It was Marcus Melnikoff, well dressed and alert as ever. When he saw me he ran over to say hello, keeping firm hold of Yigal’s hand as he did so. ‘I had one hell of a time finding this boy,’ he said as we gathered around the pop-top. ‘Bruce, your room at the bar … it’s a disgrace. It was these good officers who tracked you down. Gentlemen, I would like to express my thanks …’ He took the bewildered policemen aside and handed each a thousand pesetas. ‘Spain is well run. You say, “Where’s my grandson?” and they find him.’
I asked Melnikoff where he was staying, and he pointed to the Tres Reyes, and I said you couldn’t get rooms there, and he said, ‘You can if you know the Spanish consul in Chicago and the American ambassador in Madrid. I’m a heavy contributor to the Republican party.’
‘What brings you here?’ I asked.
Grandly, silently, Melnikoff pointed to his grandson. Then he said, ‘I’ve come to take him home.’
‘I’m not going back to Detroit,’ Yigal protested.
‘Please! In front of so many, it’s not necessary to discuss family matters.’
‘I will not go home now. I said I might in mid-September.’
‘Mid-September is too late to get you into Case Institute of Technology.’
‘Who said I wanted to go to Case?’
‘Do you know how difficult it is to get in a good school these days? Only because one of the top professors at Case happens to serve as consultant to Pontiac …’
‘He can give the vacancy to some deserving black,’ Yigal said.
This unexpected reply angered Melnikoff, and he snapped, ‘I’ve heard about you at the Technion … To waste a talent like yours … Please, let’s go elsewhere. This is a public driveway.’
Yigal said, ‘The gang was planning to have dinner together. Join us.’
‘I would be honored to meet Bruce’s friends,’ Melnikoff said graciously. ‘But only if I can pick up the check.’
Monica cried, ‘You sure can. Free food, gang!’ Mr. Melnikoff laughed and asked where a decent restaurant could be found in Pamplona, and Monica had three quick suggestions, concluding, ‘But the nicest place is an old castle perched on the city walls. You’d like it, and since we know the food is excellent, so would we.’
‘You shall sit at my right,’ Mr. Melnikoff said.
The restaurant Monica had recommended was popular in Pamplona, El Caballo Blanco, situated in the old part of town on a cliff overlooking the Río Arga. It was an ancient building, beamed with old chestnut rubbed with oil, and it conveyed a sense of good living. During San Fermín it was crowded, but the manager at Mr. Melnikoff’s hotel knew the women who ran it and he had arranged a table for fourteen, which included the two college girls that Joe had picked up and the boy who was grieving over the death of Octopus.
It was a gala evening and Mr. Melnikoff proved a charming host. He told many stories of Detroit’s automobile industry, then listened as Clive explained how the musical groups in London operated. He wanted to hear the latest doings of World Mutual and congratulated me on our recent successes, and this led to our serious discussion. ‘How could a man of your interest and attainments bother with a cheap Mardi gras like this?’
‘Some of us happen to revere Pamplona.’
‘Why?’
‘As the last evocation of something important.’
He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I happen to like Miami Beach. My friends in Detroit think I’m crazy.’ He hesitated, then asked, ‘What kind of boy is Bruce?’
‘To begin with, he’s Yigal.’
‘A phase. Have you heard about his grades? In every science, almost a hundred. Perhaps a genius. We mustn’t let that go to waste.’
‘Israel produces some very fine scientists. And she needs him.’
‘We need him.’ He looked down the table to where Yigal was arguing heatedly with one of the new girls. You could see how much the old man cherished the boy. ‘Did he tell you that he was a hero in the Arab war? What’s a boy his age doing at war?’
‘Life everywhere is pretty dangerous, Mr. Melnikoff. Those riots in Detroit …’
‘A phase. The simple fact is, that boy is needed in the United States.’
‘He knows that. I can assure you that as of now his mind isn’t made up against America.’
‘Then what in hell is he doing in Pamplona? Torremolinos? That no-where place in Portugal? Has some girl got him on the string?’
‘Mr. Melnikoff, you see that pretty girl down there, the one they call Gretchen? This morning she took us on a picnic to an old monastery.’
‘I know, the policemen here called the policemen there and they said they saw you go in.’
‘Good old Spain.’
‘What?’
‘Anyway, we were discussing the fact that for the last seven hundred years pilgrims have been traveling up and down these roads … wanderers in search of meaning. That’s what Yigal’s engaged in.’
‘Some pilgrim! You see the filthy bar he’s living in.’
‘I’m living there too.’
‘You ought to be ashamed.’
‘I would guess that in the old days half the pilgrims slept in monasteries, the other half in whorehouses.’
Our conversation was broken at this point by Cato, who came to our end of the table to pay his respects to the host. Monica was with him. ‘We have to meet some kids from Denmark at the bandstand,’ he explained, and when they were gone, Mr. Melnikoff said, ‘Ten years ago I’d have been outraged by such a sight. Now I think it’s great. If I were young and had talent, I’d want to be black, and the first thing I’d do would be to marry the boss’s daughter … for the betterment of everybody.’
Long after midnight I was in my room when a knock came at my door. I supposed it was someone who had been sent to find a place to sleep, but it was Melnikoff; a taxi had brought him from the hotel. He asked softly, ‘Can I talk with you, Fairbanks?’ I nodded, and he went to the window and signaled the taxi to wait. Sitting on my bed, he said, ‘I feel as if I were lost. This dump you’re living in. This afternoon when I visited Bruce’s room, there was a strange couple in bed. I’m sure they’d been smoking marijuana. What’s our boy doing with a crew like this?’
‘He’s part of a total revolution,’ I said, not satisfied with my answer.
‘In America the college students burn down buildings. What is it?’
‘Mr. Melnikoff, I see these young people over here and I find them some of the finest kids I’ve ever known.’
‘This I cannot accept. I think a sickness has overtaken a whole generation.’ Before I could argue otherwise, he took my hands and said earnestly, ‘Tell me this. The Negroes. Why can’t they work their way up the ladder … the way my mother and father did? The way I did?’
‘Is that what you ask in Detroit?’
‘No. There I keep my mouth shut. I figure there’s something going on I don’t understand and I don’t want to look the fool.’
‘I’m glad you haven’t preached that in public. It accounts for the bad feeling the blacks have against the Jews.’
‘And that’s another thing. I’ve paid my dues to the NAACP for thirty years. Without the leadership of us Jews, the Negroes would still have no civil rights. You look at the record.’
‘But don’t tell them that because you Jews worked your way up, they could do so, too.’
‘Does Bruce feel the way you do?’
‘If he has any sense, he does. But let’s drop the Jews and blacks for a minute. I happen to know the Irish in Boston. When they came over here they were treated worse than the blacks. Yet they rose by their own power. Why? Because they had at their disposal a ladder of vertical mobility. The older Irish could get nothing from the Protestants in Boston. But those resourceful Irish developed the habit of producing beautiful girls and rugged boys who starred at football in the Boston high schools. So what happened? Whether the Boston Protestants liked it or not, their sons fell in love with the beautiful Irish girls, a
nd Harvard University gave the rugged Irish boys football scholarships, and in time those boys married their roommates’ sisters. But the black never had access to this vertical mobility. A white Irish girl can hide the fact that she’s Catholic, or she can join the Episcopal Church. But a black never could hide his color, and we allowed him to join nothing. There is no possible comparison between a Jew who got ahead and a black who didn’t. They were not even playing in the same ball game.’
‘Then you agree with the young people? There is something wrong with America?’
‘Much.’
He was silent for a long time, then said abruptly, ‘Vietnam. Shouldn’t we throw the protesters in jail?’
‘I used to live in Saigon. Tell me, has there ever been a worse war?’
‘You tell me. If you were a young man, would you burn your draft card?’
Now I was silent. We were engaged in an honest discussion, so I answered honestly. ‘It’s impossible for me to think as a young man, because I carry the stamp of my education—automatic patriotism, a certain attitude toward women, a belief in contracts, faith in the ideals that were prevalent in 1932 and were proved so dreadfully wrong. I’m an old man, encrusted with all the errors and abuses of age. If, continuing to bear my present stamp, I were suddenly made nineteen again, of course I would respect the draft and go to war. But if I were really nineteen—thinking like today’s nineteen-year-old brought up under his own system—I don’t know what I’d do … probably burn my draft card.’
Mr. Melnikoff rose, paced for some moments, then asked, ‘What do you think will happen with Bruce?’
‘I think he’ll go to the United States, study it carefully, and in the end, decide to cast his lot with Israel.’
He sat down. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I know him very well, and he is a boy who looks with cold logic at the facts.’
‘But the facts are all in favor of the United States.’
‘Physical facts, yes. Emotional, no. And this generation is not going to defraud itself where emotions are concerned.’
‘Have you advised him to stay in Israel?’
‘I’ve advised him to try the United States … but not Detroit.’
‘Why not? We have a good life there.’
‘I promise you this. If you keep him with you in Detroit, you’ll lose him.’
‘What can we do to hold him?’
‘By doing the only thing that ever holds young people—the good ones, that is—by setting them free.’
‘To what?’
‘For Yigal it could turn out to be engineering in one of the new Negro republics like Vwarda, or research at Oxford, or teaching at some college in the south. I don’t know what it will be, but unless he finds it, for himself, you’ll not be able to hold him.’
‘You talk very glibly about children. I suppose you have none of your own.’
‘I had a son. Much like Yigal. And I lost him.’
‘How?’
‘By using the same tactics you’re using with Bruce … as you call him.’
I was much agitated by my conversation with Melnikoff. I found that my attitudes were so close to those of Yigal, and Melnikoff’s so much like those of Holt, that I wanted to discuss the matter with Harvey to check whether I was on the right course in defending the boy. I was especially keen to get his guess on whether Yigal would choose to remain in the United States, because I didn’t want Melnikoff to be swayed by my own somewhat prejudiced opinion.
Before returning to my own room, therefore, I stopped by Holt’s. As I started pushing the door open—there were no locks in Bar Vasca and not too many latches that worked—I vaguely thought that he must have a suitcase or something by the door, and it was only when I had the door well opened that I realized it was a chair, propped against the door, purposefully. I started to retreat, but at this moment Holt growled at me from the bed and I, like a fool, stopped to answer. I wish I hadn’t.
For the last several days I had noticed—at the picnic this afternoon, for example, when we were discussing music, and the other day when we were arguing motion pictures—that Britta was deferential to Holt’s opinions. Politically and socially he was quite unlike the people she preferred, but in his rocklike simplicity he resembled some of the stronger men she had known in Tromsø. There was, she told me once, a certain Norwegian honesty about him. The men of Norway whom she admired had usually been wrong about everything except what mattered most—character. ‘With them you felt that if you got into a fight … Let’s suppose we were in a real fight. I could trust you to decide which side was morally right. I could depend on Cato to make a speech. I could depend on Yigal to know what to do if the going got tough. And I could depend on Joe to give me sympathy if things went wrong. Mr. Holt I could depend upon to do the fighting. In this respect he is much like my father.’
‘I thought you said you felt sorry for your father.’
‘I feel sorry for Mr. Holt.’
When I saw them together—say, at lunch or if we went out to a restaurant for dinner—well, they weren’t together in that sense, but they did usually find chairs at the same end of the table … Well, I had the suspicion that pretty little Britta had spotted Holt as her last best chance of escaping Tromsø. Certainly her affair with Joe had permanently ended, and for some years Yigal would have problems larger than girls, and her time was running out, for she had only the money that Gretchen gave her. Under those dismal circumstances, Holt must have appeared the only good bet, and I admired her perspicacity.
Holt, for his part, had never been blind to an attractive girl, and if one flattered him, as Britta had after the run that morning, he was susceptible. I should have caught on when he asked me, ‘Are Norwegians pretty much like Swedes?’ I began by explaining what I knew of Scandinavian history.
‘I don’t mean the history,’ he interrupted. ‘I mean the social customs … today. Are the Norwegians as … well … liberal?’
‘Oh, you mean sex? I don’t know.’
‘You’ve been there.’
‘Yes, and if you want to know about hydroelectric plants, old-age pensions, shipping …’
‘You study the wrong things,’ he growled, and I forgot the conversation.
Later I was to learn that after the fireworks one night, Holt and Britta had walked for miles through the darkened city, stopping at one bar after another, till nearly dawn. Britta told me, ‘I felt that he was both a little boy and a powerful man, and that’s a dangerous way for a girl to feel.’ At one of the bars there were some English students who hadn’t been to bed for three nights and they were obviously smoking pot, and Holt had asked if she smoked, and she had replied, ‘Everybody tries it.’ The phrase had struck him oddly; for the first time he vaguely understood that it was a total society in which these young people lived, a society in which it was unlikely that a young person with curiosity would avoid a confrontation with marijuana.
‘Have you tried LSD too?’ he asked her.
‘I’m not that crazy,’ she replied. He then asked her if Monica smoked, and she had fenced with him, saying, ‘That’s each girl’s problem. Ask her.’
Holt found her fascinating, a window into a new world, and since it was a world of which he had been contemptuous, he found special pleasure in exploring it with her. The overriding consideration, of course, was the fact that Britta was unusually handsome—a tall, beautifully dimensioned girl, with an enviable complexion, very white teeth, and flaxen hair that shimmered in sunlight and cast flecks of gold by candlelight.
One afternoon I was walking with them back from the bullfight, and I noticed that Britta kept stride with us as if she were our tested companion, and Holt asked suddenly, ‘You ever ride a mustang?’ and Britta replied, ‘American cars are too expensive for us in Norway.’
Now, on this night when Holt growled at me for pushing aside his chair, I saw in the light that entered the room that he had had good reason to block the door, for there was a girl in bed with h
im. Because of what I had observed in recent days, I assumed it was Britta. I was strangely relieved when I saw it was one of Joe’s college girls, wearing nothing and making no effort to draw the sheet over her face. The couple showed no embarrassment, and as I backed out, Holt said, ‘Pull the chair back against the door, if you can.’
July 12 produced one of the most dramatic runs in recent years, and this was unfortunate, because standing beside me on the plateau of the art museum was Marcus Melnikoff, who had insisted upon seeing for himself the madness that had captured his grandson. I had advised him not to come, warning him that he would neither understand nor enjoy what he saw, and Yigal had protested that the bulls held no fascination for him: ‘In fact, I think the part you’re going to see … the running … it’s insane and no rational man would bother with it.’
‘Then why are you in Pamplona?’ Melnikoff demanded as we had our cups of hot chocolate.
‘I’m like the others. I enjoy Pamplona … the music … the fireworks.’
‘I’ll see for myself,’ Melnikoff said, and now he stationed himself stubbornly on the ramp as if to say, ‘Show me.’
I told him, ‘What Yigal had to say was right …’
‘Please don’t call him Yigal.’
‘Yigal or Bruce, he’s a terrific boy and you should accept him as he is.’
‘One of the fundamental errors of our age. Anyone who accepts an eighteen-year-old boy as he is … he’s nuts. The whole purpose of life is to change people into something better.’
I changed the subject to the bulls, and explained. ‘They’ll come out of that corral down there … Look at that man by the wall. That’s the fellow we had dinner with last night. Yigal’s friend, Harvey Holt.’
‘You mean a grown man is going to make an ass of himself? What’s he do?’