by Joshua Cohen
And as everything is nested in everything, and That, too, in everything, unto when or wherever you just get tired, decide to call it a day and it was and it was good…or, maybe Gnosticwise, that heresy older than heresy, older even than the One True God against which or Whom one would rail—holding that the ruler of this world is only the ruled of a greater world, then that the ruler of that world is in turn only the ruled of an even greater world, and then yaddaing blah imploding on down through the core of the cosmos, if you’re interested, threehundred and sixtyfive times, which, FYI, was how many days they’d had in their old years, way back when: O to have lived before the Sixthousands…a dayschool group yawning, fidgeting amid a handful of misanthropic sketchers in ash, in ashes and uniformed sackcloth themselves (as thinly sketched as they are here, it’s nothing compared to how blank their own pages), annoyed and trying to appear as such, mourning recess, feeling sorry—then, there’s also a Museum of Museums, the mensch says, gasping for air, and here there’s all of one exhibit, one piece…this spindly docent he folds himself up in his map of the premises, distractedly forces it around himself, over his eyes, around his ears, nose, and mouth until the urge obligingly rips a hole for his voice, high and yet groucho, at the southernmost tongue of the southernmost state, which is this one.
It’s named where it is, he says, what it is, holding the torn shreds in his old, unsure hands—it’s the world!
Unimpressed, the group from the dayschool leans up against the walls, futzes with the peel of the plaster.
But you’ve come for the Inhibition, no?
Follow me, he says with a tremor, singlefile, this way…
This here is PopPop’s unit towered down where the sun don’t shine, and this particular docent (an ancient stoop of a Miami native, a retiree, slippered, rippedarmchair historian who wouldn’t be made assistant to the least curator despite his appeals and the expertise of his simper), he guided on Mondays & Thursdays, then mensched the Information Desk on Fridays until sundown, at which position he’d give out only information about the desk: this is wood, he’d say, rap his knuckles atop, about two centuries old by the best guesstimate, mine…the tree, it was sawed down, wood planed, legs nailed into place, then all of it varnished; it was owned by a resident of this tower who died with the Rest, shipped Over Here from the Old World, Over There roundabout last millennium, midcentury or so before, though who knows for sure…one can’t accurately tell the extent of its use due to frequent restaining: a light red, I’d say, at least it once was or should be, a pity that now all colors come hard to me; it’s the old eyes, and the weather—but seriously (refers to his notes): handbrushed cherry almost oxblood’s its name with a nice fluted edge, two drawers and two leaves for extension, seats eight, I’m telling you, you couldn’t do better…
Here at PopPop’s, he shoes polish, a volunteer when no one else would, he’d often joke around to groups that he lived here, as if underwater, down in the foyer’s fountain, with a ram’s horn for a snorkel how he’d subsist on spare shekels, drinking his dwell, accepting donations and wishes in kind…
Restored some time ago thanks to funding Federal matched by the State from the taxdeductible Other, various recently reprivatized sectors guilted into writing it all off on the wind, this tower’s lately sealprotected, signedover as landmark, thing even has a plaque on its face that they earmarked for it to be polished by hand once a moon; and lately, its penthouse condo unit’s become a place of pilgrimage for dayschools, and for yeshivas, too, when their kinder do the work, put in the hours, seem to merit six goldstarred and four quarters straightA’d a vacation from the Law, their studies thereof—a firsthand field-trip to sacrilege: Isaac Israelien, is what the plaque says, Zeyde (Grandfather) To Benjamin Israelien, Inhabited The Top Floor Unit Of This Condominium Tower, 5735–5760, Hosting His Grandson Here Between 17–23 Tevet Of That Last Tragic Year, The Latter Date Also The Day Of Isaac Israelien’s Death.
This would be Arschstrong’s room, the mensch relates to the group, who remembers their history? Come on, don’t be shy, Arschstrong was the special poo poo friend of whom, anyone, anyone?
Nothing.
Of PopPop Israelien, right!
Wow, you boychicks sure do know your history!
Pity him, he never gives up.
And whose PopPop was PopPop Israelien? zeyde to whom? do you know? It just happens to be a young boy named Benjamin Israelien!
Not much younger than you are.
Isn’t that wild?
But there’s no response, nothing registering, payos twirled around pale fingers, poked into sockets staring, vacant: who wants to rent them, get in on the groundfloor?
Benjamin Israelien, anyone know who that was?
That familiar to anyone?
Anyone?
How he always stops visitors as they leave, detains them (only a moment) to show them a photograph, found in Polandland or thereabouts, ca. 5761 it’s been dated, asking them to identify the subject—and surely, it’s Him.
Inquisitioned, they’re given the following options.
Is it, he asks—
A.) Baruch Spinoza, you know him?
B.) Your Zeyde you never knew, so sad how he died before you were born?
C.) Your Onkel, I mean, but when he was young and with his beard black as night?
D.) All of the above, as we’re all of us just manifestations of let’s say infinite Substance?
E.) None of the above.
F.) No one special.
Thus far they still must be thinking, still weighing their choice though already chosen—the scale of their eyes & ears tipping the scales of the heart…the choice already chosen for them by their own ignorance, or by curiosity’s failure; if you think you know so much then just tell me, the docent’s waiting to hear, don’t keep us in the dark, it’s a sin…as no one’s yet identified Him, Him as He was or is still (though to be fair, the horns B’s usually depicted with, when He’s depicted, throw most off), in this passport photograph represented as one Jacobson, Esq., ripped, creased, corners bent, found down the well of a village sunk so far to the east, the Ost it was called that it might be all the way around the world west again, lost.
Nu, undeterred, so what about this one…and he goes and retrieves another snapshot out from under his snapbrimmed cap, passes it around, this photograph nearly identical to that previous save the black that’s now blond and blue and more of it up top, too, that and the weightgain and that innocence in the smile and the hope at the seat of the nose: hymn…is this Israel? he asks their shadows down the emptied sidewalk, the group returning to school and then home upon buses short and fat and chartered, and so no, he answers himself, he has to, but it was taken by him, Israel, upon a Friday and at the very last eighteenminuted moment before the Sabbath’s set, mil plag hamincha the night of the 24th of old December it’d been dated on the back, the eighth and last of their mingling existences soaked amid the developing solution of night, before the bris the next morning never to be—a moment posed Him alone and already standing on two legs and in a diapered once white Oxford buttondown of Israel’s, leaning against the stove he said oven she said in the kitchen and smile, Say Dairy! a moment before meat, before candlelighting, the savrei Kiddush, all that Blessed art Thou King of the Universe Who brings forth bread from the ShopRite conveniently located at the corner of Route 9 & W. Kennedy Blvd., then dinner, their last Shabbos’ last dinner in the company of last guests lately cometh, and then—their fill later, His eyes still dazzingly flashed—time for bed, and for a bedtime story, too, the eighth and last of the seven that Israel had delivered unto Him as if dreams…meaning, how He’d always fall asleep during the telling: not even a lip laid empty on His mattress where His father might sit and spiel, and so the story’s again delivered standing, In the beginning leaning up against the door’s wall then settling his he thinks old bones senior spine down in one of the two new matching chairs they’d just bought hospitality sidechairs solid hardwood you wouldn’t be
lieve what they’d paid—one for her and one for Israel stained a blue and a whitish pink they’re standing again to end one week ago tonight, he says, and you Benjamin my boychick how you came into this world, Creation’s over already and I promise that tomorrow night, promise that every night I’ll have a story to tell you, you’re loved; wait, just you wait, I’m going to be gone a little while, I’m going to go to sleep, just a little (too, exhausted, but think of the wife), but then I’ll be back at your side, you’ll open your eyes he says and like poof! I’ll be there, I’ll never leave you, and ready again with a story another story always another they say the Shema now O Israel the Adonai our Elohaynu is One both Adonai and Elohaynu and Israel, how he pulls up the covers, comforting up to His nose, which is already haired, sneezing gesund, it’s a reaction to feathers, the goosedown, His asthmatic allergic rhinitis, sinusitis, whatever they’re not doctors we can’t all be His parents hadn’t yet figured that out, give them a break, cut them the slack of their jaws up past His ears to His eyes hiding beneath, fear, suspicion, paranoia this how do I know, that tomorrow, it might—it’s only been a week after all…Israel to kiss Him through the comforting covers, the sheets that’d been Rubina’s spare pair, to then go off to His mother, his wife, their masterly bed with its dimmed lights amid kindled candles, unscented paraffin jars, sensual yahrezeits in memoriam the first sparks, what initially attracted, romanticizing the plushed vault of their room (its purple throwpillows thrown to the vacuum’s threespeeded winds, Wanda’s gusts), to lie down on his side, the Side that’s always been his ordained since ever before time, to shoulder-sniff, kiss at the flush of her neck, Hanna’s, him to molelick, wenlap, rim with his tongue the bones of her collar, with meat teeth to nibble at her if singly pierced lobes…to knead her dimpled thighs for rising in the stove he said oven she said of dream, and then—to enter her there, even only a week after His birth how she submits to him, still, to pass himself through her gates, and there, inside, in the midst of that lowflowing river, snaking through the winter season of her garden to spend himself there, how he can’t help himself, that’s why he needs her, to seed yet another, wants only one more again, expected to enter the world around the month of the true New Year nine months from the turn of the false…one who’d end up revealing herself, her because the boy just to look at Him He’s justifiably a freak, just my luck, nothing more, only around the ten days that follow in mourning the Rosh falling Hashana failing itself already upon that night dawning next the Day of Atonement, gefailing, gefalling, gevalt—her to be birthed into the center aisle of the synagogue, between the pews, to be swaddled in the mechitza, separated from father and brother in the very cradle of curtain divisive, and there to daven for forgiveness, for what, for what else, upon her very first day, in her very first hour and still without name, to proclaim in the midst of her people her sin, her one and her only unnamed…to repent for her very own birth. Having had no choice in the matter, if matter ever she was or would be, unlike this one, here, this Redeemerette, His Savioress out of pity anointed in responsibility, arrayed in salary and spoils, pinched pennies and the rewards that come from getting reimbursed now without a receipt: Hava, in this room freshly wallpapered, “Spring Flowers” in bloom, who knows what kind flowers grown in this house just paid off.
This is Wanda the maid now Wanda the maydel: in one side out the other, poof, as they say, and that’s that. Wanda Hanna’s One how she’s now Wanda-Hava, Hava as in Adam’s wife Eve in the new language olden again, as in that song they’d sung at their wedding high on babka and chairs: Hava negilah, won’t you, as in…you Wanda a little something, and don’t you deny yourself in my house, then why don’t you Hava little something—and he did, have her, still has: seven circumlocutions cracked out of Instruction, a host of prayerful songs shired after she’d learned what there was to learn, studied after she’d shaved what there was to shave, as per tradition, and so much, too, eighteen blessings after morning’s blessed the ceremony at the chintzy hall off the Turnpike, ink dripping from their ketubah witnessed by the caterer and bandleader, the wet of their names mingling and, with ten hours then at the sprawl of motel across the asphalt that gave you the deal if you went with what package spent in delicious Godentwining, in delectable Unification, he drove her in his tenyearold Taurus home, ensconced her in the kitchen: new sconces, three dishwashers, three fridges and three ranges, meat, milk, and pareve, from parents, his now made hers, who knew from machatunim’s the term, and there set her to work, stirring up the pot, preparing.
I Hava Wanda, I Hava Wanda, I Hava such a lucky mensch, a mucky match save passport and his bank balance, whispers as he palms her, shvitz upon her swell…witness the happiness of this new Affiliatedess with her appropriately Affiliated husband, who’d made a respectable woman out of her, a maid and more, a wife and a mother primigravida; in this world, there aren’t any irreligious naturalization problems: she is that she is now that the papers have gone through, a book’s worth of them, and nobody’s asking any questions, us sons we just don’t know how…hymn, maybe some aspersions thrown to glass-houses (perhaps their greenhouse just going up outside, alongside the tennis-court and the inground swimmingpool, subcontracted through his brother to a friend of his brother who’s been going through some tough times, his brother, too, their own many brethren, our sons and who isn’t, we’ll vouch), but nu—who are They to make judgments?
And still she launders and presses and folds clothes, now for herself and for her husband, too, and soon soon enough please stop shushkeh shushkeleh we’ve shtupped all genug for the baby inside her she’ll name whatever her husband wants, but whom she’ll secretly call Benjamin: oy, it’s a boy, to be a boy, congratulations…may he kill you in kinderbirth, may you die at kinderbed, upon it what death could be better, a hearty Mazel Tov all around.
Spit spit spit.
O Adela, she thinks as she irons the skirts she’s inherited, each of her blouses, too…O Adela back home, Over There back dead with her relations, their blood.
And Spit.
And so now in the quietly massive hours of Shtum, with her husband sleeping on the side he picked out as his long ago, long before he ever had a wife, it’s the side he clung to even in the belly of his mother olev hashalom toward the left kidneyward as if a worrying growth, while he sleeps undisturbed, exhausted, womanspent and that for the first time in his life he would remember if ever he were in the habit of memory, knowing nothing either of her Wanda’s past besides her foreign ancestry, her vague though desirable eastness, which is what had attracted him to begin with, she says to herself in her own language though she thinks it, too, in our own (she can’t help it, that’s why she has him, why she’s having him—to have someone to speak with, someone to correct her mistakes), then hides herself down in her mouth and down to her gut, to rummage for Instinct long fallow: still troubling, that she still can’t place that odd ancient whoever he was who’d attended dinner at her house, theirs, the old theirs that night, The Night, or had he, stolen in, could he have and how, and how Hanna’d seemed to think that Israel knew him and how Israel of course had seemed to think that Hanna knew him had known him maybe and how the two of them they seemed to think that if not them then perhaps the Tannenbaums they’d invited him, had they, and why, maybe he was poor, or that his wife she passed on, he didn’t have a meal that night that Sabbath when Shabboses still were temporal; pants, something about pants, maybe, or other, sockshoes…and Hava she knows she didn’t know him and doesn’t, did she or remember him leaving, and maybe it wasn’t dinner at all, after all perhaps it was after, nuzzling her head into the pink give of the pillow, the downy maw, the wishniak’s hairily soft and softening mouth whose stem feels topped with a feather: he didn’t give a name she placed or could or ever and he laughed when appropriate but too loudly, insistently didn’t say anything else, and ate almost nothing, like a bird, like a boyd (her husband), didn’t eat anything at all or even drink; had he forgotten or what, who he himself was, God, who was h
e and how did he get there, did he, and what part did he play in this spiel, which, if any at all? Then, she sleeps, snores an ocean of skin out of her mouth to soak along the round of her form…where’d you get that idea, going geist into her mind she’s woken again in a screamed shvitz hers or his by her husband (the mensch, he’d just been promoted at the slaughterhouse to Head Knife Inspector, which is a position equal in rank to the Inspector of the Finenesses of Sandgrains Used in Hourglasses, he’d joke, I’ve certainly put in the time—how much he’s proud he usually sleeps without calm, a drippy and dreamless neurotic), who shakes her and holds her and holds and shakes her at once to tell her it’s all a dream, reassure, just a dream he’s shouting and what to invoke to ameliorate, to go downstairs and nextdoor to grab the three friends husband or wife and kinder required for the prayer, what’s their names: I have seen a good dream, you have seen a good dream, it is good and may it become good, may the Merciful One transform it to the good, may it be decreed upon it seven times from heaven that it become good and always be good, it is good and may it become good blah blah…sleepinghand grabbing for the manifold amulets that hang from the scald of a knob at the door to their room, the Master Suite’s something anything to ward off: maybe that string of wolves’teeth, the cask of oil luggaged home from Safed, a missed enunciation of the O so many Names…
But a dream: every tradition old enough to regard a dream, any dream, all, as both prophetic and meaningless knows the spiel—gehenna, they invented it: our tradition’s a longtime wanderer of the worn road Nezach to Hod. And so the meaning, if any? Who knows from meaning anymore?
The prophecy, though, in her mind, and I’m talking retrospective, prophecy of the past, to linger its moment, becoming moist between the legs, a smell seeping up from under the lawn, and she…though it’s impossible, isn’t it, she was downstairs, she was downstairs-downstairs, no, she was Underground, doing unspeakable things for money in those days; he, her husband, should never uncover that nakedness: Israel, a passionate lover, though oftentimes a premature ejaculator, these thoughts! had kissed his son after finishing his story, and the old whoever, whitebearded, did he, peeked a chin in from the flue of the fireplace for show; she wraps herself tightly amid the tender errant down of her arms, the sheets of her mother-inlaw, her shviger’s her name warm to the tongue unlike her, struggles with the angel if it even is an angel and not Moloch Him or Itself, never quite figured that out either, Who kisses this into her mind, lips to impress rivulets, riverine valleys of wighair down her neck how she sleeps with it on so as not to forget, lapse the Eden then default on the mortgage…he’d a beard white like a billygoat’s, an old mensch she thinks, no goy, God forbid in whose house and foundationally ancient, maybe from the synagogue as old as all menschs are or once were, his beard she remembers, though, the color, or lacking color, of snow, of Nitor it’s said, a whiteness shining, a purity, a moon just like a shekel unsparing above. Had he come down through the chimney? Leave me alone! I’m a newlywed wife and a mama-to-be, not a prophet or soothsayer of secondhandom! Be gone and cast thee out yadda yadda psht.