When they were born, he was born, and when they came for the born, he went.
my will a legacy my very last given over leave it all to Agnesz from Mexico I married her after Liberation January 1945 back in Cologne Paris Amsterdam London but she died on the boat over in the middle of the Atlantic without middle in the East Ending middle of HERE is London the BBC Home Service capital of Hungary or was it then Czechoslovakia where she was born you don’t know from places the graces of dates all the same to you on the ship over she died of a fever which was the war maybe Hungary or then it was Romanian thrush she said Sárospatak Potok am Bodroch she’d tell me it meant the Muddy Stream the Athens of the Bodrog she’d whisper sub rosa about the mapping of maps but now you access interfacile you mouse over whole surfaces screened as if no one down there mattered existed only for the idea the world exists larger than you and is greater than too the collective concerns of whatever your poor Body & Soul the first film I sat through in America Washington Historyless Heights where I’ll die and no one will know just go over the documentaries mockumentaries the old story here in Washington George the First Heights after every revolution went through knowing every joke and every camp there were as many camps as there were jokes every witz there ever was and we were the punchlines the cast crew editors and authors my Onkel out of work dictating his feuilletons to the floors and the roofs the streets silent no more radios either the junkfunk you couldn’t own a telephonegun no radiovisuals not the Grynszpan I knew who’d worked at my father’s factory where they manufactured no more bicycles either I had a Waffenrad until curfew or 1939 no more out late party cabaret café and cigarette nights into morning liqueur only November and Wahrheit und Truth dayeinu said out of season that Purimask last we dressedup we disguised ourselves as soldiers SA SS who took over the Aryan factory on whose floor we made our last Pesach Passover Passah with the windows closed to the candles and the machinery snuffed the Elijah haNavi who stole our best hidden silver that night of shellshattered eggs O my Kristallarms and my nachtlegs the windows lashed with boiling rocks stoneshuddered the wedding of a hammer groom to the glass at the synagogue though we’d say the Bethaus on the Roonstrasse the Runegasse Temple not a shul the Portuguese esnoga or snoge with its black chandeliers huddledstarved pews I slept in through Amsterdam smashed into shuttered London shipwrecked boatgloating London-town Fagintown bombedout blitzedout Amsterdam’s Waterlooplein the disappeared Houtgracht all of 1946 the year of resurrection I shipped over the Hudson’s Atlantic from Luftkrieged London Big Ben fallen dark the clockfaced Canadians who liberated Amsterdam under the command of General Walter Cronkite (ret.) the king of the city of Spinoza but three hundred years too late for him in a century eternally late for any moustachioed ethica anything ordine geometrico demonstrata that was the structure of Auschwitz too the system the ordering Seder a concentration camp you might’ve heard of it from camps from camp after camp after every witz there ever was crossing the border with Canada burning to Rotterdamsterdamned Antwerp the Scheveningen dunes the Netherlandish moon the seachannel changechannel the lines at the JCC headquartered at 18 Johannes Vermeerstraat the Rembrandt eyes of that hollowed rabbi that Hungarian Hasid who’d married us it was Purgatorio I memorized at the Realgymnasium one canto but a generation short of the numerus clausus e canterò di quel secondo regno dove l’umano spirito si purga e di salire al ciel diventa degno lived down a job editing the personal ads in the Aufbau was how my cousin Eva had met my searching for friends for the nuclear core the De Wallen whore who’d hailed from under the last wall in Ukraine who’d witnessed our nuptials performed by that Satmar or Munkács ben Surly Yisroel the coupling the centralization the Reichsvertretung to the Reichsvereinigung was how it began with the chuppah cloudpelts of the Polaklaan pelicans of summer November Agnesz’s niece with the Rosse Buurt on her cheeks the Jodenbreestraat red of van Rijn that had run in the streets she rubbed in for rouge to cross herself over the border canals are just fancy gutters the ash of London the wet smoke of the Dickensian chimneys the artful dodging duikers the Sobibor arrivals waiting to bathe clean with Heraclitus in the Amstel my legacy to be an orphan and step twice to question getting into a whispering argument with a neighbor asked how was he a convert this mensch you were under the impression that he was your brother to loan him the money or keep it with him how he knows how to deal and with whom to talk to these people the Alliance Quelle des Heils Hitler you walked not in the street but tight up against the buildings the walls the falling Gesetze the landlord his name was the Arisator was the term the murm rein arisches Geschäft that the NSBO Nun sind die Bonzen oben DAFka we survived in this yellow house Haarlem we had thirtysix rooms enough for my family or half the Gestapo they said I couldn’t come back to school even to return my books the Heine monograph I’d borrowed from Professor Springer im Rhein im schönen Strome da spiegelt sich in den Well’n mit seinem grossen Dome das grosse heilige Köln they call it a brownstone but its windows are black all ten windows or one blacked with nine others smashed shuttered and one door everyone mistakes for a window boardedup condemned no one knocks anymore their Aufmachen they only throw pebbles the treeplanter fishbowling gravel their asphalt and shatter shatter shatter like Ecclesiastes said in the name of Kohelet that’s all these people know how to shudder the tzedakah kids from the United Way for the Save the Chicago Bears Foundation don’t come by neither does Klemperer or the rabbi from the Roonstrasse the Goongasse shul with its three portico gables burning one for me for my father burnt and muttering Rotterdamnit even the Asian post and that Dummkopf at Piccadilly with too many names Herr Krankenbehandler no longer a doctor Herr Rechtskonsulenten no longer a lawyer though he made a fortune dealing in visas berths and aufnorden births certifying for any country not Poland he’d deliver the papers in brownshirtpaper packages and cluck with tongue at his teeth as if terrorist ticking cousin Eva bombedout blastedaway into a Wanda on the passport raft a boatperson a shipped prowperson displaced she’d been Leviathaned out early from Cologne to Colonia am New Jersey must be dead by now long buried down by the side of the Parkway alongside the Indians or Canada the goldmine quarry coal coffee and cocoa shortages Mondays home idle with the French tutor’s Polish breasts and her clitoris I thought resembled Pope Rassenschande I would’ve studied hygienic phrenology at the Law Faculty sigillum facultatum utriusque juris studii coloniensis if not for Nuremberg Nürnberg barely passed the skullshaping nosesloping eyeslanting test for Gymnasium the artfremd Abitur abattoir I had slaughtered alien friends of my own with whom I’d play tennis and girlfriend one of them her family knew the Oppenheims had a cottage at Cuxhaven the Prisengracht at Westermarkt where we’d kissed her father had a moustache as if to spite the fleck of another dictator it was such a Franz-Josef you wanted to shove a school’s ruler up his Zwaneburgwal then wipe the floor with him but they had a maid for that friends with ours was Dorota who spoke Polish parle vous how far would she let me get today the Sonder peddling his who knew if they were his sons those jewels dug from anuses you could still smell and taste the dreck the shit of the Visserplein fleas taking an afternoon nap in the Church of Moses and Aron Aharon my second name the first of my neighbor nextdoor they’d put on a Kindertransport for Leeds leaving his sister behind twisted by polio my medicine spoon my candle burntup because they’ve turned the electricity off and refused utilities assistance HUD to sell out to them 203(k) and so better to havdalah the spices the kiddush bramble burnt larger and melting length onto its end forever until the wax it’s one great huge yellow white consumptive catarrh a canker this eyesore this lipsore lifesore this house as blackbrownyellow as a tooth I own the paper’s stuffed into this pillow I stole Kissenklau Zissenklau didn’t realize I stole it from the Presbyterians Columbia Medical Center but to return it means to explain myself to the old doctors ever yarmulked Pakistani Indian younger and that won’t do must repent the week in London with Agnesz fighting the Buckingham Fuckingham tourism hordes the whore the whorewife rebbetzin those Mexican Hungarian refugees speaking a Yiddish IIc I didn’t without any messages no letters or rent only welfare notices slipped under my door my windows smashattered evicted the radio off the air unplugged the telephone dead too the kilos of copper and brass to remit save your breath saving wire hold the line Operator I can’t hear I’m as deaf as a lung from the sirens the air raids the Ets Chaim Kapo I recognized on the Rapenburgerstraat at parachute dawn but there’s none anymore droppingin no photo sessions or latenite appearances with the television over too many bill summaries no credit left no more fêtes roasts of tributes might I propose a toast a savrei this prosit l’chaim to Ed McMann if he’s still alive and if so where’s my big check the gemoney the jewelgelt not here not yet will it clear drawn on today’s pants yesterday’s pants every day’s the hallway’s leg maybe the buzzer’s dead too no more innerview interview requests nothing to turn down like this bed I don’t anymore no one knew no one remembered there’s nothing at all to deny