Departure by Howard Fast Page B

who had spent most of her life in such places, and she kissed the old man. The old man began to cry, and Janie remembers that Sidney was the most embarrassed one there, and when she said she would stay for supper, he put on his jacket and ran down to buy things in the delicatessen. But after that, Janie and the old man were like a daughter and father.
    The way they fell in love and the way they went together all the time Sidney was in college was a little curious, for time was something Sidney never had much of. He clerked in a dry goods store after school; he was active in the student movement; and then in 1934 he joined the Young Communist League. But, somehow, he and Janie were closer and closer. She joined the YCL too, and had some terrible fights with her people at home; and then, in 1935, they were quietly married at City Hall, something they kept a secret for almost four years.
    Only a few of us, who knew Sidney quite well, also knew about the marriage. It was in 1934 that I first met Sidney, and I was with him when his head was cracked by a nightstick in the big downtown demonstration, and I got him home then and stayed with him while the doctor came and put seven stitches in his scalp. It was then that Mr. Greenspan, almost tearfully, raised the question:
    â€œWhy, why should he have to mix up in such trouble?”
    Lying there, Sidney said, “Please, Poppa, don’t worry about it.”
    â€œA good boy, a boy who works as hard as he does.”
    â€œPoppa, I don’t look for trouble. You think I like to get cracked over the head?”
    â€œI don’t know what to think,” Mr. Greenspan said. “Wherever you look, those Communists make trouble. They got nothing else to do except to make trouble.”
    â€œThis is such a good world, you want me to accept it?” Sidney said.
    He changed after that; they say that no scar is skin deep. When you tell it this way, looking back, with all of us a good deal older, and in retrospect, none of us ever having been very young, it doesn’t seem that there was so much in Sidney’s life; there is no ABC formula to put your finger on to explain Sidney. He said to me once, I think when he was nineteen years old, “Do you know, I’m a professional revolutionary”—as if it had only occurred to him that moment; but as a matter of fact, it was so, and every other action he engaged in was on the periphery. In those days—it seems a thousand years ago, five histories ago—it seemed that the world we lived in could not go on; and indeed that world is dead today, washed out in the blood of thirty million souls, even if the fight is not over. But someone like Sidney belongs to that world; when there is a perspective, sometime in the future, the long, long future, when the fighting is over, when the guns no longer thunder, when the scars left by the atom bombs have healed, when the gray ships lie peacefully on the ocean bottoms, then there will be a whole understanding of Sidney, of what he was and what went into the making of him. Then, perhaps, they will be able to analyze the trivia as well as the bigger things. They will know what the expression on Sidney’s face meant when he heard his father say once, speaking of his not long dead mother. “All she wanted was two weeks in the mountains, with a little grass and some birds, maybe, but she never got that.”
    But Sidney’s hatred—and there must have been a fierce, terrible hatred of the things that pervert and destroy human beings—found expression only in what he did; the mildness in this small, sensitive Jew was so entire that even we who knew him well were surprised when he left college to join the International Brigade in Spain. He hated and mistrusted guns; the most complimentary thing we could say was that a person as politically developed as he might make a very good advisor, or commissar, as they were beginning to call them. But as a matter of