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Righteous indignation was exhausting to maintain, even as a silent partner.
she quoted Stalin at me, “If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that is a statistic.”
Who cares if a thousand marched today; they were no more real to the rest of the population than the thousands who drowned in last year’s monsoons, or died in China’s famine, or were obliterated at Hiroshima. Their very numbers smeared them—“smeared,” she said, squinting through her glasses into Fifal’s dirty windshield—smeared them into meaninglessness. Their faces become a blur, their message a blot. One person is what is needed. One face. One story. “One,” she shouted. “One, one.”
Although in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.
We women were welcomed by the children, the papa-sans and the mama-sans, mostly, we knew, for the gifts we brought. But the young GIs were thrilling to them, even the bedridden kids. They were superheroes, movie stars. And were always greeted as such. We felt no envy, we do-good American ladies. We liked men better than women as well.
What’s the line from Emily Dickinson? “While we were fearing it, it came.”
“Tikkun olam.” He smiled at us all. An ancient midrash, he explained. “Your Mr. Tannen would know it,” he told me. “It means ‘repair the world.’”
“the Buddhists say, ‘Mend yourself.’”
“I know you girls want a heroic life. You want to show your courage. But self-sacrifice is never really selfless. It’s often quite selfish.”
YES, THE THINGS THAT GET SAID over the course of a long marriage: Doug sometimes accused me of having pursued him too desperately when we were very young. The extent of my infatuation overwhelmed him. I always told him he flattered himself. I married him mostly to piss off my mother.
I have to laugh when I think about it now: how much easier life must have been for certain government agencies—how much easier for secrecy to be maintained—in those days before men felt any obligation to share their lives with the women they loved.
