Joshua Cohen - A Heaven of Others

Understand I am making these translations to atone. Understand I am making these translations repent for my failure. Understand and do not pity, sympathize or empathize, identify with nor enable, me.

Who will translate:

To shove your gray tablets down into a moldy old sack wrought of skull, skin and hair, and especially after having held them aloft high above the dunes and the drops in pure, lifegiving sky, is not a pleasant duty but nonetheless duty. What Happened to your Face? the Queen would always ask and what would I answer. Tonguetied to the mullion of a window like the red rope of Rahab. What’s that on your Chin? the Queen would always ask, meaning my mouth, which once was unglassed and silent. But before I say anything, I want to say this: to my Aba, I’ve never smashed rock to make water flow flinty. No one’s ever wrought a calf out of nothing.

I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains (That Might Have Been Clouds), and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed and so neither did I then find any man by that name. Or by or with any name other. Truly. When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another. But a distinction must be made between limitation and weakness much like, in Hellenist heresy, the division obtaining between the light of the Gnostic Pleroma Aba liked that word in Greek And its warring dark and so might I mention that I had, I believe still have and will always have a brother whose name was David and is. A halfbrother actually if he ever was mentioned, he wasn’t. He was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen or eighteen years older than I suppose he still is. And if so then seething. Why I didn’t mention him before is that neither Aba nor the Queen mentioned him much to my memory and that this gloss unlike forgetting was not unintentional. Inexcusably unreasoned as this David was the son of Aba’s previous Queen, a woman who before I was born (of course, of course) had died of a disease that has afflicted many on earth and will go on afflicting them as long as the earth is not flat and is instead shaped like a secular tumor: “well-rounded,” periodshaped, musical-noteshaped, a blob of blue paint upon the neck of Ibrahim’s God — a disease afflicting though only the living (though need I remind anyone that there are less dead people on earth, or in the earth , than there are people now living), which begins gradually with the gradual growth of a third breast, an epiphytic or rather parasitic subspecies of maybe even sentient mammæ and a harder type one too, rather Lumpy and lumpish and Bumpy and bumpisch as Aba he once described it to me one Sunday as we were out walking and talking in the Old City having passed through the Jaffa Gate and walking when talkatively straight as my Aba’s appetite for history and its revelation would allow us to the Kotel, to the Westernmost, Wailingmost, Wallingmost limitation of our need he said it was A big black bumpishness that just grew larger or rather filled you largely despite what the doctors would empty, which despite the nail of any needle would never be enough to empty it all — Aba himself never went to doctors, he went to the Queen, by which I mean my first one and only his second — and so this Queen, that former Queen whom I never knew her neither her name even she was blackened as if burned like a bush once consumed, turned Big Aba once said and full of blackness (Aba saying this with a measure of ash and a shekel, one in each lung of his scales), first the big black bobbing lump then three big black bosomy breasts budded up on her who She was very beautiful and once a very very famous concert pianist too (according to the official photograph of her young in Romania Aba kept in the pantry locked with Göbbels, his gun), had three big black breasts that swelled to take over her entirety or rather the rest of her shriveled into, shrunk, was sucked into these three huge black boobing breasts that themselves merged into this one single unified huge hard black breast, A protuber Aba who he was THE professional tuner once said he became such as he was because she’d been THE professional pianist: One enormous blob ball of cancer Aba said once it was he Had to sit with and pet — as if to bounce? — all night and with the dipped then wrung out washcloth he applied to its roundingly dull shininess though In the morning it had lost its roundness, by then it had further dulled off to become this hulking huge big black square As hard as rockstone Aba he was pacing Around and around and glancing at nervously as if it had just fallen through the ozone on down from space, Aba circling Aba circumambulating seven times as she’d done for their marriage vows, then the shattering of the glasses of the seven subsequent nights of dinner and dancing in celebration of their blessedness praying prayers my Aba didn’t know he knew as he was circling all this time this monstrous circling this monstrously hulking huge big black square stone rock of death that had crushed and collapsed the bed, their marriage bed, which had been a gift from her parents my Queen, Aba’s second Queen she later threw out to the Poor her piano It was just sitting there in the room, Aba said foursquare her taking up the whole room entire until Aba he that afternoon said he just shut the door and locked it (as he had another piano to tune, to Take out of warp, had scheduled an appointment, always did or just always said so) and returned that night the eve of Passover to relieve the former Hadassah Medical Center nurse who she was now named Hadassah too, and Russian as well as short and Almost as bald as a hardboiled egg at the Seder Aba had hired out of the hospice, nightshift rotation and asked her to stay On Call until the very end with its ice on the lips and the huddling snuggle but found her the nurse gone when he opened the door to THE ROOM, in their room all there was in there was this K’aba black stone taking up the whole entire room and encroaching too, its death up against the wall of the open doorway As if threatening to spill its immaculate hardness over the threshold and into the hall as Aba once said — upon leaving the Kotel and returning home the way we’d arrived, through the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, toward Jaffa Road again and its walk to Tchernichovsky Street then down it — he Just slammed the door hard shut then locked it again and went to pace around and around nothing at all, to guard over nil at the funeral home, ANTSCHEL’S FUNERAL HOME the sign said that we would pass on the walk from the Old City to home if ever we took the shortcut we never did.

David was not spoken of (and is obviously not spoken of anymore, in this way, by this family), because at the age of eighteen, which is the age of induction into military service that for him would have most probably meant Uncle Alex’s Givati Brigade whose symbolic mascot is the farting fox plumed in a purple beret, he forsook Jerusalem and the Eden surrounding for a position in Hollywood across the finger of sea and the hand of the ocean — exchanging our trees for their open palms — where he met and then lived with and maybe still lives with a fellow Hollywood transplant, an aspiring Movieperson whose sex meaning gender was less important to Aba and even to the Queen (Aba’s then-new-Queen, my own) and still would be, if only, than the religion — sexual orientation — this Movieperson subscribed to, subscribes. An affiliation this Movieperson’s name and his way of pronouncing it Her apparently made quite clarion clear. A lifestyle that David’s severing of phone cords and unreturned postcards made even clarion clearer though not the clarionest, which was Aba’s refusal to ever think or even know of him again as his son and the Queen’s full support of such a decision, which might have made her love me even more, which was Nice.