Dissident Gardens (38 page)

15 November 1977, 22 Franz-Liszt-Strasse, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

Into long silence I hurl this communication, in a spirit of beckoning to what lies unfinished between us, and was briefly resumed during your long-ago visit to me, and which then subsequently went fallow—very much my own fault, no doubt. I shall, in any event, now tell you what has made me wish to defy the fear you will discard this letter unread, or even, more simply, some concern as to whether I still have an address at which to reliably find you! It is that I was, January a year ago, operated upon for a cancer of the gallbladder. Originally the doctors gave me little hope of living more than two years. But after two operations and more than three months of gamma rays I have a completely normal life, except for injections every other day, of a special preparation which supposedly mobilizes antibodies. As I can give myself the injections the whole thing is very little trouble. Suffice to say I am practically without pain and at my last checkup, two months ago, the doctor felt that there was only a one percent chance for a new growth.

Naturally my illness gave me quite a jolt and made me realize I could not continue to live in the same way any longer. When I thought that I had a short time to live I felt that whatever time I had left I should live consciously and fully and not negate myself and my own personality. I thus decided already in the hospital that I had to separate from Michaela and for almost a year now have had my own place and am free of tensions and have stopped suppressing my real
self. This decision has probably helped the process of healing and regeneration. Living a lie for so long probably also made it difficult for me to write to you. You must promise never to live dishonestly and with regrets.

Maybe you would feel like telling me about yourself and how you live. I would be happy to hear from you. Needless to say I wish you well.

Yours,

Dad

1/19/78

Dear Dad,

I’m generally the first one up. This isn’t a moral stance but a habit I can’t break. I do like drinking my first cup of coffee alone before I have to deal with anyone else, and I like an hour or two before the phone rings. It rings a lot. All through the day once it starts, and sometimes after I’ve gone to bed, some guy pining for one of the young girls crashing here. Or girl for guy. It gets dark and they’re alone and they call. But I like to be alone in the morning, I’m not lonely at all. So I make the coffee for everyone and drink the first cup or two. You could picture me here with a fresh hot coffee and everyone else sleeping. The hour when I’m starting this reply. The frog-shaped trivet is broken, one leg broke off, so I set the coffeepot on a manila envelope full of your old letters. It was lost for a while but I found it again. All those pale blue envelopes with the red and blue bands. I was looking for it a year ago, actually, but I couldn’t find it, and then last night I found it in the back of my desk, all your letters going to back to before I visited. I was looking for it then because Sergius started a stamp collection, even though his uncle Lenny told him coins were where it was at. You remember Lenny, I’m sure. He’s actually Sergius’s cousin, but we call him “Uncle Lenny” just to needle him. Sergius prefers stamps. And it’s a lot cheaper for us, even though Lenny gave him these penny books. You
can gather up incredible canceled stamps from a million different places if you’re willing to soak them off the envelopes. All brilliant colors and a free tour of the world. I’ve torn the corners off all your envelopes and I’ll soak them for Sergius this morning, what a great surprise: East Germany, wow. The Iron Curtain. I’m not sure I’ll tell him where they came from, at least not yet. If he asks I’ll tell him, but Sergius is stamp-mad, he has a kind of blindness for anything else, and I’ll bet he just ignores the folder, or pokes through it to see if I missed any stamps. Strange thing about your letters, you always type. You even type your name and the word Dad. You and Rose still have that in common, constantly smashing out letters on a typewriter. I read them all this morning again. That’s what I do while I’m alone in the kitchen, read and drink coffee and listen to the radio, WBAI. What the pigs did to Angela Davis lately, some other news about El Salvador. It’s a good station. Nobody listens to it. Later they’ll play jazz or run one of those Alan Watts lectures. I met him once. After a while somebody else gets up, often one of the girls, or maybe Stella Kim, or Tommy or Sergius. The guys always sleep longer than the girls. Whoever it is, I fix them some breakfast. If Sergius isn’t up by this point I’ll roust him. He has to go to school. Sergius eats like a little old lady, he only wants toast for breakfast, every day. The girls and the guys always want eggs and bacon and pancakes. Sometimes I make them a matzo brei when I can get it and that always turns them on, I have to brew fifteen pots of coffee, and there’s this kid dressed for school and munching toast, just sitting there. It destroys me. Sometimes Stella walks him to school if I’m still in my robe. I’ll give her my last five bucks and she’ll come back with orange juice and a pack of cigarettes and the
New York Post
, which is a newspaper that’s gone completely to hell but it runs a horoscope, which is beneath the standards of the
Times
. I mention this as a calculated affront to your horror of astrology, of course.

You probably don’t know what I’m talking about, in terms of people living with us. You’re a Communist only in the sense that you live in a Communist country and you have your long-held Marxist beliefs, if that’s what still motivates you. It looks absurd to me now that I’ve written it down. I guess you must be in the party still. Or again. Is it the same party you were in with Rose, in America? How
mysterious. Well, we live in a commune, something I suspect you wouldn’t really be familiar with. Honestly, Tommy and I are like the parents, and they’re like the children, so it isn’t really a legitimate commune, not like the Maoist one around the corner on Avenue C, which has meetings nearly every night, and they go on for hours, and they never figure anything out. Ours is somewhere between a commune and a hostel. We started by letting Stella move in upstairs. Then we had to fill more rooms to afford to keep this place, because Tommy hasn’t made any money from his records in a long time, and the money from the ACLU settlement for my wrongful arrest on public property is a distant memory. Did I ever mention I was one of the Capitol Steps Thirteen? We sued their asses, then I spent the money mostly at Pathmark, on bread and veggies and ground beef.

By this time in the morning the phone has started ringing and usually someone has rolled a joint and things are getting a little harder to put down in order. I mean, after the kid is off to school. I spend a lot of time listening, actually, you might not think so from this letter which is all about me, but I do. The phone rings or someone comes downstairs and the kitchen is pretty much full of people for the rest of the day. Stella asks me who I’m writing to and I show her your letter. She used to help me think of stuff to write on the
Guernica
postcards and it was Stella who drew the fancy letters with the vines growing on them and the stars and peace signs you asked about. She was just doodling while we talked and then I saw it and thought I’d send it anyway. Stella says I should tell you everyone comes to me with their problems and that I solve them, that I yell at them and make them feel better. She says she doesn’t know how I keep it all together. She also says I should tell you that she’s the one writing this letter, just to freak you out. Our handwriting really is the same, when one of us leaves a note on the message board here in the kitchen nobody can tell who it is. But she’s not writing this letter, I am.

Okay, I’m back. Just got off the phone with Rose, the daily round of complaints about the local politicos. She likes to call them “cronies,” the local bishops and crooks she deals with on the board of the Queensboro Public Library, Judge Freeh, Donald Manes, Monsignor Sweeney. These men whose deep Canarsie accents make her
feel disobedient, even while she’s getting off on their uniforms and titles. Rose is really a crony herself at this point, she just doesn’t see it. She’s the equivalent of what she used to call a ward boss, a local fixer. Anyway, half these guys were her boyfriend at some point, I can’t keep track. But I doubt Rose is actually getting laid these days from the way she talks. Any given mayor of New York is a kind of bad husband in her life, a huge and consuming disappointment. The current one, named Ed Koch, pronounced like crotch, is at least more loud and sarcastic than the previous and gives her some of that Fiorello La Guardia sensation. We call him Ed Kitsch, I don’t know why we find that so funny, just the sound of it. I doubt if any of this is going to make you laugh, it’s parochial stuff. I always had the feeling that for you politics was a pretty abstract thing. As you may remember, for Rose it’s more like a canker sore.

For us it’s daily life. The movement has hunkered down and gotten a little fuzzy around the edges, but we’re here and Nixon’s gone. Did you know Nixon was a Quaker? Tommy’s gotten heavily involved in Quakerism. It started with Vietnam. The Quakers were way ahead of everybody with knowing how to apply for conscientious objector status, during the draft. Now it’s the death penalty that takes up all our energy, and international stuff, the American Friends Service Committee. They sent Tommy to sing in Africa twice, and now we’re talking about visiting Nicaragua, where some really incredible things are going on. Through the AFSC a lot of the guys who live with us are foreign students and dissident and even revolutionary types, how they get green cards I don’t know. I guess the Quakers vouch for them, and who doesn’t trust a Quaker? We had an Okinawan living with us, Tomo, who threw gasoline bombs at the American base. He used to gobble down raw tofu and sliced green onions doused with Accent, which it turns out is pure MSG. They all keep shakers of it on their table, like salt and pepper. Anyway, Tommy is pretty involved and even wants to send Sergius to a Quaker school. Tommy goes to Fifteenth Street Meeting every Sunday and sits in silence—I don’t know if he prays, but nobody pressures you—and he takes Sergius to Sunday school. The elders at the meeting are crazy for seeing younger people show up so Quakerism doesn’t die out. In a way their political stuff is a kind of
bait to draw hippies in. I don’t mean that as cynically as it sounds. It’s a good community. They’ll even marry two lesbians. The elders say that if Sergius wants to go to certain schools, kept on a secret Quaker list, they’d probably be able to help out with the tuition. The upper grades in our local school district might turn out to be pretty problematic for a stamp collector.

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.