by Joshua Cohen
One Thousand, the slogan goes, bannered across the fence upon the rare Open House, then on the bunting: A Grand Place to Live.
Oy, wasn’t his idea.
With a swig of dietetic soda he gulps the last of his medications, a host of attention deficit pills (last prescribed by a Doctor Klockenmeyer at 82 Oak); he’s waiting—a lay member must not be caught lying down; unto the midnight shifts, with static up on the screen and the ominous crackling crush of the dogwalkers, insomniac, tromping puppies through snow and ice, through to the morning shifts, newspaper funnies fixed featureless to forehead—all those passes and identifications to understand and transmit, Developmentwide. Isn’t easy. Vigilance is key. There among the switches, his sustenance; he lives on snackfood, the carbohydrate bounty of the vending machine Management had installed in his Lodge for them to make return on their investment in him: pretzels low salt and no, these sugarless candy bars and saccharine sodas, now empty receptacles for the sorting of his meds. His screens show the lack of activity around the perimeter, the news, a situation comedy set in a Development much like this one, and Misses Herring’s private bathroom: this latter a measure of personal surveillance, undertaken on his own initiative; though more a hobby than an issue of security, it’s lonely, it works.
He’s the Master of Allowances, of favors granted (though only occasionally, in weaker moments)—he’s the Arbiter of Recognizance, this squat older goy with a gun at his hip for which they’ve never given him ammo, him with a twinkle in his eye and teeth plasticized in infinite, highrising floors to flash at passersby. For her, though, a smile more genuine, unforced, becoming sheer grin: he knows her, of course, this woman, the one with the light hair and dark eyes, the other half of the package—not the Koenigsburg’s, this is H and Is’ woman; knows her not in the sense of Scripture, not that he would’ve refused, not at all, you’re misunderstanding, it’s up to her; no, he knows her more intimately, knows her schedules, arrivals and departures, her weekly forages in the Greater Outside, which is where he’d like to live with her if ever she’d quit her dying Inside. And me here, he thinks, how me, too—in a sort of purgatory, between the two worlds, a barrier, at the edge of two middles. Not quite a coworker, far from the boss. He leans across his desk as she walks up and onto the sidewalk in a slink particular to the refugee or oppressed, keeping his eyes lusting on her until she takes her turn onto Apple. As for her, she never looks over her shoulder, rather faces down, like she’d never turn toward him, no matter what, even if he was barking her name and for her to stop and had his gun loaded and aimed at her head; you’re born knowing to walk like that, and under those conditions, he thinks, if you were born where she was and when, which was he doesn’t know where, neither when, but can imagine—even with the monitoring, that’s what he does.
Wanda walks quickly, her small head knotted into a kerchief to the slight rain, then snow, disappears from his eyes only to reappear up on his screen, heading west on Apple to the house at its loop; she’d gone out to reconnoiter Masses, their hours, for tonight and tomorrow, for herself and Adela.
He’d taken the wreathe out of its storage under the desk, had hung it on his door just last week.
A moment, though, slow up and shtum…he’d thought now might’ve been the time to spring the question: What are you doing tonight, and tomorrow, and with your life after that? Wanda, a Wonda, why the name, and from what?
As our rabbis explain—it’s because when they were building these houses, they cut down one thousand cedars that’d grown upon the face of this earth since the beginning of time.
And where did those cedars end up?
In the houses, on their roofs, as shingles, as siding.
Satisfied?
No.
How Is This House Different From All Other Houses? According to our sages, it’s because this house is the Koenigsburg’s house and all the other houses are not, with the exception, it’s been raised, of the Koenigsburg’s mountainhouse, or retreat, which is located in New York, Upstate, a house she’d wanted and not he, let’s not get into that just now (like every single one of their houses, it’d been too expensive, the mortgage and the upkeep, too, and the property taxes, and yadda). As Rabbi Bill has said in the name of Reb Bob of Normal, IL, the Koenigsburg mountainhouse is different from the Koenigsburg househouse in innumerable ways. And we all say, too long a story. According to the scholars, their househouse is different from all other houses, as well: inside, the arrangement of the furnishings, the disposition of important investment papers, the hides of their wills, passports, forks, knives, and twisted white metal hangers are divinely unique. It’s been said, other households might have some of the same possessions, however no other household has the exact same amalgamation and arrangement of the exact same possessions. And Rabbi Lao Zhang-Zhao goes on to explain—this house has an attic. And in the attic is a steamertrunk, which her grandmother had hauled all the way across the ocean. No other house has the trunk of her grandmother, and, anyway, not in its attic, though to be sure other houses have their own attics and their own grandmother’s trunks, and maybe even grandmothers’ trunks up in attics, though, he expounds, probably none have attics inside the trunks of their grandmothers. Though Rav Martinez does not rule it out. According to Rav Nuncio, it’s its inhabitants that make this house unique. And then there’s the Koenigsburg’s shorehouse…
How Is This House NOT Different From All Other Houses? Across the looping from the Koenigsburg’s, then, Hanna and Israel’s: they’re both immodest houses of outwardly similar size, multiply floored and with finished or partially unfinished attics and basements, and similar shape, a central box or trunk, from which emerge their two wings each, one from either end north to south as if they’re prepared to fly away any moment, each wing with porch extensions of their own (later additions, once they’d made nice with Zoning), wings of wings, out the sides, and in the front and back, too; they have the same number of interior stairs, which is fortyfour, and the same number of rooms, which is twentyeight; they were reroofed the same month a year ago now, and the same thieves, recommended by Management, May Their Debts Grow Higher Than Sinai, did the reroofings; they’re both filled with loving, active, and involved parents of loved, acted upon, and involved with offspring, though the Koenigsburgs have only two kinder and the Israelien’s have twelve, now thirteen.
Another difference is their color, though it’s only an opposite, a reversal: the Koenigsburg’s house’s siding is the color of H and Is’ house’s shutters, and the Koenigburg’s house’s shutters are the color H and Is’ house’s siding.
Both houses have hedges front and back, both kept immaculately trimmed for uniform width and height by the exact same workforce, who work for the houses on alternating Wednesdays as last scheduled at last January’s annual meeting of the One Thousand Cedars Hass or Homeowner’s Association, hosted by the Koenigsburgs; this coming year would’ve been the Israeliens’ turn.
Though H and Is’ house has a basement partially unfinished; the repository of all difference, the sanctum of all secrets however domestic: soggy, micenibbled cardboard boxes, spiderspun hollows of cinderblock, these bulk crates of paper product (toilet tissue, towels), twin battered and chipped foldingtables—those and a host of other accoutrements reserved only for the use of guests both wanted and not: guestlinens, guesttowels, guestshoes and guestmittens and hats, provisions for every possible guestneed and guest-want, guestdesire, demand; toward the back, more boxes, these of moldering books, stacks of old photographs, paintings, and records, too, autographed Zimmerman LPs, an incomplete set of the Brandenburg Concerti, desiccated mounds of jazz sides most of them just sleeves, opera recordings probably worth something, someone should investigate, get them appraised; and even at the decaying bent bottom of the heap a trove of cantorial 35s that’d belonged to their parents, their grandparents, maybe, walled in by a dustbound encyclopedia set featuring the latest maps of the Ottoman Empire, volumes bookmarked with the corpses of worms.
/> Whereas the Koenigsburg’s basement had been Professionally done, as Edy Koenigsburg would relate during the course of every hosted supper come the Sabbath, the guests stabbing each other with their forks and knives in their hands and jellied eyes, slicing each other and strangling and gagging one another with napkins all to be the first to congratulate her, wish her Mazel—Edy, you say it Eatee—on her Adela’s pierogie appetizers, juicyplump just perfect, as if stuffed with the revivified testes of an assortment of ancient, powerful patriarchs…and how Edy’d always say hors d’oevres and how Adela’d mimic but one night pronounced them Whore’s Divorce, with everyone assembled thinking she was referring to Miss Glaswand nèe Kahl and that whole episode, which involved—no matter, though leading to a situation requiring serious talks undertaken Hostess to Hosted as if a peace negotiation stalled, faltering, failed down in Palestein, ultimately with Adela asked to her room and given the night off with a raise.
Adela’s was a small niche in the basement exactly the same size as the room she’d been born into, the room her five sisters had been born into, the room in which she’d lived with them and hid with them under the sag of the lone bed at midnight from the extra special police who took her father away that one night investigated in the middle of summer across the ocean the size of the greater basement, it was—an oceanic vista of blue carpet dusted with white snowlike puffs every halfstep, tentative, flaky. Here, beyond the rustlegged, moldtopped, or merely green table for pingpong, scuffed of white lines, without net or paddles either and its balls lying crushed, at the white of the wall with its electrical outlets, up against the nylonate red and white flag of her nation whichever and wherever it was draped over her door facing out, and depending on whether she was inside her room or not, out and at work, a pair of footwear stands, soft soled slippers for inside, hard for out, a mat that says Witamy then next to the footwear, at the baseboard and its trim offwhite, an antiquated, toenailyellowed scale handeddown from Edy to facilitate Adela’s daily weigh in. As Edy always thought, any justification for Adela’s obesity might lay in her nationality: Adela was maybe, she thought, possibly, she’d think, acceptably overweight because she was foreign, how Edy had to remind herself again and again as the scale’s indicator, an arrow as sharp as a mean word, would oscillate its tongue toward a sum Adela would always want translated to kilos, as if Edy’d know, as if it’d matter. What can you do—these people, their numerous ways.
Inside, in Adela’s wardrobe, a wooden hulk set against the wall opposite the door, behind a pile of her folded bedding, behind the linen, the mussed sheets patterned out of date and the matching pillowcases, too, worn by sets of mismatched guests, uninvited—an icon of a saint, and behind the saint, a large and roughly hewn opening into a passage widening with its descent under the brights of these sudden chandeliers set between emergency sconces leading under the Koenigsburg frontyard and the sidewalked street then the Israelien frontyard and there narrowing again on its way up through another opening into yet another wardrobe of the same size and shape as Adela’s (though plywood, this unit discontinued, discounted, found by Israel at a firesale—they’d been swearing to get her new furniture for a year, if not for her sake then theirs), past its own saint then past its unwashed bedsheets and clothes and lingerie, smokestained, vodkadamp, all domestic fabrics and sartorial separates that’d been haphazardly stuffed beyond the reach of the iron the girls would wield upon afternoon Fridays—and into a room of the same size and shape as Adela’s though a room in a basement partially unfinished, which Hanna used to say to Edy meant that it was also partially finished: defensively this, Wanda’s room in the Israelien home.
Wanda and Adela, these two sisters from the Pale, far beyond it—you two are so pale! Edy’d shriek, howabout we make an appointment, on me, don’t you worry yourself about anything, you’re more than my maid, my kinder’s sitter, my servant or Slavslave, you’re my friend; what’re you thinking, tanning salon, should we go with sprayon or lights, makeover or just nails, maybe the spa, we’ll soak and gab, make a day of it—they were inseparable these two if sisters then nationed only through river’s blood, umbilicus choice. Anyway, as it’s often said of them, a package deal, a twofer your money maximized, the familysized—when the two of them Edy and Hanna would recite ancient history to friends gathered, maybe at a meeting of the board of the dayschool, or at a synagogue event, a Hadassah function, that’s how they’d talk, the not quite valuepak, two for the price of three, Edy only joking around, and how Hanna would always set her up or even herself wherever whichever one left off: We went down to the Agency together, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the two of them,
The two of them, here Edy’d pick at a thread, a loose strand of tooth’s salad—orphans,
Hanna’d go on, No luggage,
as Edy’d add, They’d arrived with these illegible recommendations, which my greatgrandfather of blessed memory could maybe understand if he weren’t dead now, what’s it been, twenty years…
nodding, laughter—Edy-the-funnyone,
And now Hanna’d say,
And now, Edy repeating—they never rehearsed, would you believe?
And now, how Hanna’d attempt to kill it boredom and curtains, Edy and I are like two older sisters to them, like, aren’t we, Edy?
approval, enabling—Like two older sisters, Edy’d rerepeat like maybe ten times,
sisters we never had, like sisters we never had, like the two sisters we never had…nodding, and Hanna, having always to get the last word in would say, edgewise, Older sisters,
We are, Edy not to be outdone,
nodding, We are, Hanna repeating and, to end it again this time ended once and for all—sealing her victory while unsealing another container of tupperware would add, Have a little more artichoke salad I saved the hearts just for you (I always remember—that’s what I do, I safeguard & remember),
or, And how’s your son making out at whichever school at his whatever new job is he still with that girl who, with the father who, what’s her name?
On the day they’d both arrived incountry, they’d met at the Agency, were transported to work in the same windowless van, Agencydelivered right to the same street, right to their new doors right across the street from one another, behind which locked a thousandfold then alarmed they’d work for their lives in return. This Agency that was wholly owned though operated only on the evenings of weekdays by a descendant of the founder of the very town or village or muddied well from which neither of them came but that was near enough and in the same country at least as were their own towns, which were villages, dirty burrows or caves, though that country had first to become many other countries before again becoming that country once again his and theirs; this owner and operator a descendant of their shared nation, then, who now owned, operated, and exploited his heritage that was only a Heritage in America, exploited, too, the presently disadvantaged situation of their coconspiring country in order to supply this relatively affordable and dependable workstaff to the descendants of a people who had been killed by the ancestors of those who’d arrive here five days a week and without any official sanction, eager and earnest to cook and to clean: among them, though hailing from two estranged, mutually hating and universally hated cities that had become bombed into towns that had then become bombed into villages debased amid respective cataract and cess situated at opposite ends of two nations that had survived only to fall at opposite ends of their now redistributed and so unified nation, how Wanda and Adela had each overheard the other muttering obscenities in a shared, reunified tongue (as if a breathy length of conterminous flesh, which ensured they’d never get too far away from one another), an estranging language that sounded to Hanna like SZCZSZCZSZCZ and was apparently understood only by the three of them, the Agency proprietor, Wanda and Adela, and the dead ancestors of their employers, whose eyes, even in silent stairwell photographs, often retained a moisture that sustained flies the sound of whose beating wings would resemble the buzz of their tal
k; the two turning each to face the dry tongue of the other, flouncing over shoulders hair washed in dishwater, each dressed in the same model formless sweater purchased at State department stores laden with identical shelves, CZÓSZCZÖSZCZSZÔCZØSZCZÒS it sounded like to Edy, fantastic in its palatework, its display of glottal virtuosity that no one else in the metal and glass lobby of the Agency would understand as the lobby was then at that early hour full only with working mothers and even housewives assembled to haggle over the imports, to handle the merchandise, to argue and to bargain and broker their deals, though only after making deep and thorough inspections according to criteria known only to conscience (firm breasts and sweet breath, good knees, healthy gums); then, it was a hug that neither of them understood, as if without thought, like already here they are being bold, brash, impetuous, fastfriends, these instantaneous Americans, immediately assimilated into this vast and multitudinously faceted citizenry of cheeks, with a kiss lipped amid the down of each, their hug cleaved out from the air between them a mass of wet concrete (the most famous material of their nation, wherever it is, if it still was) that would come to harden into a landmark in their lives, a monument abstracted into intimacy, founded upon nothing save the flimsy linoleum flooring of the landmass known to us as Memory: remember that dictator, yes, the one whose moustache pointed up or the one whose moustache pointed down, either, the one who was bald or the one whose hair was combed severely over to the right indicating the side to which we all would salute, both and his eyebrows, and that regime, sure, the one that took your father, no, the one that took my mother, you mean that one, and then the Revolution, right, where were you when, and what, I almost forgot, who could forget, I was only a baby, I was only a girl.
