Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

Anyone of my generation with even the slightest Judaic taint can air their grievances in Germany — not for a fortune, or even a readership, but for a psychic reparation between hideous brown buckram covers — and as I thumbed at the spines of my consonant for the sole copy the Staatsbibliothek had in its catalog, I was imagining the cycle continuing: not just children like me chronicling how their parents survived the deportations, but grandchildren producing multimedia ebooks about how their grandparents were used as slave labor, greatgrandchildren generating interactive immersive lit experiences about how their greatgrandparents had been experimented on with phenol and cyanide — all to be sold at fabulous prices to futuristic Prussians, who’ll still refuse to download anything for free, God bless.

And there it was, where it was supposed to be, where it’d been shelved since they’d ordered it. The original had been thinner than this edition, but then the original of me in the flap photo had been thinner too, my crown still sparsed with gritty city grass.

I checked in again with the infodesk clock and dedicated the 40 minutes or so left before my slot to reading myself in German, and didn’t understand a word — which was good. That meant it was a good translation. Rather, the only words I understood had always been in German. Words like Aktion, Zyklon, and Judenfrei.

Keine Familie ist ganz —not a faithful title. But still it’s accurate. No Family Is Whole? Entire? Intact? Together?

This trip — though it’s absurd to call this a trip — is the first I’ve been back to Europe since researching that book. Not to discount my jag with Principal just prior to the Emirates, or that vacation Rach took me on to Athens, Crete, and Rome — after every meal sauced and cheesy reiterating to me, to the waiters, that she’d be paying, with her account management promotion raise — what I mean is, this is my first substantial solo return.

Because that pilgrimage I made 12 years ago, fall 1999, was weeks, was months, alone. Taking the grand deathtour, budget timetravel through ghettos and camps. I’d flown from having interviewed my Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe in Tel Aviv, to the setting of every interview’s memory, Poland. Racking up expensive kilometerage on the Daewoo from Sixt Rent a Car in Warsaw, visiting the gravelessness of my family between Warsaw and Kraków. Swerving the Daewoo from red tollways to green freeways to yellow locals to the grayest byroads, as the map that was still wrought out of paper back then blew from the dash and around my face, and I skidded onto a dirtlane that muddied into a pagan grove of birch just wide enough for a uturn. Tailgating an ox and cart, unable to pass them, too timid to honk. Utilitypoles leaning heraldically like halberts on the shield of sky. And panicking that I’d already crossed the border into Belarus, even though I’d know when I had, they’d let me know when I had — there’d be a bridge, and a river churning like a wobbly tire.

This was (why am I even writing this? but then can anything about the past still be assumed?) before the zoomable livestream mapping, the captures and grabs and pinches and swipes, the make it bigger make it smaller fingers, tugging the corners of dewy pastures to a saturation verd. The only icons were in chapels, and if I hoped to obtain one’s aid I had to make a donation for the restoration of a window.

I’d paged through my book all the way to the last chapter — the Vienna chapter, by chance. If chance can be invoked.

My mother and father met in Vienna. Dad was with the Army. The US Army. Moms had come down from the mountains of Czechoslovakia, from hiding in haylofts, and a convent in Małopolska that’d hid her from herself. The fields around Bełżec were fertilized with her parents. Her brothers were also ash.

Iz, it hasn’t escaped me that you’re there now, in Vienna — picnicking in the Prater, or promenading the Ring.

If we ever meet there remind me not to tell you this.

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I sat, Tetbook in the Tetote on my lap, at a Gopal Go 2.0. Clicked the Union Jack/Stars & Stripes, which loaded up the Staatsbibliothek homepage in English. Agreed to abide by the Terms of Service. Only if I didn’t have to read them, Yes.

My IP was what it was. Proxy this, Dienerowitz, bounce it off your ass.

The only precaution I took was, I didn’t use Tetration.

Except, I did — I typed out tetration.com, was redirected to tetration.de, deredirected to.com again and tetrated, or the German verb is tetraten, I guess, “what are other searchengines?” And then I cruised the competition on another competitior’s machine, and found both lacking, and I haven’t been paid to say that, or paid for anything.

I broke my promise to Principal on opensourcers, semantics. With Clickb8, Sengine, Fravia, Phind0, Jerque, and Treap (in the order of increasing fatuity).

Whatever, their names were immaterial to me — I tetrated with all of them. Not every trademarked term can be chosen for genericide. None of us will treap. Or jerque it. What the fuck’s a Gopal? Gopal fuck yourself?

I tetrated “Izdihar Almaribi”: no results.

I tetrated “Izdihar Albadi”: check spelling, increase number of terms, broaden terms, no results.

“Ibrahim Albadi”: (“did you mean Al-Badi ?”): site operations engineer at Sohar Industrial Port Services, no, executive VP for Takaful, Doha Insurance, SAQ, no.

So I added +“Marseilles”—which autocorrected to “Marseille”—and was returned two hits, beyond the usual snippety tetspam.

Iz’s husband was listed as a member of L’Association des Stations-Service Franchisées de France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Bouches-du-Rhône division.

He was mentioned again, amid plain Anglais, on the site of the Biannual Eurosummit of BP Franchisees, which would be held, had already been held, 9/9–11 in Abu Dhabi. He would be attending as a representative of L’Association des Stations-Service Franchisées de France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Bouches-du-Rhône division — his honeymoon or whatever it’d been with Iz was a business expense.

“al-Maribi” (“did you mean Al Ma’ribi ?”): but all were just Al Qaeda — inciter clerics and deranged bandoliered teens, the victims of other American results in Ma’rib, and of Shia militias in Dhamar — until what I recalled of the address—+“1210 Wien”—got me Iz’s brother.

Yasir was a “Prozesstechniker”—“process technician”—employed by Birefringen AG, located in 1210 Vienna, and online at Birefringen.at.

Click, they were “the world’s leader in glass science,” click, “devoted to the best in architectural, automotive, aeronautic, marine, biomedical, and touchglass.”

The “In Profil” page was dotted with enlargeable but not enlargeable enough official photos of the different “Geschäftsbereiche”—divisions? groups? There were about two dozen black and brown faces in the photo labeled “Prozesstechniker,” and “Maribi, Yasir,” was captioned in the third row five in. I counted and landed, because God is good, because God is great, on a forehead wound. Yasir had a scarlet birthmark at his hairline, but then the expression below it was quizzical, like that hematic crescent wasn’t his, but was a corruption in the wifi transmission, or a blotch of phlegm on the screen.

“Maleksen”: A Maleksen gøta in central Tórshavn, Streymoy, Faroe Islands. Maleksen Island, a glaciated constituent of the Arctic Russian Franz Josef archipelago. Norwegian sites tended to spell the name “Malekson,” Swedish sites, “Maleksson.” Pages in this language usually followed the Danes. Maleksen Spezialtransporte GmbH “specialized in transport” throughout Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Hilde Maleksen offered “online P2P healing” from ~48.13°N 11.56°E elev ~518m (Munich).