0900 begins the Garden’s School Day, with mandatory enrollment for all no matter their age or education level: the kinder alongside professional professors, doctors, lawyers, and wholesale illiterates in any language known. There’s so much to get caught up on, so little time to care. At this hour, in the windowless rooms of the wings surrounding the Registry, and in a number of outlying units, too, in mismatchedly ramshackle sheds and annexed trailers, temporary structures rental or lastmoment erected slipshod and so soon to be razed to make way for shelters of a more permanent nature, which are expensive and so the financing begins…the latenight, underground audits of firstborn assets, the brunchside, bunkside pledge drives, multiplatform fundraising initiatives implemented for the sake of new beds, chairs, and desks — they’re studying, in rows yeshivish, of learners quick and slow, of Malamuds and Lerners at their markedup, knifed and gummed and grafittied tables creaking under their books omnilingual, books and languages both on permanent loan from recently domained area parochial schools, courtesy of unasked donation, benevolent largesse anonymous only in its receipt, the pitiless ledger lines, page after page flipped foreignly to distract them from, what…Doctor Abuya’s been assigned to the eldest class, invariably the least advanced, difficult to deal with though invaluable in influence; he stands in front of them parsing, glossing, wising up, a foreigner, a usurper, just a lesson ahead of his pupils, middleaged, geriatric and older even, ancient: to study — knowledge never ends, its endeavor never does, only the time in which we have to risk it, is it worth it; if knowledge promises wisdom promises happiness, maybe, and if not, then. To study the value of study. Here they work their mornings in ulpan, crashcoursing the mamalashon: the holy tongue shoved down the hole voweled into their faces, wondrously agape if breathing in snores; the afternoon, though, educates the hours of laziest attention, those of wandering gossip, grabs and gropes, the torpor of distracted flirtation, is given over to the secular, to practical business and communication skills, with pertinent mathematics. If Adam has one apple, and Eve has two, it’s a better investment to buy the tree. Chop it way the hell down. Build a goddamned shopping mart. And plant trees of plastic thereupon. Very good, Avram. Very good. All these lifesized, fully competent and heavily insured adults stuffed behind desks, with their bellies overflowing the swollen wood, squeezed into chairs tight about the thighs. Menschs all, displaced paters familias reduced to immaturity, reverted against their will, ulcerated, idle — insomniac professionals just going out of their futzing minds, if we’re being frank: middle of a perfectly good workday afternoon and you find yourself pacing the hallways, as forlorn as a hospital’s, as spare as a court’s, annex to annex with a class schedule burning in the hands, plodding through every rationale, justification, drivethru philosophy, the selfhelp exhortative; finding safety, solace in the bathrooms, smoking quick cigarettes out windows and cursing teachers, perched on porcelain while they’re expected in class to recite, to approach the intimidating presence of blackboard — how did we get here, what am I going to do. Plot a lawsuit. Hatch an escape. Hang yourself from the fixture in the stall. Above the watery laughter of the tank. Suicide. Many do. The Nachmachen’s is an easier task, and holier: stalking the younger ranks, the choice kindergarten classes, he slaps their faces, tugs hair, makes sure their yarmulkes, which are mandated, stay always on and fastened — prodding, demanding, insistent, imparting to them their own tradition, their only inheritance, despite their resistance to its assumption, despite their unwillingness to take responsibility for its meaning, its future; though tuition’s already been deducted from their accounts, which have been frozen by Garden, Inc. offIsland, in escrow, presently administered by the government and invested in this, its venture, reinvested in life, which is theirs, which is them. No appeal.
