A Heaven of Others
A HEAVEN OF OTHERS
Joshua Cohen
Starcherone Books
Buffalo, NY
A HEAVEN OF OTHERS
Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street Jerusalem and his
Post-Mortem
Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven
as Said to Me and Said through Me by an Angel of the One True God Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream
©Joshua Cohen, 2012.
eBook isbn: 978-0-9842133-9-9
Cover: Julian Montague
Book design: Rebecca Maslen
General Editor: Ted Pelton
Thanks to Liel Leibovitz for help with the Hebrew typesetting.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Joshua, 1980-
A heaven of others / Joshua Cohen.
p. cm.
eBook isbn 978-0-9842133-9-9 (alk. paper)
1. Boys--Israel--Fiction. 2. Jews--Israel--Fiction. 3. Victims of terrorism--Israel--Fiction. 4. Paradise--Islam--Fiction. 5. Future life--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O42434H43 2011
813’.54--dc22
2011003032
Starcherone Books is supported by taxpayers of the state of New York, through the New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency.
To Alexander Fried,
of Czechoslovakia, Nazism, Sovietism, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Israel & the Czech Republic.…
The last of the last Europeans.
Sie stiessen zusammen auf der Strasse
Zwei Schicksale auf dieser Erde
Zwei Blutkreisläufe in ihrem Adernetz
Zwei Atmende auf ihrem Weg
in diesem Sonnensystem
Über ihre Gesichter zog eine Wolke fort
die Zeit hatte einen Sprung bekommen
Erinnern lugte herein
Ferne und Nähe waren Eines geworden
Von Vergangenheit und Zukunft
funkelten zwei Schicksale
und fielen auseinander—
Nelly Sachs,
Glühende Rätsel:
III
H
ow did I get here, if I am still an I? If how and where is here? can still be asked and why?
He got here how he got here. How anyone gets here. How and where it is not my domain, this answering of questions. It is unbecoming. Truly, insulting. Beneath me. Below. Rather it is I, who create these questions and endeavor to create them answerless. Unanswerable to anyone save the asker to whom—and do not fall into the wrong pit if it is in me to ever create one—they are still unanswerable but who still must seek. To hide a find. To question my domain, my only power, rather the only power I allow myself in the how and in the here.
But rest assured that here was arrived at through no fault of his own. And that what is mine is my memory. A memory is all that is left and all that is mine—Which either begins or does it end only to begin all over again on what had been the most summery, swelteringly ripest pear day I can remember, I can the most. I was with my parents but already without them, verily I was outside with the cars, amongst the birds and the beeswax I was old enough for alone. It was my birthday, my tenth, a toy birthday and so we were on the way to the toystore for my present but after And only after as the Queen always said this pilgrimage Had to be made.
A nail had been sticking through his shoe, killing it, shoethrough, my Aba’s. In pain since yesterday’s yesterday, ever since a nail had stuck through cow and foot, my Aba’s.
Aba was in a shoestore with the Queen (that’s how Ababa we often called him called Ima, Wife, Eve of my Lilith, Mommy, Mom, Hello Muddah, the Woman of the House or Apartmenthold, Bride), me I was, I was as bored as a baked good, the street an asphalt birthday cake rising the candle of me flickeringly impatient to reflect dimly in the window of the display under the sign saying SHOES, over the sign saying PERSONAL DATA SOLUTIONS reflected hazily inattentive in the window from a store of computers on the opposite side of the Blah blah blah. I was observing myself, my skin stretched across the rounding toes not yet scuffed of shoes not yet my size that never would be. Puffing myself out as if Hanukah donuts were filling my cheeks, frying behind my eyes, I observed my I. Jelly limbs. What was reflected back to me was merely a reflection of my form—jam nose, mouth preserves—the shape of any not quite but almost ten-year-old, itchy in wait, twitchy with sun and light and heat and not the faces For examplish the Queen had once loved: the default Funny Face, the default Sad Face (opposites fulfill those as engaging as I once was), the Don’t Disturb Me When I’m Watching TV Face, which I meant as much as the Keep the Beets Far Far Away from Me on the Other Opposite End of the Table Face, and which of what is me or isn’t, I never wasn’t. A toy, I just wanted a toy, to break to get another toy. To break next year or upon the New Year, which were never.
He stood there, beyond All. Alone despite any reflection, picking pants from tush. In hot Ennui Aba would say steeped in stirless Anomie and
vav kaf vav
A stupid day he’d say, Aba sitting to try on pair after pair, after pair, with the Queen standing vetting, disapproving, mostly No-ing, anything but denying anyone but herself least of all. I remember I observed all this wonder through the window in which I observed, just as much, the reflection of the signs—weak as too outstretched….
And then I don’t know why I turn but I did.
It was a presence. A breath on the back of my neck, Aba would have said The tush of my head.
I turned to the boy turning to me he was running, his arms flapping flight shed wildly.
He turned and the boy met him.
His skin the milk of pigeons, with dark eyes and hair, maybe the earliest dew of a moustache.
Stubbly manna, it tickled, I laugh as much as we kissed or just seemed to.
He hugged me I don’t know why I hug him back in return.
Us, we hug tightly. We fall on each other. We feel for one and for others we fall. We feel. And we hug.
Their eyes shut, they squeeze—just like lemons.
And then they explode.
Mind the seeds.
One boy’s name was his, the other boy’s name was his too. The same age, then they were ten, near enough. And both are now mine. Equally neither.
But the question’s far from where is here, how near from there, without a stir of why.
Answer is I’m dying.
Pigs, here are only pigs, pigs there too, they’re everywhere. A huge pink hurtling, oinkmad shuttling to Get the treyf out of Jerusalem, Route One’s rushed hour to Tel Aviv then the sea to surf on over to Europe. Honk. Rumps backfire. Hynk. Pigs are coming out of the woodwork. Ambulant help. Emergent winged from the grain of void. Honk if you’re no longer living. Pigs are flying past me here but it’s not just pigs I see before I can’t see anymore or won’t live: these pigs are pigs with faces, human like the faces that kiss when you’ve folded your underwear (appropriate drawer) and scream when you haven’t and instead you’ve strewn the little stained white shrouds all over the branching boughs of the widest and only tree in your smallest and only garden: this a man who resembles my teacher Moreh Kulp at the school for the Gifted & Talented also on Tchernichovsky Street (why O why did we have to live right next door?), that a woman who must be or must have been the twin of the one that, a sister of the woman who, the Only a girl Aba once said was my Aunt was Aunt Zlforget Zelda until the Queen she came back north from the Negev and never answered anything about everything that I had wanted and waited so long to hear until I stopped asking and thought I knew but didn’t these many many many other—but now the TV’s always off (how even if you’d knot an antenna to the tailfeathers of a falcon, heaven would get horrendous reception)—pigged people I can’t recognize, don’t know and might never, I won’t, but must be nimble enough to hora around as if my death were my wedding, to jump over just like that great gymnast Katia Pisetsky tumblesaulting away from them to avoid being blindsided, swiped by them then helplessly whisked away up into the sky and its vault and its much vaunted warmth and light that neither warmed nor did it light, though others say the very snouts of these pigs flare as if suns themselves in a shine that forces you to feel their flight and to be burnt by it, remarking upon the hot puffs to be felt upon the wound of the neck, pork out your eyes because my eyes that have now become sockets can’t be opened again to this gleam this high up and higher, this glint, this bright coinlike chinging that rings in my very own ears resounding on my all the way up this gilded or maybe it’s a real solid 24 carat gold ladder I ascend as if I’m walking a necklace of jingjangling bracelets like those the Queen kept clasped around her ankles and wrists, this ladder I must, I am ascending now with the whole entire bottom of it, the foot of it All shod a thousover from whence I arose becoming dimmed to the din of
First Responders
, archangelic professionals uniformed all in white, with their protective masks and their sanitary gloves because to even see or to touch or to be touched by an entity so holy would mean a life worse than death, might mean a life lived out on one leg, for one, without the suck of a lung, for instance or two or the sponge of a liver, all thanks to the intercession of these Tzadikim Aba always said always with their booties and their beards, their flightless wings mere flutters of tape that serve to separate the living from the dead, to protect the exploded and now ascending from the unexploded and unascendant, the sudden arrival of onlookers, journalists on scene, adulterers and the electrician, all these dusky sirens that Turn turn turn just like rubies, those roseate pearls they seem pealing distantly more and more silent in their twilit settings of silver tarnished so delicately now and so small that they seem to be cities, Moshav and Kibbutz, the Multiplex and the Hypermarket with their lots empty for “ample parking,” as seen from this high up and higher heard until not seen anymore and further deafened forever by the stars that fall and the wails I’m constantly boosting from and climbing, clambering ever fainter from, past the snorting squealing discordant pigs, piglets, sows and tapirs maybe even like from WITH ATTRACTIVE TRICOLOR PLATES, the illustrations from the KETER encyclopedia set Volumes I
through
I forget that Aba had given me (ninth birthday) and let me keep in my room up on the seventh highest shelf of the widest and only bookshelf in my bedroom he built the seven shelves with his own two hands like these rungs that I’m reaching at, stretchstraining one to another up on tiptoeing for. Firsthand all the way. To the head.