by Joshua Cohen
Embrace what you’ve forsaken, the Guide guides, and they’re guided: this is just fascinating…
A trainful of them disembarks outside the Cemetery, about onehundred strong if weakened families with little ones mostly, only a few unattached, singlestoured, apprehensively lonely, unsure whom to beg for their comfort. Among them is Kaye, pale, darkhaired slickly struck down, tall, thin, and alert, impatient to visit the grave here of a fellow insurance mensch, a hero of his from the days of his very first policy. A brother worker in the service of adjustment, assessing liability, a companion in the divine office of limiting risk. Weather’s coming blown so regularly harsh it feels almost manufactured, machined, whips across his face, he squints, slowly makes his way across the street from the trainstop, toward the Gate. A pilgrimage. All those days of scrimping and saving were worth it, he thinks, have to be, he’s convincing, and now that I’m here, I’d better enjoy while it lasts. He heads up his laggard trainload in their march, keeps pace with their Guide who—with an order to them to wait at the gate for their Guide to the cemetery, because here, everything’s specialized—leaves them with a flourish of her umbrella to attend to yet another Group now doing the shuls, which are the synagogues, the houses in which these people once prayed. Hoping silently that nothing should disturb his Grave audience, Kaye’s intending to appeal for an exception, maybe a divine intervention, perhaps his merit for my predicament—even a few sales tips while we’re at it, useful if he would survive, if he could, advice regarding indemnity as if that were a theological issue, a coupla policy pointers. In his pocket, a scrap of paper folded thrice, company letterhead lined with strict, anxious handwriting that resembles the remains of insects swatted, squashed: a message for the mensch in the Grave, it’s a last will & testament, too, in addition to not a few other things; once inside, if inside, Kaye might use it for a yarmulke, a backup, just in case—he’s not in insurance for nothing.
Through the fence streaming its wall from both sides of the gate, through the inkdark smears and smudges of bars, everything muddled falls into focus: a lavabo to the left, a lavabo’s for the washing of hands…then, a vessel filled with tiny rocks ground down to pebbles positioned to the right, those are for placing atop the stones, the stele, the tombs; he’s prepared. Kaye tries the handle to the door set into the gate, tries again, grimaces wrinkles to an appearance older than he’ll ever live, to grow into his face to hide whether a blush or a blanch, turns to his trainload to ask for assistance, meekly, open of palm. Out of nowhere, there’s a mensch. His is the uniform of two wars ago or so that were never reported (who ever knew, the question every Group asks itself), a medal of uncertain insignia weighs as heavily as a head itself, decapitated, scalped to hang its shine from a scrap of ribbon a filmreel strangling a neck that’s scrawny, and mutual; that old sharp beak peeking from a bifurcate beard, one for you, one for him; onelegged, too, he feels deserving, and so he’s demanding an admission fee, supplementary, wordless, with his hands out, a sum additional to that of their entrance, which’d supposedly been allinclusive, extracted from each of them previously. Kaye shows the mensch his armband, reaches an arm through the bars, then, retracting to roll up the other sleeve, his tattoo, glossy with ointment lately applied, and then from his pockets, his documents disappeared of ink, everything he can think of, anything even remotely indicative of officialdom, of payment in full, but the mensch won’t understand, he couldn’t…he scratches his head, hops around in irrritation on the spring of his stump.
Anyway, says Kaye, cemeteries don’t have entrance fees…it only costs when you want to get in and stay in forever, that and a stone with your name on it spelled right, with the date—then a woman, thicklipped, frizzled, adds: they shouldn’t anyway, it’s not right, it’s a sin; we’re going to have to report you to Management. I’m sorry to ask, what’s your badge number, your name?
The mensch nods to second his silence, again shows his hands: tremulant, knurly; he grips the bars with one, keeps cupped the palm of the other as if to save in it weather with which to wash the dirt from his face; the trainload searches its pockets, a sprinkle of lint, as the mensch brings that hand back to pick at his teeth, with the teeth of a huge iron key, kept roped around his gluttonous waist.
But we came all this way just for this, Kaye protests.
No, says the mensch in their language, perfectly, without accent—you didn’t come, you were brought.
I’ll have you know, Kaye’s not listening to him, only to himself and that woman behind, whoever she was, how he’d like to know, that this armband entitles me to entrance anywhere within the borders of Polandland, then he nods admiringly to her, though it’s him who’s blushing. I’m prepared to talk to the Manager personally, he’s threatening, he’s not, if we’re unable to reach a solution.
The mensch lays a hand on Kaye’s shoulder, the shaky arm slung between the bars, with the other pokes at his own stomach with the tip of the key. Have a nosh, he says, a little to eat: you all look so hungry, so thin. Then, come back in an hour.
An hour, the woman asks, disbelief in the twitch of her nose that’s either repellent or enough to snare you for life—do we have that much time?
There are many fine restaurants in the area. Might I recommend one? It’s regional specialties you’re in the mood for, am I right?
Kaye graves his hands into his pockets, kicks a heel into the mud, turns from the gate only after his trainload’s dispersed: only after many have lifted themselves up on their tiptoes to peer over the low falling fence, a few attempting to decipher the inscriptions in an alphabet foreign, in a few alphabets equally foreign, abbreviated then acronymed to unintelligibility, dazzled into diacritics forgotten: acutes, graves, breves, carons, hooks and horns, dots and diaereses…it’s not that they’ll never understand, rather it’s that these invocations will always only make sense to the dead: a readership as obsolete as the language in which they’re left reading themselves—they’ll be literate in no time, give them a night. And yet, a flurry of bicker, of entitled complaint: some whine in hot whispers, others moan, then quietly enough dissipate into silence so as not to offend the sensibilities of Management (who or whatever that is, if undivine, though merciless), their observant Gates, their surveillant trees: the weather, the service, can you believe, the accommodations, the food; then, they go eat.
Their houses are emptied, almost, nearly, of all their valuables, worldly; repositories of remnants lie locked and alarmed: locked against an illimitable force, feebly, foolishly, alarmed against an emergency any response to which can only be probable cause. No deterrent. Nothing can be protected from putrefaction; there has never been any safeguard against taint. A red cancel to blemish the summons. Only open wounds on the tractearth, gashes of infecting possession, festering forlornly in the latemorning sunfrost: food rots in the refrigerator; the fridge and the freezer the twoheaded unit, huge, idolatrous, rots in the open kitchen like an unfilled, welltongued tooth cracked black down the middle of the stinky sink of a mouth that’s told nothing but lies, that’s prayed only to the wrong God for curses. A dozen indentations for eggs on a shelf at eyelevel, empty save unidentifiable stickiness, enspidered. And the refrigerator, the freezer, hums in the mouth, the hum shakes everything loose, rattles fillings domestic: the windows, the shutters, the pantries, cupboards and cabinets their wares flattened out into steps down the stoop toward the slates, the supports, the foundations, the earth below the concrete; and the food rots into smell and the smell rots into room, a wall of smells, walls, a sink of smells, a floor undusted, splotched, dulling, fading, evanescent as dulled, ephemeral as faded, becoming formless as the rot soon usurps, replaces its form: bathrooms of mold, ceilings of fuzz; the siding weathers, blighted cedar shingling (with not even the larvæ or the moths still surviving, whose nests Israel would shoot out with water from hoses, or ash with a torch lit from headlines), the morning newspapers mound on the porches, soak into one great rising page, as the weather weathers itself and the evenin
g editions of newspapers, a mass of wet print blacker than blood: Problem Nearly Solved, says the subhead, Shade to Address General Assembly Meeting of Sanhedrin Today…mail mounds in the mailbox or is held in perpetuity at the postoffice where a few, responsibly, have thought to stop it, ridiculous, too many bills, collection agency notices, magazines, catalogs and bills, always more, always too, unsolicited; lights switch on on a timer, switch off again then again on timers, sprinklers switch on on a timer, switch off, it rains, it pours rain, sprinklers switch on yet again, and then snow; the house settles, the settle settles, the earth swallows the house rotted above deeper down, a sinkhole, a pit; lights switch on with the moon, off with the sun; the keys rest under the welcomemats, a grinding of teeth with the wipe of strange feet; it stops raining, snow, no one shovels, no one sweeps, forget mops—maids have off, depends, or have been brought along, too, attending even in death, tending to the little ones to the end, a last tantrum of breath…sprinklers switch off or are frozen, immobile, the settling of the settle sinks down even more, kneemud then up to the pits, hipwading slime to the sidewalk, deeper the street; grass grows into weeds, unweeded, seeding themselves; telephone rings, machines pick up, a message is left or is not—tears; lights switch off then on again and then off and then, die. A waste of energy, wasted. Affiliated neighbors, many of them let down their shades, will themselves to ignore; an intrepid few gaze out their windows: at the lawns wrecked with neglect, strewn with the rusted carapaces of bicycles, tricycles, left leaves chattering cycles in the spokes of wheels blown onward nowhere by wind—and the oven’s timer, the stove’s watch, someone set for something, it just ticks and ticks, and they tock. Looting wagons, many of them in the northeast, at least, licensed to a certain Johannine familyowned Moshe’s Movers, proud recipients of a government contract courtesy of a friend of a friend—they’re backedup into driveways, they’re being loaded, they’re taking everything left: these schleppers, what aren’t they doing, what aren’t they responsible for; they’re smashing up a last idolette of the Virgin out on the lawn, they’re repoing the samplers, wrapping ornament valuables fragile in tissue, then hauling all of it out; what’s left that the neighbors aren’t holding onto for the hope of return, they promise, it’s just for safekeeping…
There’s an Ocean around Land, there’re lands around a Land, there’s land around a village, there’re villages around land, there’s land around towns, there’re towns around villages, there’re villages around hills, there’re hills around a wall, there’re walls around cities, there’s a city around a Square, there’s a Square around a Church, there’s a Church around an Affiliated—crucified, he’s been nailed up to hold everything in place, keep it together; this is all pointed out to them, duly noted (understand, that if this tour seems somewhat disjointed, appears somehow confused, then it’s been conducted about as well as any could hope: plopped down with a foldingmap with arrows popping sharply everywhichway, and with all these sobbing disconsolate kinder wanting, needing, to do just about everything…his personalized armband slipping down the starve of his sleeve, icecream melting down the cone of his two fingers holding he’s licking, his parents’ patience tested by the whim, the desire, the demand, fedup, wearing thin, what would you expect—he’s been excited for weeks, counting down the days, blacking them off on his calendar, a secular luach, not many of them left nowadays, secreted under his bed he’d countup the hours, the minutes, the clock the beat of his heart, despite how they’d discouraged); the city’s around a Square around a Church around this mensch, you know Him, an Affiliated, too, crucified, starcrossed, the center of every universe at once, and here, too…the city has a Square around a Church around an Affiliated, an Affiliated has the town around, the village, the Church, the Square, the city, the world, their Guide repeating again and again: a formality, memory; like, how many times do you say a Kaddish—before it becomes less than the sum of its words, its vocables and gutturals, just Amen noise, perpetuo static, no summons? Zusammen! The other Affiliated, the rest of them, though—they always lived downhill, turn, point, where the sewage flowed to, flows, the wounds of puddle, perfectly imperfecting scars (manufactured stains populated with ash, louse, and the vomitous remains of seven species). And everywhere’s like that, with huge fields between everywheres, plains: this quarter of Polandland, bombed, incendiaried, blownup, what do you call it—gone, didn’t rebuild its square; all roads here lead to all roads there and not to expectation, road, the nakedness of late night denuding earliest morning—to stand alone amid nowhere, surrounded only by the sacrosanct and furious quiescence of the ancient, made modest only by the light of late noon…at the markets: there in which numbers, for a moment, a bark or a cry, had other meanings; in which hands, so often put to violence, to death, here merely gestured for profit, the satisfying murder of urge, the gross indulgence of an object desired; at the festivalbooths: amid the gurgle of crated livestock and birds, suspended high amid the scent of the tree and the glow of its lights, always lesser. Prosit! Prost! Servus! Rooted in dregs. The Church here an ancient cockroach grown fat in a crack in the sky…a gargoyled snake (maybe the stillborn son of the river’s or river that cleaved the town, that cleaves here from banking flow to ebb of bank) swallows other snakes and islands, the jutting, falling slips, the dilapidated docks, boats and barges that themselves, in their feathered wakes, cut new forks into the snake’s tongue, the snakes’, corrupted limbless without current, to slow the flood of speech, unremitting, the water of words, as if in punishment for unknown, inchoate, sins. The snake of the river swallows rats and the snakes swallow whole plaguecolumns whole. Waters recede into mute twice daily, at noon and at midnight, then silence reigns again—that great holy and maddening still.
During reconstruction, doorposts had been spackled over in reddened night, the mark of where mezuzahs used to mark, when.
Last latest evening the Square gets klieged, shorn and drowned, the ganze obliterate: an oblation of light, beamed pitilessly from behind spires and turrets. Hordes of tourists walk in walking shadows, footed to shade, shuffling, limping, walkingshoes and galoshes, weatherproofed, wellheeled on tank-treads: a Miss Angelica gets herself caught, between two cobbles she trips, falls and sprains herself hurt, that evening to consult with this goy named she forgets who he once posed as a Goldlust, one of the handful of old Unaffiliated lawyers still around if out of practice of late, to ask him about the intricacies of negligence, liability: ideas of suing Polandland, Inc., gosh darn it all to heck, she says to him, while we’re at it why not sue the whole religion, the race, the world, to which the lawyer will have to admit ignorance of international law obtaining, especially now, though he’ll ask her a few questions she should ask her insurance provider should she ever again find herself home and alive. She can’t walk, the Group continues on without her, no one hears from her again, not a postcard. Here to make the circuit across the water to the Castle, house roomed to house from Square to Bridge felled—not the trafficked bridges where the cars would swerve to avoid the trams, where the trams would stop to avoid the horses, where the horses would throw riders over the railinged edge to avoid trampling the lowlier passing: but the pedestrian bridges, the historic crossings no vehicles allowed, the oldest spans, of ancient arches, their ways lined with statues, of saints and others, the saintlike, the sainted, the saintly, those beatified and still waiting bruised with rust in the purgatory of holiness, Salve; St. Whomever who died whatever death, who knows or should, St. What’s his name or hers who they were martyred together in each other’s arms for something under the reign of another. Polandland, Inc. knows they’re in mourning even if they don’t, and so Management’s gone and covered the statues of the Bridge, and those of the lit and touristed Square, too, with these flattering red tarpaulins: untenable to let those old Saints out alone into unsupervised night, to grant them the honor of a moon, who knows what miraculous madness they’d get into, what they’re liable to do damagewise; crosses and swords, crossed swords bulge out from
under their coverings, Cupidic arrows and roses of silver and bronze. At night, the Bridge’s statuary, like the Square, shot through with a bright river of light, an air luminous and rare above the dark river flooding below. Here on the Bridge, there’s the miraclerub, that in the light, be it that of the sun, moonlight, or artificial, flashed from the bulbs hidden behind the statuary plinths, shines more golden than anything else. A handful of stragglers lift the tongues of these tarps, to get a glimpse: how they’re turned to stone, into statues themselves to bridge high the banks, above the rocks that fork quartered the flows: uncovered, they’ve beheld eyes without pupils, faces without noses, cut off to spite, torsos unlimbed, dismembered by weather; swordhands of St. Who Knows holding tulips wilting and yet petrified, frozen, fists with macle for knuckles, or jewels, their emptily suppurant settings; a starveling dog with a mouthful of genitals prowling still at the feet of St. Anyone bound in crystalline vein. The plinths, the pediments, which are left uncovered and so visible to everyone, haven’t weathered well either, hundreds of years of thousands of precipitations would do that, and worse; as always, words are easier to efface than the fame that is form. A few, though mostly the clerical crowd, stop to make themselves rubbings of the fundament Latin, which is inept, terrible, an imported language of no one now, having been churched out of existence, its conjugations scattered, and muddled, frozen then thawed into incoherence, again—epitaphs to the stone itself, themselves…here lies, here lies
Through the Employees’ Gate, which is less a gate than the secret weedy mouth to an underground tunnel to probable sewers, the catacombs, the basement bodied in the form of the worms that once sustained themselves on their filth—worryingly late in punching in, Peddler and Wife of Peddler make their hurried way through the tunnel to its terminus: a gutter’s cover just beyond, a grating, heft it and descend fast down a ladder then down that passage through to their respective prep areas, there to wash, appropriately dirty and then uniform themselves as quickly as possible, to avoid being reprimanded if not penalized, having any fine deducted from pay. In their personalized lockers, all their worldly possessions—in this world: all the accoutrements of their trade, which is peddling whatever’s to peddle, husband & wifing, they’re peasants, they’ll do what they’re told. In the M’s for Mensch’s area, everyone’s already arrived, prepped and ready to work: boker tov this daily briefing…these rabbis and priests, these lepers, the schnorrer and shylock and solicitous shtadlan, a merchant and shochet, a baker and a candlemacher, this taperer who he’s also a careful eggcandler, the latter three fumbling still with the strings to their aprons. Tie me up, doubleknot, thanks. A calendar’s confirmed by an announcement over the employee PA: Plague’s scheduled for tomorrow at 1400, then a flood, to be followed by famine, next Thursday at 0845; next week, advance notice…gevalt a pogrom—Friday night, you’ve been warned. An old regime, the previous Management, which had been aged, morbidly obese, had fallen, on any last rung or step that itself was a wall, an ironcurtain; they’ve been exiled out, in favor of these pretenders, impersonals, who are only the usurping real, those who hold the true birthright to this nowhere, lately corrupted in the service of money, its pursuit and ambition, we’re just hustling, getting ahead in the newest of worlds spinning around and so fast there’s no ahead, there’s just now: the Peddler’s parents today earning more as farmers who don’t have to grow anything than ever they’d eked out as real, true farmers who really grew, for subsistence, for the good of the State…Peddler’s Wife’s mother lately working nights in a glass factory, huffing souvenirs until her lungs would give out; they once remembered, though only vaguely, and not anymore, a property once owned, that’s still owed them (but how lately they don’t have much to complain about: they’re working, finally free, how life works—made employees of existence, hired merely to be, to breathe their own native air, paid to stand around wherever scheduled and scratch, to putter around plots, to peddle itchy of finger, though stomached with guaranteed salary, door-to-door-to-door through the hotels, around their lobbies and pools). Mayor’s an excellent position, wellpaid, though the Mayor’s also the municipal Treasurer, the Second Assistant Poultry Inspector on alternate Monday afternoons, a Sunday Horse Trader, a Thursday Horse Thief, though during Carnival Time (dates vary, spring) he’s assigned to the rear of the pantomime, the equine tush, you do what you can, all the best. Horses, the real ones, here they’re mostly just showy, they don’t have to work much: they’ve been trained to neigh on demand, and when they drop, and O how decoratively they drop, out of nowhere ride the hostlers and a stable of squiring grooms, many of whom are by now too old for this work (most of the native young have already left, or—disappeared; it’s all about innocence, that of their memories: as youth’s too painful and blushing, it doesn’t reproduce so well in black & white, official colors of the frontoffice); despite their age, then, despite their knees, spines, and their ridiculous shortpants, buckled shoes, tricorner hats and flounced cravats, how they’re uniformly quick to cleanup.