Dissident Gardens Read Online Free

the granite weapon back and forth through the crowded room, the smoky air, Rose didn’t swing it to shatter Albert’s cranium. Nor Alma’s, which would have surely collapsed as easily as an eggshell, tight-combed and hairpinned white wisps drowning in blood as she fell to the carpet. Nor did Rose crown any of the high party operatives. No, though they made it so easy, leaning in lusciously to plop sugar into their teacups, bending to stuff lit matches into mossy pipe bowls, no, though it would have been so beautiful to watch them riot in fear of her and her granite boxing glove. Nor did she go in and murder the newly fatherless girl, whose small body Rose would still have been able to hoist through the window to hurl down onto the pavement of Broadway, drawing cops to whom Rose would then immediately denounce
the cell of Reds she’d uncovered
(You gentlemen revolutionaries are sidelong-eyeing this peasant-stock housewife for a reaction? Well,
there’s
your reaction!), no, no, no, on the night Rose Zimmer had discovered she possessed not only the capacity but the desire for murder, she’d let the most delectable array of possible victims go completely
un
murdered. She’d killed not even one of them. She’d carried the ashtray out filthy and carried it back in as spotless as the best-paid Lübeck housekeeper could ever have made it.
    Now
that
was a trial!

    So here, the night of her real and final expulsion, on Rose Zimmer’s back step she and Sol Eaglin were encompassed in a cool and fragrant evening, false escape from that pressurized, oxygenless kitchen. Theinnocent babble of voices rising through the Gardens wasn’t innocent. The whole place was against her. A minor reference in Eaglin’s original phone call had sunk in now. He’d said he and his group would be coming to her fresh from an earlier “meeting”—that elastic and ominous euphemism—to be held just across the way. No doubt, the meeting had concerned Rose directly. A neighbor had denounced her again. But who? Hah! The question, more likely, was which of her neighbors
hadn’t
, by this time? Rose felt the force of this dead utopia, the whole of Sunnyside Gardens corrupted by the onrush of coming disappointment, seeking scapegoats for their stupid guilt at their wasted lives. Rose supposed she made a fair talisman for wasted life.
    The Gardens was cold.
    Could get colder still.
    None among them there knew American Communism wouldn’t wake from this particular winter. Oh, the beauty of it! After all Rose had seen and done, to be kicked out bare months before Khrushchev, at the Soviet Congress, aired fact of the Stalin purges. Bare months before rumor of his words leaked across the Atlantic to scald the ears of the devoted American dupes. Then the words themselves, translated in
The New York Times
. Think how sweet it would have been, to see the hound-eyes of the sober and pretentious executioners waiting inside, on
that
day. But no, exiling her would be their last glorious act, or at least the last she’d have to endure witness of, these superb indignant wraiths, men dead who didn’t know it.
    Tonight, none of them knew.
    Again, Sol Eaglin made small talk, almost flirty now that they were alone. “How’d you meet this policeman of yours, Rose?”
    “Unlike some who dwell only in a Moscow of their dreams, I’m a proud citizen of a locality that includes Italians, Irish, Negroes, Jews, and the occasional Ukrainian peasant. Aren’t your people Ukrainian, Sol?”
    He only smiled.
    “My feet when they walk touch the sidewalks of Queens, they don’t float above. My beliefs don’t deliver me from a responsibility to the poor degraded human souls in front of my face.”
    “You mean doing your rounds? What’s it called, the Citizens’ Patrol?”
    “That’s right, the Citizens’ Patrol.” The two skated around facts Sol Eaglin obviously knew from her party dossier, the existence of which Sol would deny and which Rose would never be able to