by Joshua Cohen
A pleasant disciplinarian, PopPop, disposed to random fits of overbearing affection verging on emotional abuse.
In your Majesty’s room, though, He’s safe: MomMom’s old preserve (her and PopPop’d slept separately ever since Arschstrong took the eastern corner of the floor just below), filled to its trim of oceana green with novelties exclusively MomMom, kitsch like thimbles hewn from pewter, porcelain owls with fake emeralds glittery for eyes, fortunes from Oriental restaurants tacked to emery in any order of desirability—a schedule for the fulfillment of dreams. This is home if only for a week, one rotation of the wheel PopPop’s nailed to the door to the room, which flimsy paper would rotate according to the day of the week to one of seven vectors of its circle, each adumbrating responsibilities expected fulfilled at His leisure, chores to complete: clear table, clean sink’s toilet, broom and mop the floors, your Majesty; declutter gutters and weed the mail; anytime prior to bed, which is now.
Here only long enough for this barely to’ve become ritual: Benjamin tucked in with PopPop sitting at bed’s edge for their dedicated hour of skullshaping (His uppermost still as soft as PopPop’s own low head is hard)—an ordeal erotic, leaving Him distraught, dizzied audience for the story PopPop would tell, followed by the silence of the nightly Shema, noticeably unwhispered. Then, PopPop to retire a limp off to his room, offlimits, to pack his dead wife’s personals; only now, a year later, moved out from her room to make room for Him: girlishly untouched saddleshoes, bobbysocks, poodling skirts, even her weddingdress that she’d sewn herself from a magazined pattern, then mothballed and tied in necklaces faux pearl and gold, lying all the other jewelry fake out atop pillows, a flaky substance passing for diamond, costumed cubic zirconia, moissanite, not so sterling silver, pseudoSwarowski and Tiffany imitations, being charitable donations, and verily, PopPop understands, elated further, it’s all taxdeductible.
A longing twilight, with relations sundered, together only in that they’re alone—after the tempered happiness, the disapproval of day, an unblinking moon, arched eyebrows of cloud…this, a memory of that ceremonial strangeness, the ritual off, which would almost ruin such promise, their vows, put a damper on incipient bliss, its bounty eternal: the bride carried in, the door shut after its holding uniform’s tipped in splurging style, lavishly absurd in its shame; this tasteless as tastefully underlit room as expensive as happiness always is, this milk and honeymooning who could afford, and who couldn’t? Benjamin had had enough of this side of the family, Israel’s people and their Affiliated menschs, their slumming marriages, their goyishe lusts, His PopPop having married out of the tribe, His MomMom’s mother and her mothers, their mothers before them and blah, all having married an alien kind: how they loved stuff like this, they lived for it, demanded to be spent on, and their menschs were spent, paying topdollar for luxury, bankrupting themselves to be pampered, degraded by class.
His mother’s people, Hanna’s, they were that whole different story, the dialectical spiel; He never knew them, they died too long ago before they would’ve died for all time; it was cancer, too, of the wallet, of the pocket, it had to’ve been, whichever was cheaper to die of…
It’d been a mania for intermarriage that’d afflicted untold generations of Benjamin’s family: Benjamin on His mother’s side simply the product of untold generations of Affiliated women who without fail had married the Unaffiliated, and had verily reproduced with them, and so, in terms of the Law, their offspring would be Affiliated, would’ve been, though not many households were as monogamously observant—religionwise, and especially leaning to the wife’s Affiliation—as was Benjamin’s and would be still, only if. All these goyim, these goyishe monsters of prick and pride attracted to Affiliated women, gonifs with their loves and lust for darkhaired darkheiresses, breastcrowned lusciously, princesses if not queens. Benjamin’s father, Unaffiliated—born, later converted, the first—Benjamin’s mother’s father, Hanna’s, Unaffiliated, check, check, probably sundering unto the first Unaffiliated, Adam, whose second wife seems to’ve been the first Affiliated Mother herself, and how to explain, calling her Cain inside for a piece fruit, very funny. Darkeyed, darker skin, or maybe just maybe degree of endogamy dependant so pale, demure, modest modestum in their natural habitat—in winter the mall, in summer the stripmall—often to be found in their long sleeves and skirts, a secret fetish this ritualwear, dressed down to their white sneaks shomering home on the Shabbos from shul: these women, these girls, daughters ghettowilling, shtupshy. And the goyim they end up with, even worse, dripping smegma from their every pore sebaceous, obsessed with fantasies of the right shoppingbags for breasts, a thickening neck hung with heavy amber jewelry, of women thicklipped, too, frizzyheaded, between their thighs egregriously burning Flatbushes to consume, consume, consume without ever consuming…O these dyed-in-the-lamb’s-wool-maydels—preferring the savor of unkosher salami, treyf schlong, endless unskinned lengths forced through golden doors, a Chosen Peephole through which to taste, sniff, or ogle: the throb of shaigetzes, each to their own specialized lusts, unholy desires but out also to ascend angelic ladders, social and business both; and so union after separation, love sacrificed to lust, new Unaffiliateds kept on being introduced into the line, water to wine, water to wine, and still any offspring, abracadabra, would be Affiliated, thanks Mom, as long as you’re holding the—lessening—line, how’s dad?
Tell him I say what’s up!
It wasn’t what’d transpired the last three months of engagement, or during the six months prior, which her parents weren’t aware of, anyway; it wasn’t even the audacity of the two of them, or the invitations into my home, how her mother had put it, he was a guest in my house, ate my food off my plates, drank from my glasses then my daughter, it wasn’t even the pigheadedness of his parents, how they’d never understand that, that, her mother had said, even she understood, it wasn’t even that he’d asked her, or that she’d ever accepted, or that she—mother, hers—had attempted then out of ritual obligation to stick her greased head into an oven preheated to the temperature of the last war, or that they actually went through with it, wasn’t even the wedding itself, or that she looked, again her mother, sooooooo gorgeous, it wasn’t even the possibility of an entire life together, lives, entire futzed generations exploding forth from one lone smashing of want against need; wasn’t even that night or what was to happen that night, she’s an adult now and yadda, she has to make her own decisions, her own decisions to make her—no, it was most perfectly that that was made that night, the result, the issue that irked; it was, very simply, the Kid. That’s how He, every he in His family—the sprout of an estranged seed, watered with a mixed drink—that’s how they were talked about, if only initially, until they, too, could talk, consciousness with a creditcard, platinumplus and the silence around you it buys: the Kid, the Kind, and just for the sake of argument, devil’s advocate and with what he’s charging I want you should forget about the fathers before, they who’d been born pure, you introduce a foreign element and, nu—what about the Kid, think about the Kid; they even thought themselves mature enough to kid around about it, the whole process, secretly thinking it an instantaneous evolution is what she did, him, also, doubtless, with regard to himself, a next rung on the ladder, ascended just like that, snap! and she’d snap her fingers, just like that! and he’d the goyim say guffaw, nudge her with an elbow recently moisturized and joke, I last longer than that, don’t I, then who knows, she might even in her laughing at him, beside him, feel enough of a new person herself to attempt a guffaw of her own, whatever that is and right along with him, that’s how they’d survived; and this is every woman, every marriage down the Senior line until now, after those twelve, this surviving, fullsized thirteenth—the litany Hanna and Israel could recite in their sleeps, which had always been without trouble, ergonomically sound.
It’s that violation all over again, older than ancient, the rendering of a sacrifice impure, marking it as illegitimate, a sanctuary defiled, Jerusalem fors
aken and the Temple in ruins: her ovum being a Holy of Holies…and, inside her, tailspun moments after, she’s slumped, elbowkneed on the honeymoon suite’s tremendous toilet, he’s sprawled already halfway to the somatic Edenic, that’s when the encounter occurred, the illicit approach, solicitation repine, wormy rape: a burrowing, a burial if only of hope; when the sperm, always lazy, fat, and most probably Polish in origin, meets the smart, moral, and altogether perfect perfectionist egg. How it happens, hymn…he knocks on her door, of the house she’d lived in as a girl, this someone he’s selling something and she doesn’t know from what how would she, innocent as she is, she’s not even home, she’s away with her parents down the Shore, themepark Florida, or Jerusalem; or maybe she is home, and there locked in her room—a fantastic instance that most assuredly must remain Apocryphal—and she’s unable to move, to react, as this who does he think he is, whoever the gehenna, however he was raised—and it’s most definitely a he, she knows by how he knocks paw, then tries the bell, the key under the mat he thinks for once and for once the schmuck’s right, the knob, he lets himself in, and this putz, he makes himself mamzer at home: feet up on the furniture, drinking wholemilk, from where, not in my house, straight from the gallon, the sofatuber, he watches the screen until late, later than her parents ever let her watch, and unspeakable shows she’d never been allowed to know existed; and then what does he do, he stays, and she in her locked room can’t help it, she falls asleep, how long, 12:00blink12:00blinkclockradioalarm then the frontdoor, slam, wakes her up, someone’s leaving but it’s not the same someone expected; no, it’s someone else, someone who looks, acts, talks, and thinks, and everything else—though she has no way of knowing this—exactly halfway between the first someone and herself, and there’s this Thing, this odd weirdness between us, like what’s the weight, the word that it weighs on your tongue, guilt: she admits, confesses, begs…has done something wrong, realizes, a sin unmitigatingly mortal, she let something happen, the same as having made something happen, having remained silent, she’s responsible any way it’s minced to finish and the frontdoor, it’s locked eternally now from the outside, she’s helpless, absolutely goddamned helpless and shrieking for succor, You’re mine, you’re mine, you’remine—and the entire house’s settling in its foundations as if it’s laughing gut, for twenty, thirty, forty years until it’s all paid off, a divorce from the mortgage, a life agonizingly amortized of sin, having aged unattractively and unable to flirt anymore if ever she was she’s still sitting, here on the couch and drinking a from the mix Bloody Mary, talking her new nose to a throwpillow: I didn’t make a mistake, I loved him, that was all that mattered, wasn’t it, we’d planned it out beforehand, went to therapy diligently something like three times a week, four in the summer, isn’t that enough, that two people love one another, mature, it’s not like we ever futzed around on each other, or anything—to throw that pillow across the room set with sectionals, and resume her harangue to the pillow underneath, enumerating all her misses, her nears: I should’ve married Gary, Harry, Larry, he was always, we once, I ever tell you about the time he took me to supper and a show in New York, night he stole his parent’s…and eventually say three or so, with the light of the screen givingout the lachrymal evangel, its pledgedrive to benefit only those with love but none of her homes, clothes, without food or drink, she manages and with a swizzlestick stuck obscenely to passout, a life and even its dreaming—preempted…with storyhour over, unprayered, it’s time to go to sleep, Benjamin, will you?
Tell us another story, just one more.
You want another, sighing phlegmish pudding, an urge to smoke—don’t you know they’re all the same?
PopPop, Grandpaw Senior, whoever you are, one more…
Alright, then you sleep, just one last:
This Is The Story, says PopPop in a yuck yuck yabber, impersonating a foreign voice, as if that of Benjamin’s grandfather, His other whom neither of them knew, Hanna’s father Senior who’d died so long ago, of which war’s cancer forgotten—with MomMom’s crucifix swaying from his neck on a chain of seaweed, him the already caricature consanguine doing this goofy goy impression (perfected against the imagined model of all his late wife’s late forefathers), applauding his hands in mock frothy excitement, as he says, Of The Lumbering Dumb Sperm, & The Intelligent Petite Ovum:
Once upon a time, it begins in a land between your Mother’s legs and your Grandmother’s legs, and between the legs of her Mother and her Grandmother and her Mother and her Grandmother before that crotch, yadda, there was a Lumbering Dumb Sperm named Lud, no, let’s say for argument’s sake Mamzer who he’d wandered far from home in search of his fortune.
But where was his home, you ask?
Okay, in the far ’n’ widehanging testes of this terrible Oaf who roamed the dark dense pubic forest of a nameless kingless kingdom, it might’ve been Podunk for all we know, the wrong side of the tracks. And this Mamzer Sperm, he whistled a simple tune: tweet tweet tweet t’tweet, then said to himself in a language more like grunting that he the dumb schmuck thought meant something, it’s such a goddamned wonderful day! let’s wander into that sunny patch of the forest over there and find something to destroy! and so he did—tweet tweet tweet t’tweet!—and soon beheld through the trees an open grassy field up ahead so calm and so peaceful and so wandered there, and met an Intelligent Petite Ovum, an IPO known as Mazel, not a girl’s name, so sue me in your dreams…and then what you ask? I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow, my boy.
That, or the tale of Rumpleforeskin.
For now, get your rest, make a schlaf.
At least tell me what happens next, you say?
Alright, fine…a reversion to normally nasal lisp: the long story short’s that Mamzer, he rescues Mazel from Mazel’s wellmeaning but at times okay could be overbearing father—a King of Kings, really, and takes her away to an even more terrible third kingdom who knew even existed, it’s named Exile—in which no one invites them to lavish parties without at least a slight degree of wariness…you happy?
As habit evolved over the years, three of them of repeated instruction from Hanna reiterated again and again whenever they’d go on vacation, family or just the two of them, even away just for the weekend, which opportunity had been getting rarer as Israel’d work longer and harder for more money who’d ever spend (retirement might’ve meant death at his desk), Wanda’s locked triply and doubly checked all the doors, front, back, and basement, the two doors per porch interior, ex, the four deckdoors, too, had locked all the windows then let down the blinds, pulled curtains, timed lights set like alarms—her purpose, to preserve anything Benjamin might inherit, after her, and her own, as the Underground’s planning to repossess everything in One Thousand Cedars’ bracket, to ingather its lode to the Hall of Domestics, to house it there until its sale as a single lot to a fence as yet elusive, woody or wiry, going through the interview process, getting screened, prior to any dispersal, mass exodus into greater America, evading the authorities of Immigration, Naturalization, and the retribution of a reckoning substantially diviner: measures proposed then voted upon in a matter of emergency at the meeting of the Eve. Redemption, come up from below, and despite the locks, the alarms above, which are only the world of pretense, of appearances, surface—now, these women have their saving to do, personal scrimp, their own gleaning, its own degradation. Boxes are arrayed, breakables swaddled in newspapers outdated, This End Up. Underground, Domestics are occupied hauling chairs, chandeliers, tables, tarpulined paintings and books never again to be read, everything downstairs then down and out through wardrobes then into and through the wide floodlit tunnels they’re humming, they’re whistling, giddily insulting one another on down the line of waiting looters in every language that is, their vernacular an echoic, welcoming admixture of Slavicisms and the vulgar idiom of American pop, resounding like a party in revolt under the earth, whose face is being emptied chair by table by lamp: each Domestic responsible for her own transportation of the holding
s of her home to the warehouse of the Hall (endtables with casters hoarded, lawyerhusbands’ carts used to lug home files, prized), and yet the proceeds from the sale of the lot in toto are to be split evenly amongst all members, without preference equally shared among Domestics, Grounds, and Maintenance alike, an inheritance from their old worlds and its outmoded socialist governance, though Adela and despite having received no explanation in return for a promise to honor a request this unexpected if not just untimely has agreed to keep Wanda’s absence from the others and, furthering hush, even offered to glean a portion of the Israelien household on her behalf (Wanda insisting on the Scriptural tenth, the holiness of the sum she felt sanctifies greed), while preserving the rest for what she, Adela, didn’t understand, couldn’t ask—for Benjamin, if ever He’d come of age, or for His guardian down there where Wanda said, Myhammy.
Adela wakes late from the floor of the empty Master Bedroom, long un-troubled loosening neck and shoulders sleep after having taken the entire day previous to offload the Koenigsburg hold, hands chapped, fingers chaffed, rung in tens of rings engagement, wedding, formal and junk, mutlifacetedly huge, all Edy’s—she’d given herself the night off, had delayed looting the Israelien’s until morning—though her limbs still a trifle stiff from lifting heavy under the sun that lifts itself, and only the prospect of the same today, more work than Edy and Alan’d ever paid her to do; she sloughs through the tunnel toward the neighbor’s across the way; she shouldn’t be found outside, they’d agreed at the meeting, it took them hours to, none of them should: already the sirens dulled above the earth, whirling aid to the helplessly dead; at intersections, mirrored for safety, dodging her fellow Domestics flailing, hauling their own chests of drawers hanging gawkingly open, an extra helping of horror for Hanna had she been alive, their contents falling, rolling pearls over which to trip and fall, bluntedged baseballcards, compasses without west, leaky thermometers, golfpencils eraserless, gnawed, lipsticks, perfume; dragging to scratch the eyes of the tunneled floor smashed mirrors and glass wardrobes unhinged on screws stripped then spilled, vacation, college and summercamp luggage lugged overfull, footlockers, trunks, suitcases teething zippers, seams ripped, ripping, linnerdance jewelry, earrings for the fundraiser dunch, pesadicht silverware tarnished in disuse, souvenireal porcelain heirlooms, glassily plastic tabletop trinkets, weepy chandeliers fisted then dragged behind to tinkle loud and hollow through their grunts, the imprecations and arguments of Domestics stooping to scoop up what’s been dropped, fighting over whatever remains—Markéta noosed in nine of Mister Rosen’s ties inspired by Chagall, Mojca whipping her on with Misses Diamant’s diamond necklaces clasped to bracelets. Adela dashing through the last stretch of tunnel givingout into Wanda’s wardrobe and, on reaching its portal and instead of meeting with the holy protection of a saint once invoked, there’s darkness, nothing: Wanda’s room sealed with rocks the size of a head, and past them and their mound, weathered cedar 2 x 4s, condemning passage, nailed into a cracked cross—distressing these boards, having been redeemed from Maintenance without benefit of appropriate requisition form. Adela heaves a rock to the side, another, again, tiring, passage impossibly blocked, she stands, making out sound from above—the din of heavy moving, of snaps, pops, hernias lashing out to crack like taskmastering whips, knotted spines—turns as if struck to speed through the tunnel again, through tunnels, tripping over tchotchkes again, furnishings out of any season’s prospectus, shattering the glassware of Moser, touristy Bohemian crystal, plasticpebbled punchbowls and molds of fish for the baking of breads, fukatokugawa vases if that’s how it’s said worth more than they’d ever suspect, coinlike clatter of silver and stemware, shards of plate catalogcarded, and the thick prick of tines underfoot, trampling the greed of her fellow Domestics scrounging, scavenging scraps of lingerie and tracksuit torn, radios, stereos, teevees and unwieldy, doorless microwaves, the contented, contenting like until she emerges through her own portal, toppling her saint, the substitute Anastasia’s accusative, sharply jutting head tearing loose the hem of Edy’s housedress and into her room if it could be said to’ve ever been hers, in the Koenigsburg house where Jana and Veronika are fighting sexually liberated and fiercely over an antique now antiquated silver menorah Adela’s left behind out of the sentimental, a vaguely religious fear that kindles respect, keeps burning the candle of superstition forever—responsibly tarnished, a candelabra smuggled Over Here one branch at a time up nine tushes that once had seats reserved for them in all the synagogues of k.u.k. Austro-Hungary. Adela leaves them tumbling entwined, halfnaked, their nails (sharp, they’d manicured each the other’s) flying to scrape at mouths, at their own images in one another’s eyes, Veronika and Jana who if not twins then should be, scuffling throes on the floor to become bound in the rug rolled over the carpet as if the unifying mummy of a Pharaoh, hardheartened. Adela scrambles up the staircase from the basement amid leaned screens and the photographs of births, bar & bat mitzvahs, weddings in their order, portraits of Koenigsburgs posed as dead as them all, through the hallways and rooms kitchen, family, den, dining, living and dying, through the last hallway that’s also the first, to its door that’s the frontdoor though it faces away to the west, unlocks it from the inside, its key held tight between the winded throb of her breasts, then down the stoop into the frontyard, directly into the floe, the slushy fire—the slowed, thick, freezesearing path of the sprinklers secreted low amid the icicle grass, and on timers.