It’s tenable, many think, it holds — though so very difficult, involved to argue, but since when has that stopped any of us — that all of history’s happened to effect Him in the negative, much as it did Adam, time’s wearying wear on the first mensch, with everything his fault, faulting him, nothing to blame, with no brother whose mark would keep him; that when another first of a kind, Napoleon, suppose, he rode through the desert upon the horses of the great Alexander, thinking to conquer the bondage that was Egypt if only to bind it to him, to the West, then, and so to a few argue an even greater oppression — and you won’t find this in your al-Jabarti, try as you might — that one of the goys in his army went and stole a date from a stall huddled up against the edge of Cairo under the citadel of Saladin, stole a date that was poisonous, a date that it’s said killed the goy when he went to it for sustenance, this goy formerly a Venetian sbirro who’d been courting an Affiliated back home in the Republic once serene, them groping each other on the outskirts of the Ghetto Nuovo no longer gated what with the emancipation and this thanks to the campaign of that very conqueror being served in the east — the two of them Venetian and Affiliated still sheltered, though, hidden from all, declaring their love for one another under the protective ring of the Terza, a bell echoing far from the San Marco campanile; him stealing kisses and hugs and loving words from this ghetto maydel who after having waited for his return from the fight and having had none for a while went and married another Unaffiliated, who he was the dead goy’s brother who’d urged her to give up on his own brother for dead then took her soon pregnant west to an America that promised an ocean between them and the continent warring, which union of theirs and its consummating birth upon Manhattan Island led directly, some say, believe it or not, through splinteringly infinite causes of causality, gevalt, and through subsequent effects too numerously and, too, numinously insane to even allude to here, ask them, they seem to have all the answers, the charts and the trees, the graphs and riverflows — all leading to Hanna and Israel, a Developed cedar far from its Lebanon, palmed nearer to New Egypt, Joysey, and its tiny pines, branching out to bloom Him with the winter…a culmination, if culminating in disappointment, and for at least this Garden’s root, this trunk, final, that’s that.
