You were expecting what besides miserly decoration, impoverished, no humanity, just faceless lions and onewinged birds, frozen midroar and half tweeting. Above the ark, where the scrolls are kept, where no scrolls will be kept anymore — a tympanum, a woodwork canopy peeling paint and blue mold; deepplanted vaunt, hardened bounty amidst carved drapery, earthen vines strangling eternity, then above, only ribbing. Menschs on the lowest level, their wives and daughters higher, upon the balcony then on balconies decorated in rock flowers and jewels, who knows how many of them on up to the stone seat of the moon, as if one half of the Decalogue, the cleaved five commandments, and who can sneak a look? or else they’re kept to the side, or toward the rear, the women, nearest the western wall, the separating grillwork a veil of metal, an armor of plaits…the menschs keep turning, keep coming up with prayerless occasions to turn their eyes upward, behind. We’re inattentive, weekly; resentful, daily; at all times our souls unprepared — beginning there at the ceiling, its crown, an ornamental rib intended to forsake the vault of a cross. An extra, whether left from Creation or a predating build. An almemar parts the room, though later in the show the staging will remove itself to the eastern wall, the pulpit: another migration, yet another orientation, and so which way to face, though the movements are known, felt instinctually — are up and down and back and forth, in and out and this and that and what where, only now.
Everything known better days. The worn steps up to the proscenium’s ark, arching at the height of the street once again: their cups covered over in dissolute pillows, stuffed with who wants to think. Just inside the vestibule, a lavabo for the washing of hands before prayer’s suffered drought. Those without prayerbooks are to read the prayers that have been written on the walls in a hand unwashed. A hand impure, in that it’s withheld.
At that proscenium, arkways, the House Manager, resident schlockmeister extraordinaire, an obese mensch shvitzing nerves in this freeze, smokes a frond rolled in loose page, fitted into a holder hollowed out from his humerus; he taps ash to the floor, lines of ash indicating staging. All has been blocked since eternity. The pit’s just below; the baldspot on the Conductor’s head blinding the balcony: he’s bent over his score, baton in one nostril out the other, scribbling his cues in fanatical charcoal, circling rests and only the rests. Tacit. His tuxedo’s motheaten, his cummerbund an enormous expropriated armband. A clarinet running scales up from the chalumeau, embouchure cracked, his reed a sliver of skull; a fiddler, a tallskinny mensch to the clarinet’s shortfat, fiddling with the tuner on his tailpiece: if he’s sharp he’s sharp, if he’s flat he’s flat, it’s the thought that counts, condemns; an organist, pulling out all the stops, warming up the webbed pipes; the Copyist rushes in, vaults over the rail, trips over stands, slipslides in spitvalve discharge, hands out parts barely dry, just finished as all work — not just that of Creation but of copying, too — must be barred from the sunset: dusk’s red ink smeared, ink that actually ran out yesterday and is now only blood worried with spit; the Prompter wiping his forehead with the House Manager’s noserag, then numbering cue cards with a quill so sharp his cousin could perform morally impossible ocular surgery with it — a procedure ensuring prophetic hindsight, would help. The House Manager, lapels at his ears, flicking the switch to the
Nu, that’s what he thinks.
As feedback echoes, feeds back on itself the sound cud, swells in the mouth to air raid proportions, but it’s maybe a drill, let’s hope, or a close relative screaming Name somewhere near — as the crowd alarmed, is made fidgety, restless…a buzz that is its own sting, inspiring of shock, the instinctive Amen that surprises: people whispering to each other, jawing that it’s finally, about time — unannounced, from the leftwing stageright, the cantor comes forward, arrayed in an illfitting white kittel.
Houselights of the world to dim, out; the candles guttering brighter.
