by Joshua Cohen
Of course, no one has film.
To begin, is only to begin again: they’d often lived scattered amongst the Others, interspersed among the general population, sometimes in houses Otherowned, never their homes, oftentimes forced into an exchange, though it’s explained that’s only when they’d been allowed out, allowed to mingle, to mix: emancipation, the Enlightenment, you’ve heard of it, I’m sure, read the thick books under thin covers amid the springs of your lives—a great flinging open of doors, an airing, we’re talking…when some left, many purchased houses and businesses, too, on the Square, becoming assimilated, intermarried, became unto others; though that’s not what the Sandersons want to do, not what they’re wanted to do, that’s not in the Schedule today’s what they’re told: not enough local color there, no flavor for the bud of the tongue—they want In, the clusters, the cloister…O follow the shivering river! the thaumaturgical thatching of roofs, their walls below a blessing for the prevention of breath, before falling: the Ghetto, is meant, and soon, in a matter of steps, there they are—a narrowed network of streets, the grid of Diaspora, the matrix of Exile left. Are we there yet? Is this it? What about this?
One more street, one last step—here we are.
Many times a city would have two ghettos, says Miriam though I don’t think that’s her real name.
Whatever, she their Guide.
If there were two, she says, they’d be situated at opposite ends—at the limits, we’re talking walls within walls…
How do you know? asks a Mister Johnson, where’s it marked?
And Miriam umbrellas to the Gate they’re just passing—unknowingly—through, higher and lower and narrower and wider than all.
Here, she says, there, this was the boundary, the border, this, the limen, the threshold—in one world out the other, you with me, keep up…
Now, if you’ll just follow me.
Often in the absence of a gate, she says, you’ll encounter wickets, relatively unobtrusive, or a highwire strung across the street at the height of first floors.
One step more, one last step.
Here, houses are less houses, lesser, Mischlinge, miscegenetically mixed to impure; more like piles, like heaps burnt to cinereous pyres, uncertified mud-mounds of lowest class dirt, weathered by interracinate winds into unpedigreed tumbles, sloshing around, slipsliding about without concern for any code or hygienic legality—they swallow each other, consume even the bloods at their jambs: how there’re no doors, only open mouths here, or their sores, and these doorposts, they’re marked by remove…an outline, an indication, thereupon the edict, Nur für who else, such a mark, the contagion of Cain—down the well, the slither of the street’s scaly tongue. A gurgle rising, all’s poisoned, all’s locked. These streets of ringing streets ring ever outward, spinning each other on orbitally through graben and platz, spiraling Altstädter Ring into the Neue…a viper’s nest, a spider’s nodeglobe—to the left, an umbrella poking holes in history’s story, wind: a synagogue, say it along with me now, I’m saying a Shul…adjacent to that a prayerroom, repeat after me, Shtibl, established in a private residence after a fire extinguished the original synagogue, which now stands again, Ner Tamid: This Synagogue Was Reconstructed Thanks To The Generous Support Of the Mister & Misses Ronald McJackson-Schmackson-Abramoff, In Loving Memory Of Their Parents olev hashalom, their Foundation…a yeshiva, sunk to the depth of a mikveh, a community center, a Gemeinde, an Obec, HQ of the local Społeczno, a kahal or kehilla; their expectations reify, manifest themselves in the particulars, like worms there they root, there they rot, they’re severed, they’re quartered: in the Record of the records room, the slanted inked lines of the shelves, the smeared invitation to fire that is the study, the file of volumes, the ranks of their learning, to be annually purified, repristinated into the function of a winter sanctuary that went up in flames, only a season ago (the smaller Shtibl or Klaus, for when all freezes, like now—it’d also served as an auxiliary prayerroom for the High Holy Days, which are Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, followed by the Day of Atonement, Yom Kipper’s its name), its ashes to be scattered unto the air—Tephramancy, or so Miriam says, everything has a name, everything to its name—for purposes of prophecy, forbidden as of the failure of any attempt, even yours; to follow the footsteps inked on the stones, dripped in wake, progress the tactic of smear, to follow their dark for the rest of their lives, footprints slaved on one shoe only, often half a shoe, soled with rock: they serve as the touring routes, the sequence of sequence, the sequence of Once—the Hospital, next, and then next to it, the Home for the Elderly, the infrastructure of the indomitable spirit (so easy to celebrate, when all the rest goes to corpse): here are your young, there are your old; here are your healthy, there are your sick; next to that the Ceremonial Hall, the Burial Hall whatever you want to call it, you call (Miriam, she hates their languages, spits them with spite the seven she knows), the place where the bodies of the deceased were prepared, had been purified, guardedover, then next to that through the night, the Cemetery itself…there between those cerementally façaded outbuildings: Ceremonial Hall, the Cemetery, then the Carriage House, let’s not forget, a caravanserai it’s called commonly, housing the bier, the communal coffin, falsebottomed: no way out, and the only…how we’re buried only in the bodies we live in; she nods across the street, in the direction of any salvation—the Goldsmith’s, adjacent to his son the Silversmith’s, then his son the Tinsmith’s nextdoor, whose daughter’s husband he’d worked up the road at the Mill in the employ of his uncle, whose…a wide arc of her umbrella, it’s familytreehandled, canopycutting, encompassing all and their kinder in shade: the Watchtower, the watchtowers, then the further walls, their gates, beyond, the world entire and furthest…then back again in a sweep, a swoop of its plume unfurled, its sharp ferrule piercing at hearts, open up and bleed for me, can’t you—toward the Square’s center, again, which is the core of it all, as Polandland entire’s the center of the Land, of the earth…the pole of the pole’s and, too, the fundament of the whirlwind, the indwelling of the presence and the fall of the numinous veil—what do you say, you’ll get the footstool, and I’ll get the throne…I’ll meet you back at the hotel by supper, I swear. Then, back again toward the edge of the Mittel, the margin, the vale in its paling: the Ghetto’s square, which is smaller, lower, and narrower than, almost a miniature of the Square, the Square-Square, she means, as if fit for the dog of a king: the court-god, the lawyervizier, the jestering doctor or the traveling bard…toward the houses they owned altogether there, had been married into here, were born into here, died out of there, become centered in huddles around courtyards, communal; then, within this middle’s edge, this shoulder shrugged or hemmy fray, and toward its own center, centering, a shard of but whole, a reflection, say, or an imitation or satiric parody of and yet intact again, as whole again, theirs—ruined replete with its synagogue, its Great Shul, the Grand Shul, the High Shul, the Low Shul, the Old-New; its entrance humbling their shamble down a stairwell the steps of which and its wall are of headstones, mortared in memory: repeat after me, a shul is a synagogue is a shulagogue, a temple is what…
Miriam the Guide with her Group passing these houses also used as shuls and as shtibls, as places of worship, as corners of worship, as worshipnooks, or prayercracks, please notice—how their roofs sag under worries, stooped under the weight of the heaven the weights of the heavens their septenary sum; past the houses sagging under their roofs: thatched, timberframed, Miriam says, unframed, like here without door…knockknock, this poor quality wood, wormwood, turdwood, rotboard this collapse: these houses stoopshouldered, with no door in their doorways, openmouthed, how they’re gaping, stairtongue, step the buds, what’re they saying, calling out sore whose name or the wind through their windows shattered though shut under lids of dust under lashes of wind and dust shattering blindness, fever, and hunch; sgraffitod façades scumbled to innards, viscera, a decomposition from without to within as ashes to ashes to…Miriam the Guide w
ith the Group, with her next Group, the Group always next, how she staggers them forward they’re staggering ever forward on over the Land—sagging under the weight of the houses humpbacked, so burdened they follow the passage parsing southwest toward cool noon, slowly manage the wide street, which is actually named Wide Street, which intersects Narrow Street (never doubt home’s street names again: how the Market’s on Market Street, the Synagogue’s on Synagogue Street, the Cemetery’s on…no, it’s on Butcher’s Street, sorry, named for the shop at its end—got you there, you’ve got to stay on your toes…ten, the quorum hoard of your wandering feet), which leads into and out of the Ghetto, leading them into and out of the city itself, the village, the town, Polandland’s proper limits coming toward the Square now as Wide Street as it widens itself into the Square that’s called a Square even though it’s a circle, and then—it’s enough: a street storelined, its Square shoplined, too, overpriced, why not splurge, it’s over so soon; and then, only a block more…a few blocks beyond the Square, north, east, if here there be blocks, even (grid superimposed upon grid, cycles atop cycles, clocking, a staggering mumble of settle after all’s razed to very foundations, then rebuilt to fallover again), Long Street, Short Street, she leads group after group, guides group after group after group, umbrellas them and herself from the wind and the rain and the snow a few steps more just a step, and it’s darker, quieter, it’s…a Quarter, says Miriam, this is a Quarter—shush silence, isn’t it heymisch? though Polandland’s been divided into many more than mere fourths…though the streets might’ve been straightened out (like one might shake out a sheet, wave out a tablecloth in preparation for a bridegroom’s banquet, the chatanchazzan’s drinkwindy, unwitnessed tisch), by the best efforts of what we call modernity, of an involved government and public goodwill, there are still traces, in the way their feet want to walk, in how their hands need to reach to touch and to hold, of the older ways and the winding ways, the natural course of decomposition, the unchanged change of decay leftalone, gnarled spines, splintered ribs, streets ghosting their own olden roads through newer guesthouses, deadroutes trod heavy through livingrooms, deadrooms, and over a light sleeper a stumble then out through their wardrobes, empty, the walls.
At the border, here, the bruised, bloated joint, perpendicular to—the Quarter seems to genuflect to the Square, prostrating itself at this estrangement of knee, this arterial way…Wide Street intersecting Narrow Street, only to become on its other side Ghetto Street’s its name, set apparently straight, with regard to the lean of its living, though with an underlying windingness bisecting the clocked circle surrounding with the secret of its holier, unhanded time—to flow its river of homes, rushed people and the livestock they resemble into an opposite street, bounding, containing, River Street it’s called far toward the back of the Quarter, unwalled to tumbledown at their intersection in neglect, to decay; there to bridge with its loosened cobbles the most polluted swell of this river, whatsoever its name if it isn’t just River, formerly Water: this is the world, roundsmall or it was, and how everything they’d want or need, everyone they’d ever know, would exist inside its circumference, had been encircled in bondage, encycled, bound up in one; this tightness, the throatconstriction, the dizzying breath of containment, overwhelms many, all, the market, the marketed package…and so Miriam takes it upon herself to assure: what you’re feeling is normal, to be expected, and them, this is fascinating stuff…O I didn’t know that, did you, honey, I didn’t—reassured as she guides them, whichever them, with each group the same, these undifferentiated, unindividuated, up shortcuts, switchbacks long around, as handeddown father to son, generationally hand to mouth, dor l’door: mouth to ear, out of mind to its foot in through the alleys and courtyards, Baroque culs-de-sac, rococo loops, maniacally fine and fripperant turns…
We’re heading back to the Square now, says Miriam, for the clock…about to ring us the hour.
You shouldn’t miss this!
A mustdo—is everyone ready?
Let’s all stick together. As much as she sticks to the script.
No use getting to know them, Miriam, no use to even think of them as them—and not just as It, the riveredabout.
And so to begin again, again then all over.
An Affiliated bleeds in a bleeding memory, wilts in a willing memory—dies in a dying memory…dies.
In the Square
The Sandersons arrive in the Square, having passed through innumerable subsidiary squares on their way, through intersections intersecting pedestrian malls, through stretches of municipal openness buttressed by statuary and somber monuments to the most important who cares (Miriam’s stretching, herself—and the feet, they hurt so), that, too, and the Ghetto’s constriction, the poisonous suck, the thin wick through which passes the hour’s glass sand—arriving finally in front of the Clock, just moments prior to its sounding the knell of our noon in twelve tones, halved hollow. Here and waiting, they behold the Tree, which they’d previously known only in photographs, from films, promises, descriptions of print and the mouth; how it fulfills all expectations, exceeds in that it’s “simply fabulous,” though “amazing” is preferred (upon the forms they’ll later fill out—help us help you to force you to fill: our trip was amazing, we had an amazing time, everything was “simply amazing”); earlier, they’d toured another tree, the other Tree, rooted in a lesser as mirrored square rooted across the river from this square, the Main Square, Old Town’s, that’s the New’s: the tree here’s watered larger, it’s historyswollen, greater, obviously the more important of the two trees, the most, they didn’t have to be told after all—despite, even its plaque’s larger, more luminously polished; as for its ornaments, the other tree can’t hold a candle…
Here, everyone holds an umbrella.
This is the openedwide heart of everything, and everything is around this, in pulse—around the Church that is, its cruciform insides, and its Affiliated, its mensch, his own heart almost too open; its death. Mister Sanderson fusses with his jackets (slicker over nylon windbreaker, in layers), a zipper’s caught, he struggles to find the catch, zip himself up again against the bleat of the cold. Of course, Miriam says, many cities, many towns and villages have not rebuilt their Squares. All roads there lead to all roads there and road, not to expectation: the early morning/late night nakedness of a Square, paved with—how do you say, she asks herself, gnaws a lips, for their edification, how you say—tongue, that’s it, that’s the language, that it paves with bare rotted tongue, its buds suckling toes, buds roiling underneath toes, boiling, burning…keep moving, step on: the whole Group’s more pillow than head this morning, the wakeup cock had cawed too early for most, betraying, cuckoo; they’re overwhelmed, too much of not enough, sites of time, landmarks timemarks timelands, monumental disasters erected to this battle, this fire, this burning, whose auto de fé tragic death. Advertisements on the martyred façades, have been pasted over windows, nailed over doors or wherever doors should be, should’ve been they take paper for things, offer things for paper (the only falsity here, or one of the only: selling souvenirs, they’re recommending purchases if only to spite), signs & wonders ask for paper with number, with numbers, paper with faces and face; pay their way out of death’s debt, is the thought, using as guarantee the images of their executioners famed. This way, this way. Mind your step, mind your pockets, your mind, your personal possessing possessions. The Sandersons with their Group pass under the Tree, heldover for them cheerbright, starry and twinkling, toward the Clock’s clocks and their toll as exacting as promised, leaving behind them a husband whose nobody knows, maybe not even him; standing high on the exposed roots of the growth, leaning against its trunk to search for his wife, whomever’s if not already a widow, the Law orders him off, nightly takes him away, he isn’t seen or heard from again, his wife either, if ever she was. A shocking bustle of black forms as if spilled from the river, its ink: the tap tap tap of a nightstick, worming as if sexually from its wielder’s disintegrate shadow, a
pain palmmuffled, fistfaced. A helmet invasion, segmentally regiment with how many limbs. Everyone turns, then turns yet again. Unrunged, standing expectant in silence. And then, suddenly—of all things a gazelle, if you can believe it, leaps up from an open sewer, clears the canopy of Tree and of houses, maps a vast arch over the Square, naturally calm, like it’s risen to bow, appearing even, couldn’t be, to nap in leap amid the weather and with groups’ umbrellas lowered not as trees bent from the ascent but as flags hung low in a respect that’s spontaneous and yet, also brave—the gazelle’s own arc the umbrella of sky, a rainbow the covenant of colors that mark us as different, and yet all of a shade…not to worry your belief, though, it’s animatronic, in truth that’s its name, on a timer, and Misses Sanderson stares beatifically, points, forefingered heaven—with the scurrying rivered away, forgotten even in spirit, banished, consecrated to thatwasthen, thisisnow…everyone gasps, it’s amazing. What’re we looking at, Mister Sanderson demands still concerned, confused with the turnings around and the oohlings, the ahs, who, he asks, where, I don’t see anything, will someone please tell me, is it over yet, what? He stares openfacedly, a square unto himself in his jaw, in chin’s jutted flat bone, at the sun at its nooning; loudspeakers swell along with the rising, having faded out the Square sounds, the Market Sounds, the prepared Livestock Reel, fading in now a fresh snatch of music, a fan’s fared anew, just the perfect accompaniment this period score: basses surge celli, harps strung tautly with rays of the sun above gliss up and down these winds of every hue and hewing direction—light to the east, dark to the rest, in a flutter…a swirling crescendo to crash, at tessitural height, steepleward pitched, resounding within the upsidedown bell of the Square, stonebottomed the catacombed Church (Mister Sanderson’s missing everything, he’s scared without the Adamic sense of a neck whether to raise it, to let his apple drop for the slitting—he falls to allfours, reversionary, as if he’s being bombed back into an animal, strafed into the bestial again he begins sniffing at the lampposts, commences with a great licking at the territorial plinths). Having reached its apex, the higher meridian, the gazelle then descends, with smoothly greased grace, to land on the opposite side of the Square, to disappear into another sewer open, then shut. At its disappearance, the Clock handed into the face of the Town Hall sounds another hour, clocks another life, strikes twelve times over twelve tones, and how everyone just applauds like their lives might depend on it.