Fire Answers Fire

By R.D. Mumma

How would you react if you came across evidence tying your grandfather to the burning of the Hindenburg in 1937?

A cryptic 75-year-old letter leads to a large trove of German-language notebooks that a well-loved upstate New York radio and television repairman left to his granddaughter, an artist and gallery owner. As these boxes of handwritten documents are translated into English, they reveal a young man, living under a different name, intimately connected with the Zeppelin. After emigrating to America for political reasons, he and his German girlfriend use their knowledge for political ends in an increasingly violent world. The notebooks also describe his run-ins with New York's Nazi Bund leader Fritz Kuhn and his relationship with the left-wing expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, who worked with him on a dramatized version of the Hindenburg’s explosion -- the lost and unproduced play "Fire Answers Fire."

In addition to the personal relationship that develops between the narrator and the granddaughter in the present, there is an opportunity for their conversations to explore questions of political language – especially the contentious language of war and terrorism. The secrets the grandfather leaves hidden in the past -- about the woman he loved and left behind in Germany and the woman he loved and married in the States -- become as important as the secrets he reveals in the notebooks.

This book can be read as a straightforward historical novel about the adventures of a young expatriate German in New York City in the late 1930s, but it is also a book about memory, names, language, labels, and the hazy boundaries between fact and fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.D. Mumma
• Release date: Apr 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310541124

R.D. Mumma

R.D. Mumma has spent his entire career dealing with physical books from working in a bookstore to working for traditional publishers and writing books for print. Fire Answers Fire is his first foray into the world of independent electronic book publishing. It won't be his last.Please follow at http://rdmumma.wordpress.com for background about the historical and literary references in Fire Answers Fire and news about upcoming publications. Reader comments on blog posts are encouraged, as are reviews and comments at electronic bookstores and on review sites such as Goodreads. Authors write alone and love the reassurance that their readers are sometimes more than imaginary.Publication ListAs 'R.D. Mumma':Fire Answers Fire (2014, Smashwords)Co-authored as 'Rick Mumma' and published only as physical books:Teen Terminators (1989, Berkley Publishing)888 Reasons to Hate Republicans (1996, Carol Publishing Group)888 Reasons to Hate Democrats (1996, Carol Publishing Group)Daily Negations (1996, Perigee Books)

Book preview

FIRE ANSWERS FIRE

a novel by

R.D. Mumma

Fire Answers Fire

Published by R.D. Mumma at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 R.D. Mumma

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN 9781310541124

First Electronic Edition Published May 2014

For A.B.

My First Reader

Contents

Returned to Sender

The Notebooks of the So-Called Author

Your True Motives

Raggedy and Improvisational

Heliotropism

Monumental Yet Intimate

Obviously a Cat

False Advertising

Under the Falling Sky

Lighter Than Air

Fire Answers Fire

And Happy Endings with Dead Villains

The Cartography of Desire

Author Information

Jimmy Cobbett: Do you know why the tree grows, and puts out leaves that wither in the autumn? You ask for sense and purpose? I am, thou art, we are. That is the end of wisdom. Sense is given to life by men.

Old Reaper: Do you believe in the kingdom of God? The Kingdom of Peace?

Jimmy: I fight as though I did.

Old Reaper: Then tell me, where shall I find God?

Jimmy: I've never fallen in with Him. Maybe you'll find Him in yourself.

Old Reaper: But aren't you fighting against God?

Jimmy: I fight as though I believed in Him.

--Ernst Toller, The Machine-Wreckers, tr. Ashley Dukes (1922)

I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver

when the switch broke 'cause it's old.

--Elvis Costello, Radio Radio (1978)

Returned to Sender

November 2012

Earlier a little rain fell. The majestic thunderheads departing now remind me of the wintertime Big Snowy peaks that oversaw my academic disgrace out west. The craggy mountainous clouds dwarf these soft rounded Catskills of my new home even as they continue their march toward the Hudson River. They had arrived violently with lightning and swirling leaves less than an hour ago, now they're leaving just as rapidly as they appeared. The sky directly above is now bright and blue, but the still Saturday-morning air retains the smell of ozone and wet fallen leaves. The asphalt of the parking lot in which I'm sitting remains puddled. The sign for Cobbett's Radio & TV Repair hangs over this lot with two chains that seem composed entirely of rust, keeping with the colors of the trees on the hills behind this ostentatiously nondescript and rectangular storefront. I don't park directly below the menacing steel sign with its thin broken tubes that once held neon gas, especially not with those three sparrows adding their weight to it; let the random timing of the inevitable material failure of a rusty chain be the cause of someone else's unexpected accidental death on an otherwise normal day, not mine. I'm superstitious that way.

If I were back in the city I could hesitate in my parked car a block away before beginning an indirect walk past the front windows of this store and others, taking my time and glancing in nonchalantly, giving myself a chance to delay or change my mind about this errand, retaining the ability to leave or to enter at the last minute. Here in this small parking lot, one of only two cars, I'm committed to turning off the engine, entering the store, and making this delivery now. I feel a little guilty turning the key and killing the radio in the middle of this NPR story about 41 people in India who died yesterday when their bus tumbled into a gully. Lately I find I have less patience for these regular reports about scores of people dying unexpectedly. Almost every day there's one of these tales. The news stories from around the world should affect me more, but I'm afraid they'll affect me too much. At least that's the story I tell myself. It's more comforting to think that I'm being overwhelmed than that I've been totally desensitized by the volume of media I consume.

Cobbett's Radio & TV Repair, in this age when televisions are replaced rather than repaired, is not what its sign says. As with at least half the other businesses here along Route 28 just outside of Woodstock, New York, it's an art gallery. Not being one who is known to being in the know, I have to admit that I don't know that until I look through the large windows into the shop.

I'm here because I have an original letter in my possession that was sent from this address in May 1939. The letter is in my inside jacket pocket in its faded envelope bearing its purple three-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp and Woodstock postmark. It wasn't written by or to anyone in my family or anyone I knew, but it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It came to me when I was still on my career track to be a well-respected academic. The letter's mystery used to consume me. And my self-reproach about not sharing it with the others who had completed their dissertations and continued teaching at more prestigious schools as my career waned used to wake me with feelings of guilt in the middle of the night. This object has followed me through seven addresses while books and bicycles and LPs and cassettes and guitars and computers and CDs and old photo albums and friends and relatives and lovers have all fallen away. Now I just want to complete this simple act of bringing the letter home.

The exterior of Cobbett's Radio & TV Repair is a little too studied in its stylish decrepitude and aggressive lack of ornamentation. An honestly abandoned property would have acquired the uglier plastic debris of the late twentieth century. Everything on the outside is honest mid-twentieth-century metal, paint, and glass with just the perfect proportions of rust, peeling, and cracking respectively. The glass in the windows is pristine and every interior surface and object is white except for the art itself, which is abstract, largely in primary colors, and framed behind curved glass reminiscent of old cathode-ray television screens. When I enter I find myself looking at the art the same way I look at pieces on museum walls. I glance at the work itself and then I read the descriptions in black Helvetica type to the side of each frame. What is the name and nationality of the painting's author? When did he or she live? What were his or her politics? What school or movement does the work belong to? When did he or she create this artwork? And, most importantly, what is the title of the work? I'm a man of words, not abstractions. I know my limits. Only after reading the words do I look back at the material within the frame with an appearance of confident understanding. If I'm with a companion, I've been told that I've then been known to start lecturing, based on my rudimentary knowledge gained from museum pamphlets and label reading. Let me know if I start doing it. It's something I'm working on.

These labels in the Cobbett's TV Repair gallery are no help at all. Titles such as Blue #2, 2010 and Untitled, Summer 2011 should be outlawed. Abstract painters should be required to follow the lead of Marcel Duchamp and give their non-figurative sculptures and blobs of light and color enigmatic surprising titles like Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even so that those of us with a limited sense of abstract space and color can at least appreciate the works with a literary frisson. No prices on the wall either, which assures me that they are all well out of my price range. A number of the labels have red dots though, showing that there are people with pockets deeper than mine who have taken a liking to this exhibition and have paid money to bring one of these into their homes.

Luckily I don't have to speak with anyone right away as I make my way around the open white room going from uninformative label to uninformative label. There's a gray-haired man in a green t-shirt, torn jeans and hiking boots leaning over the long white front desk and signing a check. His wardrobe and the traces of dried mud on his boots don't make him look any less confident and distinguished, so I assume that both the gleaming black Jaguar in the front lot and the large brown-paper package on the table belong to, or soon will, belong to him. I can't get a good look at the woman across from him, and I don't want to stare over there, so I busy myself with giving these paintings the titles that their lazy artist should have devised. I can't imagine any of these objects, though the works aren't unpleasant -- even mildly entertaining -- sharing my living space with me. They're too bold. I tend to be the black-and-white-photos-in-plain-black-frames type of guy. The heavily textured one here with the purples and greens should obviously be titled Lucy and Ethel in Italy; the frame seems purposely constructed to look like an old 1960s television and the colors are reminiscent of an exuberant grape stomping bordering on the comedic. Probably not erudite or vague enough for a painting title though, so I'd have to give it more thought...maybe something like Midcentury Mertzian Viticulture? This is what I'm thinking when I'm interrupted.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the work. I take my first direct look at the woman behind the desk as she begins walking toward me and rolling down the cuffs of her sweater. Her previous customer is heading toward the glass door with the Kraft paper package under his arm and her casual beauty fills me immediately with the feeling that I should have given much more thought to my clothes and grooming before I walked out the door this morning.

No, I'm enjoying them though. I really like the layers of texture and the depth and three-dimensionality. I realize that I'm starting to speak in that way that I've been told can get on a companion's last nerve (or, at least, my last companion's last nerve), but I can't help it. When I try to examine the texture of the paint surface behind the curved glass there's almost this vertigo effect on me -- vertiginous effect? -- drawing me into the space between the glass and the canvas. Anyway, I like the way these pieces seem to hover somewhere between painting and sculpture.

Thanks. That's an area -- sort of a gap -- that I, uh, really like to work in.

They're yours? I ask. I mean, you're the artist?

Both. They're mine until I sell them and I'm also the artist. She tugs at her sleeves again as if the sweater were too small on her before she extends her right hand. I'm Helen Cobbett.

As we shake hands I ask, Also a Cobbett of Cobbett's Radio & TV Repair?

Yes. I know it's embarrassing to be featuring my own work in my own gallery. I do have shows for other artists, and group shows. I treated myself this month because I'm really proud of these pieces.

You should be, I say. I mean it. I'd be proud if I had created anything tangible or memorable with my career other than IRA and 401K balances that made it possible for me to leave the office before serving my full life sentence. But, actually, it's not the art that brought me here today.

No? She has a look and calmness and confidence about her that reminds me of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. You're looking to have your television repaired?

No. Actually it was this that brought me here. And without further explanation I pull the envelope that was sent from this address in 1939 out of my inside jacket pocket and extend it in her direction.

What's this? she asks without immediately reaching out her hand to touch it. Does she think I'm a subpoena server?

What I know is that it was sent to a writer named Ernst Toller in 1939 by someone named Jimmy Cobbett who used this address as his return address.

My grandfather, she says as she quickly reaches across the space between us and takes the envelope. She runs her thumb lightly across the words she reads aloud, Ernst Toller, Mayflower Hotel, 15 Central Park West, New York, New York. She starts to open the envelope, then stops and asks, May I read it?

Of course. You can have it. That's why I brought it.

She opens the small square of unmarked notepaper and reads aloud: "Dear E T, Hans Hartung is dead. I will now write and speak only English, and I will use only my new Name, Jimmy Cobbett. I hope you excuse die Vermessenheit. My new Address is on the Envelope. Please destroy this Letter as you have the others. J C. She turns it over, but there is no continuation. That's it?"

It's all I have.

"And if he said he was only going to write English, what's 'die Ver-mess-en-heit'?"

"Die Vermessenheit means presumptuousness or presumption, and d-i-e is actually pronounced like 'dee' not 'die'."

I knew my grandfather had changed his name, but why would he ask this writer, this Ernst Toller, to excuse the presumptuousness?

Toller was a playwright and Jimmy Cobbett was the name of one of his most famous characters.

Hero or villain?

Wha..?

The literary character named Jimmy Cobbett. Was he a good guy or a bad guy?

"He was a saint. A revolutionary and a saint during the Luddite times in England. It was an archetype Toller repeated in most of his plays. Jimmy was in Die Maschinenstürmer ... The Machine-Wreckers in English. I haven't read it in years, but he tried to get Ned Ludd and the Luddites to look beyond machine breaking and organize themselves for the inevitable future that would contain the automation of their weaving jobs."

Did you ever see the play performed?

No, I've only read it. But I've read it in English and German. Always. Always the need to show off.

I think all plays need to be performed. For me anyway. They need the collective intelligence of actors and directors and costume and lighting designers before they really come to life on the stage and make sense for me. Her hands draw an invisible proscenium arch in the air between us.

Barring the possibility of a local production, I can get you a copy of the play to read.

That would be great. And thank you so much for sharing Grandpa's strange letter. Can I have it for a few days to get copied before I give you back the original?

No, that's fine. I have it Xeroxed ... and memorized ... if I ever decide to revisit my Toller studies.

How did you get this letter?

"When I thought I might do some writing about Toller, I actually did start doing a little bit of research outside of libraries and I had an idea for a book. I wrote to... Now this is going to sound presumptuous."

I'm just curious how you got it.

I had read in a biography about William Burroughs that his wife -- not the wife he shot with the William Tell act -- but his first wife, the German woman he married in 1937 so she could immigrate here... Burroughs' first wife was Toller's secretary when he 'committed suicide'. I don't actually make air quotes when I say committed suicide, but I hope anyone would be able to hear them in my voice. So I wrote to Burroughs at his home address in Lawrence, Kansas.

"This is the William Burroughs? The Naked Lunch William Burroughs?"

Yes. I told you I might sound pretentious mentioning it. Anyway, his companion wrote back to me with Burroughs' answers to my list of questions. Luckily it was before email, because I still have the letter telling me that Burroughs couldn't add any details about the events of May 1939 when Ilse Burroughs found Toller's body hanging, but he did have this letter. Your grandfather's letter. It was one of the only physical things Ilse had left behind, but I was welcome to it and he wished me good luck with my writing. I assume your grandfather's letter must have been received around the day Toller died. Maybe on the day he died. Maybe Ilse kept it as a souvenir despite the instructions to destroy it. Maybe she thought it was somehow incriminating.

Do you have any idea what may have been in the other letters? The other letters that my Grandpa had asked Ernst Toller to destroy?

No, none at all. That was the part that always seemed the central mystery to me ... that this could be the only surviving artifact of an important secret correspondence. Your grandfather wasn't a literary man, was he? A writer?

Not that I know of.

A politically active man? I ask. A Communist? A man of the Left?

Not in the years I knew him. She says with a shrug of her shoulders. How far did you get with your book?

"Not very far at all. I beat myself up about it for years, even more so because I had been given this piece of unique physical evidence by a famous novelist who wished me luck. I felt bad about not being a good enough investigator to prove Toller was murdered by Nazis rather than by his own hand. I felt guilty about not finishing my graduate studies and being a good enough ... or a persistent enough ... scholar. Then I felt guilty about not returning the original letter, or not passing it on to the Toller archive at Yale. It could be the missing piece of the puzzle for some real academic researcher who has been much more serious and dedicated and talented than I have been. I feel even guiltier now as I talk about this for the first time."

Selfishly, I'm glad you kept it, she says as she runs her fingers lightly across the back of the piece of paper, feeling the pen's indentations from behind. I'm glad this letter came home and you certainly don't need to feel guilty now that you've returned it to sender.

"I guess not. I'm glad you were here to accept it. I should run. I was out running