Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  When they were, he was, and when they came, he went.

  not the Rukrainians thankless their saving us up for the gulag forget the forest from the trees the Americans either for all their chaw and Wriggley chicle chewing gum their deciding slow vodka tongues waiting around talking too much to the scopes over the tracks kill me now it’s the irony the sarcastic laughter through it all that’s kept me alive even if to laugh means jaw hinge hurt the mind explodes like a deskbomb a chairbomb an Attentat assassinating Bonhöffing Molotovgong the divedrop of old jokes returning in images in words these scraps of ragging witzs not setups no that what’s killing me isn’t example Auschwitz Auswitz einwitz the gang’s all that dopdoppdoppel hardlabor slavery the ovens gas gun to temple stumblingBlocks 10 and 11 trigger tripped on licemines the typhus tuberculosis malnutrition starvation the camp Himmler’s willing golems the Musselmänner the only good kind of Muslims we pitied them as hopelessly as Iran does its dogs in their throatlung gutplunge think she’s dead she must have been Eichmann said die the SS-WVHA said work will set you protected the whole suzerain claim the blame the nonsense began with the shylock stock the Bishop’s coin the imperial fief liege and the lives of the Dom’s incarnations the Privilege and pogroms of Rupert of Deutz the Abbot Caesar of Heisterbach and the rabbinic disputations of cardinals and Innocent III not beholden to the servus of services due to the charter of Birkenau of Auschwitz II the Arbeiter sequel it was a year there an everlasting Purgatorio translation because once I spoke every language ever spoken the German the fauxGerman the nearGerman the campGerman the diggingDeutsch the quarrysprache we organized the pebbles into gravel into gravelly details the piles of hair and pounds of heads from Birkenau to Buna and so were allowed to travel between camps to tourist vacation summering in Auschwitz I the winter of Brzezinka Oświęcim Osphitzin and Monowitz Duowitz what have you initials the acronyms and their who knew anonymous sins the IG Farben SWirtschafts–Verwaltungshauptamt between lesser and greater embodiments of supreme evil though not in the sense of beverage and burger sizes the Mc-Donald’s that’s just opened on the crack corner at the crank of the elbow the shoulder joint the haunch lunch but in the loss of sense the Guldenstarred arches eclipsing the moon one hundred ninetytwo million teeth placed under the tongue of St. James the hated sicut and the Notita de Precariis the abyss of the Abbesses their abscesses sunken ponds the pitted puddles of ritual weather Messe the Trade Fair Grounds turned Appellplatz mound the roundedup of Cologne to you we’d been there since ever before the goyim the German barbarian tribes they’re called Nemesis we’d come with the Romans not my family my people and yet there we were punctually at five in the morning stripped shaved striped and unfed the drought purged by the bloodflood of Plague salved Regina with a rash of denarii and solidi placed atop the eyes of St. Martin soothsayed of St. Gereon martyred in Cologne split in two cleaved we were butchered sundered in quartered half like the Apostles’ Church Anno II the relics of money being cigarettes shoes and political food the Hamshamed Shemname of Hashem and the Marx brotherly in Apollo God of the Great Shavuot 1096 despite gifting five hundred marks of silver mercury poison to Godfrey of chicken Bouillon king of the Judas Crusades and Jerusalem’s towers the watchtower guardhouse dogpowered wires like electrical eels rays the octopus strangle of Worms the Masada of Neuss and the taking of Xanten Would that my head were water and Bitterly they weep Babylon by the sides of the nightgraves of the knightslaves buried in black chainmail made of the spirochetes of an infinite hundred infections what I’ve known from not imagined or sawheardsmelledtasted I touched its dissemination of ideaknowledge the roadmud streetflume leading east of Exile’s Eden galutways to peasantry and slaughter little puff maggots wound around the spine rumors of Doris my first wife I called her but we never married in Polish my girlfriend ladyfriend woman the tightfisted wave the futile hurl of messages thrownup from the stomach over the perimeter fence the fourteenth century fifteenth expulsion of ticks from the forearm hairs diggingin under the pastry the noodelskin strudelskin worms through the joints through the temples like apples parasitic destruction death from within the Würfel Gate for the accommodation of every Walram indulgence the concives a citizenless boundaryworld bridge-state sealed with a promise made anew each year every year and wrought in gold marble upon the face of the Dom from age from outliving my years allotted that year outdistancing deathmarching the Carnival Crusade route the trommeltrample todesfooted in ragged step a faltering woundown step behind the freezing sun the lopped off head of the Polish step world the yellow gelbglory the jaundiced eyes shut or opened the same ding hüpfen rollen laufen drehen which should I do first or secondguess the Kommandos keep away from the sex clefts of the peaches the plums I organized apples tangledup in the barbs the rosebushes hedging the lawn of Villa Höß we called the flagged thorn wilting between my legs lying without sons or daughters but with Klein it was Kline who’d bunked next to me who’d had his eyelids sliced from his pupils for a lesser offense red and white he shrieked that he saw like the flag the same sun setting over risen Japan the Nippon gramweight of bread and the souplessness lame without bowl the cup of the palm gypsyread gypsydead with a smile wink and a violin played in sympathy upon a hair of the head of the Lagerapportführer the arm shank stroh the leg fear of God the Kapo afraid of me whom a later Kapo preferred Meister Bruningus the Bishop Hochmeister to scheme royally that entire autonomy scam the massgrave of the Greve buried with its gold bullion unter Goldschmied the ghetto Anno who knows if they even had keys to the locks for solitary confinement Emancipation came with the Morgensprache the owed ad æternam hereditary tax the protection and tolls the pledge hedged the dictus the dicta usurious and all of that dissembling Latin I knew all Greek to me its assimilation by fire the Jerusalemgässchen’s smoke the stove forever unlit in the barracks brickBlocks their tricklocks when you had to shit or rape or kill alone to warm the shoulder spine the barrack bed the spindle of the body’s Torah armspindle arm-needle harmthread the finial swindle swung with a rope to hang the thief from the rafters stolen away after lineup and linedown and right left and Recht Links to the wall with hats off to the elect of Westphalia may all of Mitteleuropa’s good writers and painters and sculptors and musicians and poets say rape all of your daughters eternally in fiery heaven the furthest Nebenlager of the Final Solution the Endlösung endlessly sung the nusach wind-whistle trop of the rollcall the rollstall the count recounted discounted then counted again separate the consonants from the vowels separate the oes from the cnsnnts then the ooas from the vwls loading the unloading then loading again the Krankemann Krankyman the kook krook what’s your name take one what’s your number soundoffandon the screech of the genital nails the forged mails we received Ich bin gesund and what’s worse it’s the silence you get to the end the sum of the days and there’s this survival this instinct inculcated cult of us to have come back resurrected incarnated alive if this you call living or soup or herb this turnip radish bearfat catfat with water lukewarm buttonsoup collarsoup goop and a sliver salami the marble of mud the endless slats the bunkmatewake kapowake the alarms the Schadenfraids only to return to this building owned outright this plot of one room but no wife Doris I met in PoŁódź Karl von Litzmannstadt in the ghetto the Goethe meadow I’d recite to Agnesz from Mexico whose father died either in the Stehzelle Hungary or from flogging the disease that was Grabner when she died on the boat her corpse was kept cold in an overboard lifeboat so as not to infect fellow passengers or the captain’s decision to lower her tossed to the waves for the Leviafinned sharks that circle the bedroom livingroom familyroom den of all rooms in the middle of this house the pitted Pharaoh’s tomb brownstoned blackrocked walls an Uptown pyramid Corfu’s deportation that goaded load took a month the Hungarian moon over Reich and raum and when the Egyptians finally arrived at Auschwitz everybody was already Tod dead to the Zugang the chaingang the gained slain world the love of my Birkenau Mutter whom last I saw would’ve whispered into my father’s ear slicedoff severed and served to a do
g or a God what a waste of a perfectly good train she was funny the marksmoney the Marxmoney the Trostky-Braunstein brownstone money the rent I’m owed the partydues paid in news and cigarettes only butts how much they must have saved in Zyklon Before the rest of the house is rented out to whomever Esq. collects the Vorgänger foreganger planked across the pit Moll and I dug a hole for ourselves then filled then dug again shovelfaced and spadehanded soon enough there’ll be none of us left to mean or machine the tithe the testimonial urge to make statement to Macht after me who’s next no one’s blessed the Gypsy’s empty palm the strong outstretched firsthand only heresy hearsay this pun language this funlanaguage loopholed and nooseheld in the mouth just ask D’Amato & Leib and their John Kestenbaum Esq. that polite young associate they have working for them gave me that businesscard of his with on the back his homenumber his cell who remembered me he never forgot it’s an honor and horror forgetting this failure the terrible gravesump stumpump the corpses watery slack the Body Tax the fined levied on breathing too freely the face dripped leaky faucet moan Puerto Dominican Doris who couldn’t have children then died into smoke on the Jerusalemgässchen had lived down the street around the Block10 of the corner Berlin from a friend of a friend of my father’s but not until Poland did we try sowing piglets I fed in the pen the watered zoo Höß kept fenced behind the Vartegau the Varterslaughter for deprivation experiments the phenol sensorial with the veins and syringe the dripdrop of noma and soma normal and healthy it was inquiry it was science how little to sleep how little to eat what work and medicine might be withstood without arms without legs feetand-hand shrunken tribal head on a wick of a neck reduced again rereduced useless inutile no estate leave the world nothing that won’t go to the grave just as I came into it a month too late for the bullets except for this blackened brown spoon of a house as large as Höß’s I leave for the lawyers larger even than the rats the roaches their Plagued Napoleon’s defeat and the Infamous Decree called to convene the Landtag to the credit of all Consistory the free years the Friday Freitag years we had no clocks we had no calendars we were turned into calendars and turned into clocks the workdetail I met my cousin’s brother which one of the ten also cousins who fought my Onkel in the First War and was a hero though he’d converted by then and had married an Engels no relation the rollcall the callroll and hatsonoffhats the caps we had to wear the Weltsch who said famously Tragt ihn mit Stolz den gelben Fleck the beard-fleck the badgefleck he took with him with sumptuary pride to London where he survived Jerusalem under the sign of the uniform star the sky robed with fighterplane stripes but why we still had to wear the fuckfleck in Auschwitz I didn’t understand they would know me ununiformed they’d know me naked with race and underwear purity laws the rainbow of gates their Arbeit Macht you mad insane metal of allowanced indulgences we paid indigent for through the noses they hated for not hooking a word out of our mouths save ja wohl no relatives ja not smoke and wohl air paying the wind for the safe conduct of ash a passage communal no one to care cousin Eva dead and Ruth and Nathan of Gaza the warhero too though perhaps he wasn’t even a cousin managed to make it to Israel to Palestine the Altneuland Aliyah survived my Onkel only to make instead of the New York trade the Exodus for a length of rope a moment of grope with a razor and tub nightly rollcalled the uncalled for again from the beginning to die properly back in which decade’s war for a nation a people and not for let’s say pneumonia the Titus of typhus favus Fritzsch and Feist you don’t know the difference between America’s America they say as dead as St. Severin this weakness like Samson or Samuelson I have for confusion confounding naysaying it straight from the bowels of Babel the politruk polka in bloodwatercolor just ask Schmauser or Kramer who replaced Hartjenstein in exchange for the suicide tempt as it’s said the assimilationist tendencies from ash into air into academics and stories inventions the deconstructivist dated that’s what we do we reinvent we redact every story each and every storied second season bedded down in the ground in the air in the pale of the Himmelhow sky there’s nowhere else to die nohow to sleep and yet why