."

  With that, Alexander started ticking again, slowly at first, then with a panicky feeling that time would run out on him if he didn't hurry. He began to talk about what had robbed Abner and his father and a hundred and forty-four others of their lives. They were the victims, he said, reasoning it out carefully, measuring his words, of a system that operated by a single standard: profit. That was why the staircases in the Asch Building were only thirty-three inches wide and the door on the ground floor opened inward, and the single elevator could hold only twelve at a time, and his father had been forced to jump down the shaft to escape the flames. That was why the building had ten floors, but the firemen's ladders reached only to the sixth. That was why the insurance companies had offered twenty-three families seventy-five dollars each in full payment for their losses.

  The following Sunday Alexander and Leon and several union people went to talk to the owner of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, who lived on Long Island in a country home that the workers called Tsarskoye Selo, after the tsar's country estate near St. Petersburg. At first the owner refused to see the delegation, but he reconsidered when Alexander tossed a brick through some French windows.

  His shirt open at the neck, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, Alexander stepped forward. "Do you consider the seventy-five dollars the insurance companies are offering the families adequate?" He took another step toward the owner. "Do you feel any moral responsibility for the deaths of your employees? Are you

  THE REVOLUTIONIST

  going to offer additional connpensation? Are you going to improve working conditions for the survivors?"

  At the sight of the delegation, the owner had sent his butler to fetch the local police. Two of them came roaring up the driveway in a brand-new Ford motorcar to arrest Alexander and the others for trespassing, for damaging private property, for menacing the life of one of their leading citizens. When one of the policemen tried to snap a pair of hand irons on Alexander's wrists, he punched him in the jaw. He and Leon and the others scattered across the fields.

  It was at this point in his life that Alexander Til began to think of himself as a revolutionist.

  1

  New York, 1917

  T

  ■ he moment the Jew saw the gold and silver badge he tried to I push the door shut, but the federal agent was too fast for him. He had already wedged a sturdy oxford against the jamb.

  "He is certainly not what you would call hospitable," the visitor complained to his colleague.

  "You'd think he didn't want to let us in," the second agent agreed.

  The Jew sized up the two men as they filed in. They had thin-lipped, midwestern faces and wore identical soft-brimmed Lansdowne hats and Ennyweather Shine-or-Sprinkle belted topcoats. One allowed as how his name was Hoover. The other didn't say. They slipped their badges into their pockets and methodically wiped the imagined traces of the Lower East Side off the soles of their shoes on the scrap of rug that served as a doormat. Then they trailed after the Jew through the narrow hallway lined with hip-high stacks of books to the small room off the central air shaft. There the one named Hoover, a young man in his early twenties, produced a fist-sized spiral notebook, moistened his thumb, and leafed through it until he came to the appropriate page.

  "His real name is Alexander Til," he said to the Jew. His voice, hoarse, strained, seemed to originate in his barrel chest. "He is a white male. Twenty-three years of age. Naturalized American citizen of Jewish-Russian origin. Five feet ten and one half inches in height. Lean frame. Receding hairline. Green eyes. The subject wears eyeglasses, and has a three-inch scar behind his left ear, the result of a wound inflicted when he resisted arrest for illegal picketing during the 1912 garment workers strike. The blow to his head impaired the hearing in his left ear. He has a way of cocking his right ear toward

  THE REVOLUTIONIST

  people when he talks to them. He is known to have disguised himself by growing a mustache and a beard."

  The Jew, who rented the three rooms on Hester Street and sublet the smallest one off the central air shaft to make ends meet, fixed his eyes on Hoover. "The name Til I never up to now heard," he replied cautiously. "The tenant I rented to, he told me his name was Rosenstein."

  The other agent wandered around the room, absently running the tips of his fingers over a tabletop and the windowsill and the spines of books the way a woman does when she suspects the presence of dust. "Did your Rosenstein have a beard.?" he asked the Jew without looking at him.

  The Jew shrugged. "Beards many people around here have."

  "Was he hard of hearing in one ear.?"

  "I never talked to him enough to notice."

  The agent turned to stare directly at the Jew. "How long ago did he clear out.?"

  "Four, maybe five days."

  "Why'd he leave.?"

  "He left is all I know."

  "He didn't say where he was going.?"

  "No."

  "And you naturally wouldn't know where we could find him.?"

  "That is correct. I would not know."

  "You're an alien too, aren't you.? Lying to authorized agents of the Bureau of Investigation could get you into hot water."

  "I do not know where he is," the Jew insisted stubbornly.

  The Jew's twelve-year-old s
on came into the room. The boy, like most tenement children, reeked of kerosene; it was spread daily on his neck and wrists and ankles to ward off lice. He planted himself timidly behind his father's legs, hooked his hands through his suspenders, and stared at the intruders with enormous black eyes.

  Hoover wrinkled up his nose in disgust and began jotting in his notebook a list of the few objects in the room. There was a low steel bed with a straw mattress, and two sentences chalked on the wall over it: "Capitalism creates producers and consumers. Communism creates beings who also happen to be producers and consumers." Next to the bed stood an upside-down wooden crate that served as a night table, with a kerosene lamp and half a dozen back issues of a radical magazine called The Masses on it. One of the magazines was open to an article by John Reed, written from Mexico, about Francisco Pancho Villa, a fact duly noted by Hoover, who recalled reading extremely uncomplimentary things about the notorious Villa in an interdepartmental circular. There were several tin plates and cups and a grimy

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  teakettle on an old table, along with a copy of Emma Goldman's anarchist journal called Mother Earth, an edition of Das Kapital in German, Chemyshevsky's novel Chto Delat in Russian, and a book entitled .4 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Chalked on the wall under the tiny window that opened onto the air shaft was a single line: "Property is theft—Proudhon." The word "is" was underlined, as if the person who wrote it had heard the phrase many times but only recently become convinced it was really true. Tacked to the back of the door was an article torn from the New York Tribune about the townspeople of Erwin, Tennessee, lynching a circus elephant from a handy railroad derrick for trampling a man to death, an advertisement for a Caruso concert at Carnegie Hall, and an hectographed leaflet announcing that the famous Russian revolutionist Leon Trotsky would speak at a Socialist Circle on Bedloe's Island the following Sunday, March 18, 1917. "Come one. Come all," it read, "bring your own picnic." Across the bottom, in bold letters, it warned: "Positively no alcohol."

  Hoover glanced up from his spiral notebook. "These books on the table, are thev his or vours.''"

  "His."

  "He coming back for them, you suppose.'*"

  The Jew shook his head. "He told me to sell them for the week he owed me."

  The other agent turned a glass paperweight upside down, and held it at eye level to watch the snow settle in it. "What with this business in Russia," he said, "we have got to be more vigilant than ever. One revolutionist like Til can infect thousands.

  "From our point of view," Hoover said, "this Til is a dangerous idealist." Flashing a smile as thin as a pencil line, he baited the Jew. "You do see our point of view.'*"

  The Jew pulled thoughtfully at an earlobe that looked as if it had been pulled at before. "I see your point of view," he finally said. "And you are clearly right from your point of view. But your point of view is wrong. In the United States of America, idealism has not yet been declared a crime."

  "It is not a question of idealism," Hoover said impatiently. "It is a question of property."

  "Property," the Jew pointed out, "is theft."

  "Scratch a Jew," sneered the other agent.

  Zander—as Alexander's friends had taken to calling him—stood at the fringe of the crowd watching the men from the slaughterhouse, in blood-stained aprons, struggling to cut away a horse that had collapsed

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  in its tracks wiiiie pulling a wagonload of coal down Third Avenue. Several passengers were hanging out of the windows of a passing trolley offering advice. The horse, which had blinders on its head and ribs bulging out of its hide, whinnied and lashed out feebly with a hind leg, catching one of the workmen on a shin. Cursing, he hobbled off. A young fresh-faced policeman bent over the horse and pressed the tip of his revolver to its ear. Most of those watching looked away. The passengers pulled their heads back into the trolley. A boy in corduroy knickerbockers giggled nervously. The young policeman squeezed the trigger. The pistol jerked in his hand. Blood and foam gushed from the horse's mouth. The animal heaved once and lay still.

  Zander edged away from the crowd. Being in one made him uncomfortable; he was always afraid he would be trampled to death. Looking back, he caught a glimpse of the dead horse, a hind leg sticking up grotesquely like a finger pointed accusingly at the sky. It occurred to Zander that in capitalist countries it wasn't only the animals that died in their traces. Human beings were also worked to death, and then disposed of while those more fortunate looked away in embarrassment. Well, Zander had never averted his eyes; he had stared at every living death until he had memorized it. He had seen factory hands collapse just as the horse had collapsed; seen people incapable of lifting another sack, of taking another step. The bosses had not put pistols to their ears; they had simply cut off their paychecks and discarded the workers, like used shoes, in the street. But what was that if not another form of execution.^

  "Nothing intimidates you," Zander's stepbrother, Leon, had exploded during one of their regular battle royals over the best way to set the world straight, "not the possibility of death, not the possibility of failure, nothing!" Leon had been dead wrong, of course. Zander knew how things were, and dreamedo{ ho^w they could be—and he squirmed. What if it weren't in his power to put them right.'' What if nobody could put them right.'* What if Marx was mistaken and the revolution was not inevitable and the great massses of people out there were meant to be exploited to death like the horse pulling the coal wagon down Third Avenue.'' What if the factories and the mines and the ghettos and a permanent pecking order were the things that were inevitable.'' No! Zander would never accept that. And he would never abandon the struggle. He would man the barricades whenever and wherever the workers threw them up.

  Since the death of his father and brother in the Triangle fire, he had been doing just that. New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Colorado all had warrants out on him for illegal picketing, illegal assembly, inciting to riot. Inciting to riot! He had been inciting to more than riot, something the federal government understood when

  ROBERT LITTELL

  it issued a warrant for his arrest under a 1903 law calling for the deportation of alien anarchists. The Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation had been tracking Zander for the better part of a year for "preaching sedition, armed uprising, and other Communistical theories aimed at overthrowing the existing order." At least that's what the caption under the fairly accurate drawing of his face on the wanted poster had said.

  Zander continued on toward the pawnshop one block up Third. He wore a wide-collared shirt of unbleached linen and a suit that had been "turned" by a Greek tailor on East Broadway; in its new incarnation it buttoned right to left. He had a thick tangled beard, soft skin that he vaguely thought of as unmanly, and eyes that a Yiddish actress, in a flash of insight, had once described as "bruised."

  The bell screwed to the inside of the door tinkled as Zander entered the pawnshop. The pawnbroker appeared from the back room. He had a skull so narrow it looked as if it might have been deformed in a birth accident, and enormous red ears that flapped out at right angles to his face. "Are you a buyer or are you a seller.^" he demanded in a whiny nasal voice.

  From the back room came the staccato sound of a typewriter. The typing stopped abruptly. A woman's voice muttered, "Oh, shit!" Then the typing started again.

  "If the price is right, I am a seller," Zander said.

  The pawnbroker laughed under his breath. "For a seller, when is the price ever right.'' So show me what you got." He pushed aside harmonicas and pocket watches and cuff links and compacts to clear a space on the counter.

  Zander pulled a folded handkerchief from his jacket pocket and carefully placed it on the thick glass. He peeled back the folds of the handkerchief to reveal a silver cameo brooch, with a small red stone in the center. His mother, Rivka, had given it to him in 1908, on the pier in Rotterdam as he and his father and brother were about to board the ship for America. Alexander's father had turned back at the foot of the gangway. "I have changed my mind," he had said miserably. "We will all wait in Rotterdam with you."

  "We settled that last night," Rivka had insisted. "When I am well enough to travel, rest assured I will cross the ocean to this America of yours." She had tried to smile encouragingly. "Tuberculosis is after all not the end of the world."