It's the end of nothing, Avram Chernovsky said, sitting at the oil-cloth covered kitchen table in the old, ill-lit kitchen in a Moscow suburb as he bit into a piece of tea-soaked sugar and lifted the hot glass of strong tea to his lips.
Nothing! Heed what I say. Chernovsky looked at Miriam, his wife, although, in fact he was addressing his only son, Elijah -- but in school, he was called Sergey -- aged ten, attempting to moderate the boy's excitement, which, it seemed, the entire population of Russia shared since the fall of the wall in Berlin, city of unnumberable deaths.
Nothing! It's always the same. We go from constriction to chaos and back to constriction again. And chaos, chaos they think is freedom. Freedom!
He attacked the word, yelling it in a whisper, and was quiet.
Well, he said after a moment, reflectively, maybe some good can come out of it.
He kissed the ground, the hard concrete, of the American earth after they passed through customs at Kennedy and emerged into the gloomy daylight of a rainy September.
Papa, Elijah, said.
And why shouldn't I? his father said, standing. This is not nothing.
They found the bus to the Port of New York Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and that was all their sojourn in New York City. The bus there took them up to the depot on Main Street in Burlington, Vermont, in front of the bagel bakery, where they were met by a young woman in a Russian peasant blouse and a wind-breaker from the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Association. It was balmy and the middle of September and the blazing leaves were still on the trees, and the color of everything kindled a blaze in Avram's soul.
They had an apartment in the Old North End, bigger for sure than in Moscow, and Elijah -- now in school also called Elijah -- had his own room with a backyard window looking onto a small forest with an elm tree stark in its bareness from the blight which had killed all the elms.
Miriam worked at the City Hall as a computer programmer and Avram delivered bread for an artisan baker located in Craftsbury, driving up I 89 to Craftsbury at four each morning in an old Subaru station wagon that had only squeaked through inspection, and stopping on the way back in St. Johnsbury, Montpelier, Richmond, Williston, South Burlington, and Burlington to make deliveries.
At night, he practiced his English by reading War and Peace in translation, sometimes to himself, but sometimes out loud when Miriam or Elijah or both of them would sit with him around the kitchen table, a large pine table in a large, well-lighted kitchen, which had a plank wood floor and a door going out to the back steps, which went down to the garden, where Avram grew tomatoes and zucchini in the summer and Miriam planted daffodils and tulips and roses and irises.
Elijah grew into a well-knit, young man, tall and handsome, thick sandy hair, blue eyes, intellectual, athletic, and friendly with everyone. He played the violin in the Vermont Youth Orchestra and was captain of the swimming team at school. There was hardly a cool head in the house or a heart that did not leap at the end, when he was the soloist for the First Violin Concerto by Shostakovich at the Flynn Theater; and when he stood at the edge of the Olympic sized pool at the swim meets at Burlington High School in his tiny speedo, there was no eye that could take itself off him.
At night he dreamed of his team mates but their young and wonderful bodies were bound in chains and straps of buckled leather. Sometimes, he ran frightened through the woods or swam under the earth in a stream that became a secret tunnel and real music, French horns playing Mozart, filled the ears of his mind. Sometimes it was terror, and sometimes the white fluid of night shot through his loins and made him fly with angel wings.
Avadim ha-yinu l'pharo b'mitz-raim.
We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, and to Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Kosygin in Russia, Avram added as he chanted at the Passover seder.
Slaves, always we have been slaves, but now, here, in America, we are not slaves. Even if we are workers, hard workers, we are not slaves. Especially then! We are free men. We shape our own destiny, and you, you, he said proudly grabbing Elijah's forearm and shaking it, you are destiny I am shaping in new world, in America. Harvard, he's going to, my son. Ah, America!
The word was a fetish for him. He could not say it enough. He caressed it in his mouth like a beloved object. America.
Elijah reached over with his other hand and covered his father's hand which still gripped his forearm and smiled. Avram's face relaxed into radiance and he looked around him at all his new friends at this communal table in this America of his and said, softly, even with awe, My son!
Afterwards, Elijah walked out with his parents and his school friend Benjamin. Avram and Miriam were going to walk home, but Elijah said that he and Benjamin would walk around for a while, perhaps down to the lake, for the late April night was warm and the moon was pale and bright and full in the sky.
Avram embraced him and kissed his cheek.
It is already next year and we are already in Jerusalem, he said with a gleam in his eyes and a chuckle.
Through the trees along the hillside called Depot Street as they descended to the lake side, the young men saw the moon in the sky over the lake, and then once alongside the lake, they saw it twice, as the hypnotic disk in the heavens and as an undulous stripe reflected in the glassy sheen of the lake.
The path along the lake was deserted and the boards under their feet were sonorous with their footsteps, and they took hold of each other's hands.
They stopped at the railing and looked out at the lake.
Benjamin turned towards Elijah and, still holding his hand, placed his other hand behind his neck and drew him forward until their lips met in a long and delicate kiss.
Elijah felt cherished and desired and he gave himself with a gesture that felt like surrender to him, opening his mouth and yielding.
It was that sense of surrender, of yielding himself to his beloved Benjamin, the strong and perfect Benjamin, the only one of all his friends he thought his equal and in some things his superior, it was that sense of surrender that made everything they did maddeningly exciting.
It is strange, he said, as they looked out to the New York shore in the far distance, my father speaks so fiercely about slavery, yet when I am alone with you, all I wish for, all I feel happening within me is surrender, as if I wished to be enslaved to you. Command me and I obey, he teased, mocking himself.
Kiss me, Benjamin ordered, and Elijah pressed again his lips to his and they shared their breath, which was their spirit, and Benjamin gently rubbed his palm across his boyfriend's chest and lingered there caressing his nipples.
In secret, in stolen moments, in hidden or deserted places, they went together to the intangible secret and hidden places that exist within us in the dimensionless space of the mind, in the metaphysical crevices of memory, in the recesses of forgotten recollection.
On a late autumn day when the sky was heavy with storm clouds and lightning rent the cloth of the sky with jagged lines of incandescent barbed wire and the thunder rumbled in great reverberations, Benjamin sat on an old wooden chair in the brick and board attic of his parents' large house beside an old leather couch no longer in use but too good to throw away upon which Elijah was stretched out. Only a burning candle in an old bronze candle stick gave them light.
You are becoming more and more relaxed. You are drifting, drifting into a deep hypnotic trance, drifting slowly, floating, sinking down, sinking into a great pool of memory, into a deep, deep trance and going deeper and deeper, deeper into a great pool of memory, you are floating in a lake of memories; all you hear is my voice. My voice is your guide -- my voice is your memory.
Can you hear me, Elijah?
Yes.
You are going deeper. You are going deeper into the pool of memories, and farther, farther back until you see yourself in childhood.
Go back now, further back. You are a child in Moscow. What do you see? Tell me. What do you see? Tell me what you are seeing, Elijah.
It was early morning and they were going through the chilly streets where the women in babushkas were cleaning the streets with straw brooms, and they turned into a dirty alley and went through a doorway without a door into an old tenement that looked like it must have been standing even when Dostoevsky was writing, and took their way up winding wooden steps to a small room with chipped plaster and a hissing radiator and one window with oil cloth where one of its panes should have been. The room smelled of boiled fish and boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage. A group of men was gathered there.
I don't know, his father said, looking strained as he took a blue velvet bag with gold embroidery lions facing each other, rampant, stitched upon it from out a burlap sack full of buckwheat.
What you don't know? He should know. It's time he should know. He should grow up without knowing? How would that be?
There will be worse things than that.
I won't argue with you whatever you say as long as still and all you did bring him, and he will see and he will know.
What Elijah saw was the men with their arms bared, their shirtsleeves rolled up high almost to the shoulders; on the pasty white flesh turned in circles the shiny black straps of the phylacteries. It fascinated him with revulsion, except for one young laborer among them whose arm was not pasty like a rising dough but strong and brown from the sun and muscled with labor so that his muscles rippled like stones beneath the skin and the straps wound in a hypnotic spiral up his arm to his bicep and something stirred like desire within Elijah.
He saw, and a current vibrated within him, and he knew, but he did not yet know what it was he knew.
They parted in August, when Benjamin went to Stanford in California and Elijah went to Harvard in Massachusetts. Massachusetts! a word which gave Avram almost as much pleasure to say as America.
Time passed as it will whether one is a free man or a slave. Which is not to deny there is a difference! But what that difference was became the central concern guiding Elijah's thought. Indeed, it shaped his life. And what actually did that word, slave, mean? What did it point to? One thing, when his father used it; quite another, when it shook him to the roots.
He read Hegel and Bergson, majored in psychology and philosophy and took courses in management and labor relations. He went through the tedious tomes of Stalin and Hitler and Mao. He read the Marquis de Sade and the pornographic books of Guillaume Apollinaire. He read Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch. He studied hypnosis and went to a practitioner to learn it.
Instead of to the synagogue on Friday nights he went to The Leather House. Instead of phylacteries, he dressed himself in a polished leather harness. Instead of the reveries which are for some induced by tasting the ancient words carefully inscribed on the sacred scrolls he experienced the enchantment of the trances that the swooning words, obedience, submission, domination, and master work upon the sinews.
He knelt before a man who swung a chain before his eyes, and his mind was filled with the man's words and his acts became the ones the man suggested. He bowed and licked his boots and stood beside his bed and swooned as the man turned his nipples and said you belong to me and eye to eye penetrated him and filled him till he came.
What! his father cried with a fearful shudder that rippled through him and stopped in his heart, when he saw Elijah the Thanksgiving of his Junior year at Harvard when he came home for the weekend.
What! Avram cried when he saw the silver earring in the piercing in Elijah's ear.
It is forbidden among us to do such things. It is the mark of a slave.
Elijah took his father in his arms and kissed his cheek and held him tight.
No, Papa, no, he said. Not in America. In America it is a mark of freedom.
Of freedom? incredulous the old man cried.
Of freedom, Papa, of freedom from the fears, the superstitions, the customs, and the oppressions of an old world, of a different world, of a world we no longer are in. This is another time, Papa. This is another world.
Avram was torn. From his heart he wanted to cry, All time is the same time. There is only one world and it is always the same.
And yet, it was he, was it not? who took his family to this America and behaved himself as if it were a different time, a new time in a new world. Had he not said it was already next year, and it was already Jerusalem? Was this what next year, what next time, looks like? he wondered, gazing at his son. Why not? Perhaps.
So he looked up at the strong and handsome, manly son who held him in his arms and said, Perhaps it is as you say.
Elijah held him longer, kissed him again, then let him go.
So Papa, a little vodka, no?
With ice.
With ice.
To the new time!
Avram danced with joy when Elijah got his degree from Harvard and a teaching fellowship in New York City at Columbia, where he was going for his doctorate.
His doctorate, Avram repeated, and the word was candy in his mouth.
And when, three years later, it was published -- The Dialectics of Slavery: Between the Ideas and the Realities -- Avram read it, although it made him dizzy, and, like Petrarch, his real pleasure came from caressing the book and gazing at the pages, turning them slowly one at a time, in awe, letting his eyes linger on each page seeing how the black print caressed the white paper.
[When you write, please put the name of the story in the sibject slot. Thanks.]