Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  My, how he’s aged.

  No animals allowed, says the Gatekeeper, it’s policy, sorry, and he fingers thought at his newly grown beard, infested with nitpickings and lice.

  We already have enough of our own.

  He heaves the heifer up to His shoulders to better steady His stand, and the thing—it begins a graze at His hair as if mocking.

  Not in front of strangers, you schmuck.

  What about me?

  What about you? is what the Gatekeeper asks, having quit scratching his pocks, taking from his mouth the cigarette, exhaling his last then snuffing it out with his fingers.

  Nu, who—you have any ID?

  Ben spits to the ground, just trying to fit in here; as for the heifer, it lows—which serves as a memory of the sirens.

  Then you don’t belong here neither, he picks brunch or a grub from his moustache. Sorry, rules are rules. Now stop shtepping me. Tenks.

  Tell you what, He says, I’ll give you my ride if you let me in: ten minutes, five, one, all I ask.

  Hymn…scratching under shirt at his underarms, hot, picking with smoke-dark nails the hatching eggs of his louse, flicking them a scurry to the ice and the asphalt—you might seem familiar…

  Listen, it’s red, I’m talking real red, and it milks like there’s no tomorrow—it’ll go for its weight in gold.

  You know, if gold’s your thing. If you’re into it. A heifer.

  I can see it’s a heifer, he’s squinting through a face of all hair…I’m dumb, but not blind, not just yet, poo poo poo. You got any papers for it? Rabbinic certification? Aha, that old handl.

  None, but it’s legit, trust me, echt, it’s kosher, glatt, a hundred percent, not a blemish, it never gave birth…reaches back, pries loose one of its hooves not to turn a left or right but a profit, holds it out for inspection and the Gatekeeper scrapes the nail of a forefinger down the thing’s leg, attempting to do away with the dye, but his finger emerges clean, at least as clean as it was before he’d inspected.

  Amen, but you didn’t hear it from me…and I’ve never seen you before—you’ve got a deal…and he goes to the hut, raises the guardrail. Geschwind, whoever you are, hurry up. Welcome to One Thousand Cedars!

  Ben with a groan unloads the heifer onto the sidewalk, where it sits, good boychick on its haunches as if to schnorr for littered scraps. Then, with a nod of thanking Shalom to the Keeper, He heads inside, scamperingly, and impatient, as if expecting what—for His life once within…His house to be known only through its other, with Him unsuspecting its grave, its cinderstood basementholed lot. Regard the Island’s, then, as His winterhouse—an investment in memory perhaps not worth the properties of its taxes: the burden, the fear of breakin, or fire; the Hill’s vacational double, its unseasonal reflection, an image of an image, resurrected because relocated, transported, only moved. He’s making for the house He remembers exactly—how else, if at all—from its stand upon a spur of rock at the edge of the Garden, overlooking the ocean and waste. Here, though, had been its hearth; here, His home itself was at home.

  Ben walks unburdened blocks familiar, block after blocks. Up from under the freeze the sidewalk comes to kiss at His feet, to smack His soles with lips that are cracks. Brokenbacks. Obeisance, the denial of one self in the service of another. How habit, and this despite its particularity—even if grand and luxury and maximally moneyed—always seems humble, modest, and small as too known. This is because we can adapt, we must, get used to anything, get used. But still, we’re aware of this capacity, always, of our ability to change—and so the lure of origins, the tempt of what we have been. How being here, and especially alone, it’s like living again, for the first. Though it’s not so much that He’d loved it here (how could He have, how long had He been here), or that He’d lived for so long, not long enough, in its displaced dwelling, under its exiled roof; it’s not that He was born here either that makes this all, wasted, destroyed, so true, and so intimate, and this despite the lack of stroller or sisters’ share: what makes this Siburbia so comforting, so comfortable, isn’t the lapse of time, no, neither is it the impression of time lost upon the impressionable, the able and willing, the wistful or sentimental nostalgic, think again—it’s that Siburbia itself had been built familiar, that One Thousand Cedars was built to be familiar from the very beginning, welcoming, Shalom and stay a while, take off your shoes, take a seat then holy us with conversation over coffee or tea; how it’d been intended to be indistinguishable, immediately, from any other annex, extension, or subdivision of this Development we know of as earth, as America—the freest if most dangerous and perhaps damning of possible worlds: only the fundamentally uninteresting, the absolutely anti interesting, could be so familiar as to transcend its particular existence, its particular name, its geography, and specific time. In essence, without essence, nonexistent, no life: and how it’s this very nonexistence that allows us to encounter it as we want to encounter it, however—to make its meaning whatever we want, tophet or home, whether nowhere or the only.

  Though who could tell from the ground, One Thousand Cedars had been laidout as a circle, as a concentric Abandon all hope centered around what had been the plot of the roomiest, the most spacious, house, the Israelien’s. From the eyes of birds, nested as if a target—the eye of a urus, an auroch, a sacrificial bull. Directly past the Gatekeeper’s, inside its perimeter fence, there are the poorest houses, or were: stubby ranchers set way the far back on these small stubbly lots, vinylsiding wrecks their roofs wanting for shingles, held up by the very fences they’re backed onto, wire strangling wood to splinter. And then a circular road, which separates one ring from its inset better: in this next, there’s a round of larger houses, twostories, the bedrooms up top, waking life down below, lawns respectable if still mowed by their owners. Development Maintenance had always been reserved for the homes of the three inner rings, that’s what help the prices here bought you: another road, then the rich threestory houses, colonials of ruddy brick and sparkling fieldstone; another road then the fourstory houses of better brick, never to spall, hand-made in shades mottled and faded, duskily suggestive of the old, of the made old and by hand, the venerable and the lasting; such houses a defiance of impermanence, an entitled dare to fire, privileged in their security when all’s wellinsured. And then, the largest and widest swath of fivestory houses: an inner, defensive wall of them almost, overprotective as they’re set on immense lawns lined with shrubbery of an immaculate levelheadedness, trim and fit and ready: houses with multiple drives, endless entrance porticos decked with flags in recent favor (change the regime, they’ll change the decoration), imperial façades clean and neatly marbled, their white the purest blank. Inground pools emptied or frozen, cement graves marked by the tombs of cabañas, a tiki memorial to gardenpartied wakes. And then another road, a curb, a sidewalk, an even, domepitched circular lawn—and here, set atop it, the Development’s jewel, purported to be its grandest, and most luxurious, the Israelien home. Or where it once had been, where it would have been still, if not for the Garden—where it’s since been converted into an imposing museum of Him, the Metropolitan Israelien, of late less and less visited, it’s unfortunate. Initially, it’s open only one day a week, for an hour…

  He takes the arcing turn from sidewalk to sidewalk—how tiny it is, how have I grown, a miniature life…existence matured within the shadow of the demeaning, the diminutive, Benya, my little boychick, meine Zaimele, be careful, keep safe: despite no traffic He’s still pausing at each intersection to look both ways left, right, then left again. Ima would be proud, Aba, too, would’ve been. A hexagonal sign says to Him, Stop…hazardously topped with the putrefying nest of an absent stork. To keep feet within the bars of the crosswalk, imprisoned—Wanda would approve, would have, or just wouldn’t have cared, offered a cookie nonetheless, a finger of her milk. A left, a right, the knowledge in His feet, though His head’s free to look not only both ways, but further—He recognizes no one, they all look the same. Neighbor
ing strangers, sojourners. Nextdoor in hiding. Not emptied of people, no, only emptied of life: people occupied, finally, with something other than themselves, with something maybe, shockingly, disappointingly, less. And then these new grates for the sewer, too, now stamped U.S. of Affiliated. An Underground sunken, the descent of dissent, an emptiness deeper, the septic tanks of the soul and those rank pulsing pipes…and then—Apple, the sign still says Apple, His old street…it’s His, the cornerless circle of Apple an immense looparound, islanding traffic toward the drive of the Koenigsburg’s, in whose windows the curtains are drawn; candles in the others windows, though, in all the windows of all the neighboring houses, He notices, homes, burning behind the shades. Except His.

  What once was the immaculate, gently even, geodesic rise of the lawn’s been let wild, overgrown, once suffused with that shade kept only by the richest of lawns and the newest of money now an impoverishedly sad landscape of grass grown out in every grayed shade of the spectrum not green: faded yellows and brown and black and ashdead, whitefrozen. Iciclespikes from the snirt. Mushrooms, umbrella mounds of sandbox sand overturned from holes made by hail. A swingset strangulated. The graves of sisters’ goldfish that hadn’t gone down the toilet so swimmingly. Livestock graze amid the patio. Uprooted foundations, cinderblock scatter, leaning beams, the dull crash of wet wood on wood. Gone to ruin, is going—this rise adorned, too, with the turds of goats on the loose, mating amid stalks of antediluvian weed; chickens peck among the remains of the flowerbeds, the skeleton of the herbgarden; roosters crow noon from the satellitedish, more and more storks nest atop the lightless lamps, the leaning poles…

  At His feet is a hole that had held His house. And at its bottom, a glimmer. The Garden’s goys have only disappointed any subsequent looters (the curious, the bargainhunters, and a profusion of new neighbors, their quote unquote relatives moved in from out of nowhere with the approval of no board or committee, even without that of the Keeper himself, also a raider though only of bribes being offered, a hoarder of any finds that find him), having proven themselves thorough, professionally so, greedy and handrubbing, grubbingly giddy: they’d taken everything…or so they’d thought, or so they’d reported so as not to be officially remiss; everything, that is, except this—such glint missed, forgotten, overlooked, don’t look down, who knew, who would still. Maybe they’d respected it, rated it touchingly, it whatsoever it be (Ben leaning over the mouth of the pit as if a word spoken into its echo, the incomprehensible shriek of Israel’s least favorite son, an unmentioned, unmentionable, lastbanished brother of Joseph—on His knees digging, and flinging then falling and hitting the rock of the bottom, the hole’s pithiest black), maybe they’d wanted to leave behind at least one relic wherever it lied, and there unexplained, for posterity inexplicable, the edification of any future paternally stable, maternally exacting, precise: one thing, one object, one item not in their inventory (in the house remade on the Island, and there displayed ever since their return from the traveling tour: the family’s bible, Hanna’s addressbook, her diary, and loose refrigerator lists, a legal index of Israel’s, a tome of building codes, a volume revealing of the intricate mysterium of corporate finance, it’s said—on show in these cases lining the hallways, their glass regrettably fogged, of late seldom cleaned), page 1: one find lost from their catalog cum reliquary…panel 2: missing from their immaculately kept litany of incanbula…plate 3: unaccounted for amid the bulletpoints and crossoffs of their ledger illuminated by nightlight…the glowering glowworm of the hallway upstairs-upstairs—that is, if they have a record, if records anyone keeps anymore. If a miracle, then one He has to work for, uncovering with hands dirtied to warm. It’s a piece of silverware last seen missing from an heirloom set, a spoon for Him to suck on, reduced, immaturely as not table but tea, to rattle at His teeth in defiance; still, its handle the long and strong arm of any parent, its bowl largely wide enough to hold the burn of every sun: twisted to tarnish, anno don’t ask, it’s an antique, smuggled over from God knows where when any oppression would’ve threatened to melt it down to a bullet, which would be used to murder those who once used to spoon with it supper, with a shot in the mouth from a gun of an allied metal—their bodies to tumble down into a pit such as this, where Ben’s found.

  Holding it in His hand overhead, up to the sky to glean the light that’s gleaming at noon, He’s awed, struck…He’s stuck. Trapped. Unable to get Himself out. To be held for slavery, for exile to a land named Joysey—and with of all things only a spoon, impossible to dig Himself up but He’s thinking, at least. A son stuck at the bottom of a basement, left by His brethren dead in this hole in the earth that once held His home, if unfinished—without dream or its angels, their ladders, which Israel used to keep in the garage, stacked next to the shovels, the screens.

  V

  Into the waning of summer, verging on fall. Once the time of deepening leaves, burning piles, needles smoking, a fiery pining away for life without season…an even heavier jacket sprung from the frontcloset, gorgeous autumn to be raked from tablecloth lawns, netted from inground pools leaf by sogheavy, ribweary leaf no more; it’s still snowing, tucking in the ruins of the past, whitely tired. This is Av, still and stilled, the fifth month, or the second to last, depending on conversion, on who you still can believe: this the month of mourning, of introspection and abstinence, of reflection in the ice underfoot—this the moon hosting the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, the Temple risen again, its heir rebuilt in the city just distant: the anniversary of that destruction being the ninth of the month, the day it’d been destroyed by the Romans, and Jerusalem—left to waste.

  This, the appointed day of His ingathering.

  Here is His return, a Prodigal Son situation if any we’ve known; how He’d hoped to unlock the city with the key He’d been presented, but the Garden had moons ago grudgingly returned that token to the hands of the Mayor, in one account; in another, how it’d been confiscated, taken away as if from a misbehaving bocher. No matter, it’s not as if He’ll ever find its gate: there’s no secret, no golden door to unlock, slam down without a warrant and torch—only tar, which is impenetrable, unreflective, then the ice above. Despite, He’s having thoughts of a welcome in the grand style, of New York, New York going out of its way for one of its own, though adopted, basketed through bridge and through tunnel, though not yet made good: still, thinking a parade, with every pomp, floats perhaps and tickertape, thousands no millions of them His friends and neighbors how they’re shpritzing themselves all over Him, throwing silken, soweared flowers from the windows, rooftops and terraces, from the highest skyscraping observation decks down to the lowest tenementing fireescapes—Him in a convertible, if any of them they still have, or denting a hardtop, maybe, why not, He’s waving, tophatted, sashwearing, He’s smiling, too, and unforced, with Miss Maydel Whomever beauty queen of the borough of Queens lapping it up from her perch on His lap, there’s Mayor Meir Meyer Himself—Hizzoner, He Who Takeths Away—at the wheel, honking sirens with the songs and shiring along Himself, they all are: offkey brassband music, oompah tubas and tailgate trombones, accompanying the glissy, lispgiddy shrieks of lost happy go lucky went under kinder with their melted popsicles their sticks splintered tongues, everything sticky and shvitzy, schwarmy because now (wishful thinking—with the head of a putz and a stomach in love) it’s summer again, O God it’s an echt real school’s out American summer, but how camp whether day or sleepover hasn’t yet begun amid the mountains Upstate: cityscaped humid bunking with hot, the sun’s out and shining for you…the swirling skirts of the batongirls, baseballbattwirling them flaunting their bloomers kick step kick step along with their ever younger sisters the cheerleaders their skin as pink as that of hotdogs for sale and for kosher, their pompom cotton-candy breasts and their faces seeded with gappy, sappy watermelon grins, the syncopating, offbeat, onbeat, beatenhard lust of the cymbals and drums, Baraabum…becoming forgiven by a choir of angels marching last in His the Grand Marshal’s l
ine, accompanied by a phalanx of miniature harpists, their sheet music fluttering from folders chained to their uniformed halos above; banners, confetti, and streamers, poofs of foam and crepe and bunting shred, and the tricolor, the old flag risen again, all the appurtenances of old glory, of past success and, too, of all the blustery might in the world ever behind it, the power that once preserved every freedom, if only in its assurance (how the parade will end, the floats will become scrap, and then kindling): these tanks in rows and troops, formations of them Avenuewide, in whose treads follow these great foreskinned guns shooting off salutes all around; the eruption of mother’s milk, honeytrailed fireworks foaming, spurt up from the hydrants of Houston Street…then, Him up on high, City Hall’s, atop the Empire State Building’s reviewing platform and there in rainbow ribboned uniform, waving the most demeaning, crapulously beatific acknowledgment to so many little dark subjects of His darkest and littlest whim. Not this month, though. Here He sits amid straw in the back of a cart, jostled and jiggled and pitched this way then that. No more, enough B—this is the month to get real.

  New York, New York again, as it’s said: an invocation…as if a blessing, a benediction, for luck it’s always said twice: once shining in the marquee of the mind, the second instance and final invoked over the grave. Nu York, He says to the driver, nu, York! Manchattan! once the hometeam town, I’m sure you’ve received the postcards and sent them, hymn, bought the snoglobes and tshirts and magnets and pins—the land of the rottenmost apples, fallen hard from every tree in the world, as the earth tilts away from a season of the sun and all of them roll their oddest wormed ways down to us…the land of the locusteaters, drinking the blood of their neighbors for overpriced brunch, fighting ground of the bears and the bulls, the stage for a waiter acting out The best cheesecake in town…for B, though, it’s been this walking endless walking, hitching walking and hitching again, caravanrigged, this trading up from camelbacked britzkas to landaus, then from pitiable droshkys to piteous drays, a stretch of troika and telga and tarantas, once handsome hansoms, too, and even a saintly because free, nocharge fiacre up from the wilds of Wishniak Hill—and then before that, God and His fiery chariot, think of the time, of the change: there’d been the nation, Him trudging His wander through acres of nowhere, walking jochs and jucharts, these versts of waste, morgens and milyas, halfhorse towns the rear half mostly; stubborn and bucking, now brokenwilled—who knew the United States of Affiliation, if that’s the name nowadays, even stretched out that far, into such contiguous sameness, too long?