Book of Numbers: A Novel (77 page)

They reached under their paunches for beltclipped pdas—not even, half of them still had flipphones—and flipping them agape held them up to the sky, as if seeking reception, a signal from a tower or heaven itself, approving of the time. Then they fussed up their belts and assumed the knees, the fourth prayer of the day.

White men, inured to the fervor, hurried to their VWs and Opels and Škodas. A lot of them drove Škoda hatchbacks in Alpine white, and I couldn’t tell them apart, the cars, I mean—it was amazing they could all tell their cars apart.

The Arabs finished with their worship, rugged up, and lined for the mustering buses. Drivers were reversing the placards in their windshields, from indicating Birefringen and Schott and Siemens and Strabag AGs, to indicating the districts. About half the worshippers, about six or so, were lining up for the bus to Josefstadt-Neubau-Mariahilf, and I hustled over to get behind them, as a man up front turned to chat—Yasir. It was brother Yasir—I’d lay my hand on an ereader loading the Koran and swear to Mohammed about all of this.

Yasir was friendly with the Arabs, and even religious in his way—not enough to have prostrated with them, but enough to have waited for the concluding rakat. All his lapsed coworkers and even the driver had stood without complaint, as if it were a sin to depart before the As-Salaamu Alaykum. Toward the right and left. Toward Mecca again. The busdoors sighed out, for boarding. I was hoping the seats outnumbered the crowd.

I drudged the aisle past drowsing, txting, calling—my presence was the least of their cares. I was lost, or had lost my license to booze or drugs, or my Audi or Saab to a divorce, or else I was reconnoitering the commute as a consultant, for ways to reduce its costs. Whichever it was, they rebuffed me. Yasir and his seatmate were engaged, not in whispers, but also not in German, and though he didn’t even raise his mad scientist dome as I went by, I felt his forehead measure me, that stain like a voracious sensor.

I settled into the nosebleed row of empties, alone on the aisle. I had only the backs of their heads, carpet bunches of skin, treadless tires. Bridge congestion. Stops.

Yasir got off with a few coworkers who’d kept the faith and a few who hadn’t, and an unemployed Jew in a straightjacket suit—I crossed the
street and down the block. They peeled off in all directions. Petting unripe melons at the markets, laying dominoes for khat, or just sitting by the TV in the movie of their lives, for me, their only standingroom audience. Yasir slipped into a joint booming ghetto lute music and tacked with kebab posters in lieu of menus, its Biohalal Geöffnet sign drooping its plug onto the polyvinyl, dim.

I dawdled catercorner in front of a clothingmart, until its proprietor leaned out to spit a husk of sunflower seed. I moved nextdoor, the other nextdoor. Bazaars of adhan chronometers, qibla compasses, digi misbahas, that collapsible thing you rest your book on, a rehal. Another prop wielded a pikstik to beat the rainwater off his awning.

Yasir stepped out through the flap of the plastic tarp tent for sidewalk dining, holding a brownbag flat because its bottom was spotting greasy.

We went on until we came to what Vienna calls a Trafik, apparently, a boxy phoneboothesque kiosk, a newsagent. The sign atop it, Maribi.

The clerk, who must’ve been late or just impatient for a bathroom, bowed under the counter, removed his apron and embraced it around Yasir, and Yasir, who wouldn’t bow, but lifted the counter, became the clerk—next shift.

What Yasir did was: took a razorblade and slit the brownbag into a placemat, chewed at a tangle of red drumsticks shaped like Austria. Then he folded the placemat over the bones, wedged the parcel behind the racks. He cracked the beverage cooler for a bucket and squeegee. Then it was lifting the counter and out again to swipe at the plexiplastered ads on the side (the lotto), the rear (budget airfare), the side (the lotto), and the sliding partition (between the automat pennants).

What else: he sold some papers and magazines, some stamps, candies and tickets for the bahn or tram, Almdudlers, Red Bulls, and diapers. Individual diapers. A customer brought in a blender and he repaired it. Atop the coingrimed counter. Yasir fixed a watch, toolless. But it might’ve been his watch.

He batched the papers and mags now a day deceased and bound them in twine and stacked them tidy for curbside burial.

But only after he’d hopped up on them, for the height to lower the Trafik’s shutter—he strained. And I would’ve helped. If I hadn’t been his size, or strange to him. The lock he used was like the U-type, for bicycles.

Yasir zipped his jacket, and turned the corner, so I did too, turned it for blocks. His apron flared out behind him. I kept up, kept studying him, and tried to adopt his shambles of a stride so as not to alarm the night. The engine misfiring was inside me, my heart.

He stopped at a middle house. A flypaper façade of swatted windows. This was a man who didn’t bring his glass home with him. I stomped for warmth, and for a light that wasn’t the moon’s, which wasn’t at crescent, or full, but half.

I went up to the door and read the slapdash stickered buzzers. Their names were twinned, written in this script and then repeated below in a script resembling my testing this pen, licking its tip then testing again. Maribi. All pens at the very end of their ink begin to write in Arabic.

At a middle floor a light went on. No shadow child. No revenant wife. And then curtains were drawn like how Moms lets down her hair.

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The oldest representations of the human: that their physiques remain consistent throughout the Upper Paleolithic augurs for a religious explanation, while the fact that their materials, sizes, postures, and adornments vary considerably within that period augurs for an artistic inspiration as well. Still, yet another theory is more practical. They’re maps, itineraries, schedules, lessons in that most primitive school, the body. A culture might’ve chipped the softness of the human form from out of hardness as a lesson for its children or even for posterity, to show
what it too will inevitably suffer, the swell of pregnancy, starvation, dehydration, disease, all burst at once in the selfsame corpus. If this were true, however, there would’ve been a tale that interpreted all the massed tragic layers, the strata. There would’ve been an encryption key, to enable the deciphering of the intricate systems of nicks and knaps since lost to hydraulics, aeolian processes, and time. Which brings us to the issue of value. Given that all pebbles are primordial, age can’t determine worth, rather it’s the hand, the presence of the human hand, which cuts from red tuff the stuff that merits enshrining. It’s this intentionality or, better, mindful guidance, which distinguishes nature from both religion and art. A sedimentary hunk cleaved by wind or water tells nothing, while a hunk cleaved by a human who’d lived with the imperative to make tells all. But then there are still a handful of rocks that might go either way—rocks that some “read” as anthropomorphic, undoubtedly purposefully shaped (“artifacts”), and that others “read” as the result of tectonic accidents, of convergences of erosion, spall, and aberrant psychologies (“geofacts”). What some regard as an intentional slice or whittle—a woman’s waist or limb—others regard as the wishful incidents of weather, tidal salinities, volcanic spews, ground mineral grinding mineral. See what you want to see, hear what you want to hear, whatever you search for, you find. And the more controversial specimens have been found in Israel, mostly by Arab children.

(S
OURCES
:
The Birth of Fertility: Artifacts, Geofacts, and the Male Imagination,
Alana Hampur, PhD. My mother, my loneliness, winter.)

Museum hours remain the same, but prayer hours are subject to change. Gods don’t take a day off, the sun just leaves earlier. The clouds. The clouds weigh gravid.

Out of my hostel the Trafik was a right and a left and between the turns, a bridge like a gangrenous rainbow over the Wienfluss.

A minority cleft, a migrant clave, posteverywar buildings to accommodate any ethnicity. In the yards weeding intervenient to the units of whatever the German term is, Socialistcommunistworkerhousingthebalconiesarefalling, the laundry was being taken in, colorless veils and shawls like photos hung dripping but not yet developed.

All of this neighborhood might as well have been downtown Jewish NY at the turn of last century—here was the same stage of nascent assimilation—just translate the Yiddish, switch around the referents, and update the technologies. Easier times, simpler times, tenements, peddler carts—what’s the Arabic for “egg creams”? the Persian for “spaldeens”? Bundled boys were choosing sides for a game that involved kicking a punctured tire. Then they were kicking each other. Scarves waved. Penalties.

Yasir wasn’t at the Trafik. Only one of us was early or late, for an appointment only one of us had made. The other clerk was working. The clerk from earlier. Describe him later. Describe how all day he was on the headset phone talking bluetoothed Arabic that no foreigner would ever be able to tell whether he was delighted or enraged.

Was he Yasir’s nephew? And so Iz’s cousin? Yasir’s son? How old? Still plenty young to busy with the future. He was too consumed with not becoming his father or uncle or cousin to be troubled by me—he wouldn’t still be moonlighting at our age.

I stroked the glossies, rubbed the ink from the print. The Trafik carried only a few German/Austrian titles:
Kronen Zeitung,
Kurier,
Die Presse,
Die Standard,
Wiener Zeitung,
Der Spiegel,
Vogue,
Glamour,
a few copies each.

The rest of the papers were folded into racks as if in the alphabetical order of my incomprehension, from tabloids in Turkish to broadsheets of abjad, and in that emoticonese I think is Sinhalese, and in that zodiac handicap signage I think is Amharic. Papers in languages left to right and right to left. And verticalized until continued, next page. They must’ve published out of London or Paris or Berlin, because boxed above their prices in both euros and pounds were weathermaps of London and Paris and Berlin and it was raining.

And that was the good news, which readers never trusted or skipped. The bad news was that elections were rigged, bribery scandals were sanctioned, and schools and social services had been suspended in cities that readers would never return to. Something happened to 16 somewhere somewhen, something happened to 30,000. Also, Israel.

I was pleased to find the classifieds healthy, and the backgammon column still thrives.

I wasn’t going to leave this Trafik until the work I’d done with Principal was public—until I recognized the headline of every frontpage as my own writing, and my outdated groomed promo bookphoto made the cover of every periodical in stock.

And then he’d recognize me, and nod, and I’d nod back—not him, Yasir.

The clerk was talking, but some to me, some to his headset: “Heast, Oida—du Penner—wos wüst?”

I said, “Ich spreche kein Arabisch. Nicht Arabisch?”

He chewed at his cheek and gestured my putting down the mag he’d doubted I could afford and now was sure I couldn’t read—another issue with a centerfold on Principal’s birthday.

I reracked it and showed him my empty pack of Camel Lights. Put money in the dish. Change came back in the dish, along with a fresh pack of, I’ll live, Camel Regulars. I reached into the cooler for a beer, an Ottakringer. Put money in the dish. Change came back in the dish. He popped the cap with a countermounted popper like a rusty torture chamber contraption. Worst thing about Europe is that you have to pay for matches.

Around the block again, a two cig walk. I would’ve liked to dump that sour warm beer over the cold, be done with it.

I went and stood outside Yasir’s building in another window’s light as all the desires I’d been feeling constellated into the desire just to stand there, within them, under that haloing light, to prove that I could, that I could be faithful—to anything, to myself.

According to the Muslim press it was 1432. And by the Jews it’d just turned 5772.