Just As I Thought (11 page)

And in the result, I’ve been sent to the Bien-Hoa lunatic asylum. Here I read you and write to you. It’s really a great comfort for me, but a strain too. I can’t concentrate for a long time.

I’m longing for hearing from you soon.

Cordially yours,

Thieu Thi Tao

That letter is sane if anything is sane. But it is nevertheless a letter about insanity.

Thieu Thi Tao is the age of my children, and a thousand years older. She has suffered paralysis. She has felt her mind slip away. Her sister contracted tuberculosis.

And the money that trained the men who tortured her, the dollars that kept her in a cage, came from my country. They were American tax dollars. The brand name proudly printed on her shackles is Smith & Wesson. The cage she lived in was very likely made in America.

Thieu Thi Tao is one of thousands, tens of thousands, who are subjected to this brutality.

She is a political prisoner. A prisoner of politics. The politics of the United States of America, which supports this most corrupt and most cruel regime. There lies the real insanity.

Thieu Thi Tao modestly asks to be remembered kindly to her American friend. I ask that you remember her and that in your kindness you demand of your representatives in Congress an end to her confinement, an end of support for the government that has made her life a hell on earth, an end of our insanity.

—1974

I had a letter from Don Luce the other day (January 1997). He had new information about Thieu Thi Tao. His ’97 letter reads: “She is now an agricultural scientist/botanist. She is married and has one daughter. She still has to wear a neck brace because of being hung from a hook as ‘punishment’ 25 years ago … The people who were in the cages have a club of former prisoners and meet regularly (and often challenge present policies)…”

Conversations in Moscow

As I live my talky, asking, and answering life in the United States, I often remember the First Amendment, how pleasant it’s been to me and how useful to my country. I was taught to love it and wonder at its beauty by my parents, prisoners once of the Czar. And I do love it, though I also love literature, and it has made our literature one of the most lively and useless in the world. Of course, it’s been good to write letters to the newspapers. Some are published. It
has
been pleasing to stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and hand out informational pamphlets, leaflets of protest, to assemble in rage a couple of times a year with tens of thousands of others.

The elected or appointed leaders of our country have often applauded our enactment of these freedoms. They were then able (with clear consciences) to undertake and sustain the awful wars we spoke and assembled against for ten years.

In October, as a delegate to the World Peace Congress from the War Resisters League, I visited the Soviet Union, where a different situation exists. Literature is taken very seriously. Poets and storytellers are dealt with as though their work had an important political life. But a Russian cannot distribute a dissenting leaflet to other Russians. (In fact, it’s considered seditious.) And there is a concerned citizenry standing here and there, sometimes wearing a red armband, but often just going ahead with working life. Part of that life is the satisfaction of informing on neighbors.

Still, as an anarchist, a believer in no state, I have felt like a patriot in several. In this way, I considered myself a Russian patriot. In fact, if the entire World Peace Congress had been spoken in Russian and remained untranslated into the English Marxese of the daily bulletins, I could have been bought and sold a dozen times, because Russian is the conversation of my childhood. My nose somewhat stuffed by sentimental remembrance of those dead speakers, I stood in the Moscow hotel hearing Russian orders given and carried out in regard to rooms and luggage. Later I took a bus up Kalinin Prospekt, and one lady, looking like my mother, said of another lady, who looked like my aunt, “Listen to that one, she knows nothing; still, she teaches…” Then despite the hour, which was often suppertime, I wanted to walk around the streets of the city of Moscow and cry out (with exclamation points to explode each phrase), Oh, Mother Russia! Oh, country of my mother’s and father’s childhood! Oh, beloved land of my uncle Russya killed in 1904 while carrying the workers’ flag! Oh, country my own of storytellers translated in my ear! of mystics and idealists who sharpened my English tongue. Three times a day in the dining room my bones nearly melted. “Please,” I said, starting the days listening and answering, “one egg only, but coffee now.” “Oh, of course, my darling, my little one, only wait.”

Day and night I received this tender, somehow ironic address, full of diminutives, of words hardened by fierce consonants, from which the restrained vowel always managed to escape. This Moscow speech, like all urban speech, like New York speech, is extended by out-of-towners and foreign émigrés, then toughened to defend itself against transients and enemies.

I need to make some observations that have probably been made time and again and with more distinction by traveling reporters. It isn’t that I don’t pay attention, but I don’t think the wide world is to be judged by America consuming or compared to its shopping crowds. I feel the witness’s obligation to say: Yes, the streets of Moscow were roaring with people moving at top speed through mush and slush during morning, lunch, and evening rush hours. Yes, they were all warmly dressed in heavy coats and boots or galoshes, the children in magnificent fur-lapped hats. No, there were not a lot of red or blazing blue scarves, those colors together with greens and yellows and marigold orange were scrolled around the domes and turrets of the churches. Yes, GUM, the department store, was crowded with buyers, looking mostly for more hats and galoshes. Inside the hotel the young girls were not sizzling in Western high style, but did tend to rosiness of countenance, and yes, late in the Moscow evening, 11:00 or 12:00 p.m., we saw people walking about, returning, arm in arm, from visits to friends and family. And as happens in Chicago, New York, Santiago, San Francisco, and Rome, the cabs go flying by even though their green “free” light is lit.

Maris Cakars and I were the War Resisters League delegates to the World Peace Congress. Father Paul Mayer was one of many delegates from PCPJ (People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice). He was a member of the preparatory committee, which had worked in Moscow in April organizing this enormous event. At a delegate meeting, the first or second day of the congress, though he was not present, he was elected co-chairman of the American delegation.

About this World Congress of Peace Forces, the press has been rather lazy; or perhaps it has edited itself too strictly. Most of its news stories were about the statement Paul Mayer read to the Human Rights Commission, which had been signed by a number of antiwar activists, including myself, and distributed by us to interested people. However, there
were
3,500
other
delegates. And many of those had suffered their country’s oppression and were famous fighters against the colonial uses of their people. They traveled in exhaustion from commission to commission calling out their histories. I suppose journalists on foreign beats are familiar with the beauty and passions of the women and men of this world, but I am not. For me, they were astonishing to see. They came from Africa, Asia, continents, countries, and villages where occasion still allows golden magnificence or delicacy in dress and demeanor, instead of dour formality. Familiarity is no excuse for ignoring beauty.

On the last day of commission meetings, Paul Mayer read a statement signed by Noam Chomsky, Dave Dellinger, Daniel Berrigan, Paul Mayer, David McReynolds, Sidney Peck, and me. In it, the signers identify themselves as American dissenters. They establish that they are not cold warriors. They condemn the Soviet government for its persecution of dissidents, but call upon the dissidents themselves to join in protest against political murder in Chile and the continued imprisonment of hundreds of thousands in South Vietnam. I distributed this statement to fifty or sixty people who requested it (mostly Russians), but also to members of other delegations and the press.

We were corrected in a fairly sensible Russian tone by the next speaker and excoriated by several others (Asian, African, American, European). At supper that night I offered copies to the American delegates and explained our position. In this way, we found that many people shared our views but had not yet spoken. A steering committee meeting was called that night. Paul, who had been co-chairman of the delegation, was called a liar, an agent, a deceiver. They feared that it would be assumed that he spoke for the entire delegation, a legitimate fear—still, we met no one who assumed it after speaking to us and the steering committee. Paul was censured and resigned in order to maintain some unity. I have been told this is why people resign. In this case unity was not maintained. I was more contemptuously dealt with as a woman and a mere leaflet carrier. At all times the Russians were calmer than the Americans. For instance, the Russians never said we should be shot. A couple of American women said that I ought to be shot. Then they thought it over during the night. In the morning, they said I should not be shot but “something … something terrible should be done.” It has been suggested to me that the Russians depended on some sort of strong American statement to prevent the burial of the Peace Congress by the American press.

What I’ve described so far is talk and paper, ideas and hope. As for direct action, the day before we left Moscow, Maris Cakars went to GUM, the lively, mobbed Macy’s of Moscow, and deposited handfuls of leaflets (
The New York Times
ad for Soviet amnesty translated into Russian) on various strategic tables, counters … Finally he was seen, gathered up into energetic police arms, and taken to the police station across the street. He was, he said later, better treated than on certain similar American occasions.

I would have preferred to have been part of that action but felt a responsibility to work with Paul within the hopeful meaning of the congress and use whatever time could be saved from meetings to try to speak with at least a couple of Russian dissidents.

The First Visit

Paul Mayer had already talked to one of the most religious and conservative of dissident Russians, the novelist Vladimir Maximov, author of
Seven Days of Creation
—translated into German, not yet English. Paul Mayer is a Catholic priest and not as ashamed of saving souls as some other American radicals. He had been in Moscow in April as part of the congress preparatory committee and had gone to see Alexander Galich and Vladimir Maximov. He said later, “I couldn’t dismiss these people; the mark of suffering was clearly on their faces, and the integrity so clear that when these awful things came out of their mouths I was perplexed, but I couldn’t dismiss it.”

According to Paul, Maximov believed that the Vietnamese and Communism would have dominated the world if the United States had not bombed and smashed Vietnam. The United States, he said, had no choice. Maximov was Russian Orthodox. He told Paul there was a great spiritual awakening among Russians, who are now worshipping in tens of thousands in secret chapels. He said that social change and revolution have nothing to do with Christianity, that good works could not have a public life. It was Lent. Maximov was fasting. Paul Mayer was not. Maximov was angry and indignant with Paul. I understand they argued fiercely. However, since in the course of most wrestling, hugs occur, they ended as friends, and each expressed great longing to see one another again.

All of this had taken place at the Galichs’ family dining table in April. Paul had exchanged medallions with Angelina Galich, received a medieval Russian medallion, and given her the cross Dan Berrigan had given him when his son Peter was born.

Therefore, Paul and I were welcomed in October with apples, sardines, tomatoes salted and unsalted, glasses of Georgian wine. There were immediate questions about diet and digestion from Angelina Galich, who called greetings to us from her bed, for she was quite ill.

Galich spoke to Paul briefly about Maximov, then took our statement from us. We had not yet read it to the Human Rights Commission. He liked the first words of solidarity and support. Then he became troubled. He was disturbed by the third paragraph, he said; it was not wrong, but he considered it an attack. He said they didn’t know about Chile anyway. The Soviet press lied about them, the dissidents, why not also about Chile. There
was
a curtain of silence. Also, he didn’t like the language—it was unjustified, but not incorrect.

There were fifteen or twenty minutes of uncomfortable discussion about words, sentences. Finally he said, “But you see, it was not Sakharov alone. Maximov and I at least were involved. We issued the statement together, you must put down our names. It all falls on him. Always because he’s the famous one, he has to bear it all.” We agreed at once and changed the sentence to read “or leading intellectuals such as Sakharov, Galich, and Maximov…”

Angelina called out from her bedroom and asked me to sit with her and a neighbor for a while and watch how, on television, the dancers of the Bolshoi were stunning the delegates of the World Peace Congress. She laughed and said, “Look what you’re missing! Stuck with us!” I said, “Oh…” and hugged her. I was always short of vocabulary at the beginning of an evening and had to resort to gesture or affection. I did tell her that my parents came from Russia from the town of Uzovka, which became Stalino, which became Donetz. I announced this fact to nearly everyone I spoke to in Russia. It never interested them as much as it did me. The neighbor said, “That one, Angelina, wrote a book about the steelworkers of Donetz—for children.” “Well!” I said. I thought of that town. In my head it is always a bloody Easter and my uncle is killed. My love of country, any country, is always being interrupted in its patriotic advance by terrible remembrance.