"Yes."
"Then—fight."
That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then—and kids are brave if they have brave parents.
In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward. Who's different?
Who's different without being more coward?
There was the time in Warsaw.
My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier—like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.
In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them—in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia—in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths—in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes—we talked too much.
We drank too much and talked too much—to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner—waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia. Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind—being noncommittal at the outset—we had seen better.