A Heaven of Others by Joshua Cohen Page B

spill its immaculate hardness over the threshold and into the hall as Aba once said—upon leaving the Kotel and returning home the way we’d arrived, through the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, toward Jaffa Road again and its walk to Tchernichovsky Street then down it—he Just slammed the door hard shut then locked it again and went to pace around and around nothing at all, to guard over nil at the funeral home, ANTSCHEL’S FUNERAL HOME the sign said that we would pass on the walk from the Old City to home if ever we took the shortcut we never did.
    David was not spoken of (and is obviously not spoken of anymore, in this way, by this family), because at the age of eighteen, which is the age of induction into military service that for him would have most probably meant Uncle Alex’s Givati Brigade whose symbolic mascot is the farting fox plumed in a purple beret, he forsook Jerusalem and the Eden surrounding for a position in Hollywood across the finger of sea and the hand of the ocean—exchanging our trees for their open palms—where he met and then lived with and maybe still lives with a fellow Hollywood transplant, an aspiring Movieperson whose sex meaning gender was less important to Aba and even to the Queen (Aba’s then-new-Queen, my own) and still would be, if only, than the religion—sexual orientation—this Movieperson subscribed to, subscribes. An affiliation this Movieperson’s name and his way of pronouncing it Her apparently made quite clarion clear. A lifestyle that David’s severing of phone cords and unreturned postcards made even clarion clearer though not the clarionest, which was Aba’s refusal to ever think or even know of him again as his son and the Queen’s full support of such a decision, which might have made her love me even more, which was Nice.
    But Moviepeople and my halfbrother are not important as such. What is important is that I, a son of my Aba’s old age and the Queen’s hopeful youth, did not enter into the Valley of Nails to save myself from the inexact succor of this heaven, my hell. What David did and maybe still does is David’s, and it’s my parent’s life to have thought that a weakness, a flaw. In that standing at the lip of the Valley of Nails I had a revelation. A revelation not swallowing of the earth but my own. Whatever David did or did not do—and I never knew him before the now in which I know all—was done, or undone, to others too, no matter intention. Not the sex but the dodging, the flee. Which if not unforgivable has passed unforgiven. I must never forget. That I have only myself to answer for. Now.
    That I am alone here with no parents.
    With nothing to dodge, nowhere to flee.
    And a stranger only insofar as I am thought strange.
    His turning back from the lip of the Valley was not weakness or failure. Neither was it limitation however. As that might is not of me or ours. Rather what he did was give choice to choice, put question to question. What I did I did, and is done. Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again . And that it is not for the living to judge any of the sacrifices that others are bound to make to keep living, we all are—which is what Aba always said about Cain and Abel in answer to my question as to why I didn’t have natural brothers? as I’d always wanted one or more of them, any thousands of millions worldwide the Queen always said she’d been asking ever since I knew it was moot.
    Listen, when one choice is a Jacob and when one—the other—choice is an Esau, I sought the brotherhood merited in, and gracing, surrender.

Listen we can say limitation too, when we say about the borders of Heaven, the lines of demarcation, even of, yes, inevitable, attrition. To say Heaven is borderless, without borders as if they were unnecessary, superfluminously superfluous, is to say the thing that is not. Or at least A thing that is not. Rather Heaven only appears, is only sensed first dully and then, once accustomed, dimly