Libra - Don Delillo [87]
Another car hit the iron grillwork at the center of the bridge and that low groan went up.
He wanted to believe he was out of prison. A one-time fighter in the Sierra and Playa Girón, he was reduced to listening to endless arguments between Castro and Kennedy, arguments that determine where he lives, what he eats, who he talks to. In Oriente he was a skilled worker, a mechanic in a nickel-mining operation, American-owned, and this is where he learned about the movement of the 26th of July from students who spoke convincingly of wide injustice. Now he stands on ladders picking fruit and waiting for the maximum leaders to tell him where he goes next. They carry such a stain of greatness, both these men with their visions and heroic bearing. Each takes a turn as the other’s shadow, his haunted dream. One buys what the other sells. Eleven hundred veterans of the assault brigade were released from prison after the U.S. paid fifty-three million dollars to the Castro government. Raymo stood on a sideline stripe in the Orange Bowl, three blocks from this stinking bed, and heard the renewed pledges, the second wave of emptiness. Six months had passed since then. He did not believe he’d been freed from anything. Training in the wild grass of the Everglades. This was the only time he felt free.
The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man’s head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you’ve seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured.
In Minsk
The plant was an eight-minute walk from his flat. He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled. The plant covered twenty-five acres, employed five thousand people and turned out radios and TV sets.
On his first day he presented a handwritten autobiography to the plant director. “My parents are dead,” he wrote. “I have no brothers or Sisters.”
The director welcomed Citizen Oswald.
At eight sharp the duty orderly rang a bell. Grinding metal. Saws cutting through iron ingots. He hadn’t realized such high-pitched fury went into the making of a radio.
Meetings all the time. A large picture of Lenin looked down on the workers. Fifteen meetings a month, all after work, plus compulsory daily gym.
He took girls to the opera and went sightseeing. There were a number of imposing structures in this industrial city, some of them a little funny, he thought. The trade-union building had a Greek temple facade but the figures carved into the frieze were a bricklayer, a surveyor, a woman shot-putter and a man in a double-breasted suit, with briefcase.
He ate fried cabbage in stand-up cafés.
Each autonomous republic is represented by eleven deputies in the Soviet of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet. Soviet means council.
I am learning Russian quickly
In his fourth-floor apartment he had his own kitchen and bath. He slept on a sofa bed. There was a private balcony that overlooked a wide bend in the river that runs through Minsk. The fifth day of every month he got his Red Cross check.
He read on the balcony, wrote in Russian in his steno notebook. Thank you, he wrote. Neuter nouns ending in o take a. He wrote the lyrics of a popular song.
Church spires in the distance.
He had money to spend. He was someone interesting, an American, a stranger with a story. America was a rumor down the street, a gleaming place people didn’t quite believe in, and they wanted to hear what he had to say.
Then on May 1, May Day, in the skies over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, the heart-shaking event took place.
The prisoner stood in a metal cage inside the elevator. Light-proof, soundproof. This was a form of naked awareness he didn’t need right now. Irregular heartbeat. Right leg stinging. An exhaustion settling in over the raw headache, the