Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  That’s not mine, Kaye whispers as the hat lands on his head.

  Thief! the mensch yells, accusing; he leaps in the air, upon finding ground his crutch snaps in two, into two little limbs, and he steadies himself, leans, waves the amputee splinters at Kaye, wildly, clattering them on the bars, between them.

  Two Security scamper over, pat Kaye down with lingering hands.

  Your papers, they ask, your passport and visa, your name, date of birth, which would you prefer: cash or credit?

  This is preposterous. I have nothing of the sort. You know my identification’s been confiscated.

  Is this yours? one Security asks, this the short fat mensch; the other’s as tall as his partner’s wide, thin as he’s short: always, they were hired that way from birth, have been bred for this gig—without culture, tradition’s convention, how would these two ever get work, stay together? He waves around the Room 50 key he’s found in Kaye’s pocket, turned the outsized iron key the onelegged mensch had used to unlock his teeth. How’d he exchange it so well, with such sleight, Kaye thinks: no doubt about it, these are professionals.

  A woman handed it to me, a woman who had my hat.

  You expect us to believe a woman stole your hat? says the tallskinny, taking the mensch’s from Kaye’s head and snooping his nose around the thin lining.

  Not this hat—this one isn’t mine!

  And so you’re also a liar! the onelegged mensch says, he’s leaning between the bars and panting, heaving his lungs out; he broke my crutch, too…shortfat takes hold of Kaye with one hand, liberally pinches his fiancée, unprotesting, with the other, as tallskinny goes to telephone, maybe, and never returns; shortfat relents, it’s getting dark and there’s Curfew to think of, last rounds coming on, rubs his hands for warmth, grows tetchy about the eyes and mouth then nervously asks the old mensch—who’s turned out in his second statement to the officer to be only the cemetery’s (and at that, third asst.) caretaker—for the time…are you sure that’s exact?

  Quite.

  And so shortfat dismisses the caretaker, nods to Kaye his release, walks up the street leaving him alone, without fiancée or Group—one gone back to plead his case to the head concierge (The Swiss is his title), who she’s been told has vast intercessionary connections, unspecified privileges, abusable power; the others gone showered, then mealed again to their sleeps, forgetting about everyone not dreaming their dream—as Kaye, enraged, freecaged, tries once last to bend the bars of the gate, smacks them with his head, flails in an exhaustion of even frustration.

  You’d better be getting back to your hotel, shortfat yells over his shoulder, it’s Curfew.

  Soon enough. Whenever we want.

  We wouldn’t want you getting into any trouble you can’t afford.

  By now, it’s dark, and the Cemetery would be closed: he’ll have to try again tomorrow; that is, if Faye’s up to it, if he is, not too sick from a night out in the snow; if she’d still love him, if he’d love her still, if they’d let him live just one more moon into morning.

  A trashcan upended to its rumbustious side tumbles past him a laugh down the street—rolled in snow, rolling, still burning cold: crumpled corrugated with letters that’ve been sent by and to these tourists, his tourists, these postcards not censored, only forbidden, unsent, consigned to, cosigned by, a sinister flame. Dear Father dead father, and yet, never Sincerely. A dissevered chimney bellowing ash, the ciphers of sentiment’s cinefaction: Kaye follows the smoke, as he slips down the street, and every other step he takes he’s making moves for his hat, though he knows it’s not there.

  It seems to be the season of disappointment, now, doesn’t it?

  And so, in the spirit, here’s another interpretation: it’s that the Cemetery, this cemetery, was open all the while. It has been open, and is open still, six days a week dawn to dusk, major holidays excepted—though if it shuts its gates a moment too early upon Friday afternoons, which is the eve of our Sabbath, who can blame them, who would—and that anyone who ever wanted to might’ve walked in, and wandered around, without hindrance or hurt, beheld the Grave, had their audience, spent however satisfactory hours in contemplation, in suitable prayer, appeal, thanks or no thanks, a murmuring of hope, the laying of a florid rock, mulling over own mortalities, your blessing, your call. Without denial, without interruption. But it’s that these visitors, these maudlin tourists, wouldn’t have wanted that, wouldn’t have had it that way; it’s a situation existing only in their disappointment, what a waste: as it was, as it is, as it could’ve been, as it still can be—they’d file in, to pay not admission but homage, respect (entrance is free, as it is to every cemetery, the way it should be: after all, the people interred, the permanent visitors, the visitors permanentmaking, they’ve already paid for the privilege of any future visitation, dearly, in death then in the fees for death’s upkeep); the Gate’s open, any gate’s open; generous hours are prominently posted, again: excluding holidays secular, and religious, and Shabbos; the elderly groundskeeper or caretaker, call him what you will and he’ll smile, he’s always smiling, he welcomes the visitors, happy to have them, he’s lonely, he pities; the Grave’s kept in flowers, it’s kept full of them season depending—they’re sprouting from the very earth that’s the grave of all graves.

  As for the mensch so sought after, this Cemetery’s most visited burial, this famous writer of stories and novels unfinished by night as by day an ironic functionary, a bureaucrat’s sarcastic conscience, this lowly insurance assessor (and they need insurance now like a hole in the head, Kaye’s thinking for whose peace of mind)—he lies alongside his father in a dark, leafy plot; given the relationship, their grave’s incredibly undisturbed, at peace is the feeling. He lies with his mother, also, they both do, under a stone that, however, is not the original. Regrettably. Wasteful. Ultimately, for its own good. No, all the originals are for the museums now, organizations only recently not for profiting, lately chartered, commissioned, just securing the necessary paperwork and approvals, stamps, clearances, and blessings to move in, to refurbish, spiff and shine. Now, about their own rejections, their touristy trials by delay, their processes interminably scheduled—petition after petition, only frustration to follow appeals to any Authority designated supreme—here’s the truth: they secretly wanted to be turned away, they not so secretly want it; we welcome that species of horror: after all, it’s all part of the experience, isn’t it, figured, refigured, packagedin. Terrible, that in the end it’s mere—entertainment. Anyone who has achieved purpose has failed it. Anyone who gains entry has lost life. But neither are such wretched exempt: if they prevail, even they must be humbled; we, too, must cover our heads—with something, with anything…with even the sky, or with the earth shoveled above us, a stone.

  In the Church

  All the sites taken care of, the musts, the have tos and don’t misses, checked off the To Do, blackened from red as if blood in the night lacking air, canceled from memory in anticipation of the final cancellation (no refunds will be offered, don’t even think it to ask), annulled in the face of the allannulling, the hind allannulled—they’re indulged, as if thanked, given the grace of a single allowance, their last. They’re shepherded perfunctorily, if with a slight disappoint with regard to the derision expected by most, to the Square, and into its Church: before any sacrifice, these lambs need time to mature, need to fatten their lean time, need to be fleshed out in full so that we know what exactly we’ve slaughtered—they’re lain down in a valley of glass, watched over by windows eve’s eyed…a marble pasture of Church. Though others hold it’s a Cathedral. Godfearing forget it, faith me no faith—it’s naming that’ll always be the duty most sacred: to church or not to church, that’s not the question—it’s naming, it’s number, its Record. And so the answer’s that no one knows from Cathedrals anymore, and that this building, whatever it is, whichever it was, whether the footstool of the bishop or the throne of the homeless, might be anything at all in its next incarnation: an orpha
nage, a hospital, warehouse, granary, stables; or else, it might be left empty, to be remade if into inutility, purposelessness, without worth; it might even be destroyed, like the rest, like its worshippers here, rubbled to the rabble of the Square, never to be remade, never to be rebuilt, resurrected in memory only through the sky that, over the centuries, in the course of the worship’s erection, has held its spiring shadow, now faded in the ambition of form; the heavens would waste away into a nothingness, a void, found in the volute shape of the grandeur that once shaded the further light of the furthest sun from the earth and its barren cold dark. Though if a grandeur, then a grandeur unfinished, always imperfect, imperfecting, anonymously flawed in its failure to effect, to aid, in yet another opportunity forsaken by God to rejoin us in our own supplication. And so as not to embarrass them in this moment of need, let’s say it’s whatever they want it to be—a church, a cathedral, Saint Someone’s, Saint Other’s, Saint Anyone They So Desire’s…if only they pray hard enough for it; only the best for the conduct of their martyrdom, their decisive confession, what else to expect from such accommodating hosts? No need to thank us, just die. To fist a hole in the ice of the font, knuckleshards from the lip of the piscina, a flotsam of blood, stoupy skinchips, bergs of bone. With quick nervous fingers they flick themselves pure with the lick of filthy water restive under the freeze. Maybe it’s holy, blessed—by their pain, by their (even the Virgin groans) tears. To kneel at the threshold, then rise, they make their way toward the altar.

  Here, this place of worship of nondenomination…enough to know that it’s theirs, not much longer—arching Magnificat, delicate yet hulking, an elemental transcendence of elements, less rock and stone than an architecture of them that is in its totality history itself, an earthrecord, time bound within a complex of complicated masonry, ascetic iron, vitirform trills, rills of gold. Here, they’re here to pray, to flagellate themselves with tongues, to mortify—to pray though for what they’re not sure exactly, besides the condition of prayer itself, innerness, attentive mindquiet: for salvation, maybe, for an afterlife, perhaps, let me go without pain—to consecrate themselves worthy of such terminal martyrdom, it’s important before anything else to make a firm ground of faith, to more deeply found their belief. Please, let us go, let me loose and I promise to do whatever I’m asked, even hope…O if only You would send us an angel, an aeroplane and fast, parachute me a new pair of shoes. Redeem me first, then we’ll talk about trust. Blame, later bargain. All fall to their knees, the Sandersons prayer to prayer. From its console in back, the great organ shakes, throaty pipes, its diapasons woken to rattle, giving a gag; divisions shatter like the stains of the glass, admitting pure light. To pray for their own souls, no—to prey on the souls of family immemorial, sacrosanct and died long ago, whose scavenged holiness might merit for their inheritors, they wish, the most meager of Miserere, all they Psalm to ask. To be delivered into the very hands of the stigmatic, openpalmed, dirtynailed…clasped seeking prayer, clasped seeking the blessing of prayer—for the miraculous resurrective unto the sacristy’s hide, Amen, hold me near. Mold weeps from the altar, flows from the skinflint folds of the wormworn antependium, the glaciate rot of settings high and without jewel atop the jut of the retable, the reredos, oozing wet down the apse westward toward the opposite apsis, down the nave, also, toward the stumps of the transept, its cruciform arms uncrowned, without hands, fingerless…sheathed in thorns iceformed, iciclebarbs, clots of cold veining the floor, which is marble. A dust stirs, as they kneel to rise only to kneel again, then rise again, and then again kneel. Hassockfooted sons of a Father with the head of a Son, they swallow their paternosters in a teemed teething of lips: less to invoke the divine, His mercy, not one authority holds, than to ensure the remembrance of history, the good faith of record—if such ideas as History and Record could ever exist in a future to which we, too, would impossibly survive.

  Pray, Miriam’s offering encouragement, pray your hearts out, if hearts you have; this is your last opportunity, be…how do you say it? be grateful, that’s it, for your lives, for its plenty, what was. Thank us; thank your God for us.

  Again, she reminds—don’t forget to enjoy yourselves. I’ll be back to collect you all in an hour.

  Above them, the bells: their waves ripple out a sea in the air—an ineluctable mass of soundweather, the sonant oceanic, a diluvian rumbling flume: it reverberates a rusty air, stifled dully by that other wet coming in through the belfry, the eaves. They’re too many tolls…they can’t all be counted, how much time: their ringing descending deep from the hollows to patronize the leaden vaulting below; they’re heard resounding as if brass beaten to lime, encrusted in cirri, balmcaked in salt; theirs less a bright clanging clank in the belfry than the clattering shatter of frozen fire; less the brilliant lick of an icebound bell than the cloudcast sounding of an anchor struck wreck: the walled claps of the bells’ wake swelling a sensed force into a felt power…reaching upward in prayer, our worshippers making as if to clasp them beaten as hearts to their breasts, are then knocked down into a thronging Mass, humbled, made modest at the knee—the hindmost hinge in the door of their bow, the gate of their prayer: to enter the sound that is the church, the sonic itself that is the cathedral with them rendered unto air, the substance of only an echo; to exit, they have merely to remain ringing until they’re no longer—to shut their mouths, stand alone. Fade. They’re pewed, rowed, fallen down to one knee, bent to grovel at the hovel made of another’s bow—the father one ahead, the stranger one over, the same. Then, they’re righted again, now again, up and down they creak, they crack, as if their bones are deadened wood, suffused with an ache, dull as deepgrained, the knotted throb of limbs, sapped alive if cold with thin blood. A few older members of the Group, many of them more stubborn than believing, more habitual in this than ever swayed by a faith, they get up after an initial kneel, sweep their slacks and skirts of dirt and must, remove themselves from pews’ hassocks to the seats rowed along the walls in cornered chapels, to sit a while and think less of God than of the art hung around them. To look and whisper, to point and listen and touch and—to tour. Then, as if not feeling quite confirmed in their covenant, whatever that would be, they all, eventually and without exception, fall down again, prostrate: to make meek, an attempt at the inevitable abject, their souls weak, but pathetically true; humility as an order of wretched sublimity—the immodest shame of those who would seek eternity not in heaven (which for us is merely the forgetting of earth, a mundane, temporal forgetfulness), but rather in the lives of tomorrow, the future; their names to be writ into prayers to be invoked by generations, of and for generations, to come, seeking favor far in excess of anyone’s merit, even that of the very son of God, whose image—which merely usurps the miracle of his existence, they should be told—is splayed up on high, nailed to a cross just beyond the further altar. Up and down they kneel and they narrow, they straighten, they genuflect, bow down and up—as if this Group’s nothing but a congregation of marionettes (which are a local kraft-product, and after antique home furnishings Polandland’s most notable export), wunderpuppets strung down on spidery strands from the vertex of the highest spires, tugged to the innermost peaks of the vaulting and from there set down slack on their wood, the flaking flesh, now made to rise up again, then down upon their knees again and again, writhing along with the snakelike wriggling that holds them: slitherine dust, illuminated through the roseate windows, mullionmartyred, the iron hairs of the sun, them being made to cross themselves madly and, inevitably, silly…tangling, becoming knotted with the crux of that sacrifice maddeningly ancient, laughable as so long ago and yet still worshipped, held in immemorial awe. Spectacles, testicles, it went, wallet & watch, and with time almost up: all those millennia later and still they libel us with blood, long deserving, earning, their present fate—the conscience of such curse…to cathect every Christ’s the idea, the sacred heart of the Mater, dolorosa, virginal in punishment, mangered new to a retribution as exacting as this: t
hey pray to her, too; her son, they’ll begin to ignore: if any would survive, they’d survive without him, soon to regard God’s putative heir with less love than pity, the submission of only a pitiful shrug—now that they’d know what he went through, now that they’d know what even he didn’t survive.

  Dogma, it’s worthless, gone to the dogs to bury bonedeep…and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, sure, right, whatever you say. They’re thinking, what makes a ghost holy, what’s so holy about any old spirit, and what makes being holy that much better than being alive—a catechismic calamity, lost. They weep a last Lacrimosa; their teary mass rips a voice through the Mass. Have mercy on us, Kyrie, whether we be flawed or perfected as one. To sing through a single mouth, sunmutual, sunswallowing—silent. Lord in Heaven, we’re homesick…there’s a moon through the window, it’s time to go home. Miriam, her umbrella ever aloft (clutching in her other hand a weave of basket, her own late brunch), wades through their tears down through the nave, through the reeds of their rush, their quick murmur to finish, to sum—then herds them, in a docile flock, as compliant as corpses already, back down the nave again and out the doors of the Church, parting, their weeping streaming out in advance of them, though, as if to announce their end to the coldbrazen air: their flow to freeze, then, into a slip of steps; they slide down them, this stair shed of flume, how they fall—into the gaping, screwtoothed mouths of waiting trucks, gasping exhaust, to be hauled out to the sorrowed stations, and there…trucks dumping their burden to the insatiable bellies of idling, smokefoaled trains: their tracks as long as the rail of the day and as torturous, thrashing, wild—chartered by dusk, they’re to be hauled through the night, for tomorrow’s yawn, the dawn of their death…