Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  B follows them out, dispersing north then east toward the University’s gates on a mission on paper for their next personed, impressionable save. As for Broadway again, it’s denatured, silently without search, disappeared. All too easy and suspect; He’s expecting an ambush, an Amalek lying in wait, what schlock tactics even a kock could imagine. And so He makes to bringup the rear of their converting pogrom, more evangelically pleasant, less baseballbats and kitchendrawers’ knives: B crossing cautiously to stand in street’s middle, atop the trafficisland by the old IRT subway entrance turned almshouse seething with those without house or home, but with God—mouth agape, receiving the snow on His stump as if manna.

  As for the world, it feels as if it’s caving…what with His weight and that of His burden carrying it further, we’re talking Biblical strata, the depths of wells, graveward regression, this reversion of earth, down to the floor of the past, the ocean unswept by the breath: the roofs seem to be raised up to the heights, as if tugged to an invisible, inexistent rainbow by ravens, a few of them on each roof they’re clutching with claws, straining their wings to scar an incision on the face of the sky; higher, luxury apartment buildings turned to underheated tenements…boarderbordered, coldwatered, commonly lived, dumbwaitered, dumbbells uplifted, they inherit more and more floors, and grayer, floors already filled with people already observing, preparing, they’re always preparing for what—to prepare; gray candles newly lit in sills newly filthy, eight families ingathered from Siburbia too north to be the Bronx and with all their extensions to inlaws and who knows who else crammed into the cramp of a single apartment, one room, what is this insanity, is this how they prefer it, why not…newly hewn tenement rooms with a view (a word that’s been assimilated from the most assimilated of tongues, from Latin’s Tenare, to hold—which is to keepsafe…the within from the without, and, too, the without from the within, as we’re told; to erect: a fence around the Law, and an eruv around Upper Manhattan), to another world, a terra old but never forgotten, ancient, and yet perpetually reborn if in the process idealized, evoked, worked up from photographs, documentaries, unfaded, defaded, testimonies censured then banned only as they might expose the falsity of this, their next incarnation: as if the rituals have been encoded deep in their souls, in the muscles, glands, and organs once dormant now flexing and pumping awake; tables groan under the weight of baked braided breads, massively musty volumes are stacked thereupon, what’s the meaning of this, what son might you be, go ask the rabbi if that’ll make you happy, gesund.

  Through the weather, left light overflowing their sills and the winded wafts the smells of a Shabbos that’ll go on way past the sunset of any wintry night, the dark dawning forever—streets stained with wax, the stain of His tears…these streets and avenues the once fattened arteries of this city, the past’s hardened plenty of late become lean, gaunt, heir to a why enforced hollow: a whiff of smoke as if flicked up from under the chins in its coming, the seethe of its anger, and then the sound of the mob approaching again from behind, led now by those two puny, pugnosed kinder, improbably the two posterboychicks from Downtown called up here to identify whatever it is they think they encountered, they who only know the distraction that are streets at all from their passage to and from school, shul, wherever holy, presently stalking this ritzier, glitzier, who knew from it neighborhood why, to keep the scare in the people, maybe, how He flatters Himself—it’s a gift, to keep the myth of His terror alive, and perhaps, too, to remind them of His own remembrance, how He taints, always sullies their efforts, renders impure, how He ridicules them, and without ever intending to, how the provision of His every existence itself precludes their very own. He stands still an orphan on the island untrafficked, not knowing what to do or not, and making little quiet grunting appeals with His mouthstub at those just passing in advance of the throng: their heads bowed chins to guts, most hurrying past without looking up, murmuring prayers (which: the blessing over avoiding a puddle, the blessing over averting the dreck of a dog or a pigeon, the bracha for concrete and breath), and reciting, also, a host of recently memorized passages of Torah no longer mere quoth endquoth Scripture, not wanting to waste even a moment, especially not on what has to be just another homeless mooch impersonating mensch, a lay leydikgeyer in search of nightly food and drink, lodging, warmth, anything you’d be generous to give. A handful throw Him windscattery bits of old currency, shredded as feed for their livestock they keep on their fireescapes, elevatored and in alleys, where not their cawing and clucking and pecking all night, who can sleep; Him bending down to defraud a defaced quarter from the freeze just as the mob approaches…across the street they’re waiting with no traffic’s law for the light to change to alight on the island, to visit upon His head and hunch a garden’s variety of the graceless, insults, murder—He’s turning from them and hiding His face, slips on the ice and falls.

  A small, professionally neat mensch in a pinched derby, suit and tie, his face scandalously shaved, accosts impulsively from the opposite direction, the eastern, leans over, takes His arm and tries to help Him up but He’s too heavy and the mensch almost falls himself, withdraws, folds his arms and waits for Him to aright at the foot of the mob quickly massing.

  I have to thank you, the mensch says in a calm, polished voice, making a mess of their iddishy idiom to the two boychicks bringingup the head and holding torches, flaming newspaper rolled for the fire, inky smoke billowing, blackening as imageless as Him…what luck, you found Him for me. My shabbosgoy, a runaway—I’m in your debt. Tell me, how much do I owe you?

  Your shabbosgoy, one says, I don’t think so…just look at Him, says another, you know who He is. A gonif, says the first again, a thief in the nightly murderer, not quite a goy more like an animal we’re dealing with or worse, Unaffiliated with anything, spit spit grit and soulless—then to Him, explain yourself…they’re asking while being asked by those behind them, you’re presuming It can talk?

  Hymn, you’re right, says the mensch, you got me—Baruch Hashem, you boychicks are smart…it’s only a joke, that and a poke in the evil eye, keyne hore, you’re no match for me. But He is—for her, is what I’m saying. A murmur’s mumbled rising. I’m bringing Him home for my daughter; it’s high time He converts—those two have been making eyes at each other long enough, and then he rolls his, from the smoke. Her, she’s aging…disgusted groans, a pick at a mole, a rashy nostril—let’s leave it at that, He’s not so young Himself; she’s a good cook, a pleasant personality, nu, so a hump, too, that and there’s a tumult of refusal, a slight limp while we’re at it, this slow shuffling dispersal losing one-by-one-by-two, but you should taste her latkes such as you’ve never had. A giver. Any takers. Only a scattering of punches and kicks for the loitering homeless, a few shots drunk from flasks of the hip, lchaimlchaim a zay get going…he was saying, how they’re always served up with a little something extra: some sweet sauce, some sourcream, a little love, or lying through her weakened teeth (how the latkes are frozen, storebought’s the blushing truth). A cigarette licked loosely of bad tobacco, found in pockets their pickings passed around…though, this mensch he’s not yet finished, if He’s not ready to make an honest woman out of her, let’s just say I’m prepared to consider any other offers; that of the mob heading south into night. Ot azoy. You wouldn’t happen to both be single—I’ve got a cousin, too…but they’re gone Downtown the paperers, separately if brothers.

  As he and B head westward toward the river, there’s a final ploy if only for the pleasure of the wind: I’m a proctologist, it’s a decent living…but of course, I’d have to examine you first, my future son-inlaw, whomever; then, a last call over his shoulder, a gesture parting, a hand tipped to the hat: don’t worry, boys—it’s as simple as bowing, he laughs into his other glove, is what I’m always being told.

  It’d been a clutch of thatchy, fireperfect hovels at the thinning vale of the forest, now a lonesome field salted with the melt of snow—a plain without crop, a barren threshedover, naked
earth, pocked in a vast ruin, the remnant of wars, without jubilee, left fallow until failed…it was here, in the midst of this village whose menschs had all been killed, their synagogue defiled then set aflame (which set their houses aflame, then their livestock and harvest), their womenfolk raped and their kinder enslaved, that the seed had been winded from far in the east, had fallen with spring, to take plant then root deep within the scar of this flesh, this weathered pale—a wound that had once been a basement, the library of their yeshiva. Under the tromp tromp trampling of every weary army, the seed sprouted; as it was watered from the waters above and the water below, a shoot began to grow; to begin with, a small sapling, the reflection of its taproot: tromped by maddened Franks, the Plague of Rhenish mobs, hephep, the Mongols, a motley mob of crusading barbarians, mercenary warriors of who knows what allegiances, only later the civilized and civilizing Swedes, their immaculate soldiers marching in impeccable ranks, trampled by horses and hauling carts, by the feet, too, of their merchants, those fleeing the furfisted Tatars, the east in perpetual pursuit, the Cossacks are coming and with them, their hetman, O the fury of Polyn…becoming brushed in more peaceful times by summery courses, by foxes, by hounds; this tree watered by young love in the Lorelei spring, Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten—growing higher, against all that’s human and, evil: an axe, a sword, attempted it once, a mace lodged in its trunk at the height of a head…generations shading the green grown below, it’d kept guard over Kinderspielen, picnics with Mutter and the governess of hundred of years’ duration, perpetrated upon a cloth torn from a chuppah, in its basket the shewbread, the risen loaves—until just last week: it’d been sawed down then shipped express to the Garden…the schwarzwald fallen, its trunk to bridge the cold of the ocean, arriving with its memories intact, imprinted deep on its leaves, resident in the very air breathed out from its ageheavy boughs: the birds, the crows and the ravens, the hand and eye knowledge of falconry exercises, training the seasonal goshawk on the hood and the gauntlet, the bells and the jesses; arrows bearing quivering messages (to be read into the wrinkles of wood), bows curved into branches, the withered bark faces of witches, souls trapped in knots; then, once clearing Customs, it’s erected in the Great Hall of the Island, within its arched vault, snipped only a berry’s pit to fit a breath from the crown of the ceiling, majestic.

  This is their tree, let us trim it.

  It isn’t night just yet, it’s only the eve, that of Xmas—soon to be the first of January, which is false and forgotten, a year unrenewed. Tonight, it’s the yahrezeit, the Anniversary of the Death (A.D., as it’s respectfully, avoidingly, mentioned), which is anyway only slightly remembered, commemorated by few and that strictly officially, a matter of governmental not of popular mind: all are seemingly too occupied with their new identities, their own Affiliation, to be bothered much with the whiskered past; besides, it’s just too painful to remember, to be reminded not as much of a celebratory loss as of their own illegitimacy, again, a future loss of their own: what with kinder being born, and time. To remember now would mean to lose the present’s meaning, and, too, its hope for tomorrow: send a giftbasket out to whoever scripted that one, that and a poinsettia for the wife. All is nigh within the Great Hall, the Garden: settled deceptively firm in its foundations, the money, the power, the trash and the bodies shored around; doors exhale drafts into overheated, underventilated, basrelieved hallways, their rooms are silent in disuse and dark; outside clouds assemble, churn themselves up churlishly, into aggravated masses: everything below’s in suspension, seems only to attend upon a Fall…the very first of the night, a single perfect and softly falling flake with which to tender the evening, none of this unpredictable, unpredicate weather, just a sweet, sharp, and gasping drift of flak that might remind how hospitable nature could be, not too much to ask…which would be forbidden as aeromancy, anyway, now made subject to rabbinic wrath (if you weren’t aware, you’re no prophet). Quarters here still being used by the remaining employees, those who haven’t been let go thanks to quarterly financials, or who haven’t yet left to save themselves, are decorated with trees of their own, miniaturized mistled models in plastic of the real tree evergreened amid the Registry: wooden nutcracker and egg ornaments, with tissuepaper flowers and tinsel, lacy angels atop with model trains on tracks spiked across bibs tied around trunks. A ball as if a blob of misplaced ink bounces down heavily on the lightest of lyrics: Wish, Merry, and the heads fellowshipped follow along; they nod, some in rhythm despite, others totally drunk, shikkered all over the place staggering about fireplaces grating away toasty, sparklingly as if laughing, a crackling cackle swept choking up the flue; fluffy, coalblack stockings stuffed with pinkslips sway lulling, perilously near.

  Sensing this to be the last of this holiday he’ll know but not yet why, Die’s ordered up an observance he’ll never forget, no one will, its expense and luxurious fury, the implacable tide of this Yule waked between the coasts of Joysey and that of the icicle of Manhattan: after all, someone has to keep up the old ways, their traditions—if not now, when; if not me, then tell me who better? He faces away from this in truth disappointing, depressing, gathering of these his last few adherents, employees along with any weathering friends, hangerson, anyone desperate enough to remain in contact, in business with him or his: fifty guests tonight, and how they’d expected a few hundred, which means—leftovers; abandoned by Shade and so by the Administration entire, the government, the Abulafias, too, who not, there aren’t that many left. And it’s hard not to notice that most of the fifty gathered are just remaining staff required to attend, paid to be here, ten of whom’ve been especially hired to attend to the tree, the Baum as it’s been called by the Teutonic site supervisor, overseer of a staff hired to prune, snip, trim, and wreathe, to decorate and deck. Ornaments have been hauled up in last century’s steamer trunks from their subterranean storage unit, each trunk labeled as to style of its contents (ball, lace, gingerbread kinder, marzipan snowflake, glitterencrusted pine-cone—stop me when it’s been enough), with each ornament itself labeled as to its appearance and provenance: ball, red, gift of the Russian Ambassador; each guest’s required to hang at least one, as if proof of loyalty, the oppression of that ole tradition again. This staff of fayg decorators flown in from Europa leaps over sofas and endtables to midwife the proceedings; they’ve planned this year’s Baum to a limpid perfection, after having labored for a moon over diagrams of ornament distribution, lacepatterning, tinsel saturation schematics…the scaffold’s erected, hydrauliclift driven inside through the doubledoors of the Hall’s portico, upsets a vase (to say nothing of its florist); Kush daughters grim, hired to replace the Marys disappeared to God knows where, and with the Garden not willing to spend the gelt to find them, they tidy up efficiently, are shooed away with the limp flicks of wrists.

  By an hour before the party’s scheduled beginning, the Registry’s been feathered, nested, transformed into an extravagant indoor aviary: birds are flying around the heights, swooping from wings of rafter to loops wrought of iron, shrinkydink droppings sacs attached by strap around their bodies, pinching, hanging weighted from cloaca: peacocks strut across the floor, garbed in festive sweaters and similar sacs to hold their turd from the rugs; they parade regally, stately as if the only guests and as such, the most honored, through the interminable passages connecting the wings of the Hall, their plumage held open with cruel metal struts, resembling elaborate, undoubtedly sadistic orthodontia. Toward decumbent dusk, a staff of nine equipped with monogrammed books of matches flit from room to sill, to light the oil votives in all the windows shining, despite having been naturally frosted, and then to light them, too, in the interior windows, which have been frosted over with soap; all doors inside and out have been ordered wreathed in a host of evergreen voids that resemble zeros, or immature bagels, crusted in holly, adorned with leis of popped maize, strung cranberries dredged from the deepest bogs of Joysey. In the square fronting the Great Hall, aside the landing reserved for arrivals
never again to depart, atop its manicure of ice over the fake green and real manure, a magi troupe of underemployed, off-off-Broadway actors are rehearsing a Nativity pageant, their requisite shvartze, a reformed Ethiopian, reciting his lines to the applause of the wind; he’ll make a passable Balthazar, though he might lack a visa…the other two kings petting then illicitly feeding handfuls of moldy lump sugar stolen from the condemned Commissary to the herd of animals linedup for the casting of tomorrow’s Manger Scene: Moo for me, thanks, we’ll be in touch, and the poor mensch leads his starving cow back across the ice to Nutley; their progress lanternlit, to search by night for a better talent agent. Abulafia II never came through with the camels. A staff hired away secrectly if only temporarily from Mitteltown’s most famous department store, Wiltinghill’s, sets to work wrapping presents, which are little more than bribes, on the salvaged tables of the Commissary set end to end down the network of tunnels, underground: off the artery leading to the Treasury, wellstocked shelters linked by citybound passages recently excavated to allow for emergency disappearance, in case of contingency, better not to think of it, best not to ask or even know of their existence; giftwrap (Seasonal Red #3, Fluseason Green), tissue, ribbons, and swatches of scotch, sticklosing tape hang like impurely rendered hides tanned from the overhead heating ducts; three secretaries previously attached to Mada’s office demoted to noel assistants, present facilitators, papercutup and harried, they mock gambol up and down these hallways of tunnels with their scissors freshly sharpened they dash through the passages, go blindly around corners shoutingout their orders, kickingup skirts past piles of torn tags, hangers, and shrinkwrap, almost trippedup on lengths of string, on the twines flapping in front of the gratings to which they’ve been tied for momentary snipping, the women’s steps syncopating with the whirr of the exhaustfans allied to the heating system above, servicing nothing down below, it’s disastrous they’re coughing, sicknesses sounding along with new Hanukah songs harmonized by the wrappers surrounding, undertaken to keep their ribboning apace, their ideally threepart SA-T arrangement occasionally interrupted with the scream of an unfortunate accident, the thumb against razor or slicer, a pinkiefinger knotted down to the quick, to purple then pulse.