Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  Here, look here: His father in moustache days, laying hands on a suit high and thick with padded shoulders, Hanna’s, she’s seated, which is unlike her, though pregnant, which is; red, there’s writing on the reverse: Is & Han, Woodmere, with swingset and toy pony, it would’ve been backyard at the house she’d been born in, deep in what’d been known as the Five Towns, retroactively doubled to ten, fifty and further (neighborhoods expanding, the Affiliate sprawl), another island, another world to remember…another photo, this His father again, alone and younger, like what they’d take at a mall, or in an auditorium, lobby, or hallway upon graduation: gray screen behind him whitewisped, as if oceanwaked, hair’s styled wet, eyes, too, and on the reverse, another inscription, another hand: to Hanna, with love, XOXXOOXXXOOO; His PopPop, in a warmup suit, it must be polyester, he’s not warming up, He’s cool and removed, with casual knees seated at the edge of an unlit hearth; on the reverse, Dad, Hanukah, December/80; Hanna was always great with the details, organized was her life, she’d probably snapped the shot, too; then Pop-Pop at the ocean, in a suit, watertight, like a wet hand clutching his cluster, hairless, longnailed toes sinking under garish grains; reversed, Dad, Florida, July/76…relics, then, of the displaced, the replaced, made museum: Hanna’s father, her stepfather, stepstep and on up the stairs; recognition repurposed, reversed: some mensch in some country there in the uniform of its military, then the same mensch in some other country there in a suit and vest and tie; the same straw’s doll clutched to a breast by the same hands on two continents, who is she, she looks like Ima, but what about the girl holding her? MomMom’s pain if she ever even knew that emotion as separate, as a part of life, and not just all there was to it: PopPop and another, not Arschstrong, posed around the unit of the latter, condo’s hall and its tree for Xmas, mistletoedecked, about to kiss with closed eyes, with tongue. This’s your (great-great-great-)-grandmother, that’s her standing with a hole in her bucket and behind her, that’s Rus. See the trees. How the snow seems so white and as white, so pure, it’s so fake. Frames are savage, it’s been said; they’re terrible, as they limit the world, obliterating what is with what was, while also negating the future, forbidding any sense of what might still be. To be punished for this trespass in image—Ben should be forced to wander around until the end of His days, hung around His neck an unfinished frame, unwieldy, nailstuck wood. All this is mysticism, though, the world as we’ve posed it—this desire to know who we are today merely an outgrowth of our fanatical memory, our insistence on not denying anything its existence; the result of our demand upon responsibility, of our passion for Law; this obsession with preservation merely our own human, mundane, limited imitation of the next world’s coming to come. A reproduction in advance of this world to be divinely perfected. On every reverse is scrawled a last question in invisible ink: are we patient enough—to wait for everything we’ve ever been promised, being content to accept its fulfillment, however, only in image, in images of Image…in imaginings, hymn? Even here, amid this Eden we’ve so tastefully and expensively furnished and draped—nu, we’ll have to make do.

  Thrashing under the water under the ice, He flails, He founders…He but not yet He, Ben not yet: only a dimness, a trifle of dark, diffusing in the depths of the bath to cleanse Him of He…purified, but into and for what: not fetal but unshaped in the solution, enwombed without form save flub, glub, and the bubbling—I can’t breathe, which given the wetness sounds only as ripples, as waves. Limbs liquefying, not their loss through melting but to become remade, to be crucibled. He tides into seas and oceans, turning up wake. Viscous uterine life. Maternal syrup. Paternal stick. Its eyes stinging, its nose, too, then its mouth and throat, then no eyes to sting, no nose nor mouth, tongue dissolving at the hint of honey, the faint taste of urine, then, of silvery poison: sensing its last…a substance that Hanna would’ve kept under the sink, always offlimits, kept locked.

  Will you shut the goddamned tentflap? the traveling photographer yells.

  Who’s he again, who does he think he is? A mensch time out of mind—he looks any way you want him to look, though most of the timeless you can’t see him because he’s looking at you.

  Here, hold these—and there’s a great shuffling of glass sound, a crashing, the breaking of plates…pass that nitrate over here, will you, the sound of fumbles around. He’s yelling at his assistant, a slow, dullwitted girl disguised as a boy with bangs, the rest of her hair gathered in a pile under his cap, a slight moustache smudged on with tint; her first name’s Never, and as for her last name, Forget. Or else we’ll do the albumen, he says to him, or the gelatin; forget it, we’ll do it all, we’ve got the time. Smash those eggs for me, will you? And, this time, don’t forget to separate the yolks…

  To stir, then tong flat—picked up then hung, they seem thousands of Him, they seem millions, Hims suspended from heaven by a pinch of the trees, their wooden reaches pinned to horizons. Dripping emulsion, He’s patted down with sheets, these sheets His selves in the sopped love of image engendering images. These padding clouds. He’s bent, then checked; memory’s done entirely inhouse; ripped already, pretorn, folded thrice, then shrunk, then enlarged: pores of an infinite process, He’s inhaling this whole time, in-taking, passingout, comingto, elementally, being assembled from every gradation of the mnemosynic bath; given focus only to dry: in a black & white encompassing every slowslipping tint, which if anything they might first yellow on their slow ways to, disappeared. To be developed, finally, then exiled out to the edge, posterity’s furthest diaspora. There, at last, to be framed. That is, if anything can ever contain Him.

  Ben’s image will precede Him everywhere except here, it appears, amid these trees unknotted with signs, these forests left barren of martyring tacks through His face: this the most religious enclave of recent adherents, enemies of representation, of the modern, of even the olden made new—the land of the people formerly known as the Amish, the Pennsylvania Deutsch, if you’ve heard. At least for them, conversion hasn’t been tough; they’d already grown the hair, bought the hats. If yesterday’s habits die hard, what about its people, community, brotherhood. What else to do, they’ve already committed to black. In a field, Ben wakes to a rain, a drippingly dense precipitate, intermittent if implacably slow, deliberate, and thick. Ruddish raw milk, irritatingly unprocessed. He turns His face to the tasteless heavens, the pinked underside of a naturally nonhomogenate moon. He’s under an udder, bovine, that of a Joysey cow, not just any: a heifer red and so rare, whose bloodlet ashes would’ve served to purify the sins of His people back in the days of the pioneer temples. Exhausted from the trek, His owners who deep in their souls are the owned, masters and hosts of underground trade, that moneychanging hands passing hands fingering change, the cartrides then the horserides, the changes of horse and cart then the portage, hiding in steamers and trunks, amid bags, boxes, and crates, His entire smuggle wormhollowed, spoondug—He opens His lips now only to spit, as if there’s anything left to be said; this after having been ignominiously dropped, left in the Keystone, abandoned without ceremony or cerement as not worth the skin He’d been born shrouded into—that and His onerous appetites, this sleeping lazily late until too tired to wake—the pinchednasal kvetch of the slave whose soul’s the enslaving. He closes His mouth to the weather of this cow on the graze, turns away and sleeps on, the ingrate, not thirsty.

  That night, which is that of the new moon, and so that of the month known as Av—the only moon not mentioned in the Torah, it’s related, a moon too dark to mention, we might, the darkest, as if so old or forbidden as to be no moon whether new or not, its absence tonight too sad and best forgotten or never lived through, the moon of destruction, the moonlessness of the dead—above Him appears another vision, a visitation of sorts…this mensch who seems like the grandfather He’d never had, never knew, maybe great, or greatgreat: his payos rustling in the slightest of winds, he’s bearded but without the moustache. Are you oppressed, my fellow? he asks Him.

  Bro
ther, might you be hungry, or a pregnant sister—ach, you need maybe a pillow, or are you good with the grass?

  Hab rachmones, He can’t just sleep out here all night without a moon, says the mensch’s true grandson with the name of a prophet, which one who remembers: nicht nicht…a bad omen, bodes ill. And so through such an unpropitious pitch, a copse of trees is mightily felled from the edge of a lane, they’re chopped to size then their logs are planed, their boards becoming fitted and nailed. At dawn, their strapping kinder raise up a barn around Him; their womenfolk having spent the eve further antedating themselves, while at the same time updating the past, what with their knitting of yarmulkes and hermetically holidaythemed scherenschnitte, doing their laundry so as to be prepared for the approach of the ninth of the month, hanging their white mourning garb out on the fences to gather the darkness, then in their kitchens preparing a meal for the eventual wake of their arrival, busy with their stews and goulashes while cuckooing gossip to one another, which translates to prayers; a syncretism this eclectic mix of writs and superstitions, traditions and rituals, incantations of spells the recipe, a meltingpot blackbottomed, full of misgivings’ blue brew: prophecy’s invoked, stars are observed in their own light, alone: how in the zodiac, it’s lately Leo, traditionally the time to snip hairs to be pressed under pillow; then, how Virgo the virgin comes next, hens to be lifted to count their eggs out from under them and then, from that number, interpret, extrapolate. Go on. Plates are shattered, their remains are stirred in the fire.

  How to rouse Him?

  Maybe I should kiss Him on the mouth with the tongue of a turtledove? says a girl not yet of age.

  What about me? says her rumspringa sister, a year older though already a mother herself.

  His presence an omen distressing, how could it be anything but what with Av’s erev upon them. Almanac tells only of frost, perpetual, ferhuddling. After their work through to dawn, they pray away the rest of the morning then at afternoon hit hard a schnitz, beginning brunch without Him still sleeping, as if unable Himself to be raised without nails: they dig into their shoofly pies sided with greens, their breads spread thumbthick with apple butter, accompanied by bottboi and chowchow, pickled eggs to nosh, bushels of beets. Hardcider flows freely, without a mind to their P.ints & Q.uarts. Then, finished with their leftovers then with afternoon prayers, the daven of mincha, their meeting begins, if in a tumult of grievance gotten unrepentantly drunk, plowed with paranoia: pews are tossed around, scuffled across the floor, broken, beards are swallowed, moustaches sucked in annoyance: what portends this passedout mensch? our charge, our barnyard starred? He’s a spy, Meek Zeke shrieks, from the government, Intelligence, here to keep tabs or chits, checkup; or, He’s come to convert us, to lead us back into the corrupted fold, a wandering proselytizer if a touch sleepy, or sheepish…gevalt—a missionary inleagued only with death!

  They referendum to port Him out of their barn newly risen (to be repurposed in repentance to an almshouse, if not to be razed), to cart Him unconscious still over to Paradise…by way of Bird-in-Hand, if you follow, then Intercourse, let them decide what to do—arriving there a day or so later and in terrible weather, to tax shelter under the gables of the former Trinity Reform, now a synagogue, the hochshul’s what they say, its hex replaced with the Decalogue; they sprawl Ben out on the lawn. A freshly accredited rabbi sits on the stoop—he looks just like them, introduces himself as Rav Nissen King, asks them if they’d consider contributing to the reduction of a mortgage. Forget it, they cart Him back, then into Lancaster proper, get orders from the community to wait for a responsa from York, city of the white rose, the light of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, or l’PA: searching for what, remedy, guidance, a party to assume their burden, their charge and its charity’s care. Tzedakah this mitzvah. This whose is He. Not one of us, meaning stranger. They store Him granaried, in disused silos and troughs, and in cowsheds again erected overnight, so as not to profane the sanctity of their own haylofts and homes.

  On the eve of the first Shabbos of Av, Ben wakes to a sliver of moonlight, shining in through the grain of the slats. He gets up amid the small space, finds a rusting, whirlwindreaping scythe propped lazily in a recess, against the woodenwall sunk in straw, makes to hack His way through the lock, slices it down to splinters, rips a gash of door in the door in a single sharp sweep: there’s darkness without, still’s quiet, a night. Free and about to quit the cow-shed, make an escape, He hears a lowing the sound of a shadow within, a low and susurrant moo, full of loneliness, sympathetic grief. What else but the cow, the Joysey, the heifer red and as huge as its sound: red the shade of its odium, it’s never been yoked. Insistent on following Him from town to nowhere as these reformed Amish of greater York, they make their rounds to plead help; curiously, it wouldn’t milk unless it’d been allowed to follow, and no one intended to grieve it, foolish to even tempt at its vex: God forbid it should die or be rendered otherwise impure before it goes for undreamt gelt at Philadelphia market or auction, hope, to that mensch from the Temple up north made an offer, in the big city, who trusts them, who’d afford not to these days…that deal means future, survival—a refurbished kindergarten, just think of it, the new mikveh, the lease of a new cemetery, too, and a bier bought to own; and so they’d tied the cow off to the cart, led it on, never letting it tow, not even thinking, such defilement, shtum.

  Ben stands—His legs flung doors apart, facing the open. As the heifer stampedes its charge straight ahead, at Him, determined and quick, its horned head down underneath Him, carrying Him over then onto its mass hairily red and pulsing in muscle, and then out and into the night. As if told to Him, but it’s no talking cow, not all of them are—revelation transmitted up from its beating, breathing hide dirtily wet to His tush and then into His mind, Ben understands He’s not to lead but to follow, to be led, only to ride. He surrenders Himself to the heifer, winding its ambly ramble down the pike east into the liberty of Philly, toward its columns and cobbles, its kites, keys, and cracked bells, through its ritzy, Rittenhouse streets, heading for the riverfront alleys, Penn’s Landing past the statues tugged fallen, monumental malfeasance, skyscrapers lacking for glass; the heifer hoofing them through the following dark, a slide across the Delaware’s ice, enacting Washington’s crossing but now in reverse; through the hushed middle night of wharf and warehouse collapsed, of boats frozen to shelter slips and gullish middens—Ben tightening His thighs around the heifer’s flanks, holding fast with the fist of His loins.

  How much longer until we’re there yet, again…but even after having reached the other shore, this heifer’s not too big into conversation—remind Him, not all of them are; no offense meant, if silently taken. Ben without blessing dismounts from its back, clumsily, insulted as much—which the heifer interprets as a sign now to switch. Upon its two hindlegs it hurls itself up on His own back, scarpimply, hairy itself, a huffy hump stooped. Ben gives a groan under its weight, it soon settles, tips, weaves lanes forsaken, grazed of their traffic, the heifer steadying itself with its hindquarters to hooves wrapped around waist, held by the bulge of His motherly hips. He walks on, trudges, a slipsy route down the untrafficked interstate shoulder—its pines and within them, the myriad, secret sandy paths linking graves: the trails and paths dug between Turnpike and Parkway, between Expressway and local—them highstepping over and around the thrown tires and trash, then, back to the blacktop, slowing up on the turns, yellowarrowed reflectors they dazzle the eye, the forehead’s headlight, holes of uprooted mile markers set for the occasional stumble, the sharp clovens of His burden digging a urinary sting into His kidneys, its hindquarters pried loose from their hold under the lungs at the ramps on and lost off He uses as turn signals, alerting with hair and hoof their presence to no one around. Though Ben’s carrying, the heifer still directs, navigates its own load, leads as always in its snouting of lefts, its horning out rights, though it seems not quite sure where they’re headed, exactly—suspicious, this transference of bestial blame, as if
a sin offering to the subliminal…what He needs, what wants, where the feet feel to walk: how this is beginning to be familiar, intersections these interstices familial, then known. Route 70what. The Mall. Ellisburg, what’s it called, Ellisberg, King’s Highway. Names, and numbers, too, these codes born of area, the zip that doth zone; the network, its treelike ringings and reticulations of tar, the grid wide and open, the grin of the turns and the looparound smiles, even the smirk of oneways—all the sudden and happy logic of connectivity, of togetherness…a gathering, more communicative than most, not taken but granted. Now how it’s all that old comfort made cold, still loving if saddened, a family there for each other if lately forced empty, forlorn; feels as if there’s been a death in the immediate parenting, a hearthloss, a graving of home. You can take the boychick out of Joysey, but you can’t, forget it. Take Joysey out of, you know. Wishniak Hill it’s called, a city of no hills, only plain, the inexorable flat—and then, above that eponym of a hill that doesn’t exist, that fat, juicy Wishniak itself, a cherry beckoning, gleaming high and yet outwardly impotent, a stormy and fiery sun.

  All that—with the unexpected on top.

  Ben loses Himself to memory found, rediscovered…the trike on the lawn, the umbrellad heap of patio furniture, denuded rhododendrons amid an ashen pyre of cedar split fallen—hollycroft groves the sharp of their leaves scarring the wind, remember, too, the poisoning balm of their berries in season…it helps to forget mind more immediate, that and the kidneys and the spleenstrangled stomach, His raw arms and legs and the spine between that’s bent and begging there on its vertebral knees for realignment, a shvitz, perhaps, followed by a dip at the Development pool, Israel’s Sunday hour or so at the Rec Center and then the crack of the chiropractor who’d once bought down the block for his daughter: reverie, idyll, distracts, diverts, it’s all coming back to Him now—until a mensch emerges from a unit showhousey spacious, if a model dilapidated, or as yet unredone, then hobbles over to face Him, and His load, the hefted heifer.