Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  Downtown the half snow half rain are done arguing themselves to all wet: it’s agreed, a day as holy as today requires such compromise; tonight’s introspection makes this kind of weather relevant, admissible, wholly appropriate, and so God opens wide His pockets, which are deep and silverlined, drops it down, a storm. Having wandered at His own painful pace, and through a personal fog, as if privately pursued by a cloud even daytime dark and its imminent burst hovering always just over His head, a breath—the pressure, the heavy gray and threat, He’s crossexamining for dry over and around a schaft of loiterers, assembled at the base of the stairs in dripping casualwear caftans up the steps forever high, as if leading up above the sky itself, B breathless: to stand a loiter under the portico colonnaded heaven above Centre Street, hiding behind a column as wide and as tall as any of Solomon’s, waiting for judgment to cease and desist. A practice of ponchod employees stream down the steps to haul the sty of piggy pushkes inside—the Courthouse, where everything but everything smells by wet.

  An overhanging freeze…a glomming gloom, a second skin, and suffocating. It’s hard to swallow. All that, and He’s getting stares from the guards. And so B goes for further shelter, within the door under the portico and the perilous, dizzying sway of its lamp never lit. He’s soaking, was what Israel would’ve said, Hanna would’ve said, drenched; His heels squishing on the atrium’s tile, don’t ask as to the socks. He sits down on a long stretch of knot, puddles the floor, rising only when a guard officialmouthed—with sadness rung around his eyes like the rings left by mugs, by cups of coffee left to sit atop the table of his face with their marks then traced in sentencing ink, with an angry fist and wagging fingers—motions for Him to rise and that’s right, follow me, sir, leads Him down halls through halls radial each poorer away from the arch of the atrium and its rotunda, tile giving way to linoleum, dustducts, cloudbursts now of exposed wiring, then through a door and into a courtroom, which is empty and cold and barrenly lit, screeching a seat out then leaving Him to decide whether or not He should sit. A straightbacked wooden chair—the chair of the defendant, cobbled together to be the most uncomfortable, the least conducive to shifty slumps, engineered for incrimination, the seat of the client who usually pays the most though gets the least; it holds Him fast, His housecoated fat bulging out the slots of the sides, catching Him unhanded. The guard leaves Him with a pat to the shoulder as what must be His lawyer, His Goldenberg, it’s been a while, too long and yet not enough, enters wet himself, and sloppy, in an untailored, seamstripped suit, and with a clammy palm without calm shakes Him a Shalom.

  Glad you found it, he says, you just made it, you seem well, haven’t had the pleasure in an age.

  Don’t worry, you won’t have to do much talking, no one expects you to, what with…this is just a formality, let’s hope—at least, the jury seems sympathetic, have pity. They’re too honest not to be, and pitiful: we managed to get rid of the living early on in the process…still, we need to present well, and unfortunately we haven’t had much time to prepare. Answer me this. You can nod, or shake no. Or else we could have a whole system figured out: how one finger means yes and how another means, you get it. Suss it out. What I want to know is this: do you swear to tell the truth, to me, not the whole truth, to them, God help us, I object. What I mean is, next witness. And then upon the seventh day, we’ll rest. A bailiff, who’s just the guard who’d led Him here changed into a new uniform for overtime’s sake, approaches with no recognizance whatsoever, and without a word wraps his hands around His neck and clips onto Him a bowtie, obtained from a reputable receptacle piled with all manner of neckwear worn, mildewed tongues, preknotted, knit lengths stained with shvitz. Are you with me? Look me in the eyes. Read my lips, and without moving yours. Isn’t it true that? What—is that two fingers, or just one; work with me here, you call that a signal—you’re going to have to nod better than that. What were you doing on the night of the eighth, and how was that night different from the morning of the ninth—where were you when? Do any of the following names mean anything to you…when she said that, what exactly did Miss Demeanor mean? Est-her, but I don’t even know her! Then, the lawyer for the State enters, a piercing mensch his hair not wetted slick but oilgreased, rivulets of melt flowing atop the sheen of his widowpeak, his lips thin like the most expensive and so most successful but still painful of knives—he’s a shysty son of a something…ben Ballshabayit’s what they call him naked in the shower at his countryclub, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t. Toweled then dressed in a wonderfully unconventional entirely camelhair suit, he’s much better tailored than His who in his shmatte (which his wife’s been after him to launder for a moon) the more he sits the more it’s wrinkled, rising with a sigh, such an effort to greet his colleague, his better save the two hundred more he bills per hour with extra padded for this very rising while still gripping his valise, which falls open to spill an unfinished ostensibly lean pastrami sandwich, the only contents of the dingy pleather case; as he stoops to pick up what’s left of it he smiles happens regularly, apologies to opposing counsel who’s used to all this, too: a ploy, this wry distraction, him having to address all the while the seeds of the ryebread stuck in the gaps between the teeth.

  Everybody rise, is what the bailiff says as if in training for the reformed rabbinate, which he is, thanks to a correspondence class his daughter’s enrolled him in, nightseminary—and so everybody halfrises, more like stoops as if they’re too tired to care, or too cold, what happened to the heating. A door opens behind the dais and a bird, white, white, forget the species, flies in to perch on a bench in the back. An honorable I’m sure Judge, at least his intentions (and as golden, too, as the light that accompanies his head, a shining bulb as beacon), enters now, habilamenting his robe as dark as night on tight over his thickfeathered, strongstalked wings—always too cramped, everbinding; zips himself tripping over its flow, getting tangled, arranges himself then sits; instructing the bailiff with only a fluff of his beard to make himself useful, will you, and usher in the jury—laggard, haggard, and twelvestrong, a late jury here of the last twelve, the tribally lost, resurrectedly lining to their seats in the order of their deaths: Steinstein the Foremensch sits last, straightening his black, barmitzvah suit and tie he never got to wear, it’s shrouding, uncomfortable; he’s fidgeting with his collar that it keeps coming up, the fistsized knot that’s too strangling buttoned beneath, so handsome. As for the sanctuary of this courtroom’s case built against Him: worries that it was to be thrownout, desertexiled and such, are proving unfounded, at least unsubstantiated, un-transubstantiated, within the without of reasonable doubt. Rumors, excuse them into evidence. His judge clears his throat of that honorable beardness; his fist serves as a gavel, which he or it B’s thinking bangs hard to create a void in the icy air for the airing of a voice.

  Has the jury reached a verdict?

  How to raise my head?

  The box is piled overflow with corpses.

  I’m going to go with guilty, then, twelve times over—as if I don’t already feel that way myself. But the trial, if you can call this that, hasn’t even begun, is what I note without tongue. It comes out like choking. Restrain yourself, will you, to your representation—the Judge overrules all, even rule itself. He then asks, will counsel please approach the bench? and the prosecutor goes and first approaches the Goldenberg next to Him, wakes him up with a fraternal slap to the head, a light greasing of recently moisturized palm and the two lawyers one dazed and dozy approach the dais, a hunk of beaten, comingapart plywood at which they stand silently, then wink at one another, both eyes, now turn around, each to his own table, His shorter and narrower and, as it’s missing a leg, as tipsy and unevenly spoken as this Goldenberg here—guess which one of them puts his head down again and is soon lightly snoring. And so we’ll proceed directly to sentencing…what can I say: my representation’s beginning to drool. Still, I gargle and fume, spume air from my mouth, a throaty objection. Stumped. Strike that. Jury, I’ll i
nstruct you to ignore that—whatever that was or wind, but they’re still dead, with fattish flies gathering at the wet under their eyes, wallows freezing fast…until another bailiff, this the first’s son or his brother, maybe, enters from their door and with a beaten, lipbloodied wheelbarrow, into which he begins loading their weight one by arm and leg, the courtroom clearing.

  Will the defendant please rise, and I can’t pretend I’m deaf, too, so I rise to the voice, its occasion: case or docket number, does it really matter, the People v. Israelien—let it be known that this court has upheld the rulings of the lower temporal courts, nu, remember those: we are, Mister Israelien, not under anyone’s jurisdiction…the Judge of Judges, is how the whole spiel goes on, with the Judge’s face if angels or dreams or else experiential hallucinations, hymn, who knows whether from bad blood or its loss ever have faces with eyes to see one truth and ears to hear another truth and then a witnessing mouth through which to speak up for them both becoming puffy and flushed, with bulging nose and wings slowly but viciously ripping their sharp ways through his robes to spread themselves over the dais, shadowing the entire proceedings—the Judge of Judges, this is what the voice’s calling himself, demands as protocol, perhaps, to be called to what account: a self-promotion, flown upstairs…having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Benjamin Ben Israel Israelien; that’s you, son—hereby tells you to get lost; consider yourself unconsidered…what I’m saying is, as good as dead; as of today, you have been excommunicated, anathematized, made an example of…as a warning to others, what not to be or ever to become, what not to make of your life, or ever allow to have made of it, I’m saying: as such, no one is to talk to you, with you, or of you; no one’s to even acknowledge your existence, loan you a shekel, help your corpse to cross the street; more: castigated are you as you are cursed, and cursed are you as you are damned—you following; cursed are you by day, and cursed are you by night—stay with me here; cursed are you when you lie down, and cursed are you when you rise up; cursed are you when you go, and cursed are you when you come—and when neither, and, also, wherever…cursed are you with all the curses of the Law—as of tonight, I’m talking. As long as we’re at it, even your curses they should be cursed, the Judge of Judges says, tell me why not, that the Lord of Hosts Blessed Be He shall blot out thy name from under Heaven, so there…and he pauses for a moment, hacks a storm into the flightsliced tatters of his robes then nods to the bailiff whose son or brother’s just left carting the last of the corpses and asks him, would you please remand whoever that is, I’m not sure, to Himself? And so the bailiff approaches Him, who for a mensch just fated worse than dead’s rather angry, struggling out of His seat to stand a hollow holed into His face, then takes His arms at wrists and applies to them shackles, which aren’t shackles as who has them so large—what restraints, tell me, come in my size—but are wheels off wagons once towed, never claimed from the lot of municipal impound.

  Don’t worry, son, says the bailiff, kindly because old and known this before, escorting B out of the courtroom…it’s not like it’s that hard being a nobody, I’ve been one for years, you’ll get used to it quick. But you’d want the brightside, the halfsized full…it’s not like we’re going to tattoo your forehead or anything. Your mark’s even less subtle, or more: it’s your very existence—escorted out the door, then down the hall down the halls in reverse, dead mensch walking down the ways of the just and the seeking, the urgent emergent and the developing kvetch, past doors behind which lord the courts appellate, lower and lowest, those courting the newest interpretation of the Law, favoring those lately favored by God, over what; linoleum, kitschratty carpeting, cracked tile then again into the processing area with its windows and wait, wending through tangles and fringes of people worried faceless, encampments and strongholds not kept or held themselves together enough to be called lines they’re more like hopes, like pleas or appeals to: the mercy, maybe, of that approved namechange, a conversion meriting an inheritance, perhaps, a reparation or restitution, each to murmur to any teller or most abject glassimprisoned authority their own personal prayer, their own private malediction, united only in their though forbidden, unofficially encouraged, uplifting through sin hatred of Him, as they now spit at His feet, in His face, throw rocks of slipping salt and stones at Him, too, to smash a skull, rip a stomach minding—official implements of ridicule obtainable from a host of utilitarian white urns positioned in only the most wellmarked, heavily lit areas of the Courthouse lobby He’s escorted through, toward the door leading out to the landing below the portico underneath the Decalogue chiseled above as ten clouds upon the sky and there their lightningstruck, thundervoiced commandment to weather, though the wet’s stopped for now, if not just slowed. He’s led out toward the landing, to the top stair of these roundeddown, smoothed marble minyans of them descending in rubble to offer grounding to flood, this bedding of short, narrow streets better alleys turned fluming rivers scummed with junk loosed from neighboring shops and stands rainbowgray, with oil and grease—or, as if an ocean of stair shoring itself endlessly north toward Mitteltown if not further into inscrutable mist (the Upper West Side, Harlem, the Heights), then again and eternally lapping its wake returned to the top of the wide marble stairwell from which He faces the trashdappled dusk; the engorging throat of the crosswalk, the budcutting jut of a traffic meridian opposite; moored carts and boats in from the islands surrounding with their dimdark people stomping their rubbers high through the muck on their ways to prayer and what’s done between prayers, which worship is anyone’s guess. He stands quieted, which for Him now is still, as the bailiff removes the wagonwheels, unlocks the chains that bind Him to Himself and, why not, to any He’s outlived, survived—holding them together tightly and fumbling, swearing throughout in a tongue soon to be legislated forgotten, the key to it all kept between his teeth between locks. A tiddle liddle jiggle, a tug then He’s out, freewheeled, finally. Kneels tush to heels, rubs His wrists back to blood.

  B stands between the central columns of the landing’s colonnade, two large and thick, closely spaced hunks of assimilated marble, their twists involved and dizzying around and around the fineness of their flutes, each identical, topped with pediments heavy on the fruit. He puts one hand to each, sets teeth. And strains, again with the neck how He’s exerting Himself, hoping to bring this house, theirs or the Law’s, to ruin, to collapse all around. But no, they won’t be brought down, even moved as the bailiff is here (sniffling into his uniform’s sleeve), won’t be budged despite efforts, won’t give or even lean the merest of falls. His strength fails, is denied Him, and so He gives up, relents if demonstratively, falls His columnar arms to shanks at which they hit limply then hang, useless meat, the soul’s beefy excretions. Exhausted, enough. Hang Him out to die. He turns to nod at the bailiff, then turns again to the open world oceanic, steps out to wander upon it from under the portico, upon which step the sky opens its womb, redoubles its birthing as the bailiff yells after Him though softly and weepily rasping to have a good New Year, a happy and healthy!

  Todah Rabah, I think, to you, too.

  As for me, I’ll do what I can—the rest is out of my hands.

  A strongly outstretched arm of blocks Uptown, the menschs in the looted, holocausted Library they’re still sitting still scribbling, untouched and alone: glosses and marginalia, obscured references to menschs who might never have lived, rejoinders and reprimands to the mensch sitting just next to them and scribbling still, points and ripostes that would’ve been more easily spoken—but here these menschs have no voices, and no sight either, nor smell neither hearing, no touch, not haptic. Nowadays, they merely disagree, the only sense left to them is disagreement and, nu, very funny surely they won’t agree on that either, have your laugh…hymn. These are the Garden’s menschs from goys, the Administration’s, Shade’s, humorless, incorrupt, and altogether brilliant, who’ve been fully invested with the power to Selekt; menschs lately forgotten, too—will the last one to leave please kil
l the lights, make it hurt. And so only one dark decision in all this year, almost, has it been that long, only one decision has emerged from their void to be voided itself in due time, process, neglect…drool hangs loose and hot from their lips, the uppers fattened ripe, the lowers furried mold: and no, their decision’s not death, that’s too simple, too evident (though they haven’t yet ruled that out—or have they?), not exactly excommunication either, at least not in the way we understand it: not a putting outside of the midst, not a giving of Him over to the wilderness of bridge & tunneled Joysey, it’s more like a total forgetting, a denial, an assertion that B simply, evidently, just isn’t, that He never even was; it’s just a recommendation.

  Vergessen, going and gone, Israelien’s to be made verboten territory, shtum…though rumors passed among the least respectable and rearmost of pews have Him surfacing next in Europa, scattered reports probably dubious (whispers during the Silent Amidah, jokes told during the final recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish), Apocryphal meaning hidden in Greek though its ramifications evident in any language evidenced here, on the tips of tongues intact and attached, placing Him in Portugal at the same time as Spain, then in Paris, too, living south to the sea, on Mediterranean time: misnomers, misnomrim, this season’s Polandland has Him gone and turned, according to some, fryzer’s apprentice in this sinkhole once known as Kazimierz, though others hold by yesterday’s Zamość, or a secondhand to a onehanded cowhand at what was once Sandomierz, what a pit; with only the ignorant swearing to the city formerly known to us as Warsaw…devotees and even Casualist cartographers marking the maps they’d salvaged from burnt books, ripped from outdated encyclopedia sets still mentioning—what else—Galicia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Carpathia, Sub-Carpathia, Sub-Sub-Carpathia, Ruthenia, the only atlas ever to mention Yehupetz…in the courtyards and converted parkinglots of their services holding up evidence of antique postcards, German pastels, Bohemian black & whites, forgeries upon expert inspection, others stamped what’d been Vilna and Kovno, Litvakworld up toward Riga to the north, Sweden then the Pole. Anybody who’d expected to make a killing at auction’s left sore, though that might not be from disappointment alone: all of the kollectible kitsch, the ephemeral paraphernalia, the swag and the junk, it disappears overnight, mandated, maybe, on orders of, perhaps, but also consciously forgotten, in a mindful attempt to displace, to revise, always rewrite. Whoever they ever are to smash the plates of In Hanna’s Kitchen (Binder’s & Sons, 0 A.I., ISBN#: 0-394-53258-9), of Israel’s Unabridged Deposition Transcripts (Loot of the Frum, 0 A.I., ISBN#: 0-671-76089-0), Introduction & Notes by Doctor Elisha Abuya & Reb Shimi Schreiben, the Nachmachen, with a new Afterword by Dr. Allen Sherdowitz PhD…how they rip off the covers of the remaining copies killing any value in resale, then torch the remaindered stock because they can, that’s that. Icons are put out on firesale, then put out to fire, too, ash and then trash. All His Signs & Wundas (S&W in Industryspeak, referring to the entire Israelien family of products) are taken down and warehoused un-cataloged, secreted in the underground vaults of the Garden with a vast trove buried up in the Bronx dugout beneath the infield of Yankels Stadium turned perfidious genizah, and the whole image fades, is effaced, thumbedaway with fists, rubbed out with knucklespit, ghostly tongued in a great if painful schmearing: of laity’s laxities into potholes, into the sewers and subway tunnels, down into the inner guts—the gutter intestinal seething with a depraved deprivation, making room for a vast gastric disburdening to empty…there, the lower home of those who are or who have willed themselves to the life of the indigestible, the rumbling fate of the unassimilatable, those with no interest in observance, any next incarnation, shirking that whole dominant paradigm shtick—not so much goyim voluntaries as rat and roachlike people plagued with huge families both immediate and extended if not by sympathy then by appetite’s ravage: they’re hauling subterranean their keepsakes and stray kinder napped from streetside, fleeing the flood of Affiliation, the threat of Metro Gestapo, word making rounds of what’s still to face, whispers of renditions and roundups, lineups, mass detentions without representation, violations no one questions of rights now left to the dogs…