Dissident Gardens (36 page)

Cicero ignored the question. His students regarded the movement, to his knowledge, with the agnosticism they’d feel toward a social media website from which no peer had yet sent them an invite. “What is it that brings you to Cumbow in the first place, Lydia?”

“New England has twelve Occupy encampments still going strong. It came to me in a dream that me and my Gibson should occupy in all of them, at least for a few nights, so I am, which has been pretty crazy but it’s also been this totally incredible experience which I wouldn’t have missed for the world. It’s
exactly
like you said, Cicero: Bodies carry messages from one place to another. I actually have to get down to Portland today, so that’s another reason it was such perfect timing that Sergius came along.”

“You’re driving her to Portland?”

Sergius disregarded Cicero’s scorn with no seeming effort. “Yeah. In fact, we’d probably better get on the road, Lydia. Because first we’ve got to pick up your stuff.”

“Ready when you are,” said Lydia through a mouthful of crumbs. “Nothing but my ax and my bedroll.”

“I’m already loaded out of your guest room, Cicero. I left the house unlocked, I hope that’s okay.”

“The whole state of Maine is unlocked.”

“Great. Well, thanks, then. I’ll catch you later.” Sergius offered Cicero his hand—dead fish, meet dead fish. So the romance was for Sergius concluded, the feeling between them, at last, mutual: Chalk up another triumph to
affect
.

Still, though it wasn’t yet eleven in the morning, one further mortification awaited Cicero this day. Now standing above them, wholly unbidden but undeniably
there
, Vivian Mitchell-Rose, the associate dean of students, Cicero’s fellow person of color in Cumbow’s desert of same, and, more than once in a while, his kvetching partner, in tones as scalding as could have been worst-feared by white folks seeing them lean their big dark heads together over a restaurant table or behind a half-open office door. Fellow member of the unacknowledged Guardians Association of academia—or perhaps they more resembled the Wandering Boys or Buffalo Soldiers, since blacks in academia threw themselves no ballroom galas or Fourth of July picnics, worked in general a stonier side of the street. The associate dean had been approaching to greet him, then, at absorbing a blast of their corner table’s shitty vibe, halted. The Lyrical Ballad was too small for a full and covert retreat, however. You’d barely hope to pull off one of those within a mile radius of campus. So Vivian had frozen, mid-floor, giving a raw checking-out to Cicero’s breakfast companions.

The sensation drew him cascading back again. Though not, for once, to the soda-counter stools. No comic book, no egg cream. This time he was out in the blaze on the pavement, Rose at his side, monologuing on who-knew-what civic outrage, the two in full stride as they passed a schoolyard on a Saturday morning. There, on the other side of the cyclone fence, laying out of a stickball game, fingers through the mesh to stare as Cicero and Rose went past, a black kid Cicero knew. Fellow person of color in Sunnyside’s desert of same, etc. One of Cicero’s occasional-almost-friends—it did happen from time to time, before Cicero’s fey bookishness canceled the hope that this hefty cop’s kid might be useful to have at one’s back. The look that crossed the gap between them that day, through the cyclone fence, was one that said,
What’s this company I find you in today? What have you got yourself into? And will I make things better or worse for you if I open my mouth, if I even admit I know you, in front of the crazy-ass white folk?
He only had to blink away the involuntary fantasy to see
the same script scrolling as if in teletype across Vivian Mitchell-Rose’s eyes. Maybe, it occurred to Cicero only now that Sergius had quit asking, maybe Cicero’d blown his chance to offload Rose from his brain, shunt her into another’s. Maybe he should have tried. Yet how could he believe it could be accomplished? Rose Zimmer was an affect beyond Cicero’s powers of transmission.

14 October 1958, Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

Imagine my surprise to receive your letter and discover that the girl I remember has been transformed into a young woman capable not only of making such astute and forthright inquiry of her long-silent father but of proposing to undertake to visit here so that we might come to know each other. Or, less to know each other again, truly, than to meet for the first time. Let me begin by saying with delight that, yes, you must come. I’ll not burden you with an account of my decision not to interfere with you and your mother, after the silence enforced by the first phase of my repatriation. Let me instead say that the happy shock of contact has now unloosed a reserve of hopeful feeling. May we close the gap of years, and of national boundaries, that has divided us for too long! For now I’ll reply to your questions as directly as possible in such a letter as this, while knowing that a fuller understanding will be possible when we sit together and talk, as we must.

Our striving on behalf of international Communism during the years leading up to the war was, however sincere, deeply naïve. How could it be anything other, given the situation of a Communism attempting to bring itself into consciousness from within the American
atmosphere? Each of us working in the U.S. party felt the sway of a seductive individualism, one not so far from a kind of drug or sickness—or, perhaps, a messianic religious fervor. (Possibly this may only be viewed clearly from a vantage such as I’ve attained in Europe.) The brutality of the period of the blacklist and McCarthyism, which I was mercifully spared, represented at least a kind of scales falling from the eyes, for any honest Socialist operating under the American system should understand himself destined to be persecuted as an enemy of that system—such enmity being the precise measure of his honesty. This, your mother and I lacked wholly.

It was during my period of reeducation that I discovered, for the first time in life—late, but it’s never too late!—my passion for history. And more, a passion for scholarship: both for working with first sources, with my nose to the earth, in constructing a People’s history, and a passion for teaching others. Americans are a deeply (or should I say “shallowly”?) ahistorical people. This luxury no European could afford. My immediate subject, and a tragic one, is that which lies to hand all around me: the near-complete destruction of Dresden in the conflagration. Like citizens of every nation, the German civilian population found itself the victim of Nazism, but it was Dresden’s special “honor,” alone in Europe, with only Hiroshima and Nagasaki for company, to be on the front lines of the Cold War, and to serve as a horror-tableau of Allied might.

So you must understand, dearest Miriam, your father has in a manner returned to “school”—history being that school from which we never graduate. I am as much a student as you. I must also explain to you how this is in one very literal case the truth: This institute, where one comes to be debriefed after a border crossing so unorthodox as my own, and in which one is typically expected to dwell for several months of orientation and preparation for a fully integrated life in the East, has in my case become a permanent home. It was my fate not only to discover my avocation here but to choose to stay and impart it to others. This place, pleasantly located on the eastern outskirts of Dresden, is an old campus, its grounds comprised of elegant eighteenth-century buildings, a rare instance of those spared, by dint of the countryside locale, during the firebombing.
The Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, though it goes among those of us here by a nickname, Gärten der Dissidenz, which I suppose one might translate as “Dissident Gardens,” however droll this may sound to you. It is not a solitary life, but one I share with Michaela, my second wife. We became acquainted when Michaela came to work here in the administrative offices; she is a number of years younger than myself—another sense in which I remain a student of life! Please know you’ll be made welcome amid my new family.

Your plan to visit elsewhere in Europe before crossing to Dresden by train is a good one. If you stay first with your friend’s family in London, then cross by ferry to Belgium, you’ll be easily able to visit any number of cities by international rail. May I request, only, that you arrange to make a stop in Lübeck, and visit there the “Buddenbrooks House,” made so famous by Thomas Mann? As you surely have been told, in the house next door the opera singer and the banker lived in great innocence and splendor—I mean, of course, your grandparents, as I prefer to remember them. In that house I was born. Lübeck was among the first cities to receive Allied air fire, the opening act of the nightmare destined to reach its climax here in Dresden. In that way your journey may serve as a pocket allegory of our family but also of the subject to which I’ve dedicated my research, and prelude to everything we’ll wish to talk of.

Please write again when you have an exact date for your arrival, so that Michaela and I may prepare your hospitality.

I wish you well.

“Dad”

2 March 1961, Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

I send my heartiest congratulations on your marriage! I suppose I must accustom myself to being continually surprised by your news and I will admit that despite everything I am still adjusting to your
maturity. No doubt next you will declare that you have made me a grandfather. If so, as suggested previously I’ll arrange a journey to Canada so that I may meet the child, to spare your new family a longer journey. I am also gratified by the swiftness with which you rebounded from the awkwardness with the German boy, into a next romantic adventure. I’ll venture that you remind me of myself! I am holding you in my arms as not only a daughter but a newfound friend.

After the admonishments I received from you both in person and by post I should hardly dare mention your mother, but as I’m certain you’re aware the scene you present in your letter is an irresistibly comical one, however discomfiting it surely will have been to undergo. The image of Rose’s abrupt appearance in the home of the Negro minister with a rabbi in tow, in order to demand that your nuptials be legitimated at the last possible instant in the Jewish faith, has the quality, I must say, of a poem. For Rose everything was always, by its nature, its own opposite. This sudden fawning before religious authority, a legacy she had by her own account overturned sometime in her teenage years, is rather priceless evidence. Yet in the truest sense Rose would have been the only authority in the vicinity, the rabbi and your Negro officiant notwithstanding. You do not say (and so leave it for me to assume) that you consented to your mother’s wishes and were sanctified in the bosom of Abraham, etc.

The record album you posted separately has also happily arrived, and I accept it in lieu of photographs of the occasion—I wonder if the brothers all sang together at the ceremony, and also whether the rabbi joined in? Your red-haired boy possesses an ingenuous vitality in both voice and features, I can very much understand your delight in him. Keeping in mind again certain criticisms of my condescending attitude, etc., I will pass over any remark on the “political” nature of the songs you say he has been writing subsequently.

Please let me know, even if merely by postcard, that my package to you arrives. Michaela and I send blessings to you and Thomas,

“Dad”

23 May 1961, Werkhofinstitut Rosa Luxemburg, Dresden

Dearest Miriam,

I write in haste to make the sincerest apology, for giving offense by what you call my “flippant tone”—I was delighted by your letter, and wished only to share my delight with you. I’m aware that your visit here was not entirely simple for you, and in no way intended to diminish the seriousness of your feelings, nor of your new union, with the word “adventure.” As far as other matters less intimate than ideological, let’s please brush those aside for future talks, and rely on such opportunities being plentiful. Please accept a father’s repentance and let me know if the T. Mann book has arrived safely, I worry about the mails!