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and won a Photoplay gold medal as fare for the entire family.
The queue that had lined up to see the film stretched from the ticket booth
across the front of the building, past a candy store with a window full of
popcorn balls in half a dozen different flavors, past a laundromat, around a
corner and three-quarters of the way down the block.
It was a quiet crowd. People in lines are always a quiet crowd. Arch and Frank
were quiet. They
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.txt waited, with Arch listening to the transistor, and Frank, Frank Amato,
smoking and shuffling.
Neither paid much attention to the sound of engines roaring until the three
Volkswagens screamed to a halt directly in front of the theater. Then they
looked up, as the doors slammed open and out poured a horde of young boys.
They were wearing black. Black turtleneck T-shirts, black slacks, black Beatle
boots. The only splash of color on them came from the yellow-and-black
armbands, and the form of the swastika on the armbands.
Under the staccato directions of a slim Nordic-looking boy with very bright,
wet gray eyes, they began to picket the theater, assembling in
drill-formations, carrying signs neatly printed on a hand-press, very sturdy.
The signs said:
THIS MOVIE IS COMMUNIST- PRODUCED! BOYCOTT IT!
GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM! STOP RAPING AMERICA!
TRUE AMERICANS SEE THROUGH YOUR LIES!
THIS FILM WILL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN! BOYCOTT IT!
and chanting, over and over: "Dirty little Christ-killer, dirty little
Christ-killers, dirty little Christ-killers ..."
In the queue was a sixty-year-old woman; her name was Lilian Goldbosch.
She had lost her husband Martin, her older son Shimon and her younger son
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Avram in the furnaces of
Belsen. She had come to America with eight hundred other refugees on a
converted cattle boat, from
Liverpool, after five years of hopeless wandering across the desolate face of
Europe. She had become a naturalized citizen and had found some stature as a
buyer for a piece-goods house, but her reaction to the sight of the always
remembered swastika was that of the hunted Jewess who had escaped death--only
to find loneliness in a new world. Lilian Goldbosch stared wide-eyed at them,
overflowing the sidewalk, inundating her eyes and her thoughts and her sudden
thismoment reality;
arrogant in their militant fanaticism; and as one they came back to her--for
they had never left her--terror, hatred, rage. Her mind (like a broken clock,
whirling, spinning backward in time)
sparklike leaped the gap of years, and her tired eyes blazed yellow.
She gave a wretched little scream and hurled herself at the tall blond boy,
the leader with the gray eyes.
It was a signal.
The crowd broke. A low animal roar. Men flung themselves forward. Women were
jostled, and then joined, without reason or pausing to consider it. The
muffled sound of souls torn by the sight of stalking (almost goose-stepping)
picketers. Before they could stop themselves, the riot was underway.
A burly man in a brown topcoat reached them first. He grabbed the sign from
one of the picketers, and with teeth grating behind skinned-back lips, for an
instant an animal, hurled it into the gutter. Another man ripped into the
center of the group and snapped a fist into the mouth of one of the boys
chanting the slogan. The boy flailed backward, arms windmilling, and he went
down on one knee. A foot on the end of gray sharkskin trousers--seemingly
disembodied--lashed out of the melee. The toe of the shoetook the boy in the
groin and thigh. He fell on his back, clutching himself, and they began to
stomp him. His body curled inward as they danced their quaint tribal dance on
him. If he screamed, it was lost in the roar of the mob.
Also in the queue were two high school boys. Arch; Frank.
They had been alone there, among all those people waiting. But now they were
part of a social unit, something was happening. Arch and Frank had fallen back
for an instant as others rushed forward; others whose synapses were more
quickly triggered by what they saw; but now they found their reactions to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]