That evening, to ascend the mountain next into night, trailing behind me what still call me by motherly things, they give me no rest was what she’d always say…left dirtied pots and pans over my shoes, I’m stepping mixingbowls halved, dragging threadpulls, unravelings, broombristles and mop-heads and feathers from dusters, knipls and kvitls a tittle yidl zidl yi di di yi di di, clanging and tangling up to the summit one over, upon which I behold another valley below. Here, too, villaged with yet another town, the last of them this last Shabbos, I hope: my father’s town, Aba’s, I’m sure of it, from whence my father’s family had fled or once left, who knew…I do, only now. A town Unaffiliated, maybe, with my mother’s, though it’s been forever a neighbor; or, perhaps unaffiliated in any other, lesser, sense of that slur: that of its rare tidiness, its neatness it’s almost shocking; its relative order as compared to the waste of the barren maternalized just over the hill, down the mound. Never been sacked is what, or not much — at least not as retribution for the imageless worship of a God without son, or in retaliation for the grace of a minority ethic. Unlike by my mother’s, there have never been any pogroms here, nor ghettowide pillage — no prunestewed, beerbothered, sausagestumped rape. From here, my father’s it’s so clean, so beautifully perfect: everything in its proper place, at its proper time, yet abandoned…a clock stilled but still secure in the promise of tick, safe in its jewelcase, the glassy sky clearer, and bright (if only you knew how to wind, wheel its dial the horizon around) — a relic that is its own reliquary’s more like it, as it’s both the object holied and its holying set.
At the summit, I stumble…panting, I trip to fall over this well, halfopened, exposed — in my shock stubbing its lid off to scatter round down the scarp of the next prospekt promised, which is only the manicured furtherance of the previous mud. It flies wildly — skidding its way toward the purity of the village that once iced patrimony, home to the goyim who’d melt down to my father: a townspeople of immaculate surface, a townsfolk cold and of glaciate calm, whose regularity and slowness seem only quaint to me now — though if every once in a century they’d be mannered faster and louder toward strangers surrounding, and even angry, at times, furious and violent, abusive…still, the worst they could ever be accused of within their own world would be the reticent, the reserved, the brutally civil: pleasantries toward one another by which to service every occasion, fathering each other with specific forms of formal address. Du, tu, to you, too — I shouldn’t expect the same from myself, halved between valley and vowel. Abandoned alone to my shriek, an echo of the throb of my toe through the straw and a loafer. To curse out of spite that quiet sleepy town down below me — to curse its Church and its steeples, its cross high above as if the tongue of the sky’s bell stilled silent at compline — and that with a mouth lamed by that very Imagelessness all of us bless whether as Father, or God…the gummy gape of the Square, wideopen, welltended, soulless. As if a crumb to poison the churchmice, a collectionplate coined even smaller, or distant — the grating puckish and spun, as if a lid without eye, the knee’s patch of a skullcap, it hits, at long last, to a skittering stop against the westerly wall of this village Town Hall, denting a mark on that venerable frontage, which is as impassive as the ice is gray and yet, now imperfect.
I stand at the rim, the lip of the pit…what, you think I’d only recognize a well I fall into?
