Apu Golden heard about the large gathering of protesters against the arrogance of the banks which had begun occupying an open space in the Financial District and when he went down to look, wearing a Panama hat, khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt so as not to stand out too much, he found himself enchanted by the carnivalesque character of the crowd, the beards, the shaven heads, the lending library, the kisses, the odors, the passionate activists, the crazy old coots, the cooks, the young, the old. “Even the policemen seemed to be smiling,” he told me, “well, some of them, let’s be truthful, some of the others were the usual Cro-Magnon you-cross-the-road-to-avoid-contact-with-them types.” He liked the visual and also literary aspects of the event, the recitals of poetry, the placards made from old cardboard boxes, the cutout fists and V-signs, and he was impressed most of all by the support being given to the protesters by the mighty dead. “So wonderful,” he told me, “to see Goethe lying down among the sleeping bags, G. K. Chesterton standing in line for soup, Gandhi wiggling his fingers in the form of silent applause called up-twinkles—or actually of course it’s Ghandi because nobody can spell anymore, spelling is so boozhwa. Even Henry Ford is there, his words rippling through the crowd via the technique of the human microphone.” I went down there with him because his giggling enthusiasm was infectious and watched with admiration the speed and accuracy of his pencil as it captured the thronging scene, and yes, sure enough, there in his drawings were the immortal ghosts among the crowd, Goethe pompously pontificating, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” and “Ghandi” reciting his old chestnut, “First they ignore you, then they blah blah blah, then you win.” “He never said that,” Apu pointed out. “It’s just an internet meme, but what to do, nobody knows anything, like I said, knowing things is boozhwa too.” Chesterton and Henry Ford in their tailcoats seemed incongruous here but they too were given respectful audience, their sentiments being right on the money, so to speak, “An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended,” old G.K. opined, “on finding defenses for the indefensible conduct of the powerful,” and H. Ford standing by his assembly line cried out, “If the people of this nation understood our banking and monetary system, I believe there would be a revolution tomorrow morning.” “It’s impressive,” Apu said, “how the internet has made philosophers of us all.” I personally preferred the cardboard declamations of an anonymous thinker who seemed motivated primarily by hunger, “One day the poor will have nothing left to eat except the rich,” he admonished us, and on another cardboard speech bubble he expressed the same thought more pithily. “Eat a banker.” This thinker wore an Anonymous mask, the mustachioed smiling white-faced Guy Fawkes face popularized by the Wachowskis in V for Vendetta, but when I asked him about the man whose face he was wearing he admitted he had never heard of the Gunpowder Plot and did not remember, remember the fifth of November. Such was this would-be revolution. Apu sketched it all.
He showed this work in a space run by Frankie Sottovoce on the Bowery, a “grittier” environment than Sottovoce’s Chelsea galleries. It was a joint show with Jennifer Caban, the most prominent artist-activist of that argumentative instant, who, at one point during the opening, lay full-length in a bathtub full of fake money; and they were soon both acclaimed and derided for their partisanship. Apu resisted the bathtub photos and also the partisan label. “For me the aesthetic aspect is always primary,” he tried to argue, but the zeitgeist wasn’t listening, and in the end he surrendered to the descriptions that were imposed on him and the measure of political celebrity they conferred. “Maybe now I am famous on more than twenty blocks,” he mused to me. “Maybe now it’s more like thirty-five or forty.”
In the house on Macdougal Street Apu’s new agitprop notoriety was accorded scant respect. Nero Golden himself said nothing, neither praise nor damnation, but the thin line of his lips said as much as speech would have. He left it to his wife to let rip. Vasilisa on the living room floor surrounded by glossy home decoration magazines paused in her work to give Apu a Russian earful. “Those beggars in the street, making noise and filth and for what? Do they think the power they are attacking is so weak, it will quail before the rabble? They are like a mouse that stamps on the foot of a giant. The giant feels nothing and doesn’t even care to squash the mouse. Who cares, really? The mouse will run away soon. What will they do when winter comes? The weather will crush them. No need for anyone else to waste effort. Also, they have no leaders, this peasants’ army you love. They have no program. Therefore, they are nothing. They are a mouse without a head. They are a dead mouse that does not know it is dead.”
Only half in jest she threw a glossy magazine at him. “Who do you think you are, excuse me? You think when their revolution comes they will put you among their holy ninety-nine percent because you drew some pictures? In my country we know something about what happens when the revolution comes. You should kneel with me before the Feodorovskaya Madonna and we will pray to the Blessed Virgin for our salvation, so we are not murdered in a windowless cellar by the army of the headless mouse.”
There was a change in Vasilisa Golden now. At some moments, when the light fell on her face in a certain way, she reminded me of Diane Keaton in her Godfather role, her face, mind and heart frozen by her daily need not to believe what was staring her in the face. But “Kay Adams” had married “Michael Corleone” believing him to be a good man. Vasilisa had married, so to speak, the Marlon Brando character himself, so she was under no illusion about the ruthlessness, amorality and dark secrets that are the inevitable consiglieri of men of power, and when the light fell on her face in another way it was clear that she wasn’t Diane Keaton after all. She was complicit. She suspected him of a terrible crime and she agreed with herself to set the suspicion aside because of the life she had chosen for herself, the life she deemed worthy of her beauty. And, perhaps, because she was now afraid. She still believed in her power over him, but she now also believed in his power, and knew that if she tried to pit her force against his, the consequences for her could be…extreme. She had not come into this house to face extreme consequences and so her strategy had to be altered. She had never been an innocent abroad. But in the aftermath of the shootings in Union Square she had grown tougher. She was clearer about the man with whom she was in bed and she knew that certain silences might be required of her if she was to survive.
REGARDING THE FAMILY: AN INTERROGATION