Again they present themselves at the Cemetery, a full five minutes before the hour appointed: a clock cheeked big and bloated, its hands expanded, as if the two hands together they’re a belt with not enough teeth, stretching as far as it can go, about to snap off the scale into…they’re full to groaning of traditional delicacies, the very best of the regional kitchen, their fingers and lips wet and salted, their kinder messily smacking a snack, licking two scoops each for dessert — might we recommend the Creamatorium, MAP 3D? Can I borrow your book? Can I hide with my guide? A young mensch squats in front of the gate presently open, shuckling lowlife and sucking away, at a cigarette he’s rolled like his mother flakes pastry, like his favorite barmaid flicks her tongue at his…slowly coming apart.
We’re closed today, he says, keeping his eyes from the smoke — closed, the appropriate state of the eyes for memory’s opening.
Smoke required, too, and so, the puffed tone.
No, it’s not, says Kaye, then nods at the woman who’d supported him earlier, who over the course, third, of their meal has become his fiancée. Maybe they’d let them marry at the church in the square.
Who to ask?
We’re undergoing repairs, the mensch says, reconstruction, please consider a donation, you know the spiel, I’m on break.
No, says Kaye, I don’t. What gives? He turns to the Group, it’s his Group he’s thinking of it as, he lets himself think, if only for a moment, a shut of the eyes this meditative minormorphosis, a protomorphosis, perhaps, come unto the minatorily mundane, whichever’s opposed and so comfortable, known: his Group that’s beginning to lose interest in the Cemetery, though, any at all, really, beginning actually to lose interest in even being a Group, would just as well give up on it, individually, call it a day, without loyalty, go back to the hotel, take a hot shower and — suddenly, the mensch springs from his squat, steals Kaye’s hat from his head (a new, spooning bowler he’d upgraded to upon arrivaclass="underline" a pity, its brim had been bending just perfectly, upturned and immaculately round as if a haloing smile), then steals through the gate, leaving it open and then into the Cemetery itself, disappears behind bars, imprisoned by trees. Nothing obstructing their entry, Kaye walks in heavy, freezing shoes two, three steps to the gate but as he reaches for its handle to open it wider to allow his fiancée to pass through gently first, a gale swings it away from him, fled: rudely shut, rustily latched, locked in an untoward kissing of metal; and so he tries for it again, tries at it, the hefty knocker founded obscene as a fist, the handle yet again an extended palm cast in iron but empty, still nothing, then remembers, the first mensch’s key, in that memory withdrawing a hand to knead the full, lumpy hurt of his stomach as if to heal a bloating of boils, their expression, a carbuncle’s emote, an indignity lanced, brought to a head from which he’s soon weeping; that, and he’s developing a troubling rash. He falls on the gate with forearms, elbows, shoulders, the edges, the sharps, but no one answers, none opens, then presses the full but also emaciated, increasingly fevered, almost tubercular weight of his body against it, catarrhconsumptive and bleeding its time what a waste of good scrofula, such a squander of nodes…it won’t budge, and so he turns to be comforted by his fiancée, Faye her name is, stepping into a mudpuddle that wasn’t there before, he hadn’t noticed: it’d probably been secreted from below, piped up from an underground tank designed especially for this muddying purpose — it creates business for the hotel shoeshines, keeps the rag industry going through a tough patch, scuffed, supports Polandland’s polish; and then there’s his hat to worry about, food poisoning, indigestion, or an allergy, maybe. All at once the skies open, nature ungated, the Group huddles together under the gate’s overhang…as a girl with hot rubor eyes and dark hair that’s inseparable from her dark, deepnecked dress makes her way past them, topped with — it seems like, Kaye’s hat. He twitches ticks to the front of the shiver, yells out to her in a voice of hoarse ice, the expected: that’s my hat, you’ve got my hat blah, but in response she just stops, turns to face him, shakes her head sultry, even more hair tumbles loose to the sky the hat flies to, coldly brimmed by the wind, swooned up through the air. Then she reaches among the pockets of that dress, which is slinky, formfitted by gusts, and empties herself, untucking: coins and bills omnidemoninant, (telephone numbers of and mail from the) presidents of shipping concerns and inspectorate bureaucrats, produces from her bosom a key on a chain inscribed with the legend: Room 50, hands it to Kaye with a whorish leer that makes Faye jealous enough to slap the wet from his face.
And surely — the key opens the gate.
Nu, fill in your own personal details, your own private designs — these coincidences have been keeping culture going for ages…it’s a paradox, all of it, it’s easy to think, in that it’s a parable, too, and as such, parabolic: always returning to whence it arose; a parable in that while it might make sense within its own system, which is closed, it won’t be applied outwardly, however you try, nothing corresponds…though how can anything be both paradoxical and, also, something else, in possession of any other quality, hymn, not so simple’s the thought: if it’s paradoxical, it’s only that, and nothing else, only a paradox, and then not even that, too. Kaye knows only this — he wants in. But there’s always a tug, isn’t there, the chain and its decapitated ball with a face, without eyes, without mouth…Faye his fiancée seething but dumpish, petulant, pouting, with the rest of them almost wholly disinterested now, though anyway becoming herded behind him — and so, to narrate themselves on. Kaye steps toward the gate, halfway through it, making it to the middle of the arch, between its archings, just as a mass of people stream out, umbrellasfirst, an even earlier Group or groups nearly impaling then trampling this Group, his, trying to make their way past in orderly file, trying to make their ways through, to insinuate themselves if only halfheartedly — but the other Group’s too strong, too willful, and anyway wanting out of the weather and home, their hotels, the ferrules of their umbrellas too sharp, too accurate, and black with hate, they beat them back, gouge eyes and navel, prick and slash. Finally, the old mensch with the one leg that this time around it’s the other he’s missing, him with the moles and nose and bifid beard, and a crutch stripped from birch, shuts the gate behind the Group just departed, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, points at Kaye, grins angrily.
You’re late, he says along with the bells of the Church, ringing out in echo Kaye loses count how many tenored times; the mensch winds from them, their toll toll toll, his pocketwatch, chained inconspicuously what with the heady medal and the beard obscuring, setting himself five minutes early just to be sure.