Joshua Cohen - Witz

And so far everything had remained a secret, as if the husbands, guilty as they were, would talk, many of them being lawyers and in this state women being entitled to half. All Domestics, all with wardrobe access to the Main Tunnel, were circumspect themselves, how weren’t they cautious: protecting their entrances with a holy vengeance, enshrining an assortment of religious icons in their entryways, these idols of saints, graven images. How each Domestic had her own saint to make sacred the rear of her wardrobe, to safeguard her own entrance and exit, and how when there happened to be more Domestics than there were saints, whether due to the enormity of the Development, its increasing need for qualified Domestics, or to the wanting slightness of the eccleisiastical calendar, the slowness of the church to canonize the worthy, or else thanks to the true scarcity of the truly miraculous upon this profaningly ephemeral earth, then saints had to be invented, miracled out from thin air: new arrivals had to fake a saint, which an eager, unilluminated, and yet earnestly religious member of the Maintenance Staff would then mock up in wood, which had been mandated cedar. This despite the belief that to fake a saint was disgraceful if not sacrilegious, a symbol of the new, the foreign and its reminder of confusion, of Babel; as such, it was suspect, looked down upon, sniffed about. Though the only way in which a newcomer could obtain a true saint was for its patronized Domestic to become reassigned, which happened almost never, or to be fired, which happened if rarely, not if her favorite husband could prevent it, if he had say, his own sponsors, connections and contacts among important Hostesses aboveground — or else to quit, maybe, or die, and why not.

This was their embarrassment, the mark of an outcast estate: they’d arrived too late for the real, and so had to make do with the American fake — Wanda and Adela, they’re dealing. When they’d arrived, the assignments were deepening into all taken Decembers; their days setting, feasts starving them out: there was the saint who was first a virgin, then a nun; then there was the saint who’d been martyred by the Muslims at Eleutheropolis; the saint who was first a hermit before coming out of the wardrobe to free his own people from those very Muslims; then the saint who’d married the son of a saint whose own son and his sons then, too, were to rule all the west of Europa, and yadda. Wanda had wanted Saint Anastasia, long spoken for, imaged and installed, her mother’s favorite, too, feasted on Xmas itself, the 25th of December: Anastasia whose refusals to go to bed with both her two husbands had ended in their deaths, whose three maids were then brought before a Roman prefect on the suspicion of witchcraft, were ordered stripped and yet, as it’s been said, how their clothes clung tight to their youth; Anastasia who was banished, exiled out to the island of Palmarola to receive her requisite martyrdom, being burned at the stake under the reign of Diocletian; her mother, Wanda remembered, had always worshipped an Anastasia, though which Anastasia Wanda wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure her mother had ever been sure either, whether hers had been a saint or a Romanov, or only a dream. Adela, ardent adherent of the mirror Edy had hung on the wall opposite her wardrobe, also wanted what had already been taken, made iconic for the sake of another, the saint after whom she’d been named: St. Adela, the daughter of the King of the Franks, founder and abbess of the Benedictine Convent at Pfalzel. After a host of arguments, offered bribes, and the failure to broker chores with St. Adela’s protected, a lifer, Greta from Pomegranate Way, Adela had had to resign herself, reassign, imagined for her use a St. Schwartz, founder of the Order of Absent Fathers. As for Wanda, after the Anastasia disappointment and consultation with Adela her bestfriend and an avidly sardonic churchgoer, she’d settled on a St. Weiss, in her mind the son of a German draymensch and the daughter of eminent rabbis from Poland, a native of Los Angeles, patron saint of media, fish, and eyewear, martyred in an earthquake in an attempt at saving the neighbor’s chihuahua.

Adela arriving home from mass, the eve of Xmas, long past middle night — she’d had the day off, they’d had the day off, had nothing all today save this service, then home to prepare for her shift Underground, which was never off, canceled or closed, which all actually expected to be busy if experience serves. She enters the kitchen, folds the arms of her sunglasses into a worshipful embrace, lays them on the marble next to the sink then turns to the window, its reflection of her as if in dishsoap, wrings the part of her hair, severe, to air naked scalp, how stark her roots show…

The Development surrounding, it’s motionless, noiseless, because all she can sense is herself: it seems no one’s at home or awake. Midnights until Fridays late (Edy’s hosted cousins tonight, relations so far removed as to constellate another spacetime, and even that neighborhood changing, not for the better), Adela would help wash the dishes, sponging away whatever’d been left behind after Edy’s quick rinse, the scraps that’d feed families, the detritus of rind and fat, grease and oil pooled only a gesture above an initial superficial scrub, at this hour Edy usually at the sink herself less working than waiting, like Hanna a maker of one meal a week, and insistent on washing up after it, at least a little, one squirt from the faucet’s long nose; maternal proofwork to herself more than to her kin, washing distracted and so poorly, leaving the salvaging to Adela, once she’d arrived upstairs from the exile of the meal, and before returning Underground for the night. She’s whispering, American lipstick and Slavic dentistry, Eatee, Eatee…throughout the house, seeking order, direction, the host that is mastery: her whispers to rise up the stairwell slat by slat up to the rooms upstairs-upstairs, to sound plank into rooms that uphold the walls, voice to grain away wood. Furniture, possessions, stuff. That that is owned has no right to respond. Only echo, reflecting echo — and even when ordered to respond, it cannot, because it’s not only owned, it’s dead. Adela shrugs, smiles caps, crowns, a mouth full of fools and princes, the cityscape of a world far away, vista of castle and church. Pleased to be alone, to preserve her hands, safeguard her manicure for the favor of night, it’ll be pleased, they always are: her hand strokes up and strokes down, then a milky moon appears above the valley of palm. To leave its dish with the others for the promise of tomorrow, though what’s not done tonight is undone forever, can’t blame. Even upon the Sabbath, Adela has to sign herself into the Register, with the pen left on its table, Alan’s spare fountain: one of two received as a wedding gift a life ago, it’s never been used to sign anything but her own name; then, makes her way down the other slotted stairs to her room, downstairs-down-stairs with her heels heeled off held in her hands she passes there on the walls the albums eviscerated, their remains now framed for inspection, portraits of family, immediate, ancestors, once her fellow countryfolk, never her fellow countryfolk, who knows what they’d have to say about it, their lips held tight, one black, one white, the rest of them predeceased gray. Koenigsburgs long passed on…their eyes compel, then concess and give depth, they aren’t just frames sunk into frames — they’re photographs themselves: each pupil the home of the portrait entire held within its gaze, and within the eyes of that portrait the photograph admitted again and yadda unto infinity and eternality, perhaps, at least the unphotographable. Timeless just means whatever’s no longer. We are not buried below the earth, we are buried atop our own dead. And then, to enter over the threshold.