Living My Life - Emma Goldman [275]
In Moscow we learned of the presence in the city of Louise Bryant, Reed’s wife. Ordinarily I should not have looked her up. I had known Louise for years, even before she was with Jack. An attractive, vivid creature, one had to like her even when not taking her social protestations seriously. On two occasions I had realized her lack of depth. During our trial in New York, when Jack had bravely come to our assistance, Louise had studiously avoided us. They were planning to go to Russia and she was evidently afraid of having her name connected with ours during that dangerous war period, though she had always protested her great friendship in times of peace. I considered it of no great importance, however.
A much graver offence, and one that had angered me considerably, was her misrepresentation of anarchism in her book on Russia. My niece Stella had sent me the volume at the Missouri prison and I was indignant to find repeated in it the stupid story of Russia’s nationalizing women that had made its rounds in the American press. Louise charged the anarchists with having been the first to issue the decree. She had taken no trouble to adduce any evidence for her wild assertions, nor had she done so in reply to my letter demanding it. I considered it on a par with the cheap journalistic libelling of the Bolsheviki and I decided to have nothing more to do with Louise.
That seemed ages ago now. Louise had suffered the loss of Jack and she was all broken up over it, I was told by common friends. I went to her without any mental reservations, too deeply moved by her tragedy to remember the past. I found her a wreck, completely shattered. She broke down in convulsive weeping that no words could allay. I took her in my arms, holding her quivering body in a silent embrace. She quieted down after a while and began relating to me the sad story of Jack’s death. She had made her way to Russia disguised as a sailor and under great difficulties, only to find on landing in Petrograd that Jack had been ordered to Baku to attend the Congress of Eastern Races. He had begged Zinoviev not to insist on his going, because he had not yet fully recovered from his experience in Finland. But the chief of the Third International was relentless. Reed was to represent the American Communist Party at the Congress, he had declared. In Baku Jack was stricken with typhus and he was brought back to Moscow shortly after Louise had arrived.
I sought to console her by the assurance that all possible care must have been given Jack after his return to Moscow, but she protested that nothing had been done for the boy. A whole week had been lost before the physicians agreed in their diagnosis, and after that Jack had been turned over to an incompetent doctor. No one in the hospital knew anything about nursing, and only after a protracted argument had Louise succeeded in getting permission to take care of Jack. But he had been delirious in his last days and he had probably not even been aware of the presence of his beloved. “Didn’t he speak at all?” I inquired. “I could not understand what he meant,” Louise replied, “but he kept on repeating all the time: ‘Caught in a trap, caught in a trap.’ Just that.” “Did Jack really use that term?” I cried in amazement. “Why do you ask?” Louise demanded, gripping my hand. “Because that is exactly how I have been feeling since I looked beneath the surface. Caught in a trap. Exactly that.”
Had Jack also come to see that all was not well with his idol, I wondered, or had it only been the approach of death that had for a moment illumined his mind? Death strips to the naked truth—it knows no deception. [ ... ]
A grey sky overhanging Moscow, rain steadily drizzling its melancholy tune, and artificial wreaths that had served at other funerals were Jack Reed’s farewell in the Red Square. No beauty for the man who had loved it so, no colour for his artist-soul. No spark of the red-white flame of the fighter to inspire those who in bombastic speeches claimed him as their comrade. Alexandra Kollontay alone came close to