A Heaven of Others Read online

  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

  How 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 i
f 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.

  He’s not even sure if it is a true ladder but not thinking this either, because all he knows of it is a single leg, just a single leg is all and with all of its many myriad rungs extending off to one side (east, if), and so far he’s unable to discern or even sense a second or any other leg otherwise numbered—but who has the time to count, an end at all to these numinous rungs that for all I know might flow out on forever, growing weaker and weaker, and weaker forever on, less like rungs more like rungs of water, as if streams through utter nothingness to step splash down into and fall through forever, and so I cleave, cling tight to the one and only leg, and climb, just climb the ladder I found climbing abandoned by everyone else inside the emptied footloose shoestore: indeed this ladder was the grownup, morphed around just like on the TV ladder of the small stepstair stepladder (actually three-step-ladder), the employees of the shoestore used to use to grab up their merchandise, grubbing all the different sizes and shades from the higher than infinite shelves. Whenever I opened my eyes and found myself alone and what’s more possibly, probably, dead I walked into the shoestore—small yet sepulchral bells hung like heads, as if the speaking of tongues had been emptied from the very innards of chimes sounding hallowedly hollow, Tituslike tintinnabulation of timbrel to sentinel my entrance (through the no glass that was left, past strewn dispersion everywhere amid empty shoes, estrays flung far from soulmates and)—walked into the shoestore as if to find there Aba and the Queen but they weren’t there and I was because actually nobody was, then finding this ladder grown up right in front of me like the stalk of a skyscraper I don’t know why I began to ascend but I did, just like Spideyman I don’t know why I ascended but I have and by the first rung pitched at the height of the roof I scaled how I’ll never know why I found the ladder flowing up ever higher, up and up into sky up and then into void void of void. Stratospheric and further beyond into nothingness and its absence, which is nothing if it’s not the very proof of nothingness just through the hole blown into the blown up roof of the shoestore.

  Now that he has made his ascent, he is wrong. In the wrong. Being dead, he’s correct. But being dead where he is, he’s in error. Incorrectly mistaken. Not him but here is what’s wrong, all wrong, because everything about this heaven is wrong, and the timing of it too, for him, for now and for here.

  Pigs tried to take me unto their squigglies, their hypnotically spiraling tails and hairy and rotting though citric oiled flanks (due to a vicinity citrus stand), exposed hunks of bunched phosphorescent bone to hug with thighs tightened against the grease of the wind, oinked me to grab on, snouted me out to hold on and hold still, offering me to ride them out to wherever their flights might end, terminus, maybe hoping I’d guide them to safer, smoother landings. But I ignored them because of climbing, climbing is enough.

  Yes I’m not as Dummmmmmmmkopf as Aba he once said and then apologized more for the Queen than to me: I know I am deader than dead. And that the boy whoever he is, whoever he was went and exploded me because he was one of them and I one of mine. And maybe still am or no. My parents are dead too. Perhaps. They were also of mine. As the boy’s parents were most definitely one of his, most probably are. And that they were one of his made him one of his, still makes and blah blah. In return. Maybe it’s because he hugged me, and so tightly, that I’m here. He squeezed me in with him, possible. Like just managed to. Embrace it. But here, which is in the wrong heaven. His. Theirs and not mine. A heaven of others, Not for me.

  He expects me to do something I can’t.

  Though some appeal, most won’t.

  Politics were always on the radio when I was alive. Whenever we listened to politics were on the radio Kol Israel 98.4 on your FM dial all I ever heard was the sound of goat. Sound of tragedy the sound of goat. Radio said Goat and I listened. Bleat bleated to bleat in bleat at bleat, bleats bleat of bleat and baa baaa bleating. Hungry goat senseless as goat as hungry but when I listened it was always with a full stomach (an empty head). Why I say politics is that I want to say goat, and why I say goat is that the radiowaves traveled through the air and past me (INFO, from Informashun, is the word in American, an acquirement thanks to my dictionary, ALCALAY shelved alongside my encyclopedia set), radiowaves announcing the death of a boy named the same as I’d been back then—and the deaths of his parents too, I think I heard and that of others and their parents and static, István Jontovics, 72, Raya Malesa, 23—but the radiowaves that sounded to me as if the sounding of goats they bounced off the pigs that were flying, bounced, rebounded, redounded, were deflected, repelled, ricocheted, shuttleshunted, became babble bebabbled and so all the while ascending the ladder, its rungs, I heard my name, I am sure of it—and many other names as well, such as those of Nir Pershits, 32, Einat Yavin, “only 18”—but I heard them all strange, all goatish or goatified and the sounds further said upside down, outside in. But how I knew, how finally uti possidetis as Aba used to say—wrongly—in the Latin of our terra nullius he said Aelia Capitolina if you know it I knew and know I was and am really truly totally dead Absolutely so is that at the very summit of the ladder (or just on an amazingly huge, filled with heaven rung and me, I’m none the wiser) I found myself once again in Jerusalem, my home in Jerusalem and what’s more in Jerusalem on its Tchernichovsky Street, the street of my house (our apartment), the street of my school with the shoestore adjacent (the toystore was always “just around the corner”), and what’s worse once again in fr
ont of the shoestore itself and in good repair as if the ladder had ascended up into air up into space only to emerge through a merely mundane sewer just now steaming open, the mist listing my stagger onto the street I had only just left in the proverbial down below. It was strange. And the same. Except that here the shoes were back in their boxes. The boxes were back on their shelves. Intact, the window was too. Though alone.

  I came closer to the window as the window came closer to me, on the heels of the shoes on display within the sheen of its glass, my reflection. As I have said, my parents weren’t there. As it has been said, seemingly no one was though only at first. It was then that I walked up to my very own me, its reflection dim in the dark but of form there was more than enough. To be shocked like the once I stuck my sucked thumb into the socket at the wall under the table in the kitchen, stuck my tongue in the What Happened to your Pants? which was what the Queen always asked me who turned around to look down at his hands in all privacy. They were hands even private: one palm up, one palm down, one half always unknowable. Unknown, I touched my nose with a knuckle. It was a nose, the one I got from Aba’s mother, my grandAba’s Queen and a knuckle. I turned again wildly as if to shatter the window of the shoestore and there it was three times thrice undeniable. My face was full open to seep. A squishy squashed olive from the tallest and only tree in our largest and only garden. Out back with the benches and bush. A pond small and dry. To have nails instead of features, dimples their heads, the lineaments of my face each a pure length of rust, nails and their heads bowed reverently as if hammered by hate, lowered out my temples just then shook with a laughter. My tongue burned. I couldn’t contain myself. Let it all hang out. Spill it, Yon. It was a hole in my stomach I bowed forward to—taking three steps back from the reflection to accommodate my goggle—a jaggedly pulsing hole, edged in a heat that was furious, through which my eyeless sockets first beheld the first fully naked naked woman (no, not even the Queen) I had ever remembered.