Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Watch the road. Three live in flats all the time. My parents’ flat held six.” What she didn’t add was that babies weren’t raised in flats, they were raised in blocks of flats. In neighborhoods. Babies were dropped at upstairs apartments for an hour, or for three or four hours—babies, to Rose’s understanding, thrived on a density of other babies and their mothers, in rooms streaming with aunts and cousins, kitchens blazing with arguments drowning the radio. Who’d teach you to boil a diaper on a farm in New Jersey? Or, better, boil it for you?

  The city at their back, the trees whistled past, a leaf tunnel into incomprehension and fantasy.

  “You want to discover the New World, Albert, you should have a bigger map than gets you only to New Jersey.”

  “What’s wrong with New Jersey?”

  “The teeming millions come to New York, they either have the sense to stay put in the greatest city on earth or the raw stupidity and courage to go in covered wagons and stake out an Eden of the far horizon, some place with an Indian name, Dakota or Oklahoma. Or to Hollywood, a paradise worth clawing your way across a continent. A place worth getting a few people eaten along the way. Go get corrupted in the sun, like Ben Hecht. To turn your back on New York City yet only go as far as New Jersey suggests, as they say, an impoverishment of the imagination.”

  Rose found again she had opened her mouth and couldn’t quit. After that first year of marriage, it turned out her silence had an expiration date, like a package of butter. Sometimes she marveled over herself as she’d always heard herself marveled over: Oy! Where does the third Angrush sister get this fershlugginer mouth on her? From where does this girl find the material with which she berates her family? Can she be stopped?

  She couldn’t be stopped. From the day Rose learned to read and converse she’d been assembling the vocabulary with which to animate her own mother’s attitudes not by shrugs and moans, not by hands wringing or hovering at her temples, but with lashings of the English tongue. And on finding herself at a Communist meeting, where the new kind of argumentation was being enacted by young persons no different from her in background and temperament, a few even with the mouth and the brain atop a body with breasts and vagina—for why not? wasn’t history crying for the arrival of such?—on finding herself at a meeting, Rose’s voice was catalyzed. She marveled at herself but would never admit she found herself a marvel. It was merely right to be Rose Angrush. To be Rose Zimmer was no less right. History had commanded she exist. And marriage was, itself, she discovered after a year of foolish fearful silence, a highly dialectical situation.

  At their arrival at the Jersey Homesteads, Rose’s view of her prospect was in one sense improved and in another sense injured. The place was not exactly as she’d pictured, a place with barefoot Jews with faces like dust-bowl photographs. She and Albert were treated rather royally by the two organizers, evidently party men of the scurrying toady variety, who’d greeted them at the address, a low slab of house identical to many others, where Albert with no small difficulty had been directed and parked the car. The two, one with a sunburned bald spot and in overalls, a New Yorker cartoon-Jew farmer, named Something Samanowitz, the other sweating in a black suit and miniature tie, a Red clerk of the variety who greeted you at doorways with pamphlets you’d never read but couldn’t refuse, named Daniel Ostrow, ushered Rose and Albert first to the garment factory, the shop floor. Here, if you squinted to blur the sun-garlanded pine boughs at the grimed windows, the place could be taken for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, with the improvement that if you leapt from the window you’d land not ten stories onto pavement but a few feet into dust and manure, the pervasive smell of which intensified as they advanced to the central farm.

  Never mind the smell. Their guides might be imagining they gave a Soviet tour to John Reed and Emma Goldman. They were as solicitous of Albert’s and Rose’s regard as could be imagined; in her naïveté concerning the day’s agenda, Rose first ascribed their fantastic deference to the borrowed Packard. But none of this mattered. It was no good, it wouldn’t work. This wasn’t Latvia or the Ukraine, it was New Jersey, and Rose’s snobbism concerning this frontier’s mediocrity couldn’t be assuaged.

  Really, the place was wretched, dismal. Political devotion, among those who’d migrated to the Jersey Homesteads, ranged from progressive fellow traveler to the hard-line cell member, but who’d have time to do much organizing while drowning in broadcloth scraps and chicken shit, or while shaving grayish root vegetables, stuff you’d be better advised to toss into the rubbish, in order not even to boil them for broth but to make a “salad”? This was what the Depression had done to them all. This was what the Depression had done to Communism. When it should have stoked the revolution, it had smothered it—precisely because it was in the parlor that the nascent flame of American revolution could be nurtured, and it was in the bovine, calloused imagination of the American worker that it went to flicker and die. In a way, Rose had to revise her thinking: This was a frontier as distant as the Great Plains, for even an hour into New Jersey you couldn’t detect the throb of European history anywhere at all. The American story, all over again. Set out into the dusty blandness of this starving utopia and you instantly began dying from lack of mental oxygen.

  They’d come to the vast central field, where, it now dawned on Rose, some scheduled activity—the occasion for their visit on this particular day rather than some other—was to take place. Not a lawn but a field, one that she felt certain had been not mowed but hayed, by a thing dragged behind a tractor, so that the ground on which folding chairs had been set up and blankets thrown down was pimpled and prickly, where fieldstones lay exposed by the sheering away of whatever growth had covered them before, and where a low wooden riser for a band or speaker had been set up. Could the Jews of the Homesteads be so daft as to intend a square dance, to persuade themselves they’d really gone west? Now they emerged from the low concrete houses with baskets, these farm Jews, these forest Jews, these tailors whose wives seemed to her to be begging with their whole bodies for the social sanctuary of a tenement to give articulate form to their suffering, suffering that instead was to fester here in the merciless sunlight. God help them. Around the riser the women straightened their blankets as well as they could be straightened on this broken ground. Then laid out baskets and in the sun-dappled quiet of the afternoon set themselves to the task of what could only be called picnicking.

  The little riser with bunting sat empty apart from three folding chairs. What was meant to occur there? Rose hoped to leave before finding out. Anticipating boredom, she’d retrieved from the car her volume of Lincoln: She’d lose herself in Sandburg’s prose before another car-sickening ride back to civilization. She’d seen enough. The day that had begun with Rose having to take the mad prospect with some seriousness had met its end. The certainty that she would never live in this place she felt as a cord of titanium in her soul.

  Albert led her to the blanket occupied by the Jew farmer in dungarees, Samanowitz, and his wife, Yetta. Rose tried to radiate preemptive disinterest in the social niceties. Yetta Samanowitz resembled a grainy black-and-white photograph of someone’s grandmother from some town neither Polish nor Russian, a figure glimpsed in a frame or locket, except this gray figure managed to lean toward you and offer a plate featuring egg salad and pickles and chopped liver on toasts—God help you, to eat chopped liver in this heat!—and say in perfectly normal English, “Take a little something. And a glass of tea. You should have brought a hat for the sun, I can go inside and fetch you one if you like.”

  “No, that’s fine.” Rose’s cord of adamancy only tightened like it was bolted at one end to the heavens and, at the other, to the earth’s core, with this blasted lawn beaded between them. Yet at the next turn, when Albert and their two escorts, the farmer and the schlepper clerk, ascended the small stage in the dire sunlight and waved their hands and she saw that Albert was to speak to the assembly—such assembly as it was, the scattered souls melting on the straw,
these Jews like insects paralyzed in daylight—Rose felt that cord wrench itself into a pretzel shape.

  Albert and the farmer sat in chairs while the clerkly one stood and coughed loudly into his hands, without a microphone to gain their attention, yet finding no difficulty silencing all but the children. He introduced Albert Zimmer, special guest from New York City, “an important organizer and speaker.” Out here, importance could be claimed for Albert, Rose supposed, in a one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind sort of way. Perhaps that was the draw. How long after he relocated here the residue of such borrowed importance would attach to him was another question. This place being where importance, it seemed to Rose, came to die.

  Albert thanked his introducer, Ostrow, and the farmer Samanowitz, seated behind and who hadn’t spoken, then thanked all gathered for welcoming him here “on such a day.” Why such a day Rose couldn’t imagine, but Albert was graced with a little applause of the sort managed by an aggregation of human beings congratulating themselves for existing in the first place.

  “The very first thing I wish to say to you may come as a surprise,” Albert began. “To begin with I want to tell you my high opinion of you, as workers and families, but also as Americans. You are all, seated before me, outstanding Americans, better than you know. Better than many. I say this because I’ve heard stories, in preparing to meet with you, and even as recently as during my tour this morning, that in the neighboring towns they won’t sell to you if they learn you’re from the Homesteads. Because, they say, you’re Communist here. I’ve heard the Monroe Township won’t let the children attend their schools. Because you’re Jewish and suspected to be Red.”

  “Speak Yiddish!” came a cry from the field. Some scant applause followed.

  Yetta leaned in to Rose’s ear, startling her. “Someone will always say this, half our public meetings.” Her tone was shrugging. “The other half, the meeting’s in Yiddish, and someone yells ‘Speak English.’ You can’t win.”

  “He couldn’t speak Yiddish he wanted to,” said Rose. Yetta fell silent. Rose, by way of partial apology, and despite her Brothers Grimm suspicion that to eat of this place was to accept the contamination of its possibilities into her body, against every instinct of her refusenik mind reached for a toast smeared with chopped chicken liver and pan-browned onions. It was fresh. She was starved.

  “Of course, you may also wonder who it is who has come to you and presumed to affirm your accomplishments as Americans. I hasten to confess I’m nobody in particular, bear no authority before you except that as an American, another citizen of this land but also of the world, a citizen like yourselves of human civilization, and therefore entitled not only to speak to you as one equal to another but entitled to my beliefs. To share my beliefs, against prejudice such as that you’ve encountered, and beliefs in favor of what we come here this great day to celebrate—freedom.”

  Okay, thought Rose. Quit setting the table and put out a meal. Albert was a great setter of tables, but the meals were fewer. Still, he somewhat came into his own there, on the platform, high forehead glinting with perspiration but whole frail being also glowing slightly with the regard of the scattered bodies. Their selves flowing toward him and that essence of the lost city that he represented. The citadel of cobblestone and language, dense with intellection and, no matter how poor they had been there, a paradise compared with this squalid sharecropping into which they’d been duped.

  Albert had talents as an orator, though this was a different thing, completely, from possessing any powers of looking you in the eye and speaking with conviction, or of going toe to toe with Rose or any other potent challenger to his bromides. In this she ran rings around him. It was only here, in the middle distance, that Albert could resuscitate some measure of Rose’s regard. Seated close in the car he’d been too utterly enclosed within Rose’s obscuring field of acute and ravening disappointment. Here, up on the riser, she could glimpse his charm, a blend of loquacity and elusiveness.

  This was the case in their bed life as well. He’d impregnated Rose trying not to, as she was driven mad by his persistent squirting on her thighs and belly, the indirection of what ought not to be indirect, and so had madly clutched him to her a crucial instant longer. Now, in his attempts to repeat the first accidental success, that which threw them into this panic of a marriage, his diligent wish to assuage her and her sisters and his mother by the dowry of his seed, Albert struck Rose as a man who was invisible when going the main path. Indirection was all he had. Coming at her straightaway she could barely feel him, and the seed reached no target inside her, vanished instead as in a parlor trick.

  Albert flickered in Rose’s desire like a radio going in and out of signal.

  “Let me ask: What nation possesses a richer heritage of revolutionary struggle for human freedom than our own United States? Yet the revolutionary gold in the ore of American history, so rich and abundant, has, like the material treasure of capital itself, been hoarded by the forces of reaction. By default, the revolutionary camp has been unable to claim for itself any continuity with American tradition. This is why your homestead is so heartening a signpost, why you, though you may not know it, though as your head is lowered to the fields you may feel you’re merely eking out an individual subsistence, you’re struggling for far more than one factory or one farm. More even than one new town forged in the countryside, but rather for a shining prospect of material communalism for the whole people of this land, even for those who suspect and denounce you, those whose prejudices blind them to dreams of freedom. This is why I’ve come to honor you with my admiration and bring you encouragement from those whose admiration you may not be able to feel from this distance. On this day above all.”

  Say it, Albert, now, go ahead and say it. Explain that to scrape their potatoes from clods of earth makes them activists.

  “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”

  Did anyone, among the sun-slackened arrangements of bodies on blankets, shout out any protest at the tired slogan? Did they interrupt with requests that he speak in Yiddish or for something more nourishing than recruitment ideology? No, they lay paralyzed by his flattery. Though Rose supposed others here might be silenced by a cynicism not unlike her own. For now, as the fulsome arrangement of People’s Front clichés were produced, Rose felt herself not only turning off to Albert as she’d been briefly turned on but experiencing a revising revelation about the facts of their mission here today. It was that which caused the cord of adamancy she’d felt within her now to move like a band to her throat, imposing not only silence but a struggle even to breathe.

  For she realized now that this speech of his was a party errand, product of a party command. No surprise in that. Ostrow and Samanowitz not merely tour guides but Albert’s party contacts.

  Albert’s sudden learning to drive, bumping into curbs for a month seeking his license, that had been a party errand, too. Which meant, as she followed the logic, that the whole proposition to move here had been a party errand, one originating not in recent days but known to him months before springing it upon her. She could hear every word, as if in a stream the secret dictation now poured into her ear. Consider the situation of a town full of abject Jews, ringed by the yahoo suspicion that they were Reds, as if merely to erect their winsome farm and factory dream was equal to traitorous affiliation with the Soviet. Given this plight, and their terrible weakness, why wouldn’t this town choose the strength that came from the party? Why not opt for the support that would then flow from New York, and from farther east than New York. This was a chance to enlist a fully CP municipality, America’s first!

  And not one word of any of it had been made known to Rose, despite her place, ostensibly at Albert’s side, in their cell.

  All these specifics suffused into the general knowledge of what she already knew: the things a party cell required of its women. In regular behavior the women were always to avow and affirm the primary myth, which stated that in the gleaming future toward whic
h their efforts all pointed, the divisions and inequities between man and woman would be effortlessly solved. Meanwhile, in the nearer term, the party, with its genius for skulduggery, routinely destroyed the tender trust of a marriage between so-called equals.

  As if Albert had ever been capable of inhabiting such a trust in the first place. Rose doubted it.

  “On this day, of all days—” What in God’s name was he talking about? Then Rose squared Albert’s words with the limp bunting arraying the riser on which he stood. All day she’d been seeing the flags, thrust out on poles and draped from porch rails, yet only registered them as a trite irritant, at a level well beneath the range of her exasperation at the foliage. Yet of course, this day of all days. Their Packard expedition rearranged itself one last time and shame flooded Rose’s body, both at her obtuseness and at her therefore helpless participation in the most inane of rituals.

  It was the Fourth of July.

  How then, if it was the party’s desire that they live in the Jersey Homesteads, did they land in Sunnyside Gardens instead?

  They’d underestimated Rose’s strength.

  If the cell’s intentions had been conveyed to Rose only by the secret telephone of her husband, she’d reverse the charges. Let the cell hear from her by means of the same telephone. No. A fairly simple message, requiring no Soviet cipher to unravel.

  For Rose, a student of no, this was a sort of graduation day, a dissertation in one syllable. A no of her own personal devising, no longer merely the no of her inheritance, the no of her forebears. With it she need be audible not merely to Albert but to some functionary in Moscow, one who could be envisioned as standing with a seashell to his ear, monitoring her husband through oceanic vastnesses. Rose had to make her reply audible against the force of a command she herself affirmed as historical in its imperatives, rather than pretending it didn’t exist. To refuse was to say: I exist not only to subsume myself to this cause but to flourish within it, and I want no chickens.