That’s what my father would have had me learn from him. He saw Hitler’s ovens as an expression of the capitalist spirit. Nazism and capitalism thrived together in Germany, they were locked in a passionate embrace, soulmates, which I guess was true enough. “Away with all your superstitions, servile masses arise, arise. We’ll change henceforth the old tradition.” I sang with a fervor at camp to make my parents proud, and I suppose they were. And there were a lot of songs, not just “The Internationale.” That’s the first one to come to mind, with me suddenly remembering all this, but we had a leftist hymnal published by the IWW, called the Little Red Song Book, and we sang all those songs, and now that I think of it, there was another song that stood out for me back then. In 1914 the capitalist bosses of the copper mines framed a man named Joe Hill for murder because he was like a working-class troubadour wandering from migrant worker camp to hobo jungle to city slum and singing about the truths of capitalist exploitation. He died a martyr before a firing squad. Many of the songs in the Wobblies’ songbook were written by Joe Hill, but one of them was written about him, after his death.
I haven’t thought about all this in a very long time. That camp sat in the center of almost every year of my childhood, but there’s so much that’s just faded away. I grew up to disappoint my father, I suppose. I still visit him once a week in his apartment in Brooklyn and he sits at the kitchen table and spreads out the New York Times and he interprets the news for me in a steady stream of Marxist analysis and at the end he always shouts at me, “You’re not hearing what I’m saying,” and I say, “I’m listening, Papa. I’m listening,” and he says, “Listening and hearing are two different things,” and I say, “Saying and propagandizing are two different things,” and it goes like this every time. We have this ritual dialectic and when I say I have to go, he gives me a handshake, but he will not look me in the eyes.
What did I know of death when I was a child? Joe Hill was shot to death. It meant nothing to me, except as an idea. The Holocaust was the same. I’d heard the tales of those things, I’d heard the numbers of the dead, I’d heard the invocation of mother and father and sister and brother, lost, gassed and incinerated. But I was a child. I knew nothing of death, except as an idea, a child’s idea. I sang, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.” I sang, “‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you, Joe,’ says I. ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Joe. ‘I didn’t die.’ Says Joe, ‘I didn’t die.’” And maybe that’s why the song stuck with me. Joe said he wasn’t really dead. With what little I knew directly of the world, that seemed more real to me. And it took the edge off the tales of the Big Death, the millions. Joe wasn’t even Jewish. If he could do it, if he could overcome death, so could they.
But then there was Tony Marcello.
I don’t know what’s going on in my head right now. I’d put him out of me long ago.
He was a kid from Philly, a first-timer at the camp, and he had some kind of grandfather situation, too, his father’s father, I think it was, being close with Palmiro Togliatti. It was another like-grandfather-like-father thing, though on his mother’s side everyone was still a practicing Catholic, praying to the saints and so forth. Tony bunked right beside me — he and I were both on the top of doubles — and I never could get to sleep too fast, even in the mountain air, and I remember every night listening to him breathe. He was louder than the crickets, though it wasn’t a snore he made, exactly, the air just seemed to move heavily inside him and I could hear it and I’d listen to him, even though I didn’t want to.
And it was about four weeks into the summer that one day we all went swimming in the lake. Officially, this was, with the camp counselors and all — there were a few nonpolitical summer-camp-type things we did — and Tony was a good swimmer. So he heads out deep, and this all happened so quick and simple that it just made things hit me even harder. He swims out and one of the counselors calls to him to come back. I was clinging to a post on the little wooden pier because I wasn’t a good swimmer and I was scared of the water and I was just holding on there in the shadow of the pier and waiting for this to be over. But when the counselor calls out to Tony, I look and I see him maybe a hundred yards out and he stops and his head bobs up and then he goes down. I figure he’s just turning around or something, or swimming back a ways underwater, which I guess is what the counselor is thinking too. But after a few moments, Tony’s head comes up again and it’s in just the same spot and this time it’s quick, just up and back down, and the counselor jumps in and starts swimming out.
I don’t know exactly how it went. Another counselor leaped in, too, and a third one took all the rest of us out of the water and brought us up to the mess hall, and this is where an atheist is at a disadvantage, I suppose. It was hard to apply the dialectic of history and the oppression of the working masses to what was happening in the lake. And to their credit they didn’t try. They just let us be. So I started inching my way back to what I somehow knew I had to witness. I went to the mess hall door and nobody stopped me. Then I went out into the sun and over to the edge of the slope that led to the lake and nobody stopped me. There were a few people on the pier and somebody near them in the lake and then there was some activity between them and I went down the slope. I lowered my eyes and watched the rutted path as I walked but I went down to the lake and I arrived just as they laid Tony’s body out on the pier. Once it was there, they sort of backed away a little, struck themselves, I guess, by the thingness of it.
And I came up to them and pushed between them and I looked at Tony Marcello, or what used to be him, because that’s how I saw it, clearly. His body was laid out chest down and flat, his arms at his side, his palms up, his face turned away from me, and his death fell into my mind and then straight to the center of my own chest and into my own limbs, which suddenly were sharply aware of the tenuousness of their own animation. There was a terrible lumpenness about this body before me, a heaviness, an absence. Tony Marcello was gone. Gone and done with. And all of a sudden, from the body of this boy who was no Jew at all, far from it, from the body of this boy who was a Christian, at least by the prayers of his mama and his mama’s mama, from the body of this boy, I finally felt the thing that happened to all those Jews as real.
So I guess I didn’t put Tony Marcello out of me at all. He turned into a cry in a subway tunnel, a puff of vapor from a manhole, a scattering of bones on a sidewalk. And I really did dream of Joe Hill. For weeks after that, every night, I’d wake in my bunk bed and there must have been the sounds of other boys sleeping all around me and the chirr of crickets outside but all I’d hear was this silence, this clear and deafening absence of Tony Marcello’s breath, and I’d be in a cold sweat and I knew I’d been dreaming of Joe Hill. He stood on a pier by a lake and they shot him dead and he fell in the water and disappeared without a trace, and I knew he was gone and I knew he was dead, no matter what he said, he was dead. And in my dream, he was a Jew.
And Jacob Klein dreamed again. His words stopped and he dreamed and I was afraid of his dreams. I am afraid once more. Of Arthur’s dreams, of Viola’s dreams, of Judith Marie Nash’s dreams, of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s dreams, of the dreams of all those creatures there below. I am afraid. For them and for myself. They live so intensely with such difficult desiderata. And I Think I’m Going Out of My Head. It is not Jacob Klein before me. He has returned to his life down there, his memory of me gone forever, like Tony Marcello. This is one thing that has brought on this spasm of fear, I realize. I am Tony Marcello to hundreds on this planet. I am before them, I am even part of them, I share their voices, and then I am gone forever. Worse. Tony Marcello’s body was gone and yet Jacob Klein kept a memory of him. I am gone from these lives and nothing of me remains. Nothing. Except with Edna Bradshaw. And with Minnie Butterworth, whom I allowed to remember. Does she think of me still? But no. Now it is she who is dead. Almost certainly dead. But I am not. I am not. Though I am in no one’s dreams on this planet, I am still alive. How fuzzy in my thinking I have become. How self-absorbed. I turned to Jacob Klein’s voice seeking the third red white and blue eagle and the big jackpot of understanding, I would know this species at last, not in my own terms but in theirs, but I cannot put these three voices together, I am losing the meaning of even any one of them. I have only blanks before me.