Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  What will you do to Him…that is, if you ever find Him—and I can be of help: I have contacts, I know people from Poles, am contractually owed, I’ll prove myself essential again, I promise, I swear, oath and affirm on my life…thrashing against the mattress above.

  In light of the pain that will be His, yours will be as a pleasure…and the Rebbe rises to allow the goy his last wind, goes to the window, opens it to the alley below. He lips a wad of tabak out into sky, which is wetting with night, slicking cobbles: another day’s winter, dying like snow by the millions.

  He’s only one mensch, you’ll never…

  Never Schmever’s the tsk, it’ll be easier than you think: the idea’s to seek out anyone different—divine intervention, surrender, I mean…His face is known, as are His habits; it’s miraculous, a matter of fate; it’s mystical, you of all people should understand—if you intend to die peacefully, you’ll have to…

  He’s why we’ve returned here to this abominable Witz. He led us here, lonely for destiny…resolution; please, it’s all too obvious not to have been preordained, prophesized already done…hesitation—we have our top menschs on it; it’s not my department.

  You came here to save Him for life, and I came here to save you from Him. You have no claim, you have no blood—that is, not after I spill it…and the Austiner Rebbe points a silvery yad at a young, faired mensch who sallies a little too excitable one step over the threshold then into the room he’s already shooting, hitting Hamm through the drapes, staining two to the head, as Mada smashes out of the wardrobe and shouting, a pistol in his hand screaming its rounds, he’s shot dead a step before the Rebbe, to fall at the hem of his uniformed underworn kittel, floored with a thud to writhe, then stiffen; another mensch, this one a pure whitehead with pupils the stings of waylaid wasps, he’s filling in for his friend who he’s not hit mortally only knocked over with a great wind rung at his vest, which has been proofed as if to save him from even the collision of his soul with bad faith—he opens up on the steamertrunk, holes it and Gelt inside and all over, with such a force that the trunk falls over, and with it the lid wounded open with an overflow gush; two additional menschs (who are they, who are any of them, they all look the same, what I’m saying is—who can tell, make up the difference), they do a number of recommended stretching exercises, kneebends, deepdipping, and knucklecracks—consult the manual then your doctor your father before undertaking’s disclaimed—then hand and knee it down to the floor, to drag Die out by the armpits, pinch him up squirming to hold him a shiver at window, in blown snow, an ultimate beam of ultimate sunset, thunder lama lo and with lightning, too, this grossganze Apocalypse shtick…no tragedy this going all out, last rites with all the death-trappings, an honor (for once, the accounts agree, the weather’s never been so benevolent to circumstance—which means either that the divine might approve, or It mightn’t); ices pour in, mount in drafts, swirls, and sinuous whirls; blanking a pile of hotel stationary from atop the desk, as if to sop with its whiteness the bleeding below; have you ever felt such a kaltmachen draft? rattling the Rebbe’s vacated chair. Die restrained, he’s trussed with hands, hogtied with tongues, a snarl of languages ordering him in tones heated, and as angry as fast, to calm down, be a mensch about it, keep still: unable to even reach into his tush, and so disallowed the mercy of a mortuarial stache, knuckled out to pall away nerves with its schmear. The Rebbe unsheathes a chalaf from a scabbard hung on his gartel, approaches, with the blade held out, its crescent aloft. Long on sharp and without serration, an undisturbed stretch of steel, without blemish: he holds this knife to the face of his victim, reflects; lights dusk into their eyes, the burn of disbelieved skies.

  Examine it for imperfections, and if we had all of eternity still you’d find none…

  But, of course, many hold that the holiness of the sacrifice has nothing to do with its how or intention, technique—that it depends entirely upon the holiness, or the purity, oy, of the sacrificed soul: an inner kashrut, makes you think…though if you follow that interpretation, there’s nothing I can do—except slaughter you according to the Law, it’s a mitzvah: giving you at least one blessing on the curse that is your life, that has been, Shalom. It’s a beginning, think of it as, all over again: call it a circumcision of your head. One slice, just a slice, and it’ll be over—quick, and unangeled…the Rebbe’s son-inlaw approaches, holds Die’s head back by a stray tuft of gray greasily sprouted at the back of his neck from between the fats of his bald, a reverse turkey gullet, this warblingly negative jarble at nape, shakily fearful, imperfect as animalistically ugly—exposing the voice of the front…the core of the goy’s humanhalf, his Adam’s apple whose pluck would leave the rest of him bleak: a fruit that’s halved, too, from the sin of its knowledge offyellowed, straining to speak through its wrinkled, thin peel.

  Holding the chalaf high, the Rebbe now, without hesitation, slits down, silently fast—and from blameless steel, the stream of a fountain, a gush of blood wandered with the tread of his boots toward the doorway then through it, life heeled, stepped into stain…a heavythick spurt of ice from outside, the latest sky shot through with stars, freezing on their ways down sodden, and smashing: the flow of the artery Most High severed upon the horizon’s own sharpness, it soaks through the air, its purity pouring to empty the other edge of the night: our vessel lacking a single shard and so leaking through such darkness, light…then, there’s a last clasp of thunder from lightning’s strike at the breast—the Rebbe turns on his heel as Die, limp, falls with the sun.

  And the moon with Shabbos now rises.

  Me, I’m still being me…I don’t have much of a choice, stuck out of the one window of the one remaining wall of a house destroyed atop a mountain, I am. Eheyeh. It’s been many hopes, this structure fallen, mostly ruined save its last windowed wall just last moon, had incarnated the dreams of untold—it’s as if their last dream’s this whitewall itself, with them willing it, from their furthest sleeps, to maintain a last stand against memory’s lapse, and so to maintain my sentinel: from most recently to its oldest origin, it’d been quartering for Affiliated Forces, then before that a warehouse, before that a stable, just prior a priory church, an orthodox chapel, then a synagogue, a shul, even earlier the home of a family of let’s say peasants, what to do: home of the husband’s parents, home of the parents’ parents, the parents’ parents’ parents’ home, I forget how far forever—their hallways dug out, leading deep into the watery past, twisted passages seeking hospitable wine and the dregs of firm rooting, the native soil of a creation story, an origin myth making much of a Garden’s two trees with their multanimous branchings of telling and told…giving way to the rooms of my others, passing into homes of their own: their own earthgraves, dwelt amidst wells only a little leap further—there at my echo’s other foot, this overlook’s opposite slope.

  Enough to say, this had been the house of my ancestors, the ancestral home of my mother’s side, Ima’s, Hanna her name was; though essentially peasants, they were once the richest in this village below, or this town, from which they’d impoverished themselves enough to emigrate from, to immigrate to—and thank God for that…enough to say, this might’ve been my own home, too, think of that, only if.

  Their home, it’d actually been a guardhouse, given to them in return for their work, which had been guarding, without fences or gate: these families, mine, had been Messiahkeeps, were kept always on the lookout for the Moshiach, imminent the Redeemer in Whom we believe though as we’re always so quick to say though He tarry—and so theirs was perpetual work, perpetualizing, and yet amply provided for, with a chicken every Friday and fresh milk twice a week, courtesy of those whose salvations they were ensuring, just a fall or shofar’s call down the slope: saviorseekers they were and that’s why, it’s thought, the dwell and its wall had been left atop the hill above the round valley and its settlement squared down below; maybe spared through displaced superstition, as if to destroy the thing would be to destroy future hope, and then a
gain, perhaps it’s survived only out of a moment’s respect, or from symbol: never know when its vantage might come in handy again…O the handcup, the jubilant summons: they were supposed to wait there until the resurrection of the dead, then muster the living with primitive hoots and alarms. Disturb their mundane’s what, interrupt diaspora for an ingathering to where, they weren’t sure: how the people once here and now dead, they only engaged and supported such watchwards because the town, or the village, was located so far away from everywhere else that they were afraid the Messiah would miss them, or that they might miss Him in His coming, and so their stand and the conflict, again, as to where exactly to paradise to—whether the market city, or Jerusalem, if it’s the capital—once the day would dawn of their reckoning, if. And nu, how it was only my relatives among them who’d hoped that that light would never arise, what with the poultry, the butter churningup the holiday tips, free aliyahs and kavod galore—not the only people, though, for whom exile workedout, meant success…not the only people who’d hoped against Eden in their fortress defense of a livelihood, the health and happiness of their kinder—before relocating to America thinking they’d made it, done with all that custom and boredom, only to hope there anew and this time around with a longing that’s greater than ever: hymn, waiting on the corner for Mammon to show, streetside peddling their apples and patience.

  As for me, I was hoping the window led out…mystically, hoping above the above, upstairs-upstairs-Upstairs, but no: it’s new town, old evil; new village, only the newest of ruins…eastern form razed razed razed to its very foundation; inhabitants unable to be raised despite the hurt of my howling, whether they’re in hiding or dead, hiding in death, who’s to ask. Skeletally stripped, rippedopen staircases spiraling turretwork, tower’s marrow…what’s a spire and what’s a smokestack, what’s a building or was and what’s grave or a tomb; from this vantage, resembles a cemetery. I lean, I’m leaning, to search, to find, to root amid roots, to moon amidst the maternal…deeply, too far. Finally—painfully, I birth myself from out of the window, tumbling to snow, then down the flank of the mountain, which flows into this plot’s main and only prospekt, when I have none to speak of, and that as no speech. Though even if talk I had in me how, there’d still be no words for where: bombedout, clearedout and out destroyed, then salted with ice so that nothing would grow again, ever. Fallow without jubilee. I fall from the summit of the hill behind me on down to egg the nest of its valley: as if a wedding’s lost band its circumferential containment, the ring of its bind, my mother’s and tarnished…toward its Square down its slope I’m hurtling steeply through the Square proper, which is unpaved, packed earth—only to land slammed against the pediment of a spire forlorn, a towering topple…its Plague Column, I think, what’s called a Pestsäule: a bestially marbleized swirl.

  Not quite (which was Aba), have patience as Ima herself would’ve said and I’ll tell you: it’s a schlong…you know of what I’m talking, she’d say, it’s a putz, that’s what, the kind that crawls down below…without legs, to forever beg on its belly for affectionate time—it’s flaccid now and so distended from its plinth, hanging stubbily shrunken atop the dust as if lazily asleep, unaroused. A clotting of vein and frozen gray uncircumcised fleshiness, I’m looking it straight in its eye, without sense. I get myself up and stand a little, then long; entranced, waiting to expect what, I don’t know.

  From sunrise on the next morning, which is the Shabbos, the holiest day of the cycle against which this dial’s intermediary shadow has been erected opposed, it begins to fill itself up, to pump stiffly with life as if sucked from below: taller and thicker it grows, its foreskin retracting, until an hour or so before the highest pitch of the day, and there as if dinged struck, stricken at the headhuge clap of the sun, ringing out the sky’s call to account, everyone rise—it’s up fully, and fat and hot, too, melting the weather from around the platform upon which it’s risen, a puddle, a pool…pulsing immaculately in the midst of the Square, and then above the village, the town—expanding hillhigh, extending mountainously and yet soon, as presently noon, casting no shade to speak of: pinkening then fully red and rashy as if alarmed angrily, made mad, and heftily hard, too, with the undiminished course of blood urged up from the earth—life spilled being absorbed again and again into time, and its telling.

  At this twelve with its ring donging above from the bell of a church…it explodes into seed, in all pulpy seeds—which hit the rounding, impotent sun, in a great spot of stain…sticking only to drip off that orb as latterday fug—throughout the afternoon dropping away in failed viscous globs.

  As nearing sunset again, what’s to expect…it’s gone flaccid again, snakes around itself as if to sleep away a next dark, fenced in and gated safe by its wild pubes sticky and hard at the foot: these wickety weeds I’m stepping on, these slatted stalks I’m stepping around…to smite one off and step on with a staff.

  That evening, to ascend the mountain next into night, trailing behind me what still call me by motherly things, they give me no rest was what she’d always say…left dirtied pots and pans over my shoes, I’m stepping mixingbowls halved, dragging threadpulls, unravelings, broombristles and mop-heads and feathers from dusters, knipls and kvitls a tittle yidl zidl yi di di yi di di, clanging and tangling up to the summit one over, upon which I behold another valley below. Here, too, villaged with yet another town, the last of them this last Shabbos, I hope: my father’s town, Aba’s, I’m sure of it, from whence my father’s family had fled or once left, who knew…I do, only now. A town Unaffiliated, maybe, with my mother’s, though it’s been forever a neighbor; or, perhaps unaffiliated in any other, lesser, sense of that slur: that of its rare tidiness, its neatness it’s almost shocking; its relative order as compared to the waste of the barren maternalized just over the hill, down the mound. Never been sacked is what, or not much—at least not as retribution for the imageless worship of a God without son, or in retaliation for the grace of a minority ethic. Unlike by my mother’s, there have never been any pogroms here, nor ghettowide pillage—no prunestewed, beerbothered, sausagestumped rape. From here, my father’s it’s so clean, so beautifully perfect: everything in its proper place, at its proper time, yet abandoned…a clock stilled but still secure in the promise of tick, safe in its jewelcase, the glassy sky clearer, and bright (if only you knew how to wind, wheel its dial the horizon around)—a relic that is its own reliquary’s more like it, as it’s both the object holied and its holying set.

  At the summit, I stumble…panting, I trip to fall over this well, halfopened, exposed—in my shock stubbing its lid off to scatter round down the scarp of the next prospekt promised, which is only the manicured furtherance of the previous mud. It flies wildly—skidding its way toward the purity of the village that once iced patrimony, home to the goyim who’d melt down to my father: a townspeople of immaculate surface, a townsfolk cold and of glaciate calm, whose regularity and slowness seem only quaint to me now—though if every once in a century they’d be mannered faster and louder toward strangers surrounding, and even angry, at times, furious and violent, abusive…still, the worst they could ever be accused of within their own world would be the reticent, the reserved, the brutally civil: pleasantries toward one another by which to service every occasion, fathering each other with specific forms of formal address. Du, tu, to you, too—I shouldn’t expect the same from myself, halved between valley and vowel. Abandoned alone to my shriek, an echo of the throb of my toe through the straw and a loafer. To curse out of spite that quiet sleepy town down below me—to curse its Church and its steeples, its cross high above as if the tongue of the sky’s bell stilled silent at compline—and that with a mouth lamed by that very Imagelessness all of us bless whether as Father, or God…the gummy gape of the Square, wideopen, welltended, soulless. As if a crumb to poison the churchmice, a collectionplate coined even smaller, or distant—the grating puckish and spun, as if a lid without eye, the knee’s patch of a skullcap, it hits, at long last, to a skitt
ering stop against the westerly wall of this village Town Hall, denting a mark on that venerable frontage, which is as impassive as the ice is gray and yet, now imperfect.

  I stand at the rim, the lip of the pit…what, you think I’d only recognize a well I fall into?

  Inside, there’s a nipple…just deal, get used to it, will you: after all, this is the very end of the tip, hard up from the puffy. Down there it’s halfburied, not so deep I can’t reach. A giver of life this earthbound nipple, as if the whole world’s a tit and this, its summating jut—springing forth with gainful fluid. A pap that after I go to take hold, it grows, to poke high out from its setting. This, then, a sacred sucklingplace. I fall myself to the ice that surrounds. A nipple of nipples, The Nipple of, an impossibility made mythic, the mythical made possible, pasteurized or homogenized down, skim a percent then decide whether bile or curd…it’s handhard, fistswollen as it seeks at my mouth: all flesh and fiery areole that rises to rim, as a lip at my lips, its tip distended to glory my pucker. I’m thirsty, hungry for edge, even a lick, would settle for swiping…prostrate, initiatory of suckle. I swaddle my beard around its overcast red, Adam’s red, Edom’s red, the unnaturally bloodcoursed, applerashed…having a difficult time because I’m sucking, or trying, and nothing, I’m losing my breath. My mouth stabbed by a phantom. I stroke the whole length, then, attempting to milk the flabelliform thing with hands filthy and rough—in a satisfaction unwashed, and unblessed, this resurrection of the breast of every mothering woman: my sisters’, Ima’s and her mother’s, her mothers’ Imas’ yadda and blah bladdering forever around and around this hefty sphere, this sustenant orb…