Dissident Gardens Read Free Page B

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 withinher. 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 insome 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