The End by Salvatore Scibona Read Free Book Online Page B

regarded by the old lady, who adjusted her eyeglasses.
    “What? I’m interested,” he said.
    She lifted a hand.
    “I have something to add.”
    She lifted the hand another inch, and the big boy plodded to the kitchen, from where Rocco then heard the washing of the dishes.
    A week had followed with no further news. Then recently they’d published interviews with the first round of released prisoners, who described the conditions in the camps: to eat, cracked corn, one cup daily; men kept for weeks in underground cells too small to stand up or lie down in; death from untreated wounds, malnutrition, dysentery. The North Koreans and Chinese had forced them to smoke marijuana and tried to brainwash them with respect to thieving imperialists, glorious revolution, inevitable victory of the proletariat. There were colored and white soldiers together in the same huts in subzero temperatures without firewood, but it was with the colored prisoners that they had made a special reeducational effort. For example, the colored soldiers had been made to watch news footage that depicted how the police at home were handling certain crowds of colored people involved in political demonstrations.
    Some of the colored prisoners finally capitulated. They were offered houses, young wives, and jobs in Red China, where they could live out their lives in a workers’ paradise, and they accepted. And this handful of individuals represented, it would appear, the prisoners missing from the original exchange. Wasn’t that something.
    The funk of August midafternoon now permeated the dining room. From outside, the beginnings of the feast crowd in the avenue rumbled.
    How sad, Rocco concluded, and it just went to show that, unfortunately, it was true what one heard so often repeated, that a Negro did not have the patriotic feelings of a white person.
    “You or I,” she said, “would never think of leaving our native soil for a home, a spouse, an occupation on the other side of the world. The idea would never enter our heads.”
    “Well, now.”
    “Not on pain of death.”
    “Wait, wait. You misunderstand me. I have two points. My first point is that there is moving away, and then there is to defect, to make treason against the home country, and so on and so forth.”
    “I contributed cheerfully with my tax dollars to the destruction of Cassino not ten years ago, which is in my home province.”
    “That’s different. That’s not the same, and that’s different.”
    “Two points you said you had.”
    “It’s not the same, and I move on in any event to my second point, which is that these people were brought, but you and I came. Which there’s a difference. If I’m a colored person, do I salute the flag? Who knows.”
    “In fact, the importation of slaves to this country was outlawed in 1808,” she said, sucking her teeth.
    “I’m having a day today where I can see the big picture,” he said. He was not in control of his mouth in the usual way. The uncooked contents of his brain were transported so quickly out of his mouth that he had to listen to himself to find out what he was saying. There was one Rocco outside, in the world, holding forth. And there was another one down in here, observing the proceedings, feeling awake and asleep at once, and feeling—what was the word, how could you say it?—joy. However, he did not feel it at this precise moment. He’d been feeling it a couple of seconds ago, before he’d noticed. And he wanted to not notice it again, the joy, if that could be done, to not know it, to lose it and thus to get it back again, like a Christian does with his dignity when he puts his faith in the Lord.
    “Let me say politely that you are seeing the little picture,” he said, “such as picking nits over somebody that was brought versus somebody that his grandfather was brought. In the big picture, let me say politely that you are just talking like certain people.”
    “Which people?”
    “The people who say, Let