The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Both therefore forced, at some point, to bite a tongue and hear the other. Until, as they tussled for dominance in pursuit of an identical outcome, some other form of tussle emerged in the thinking of both, and the hall’s other occupants melted away into irrelevance. Albert thinking: Who is this young Emma Goldman, this zaftig Brooklyn shtetl girl in the hand-sewn dress, covering the Yiddish parts of her speech with elegant rhetoric, with comical double-feature at the Loew’s Britishisms? Rose thinking: Who is this fair Germanic professorially handsome fellow in suspenders and gold-rimmed glasses—and can he possibly be, as he claims in his speech, Jewish? This was, you did have to admit, screwball comedy, but such as no Red-leaning Jew playwright, vamoosed to Hollywood, would ever dare committing to paper: Sent to convert the Young People of Gramercy, the two lost sight of their marks, becoming each other’s marks instead.

  Their infatuation was above all a meeting of two intellects gleaming with the same exalted certainties, two wills emboldened by the same great cause, and they were still uncovering this extent of their political sympathies (though “political” was too limited a term, insufficient to describe what joining the greatest movement of human history had done for their sense of what life itself was for), gabbing a mile a minute, barely able to stop talking to eat the food that sat cooling on the table where she’d cooked it for him in the kitchen of his flat, or to sip the wine they’d poured but in their intoxication with the cause hardly needed, when Albert first unbuttoned her dress and his trousers. So the tussle, begun in full public view, now was consummated behind closed doors.

  For a little while, Rose and Albert lapsed in their attendance to all urgencies, except those of a cell of two. Two fronts moving as one. Full synthesis achieved and lost on a nightly basis.

  Then, when Rose missed three menstruations, married. What could be so wrong? They were two Jews. Two humans. Two believers in revolution. In the eyes of anyone but their families, a matched pair. Any “real American” would have heard his German accent as close kin if not identical to her parents’ Yiddish. He was fair and she was dark, sure. But spiritually, they could be taken for brother and sister. Certainly Albert and Rose found themselves allied utterly, proudly so, in the glance of any hater of Jews or revolutionists. Wouldn’t the cause soon erase all such distinctions of class and creed and race, weren’t enlightened and secular Communists abandoning inhibition to mate furiously with goyim, female comrade seeking camaraderie with male comrade whether Irish or Italian or otherwise? Wasn’t any child seeded across some obsolete boundary or prohibition an ideal mongrel citizen of the future world every comrade ought to seek to bring into being?

  Try telling it to the Jews. At their futzed-together, hasty wedding (which nevertheless had no reason not to be as sweet as their own private love still could be in that time) (never mind how soon that time had been destined to pass) (never mind the appetites that had been lit in Rose in that brief interval) (never mind, never mind), Alma and her brother high-hatted the Angrush clan, that whole chaotic array of Rose’s sisters and their husbands and their broods, the innumerable cousins, as though the shtetl progenitors had been summoned to populate a Brooklyn they’d been mistakenly informed was vacant of Jews. Alma and her brother, the vain and elderly and most probably inverted Lukas, treated Rose’s family like the servants they’d been forced to terminate just before fleeing Lübeck. The Zimmers, the progressive, the enlightened, the worldly Zimmers, in the face non-German Jews, semireligious Jews, village Jews, felt their own place instantly: above them. This union was not what world revolution was meant to make possible, thank you very much!

  Then, as if to prove that the cosmos wanted no such union, the pregnancy lapsed, in the privacy of night leaking out of Rose in gobs and streams, so discreetly she was left to explain it to Albert herself, just weeks after the wedding. That, only after a doctor explained it to her, saying it hadn’t been much of a pregnancy to begin with, if five months along it could dissolve more or less painlessly in the night. Something hadn’t taken, only tried to. It was a mercy, a mitzvah even. Not to bear any longer the thing incompletely forming within her. Now, girl, eat red meat and salad, avoid exotic fruits such as bananas, and try again.

  Try again? She bit her tongue. They hadn’t been trying. He’d meant to pull out. Now, married, they’d try.

  By now they’d settled, out of Manhattan, but not out of the heart of the world’s happy controversies: no. Instead they’d made their home in the official Socialist Utopian Village of the outer boroughs, Sunnyside Gardens. Designed, as they discovered, and ironically, on a German basis, Lewis Mumford borrowing from the Berlin architects’ vision of a garden city, a humane environment grounded in deep theory, houses bounded around courtyard gardens, neighbors venting their lives one to another across a shared commons. Yet with such struggles as overtook Rose and Albert in that utopian zone, truthfully, they might wish to be a little better partitioned from their neighbors’ overhearing. That first accord between them, had it only been a fever of hormones? Their marriage, only a panic of pregnancy, in the wake of brain-befogging stints of sheer fucking?

  A baby would make it right.

  They tried and tried.

  Synthesis of this sort was denied them.

  Four years of trying before his seed would take in her again and make Miriam. The girl arrived at the doorstep of the war, ready shortly to be assigned her own booklet of ration stamps. Born into a new world unresembling that nascent utopia in which Rose and Albert had sought to start a family, against the skepticism of two armies made of different species of Jewish uncles, aunts, and cousins. Would it have grounded the union to make issue earlier? Was Albert unmoored for want of a child at home?

  No. Rose could revere, in her morbid way, the Kafkaesque penalty of her first trial because she knew the party was only putting something out of its misery after all. The marriage had failed. Wrecked on reefs of personality, the incongruity and nonsupport of the two alienated families, and on Albert’s vanity, his uselessness to the task of anything but distant and unreachable revolutions. He was either above or beneath mere work: Given even a sheaf of pamphlets to distribute, you’d find them stuffed into his suit pockets, Albert’s campaign to distribute them among the working classes having ended in some dialectical flirtation over drinks with a fellow pamphleteer he’d just happened to run into. As for the demands of parenting, once the girl came along, forget it. Rose had been a single mother before she was made a single mother.

  The fact of which Rose was proudest was that one she’d never utter aloud, not to Sol Eaglin, not to her beautiful policeman, not even to Miriam, the daughter who was repository for Rose’s whole self, her insurance against being forgotten. Yet it was her signature triumph: the containment of murder. Rose Zimmer emptied and rinsed the Lübeck ashtray three times during the course of her first trial. Ferrying the granite weapon back and forth through the crowded room, the smoky air, Rose didn’t swing it to shatter Albert’s cranium. Nor Alma’s, which would have surely collapsed as easily as an eggshell, tight-combed and hairpinned white wisps drowning in blood as she fell to the carpet. Nor did Rose crown any of the high party operatives. No, though they made it so easy, leaning in lusciously to plop sugar into their teacups, bending to stuff lit matches into mossy pipe bowls, no, though it would have been so beautiful to watch them riot in fear of her and her granite boxing glove. Nor did she go in and murder the newly fatherless girl, whose small body Rose would still have been able to hoist through the window to hurl down onto the pavement of Broadway, drawing cops to whom Rose would then immediately denounce the cell of Reds she’d uncovered (You gentlemen revolutionaries are sidelong-eyeing this peasant-stock housewife for a reaction? Well, there’s your reaction!), no, no, no, on the night Rose Zimmer had discovered she possessed not only the capacity but the desire for murder, she’d let the most delectable array of possible victims go completely unmurdered. She’d killed not even one of them. She’d carried the ashtray out filthy and carried it back
in as spotless as the best-paid Lübeck housekeeper could ever have made it.

  Now that was a trial!

  ————

  So here, the night of her real and final expulsion, on Rose Zimmer’s back step she and Sol Eaglin were encompassed in a cool and fragrant evening, false escape from that pressurized, oxygenless kitchen. The innocent babble of voices rising through the Gardens wasn’t innocent. The whole place was against her. A minor reference in Eaglin’s original phone call had sunk in now. He’d said he and his group would be coming to her fresh from an earlier “meeting”—that elastic and ominous euphemism—to be held just across the way. No doubt, the meeting had concerned Rose directly. A neighbor had denounced her again. But who? Hah! The question, more likely, was which of her neighbors hadn’t, by this time? Rose felt the force of this dead utopia, the whole of Sunnyside Gardens corrupted by the onrush of coming disappointment, seeking scapegoats for their stupid guilt at their wasted lives. Rose supposed she made a fair talisman for wasted life.

  The Gardens was cold.

  Could get colder still.

  None among them there knew American Communism wouldn’t wake from this particular winter. Oh, the beauty of it! After all Rose had seen and done, to be kicked out bare months before Khrushchev, at the Soviet Congress, aired fact of the Stalin purges. Bare months before rumor of his words leaked across the Atlantic to scald the ears of the devoted American dupes. Then the words themselves, translated in The New York Times. Think how sweet it would have been, to see the hound-eyes of the sober and pretentious executioners waiting inside, on that day. But no, exiling her would be their last glorious act, or at least the last she’d have to endure witness of, these superb indignant wraiths, men dead who didn’t know it.

  Tonight, none of them knew.

  Again, Sol Eaglin made small talk, almost flirty now that they were alone. “How’d you meet this policeman of yours, Rose?”

  “Unlike some who dwell only in a Moscow of their dreams, I’m a proud citizen of a locality that includes Italians, Irish, Negroes, Jews, and the occasional Ukrainian peasant. Aren’t your people Ukrainian, Sol?”

  He only smiled.

  “My feet when they walk touch the sidewalks of Queens, they don’t float above. My beliefs don’t deliver me from a responsibility to the poor degraded human souls in front of my face.”

  “You mean doing your rounds? What’s it called, the Citizens’ Patrol?”

  “That’s right, the Citizens’ Patrol.” The two skated around facts Sol Eaglin obviously knew from her party dossier, the existence of which Sol would deny and which Rose would never be able to prove, yet believed in as a certainty, in the manner with which she had been raised to believe—but failed to believe—in an invisible Jehovah, or that her name was recorded somewhere in the Haggadah secreted in the shul’s rosewood cabinet. Her dossier would have told him, undoubtedly, that Rose had begun her affair with the Negro police lieutenant after colonizing the nascent Sunnyside block-watchers’ organization and appointing herself the liaison to the Sunnyside precinct house. Perhaps Sol imagined her participation in the Citizens’ Patrol was a long ruse, designed to allow her to sidle up to a married man she’d already lusted after. Let Sol think what he wanted. Rose had never glimpsed Douglas Lookins before that day.

  She lowered herself to a defense. “A neighborhood watch, Sol. Workers helping other workers, making them feel comfortable walking home from the el after a night shift.”

  “Some of us can’t help being reminded of brownshirts, seeing civilians forming marching societies, whispering on street corners to men in boots.”

  “You’d like to provoke me into an act of despair or outrage, so you can make a report of my diminished value to the cause. Or more likely you’ve written this report already and are disappointed I haven’t obliged you with a nervous breakdown.”

  “I haven’t written any report.” He spoke tightly, as though she were the one who’d crossed a line, referring too intimately to his subjugation to the unseen cell leader. For Sol Eaglin, that, rather than bodies meeting in the night, constituted intimacy.

  “I’m done inside, Sol,” said Rose, meaning the kitchen and elsewhere: inside all the implied philosophies and conspiracies that clung in the air around them, had been belched out when they came through the door like heat and fume when you opened a coal stove. “Take them away.”

  “You should permit us to follow procedure.”

  “Procedure for what? Looking at you, old man, I can see what the mirror won’t tell me. I’m an old woman. I don’t have time for it.”

  “You’re a fine woman in her prime, Rose.” Eaglin’s tone wasn’t persuasive. Who knew whom he didn’t want to be heard by, in the nearby bushes?

  “I’m a degenerate, to hear of it.”

  “Come now, Rose.”

  “No, it’s a degenerate world now, so why wouldn’t we be part of it, you and I and those idealists in my kitchen?” She stepped into his embrace, loathing them both and wanting him to feel her loathing, as well as to prove how easily still she could squirm her bosom into the palms of his hands. Eaglin gave her boobies a good feel before shoving both hands into his jacket pockets. The act might have fit his definition of procedure.

  Yet she’d outwitted herself, wanted more than she knew. She took Sol by the wrists, this time forcibly inserted his chill palms within her blouse, let him rediscover how she spilled at the whole periphery of her brassiere. Rose’s versatile cynicism was dangerously near to spilling, too, becoming irrecoverable, mercury in a shattered vial. Sol Eaglin knew her better than any man alive. Better than her black lieutenant, though she might die rather than let Sol know it. She and Sol had for nearly a decade suffered identical contortions: the party line, and each other. If she’d only managed to wrest him from the obedient disobedience of his marriage, to a meek woman suffering nobly his claim to free love, Rose might have imprisoned Sol happily. They could have installed themselves as a Great Red Couple, lording it right here in the Gardens—but how these fantasies reeked of conformism! How bourgeois, finally, the aspiration to succeed socially within the CP!

  Be grateful, then, for Sol’s limpet wife and for the instincts of the body that had led her to seek elsewhere. Rose was beyond Sol’s destruction, being larger than Sol knew, much as Communism was larger than the party and therefore beyond the party’s immolations, its self-stabbings. By reaching for her impossible policeman, her Eisenhower-loving giant, Rose had practiced a radicalism, a freer love than Sol Eaglin could know. The critique was implicit in the gesture. Yet she wasn’t tempted to translate it all into Marxism for him, not at this late date. Rose might be slightly weary, at last, of Communism. Yet Communism—the maintenance, against all depredation, of the first and overwhelming insights that had struck the world in two and made it whole again, and in so doing had revealed Rose’s calling and purpose—was the sole accomplishment of her life, short of balancing a pickle factory’s books. It was also, and not incidentally, the sole prospect for the human species.

  “I’m cold,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”

  “You’re lying.” Now Sol was turned on, getting a little humpy, she knew the signs. “You’re not cold, you’re hot as a baked potato.”

  “I won’t argue, the world is founded on such contradictions. It’s possible I’m all at once cold and hot and lying. But not lying as much as you, Sol.”

  ALSO BY

  JONATHAN LETHEM

  The dazzling new novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of All-American radicals

  Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed “Red Queen” of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and a mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Rose will dominate all who come under her sway, even after her death.

  As the decades pass—through the parlor communism of the ‘30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movem
ent, ragged ‘70s communes, the embrace of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

  www.jonathanlethem.com