Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  He said nothing.

  “What?”

  “I’m wondering if there’s more you wish to tell us.”

  “You could use me is your bottom line here.”

  “I admire your confidence. But the necessities of this present cause require keeping free of distraction, being capable of blending into a certain environment.”

  “Is it my last name?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My husband’s famous as a singer. Is CORE worried the reactionaries will find out who I am?”

  “I see, I see.” Rascoe paged through the file. “I appreciate the concern, but no. There’s no suggestion that’s the difficulty.”

  “He’s written a song or two mentioning Mississippi, of course.”

  “I’m not familiar with his work.”

  “Do you know who the Reverend Gary Davis is?”

  He stared at her blankly.

  Miriam wondered nonetheless if she should have come as Zimmer. Not have surrendered the surname that gave evidence of her place in the fundamental Negro-Jew alliance. CORE was taking Jews all over the place.

  “You mention a difficulty,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What is it? The difficulty. You used the word, not me.”

  Cough. “Mrs. Gogan, there’s a matter of a certain amount of ill-considered bragging about certain family relationships. A liaison of your mother’s.”

  “Liaison?”

  “Of your mother’s. A certain excessive pride in the matter. Unbefitting the circumstances of the work we are trying to do here.”

  “I’m stunned.”

  “It’s mentioned again in a letter just now.”

  “Wow.”

  “You do know the great taboo in the region, the great myth with which we do battle?”

  “Now you’re going to tell me men have died for less, aren’t you?”

  “Precisely.”

  Miriam saw abruptly that any expansion of her confidential persuasive self into the space of the little office had been apt, under the circumstances, to be misread. She couldn’t win for losing. As in the lingo of the one acting class she’d sat in on, she’d come in “big” when they wanted “small.” Rascoe’s rectitude contained more than a little distaste.

  “Let me get this straight.” She was done making her appeal, but not quite done with him.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re telling your people down there to hand out the line that sex between Negroes and whites is a myth?”

  College Football: The Bowl Games. Miriam might just as well leave actuality unattended for the moment.

  Matusevitch $235 Gogan $45 Stone $215

  Rose Angrush Zimmer. The second of her imagined categories consists of nothing less than Miriam’s life study. To whom does Rose Angrush Zimmer make love? To Douglas Lookins, police lieutenant. Are they married? Yes, but to other persons. To whom is Rose Angrush Zimmer married? Her first husband was Albert Zimmer. Were they not divorced? They were divorced. Is he still alive? Albert Zimmer still lives in East Germany. Vee vould prefer to pass over zis matter in zilence, jah? Jah. Her second marriage, after divorce from Albert Zimmer, is to Abraham Lincoln. Correction—to Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln. Rose Angrush Zimmer is married to a book? Yes, that is correct. A Person of the Book, she has also chosen to marry one. In Rose’s utopian scheme you can marry whom you want. Only, a rabbi has to officiate.

  Goats in Fact and Fable. Art James says jauntily, “We’ll see who knows their goats!” and Miriam, aware the show is nearing its close, thinks Fuck it, bets her remaining forty-five dollars, again on “Who,” at the nice odds of three-to-one. When the question comes up, “The novel Giles Goat-Boy is a parable about a young man raised as a goat who later learns he is human, and commits himself to learning life’s secrets. For one hundred and thirty-five dollars, and at risk of elimination, name the author,” she arches her eyebrow and bats out “John Barth,” just as if she has been dominating this proceeding as she’d expected to all along. The payout somewhat salves the humiliation the scoreboard advertises above her head, the applause of the studio audience breaks like surf over her head—their relief on her behalf explosive in its fervor—and Miriam, coming down from both the fugue of drug effects and her fury of disappointment, returning to her body under the bright plasticky light, surrendering her hard-won separation from the absurd immediacy of Art James’s tie and the boinging musical transitions, measures what she can salvage here. Even losing, she can use the dough. Something better than nothing. Hell, she’s in the game. Never mind that the others score as well—they all three of them know their goats.

  Matusevitch $285 Gogan $180 Stone $265

  The Works of Charles Dickens. Graham Stone nails “Fagin.” Peter Matusevitch bets too much and falters on “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.” Then Art James presents Miriam with the following: “After a trip abroad in 1842 Dickens published a volume of travel sketches that were well received in England but gave great offense in the country he had visited. Name this country.” Miriam lingers for an instant on the resemblance to the earlier question concerning “Babylon piled on Imperial Rome”: You are to be presented with an unrecognizable image of yourself which you must not fail to claim as yourself.

  “Here,” she says. “America.”

  “Yes, that’s right, the United States.” James’s voice savors the words as if they are a steak. “Well, Miriam, you’ve made a nice comeback from a long way down.”

  Her losing streak broken, Miriam’s cloud of silence breaks, too, and speech rains out. “Funny about these Limeys,” she says. She won’t likely win this contest but as in her CORE interview she will not go down voiceless. “Coming over here and throwing conniption fits.”

  “Yes,” says Art James, but it is the sound of a page turning in the air between them. Keeping things moving along is James’s only real style, the style beneath the tie and the jocularity, a cold formation of military origin. If you proceed with alacrity Monday and Tuesday can be fit into Monday, and Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday into Tuesday, the remainder to be hoarded into resupply.

  “Pretty rich—J. B. Priestley coming over here getting all huffy, calling us an empire.”

  “Uhhhryes.” But all this will be edited out, she knows.

  “We could have a category on dumb shit the Brits say about America. G. K. Chesterton and F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence.” But all this will be edited out.

  “Uhhhryes. So now—”

  “Because no New Yorker has ever once equated this place with Babylon, it’s just utterly bogus.”

  But all this will be edited out.

  Matusevitch $285 Gogan $230 Stone $315

  Pot Limit. Quotes: Words from the Bible. In the final round the fifty-dollar limit is lifted, and so it is technically anyone’s game, and Miriam must qualify her crazy desire to claim an improbable victory against the odds that both Stone and Matusevitch would fumble on the same round, an event that has not to this point occurred, as well as against the fact that it would not hurt in the least to bring home a check for two hundred bucks, and it is at the moment of this thought that she is riven by a savage yearning for the child, by a phantasm of his voice, an image of the fair, tear-damp hair at his temples. For the cost of not thinking of Sergius for an hour, it has been proven again today, is that an hour’s deferred anxiety and passion may be injected into her bloodstream as if having accumulated in some unknown rupturing organ of her body.

  The periodic exits Miriam craves from the cloying auditorium of her maternal life are sustainable only at the extremes of triumph or disaster. As in the arrest on the Capitol steps, and in the jail cell, a day all triumph and disaster both, nothing in between. Sergius in the hands of Tommy and Rose, neither as capable of changing a diaper as Stella Kim, didn’t matter in the least. The extremities of the righteous cause, the indignities of the baloney sandwich, these had exempted Miriam from her guilt. This cataclysmic principle may be motive enough for Miriam to wager her whole
stake and thus come out of here with something more definitive, to avoid the mediocre middle where too much of life is lived, in which the child is waiting for her to slump home on the subway and rescue him from the Carmine Street commune where he is likely underfoot while Stella stirs a pot or smokes some pot or talks on the telephone, where he likely clings to her legs in bafflement and need.

  Miriam, hedging, bets fifty on “What,” at even odds, and Art James reads: “Included in the judgment stipulated by Moses is a famous phrase specifying parts of the body that epitomize simple, one-to-one retributive justice. Tell me this phrase.”

  “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?” She speaks this reply as a question, not out of any uncertainty but because Miriam feels all stridency fall from her as she melts back into the conventions of the game, letting it recapture its proper form, the script she has absorbed into her body’s knowledge as the show’s passive viewer—in this case, a contestant’s modest uncertainty that even the most obvious answer will elicit Art James’s approval and be awarded the points. She is the mother and housewife and she has placed third, no shame, in a contest with two men. The show’s end is a kind of small death, covered in applause and prizes, and Miriam now finds it incredible that Art James and his staff can bear to enact more than one of these in a single afternoon. The upstart accountant has in the end toppled dapper Peter Matusevitch, denying him the distinction of a one-week championship, but that is because he is not upstart but upholder, of the status quo, against suspiciously flowery-looking advertising men who speak too softly, who speak in tones nearly sultry, who speak as if placating feral policemen at an antiwar demonstration’s front line. Graham Stone has come here in the mild disguise of his merkin-like beard, but his suit, and the girth displayed within his suit, and the trim of his hair around his ears, and the barking heartiness of his voice collude to proclaim his right to seize victory here. Peter Matusevitch turned out in the end to be another skinny hippie, hair smoothed over his ears and collar fooling no one, and the show has been scripted as a delayed rebuke to him—for he fails in the end on a biblical quotation while the accountant aces his own. Miriam, for her part, is real real gone, drifting untethered from the scene by the last dissipation of her hopes, a part of her already on the subway rattling through tunnels downtown to rescue the kid, and she feels now that she has failed not only Sergius but also the mournful man with the framed photograph, for whose honor she’d been playing here today no matter how oblivious he’d be to that fact, even as Art James proclaims “That’s right!” to her shamefully obvious answer, and pours patronizing congratulations again on her comeback to this respectable showing. She is to be awarded a check for two hundred and eighty dollars. She has also won a lifetime supply of Adorn hair spray, token of one of the program’s sponsors—“lifetime” signified, it will turn out, by the arrival at her address, two months later, of a large cardboard carton filled with twenty cylindrical aerosol cans, along with a certificate avowing her right to demand more.

  It is Stella Kim who, in the Yippieish spirit of putting the crappy artifacts of a corrupted world into play as absurdist political gestures—the pleasure they both share in plopping heads of iceberg lettuce into freezers, or shoving Danish five-ore pieces and Trinidadian pennies into the dime slots of pay telephones, or opening a pile of junk mail and removing all the postage-paid return envelopes from odious corporations and sealing within them a single slice of Kraft American cheese, shoplifted earlier that day for this purpose, then dropping the results in a mailbox, to arrive grease-stained and stinking at their point of origin—it is in this spirit that Stella suggests one day when the American Friends Service Committee has sent out a call for supplies to be added to a shipping container that will be delivered to the embattled mountain exiles of Guatemala that she and Miriam gather up the incongruous and already dust-gathering crate of Adorn and ferry it to the AFSC offices and add it to the stash. And, though the wish is hardly in the spirit of nonviolence the Friends espouse, Miriam can’t keep from hoping the Guatemalans will be able to convert Art James’s gift to their cause into individual flamethrowers. Or a bomb.

  3 Sandburg’s Lincoln

  This is how Rose Zimmer came to live her long decades in Sunnyside Gardens: It was instead of a Jew farm in New Jersey.

  Her brand-new husband was two husbands, a Jew and a German. The Jew in him wanted cities. The German wanted forests. The German wanted a farm. The German in him, God save them both, whose father was a banker and mother an opera singer and society wife, the German in him who knew only urbanity and culture, who encountered his first and defining jolt of Marx as one of the appetites of the parlor, served forth with tea and cakes and intellectual conversation, the German in him who’d discovered, when he met his comrades, a peculiar flavor of intellectual conversation that had galvanized his passivity and reordered his life, made him proud with revolutionary possibilities—yet was, nevertheless, an intellectual conversation, a construction of the parlor, like tea cakes piled in a delicate formation on a plate—this German part of him now wanted a farm. Wanted, he said, chickens. Would clean chicken shit, collect chicken eggs, strangle chicken necks when needed.

  Thus Rose née Angrush, newly Rose Zimmer, found herself in a Packard riding south beyond all known civilization into the wilds outside Newark to consider taking up a plot of land in what was called the Jersey Homesteads. He’d unveiled the trip quite suddenly, saying vaguely that there were some people there he had to talk to, and adding, as if it were nothing, that he wanted her to weigh it as a future home for their family. Dragged almost screaming by Albert, who could barely steer the dusty, sagging, borrowed vehicle with any competence, who had barely known how to drive before becoming obsessed mere months ago with acquiring his license. As they veered scudding around an ordinary bend in the highway Rose smacked her hand downward to find her copy of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Volume II, just published, and borrowed from the Jefferson Market branch, and gathered up today as an essential survival option for any outing to the countryside: something to read. She gripped the thick binding as if praying to Lincoln to reinvigorate the union between the Packard’s tires and the earth.

  “If you pilot your tractor in the same manner as you’re keeping us on this turnpike, your—what are they called, furrows?—your furrows, Farmer Zimmer, will come out fercockt and your string beans will all resemble lightning bolts, do you realize?”

  “Please, Rose.”

  The Jersey Homesteads, something impossible, something that couldn’t be, but was. It happened under the leadership of a crazed utopian named Benjamin Brown—“a Russian-born Little Stalin” the newspapers had called him, though in fact he was under command of no known cell, was just a shtetl man with a vision, that of wishing to lead tenement Jews out of tenements and back to the soil. Against all odds, except that this was the desperate low pitch of the Depression, when the impossible routinely happened, this Brown had gone to Washington to meet personally with Harold Ickes at the Department of the Interior and come out with a hundred-thousand-dollar check from the Roosevelt subsistence program, with which he’d begun buying up dead farmland from every ignorant New Jersey farmer with his hand out, assembled twelve hundred acres of this nothingness, and then begun to organize Jews. As dubious a plan as Hitler’s Madagascar, probably, but Brown had managed it. Here, he’d announced, would be a communally owned factory, a clothing manufacturer employing hundreds of tailors, as well as a communally owned store and a communally owned farm. This Moses of the Tailors roused the sorry Jews of the Lower East Side and the Bronx—those who, in those low days, could assemble their five hundred dollars for a share of the Homelands. Voilà. The future. Rose had heard stories from housewives visiting cousins on their brief return from toil: dust for five months, snow for three, mud for four. In the little concrete-box houses that dotted Brown’s utopia, the housewives, when they weren’t in the factory or field, did nothing but shovel, scrub, sweep, and polish. That was if you’d
dragged with you anything still to polish, if you hadn’t sold it all off a cart on Delancey Street in order to afford the five hundred to go live in this glorious future.

  Now the scion of Lübeck’s bank and opera house, this idealistic husband of hers, would drag Rose to this muddy hinterland because of some lingering Black Forest fantasy of a pastoral agrarian homeland. A scene like something Lübeck Jews had never glimpsed except painted in blue on a Meissen plate.

  “Jews come here in buses,” said Rose. “Not borrowed automobiles. Those with automobiles get a little fresh air out on Rockaway, or all the way to Montauk, if they’re ambitious. Then go back home where they belong.” Only a city Jew could want farms, she wanted to scream. Those with villages in their blood knew the depths of ignorance, the suffocating stupidity of the life of the countryside. Only those with the villages still in their blood could understand that the future, for Persons of the Book, was in the cities.

  “This could be an answer for us, Rose. You know three wouldn’t fit in my flat.”

  Since the failure of the pregnancy Albert brandished it in every situation so proudly: their invisible baby. That which like the revolution was proven inevitable by its refusal to appear. That which like the inevitable revolution was a solvent clearing up any reservations expressed, any negativity or false consciousness. The day would come, and they’d better make themselves ready. Which apparently now involved a Packard ride to the Jersey Homesteads, if that didn’t moot it by killing, instead, the two and the imaginary third.