I am not a good man. I am not a bad man either. Somewhere in between, I think. Or perhaps I am a good man who has done bad things? It's something I've had occasion to ponder lately, and there are no easy answers. Things have changed with me recently and I'm trying to be what I think I should have been in the beginning. Only it's much harder than I thought.
Not everyone on this earth starts out at the same place. I was born very poor to immigrant parents from Poland and Russia and it was pure irony that our last name was Gold. Back in the old country they had been practising Jews, but they let go of all that when they came to this land, trying to fit in, trying to be something they weren't. My father was a rag picker and a tinker, sold old clothes you know, traded things to people, sharpened knives and scissors for them at a little wheel he carried with him on his cart. All day, everyday, he traveled through Londontown and sometimes into the south beyond the river.
Me, I saw how hard he worked and how people treated him and wanted none of that. I wanted an easy life of good suits and glamour and most of all respect. We lived in the East End of London close by Brick Lane and I fell in with a gangster crowd, Reggie and Colin Mills. We ran those streets for a few years, but then I met a woman and fell in love. Her father had just died and she needed someone to run the pub.
I've never been a big man, but I had a hard reputation and I could scrap with the best of them, so I retired from running with Reg and Col and frankly I was glad of it. They'd changed since we were mischief making young lads and were going into things like pimping and serious, fatal violence on people who didn't deserve it in my opinion. Me, I'd rather be making deals with people than knocking them off. Hurt and killing always bring the coppers round and I knew Reg and Colin wouldn't last much longer this side of a prison the way they was going.
My father was happy when I set up with the pub. He didn't approve of the whole gangster thing. He fancied himself something of a poet. As he walked with his cart he told, he used to make up rhymes in his head in Yiddish, the beat going along with the movement of the cart on the cobblestone street. He knew plenty of sayings too, memorized things his customers said, idioms in English which he'd ask me to explain to him. Sometimes I didn't understand them either, the references to a world so out of my reach meaning nothing to me.
Often he told me how the world is this strange, strange place, full of beauty and horror side by side, tragedy and joy, separated by no more than a hair's breathe, a sudden motion. The newborn keeping company with the dying in the hospital. And the fact that there is so much loveliness in the world makes the horror no less horrible and the fact that there is horror makes the beauty no less piercing to the heart. But that thing about everything side by side, my life's been like that, completely checkerboard, the misery and despair taking up shop next to joy and wonder with little compunction.
I went to war in 1914. I was young, newly married, in love and excited to go someplace new, having never left London before. I'd always wanted to see France. The art I was told was spectacular. My wife, Mila, was something of an amateur artist and I'd promised to send her plenty of postcards and reproductions from the museums of Paris.
I met Jefferson in basic training and we had an instant rapport that no one could quite explain. He was planning on going into the officer's intelligence core afterwards, his family being posh and my mine being quite otherwise.
If you think I should've hated him immediately just based on the way he talked, then you really don't know Jefferson. He was entirely without front or pretense, just straight up himself with everyone he met. He wanted to be an actor or a trumpet player and had a bullshit detector that saw through everything. His philosify of life, he claimed to have got from a book called Scaramouche, something about being born with a gift for laughter and a sense that the world was mad. It seemed to fit him. He thrived on chaos and loved to ferment it with a well placed quip or insouciant look. He was a confirmed shit disturber and grinning naughty boy, always pleased to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But this was all before the war, before the world really did go mad, before he was caught for real with his hands in something much worse than cookies and the people who caught him hurt him in ways I can't even begin to imagine.
Poor Jefferson had what soldiers, in a grand feat of understatement call "a bad war," but more on that later.