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 evening 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.