Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Comraderism,” she repeated, moving one stool nearer. “I’m with you, Archie, I don’t care what anyone else says. You and me are a couple of unrepentant comraderists.”

  He made the face of a querulous bulldog, raised a chubby finger. “Watch it dere, Rose, don’t you go takin’ my words out of contrext.”

  But she couldn’t stop. To see Archie on the brink of explosion was Rose’s only vice now, the whiskey nothing by comparison. That he might explode in her direction was tantalizing. “My dear Archie, I only meant there’s something in the way you or Harry can be relied upon always to be buying rounds for the house, something which somehow seems to testify for a from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-each-according-to-his-need view of things …”

  She raised her glass and Archie reflexively raised his own, then squinted, wondering if he’d been tricked.

  “Dunno if I follows ya …”

  “The whole atmosphere of the tavern,” Rose said, freeing herself to play to the unseen audience hiding in the footlights, letting herself be more than an extra here. “It suggests a sanctuary, from the depredations of the market. What’s the phrase? ‘After the subordination of the individual to the division of labor has vanished—’ ”

  “What littles I understand in yous gobbledlygook, which is minimal, I wish I didn’t.” Archie delivered the line with restored brio, triumphant in his sacred ignorance. The place exploded with congratulatory laughter, much more than the scattered population of drinkers should be able to supply.

  She carried on, into the teeth of the hilarity, but narrowed her target to Archie himself. Forget the room. She’d lost the room long ago. “You’d better face it, Archie, I ought to know a commune when I see one.”

  “Don’t talk that way here,” he hissed. The dime on which his rage turned could never be spent.

  “Yes, I’m a Communist, take a good look. I’m a woman and a Communist and I got under your skin. I know that look in your eyes, a lifetime’s worth I know it.”

  “Stop dat!” He leaned in conspiratorially close, eyes scanning for the informant, the mole among his drinking companions. In fact, no attention was paid. Snowden, Pivnik, Hefner, Van Ranseleer, they were like switched-off machines, like string-clipped marionettes, apart from those moments when Archie addressed them directly.

  “I love you—” she began.

  He tugged her by the arm from her stool, his head turned on its exasperated spring, white hair drifting loose maniacally. His lips were drawn back in panic. “Come you! Come into the back, we can’t be talkin’ like dis out heah.” Rose found herself shunted into the bar’s storeroom, a place of cardboard crates loaded with bottles, full and empty, and lit by a bare hanging bulb.

  “Listen, now, youse.”

  “Hold me.” His mitt had still clasped the back of her arm. Now it leapt as though she were hot.

  “Don’t get me wrong, youse is an attractive lady, Rose, but jeeeeez I got me a wife at home.”

  Rose knew all she wanted, more than she wanted, about mawkish, screeching Edith, and the home-truths this man daily fled—the drab recursion of cold bacon and eggs, the sing-alongs at the ill-tuned upright piano, things even his dim sensibility had grown incapable of enduring. How to let him know she’d been around this particular block, had lost all aspiration to remove a man from his wife? She’d be satisfied with a cuddle from Archie. Or a roll in the sack. Yet how to let Archie know it, without razing the little castle he’d erected around his despair? “Now it’s your turn to listen, Archie. You think a quarter century of infiltrated cells didn’t make me a sorcerer at keeping my yap shut? You think I won’t go to my grave with secrets of global import? Sure, I’ve been an enemy of bourgeois propriety my whole life, it doesn’t mean I care to wreck your home. Be orderly in your married life so that you may be violent and original in your adulterous affairs, that’s Flaubert who said that. I’ll tutor you in doublethink, Archie, just for God’s sake and I don’t even believe in God take me in your arms.”

  From Archie came only the slowest of slow burns. His eyes popped, oatmeal with bubbles of steam escaping. She wanted to seize his calflike cheeks in her hands and scream Bubbelah! She wanted to gnaw on his jowls.

  “I’ve chosen you for my final lover. Your lifelong dream, Archie, only you don’t know it. Hump a hot Red.”

  He gaped at her in wonder. “We ain’t right for one and the other, see?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s like this, Rose. A Jew and a gentile ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”

  Archie was alone and never without a choir. Rose needed to accustom herself to this. His invisible studio audience roared with laughter, acclaiming the brutish joke. Jew, gentile, and Chinaman. If Archie’s sensibility was where melting-pot dreams went to die, this aphorism made a fair epitaph. Yet let it not be the epitaph to their affair, let it not be Rose and Archie’s hill-of-beans farewell address on the tarmac. She wouldn’t give him up so easy.

  “Can you not see that I’m a subversive foremost and a Jew only negligibly? Very well, if it makes you hot, fuck a sorrow-maddened Commie Jew lady.”

  “Yeeeeeeeze, yers got some mouth on you, Rose, do you think you could stifle it down a percent or two?”

  Too easy, he’d only needed to reach for stifle to oblige his invisible mob to another sidesplitting crescendo.

  “You won’t have me?”

  “I am havin’ all of youse I can take RIGHT! HERE! AND! NOW!!!!”

  The pileup of agonistic punch lines suggested, to Rose’s terror, that the credits verged, the episode nearing its end. Just when she’d gained Archie’s attention at last. The consolation being that, should they end here in this back-room cliff-hanger, she’d undoubtedly be central in subsequent episodes. Perhaps a spin-off was in the cards. Call it, simply, Rose. Or Unrepentant!

  Without Rose noticing, the door from the barroom had been nudged open by a small hand. A black-haired girl now slipped inside and called to Archie. The girl wore corduroy overalls and a turtleneck, had hair in braids, might be nine or ten. Archie and Edith’s foster daughter; how could Rose have forgotten? No, Rose would never have this man to herself, not long enough to matter. Archie was a planetary giant around which lesser bodies orbited. Whether at home or tavern, someone new always strode through the door. Characters were buried, like Stretch Cunningham, and new stooges appeared, fresh butts for Archie’s rage. Rose should learn to live with it.

  Archie granted the girl no outward display of affection, only caustic rebuff. “What are you doin’ in here? How many times I gotta tell you, this ain’t no place for a kid!”

  The girl ignored his bluster. “Archie, can you buy me some roller skates? McCrory’s announced a sale yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? Well, then, you missed it! And tuck that thing into your collar, for the love of Pete. Just ’cause I bought it for you don’t mean I wanna be starin’ at it—”

  “Sorry, Archie.”

  “Bought her what?” asked Rose.

  “None of your business,” said Archie.

  “Wait.” Rose intervened, stopping the girl’s hand where she gathered the necklace dangling at her blouse front. Impassive, the girl unfolded her fingers to display what lay in her palm: a chintzy aluminum Star of David.

  A Jewish girl orphaned by fate, sheltered in a cold universe by the neighborhood bully. Of what was Rose meant to be reminded? Anne Frank? Or—? How putrid the heart-tugging shamelessness of it all.

  “You bought this for the girl?”

  “And what if I did?” he nearly spat.

  “You and Edith are foster parents to a Jewish child?”

  Archie winced, bared his teeth, hoisted a reproachful finger. “Don’t youse get smart with me now. This here is a family matter, see? She can’t help what she is!”

  “No more than—” But Rose failed. The body had requirements of its own, commands among which the language of the mouth was only a minor outlet. Something in the contact broke Rose open. She clutched the delicat
e hand that held the Star of David to her own bosom, as if the trinket could serve for them both at once. Then, kneeling, swept the girl into her embrace. The girl lay cool and inert against Rose’s heaving chest, as Rose’s tears now began to pelter her hair. Archie shrugged, screwed up his mouth, rolled his eyes, helpless as ever against the emotional mayhem of Jews. Rose, through the scrim of her sorrow, understood this was no longer her script. There’d be no spin-off.

  “Aw, jeeeeeeeez. Will ya look at the two of youse?” Archie’s voice grew tender now, almost a whisper. He could afford tenderness, having won again, winning always as he did. “I gotta wonder, lookin’ at youse there, why didn’t youse take in your own grandson?”

  Rose didn’t answer. She released the girl, who stepped into the protectorate of Archie’s bulk.

  “Was it some kinda objectivation to the whole Quaker thing?”

  You asinine ape, I could care less about any religion. But Rose was finished with lines. Let Archie have the last word. She was done speaking aloud to shadows crossing the room, the lashings of the tube’s light and color against the gray inward screen of her longing.

  “Nuttin’ like dat should get between family, see? It took a little Jew girl to teach this old dog he had one new trick in him, go figure.”

  Applause. Credits.

  Part IV Peaceable Kingdom

  1 The Lamb’s War

  Was the book about the bull the first book he remembered? If not, then maybe the first on whose glossy cardboard jacket the boy’s fingerprints were the first fingerprints, the first whose pages he softened into use by himself. Perhaps there had been some soiled floppy picture books in his room in the commune. Likely so. He’d never remember exactly. Other books encountered at Public School 19, or the library, all beaten to submission by innumerable children before him, cats, bears, tugboats, steam shovels, Sneetches, anyhow nothing making much impression. His mother read aloud to him from her battered Heritage wartime edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; he held on to this fact clearly because Stella Kim later visited and brought him that book, along with other keepsakes of Miriam. But the book about the bull had traveled with him to boarding school, been clung to like a security blanket, a minor embarrassment worth enduring when others had moved on to boy detectives and boy scientists and comic books and even stashes of Playboy, an embarrassment endurable because he was “the youngest” there at Pendle Acre even when he was no longer the youngest.

  To be understood that way, as official baby brother to the entire school, was Sergius’s special dispensation. Long before he could grow old enough for it to be questioned, the boy’s parents were dead, so anyone who’d have otherwise mocked him for retaining the book about the bull was thwarted. At some other school, who knew? At kindly Pendle Acre, mockery died with Tommy and Miriam. It might be supposed—by the other students and by his teachers, by the resident advisers, by the headmaster—that the book was a talisman of his dead parents. Yet in fact, unlike the Alice volume, which he’d keep untouched on his shelf, the book about the bull wasn’t a keepsake of his mother, or of his parents generally. It had nothing to do with them. It was a talisman, instead, of the boy’s single encounter with Santa Claus.

  His birthright: full hippie and half secular Jew. Given that, and with Rose’s withering contempt for all ritual and ceremony lurking somewhere in the background, Christmas, for the boy, didn’t exactly loom large. No one indulged him, the only child in the house full of adults. It wouldn’t have occurred to them. In the Seventh Street commune the mercantile and decorative changes that came over the darkening city in late December made an occasion for exasperation and jokes, for a few temporarily vacant rooms as younger housemates reverted to their distant families for the holidays, and for a few pot-head potluck gatherings. Then for a New Year’s party to sweep it all away.

  Tommy and Miriam were historical materialists, maybe. Materialistic nohow. Before he understood the word the boy had learned to despise property, a series of injunctions as near to commandments as were ever instilled in him: Thou Shalt Not Covet the Plastic Junk. Thou Shalt Not Request That Which Is Advertised During Looney Tunes. Expect Not the G.I. Joe, Putrid Icon of Militarism. Demand Not the Sugared Cereal. Thine Blocks Be Wooden. Old stuff was better than new, less was preferential to more, group belongings superior to anything hoarded. All this cut firmly against Christmas and Santa Claus. The boy’s world, his room, was not so much devoid of toys or books as it was a place toys or books drifted through. These items, handed down and likely to be handed down again, worn into timelessness, were by this loving use cleansed, even if they depicted commercial icons like Snoopy or Barbie, of their polluted nature as commodities. The nearest to an exception? Tommy did like to blow up balloons. With the boy in tow, Tommy would buy balloons at the Avenue C bodega—thirty-nine-cent packages bright enough to bait children yet not in the forbidden realm of candy or gum or baseball cards—and return to the commune to inflate them, one after the next. The boy supposed the balloons were by definition “new,” since he’d seen them purchased. But they weren’t presents. Weren’t toys, exactly. Weren’t even exclusively a child’s province, for when the rooms grew cloudy with pot smoke the adults played with them, too.

  But at the Fifteenth Street Meeting one December night Sergius Gogan met Santa Claus, or someone dressed as him, and was given a present. The Santa Claus appeared in the middle of a Quaker holiday party, gathered the children around him, reached into a sack, and placed it in his hands: something new and belonging to Sergius alone. This unique status was demonstrated by its wasteful wrapping of bright red-and-green paper, which existed only to delight Sergius for an instant, then be torn aside and forgotten.

  Inside was the book about the bull.

  The meetinghouse, which wore the name of “Fifteenth Street” but bore no relation to the concrete island’s grid, dwelling in a secret gated garden all its own, was Sergius Gogan’s sanctuary. It made a place apart from the lawless excess of his daily life, both in the commune and on Seventh Street, where, while Miriam sentried from a vantage on their stoop, he crept sometimes into the junk-laced lots to encounter Alphabet City’s feral children. Tommy, drifting into Quakerism as a symptom of his peace activism, had with Miriam’s shrugging consent begun taking Sergius along with him for Sunday school. What happened there was more or less impossible to remember even five minutes after it happened: actual Bible study, crafts projects designed to evoke the plight of the Native American, and fifteen-minute sample visits to the meeting for worship, that vast and mysterious room where his father sat with a hundred others to wait in silence for something to enter into them and bring them to their feet to testify, a noble activity regularly interrupted by incomprehensible murmuring speeches on various unrelated topics.

  The population there formed an odd mix of young hippies and the Quaker meeting’s decrepit core, who greatly resembled those elderly you’d pass everywhere in the city and never consider at all. Yet it was as though both groups had agreed to blur their differences, the hippies dressing less flamboyantly than Sergius suspected they wished to, opting for the drabbest colors in their wardrobes, tucking button shirts into their belted jeans, male and female alike banding their long hair; meanwhile, the elderly made concessions from their end, wearing flowery vests and soft shoes, the men growing surprisingly elaborate beards, the women donning chunky necklaces. They met in another middle, too: All were quiet, unstartling, and cloyingly kind. Everyone in the big silent room, no matter how deep in brow-gnarled contemplation, smiled on the children who filtered in and mostly wrecked the atmosphere. The Quaker meeting was where all kinds of adults who might otherwise reveal their ferocious eccentricity, their unpredictability—the old, the strange, the Jewish, New Yorkers of all former intensities—went instead to practice being innocuous. That was what Sergius liked about it.

  The Quakers frequently spoke of the Inner Light—“that of God in everyone.” For Sergius this was unavoidably conflated with the notion
of a pilot light, the mysteries of which he’d contemplated at the Seventh Street kitchen’s battered, enamel-chipped Kenmore range: the Inner Light a thing by its nature tamped and unsparking. A thing, seemingly, quite capable of leaving the outer surface of that which sheltered it cool to the touch and marvelously undangerous. Miriam encouraged him to understand he didn’t need to stand on sentry: It was pretty much okay to just forget the pilot light was even there! And a Quaker might even be like a stove with no dials for igniting the jets; you’d leave a kid alone with a Quaker in a heartbeat. When no one at the commune was willing to babysit, this was what Tommy and Miriam did, dumping Sergius at afternoon playgroups within the shelter of Fifteenth Street’s high gates, watched over by benign childless meeting “elders” or virginal teenagers with braids and ecology-sign-patched jeans, there to clamber on play equipment in a black-padded courtyard, under the leaf shade of the hidden oasis, eye of Manhattan’s storm.

  The Sunday evening before Christmas, Fifteenth Street threw open its doors and served a massive bland dinner for itself and for the local bums. Sergius had learned that his father had a special feeling for bums. These street-corner men might not be as urgently heartrending to Tommy as those on death row, but the death-row men were distant abstractions, unavailable to meet and be offered cigarettes, cups of coffee, or White Castles from a massive greasy paper sack. So Tommy had volunteered to help serve the men who wandered in for the free meal, also bringing his guitar in case there was a chance to sing. He encouraged Sergius to come along—Miriam as always taking a pass on the Quaker stuff, but you guys go ahead, paint the town red—and it was there that Sergius had been blindsided by Santa Claus.

  Sergius took the book aside once he’d opened it, sealing himself from his surroundings, the stringy men shoveling roast turkey and baked potatoes into their mouths and pockets, the other children thronging the man in the red suit, his father now gently strumming his guitar, beguiling music-averse Quakers with an Irish-tinged “Silent Night.” Curled in a chair, Sergius studied what he could of the tale of the calf who became a huge bull and yet refused to do anything but sniff at flowers, even when compelled at swordpoint in an arena of jeering spectators. Then, needing the words, once home he demanded Miriam read it aloud immediately. Sergius’s mother was generous with reading, according, however, to her own priorities, imposing the Alice book, or The Hobbit, which she’d been grinding him through on a nightly basis, one murky chapter after the next. Sergius wanted pictures in his books—now he had them.