Excerpt from a story in progress:

You’re the fourth person who’s wanted to talk about that time 50 years ago. And I agree: how momentous a time. Our whole sense of our place in the universe was altered, and we all said, Nothing will ever be the same again. But it’s the same again. It’s funny how it always seems the same again no matter how many changes we live through.

And you have to remember, it didn’t seem as momentous on my end. There was a giant crisis going on at the time. We’d done it carefully, and we’d done it slowly, but we’d finally drunk fully from Mother Earth’s teats. All of central Africa around us was falling apart, and Brazzaville was growing with refugees, and every morning and every evening, they’d travel the four kilometers beneath the Congo River to Kinshasa courts and the immigration offices and small storefront organizations that provided them with lawyers and mediators to find a place for them before lawyers and mediators working for the government arrived with gendarmes and soldiers to escort them back to their borders. And that was my life back then, trying to help those refugees find a place in our nation, which for centuries had been one of the two beating hearts of Africa.

Here’s what I remember of that first day: my husband’s voice sounded in my head: Senga, you won’t believe it. It was pure luck I got the assignment. I need your help with this refugee. They tell me she speaks Hindu--” I didn’t speak Hindu; I still don’t-- “and English. They tell me it doesn’t sound like any kind of English they’ve heard.”

At that point, my mind was fully trellised, and he’d mediated through the system to my head with his sense of urgency. These days I’m not vined to the trellis, and I’m BLANK-free, so I have none of those proteins that organize your mind like system of files. I now have the same brain as the ancestors of our memories, you know, a mind that works just by association, that every time you decide to remember something, you open that memory to change. So I have no idea what project I was working on at the time; I just remember the world around us was falling apart and I was busy and didn’t want to take on something new just because my husband had called me. I must have said something because I do remember him saying, “Listen to me, my wife, this may be the one.”

Except from ABE: A Narrative

"Some of the memory is so blurred," Abe tells me, "I can't even invent what might have happened."

It's summer, 2006, and we are in Seattle, 2,500 miles from New York, from Brooklyn, from his beloved Brownsville, that neighborhood of Russian and Polish immigrants speaking Yiddish, that compost heap of one and two storied walk ups where flowered Aaron Copland, Danny Kaye, Alfred Kazin, Joseph Papp, and Murder, Incorporated. Here, in Seattle , we are talking about the war in Spain, and the choices Abe made seventy years ago.

Abe is sitting in his recliner chair, brown leather, flared armrests. He will turn 91 in October. His large body, an imposing presence well into his eighties, now seems contained in that chair. He calls it his prison. It is the only place he can sit and remain in relative comfort. His white hair, brushed back, has thinned, and his full beard, which once gave him the look of a prophet, is a now a pale ghost of itself. Beside him is a tiny desk with a telephone and lamp. This is his base of operations. In the morning he reads and writes his correspondence, an early morning tradition from his days as a full-time carpenter. His letters were once voluminous, pages of anecdote, current stances, and advice. Now carpel tunnel shrinks missive to a few well-chosen sentences, Tolstoy reduced to haiku. After breakfast--espresso with heated milk, whipped so there's a layer of foam, and toast, perhaps some yogurt to take his pills--the phone rings: friends who want to chat, high school and college students who heard him speak and now want to hear more, and journalists seeking interviews for obscure leftwing magazines. Friends will stop in, and pull up a chair opposite the desk, and Abe holds court, only abdicating his authority when Gunnel, his partner of 23 years, speaks.

I'm sitting in the brown leather coach, before me is a table of blonde wood that Gunnel built before retiring from the business of fashioning elegant kitchens and furniture. She's sitting in a recliner chair, the mate to Abe's, her feet up on a stool, reading the New York Times, muttering commentary to the day's moral shortcomings. She's a thin handsome woman, her hair cut short. She speaks with a slight Swedish accent and when she gets worked up she speaks with the taut energy of someone who's spent far too much of their life being reserved and polite.

Even though Abe and I have known each other for a quarter of a century, even though he's told me this story before, the presence of the tape recorder on the table and laptop on my thighs has made this an interview, and Abe prefers to give all interviews in private. And, at some point, we will have to talk about Ruth, so we are waiting for Gunnel to leave. "Your partner can be secure in the fact that you love them," Abe tells me after Gunnel has left to check her e-mail, "but they can still suffer retroactive jealousy."

So he says, "Let me set the scene." A flurry of anecdotes. Brownsville, Brunsvill as his parents and aunts and uncles, the first wave of immigrants, called the neighborhood. Their rich relatives in nearby neighborhoods were Democrats; they were socialists and communists. There were as few rabbis as there were bars, but the neighborhood lived an orthodox life. They ate with a knife for dairy and knife for meat, and when the bakers switched off the gas to their ovens on Friday afternoons, neighborhood women filled those empty spaces with food to be baked by the dissipating heat for the Sabbath. Brownsville smelled of horses and outhouses and the press of bodies bathed one or twice a week. It sounds of the peddlers calling out their wares, children calling out their games, mothers calling to their children; the clopping of hooves, the mechanical hum of the occasional car , the screech of brakes of the delivery trucks over on Pitcairn Avenue.

When he was seven or eight, Abe saw a man hunched over a garbage bin outside a restaurant. The man pulled out something, a slimy lump. He examined it, shook it, a few drops rained to the ground, and he took a bite and Abe watched him chew. "Yuck, I thought," Abe says, but it was more like the world had tilted. Abe had never missed a meal, and he had aunts who enjoyed pampering him with extra goodies. He ran home to ask how this could be, and his mother without answering walked into the kitchen, placed some bread, some slices of meat, and a few other items Abe no longer remembers into a bag, then went downstairs to hand it to the man. His father, when he came home, answered the questions thusly, "You'll understand when you grow older."

"But, Papa, I want to know now."

His father didn't have a good answer, and Abe longed to know such answers. But when Abe retold this story to someone else, Abe's father said, "I don't know, but I think the Communists have some good answers."