Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  I don’t mention Quakerism as a calculated affront to your horror of religion. Actually, the Quakers keep it pretty plain and boring, not kabbalistic at all, you’d be relieved. Very respectable and even kind of German, in a bourgeois Buddenbrooks sort of way. I never told you that I read that book when you sent it, the special dedicated copy with the snapshot of Mann on his patio hinged into the flyleaf just like the way Sergius tenderly hinges postage stamps into his albums. I was so eager to understand what you and Alma were all about, when I was a kid. All those dishes and pianos and all that chocolate, Alma’s accent and all the whispering about Lübeck, Lübeck. You probably have no idea that I have that five-ton marble ashtray from Alma’s apartment, the one from your father’s bank, her one souvenir from the ruins. There’s a joint burning in it now pretty much around the clock. The reason I’m going on about this is that for me, that stuff was religious. It was kabbalistic. Being from Queens, the whole High German side of things was to me like some Greek fable about being descended from gods, and then falling into the mortal world. I just want you to consider that your whole idea of yourself as so modernist and atheistic and materialist might not be as complete as you imagine. From my perspective, all the Dresden stuff that consumes you now, all that ruined culture, the stained glass and parapets, it looks from this distance like you’re a monk in the Church of Dead Europe. You have this horror of rabbis, but there are different ways of being a rabbi. When I was nineteen and I visited you at that nightmare spy compound that you were calling an “institute” I actually figured out pretty quickly that being a historian in East Germany meant pumping out revisionist Cold War stuff about how German war crimes were no worse than anything else. I didn’t get the full picture but I had an inkling. Still, there was something humane about how you went around collecting all those stories, those terrible stories of the fire. You seemed tragic to me, the way your sympathy and your Communist ideals had shackled you to this bogus “scholarship.” It wasn’t until I realized the flip side was that you had to discredit Guernica to make your case that I sort of lost it. Incidentally, another thing I found yesterday in this file of your old letters were two more blank postcards from the MoMA gift shop. Stella stuck one up on the fridge and I guess I’ll enclose one with this letter if I ever finish writing it, just for old times’ sake. I really intended to mail you one of those every month for the rest of your life. Sorry if I’m angry.

  Where was I? The point was, what I still didn’t really understand until just now when I wrote it down was that the unreconstructed Stalinist bit was the least of it for you. What your new life really meant was a chance to climb up the ass of Lübeck again, through Dresden. They bombed your Buddenbrooks, Dad. I’m so sorry. Even Alma was willing to come and live in her welfare hotel on Broadway, but you couldn’t hack it in the New World, could you? You weren’t too Communist for America, but you were too German. Well, here’s the other thing I never really let myself understand until I began this letter, even though I haven’t said a thing about it yet, is that my visit to you was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. What you once called “the awkwardness with the German boy” was horrible, and Dirk wasn’t a boy, he was a man, one of your weird colleagues or comrades, and the day of the picnic he told me he’d been Michaela’s boyfriend before she married you, and what he did to me could, I know now, practically be considered rape, and it seemed like it was some kind of revenge on you for marrying Michaela, and I have always assumed you knew all these things. What you didn’t know is that I was also pretty inexperienced at that point, despite my acting, I’m sure, to the contrary. When I came home I couldn’t tell Rose about it. She’d said to me for years that the Germans had stolen everything from her—I guess she meant you, and the war, all her dead cousins, and also the revolution she felt she deserved for all her labors on its behalf, and I used to think it was funny that she’d mixed up Nazis and her Jewish ex-husband! And what she always said, at the climax of this particular theatrical monologue, was that it would kill her if it took me, too. And here I was, apparently returned but secretly stolen.

  It takes two parents to make a kid, a simple fact I’m sure hasn’t escaped you. A missing parent makes the kid, too, either by being missing or by cropping back up. One way or another, or both. Rose taught me, as if it was the most important thing she could teach, to want not to be Jewish. I didn’t get it, I didn’t see the point of wanting that, because I didn’t feel Jewish to begin with. We didn’t go to synagogue, she’d pried the mezuzah from the door when we moved into the Forty-Sixth Street apartment where some Jews had previously lived—I could see what Jews did and we didn’t do it. My identity was New Yorker, and leftist. An anti-American American, which was complicated enough, a role requiring a constant vigilance. But when I visited Germany and met you, I understood what the German part of you felt about the Jewish part, and what you felt about Rose. You’d taught me, however reluctantly, to feel Jewish. Suddenly I knew that I was, so to want not to be finally made sense to me. I got the information in reverse order. So there you go: It took a mother and it took a father to complete my education.

  You two are alike, still fighting the war. Grieving over those charred bodies, some here, some there. Meanwhile not seeing the present world for what it is. I wouldn’t entrust a kid to either one of you—but I am the kid who was entrusted to both. I suppose I would have chosen as you did, to leave the kid with Rose, in the New World, despite some particular horrors I could tell you of, not Dresden horrors but involving ovens, a great legacy we share. But really, thank God I remained in the New World with Rose, not that I imagine you entertained any notion of taking me with you. Thank Christ. Thank Sagittarius and my moon in Gemini. Thanks, Uncle Sam, for forbidding the East German spy reentry across our border. I’m reading this crazy letter and it looks like the scrawl of a child, I have no idea if you’ll get this far, but in a way it is written by a child, so that’s okay. It didn’t escape my notice that you’ve arranged to abandon poor Errol, my Cold War half brother, whose name is completely missing from your letter, at seven, the same age you abandoned me. Please keep the secrets I shared here. Stella’s reading the earlier pages of this letter and now she knows. She says I should cross out the word “sorry” I wrote yesterday. But I am. I’m sorry you’re sick. And sorry to go on so long, but you asked me to say how I live. I’m trying never to live dishonestly and with regrets. Please don’t write to me again.

  Sincerely,

  Miriam Angrush Gogan

  (The preceding materials comprise the entirety of file #5006A, scanned from the Stasi archives discovered at the Ruschestrasse headquarters in Berlin in January 1990, released according to Inter-Atlantic Coalition Freedom of Information statutes upon solicitation by Sergius Gogan. The letters postmarked “Dresden” represent carbons of typewritten correspondence, routinely submitted to authorities by their sender. The letter postmarked “New York City” is represented in original ballpoint-pen holograph, marked by its interceptors with the English-language annotation “Excerpt? Or hopeless?” It presumably remained unseen by its addressee.)

  3 The Halloween Parade

  The costume fit, beard, hat, black suit, all of it, even if his Adidas running shoes, peeking from below the overlong pants’ cuffs, slightly marred the historical gravitas. He discovered the outfit in a shop called, incredibly enough, the Marquis de Suede, where it hung inside a small annex of traditional costumes nearly overwhelmed by disco jumpsuits formed of parachute cloth and tiny leather shorts dripping with brass and aluminum hardware. His tie-dyed T-shirt, jeans, and fringed leather jacket he not only removed but chucked into the shop’s trash bin—they were as much a costume, anyway, as this new disguise. Then, after scrutinizing the clientele and any passersby visible through the shop’s storefront glass to be certain he remained free of surveillance, Lenny Angrush peeled cash payment off a roll made entirely of the new two-dollar bills—just waving the talismanic bills at the jaded, mascara-and-stubble-wearing Village Person man
ning the Marquis’s register, to say currency’s a history lesson if you trouble to examine what rides in your wallet but who ever does?—then descended into the Christopher Street IRT. The MTA operative trapped in his booth there made no remark on Lenny’s costume but, unlike the homosexual, attempted at first to refuse a Bicentennial Two. Lenny was forced to harangue him with his responsibility as a city employee to familiarize himself with and legitimate the issue of the realm, sixteenth president defending the third. Successful in this attempt—nobody topped Lenny Angrush for a harangue, and he soon had a long line of irate fellow riders in line at his back—Lenny was granted his brass token. NYC subway scrip, the local currency of Hades, which only a doomed fool collected. Lenny never bought more than one, which he then deposited within a few steps of purchase, refusing to sully his pocket’s lint. So he gained entry to the platform to wait with the other decorated losers for a chance to board the uptown local.

  Was it just Lenny’s imagination that despite the various cretinous bloody ax murderers and sultry Catwomen and Frank N. Furters and Darth Vaders cluttering up the IRT car the black people aboard all seemed to be singling out the rail-splitting lawyer from Kentucky for the hairy eyeball? Was it so wrong to think their gaze ought to fall on this particular figure with gratitude? Or perhaps they found the man beneath unworthy of the beard? Well, joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck.

  One rider had managed to pass in the costume of a camel through the eye of a subway turnstile.

  Here was a fellow in a perfectly subtle Crazy Eddie costume or perhaps it was actually Crazy Eddie himself riding home from work, in this city you couldn’t be sure of anything.

  Lenny exited at Fourteenth, and promenaded, disguised as a Kubrick monolith in his stovepipe hat, back to Westbeth. Call it a decoy maneuver. Keeping his journey circuitous was as essential as the beard: Lenny tonight wore the whole of the island for his camouflage. The particular mooks on his tail were uncomfortable in Manhattan, a terrific advantage from the start, and on Halloween night the depths of their discombobulation would form his cloak. Probably Greenwich Village in its present manifestation appeared like Halloween to mooks like these on any typical night, inhabiting as they did an inalterable Eisenhower administration of the imagination. Their brains had shut off since, all things subsequent, including astronauts, hippies, metal detectors, minidresses, the Concorde, and the Krugerrand, being modernistic intoxicants they couldn’t fathom. Lenny had been commanded not to exit the borough of Queens until the following day, when Mook Prime aka Gerry Gilroy was “to have a word with” him—such euphemism being a Queens-Irish mobster’s notion of admonitory subtlety, and the best reason Lenny could think of for taking to the hoof, for going, in the manner of Hoffman and Leary, visionaries no longer finding the decade’s waning years simpatico, underground.

  Coming out of the subway he passed a coven of witches who hailed him theatrically, black hats doffed to one of their kind.

  Lenny liked his own nose. He might be its sole appreciator, but so what? He was equally in the constituency of his own scabbed knees and his blunt but effective thumbs; he enjoyed walking without a crutch and breathing with no jolt of cracked rib or exploded spleen. Therefore don the stovepipe and beard and evaporate into history. Be the man on the penny, the copper face in the couch cushions, everywhere and disregarded—be subliminal money. Rather than go rural Lenny’d hide in plain sight like Peter Sellers in The Party, take a room in Miriam’s Alphabet City town house and dwell with the painted elephants. He was as much an apostate citizen as any of the roomers there, could probably teach them a thing or two about true Communism and in return be at last absorbed into the routine orgy he’d denied himself for too long.

  Lenny’d made it with one flower child in 1974, or maybe ’75, in a Stony Brook dorm room, having met her on the LIRR platform after she’d taken in a Pink Floyd concert and likely also a tab of Owsley at the Nassau Coliseum, and while he was returning from a suburban errand for Schachter’s Numismatics. Though in bed she called him “daddy,” the hobbitish girl’s legs were nearly as hairy as his own, truly saying something.

  Not that Lenny minded.

  Lenny also had a tuft at the small of his back that was increasingly like monkey’s fur.

  Lenny suspected Miriam’s commune was a hotbed of such chicks. Let him have his share. Let him join then in the orgy that would be forgiving of hair in unusual places. In petulant unrequitedness he’d divided himself from his cousin Miriam and her generation for too long. Let him get stoned, since everybody must. He’d been banned, five years before, from MacDougal Chess, for hustling and side bets and too-vociferous lightning rounds that upset the paying clientele, so had said: Fuck Chess. Now he’d been eighty-sixed from Schachter’s on Fifty-Seventh—so let him say: Fuck Coins Already. Lenny would help Miriam’s red-haired boy steam stamps off postcards, maybe one day he’d find an Inverted Jenny. Now Gilroy’s mooks hunted Lenny in Sunnyside, so let him say: Fuck Queens Entirely. Fuck the amnesia of Communists who’d conveniently forgotten they were Communists, of immigrants who’d forgotten they were immigrants, of micks and Polacks who now put the squeeze on the Mongolian and the Korean and the Turk, as if their own food was any better, as if a generation or two had blanched them of history. Perhaps true Communism had gone after all to reside with the Weather Underground. Let Lenny vanish from history himself, into counterhistory. Let Miriam grant him access to her radical commune and they’d blow up a Brink’s truck or two, get it out of his system; perhaps: Fuck Even True Communism.

  Fuck Everything, Until We Have Nothing to Fuck Except Fucking Itself. Let Lenny be the last aboard the Me Decade before it collapsed, before it was uncovered as a Ponzi scheme of herpes and divorce. Something about the mixture of the Lincoln outfit and the mobster Gilroy’s barely masked death threats had given Lenin Angrush the hard-on of his entire life. He had a stovepipe hat on his head and one also in his pants. Nothing to do with the glittering Jayne Mansfield just this instant crossing Hudson Street. The deeper and more persuasive the cleavage, the more certain Lenny was tonight that he was ogling a man.

  He found them at the appointed intersection by the gates of the Westbeth complex, the outlet of the Halloween Parade, where the big floating masks and marching bands assembled for their horny trawl through the Village. Revelers swirled: teddy bears, spray-painted Green Giants, headless horsemen, nuns, and the immense sculptural heads held aloft like banners, depicting heroes and monsters of all variety, among them another Lincoln, looming as if he might topple on the humans below, his eyes like empty windows in the black night, his mole big as a half-deflated basketball. Miriam and Tommy were dressed in fatigues and with red berets and heavy black false mustaches. Tommy had, of course, his guitar strapped across his back as if it were a machine gun. Lenny’s desire was such that he couldn’t look at his cousin directly. Nothing in his pants had abated in the least, but the Lincoln suit was good cover.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You’re the new Marx Brothers, in a remake of Duck Soup with Steve Martin and Gene Wilder.”

  “We’re Sandinistas, Lenny.”

  The boy stood in their shadow, almost impossible to notice in a gigantic set of cardboard horns garlanded with tissue-paper flowers. Beneath the headgear, the flaming rust of the boy’s hair. How a half Jew could look so Irish, a mystery.

  “You?”

  “Ferdinand the Bull,” said his mother. “Sergius is protesting our choice of what he regards as violent guerrilla fighters.”

  “A bull is protest of Sandinistas exactly how?”

  “Ferdinand’s the bull who wouldn’t fight. He’d rather smell the roses.”

  Ah. The private codes perpetuated between parent and child, the eternal mystery of hearth and home. Lenny shook his head. What Miriam had needed to explode in Sunnyside Gardens, she’d reproduced in Alphabet City.

  “And you, Lenny,” said Tommy. “Honest Abe on the run from the Irish Republican Army? I like the incongruity. ‘I cannot tell a lie, it
was I that tried to hoodwink a leprechaun with fool’s gold.’ ”

  “The IRA’s not leprechauns, they’re fucking mobsters. And it wasn’t fool’s gold. Contrary to popular understanding, the Krugerrand’s not pure, it’s eight-and-a-third percent copper alloy. These Kruger medallions had the same ratio, exactly.” Lenny felt he’d been incanting these facts into one uncomprehending face after another for five sleepless days now. First, the Schachter brothers, when they’d first come across one of the ersatz Krugerrands Lenny had been peddling under the auspices of their established name. Karl and Julius Schachter interrogated Lenny, first on the showroom floor and then, when from both parties the yelling began, in the back-room vault. There on Fifty-Seventh Lenny had for years been relied upon for his expertise and discernment, his unparalleled knowledge of strike variants, and hence tolerated in his sometimes unwashed state as an eccentric necessity of the business. So what if some dumb mook couldn’t tell, in the gloom of an IRA barroom, the difference between an authentic Krugerrand and a medallion, produced in Cameroon, featuring a portrait of the South African president Paul Kruger and on the obverse a springbok antelope? The gold content was the same. The gold content was the same. THE GOLD CONTENT WAS THE SAME! You traded in Krugerrands for the gold content, correct? Or did you have some special sentimental dedication to propping up an apartheid nation? Lenny viewed his propagation of the medallions, which, while functioning perfectly as well as Krugerrands for anyone hoarding gold, undermined that coin’s malignant authority, as a minor act of righteousness. This episode, he felt, ought to have been folded into the Lenny Angrush legend, not be the end of it. Karl and Julius refused to agree.