Читать книгу Red Star, Crescent Moon: A Muslim-Jewish Love Story - Robert A. Rosenstone - Страница 6

I hope you don’t mind reading a memoir told in more than one voice. Alternate his and her chapters may make for some redundancy, but as we all learned from Rashomon decades ago, people participating in the same event never see precisely the same thing. Even moments shared with those closest to us, lovers, family, friends, are different once put into words. It’s important to recognize that we’re long past the time when a man can get away telling a story from a male point of view without having not just militant feminist scholars but all the women he knows and loves—mother, sisters, girl friends, daughters, wives—complain about how one sided, incomplete, and false is his vision, a product of the dread male gaze. That’s only one of many reasons I’ve asked Aisha to give you her version of what happened in Spain. Together we made the decision to ask some of the other participants to have their say as well, though it’s not clear how many will answer our invitation. So it’s best to think of this work as one suited to the age we call postmodern, a period when we no longer, as critics tell us, believe in a narrator whose words we can trust, nor in a single point of view. We have all become as large as Walt Whitman: each of us contains multitudes.

My first self, the one I wanted to be, was a novelist, not a historian. Nobody really wants to be a historian, do they? It’s just something that happens when other things don’t work out. In a 10th grade English class I fell in love with the overwrought novels of Thomas Wolfe and decided to devote my life to producing similar enormously long works full of the mournful sound of railroad horns in the great and lonely American night. That I knew nothing about railroads and damn little about the American night did not deter me for an instant, but a C plus from my freshman English teacher on an essay arguing Wolfe was the greatest writer who ever lived helped to turn me in a new direction. A note in the margin saying it was time to begin reading Hemingway was my wakeup call. It helped that Hem, as we were told his friends called him, had recently made the cover of Life after breaking a few bones in the crash of a small airplane somewhere in Central Africa. There he was on the cover, bearded and grizzled, standing in the bush with a bunch of bananas in one hand, a monkey on his shoulder, and bandages covering his face and arms. Hem’s books didn’t so much evoke fantasies for me as help to create new ones. Reading his tales of war, disillusionment, and heroism made me want to face danger at the front lines or on the white sands of a bull ring, calmly report on great battles and death in the afternoon. Some such notion took me into a master’s degree program in journalism to prepare for a life as world traveler, correspondent, novelist, witness to wars and revolutions. But two years on the Los Angeles Times helped to squelch any romance in that notion. Too many cigarettes and martinis each day, too many interviews with stunned liquor store owners who have just been robbed, too many speeches by City Council members at supermarket openings, too many stories cut from six paragraphs to two by editors incapable of recognizing my great literary genius. And far too many of my short stories, written and rewritten in early morning hours, returned with neatly printed rejection slips explaining that however skilled was my writing, what I wrote about didn’t suit the mission of the publication.

What to do? Follow the example of a good friend who had loped through grad school like a hungry greyhound, taking a PhD in history at Princeton and a job as an assistant professor at USC. His experience made academia look cushy. A place where you could have the leisure to write books that unlike newspapers would last more than a day. It wasn’t too difficult to convince myself that works of history and novels were not all that different, but it took two decades for me to understand this insight was essentially correct. As if fearing academia would make for a dull life far from battlefields and world shaking events, I found myself seeking topics that dealt with outsiders, artists and radicals, people who helped to change the world and usually destroyed themselves in the process. Never was I much interested in the rich, the famous, the powerful. Even revolutionaries like Lenin or Marx seemed too establishment, too well known, too tame. My taste ran towards men like Leon Trotsky, who could write a history of the Russian Revolution while living it, Emiliano Zapata, who walked away from the president’s chair in Mexico City to return to his campesinos in Morelos, one-eyed Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, who enjoyed a brawl as much as a strike and didn’t much distinguish between the two.

I had, in short, a serious case of over identification with the underdog. That’s what led me to the dissertation on the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War, the Lincoln Battalion or Brigade as it was called by both supporters and opponents to make it seem larger than it was. If you’ve seen Red Star Over Madrid—and who hasn’t after our eight Oscars and two hundred fifty million plus take at the box office?, not much better than an opening weekend today but a fine total in the nineties—you know that a certain idealism compelled some three thousand Americans to volunteer for this foreign civil war, and that close to half of them lost their lives in Spain. The film is, as you might expect, all Hollywood—the men too heroic, the nurses too sexy, the battles too well organized, the dialogue too clever, the ending too full of hope. But some of the commitments, hardships, struggles, and betrayals of the left make it to the screen, and this includes depicting some Communists as leaders and heroes. TJ pulled fewer punches than you might imagine. Plenty of details were invented, as in any history film, but Red Star does catch some of the spirit of men who were moved to fight the spread of Hitlerism long before it became fashionable. Before the film, the Lincolns had long been an obscure footnote to the history of the thirties. For a few months in the late nineties TJ made them well-known, the subject of countless blogs, op ed pieces, Sunday supplement spreads, and TV talk shows, but a decade later they’re a footnote once again. History, as we all should know by now, is not linear but circular.

Crusade in Spain, my first book, an expanded version of my doctoral dissertation, started my rise in the profession. I will spare you the details of what followed. A historian’s life is not interesting. You sit in archives. You spend months staring at sheets in a typewriter or, more recently, at a computer screen. You deliver papers at academic meetings to small groups of people who yawn a lot. You publish books which get reviewed in journals read only by others who publish in them. Each book leads to a promotion and soon enough you are a full professor. Then one afternoon when you are at the computer trying to start writing the first chapter of a history of the American left for an editor who has a series on that fashionable new approach, History From Below, the phone rings and a voice on the line says: Professor Redstone. This is TJ. I’m about to make a film on the Lincoln Battalion. You wrote the best book on the topic. We need to talk. Let me take you to dinner. We can meet in an hour at the Aware Inn. Do you know where it is?

I do, but that’s not the issue. My old lady (her term), Cheyenne, is currently in an Earth Mother phase. She has a fourteen grain bread cooking in the oven and a stew comprised of an untold number of vegetables on the stove. When we met three years earlier, her name was Sheryl, but that changed after some stoned freak, seeing a photo of her Nevada goat farmer grandfather, insisted he had the face of a plains Indian warrior. Cheyenne is a painter—a Surrealist one month, an Expressionist the next, a Minimalist the third. Not that the art world cares. She hasn’t had a solo exhibition in a decade because when only three of forty paintings sold at her first opening, she stormed into the gallery the next day, pulled her works off the wall, and took them home. Since then no one will exhibit her works, but this hasn’t stopped Cheyenne. Every few months she finishes a series of new paintings, carts the canvases to the parking lot at the nearby Ralph’s market, puts up a sign that says free works of art, and spends the next two days interrogating anyone who shows an interest. Those which don’t find suitable owners are stuffed into the dumpster behind the market. Then she comes home, goes to bed, and refuses to speak for a week or two.

I check about dinner.

Ask him over, she says. He can use a home cooked meal.

An hour later TJ is lounging on my couch. He is much bigger than I imagined, inches over six feet and with such a large and startlingly handsome face that it’s difficult to look directly at him.

Let’s trade fuck stories. Those are his first words. Who did the Lincolns fuck? In Madrid, in Tarazona, in Jarama? Did you interview any Spanish girls who slept with Americans? One thing I know for sure: these guys didn’t just poke it up each other’s ass.

I confess: it never occurred to me to look for girls who knew the Lincolns. They wouldn’t have still been girls.

Fuck no, he says, they’re women. Women never forget their lovers. I went up to Palo Alto to interview Robert Merriman’s wife. In her memoir she claims she was raped by an officer at brigade headquarters. But c’mon, don’t they always say that? I took her to dinner, poured her a lot of wine, moved close, put my arm around her. She’s almost eighty now, but shit, she’s still a woman. She likes being close to a man. So eventually I get around to asking was it really rape? Didn’t she consent? Her husband had been away at the front for months. Wasn’t she horny? And what happened after he disappeared and she stayed on alone? No Spanish lovers? Remember, she was pretty damn wild in college, and soon she was crying softly and half admitting it. Didn’t deny it anyway. Fuck, these guys were heroes but they weren’t exactly priests.

Probably you remember Merriman from the film. The first commander of the Lincoln Battalion. A tall, handsome, all-American type. Football star at the University of Nevada, lumberjack during summer vacations, grad student in economics at Berkeley, organizer for the longshoreman during the San Francisco general strike of 1934. Twice he was wounded while leading his men and both times he returned to action. He’s a genuine hero, the guy who has the girl but loses his life. Without a character like Merriman there couldn’t have been a film. Even then I suspected that TJ would play him like Gary Cooper, shrug his shoulders, set his jaw, mumble his lines. Some critics thought his performance more a parody than an homage. TJ was furious he didn’t get the award for Best Actor. Best Director wasn’t good enough for him.

At the first use of the word fuck, Cheyenne charges in from the kitchen, and soon we are treated to plenty more along with a few sucks as she recounts her own adventures. This is standard behavior. My old lady is ready to brag to anyone—people at the next machine in a Laundromat, at jazz clubs like the Parisian Room, even at departmental parties—that she has slept with over two hundred men. Give her half a chance and she is likely to go on to age, profession, race, height, weight, shape, and personal proclivities. Over the thick stew, a salad overloaded with jicama and carrots, and the home baked bread, TJ urges her on to details about size, texture, smell, taste and feel. She is happy to comply. By the time we are on the apple pie, a certain glaze in his eyes suggests our guest has begun to wonder how much is truth and how much fiction. Even Cheyenne doesn’t know. When we first were together, she decided in a kind of offbeat homage to my profession to set the historical record straight by providing specific data. For an entire afternoon she paced up and down her studio, sitting occasionally to scrawl names of lovers. The final list totaled fifty-seven. Thirteen were no more than X’s.

Black Muslims? I ask.

Cheyenne is embarrassed. The total is way too low. She makes excuses. She used to drink a lot, do some drugs. She has forgotten many one night stands. Give her time and she swears that number will rise above two hundred. And though she never does another accounting, she continues to use the same number when anyone asks—and often when they don’t.

Before the evening ends we get to enough historical stuff for TJ to say that when the film goes into production he wants me on the payroll. Until that time, we should meet regularly as part of pre production to talk about the Lincolns. For the next three nights he and I dine at the Aware Inn on the Sunset Strip. Long before cell phones took over our lives the restaurant had special lines at the tables for important people. Our attempts at conversation are regularly interrupted by TJ making or taking phone calls, by autograph seekers, well wishers, and old friends like Elaine May, Robert De Niro, Goldie Hawn who stop by to say hello. To each I am introduced as The Professor. When on the second night I am brave enough to complain that I’m not just a title, I’ve got a name, TJ says Shit. We’ve all got names but we don’t all got titles. What other Hollywood project has a PhD attached? Enjoy the status while you can. We ill educated types can use someone to admire.

Our meetings don’t go on for just three days or three months, but for years, seven years of me playing the role of teacher, librarian, and consultant, spilling out endless details about the backgrounds, personalities, beliefs, motivations, situations, quirks, fears, and heroics of these volunteers for liberty, as the Communist Party liked to call them. A good deal of the time I am no more than an ear for TJ’s monologues. He loves to ramble, to regurgitate stuff from my book and make it sound as if he were its author and I a rather slow student who is being introduced to a difficult subject. Often enough TJ is—how can I put it delicately?—full of shit, enormously stubborn about what he doesn’t know. When on occasion I become tired and fed up enough to criticize his pseudo facts, ill informed opinions, or bizarre interpretations, he pouts, then when others are present, gets back at me.

The professor, TJ says. Oh, never argue with the professor. He has a PhD. He knows everything about everything.

The years take us from the Aware Inn to his messy bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the enormous but empty living room of the mansion he buys on Mulholland Drive. Sometimes he phones me at home or at the university for a talk which is inevitably interrupted by another call. Sometimes he reaches me in unlikely places at unlikely hours, places where I am teaching or doing research or on vacation. The term I have a chair at the Europe University Institute in Florence, he catches me after a dinner in the Tuscan hilltop town of Montalcino. After a bottle of Brunello, I am drunk enough to suggest he come over and we have our talk while dipping in the old Roman hot springs at Bagno Vignoni. Never do I believe a film on the Lincolns will actually be made. Who in the world of film would, after all, be crazy enough to finance an epic about a bunch of American Communists?

Flash forward almost a decade and I am in Madrid, enjoying the perks of Hollywood which begin the morning of the day I meet Aisha, begin right past immigration at Barajas Airport where a uniformed driver takes my suitcase and my laptop, leads me outside, and holds open the door of a black Mercedes. Through tinted windows I watch a red dawn stain the sky behind the huge billboards and the rows of office buildings and apartment houses that line the expressway. The porters at the Palace Hotel are dressed like admirals, the clerks at Reception like the directors of funeral homes. A bellhop leads me into a sixth floor room with flowery period furniture. Don’t ask me what period. If it’s not Bauhaus, I won’t recognize it, and the curving legs and bronze fittings of the table in the corner of the room are definitely not Bauhaus. Neither is the cut glass vase that holds the huge bouquet or the silver ice bucket with the bottle of Dom Perignon leaning at a jaunty angle and a note card propped against the side.

Dear R: Bienvenidos a Madrid. We are honored that you can leave your busy schedule to join us. Your presence here will help make this a great and historically ACCURATE film. I’ve always said we couldn’t do it without you.

Abrazos, TJ

P.S. Take the day off. Drink champagne. Get some rest. Enjoy!! See you Jarama tomorrow! No pasaran!

I start to crumple the note, then think better of it. Here’s a possible piece of documentation for the new book.

The telephone buzzes as I am about to get into the shower. It’s too early for local friends and too late for California, so it must be the production office in search of their daily bit of historical data. That’s one of my jobs. Historical Consultant. I wrote the book, I must know all the facts. Or so the producers think. Early on I tried to respond honestly to their questions. When asked how many Americans were in the trenches of Jarama on February 22, 1937, I played the good academic and said: Nobody really knows. The records aren’t complete. This wasn’t a regular army. Lots of paperwork never got done, lots of stuff was lost in the great retreats, or shipped to the Soviet Union. Some who claim to have been at Jarama were still back at the training camp in Tarazona. Some guys got to the front lines without being listed. The best I can do is put the figure at somewhere between 375 and 425.

Not good enough, shouts Rick Toomey, the line producer. I can’t work with approximate. You’re the goddamn historian. Give me facts. Isn’t history facts?

No, not exactly. But neither he nor you really want to hear a lecture on the epistemology of historical knowledge. Surely you don’t want me to go on about how facts are, as we say, constituted by the discourse—or to make it simpler, by the way we write the past (discourse being one of those scholarly words that nobody inside the academy can give up and nobody outside it wants to hear). It’s simpler than it sounds. There are all these traces of stuff that happened in the past, documents, letters, newspapers, artifacts, but nothing becomes a fact, a useful piece of data, until we use in a story that involves connecting it to other facts and claiming we understand how these facts affect each other.

End of lecture.

Soon enough I dropped the academic approach and adapted to the historical logic of production, one based on a different kind of fact: how many extras must be hired for a particular sequence? Now it was easy to be precise. When we shoot the February 27 sequence, 413 extras will storm up the slopes of Mount Pingarron.

I pick up the phone.

Professor Benjamin.

Yes.

Good morning. Eduardo Gonzalo Hernandez here, from the American Embassy. Assistant Secretary to the Secretary to the Assistant Vice Consul for Cultural Affairs.

Good morning.

Welcome back to Spain, Professor Benjamin. We at the Embassy know and admire your work.

Thank you.

We want to consult with you about the . . . the project that brings you here. The film of your book, Crusade in Spain.

Fine with me.

The Embassy car will pick you up in forty five minutes.

Not right now. I’m exhausted. I just got off a flight from the States.

Sorry, but we really need you right away. We understand that you must be tired and we won’t keep you more than a few minutes. But it’s very important. Your government needs you.

I say okay before he begins to sing the Star Spangled Banner. I suppose it’s my government even at nine in the morning. Even if I haven’t cared much for the people running it for the last few decades.

Embassies give me the creeps. At the entrance, the usual tall unsmiling marines with slit eyes, wearing blue pants with red stripes at the seams, khaki shirts and neckties, white peaked caps and white gloves. A sergeant behind bullet proof glass checks my passport against a computer screen. Next to him, a sweaty looking civilian with a huge, plastic ID card hanging from the pocket of his jacket, smiles and waves. This assistant to an assistant something leads me down long hallways, past offices that contain more computer screens than people, up in an elevator, and along more corridors. He is not Gonzalo Hernandez. I never do meet Gonzalo Hernandez. In an office with low, modern furniture, I am greeted by Manolo Rodriguez and Alten Pryce-Wilson, veritable stereotypes in their dark suits, striped neckties, highly polished black wingtip shoes. In the Sixties we used to say that only FBI men wore such shoes.

Each hands me a card with the title Program Officer. Rodriguez says Call me Manny. He speaks what my father would have called the King’s English, assuming the king were from the south side of Chicago. Pryce-Wilson’s voice is full of the tones of Back Bay and Harvard Yard. We drink lukewarm coffee and nibble on stale churros during what must be the requisite minutes of flattery for any guest. Like two men with a football, they begin to toss my career back and forth, mentioning things I have forgotten and others I prefer not to remember. Praise for my books, my Guggenheim, my NEH fellowship, and my Fulbright. Pryce-Wilson clucks over my stint at Oxford, saying Magdalene College just the way you are supposed to: Maudlin. Then it’s my military service—are they digging!—as a tank commander, with no wry comment that it was only in a training company. I brace myself, but they never do get around to the three volumes in the Michigan Series on Modern History that I stole from the Fort Knox library and smuggled home in the bottom of my duffle bag. I never actually read them, but they are still on the shelf in my office.

Pryce-Wilson clears his throat. From this point, he does all the talking, Rodriguez all the smiling.

We are at a delicate moment in relations between our two countries. We don’t want to threaten what we have achieved by so much effort over the years. Anything foolish could upset the apple cart. You as an eminent historian can understand that.

So could a high school cheerleader. I keep the thought to myself.

Spain is a democracy. Free press, free speech, free elections, a member of the European Community. The king is a democrat. The king’s mother’s a democrat. Even the fascists are democrats.

He and Rodriguez begin to laugh together. They sound like a sitcom soundtrack, distant, tinny and fake. I lean forward, pick up the coffee cup, and ask what Spanish politics has to do with me. Pryce-Wilson explains that there are terrorist elements in Spain. The Basques. Their radical organization, ETA, kills policemen and politicians. They have moved out of Bilbao, spread across the country, made contact with others here who would like to destroy democracy. Lots of people in Spain dislike having U.S. air and naval bases on Spanish soil. Some of them are on the far right, some on the far left, some are regionalists. History is important here. Everyone looks to precedents for what they are doing or want to do. It’s a dangerous moment.

Intense words about the importance of history can only be cheery for someone who has spent so many years in the profession. Save for teachers, editorial page writers, and politicians on ceremonial occasions, everybody else finds academic history far too boring to read or quote. Film is a different story. Let Oliver Stone make a movie about a President or a Vietnam vet, and half the people in the country become passionate historical critics. But the interest doesn’t last. When you meet an attractive woman at a party a few weeks later and mention your occupation, she doesn’t want to talk about Vietnam or Nixon, but says History was my least favorite subject at school and stalks off to refresh her drink.

Pryce-Wilson finally gets around to the film. They know my book on the Lincoln Battalion. (Of course.) They admire its impeccable scholarship. (Sure.) As a serious academic work, it sold only a couple of thousand copies. (Don’t rub it in.) A film is different. Especially a film which involves someone as famous as TJ. They have not, of course, seen the screenplay—this voiced in a tone meant to suggest they have studied it closely but can’t admit it. But the topic, frankly, worries them. The members of the Lincoln Brigade were Communists. TJ plays a hero. He will make them look good. Academic freedom is one of the great glories of our system. They wouldn’t change it for the world. But they do worry about Communists as heroes on the screen.

The Cold War is over, I say. As I remember it, we won. Does anyone care about Communists today?

You never know, says Pryce-Wilson. History sometimes reverses itself. How about you, Professor? Still interested in Communists?

Hardly. My last book was about Americans in Japan in the nineteenth century. Not many Commies lurking around then.

Your cousin in Moscow is still a Party Member.

These guys are not wearing black wingtips for nothing. But if they know about Boris they must know I haven’t seen him in years.

My cousin is close to 85. He’s been in the Party all his life. For him it’s not exactly ideological. It’s more like an alumni association or the B’nai Brith. The place he goes to meet his old friends.

Things change. They could return to power.

Sure, I say. Save your Confederate dollars. Or should I say rubles? The Soviets will rise again.

Hard to believe they are still at it. Just like during anti war days. Maybe they’ll mention my arrest in Maryland for a bogus traffic violation while they checked out my visit to the Soviet Embassy. Or my connection to Leroy X of the Westside Studies Center. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that he actually did go off to Pyongyang to pick up funds for his activities in the ghetto. What was the source? Moscow? The CIA? We who worked with him never knew. No doubt these guys could tell me.

Pryce-Wilson smiles. The edge in his voice disappears. Their worry is that some group might think of the film as a kind of historical imperialism. Spanish patriots might think we are stealing their Civil War. Someone might create an incident on the set. Harm TJ. Even the author might be a target. People get kidnapped here. Held for ransom. I should keep my eyes open. Not make any public statements. They would like me to share their fears with TJ. They of course can’t approach him directly. He’s too volatile. Too famous. Too likely to go to the press for the publicity. The Embassy has to stay away from any hint of censorship. Films are private enterprise. Speech is free. But I’m the kind of person who understands the need to be reasonable. They just wanted to warn me before I started the job. If I see anything funny, I should let them know.

I don’t say yes. I don’t ask what they mean by funny.

The same assistant to an assistant something takes me back down the halls and elevators while making elaborate explanations about budget cutbacks and the lack of official cars. In front of the Embassy, he opens the door of a waiting taxi and says: Don’t let him charge you. Not even a tip. We’ve paid for the ride.

The traffic is bad on Calle Serrano, impossible once we turn onto the Castellana. We inch along for a while, then come to a full stop.

Huelga. A strike, says the driver. Municipal workers.

What’re they striking for?

Who knows? He takes his hands off the wheel, gestures with his palms up. These days everyone strikes. Garbage men, pilots, secretaries. No wonder nothing gets done. Nobody likes to work anymore. I’ll tell you one thing. It wasn’t this way in Franco’s time!

The slice of his face in the mirror makes him no more than forty. In Franco’s day he was barely old enough to drive. But some people have begun to think of the dictatorship as the good old days. It’s that unexpected Germanic streak in Castile, the one that brought Aznar’s government so quickly into Iraq with us in 2003. You can hear it on occasion over late night drinks in a bar when someone puts his arm around you and says, Compañero. Don’t forget, we have been there too. We ran an empire, the largest empire. We had Latin America, we had the Philippines, we had Cuba. We civilized all those parts of the world. It didn’t just happen, my friend. We had strength, discipline, vision. How else to get those lazy gypsies from Andalucia to do anything other than dance and sing? They didn’t want to get off their butts and conquer the world. We had to make them do it. With an army and navy and a language. Castellano is so simple. So easy to learn. It’s a language created for Empire. Anyone can give commands and anyone can understand them. Now you Americanos have an empire but it’s not a real empire, it’s only banks, money, companies that exist everywhere and nowhere. And your language is not a real language. Latin grammar, German words, African inflection, no masculine or feminine. No wonder your country is so mixed up.