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.