TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 188

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 25, 2000000000007


Dear Friends of the atmosphere,

	We prevented my mother from doing any 
work during the party, but after everyone left, 
she sneaked around cleaning things.  I was 
already in bed, having left the party early, 
because I was just too exhausted.  I saw that I 
wasn't contributing to the conversation, and I 
was just counting the minutes before I could slip 
away and crawl into bed.  This morning, I came 
downstairs, and the evidence that my mother had 
been busy was everywhere.  She apologized, said 
she felt energetic last night and just had to 
clean up.  These compulsions.  I think she's 
where I got it from.  Have to be helping.  Have 
to be doing.  Can't sit still.  That's part of 
what shpilchas is.





 
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Growing up with WWIII

	All the time I was growing up, I was fed 
the frightening information that my country had 
an enemy.  It was the communists.  They were the 
Russians and the Chinese, but mostly the 
Russians.  Evil incarnate.  They were bent on 
war, and had all their missiles aimed at the 
cities in the United States.  Nowhere was safe. 
Nowhere was safe because as we read and heard and 
watched on television, an atomic bomb did not 
just destroy the vicinity in which it was 
dropped, it destroyed everything for tens of 
miles, and beyond that, the radiation would kill 
you.  If enough atomic bombs were dropped, then 
the entire world would vanish in a period of 
hours.  Every man woman and child, every dog, cat 
and rabbit, every hippo, camel and crocodile 
would be wiped out, some lucky ones evaporated 
instantly, others doomed to linger from the after 
effects until a hideous death.  We read the 
stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the stories 
that survivors told about exploding eyeballs and 
sheets of burned skin peeling off, of bodies 
floating in the river, of the shadows of human 
beings cast forever on sidewalks.  It was the 
nightmare of my generation.  It wasn't something 
that came along after we were seasoned veterans 
of the global politic, but it was what we teethed 
on, what we accepted from the time we began to be 
dimly aware of the world around us.  As we 
learned there were other countries, we learned 
that these countries would be melted by World War 
III.  It was the ultimate in finality.

	"Calm down!  You're acting like it's World War III."

	The end of everything, right there on the 
horizon, something that was as close as a misstep 
by some night watchman who stood guard over the 
button.  In his sleep, if he turned over and his 
hand shot out, he could accidentally press the 
button and end the world.  What we had to do in 
order to have some faith that we would all be 
here in five years was have some sort of faith in 
the leadership of the United States and the 
Soviet Union.  We had to believe that there 
wouldn't be some nitty little issue over which 
the two super powers would be arguing, when one 
or the other had a fit of pique, launched an 
attack and finished us all off.  One or the other 
would start it, one missile headed for a 
strategic city and then the other would launch 
the retaliation, a hundred missiles aimed at a 
hundred cities.  Of course, the first country 
would send over the rest of their crop of bombs, 
and that would be World War III, a conflict that 
would never be written up in a history book.  No 
poor student would ever have to memorize the 
date.  There would be no dates from then on, 
because dates are figments of the human 
imagination, and there wouldn't be any humans 
left to imagine anything.

	I had no faith in my country.  I 
suspected the propaganda because nothing was as 
evil as the Russians were made out to be.  There 
were people there.  They all got up in the 
morning and faced their days wanting to survive 
them, just like we did.  I could not believe 
there was a nation filled with wicked people who 
all wanted me dead, who all wanted me to live 
under communist domination, by conversion or 
force.  Didn't it seem to me that my country was 
just as bent on converting or forcing the 
Russians to live the way we did?  I trusted 
neither.  The leaders of the countries, in fact, 
appeared to be duller than their citizenry.  They 
were thugs, idiots, willing to burn the world to 
save a face or two.

	So I lived in constant fear.  When a 
plane went overhead, there was always the 
possibility that it was carrying a bomb, the 
initial bomb of World War III.  And every day I'd 
wake up thinking that it could be the last. 
Would we all make it through the day?  In school, 
there were air raid drills.  The terrible sirens 
would go off.  We were all rehearsed in the duck 
and cover.  Stay away from the windows; they 
could explode.  Get under your desk, protect your 
head.  It was superstitious behaviour.  Even this 
fourth grader knew that when the bombs came 
blossoming, no desk could protect me.  It was 
laughable.

	I used to shake, actual shivering, from 
fear of everyone's imminent demise.  And I'd go 
to bed at night feeling unsafe internationally as 
well as familially.  If my father didn't get me, 
then the Russians would.  In October of 1962, the 
two ignorant nations locked horns over the Cuban 
missile crisis.  It didn't matter who was right 
or wrong.  I remember the pointlessness of people 
arguing over who was in the right.  And how would 
being right make a difference?  We were all let 
out of school to go home to our families.  Right 
or wrong, we were to be with our families when 
the bombs went off.

	On television, the newscaster said, "Good 
evening.  In a matter of hours, we could all be 
in the middle of a nuclear war."  He smiled.

	A shudder went through all of us, except 
for my Grandma Fannie, my mother's mother, who 
was staying with us for a few days.  She was 
practically nodding off in front of the T.V. 
When it came time to go to bed, none of us kids 
could sleep.  We all piled into my sister's room 
where my grandmother was sleeping in one of the 
beds.  I stared at the ceiling.  I shook all 
over.  My sister moaned.  I couldn't figure out 
if I wanted the light on or off.  Somewhere those 
night watchmen in the United States and in Russia 
were poising, their fingers over the special 
little buttons.  They were waiting for a 
telephone call from headquarters.

	I imagined the night watchmen.  They had 
maybe wives and families.  Was there any chance 
that both of them would hear the call to launch, 
and decide to fold their hands in their laps, 
saving the world?  How could a living thing press 
that button?

	We rustled around under and on top of the 
bed sheets, sighing, groaning, shivering.  My 
grandma sat up in bed.

	"Go to sleep.  Nothing is going to happen."

	"How do you know?" I asked, my voice breaking.

	"Because I've been around a lot longer 
than you have and I've seen it all.  Nothing is 
going to happen."

	An ease settled in my heart.  But then I 
shook it off.  "But what if you're wrong?

	"So sue me," she said.

	Nothing happened.  Krushchev was the 
great peace maker.  He backed off of delivering 
the missiles to Cuba.  Everyone exhaled, then 
inhaled.  The night watchmen took their fingers 
away from their buttons.  After a few hours, I 
stopped shaking all over, and started worrying 
about what my father was up to.

	The newscaster never showed his face again.



 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net