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.
He seemed if not at least tired then overly so, swung his watch, hanging his stockings o’er the ledge of the fireplace stuffed with varicose evidences of worry and work.
O thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder, the young lioncub and the dragonviper shalt thou trample under feet!
Is’d kissed B, Hanna’d always used words like smooch, smackeroo, how’d she expect me to learn her language like that…had to almost reach up on the tips of his toes to kiss Him and where, on the hot head, some say, upon the fevered forehead, others, lips spreading their pursy unsmiling mark to stretch love’s skin across the head of His loins…a pressure, a taut tingling in the prostate — then left to attend to his wife, their Hanna resting up from her exertions and cooking, the cookingbirth, the usual that she’d say the ush upon that Shabbat almost day, how that strange old liverish mensch, a skinned fatty garbed in warning red and pure white sashed how he’d later found Him left-overstuffed, then talked his way upstairs, upstairs-upstairs and to His room, nudged close, sat on a chair closer, B still diapered in a new white shirt fastened snugly around Him even on the second button of its adjustable cuffs, a pinpoint Oxford of His father’s, which were all of them too small for Him, too tight, bursting the buttons, rips in His torn, everything hanging out O the shame the embarrassment, Talmud says it’s worse than death: mortality, mortification is, and so why’m I raving like this, she asks herself (but she shouldn’t be too alarmed — you know how hard it is to get a Get these days, you wouldn’t believe how expensive, too), the mensch he shuckled a duchen maybe there in his chair, Israel’s up in the room how he muttered a few words more he had to shut his eyes to remember, then got himself up.
How do I know this?
As if to ask, what’s red and white and bearded all over…it couldn’t have been him, no, you know, she didn’t even believe in him back when she believed, when she was supposed to — and how what you don’t believe in, it doesn’t exist…back home it’d been Jesus who’d brought them the presents, that infant martyred and not this sorry schlump.
Yes! she shrieks, forgive her, and finally sits up in bed next to her husband who’s up on his elbow suggesting remedies even more recondite between dictating nistering lists of anagrams, abbreviations, and other obscurities of formal propition, she’s telling him just yes, yes, that’s where I, no, I’m sure of it: he’d walked downstairs…
Havaleh my mamele, are you alright, say something, sh, don’t talk, don’t strain yourself, relax — you want I should fetch you a glass water, warm you some milk? Don’t tell me, speak up…
Blood, was it blood?
I’m not a mindreader, you know…
But she silences him with a thrown arm and a throwpillow, says to him God to anyone that the mensch, listen, how he crept himself his way downstairs down the stairs a little I think after midnight.
Hear me out.
I’d come upstairs to get a drink when the Underground went dry, which believe me that didn’t happen too often.
Underground where, Halvamind Hava…what are you talking, what’re you talking, you’re talking, still, are you possessed, has a dybbuk swallowed down your throat and’s speaking your tongue?
No, we met in the kitchen, that’s where we always, it was dark, always it was dark…the only light for memory this the dark of the kitchen where, and listen, that stain in the grout, guilt about my teeth, selfconscious the nick, the nook, the kitchen where Hanna she’s sitting and listen, it’s important, this is earlier, you understand, this was before, and she, how with her yogurtmouth, she’s pouring to me like another one, she said, with her dairymouth, she’d say, another one…like I don’t know whether I can go through with this with another, whether I can survive it, Wanda, him or her, whether I can you know or not handle it, manage, whether or not I can like deal.
But he wants a son, and maybe baby this one, this’ll be the One — really, like what, if any, am I supposed to offer her in return?
Israel, he really wants it, but I feel like…some sort of consolation, something Wanda’d thought, like maybe don’t worry, no, sh, not to fret — you’re no enabler, not a milkfactory, no churnerouter of babies…talking like she’s in this fancy schmancy mysticalized trance; the cheap pink curtains, minor defects in workmanship, a steal from the relative of a friend’s relative as always who knows not to ask, weeped around the opened window over the twocar garage and the driveway they swell out into stormclouds — and how I get myself to the cabinet first, she says she goes and opens it wide, that’s where they kept the liquor, high cabinet, you understand after Rubina she once, the highest left one of the two above the bedecked refrigerator, lists, magnets, photos, photomagnets, polarized lists all that dreck and, nevermind, just you listen…