Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “The thing is, Lydia and I were talking, and I realized my father’s Bowery album really is in this wild sense a precursor to the movement. The Forgotten are like a rough draft for the Ninety-Nine Percent, right?”

  “Tell me more,” said Cicero, then gagged himself with bear claw before he could further betray his own interests.

  “Well, if you’d been to Zuccotti Park, or with us in Philly, you’d see it instantly. Whatever anyone intended at the start, once the camping began the movement was all about making the, you know, urban homeless visible again. Showing what the typical citizen has in common. Except first we had to learn it ourselves, by living on the streets.”

  Tom Waits growled on the Lyrical Ballad’s stereo, offering his art-school paraphrase of the lament of a hobo, larynx scarred by reflux—the exact vocal equivalent of blond dreadlocks. Cicero suddenly felt he might drown in recursions of minstrelsy, blackface of a very particular kind: appropriations of the Negro vagabond. Black bum, hot cultural ticket at last. If only Tommy had lived to see it. The youngest Gogan Boy had never, so far as Cicero’d heard, ever spent a single night “living on the streets”; Cicero wondered how many nights Sergius had, no matter his claim of acquaintance with Occupy Philadelphia. Lydia, on the other hand—Cicero could smell the girl.

  She interrupted plowing through her coffee cake to speak up now. “Sergius was obviously meant to walk by at just that moment. I mean, I know about a billion songs.”

  The ironies sank in through a certain dawning panic. Sergius had arrived at Cumbow seeking familial inspiration. Failing to drag it from Cicero, he’d scraped it off the sidewalk anyhow. This a direct result of Cicero’s non-invitation to Sergius to share in sauvignon blanc and gnocchi at the Five Islands Grill: Cicero’s reward for not dining with Sergius was to breakfast with Sergius’s new girlfriend, aka the Ghost of Tom Joad. A girl whose frank and unapologetic gaze, whose precipitous familiarity, whose braggadocio reminded Cicero of no one so much as, yes, a grade-Z Miriam Gogan. Not that Cicero was inclined to offer Sergius that comparison. Let him live in blind pursuit of his mother. Only let him please not persist in this sport in Cumbow, Maine.

  “I went to Cicero’s class this morning,” Sergius told Lydia. “My first time sitting in a college classroom in, hell, twenty years.” If Sergius ingenuously emphasized the distance between his age and the girl’s, this didn’t prevent Lydia from shining steadily in his direction. Cicero supposed that if Lady Billion Songs had a hard-on for the corpse of Tommy Gogan, then this handy substitute was youthful by contrast.

  “Cool. So what do you teach, Cicero?”

  She was the first person her age to address him as other than Professor Lookins in a while. “Why don’t you ask Sergius to tell you about it.” And close your mouth while you chew.

  “Well, I hadn’t read the texts, but it didn’t seem to matter.” Sergius’s tone was jaunty—he and his Occupy girl seemed incapable of other than moonish chirping in each other’s presence. So the fact that he was organizing a rebuke was slow to register with Cicero. “I was expecting some kind of Marxist-influenced literary theory, but this was more of a kind of sob session, honestly.”

  “It was political in the highest degree,” said Cicero, fierce now. “You might want to acquaint yourself with what’s known as the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities, Sergius. What you’re disdaining with the word sob is as political as it gets, the passage of exiled sentiment from one subject’s body to another’s. The transmission of affect.” This was truth and no good at all. Armoring himself in hostility turned Cicero’s sincerest allegiances to jargon and junk, to ash in his mouth. Besides, he hadn’t attended well enough to his students’ testimony, had walled himself from their sob stories behind the tempered shield of his own.

  “Well, I’m surprised to hear you defend it, because I thought you pretty much went down in flames. I figured it was all some kind of perverse demonstration on my behalf.” Cicero saw that inside the crimson theater of his red hair, freckles, and sunburn, Sergius’s cheeks had flushed with hot adamancy. “I felt sorry for your students, and then at the end I felt sorry for you, which is the only reason I invited you to breakfast, but I guess that was a mistake.”

  “You invited me here?” Cicero had to work to keep himself from exploding.

  “You’re pretty patronizing, Cicero, but you seem to forget I’m a teacher, too.”

  “I had thought you were here as a songwriter. But I notice you didn’t even pack a guitar. A teacher, then, sure, I’ll take it on faith. But today you visited my classroom, which put you in the role of student.”

  Lydia said, “I’ve gotta say, it sounded cool as shit, to me. I keep meaning to audit some classes in one of these college towns. I should’ve started with yours.”

  Sergius accepted diversion with plain relief. “Lydia and I wondered if you knew—have any of your students gotten involved with Occupy? She was saying they aren’t a real presence at the camp.”

  Cicero ignored the question. His students regarded the movement, to his knowledge, with the agnosticism they’d feel toward a social media website from which no peer had yet sent them an invite. “What is it that brings you to Cumbow in the first place, Lydia?”

  “New England has twelve Occupy encampments still going strong. It came to me in a dream that me and my Gibson should occupy in all of them, at least for a few nights, so I am, which has been pretty crazy but it’s also been this totally incredible experience which I wouldn’t have missed for the world. It’s exactly like you said, Cicero: Bodies carry messages from one place to another. I actually have to get down to Portland today, so that’s another reason it was such perfect timing that Sergius came along.”

  “You’re driving her to Portland?”

  Sergius disregarded Cicero’s scorn with no seeming effort. “Yeah. In fact, we’d probably better get on the road, Lydia. Because first we’ve got to pick up your stuff.”

  “Ready when you are,” said Lydia through a mouthful of crumbs. “Nothing but my ax and my bedroll.”

  “I’m already loaded out of your guest room, Cicero. I left the house unlocked, I hope that’s okay.”

  “The whole state of Maine is unlocked.”

  “Great. Well, thanks, then. I’ll catch you later.” Sergius offered Cicero his hand—dead fish, meet dead fish. So the romance was for Sergius concluded, the feeling between them, at last, mutual: Chalk up another triumph to affect.

  Still, though it wasn’t yet eleven in the morning, one further mortification awaited Cicero this day. Now standing above them, wholly unbidden but undeniably there, Vivian Mitchell-Rose, the associate dean of students, Cicero’s fellow person of color in Cumbow’s desert of same, and, more than once in a while, his kvetching partner, in tones as scalding as could have been worst-feared by white folks seeing them lean their big dark heads together over a restaurant table or behind a half-open office door. Fellow member of the unacknowledged Guardians Association of academia—or perhaps they more resembled the Wandering Boys or Buffalo Soldiers, since blacks in academia threw themselves no ballroom galas or Fourth of July picnics, worked in general a stonier side of the street. The associate dean had been approaching to greet him, then, at absorbing a blast of their corner table’s shitty vibe, halted. The Lyrical Ballad was too small for a full and covert retreat, however. You’d barely hope to pull off one of those within a mile radius of campus. So Vivian had frozen, mid-floor, giving a raw checking-out to Cicero’s breakfast companions.

  The sensation drew him cascading back again. Though not, for once, to the soda-counter stools. No comic book, no egg cream. This time he was out in the blaze on the pavement, Rose at his side, monologuing on who-knew-what civic outrage, the two in full stride as they passed a schoolyard on a Saturday morning. There, on the other side of the cyclone fence, laying out of a stickball game, fingers through the mesh to stare as Cicero and Rose went past, a black kid Cicero knew. Fellow person of color in Sunnyside’s desert of same, etc. One of Cicero
’s occasional-almost-friends—it did happen from time to time, before Cicero’s fey bookishness canceled the hope that this hefty cop’s kid might be useful to have at one’s back. The look that crossed the gap between them that day, through the cyclone fence, was one that said, What’s this company I find you in today? What have you got yourself into? And will I make things better or worse for you if I open my mouth, if I even admit I know you, in front of the crazy-ass white folk? He only had to blink away the involuntary fantasy to see the same script scrolling as if in teletype across Vivian Mitchell-Rose’s eyes. Maybe, it occurred to Cicero only now that Sergius had quit asking, maybe Cicero’d blown his chance to offload Rose from his brain, shunt her into another’s. Maybe he should have tried. Yet how could he believe it could be accomplished? Rose Zimmer was an affect beyond Cicero’s powers of transmission.

  2 From the Stasi Files

  14 October 1958, Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  Imagine my surprise to receive your letter and discover that the girl I remember has been transformed into a young woman capable not only of making such astute and forthright inquiry of her long-silent father but of proposing to undertake to visit here so that we might come to know each other. Or, less to know each other again, truly, than to meet for the first time. Let me begin by saying with delight that, yes, you must come. I’ll not burden you with an account of my decision not to interfere with you and your mother, after the silence enforced by the first phase of my repatriation. Let me instead say that the happy shock of contact has now unloosed a reserve of hopeful feeling. May we close the gap of years, and of national boundaries, that has divided us for too long! For now I’ll reply to your questions as directly as possible in such a letter as this, while knowing that a fuller understanding will be possible when we sit together and talk, as we must.

  Our striving on behalf of international Communism during the years leading up to the war was, however sincere, deeply naïve. How could it be anything other, given the situation of a Communism attempting to bring itself into consciousness from within the American atmosphere? Each of us working in the U.S. party felt the sway of a seductive individualism, one not so far from a kind of drug or sickness—or, perhaps, a messianic religious fervor. (Possibly this may only be viewed clearly from a vantage such as I’ve attained in Europe.) The brutality of the period of the blacklist and McCarthyism, which I was mercifully spared, represented at least a kind of scales falling from the eyes, for any honest Socialist operating under the American system should understand himself destined to be persecuted as an enemy of that system—such enmity being the precise measure of his honesty. This, your mother and I lacked wholly.

  It was during my period of reeducation that I discovered, for the first time in life—late, but it’s never too late!—my passion for history. And more, a passion for scholarship: both for working with first sources, with my nose to the earth, in constructing a People’s history, and a passion for teaching others. Americans are a deeply (or should I say “shallowly”?) ahistorical people. This luxury no European could afford. My immediate subject, and a tragic one, is that which lies to hand all around me: the near-complete destruction of Dresden in the conflagration. Like citizens of every nation, the German civilian population found itself the victim of Nazism, but it was Dresden’s special “honor,” alone in Europe, with only Hiroshima and Nagasaki for company, to be on the front lines of the Cold War, and to serve as a horror-tableau of Allied might.

  So you must understand, dearest Miriam, your father has in a manner returned to “school”—history being that school from which we never graduate. I am as much a student as you. I must also explain to you how this is in one very literal case the truth: This institute, where one comes to be debriefed after a border crossing so unorthodox as my own, and in which one is typically expected to dwell for several months of orientation and preparation for a fully integrated life in the East, has in my case become a permanent home. It was my fate not only to discover my avocation here but to choose to stay and impart it to others. This place, pleasantly located on the eastern outskirts of Dresden, is an old campus, its grounds comprised of elegant eighteenth-century buildings, a rare instance of those spared, by dint of the countryside locale, during the firebombing. The Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, though it goes among those of us here by a nickname, Gärten der Dissidenz, which I suppose one might translate as “Dissident Gardens,” however droll this may sound to you. It is not a solitary life, but one I share with Michaela, my second wife. We became acquainted when Michaela came to work here in the administrative offices; she is a number of years younger than myself—another sense in which I remain a student of life! Please know you’ll be made welcome amid my new family.

  Your plan to visit elsewhere in Europe before crossing to Dresden by train is a good one. If you stay first with your friend’s family in London, then cross by ferry to Belgium, you’ll be easily able to visit any number of cities by international rail. May I request, only, that you arrange to make a stop in Lübeck, and visit there the “Buddenbrooks House,” made so famous by Thomas Mann? As you surely have been told, in the house next door the opera singer and the banker lived in great innocence and splendor—I mean, of course, your grandparents, as I prefer to remember them. In that house I was born. Lübeck was among the first cities to receive Allied air fire, the opening act of the nightmare destined to reach its climax here in Dresden. In that way your journey may serve as a pocket allegory of our family but also of the subject to which I’ve dedicated my research, and prelude to everything we’ll wish to talk of.

  Please write again when you have an exact date for your arrival, so that Michaela and I may prepare your hospitality.

  I wish you well.

  “Dad”

  2 March 1961, Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  I send my heartiest congratulations on your marriage! I suppose I must accustom myself to being continually surprised by your news and I will admit that despite everything I am still adjusting to your maturity. No doubt next you will declare that you have made me a grandfather. If so, as suggested previously I’ll arrange a journey to Canada so that I may meet the child, to spare your new family a longer journey. I am also gratified by the swiftness with which you rebounded from the awkwardness with the German boy, into a next romantic adventure. I’ll venture that you remind me of myself! I am holding you in my arms as not only a daughter but a newfound friend.

  After the admonishments I received from you both in person and by post I should hardly dare mention your mother, but as I’m certain you’re aware the scene you present in your letter is an irresistibly comical one, however discomfiting it surely will have been to undergo. The image of Rose’s abrupt appearance in the home of the Negro minister with a rabbi in tow, in order to demand that your nuptials be legitimated at the last possible instant in the Jewish faith, has the quality, I must say, of a poem. For Rose everything was always, by its nature, its own opposite. This sudden fawning before religious authority, a legacy she had by her own account overturned sometime in her teenage years, is rather priceless evidence. Yet in the truest sense Rose would have been the only authority in the vicinity, the rabbi and your Negro officiant notwithstanding. You do not say (and so leave it for me to assume) that you consented to your mother’s wishes and were sanctified in the bosom of Abraham, etc.

  The record album you posted separately has also happily arrived, and I accept it in lieu of photographs of the occasion—I wonder if the brothers all sang together at the ceremony, and also whether the rabbi joined in? Your red-haired boy possesses an ingenuous vitality in both voice and features, I can very much understand your delight in him. Keeping in mind again certain criticisms of my condescending attitude, etc., I will pass over any remark on the “political” nature of the songs you say he has been writing subsequently.

  Please let me know, even if merely by postcard, that my package to you arrive
s. Michaela and I send blessings to you and Thomas,

  “Dad”

  23 May 1961, Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, Dresden

  Dearest Miriam,

  I write in haste to make the sincerest apology, for giving offense by what you call my “flippant tone”—I was delighted by your letter, and wished only to share my delight with you. I’m aware that your visit here was not entirely simple for you, and in no way intended to diminish the seriousness of your feelings, nor of your new union, with the word “adventure.” As far as other matters less intimate than ideological, let’s please brush those aside for future talks, and rely on such opportunities being plentiful. Please accept a father’s repentance and let me know if the T. Mann book has arrived safely, I worry about the mails!

  Your loving “dad,”

  Albert

  12 December 1968, 5 Vitzthumstrasse Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  It seems it needs the shock of your report on Alma to overcome the block I’ve had to writing you. In fact this is the fourth attempt and I hope this will be mailed finally. Not that I find it so difficult, on the contrary I still have a warm and close feeling every time I think of our too-brief reunion, and have frequently hoped it could be repeated, but what I consider a “real” letter takes time and leisure, both at a premium in the rather hectic life I still lead. Though I try to take it more easy, the work still takes a lot out of me, which just can’t be helped. As it happens, I have been able to travel recently. In September my researches brought me to Spain, to visit the site of the widely known Guernica “terrors,” which Western propaganda, you will likely not be surprised to discover, has exaggerated and distorted. Afterward, Michaela and I were granted a holiday at Lake Garda in Italy, where I did a lot of swimming and generally was very lazy. Then, for my birthday, we went to Verona and saw Aida in the huge old Roman amphitheater, the singers’ voices carrying in the open air without amplification. The Italians love their opera, and I really don’t know what I enjoyed more, the performance or the audience. Both belonged to each other and complemented each other; life in Italy seems not as horribly serious and heavy-handed as it is in Germany.