Witz

Inside, in Adela’s wardrobe, a wooden hulk set against the wall opposite the door, behind a pile of her folded bedding, behind the linen, the mussed sheets patterned out of date and the matching pillowcases, too, worn by sets of mismatched guests, uninvited — an icon of a saint, and behind the saint, a large and roughly hewn opening into a passage widening with its descent under the brights of these sudden chandeliers set between emergency sconces leading under the Koenigsburg frontyard and the sidewalked street then the Israelien frontyard and there narrowing again on its way up through another opening into yet another wardrobe of the same size and shape as Adela’s (though plywood, this unit discontinued, discounted, found by Israel at a firesale — they’d been swearing to get her new furniture for a year, if not for her sake then theirs), past its own saint then past its unwashed bedsheets and clothes and lingerie, smokestained, vodkadamp, all domestic fabrics and sartorial separates that’d been haphazardly stuffed beyond the reach of the iron the girls would wield upon afternoon Fridays — and into a room of the same size and shape as Adela’s though a room in a basement partially unfinished, which Hanna used to say to Edy meant that it was also partially finished: defensively this, Wanda’s room in the Israelien home.

Wanda and Adela, these two sisters from the Pale, far beyond it — you two are so pale! Edy’d shriek, howabout we make an appointment, on me, don’t you worry yourself about anything, you’re more than my maid, my kinder’s sitter, my servant or Slavslave, you’re my friend; what’re you thinking, tanning salon, should we go with sprayon or lights, makeover or just nails, maybe the spa, we’ll soak and gab, make a day of it — they were inseparable these two if sisters then nationed only through river’s blood, umbilicus choice. Anyway, as it’s often said of them, a package deal, a twofer your money maximized, the familysized — when the two of them Edy and Hanna would recite ancient history to friends gathered, maybe at a meeting of the board of the dayschool, or at a synagogue event, a Hadassah function, that’s how they’d talk, the not quite valuepak, two for the price of three, Edy only joking around, and how Hanna would always set her up or even herself wherever whichever one left off: We went down to the Agency together, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the two of them,

The two of them, here Edy’d pick at a thread, a loose strand of tooth’s salad — orphans,

Hanna’d go on, No luggage,

as Edy’d add, They’d arrived with these illegible recommendations, which my greatgrandfather of blessed memory could maybe understand if he weren’t dead now, what’s it been, twenty years…

nodding, laughter — Edy-the-funnyone,

And now Hanna’d say,

And now, Edy repeating — they never rehearsed, would you believe?

And now, how Hanna’d attempt to kill it boredom and curtains, Edy and I are like two older sisters to them, like, aren’t we, Edy?

approval, enabling — Like two older sisters, Edy’d rerepeat like maybe ten times,

sisters we never had, like sisters we never had, like the two sisters we never had…nodding, and Hanna, having always to get the last word in would say, edgewise, Older sisters,

We are, Edy not to be outdone,

nodding, We are, Hanna repeating and, to end it again this time ended once and for all — sealing her victory while unsealing another container of tupperware would add, Have a little more artichoke salad I saved the hearts just for you (I always remember — that’s what I do, I safeguard & remember),

or, And how’s your son making out at whichever school at his whatever new job is he still with that girl who, with the father who, what’s her name?

On the day they’d both arrived incountry, they’d met at the Agency, were transported to work in the same windowless van, Agencydelivered right to the same street, right to their new doors right across the street from one another, behind which locked a thousandfold then alarmed they’d work for their lives in return. This Agency that was wholly owned though operated only on the evenings of weekdays by a descendant of the founder of the very town or village or muddied well from which neither of them came but that was near enough and in the same country at least as were their own towns, which were villages, dirty burrows or caves, though that country had first to become many other countries before again becoming that country once again his and theirs; this owner and operator a descendant of their shared nation, then, who now owned, operated, and exploited his heritage that was only a Heritage in America, exploited, too, the presently disadvantaged situation of their coconspiring country in order to supply this relatively affordable and dependable workstaff to the descendants of a people who had been killed by the ancestors of those who’d arrive here five days a week and without any official sanction, eager and earnest to cook and to clean: among them, though hailing from two estranged, mutually hating and universally hated cities that had become bombed into towns that had then become bombed into villages debased amid respective cataract and cess situated at opposite ends of two nations that had survived only to fall at opposite ends of their now redistributed and so unified nation, how Wanda and Adela had each overheard the other muttering obscenities in a shared, reunified tongue (as if a breathy length of conterminous flesh, which ensured they’d never get too far away from one another), an estranging language that sounded to Hanna like SZCZSZCZSZCZ and was apparently understood only by the three of them, the Agency proprietor, Wanda and Adela, and the dead ancestors of their employers, whose eyes, even in silent stairwell photographs, often retained a moisture that sustained flies the sound of whose beating wings would resemble the buzz of their talk; the two turning each to face the dry tongue of the other, flouncing over shoulders hair washed in dishwater, each dressed in the same model formless sweater purchased at State department stores laden with identical shelves, CZÓSZ

CZÖSZCZSZÔCZØSZCZÒS it sounded like to Edy, fantastic in its palatework, its display of glottal virtuosity that no one else in the metal and glass lobby of the Agency would understand as the lobby was then at that early hour full only with working mothers and even housewives assembled to haggle over the imports, to handle the merchandise, to argue and to bargain and broker their deals, though only after making deep and thorough inspections according to criteria known only to conscience (firm breasts and sweet breath, good knees, healthy gums); then, it was a hug that neither of them understood, as if without thought, like already here they are being bold, brash, impetuous, fastfriends, these instantaneous Americans, immediately assimilated into this vast and multitudinously faceted citizenry of cheeks, with a kiss lipped amid the down of each, their hug cleaved out from the air between them a mass of wet concrete (the most famous material of their nation, wherever it is, if it still was) that would come to harden into a landmark in their lives, a monument abstracted into intimacy, founded upon nothing save the flimsy linoleum flooring of the landmass known to us as Memory: remember that dictator, yes, the one whose moustache pointed up or the one whose moustache pointed down, either, the one who was bald or the one whose hair was combed severely over to the right indicating the side to which we all would salute, both and his eyebrows, and that regime, sure, the one that took your father, no, the one that took my mother, you mean that one, and then the Revolution, right, where were you when, and what, I almost forgot, who could forget, I was only a baby, I was only a girl.