Once deloused and uniformed for the day, the Sandersons walk a botched hip downstairs together to the Castle’s courtyard then toward the Banquet Hall, to break their nightly fast in the continental style, with free refills on hope, coffee or tea with your choice of juice. An hour later, they make their way to the lobby, to join a handful of others just waiting around: some are with kinder, some are with parents, others are parents and kinder themselves; they’re flipping through pamphlets “evilly communicated” (badly translated) on purpose, stapled reams listing optional offerings, a candlelit tour of the catacombs, a river booze cruise late afternoon; some are talking, others asking yet even others to take images, initiatory in the mysteries of what to press where, the button click when and then, wind: not that they’d ever have the opportunity to develop these photographs, movies or memories, to share them with loved ones, in slides, projected upon eyes and their livingroom screens — to mount them in albums, framed on the wall or for the mantel shelf in the hall, pass them down generations and further, but again maybe it’s only an initial record that matters, only the semblance they’re after, the image of image.
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…