the case. The lefties within the Green Party didn’t support her.
Before her death she was doing antiwar work in the Balkans.
The memorial service was organized and at ended by my
old pacifist friends from the anti-Vietnam War days. Petra had
been shot to death by her male companion-lover who then
shot and killed himself. The companion-lover had been a
general with NATO in Germany; Petra had been responsible
for his transformation into a pacifist.
Cora Weiss was the emcee of the event. There were seven
or eight invited speakers, most of them male or maybe al of
them but Bel a Abzug. Many of the speakers, touched by the
conversion of the NATO general to nonviolence, spoke at
length about his courage and honor; his stunning contributions
to pacifism and world peace (through renouncing NATO).
Some of them mentioned Petra in passing. One or two did
not mention her at al but called him “brother” and nearly
dissolved in tears. (And we thought that boys couldn’t cry. )
The sentimentality on behalf of the male convert to pacifism
was astonishing. Many of the speakers appeared to accept that
Petra and her companion-lover were the victims of a plot,
probably CIA, because the CIA saw him as a turncoat and
wanted to kil him - she was, as monsters say, collateral damage.
Others thought that there had been a mutual suicide pact,
that Petra had agreed - ladies first - to be killed by the former
NATO general. I waited for Bella Abzug, one of my heroes,
to speak. She spoke last, I think, but nothing she said challenged the notion of Petra as a helpmate who wanted to be kil ed. She even managed to say something nice about the boy,
though she nearly choked on the words. I was devastated.
I got up to go to the front to speak. I was not on the agenda.
Cora motioned me back to my seat and said in a loud whisper
that there wasn’t time for anyone else to say anything. She
gestured in a way that implied she couldn’t be more sor y.
I forced myself through the ropes that marked the speaking
area and kept it sacrosanct. I turned to face the audience of
mourners. Here were men I had known since I was eighteen
- from my earliest days in fighting against the war in Vietnam.
I couldn’t believe that nothing had changed - peace, peace,
peace, love, love, love; they did not understand nor would
they even consider that a man had murdered a woman.
I said that while Petra’s life had been extraordinary her
death was not; it was an ordinary death for a woman. Petra
had been kil ed by her lover, her intimate, her mate. She was
