Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  So, when you say I should not delay in making a visit to North America if I want to see my mother again, I admit it is possible that I would gain this dispensation. Probably I could find a number of rather valid excuses as to why I can’t come at this time—Michaela’s pregnancy, financial, business, and whatnot—but, you know something, I really don’t want to come. I don’t think I want to see Alma again, for a variety of reasons. First of all, I find it easier to lie in a letter than stand before her and lie to her straight in the face, concerning so many details of my present life which have been concealed from her. More, I fear the emotional strain involved in saying goodbye. There would be something so completely final about a farewell certain to be the “last.” Then, too, I notice from her letters that Mother is approaching senility rather quickly now. I would rather like to hold on to the picture I still have of her from her last visit here, ten years ago, when we still went hiking together and could talk about many interesting things. This is perhaps terribly selfish, but there it is. This letter must get on its way now. I hope that the interval to the next will be shorter. For you and Thomas I send my very best wishes for 1969.

  Yours,

  Albert

  24 June 1969, 5 Vitzthumstrasse, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  Belated thank-you for the postcard reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica—needless to say that image is familiar to us here, despite the fact that we do not have the privilege of seeing it in person as you do in New York, but I assume your reference was “tongue in cheek”—and for your congratulations on Michaela’s pregnancy! Well, she has now ferried into the world your new half brother, Errol, of whom a pink and nevertheless rather delightful photograph is here enclosed. I hope you’ll have a chance to meet each other soon, please let me know if there’s the remotest chance of another visit to us here.

  Sending love,

  “Dad”

  8 November 1969, 5 Vitzthumstrasse, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  I write to thank you for the fourth in what I fear may be an inexhaustible sequence of Guernica postcards, and while I find these brief and rather cryptic messages not unfriendly, I do feel concerned that I may have missed a more substantial letter from you these past months. Please write and reassure me that nothing has gone astray as I fear! You probably understand that I worry about the mails.

  Fond regards from Michaela, and from Errol (whose exact time of birth, since you have requested this information twice, was according to the certificate at fourteen minutes past the hour of three, in the early hours of the morning of 26 May).

  “Dad”

  3 August 1971, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  If you will permit me, my daughter. Your keen intelligence has perhaps been betrayed by the tiny quantity of historical critique one can fit onto the back of a postcard. I find you susceptible to thinking in images and symbols, in Madison Avenue–style cameos and slogans. Yet a few of your assertions demand a response, concerning as they do what has become my life’s work. You mention Coventry, you mention Rotterdam, and of course you again and again with your postcards “mention” Guernica. You write (in boldly illuminated hand, decorating your script with flowers and “peace signs” as if wishing to impart some kind of medieval biblical enchantment to your words!), “Suffering is suffering.” All this, in dispute of the truth to which I’ve been documenting: that the Allied firebombing of Dresden was a unique moral and cultural catastrophe, on a par, in the final human reckoning, only with the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities (more died in Dresden, I remind you, than at either of those targets). Dresden also mirrors the Nazi Party’s own atrocities, those which have come to define twentieth-century horror in the popular imagination—most understandably, I add!—even to the detail of so many families roasted while huddling together in bunkers into which they entered docilely or were enticed by promises of safety.

  There is no precedent for Dresden. Coventry was the center of the U.K. arms manufacture. To overlook this is to overlook the essential facts. The civilian death toll in Coventry, while horrendous, was the by-product of a valid military target. Inquiry into the circumstances at Rotterdam, equally, reveal an episode in “military history”—rather than, as in Dresden, the annals of “terror.” A division of the Dutch army was encamped in the city, and indeed, the bombing resulted in the surrender of the Dutch military forces. The Luftwaffe even attempted to call off the attack when they learned of peace talks. Their failure is evidence of the chaos of war.

  This leaves your postcard’s face. Would it astonish you too much to learn that von Richthofen’s fliers aimed their bombs almost exclusively at Guernica’s bridges and arterial roads? Again, a military episode. “Suffering is suffering,” but the special exaggeration of the tragedies in Spain is a fetish of those who, thanks to artists like Picasso and George Orwell and Rose Angrush, accord a special sacred moral value to the minor scuffles of the “Lincoln Brigade.” I was once quite under the spell of such artists myself, so I feel rather indulgent of this error. Yet it is one.

  Why have I allowed myself to become so tendentious, when I’m sure it will be irritating to you? My wish, Miriam, is for you to understand that we are on the same side. You say I am “obsessed” with German suffering. Yet to deplore the U.S. actions in Vietnam without grasping napalm’s point of origin in the Dresden fire is to lose sight of the trajectory of history. In that, Dresden, like Hiroshima, was not the final phase of the previous imperialist war but the opening shot of the next, and one even more successful in its employment of terror than Hitler’s. We all of us live here in the flickering shadow of that fire which has in fact never been put out. To gather and sift testimony as I’ve spent more than a decade doing is to enlist in what any lover of peace such as yourself must see is the task of assembling human voices against the terrible universality of oppression, and of death.

  You say that travel is impossible, and I reluctantly understand. I do nonetheless hope that our Errol and your Sergius will someday play together, and more, that they have the chance to live in a world freed of the destructive legacy of national boundaries—if these sentiments do not seem too optimistic, after my letter.

  With my fondest regards,

  Albert

  P.S. Now that I have begun my long-delayed “paternalism” toward you I find myself incapable of stopping; forgive me. The astrological mysticism in your letters strikes me as sheerest gibberish, and I wish I could make you think better of it. Little Errol is no more “a Gemini with a moon in Mars” than I am a centaur. In fact, it looks from my perspective like a reversion to some kabbalistic superstition, not so far from your mother’s hysterical and self-loathing reversions to folk Judaism, as when she imposed a rabbi on your wedding party. The world we dwell in, my daughter, is mysterious enough for us not to wish to veil it in metaphysics! But enough.

  19 March 1972, 5 Vitzthumstrasse, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  If I consent that the horse in the painting cannot “by definition” have been a political or military target of importance, will you grant in return that the depiction of a horse in oil paint consists of not an account from the historical record but rather a poetical interpretation? Or better still, if I acknowledge what you wish, might you please cease sending me the postcard? Doubtless you’ve enriched the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art sufficiently by this point.

  Yours,

  Albert

  15 November 1977, 22 Franz-Liszt-Strasse, Dresden

  Dear Miriam,

  Into long silence I hurl this communication, in a spirit of beckoning to what lies unfinished between us, and was briefly resumed during your long-ago visit to me, and which then subsequently went fallow—very much my own fault, no doubt. I shall, in any event, now tell you what has made me wish to defy the fear you will discard this letter unread, or even, more simply, some concern as to whether I still have an address at which to reliably find you! It is that I was, January a year ago, operated upon for a
cancer of the gallbladder. Originally the doctors gave me little hope of living more than two years. But after two operations and more than three months of gamma rays I have a completely normal life, except for injections every other day, of a special preparation which supposedly mobilizes antibodies. As I can give myself the injections the whole thing is very little trouble. Suffice to say I am practically without pain and at my last checkup, two months ago, the doctor felt that there was only a one percent chance for a new growth.

  Naturally my illness gave me quite a jolt and made me realize I could not continue to live in the same way any longer. When I thought that I had a short time to live I felt that whatever time I had left I should live consciously and fully and not negate myself and my own personality. I thus decided already in the hospital that I had to separate from Michaela and for almost a year now have had my own place and am free of tensions and have stopped suppressing my real self. This decision has probably helped the process of healing and regeneration. Living a lie for so long probably also made it difficult for me to write to you. You must promise never to live dishonestly and with regrets.

  Maybe you would feel like telling me about yourself and how you live. I would be happy to hear from you. Needless to say I wish you well.

  Yours,

  Dad

  1/19/78

  Dear Dad,

  I’m generally the first one up. This isn’t a moral stance but a habit I can’t break. I do like drinking my first cup of coffee alone before I have to deal with anyone else, and I like an hour or two before the phone rings. It rings a lot. All through the day once it starts, and sometimes after I’ve gone to bed, some guy pining for one of the young girls crashing here. Or girl for guy. It gets dark and they’re alone and they call. But I like to be alone in the morning, I’m not lonely at all. So I make the coffee for everyone and drink the first cup or two. You could picture me here with a fresh hot coffee and everyone else sleeping. The hour when I’m starting this reply. The frog-shaped trivet is broken, one leg broke off, so I set the coffeepot on a manila envelope full of your old letters. It was lost for a while but I found it again. All those pale blue envelopes with the red and blue bands. I was looking for it a year ago, actually, but I couldn’t find it, and then last night I found it in the back of my desk, all your letters going to back to before I visited. I was looking for it then because Sergius started a stamp collection, even though his uncle Lenny told him coins were where it was at. You remember Lenny, I’m sure. He’s actually Sergius’s cousin, but we call him “Uncle Lenny” just to needle him. Sergius prefers stamps. And it’s a lot cheaper for us, even though Lenny gave him these penny books. You can gather up incredible canceled stamps from a million different places if you’re willing to soak them off the envelopes. All brilliant colors and a free tour of the world. I’ve torn the corners off all your envelopes and I’ll soak them for Sergius this morning, what a great surprise: East Germany, wow. The Iron Curtain. I’m not sure I’ll tell him where they came from, at least not yet. If he asks I’ll tell him, but Sergius is stamp-mad, he has a kind of blindness for anything else, and I’ll bet he just ignores the folder, or pokes through it to see if I missed any stamps. Strange thing about your letters, you always type. You even type your name and the word Dad. You and Rose still have that in common, constantly smashing out letters on a typewriter. I read them all this morning again. That’s what I do while I’m alone in the kitchen, read and drink coffee and listen to the radio, WBAI. What the pigs did to Angela Davis lately, some other news about El Salvador. It’s a good station. Nobody listens to it. Later they’ll play jazz or run one of those Alan Watts lectures. I met him once. After a while somebody else gets up, often one of the girls, or maybe Stella Kim, or Tommy or Sergius. The guys always sleep longer than the girls. Whoever it is, I fix them some breakfast. If Sergius isn’t up by this point I’ll roust him. He has to go to school. Sergius eats like a little old lady, he only wants toast for breakfast, every day. The girls and the guys always want eggs and bacon and pancakes. Sometimes I make them a matzo brei when I can get it and that always turns them on, I have to brew fifteen pots of coffee, and there’s this kid dressed for school and munching toast, just sitting there. It destroys me. Sometimes Stella walks him to school if I’m still in my robe. I’ll give her my last five bucks and she’ll come back with orange juice and a pack of cigarettes and the New York Post, which is a newspaper that’s gone completely to hell but it runs a horoscope, which is beneath the standards of the Times. I mention this as a calculated affront to your horror of astrology, of course.

  You probably don’t know what I’m talking about, in terms of people living with us. You’re a Communist only in the sense that you live in a Communist country and you have your long-held Marxist beliefs, if that’s what still motivates you. It looks absurd to me now that I’ve written it down. I guess you must be in the party still. Or again. Is it the same party you were in with Rose, in America? How mysterious. Well, we live in a commune, something I suspect you wouldn’t really be familiar with. Honestly, Tommy and I are like the parents, and they’re like the children, so it isn’t really a legitimate commune, not like the Maoist one around the corner on Avenue C, which has meetings nearly every night, and they go on for hours, and they never figure anything out. Ours is somewhere between a commune and a hostel. We started by letting Stella move in upstairs. Then we had to fill more rooms to afford to keep this place, because Tommy hasn’t made any money from his records in a long time, and the money from the ACLU settlement for my wrongful arrest on public property is a distant memory. Did I ever mention I was one of the Capitol Steps Thirteen? We sued their asses, then I spent the money mostly at Pathmark, on bread and veggies and ground beef.

  By this time in the morning the phone has started ringing and usually someone has rolled a joint and things are getting a little harder to put down in order. I mean, after the kid is off to school. I spend a lot of time listening, actually, you might not think so from this letter which is all about me, but I do. The phone rings or someone comes downstairs and the kitchen is pretty much full of people for the rest of the day. Stella asks me who I’m writing to and I show her your letter. She used to help me think of stuff to write on the Guernica postcards and it was Stella who drew the fancy letters with the vines growing on them and the stars and peace signs you asked about. She was just doodling while we talked and then I saw it and thought I’d send it anyway. Stella says I should tell you everyone comes to me with their problems and that I solve them, that I yell at them and make them feel better. She says she doesn’t know how I keep it all together. She also says I should tell you that she’s the one writing this letter, just to freak you out. Our handwriting really is the same, when one of us leaves a note on the message board here in the kitchen nobody can tell who it is. But she’s not writing this letter, I am.

  Okay, I’m back. Just got off the phone with Rose, the daily round of complaints about the local politicos. She likes to call them “cronies,” the local bishops and crooks she deals with on the board of the Queensboro Public Library, Judge Freeh, Donald Manes, Monsignor Sweeney. These men whose deep Canarsie accents make her feel disobedient, even while she’s getting off on their uniforms and titles. Rose is really a crony herself at this point, she just doesn’t see it. She’s the equivalent of what she used to call a ward boss, a local fixer. Anyway, half these guys were her boyfriend at some point, I can’t keep track. But I doubt Rose is actually getting laid these days from the way she talks. Any given mayor of New York is a kind of bad husband in her life, a huge and consuming disappointment. The current one, named Ed Koch, pronounced like crotch, is at least more loud and sarcastic than the previous and gives her some of that Fiorello La Guardia sensation. We call him Ed Kitsch, I don’t know why we find that so funny, just the sound of it. I doubt if any of this is going to make you laugh, it’s parochial stuff. I always had the feeling that for you politics was a pretty abstract thing. As you may remember, for Rose it’s more like
a canker sore.

  For us it’s daily life. The movement has hunkered down and gotten a little fuzzy around the edges, but we’re here and Nixon’s gone. Did you know Nixon was a Quaker? Tommy’s gotten heavily involved in Quakerism. It started with Vietnam. The Quakers were way ahead of everybody with knowing how to apply for conscientious objector status, during the draft. Now it’s the death penalty that takes up all our energy, and international stuff, the American Friends Service Committee. They sent Tommy to sing in Africa twice, and now we’re talking about visiting Nicaragua, where some really incredible things are going on. Through the AFSC a lot of the guys who live with us are foreign students and dissident and even revolutionary types, how they get green cards I don’t know. I guess the Quakers vouch for them, and who doesn’t trust a Quaker? We had an Okinawan living with us, Tomo, who threw gasoline bombs at the American base. He used to gobble down raw tofu and sliced green onions doused with Accent, which it turns out is pure MSG. They all keep shakers of it on their table, like salt and pepper. Anyway, Tommy is pretty involved and even wants to send Sergius to a Quaker school. Tommy goes to Fifteenth Street Meeting every Sunday and sits in silence—I don’t know if he prays, but nobody pressures you—and he takes Sergius to Sunday school. The elders at the meeting are crazy for seeing younger people show up so Quakerism doesn’t die out. In a way their political stuff is a kind of bait to draw hippies in. I don’t mean that as cynically as it sounds. It’s a good community. They’ll even marry two lesbians. The elders say that if Sergius wants to go to certain schools, kept on a secret Quaker list, they’d probably be able to help out with the tuition. The upper grades in our local school district might turn out to be pretty problematic for a stamp collector.