Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  When they were old, he was old, and when they came for the old, he went.

  the August Assumption the feasted festive arrival with the Peterite dogs the preterite lights up from the heartvoid the hearthvoid and the famine drought and disease the dizzying vertigo’s luck the guttersuck the Selektion Doris one way the other from Łódź then Lodsch loading unŁódźing years ago one hundred eight I am Harlemwide Mourningside bedbound chained to the pillow-cuffs the boxcar bedcar trackbed trundlepassover Poland the protectorate rectorate the rectum of the world the anus mundi the hot heinous hundmund I’m freezing alone here exposed by ignorance inattention the names are the first things you notice besides the noise the glareblare the clash the orchestral swillswirl the clarinet twirl and the trumpet presenting its bell to the same sun over Cologne Köln-Deutz Łódź our evacuation they called it Verlagerung after rung an angel’s ladder the traintracks to Auschwitz from which as they say in America’s America no one returned with their eyes or their lives from the unpent doors of Poland’s partition halfnaked in half an overcoat and shivering warm we were overflowed into the Appell with the chimneys of Birkenau high in the distance burbling brown schnapps and black tea for two lines the Sonder triangulating the yellow and pinkred the milites Christi their dogs with their guntongues barking gums at the sunset stilled in the spotlight the klieg and the clarinet waft and the cello’s low chords sforzando the music of painting a Boschmess the Boschbabel of rabbis rebbeim aged with their beards shorn curling the curves of the old Via Egnatia routed on another train yet another same freight rollingstock from Auschwitz and before Auschwitz in from Łódź going west to go east going east to go west by south sacking weddings brises barmitzvahs shivas along the route the rootway the day storming nights the leaps from the tower burning the Crusader pillage the Calvary charge the poisoned wells quelle the bells of who knows which canonical hour the coming of compline in claps beaten to sacks for the heads of hanged children impaled upon the Holy Lance of Peter Bartholomew the death of the Charlemagnetrain at the Antioch stop the third city of the world the penultimate station of our borne cross bent to wriggle worm the snakecharming trance harm at Xanten and Meer north of Neuss and the saving grace of Abbot Bernard the succor of Joel ben Isaac haLevi the Rabbi of Mainz the anonymous Kalonymos Would that my head toll the trainrang the hydraulick and huffapuff the triangle clang and the cymbals the tongue’s crowded clutter Mutter pushed to one side pulled with my father out to the other split sundered the distance between cleaves Wevelinghoven and Geldern the Cleves border between Kerpen and Kempen the Ninth of Av it wasn’t but there was blood enough in the Rhinerein amidst the Rhinefine Zeitime air the silver river flow of Constantine’s sword Damocles’ be damned by the goring of pregnant women the coring of babies never had any myself because Eva by Agnesz I couldn’t have been married for only a month of a morning with rings only locks of new hair hers or mine packedtight pricked to shiver in that heat already halfway to death in that roil my glasses shattered losing them saved my life could see clear to the gates of iron and gold wasn’t blind to the retrogression the regressionre Doris stroking my hair and the hair of my face before it was shaved I was blond an echt Aryan though grayed white bald the train-plain the floodlain the rippedopen windowless slatlife the boardview and the cupped seek bowed to the wood the rot the piled high of Gypsies dead in the corner we killed who killed us and Edelmann Adelmann Tadel the chugalughorseshodslug the canvas crate the palm balm of bathing in piss green mound of corpses rotting quickfast in the heat the bodies of pregnant feti fallen to deaths from castle walls tossed hurled tower vomit at dawn dashed the conquering of the land promised to the Holy Romans beyond the moatmouth the turrets’ teethwire barbed we told jokesongs jokestories sextalk fucktalk and fucked and sexed and recited the alphabet in every language we knew quietly silent my sister dead a month my brother dead a month he was sick and had a cough a pestilent mark my Muttering mother had another fortyeight hours but that’s life I’ve been told at the postoffice grocerystore no tougher than Doris never not by my side in that carspiralswirl the boxwhorl our own world in the corner to squat or die heatstricken from record reciting to each other libretti and the birthdates of painters the Bull the ode and the code the directions to the ring’s diamond my Muttery mother’s stone we whispered and buried like a close cousin in the cemetery in the Mittelalterlicher Friedhof we unburied reburied unreburied under a rock in a park named renamed then sold by Agnesz and I to the American in the green hat for the price of leaving Amsterdam London New York New York amid the sun of a deathdawn Rhineland Reinrind the skinpeel wealrope and the tug of the Muslims on the road to Byzantium after Tiberias fell and Count Emicho of Leiningen came up the Main toward Mexico the country bordering Hungary had counted his dead at Speyer and Worms and Mainz and Cologne summating in Dachau the apotheosis Treblinka or what passed for a pogrom at Kielce our commute the chugmute dare fareless wayed south through Poland the huts and fences and houses the horses and cows and the cowlike horselike lumpenprolesouls the Bauern that bowed to live scarce along the road to Nicæa from Lower Lorraine Volkmar taking the Bohemian road to Hungary the capital of Mexico Gottschalk up the Rhine through Bavarian peasants to me being a Kölnik a Kölsch I should have gone to Israel Palestine promised an Eretz it was the true gem of Westphalia to die like a human in the Crusades with the blood baked into matzah at the gates on the roofs even the libeled gables Coral of Florida Boca Raton would’ve been nice down there near Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth you’d get dysentery from if you can still get the runs in this country this rushhour spewed bloodred bloodbed pisstain shitsheets I can’t contain myself get a Pole over here now that the visas are legion have them clean broom and mop diaper my room for slave wages they loaded us living they unloaded us dead handandlegging our corpses out the halfdead the neardead the cleardead bodies piled by the Jaffa Gate the Dung and that of the Messiah Moshiach Moshiach Moshiach the cemetery to be resurrected becoming defiled desecrated in advance of my father’s arrival one cattlecar cowcar behind roiling box of hot shit and piss and sementov mazeltov shake the hands you have left you’ve survived the ghetto the foursquare boxbare oxspare slaughterhouse shechtloused Holy Shit Sepulchre it’d been an enormous dark blackstone mouthrone with surprises my tongue sucked into every slumped cheek corner drawer piled deep into wardrobed Biedermeier tin toy soldiers their rations the rusty lime rinds lemon orange and pineapple the palms of Antioch at the Gate of the Dog after the sojourn in Armenia under whose fronds Christians first became Christians became goyim expert at the shield and the sword the stab in the backside of tapestries bunched ripped and torn to smile their mess at the wall the Mona Lisa reversed the retrograde sheetmusic piano reduction of Dvořák’s American symphony From the New World its horse-hump traindump rhythms tracking past the Hungarian frontier on into Mexico the domain of King Coloman and the Danube defeat of the threefold incursion after the forcible baptism of the Ratisbon massacre consecrating corpses for Clermont ten days in November Pope Urban II hanged Odo in piñata effigy packed him with nails to swing as a warning from an overpass trestle the Hohenzollernbrücke exploded over the Bosporus to the Dom’s Magi Gottschalk Volkmar the trainyard workhard and whoever’s the taxistani shvartze Robert d’Arbrissel or Picardy Peterthehermit that fisheating loafer and fishy winedrinker with the face of the talking donkey rode arebackedandfoot Hugh and Henry and what’shisname Walter and the trinity of sons of the Count of Zimmern following the goldstar through flood and pestilence drought famine and a meteorshower in from Deutz Land of the Barbarians the beerhall pigs the sows of the Sau at the Chorgestühl of the wine cellar the Weinbar whose owner’s lover knew my cousin Felix or Franz a friend of Rumkowski’s Bumbowski’s Slumhauski’s if anyone was who didn’t survive but wouldn’t charge it to his tab at that café you say coffeeshop Angela’s Diner back on the Humboldtstraße the monk’s reflection in the face of the faience the Turkish waitress I didn’t want to bring home on the tram I’d always lived with my parents until Auschwitz m
y Stammtisch Begrüssung for your supper the Shalom whispered into my ear by a Kapo at the entrance to Block 26 for the cutting of hair the bathing of skin flayed the brand the tattoo tracks scarred over the quarantine that is the horizon Hannoversche with the SA just going Deus vult that highvoltage Dios mio conquista crazed with their pikes and stakes burning whipped taskmasterace triangles redlettered with country the crosses lashed on their surcoats and swords their lancetrance maces the haste with which they banged out the brains of the Reichsbahn employees with their dawnflickering lanterns like third eyes allseeing noseeing the corner of Jaffa Road and King George where a cousin of mine thrice removed the Afikomen hid the cousins Godfrey Godfrei and Gott im Baldwin shaved me as bald as Fritzfranz king of the Klingelpütz going off to play Passover or a Purim spiel in the park visiting cousins for breakfast a Volksgarten picnic hiding to huddle like rabbits with the tails of foxes gabbais with the eyes of spies the Birkenau chimneyfar chimneylong Saracen fall from the top of the Temple of Solomon Titusdestroyed Hadrian’s Aelia and the Tower of David the citadel-hell with their jihad enough jumps the plummeting tumult weighed down with luggage the steamers and trunks Azazelattached redtrianglethreaded bound and tied with a goatgag the tines sharps the cutlery butlery whatever you need whatever marks you’ve saved up for the stealing the mealing of bone skullbone and brainmush in quo congregati dederunt nostris maximum bellum per totum diem ita ut sanguis illorum per totum templum flueret tandem superatis paganis apprehenderunt nostri masculos et feminas sat in templo et occiderunt quos uoluerunt et quos uoluerunt retinuerunt uiuos is what I remember from the tutor with her breasts the two of them one Latin one Greek and her licorice clitoris Pope Dorota the tense of her thighs her lap fat squatting at the edge of my bed in a room of my own with floors flaming red slat-planks ganged to fall into the passing dark fields and farm and the house on the Appellhofplatz as grand as the synagogues the Temple on the Glockengasse the Offenbachplatz she’d operetta to me with eau de amour Slavic fou on the tip of her tongue about Zakopane Žilina Sillein her Poletales her Slavgoyishefables about the knights in Christ’s armor shining the sunroundtable the slog and slough of the People’s Crusade covered in moondust and fairypixels desert hoofmatted pawpatted down the Appellplatz the Hellplatz the mustering plots of her stories postcardfalse postdated predated par avionlost to family friends in Los Angeles the American West the Red Indian lullabies the cowboys of Karl May who didn’t need to put their cattle in cars my people my kind of people we all used to do this too we’re guilty all guilty al cheyt thumping chests did the circuit Ashamnu the circuitous route Bagadnu to the east One and True overland portage whether the coached road via the Roman way or firstclass on the boat from St. Nicolas’ Bari and on into Dyrrhachium Bala Cynwood Cherry Hill or Yonkers Westchester County with Bohemond entering Byzantium via Central Avenue the eldest son of Robert Guiscard unleashed trained and flownin like parachuted luggage suitcases and trunks heaped with silverpieces and Familienandenken wares dispersed dispelled exiled galuted like the thumb opposable of John the Baptist brought to Maurienne Rome’s Moriana his body the rest of it left in Samaria with his Salomé head installed as an idol at Damascus as a relic a shrine not to be visited but conquered in pilgrimage barefoot but armed made habitus rooted turned hermitage hovel with central heating and Q & A coffee with Elias and Mauss their gifts of lectern time and dais time all of that bimaside convocational speech at schools and synagogues at JCCs and at YMCandHAs churches even the Cathedral in Manhattan of St. John the Divine we’ve been prodded and pushed we’ve been traded retraded untraded detraded around like goods gone bad like wares without care recorded rerecorded we’re being reeducated into ourselves we testified Nurembergfalse to all these auditoriums all those schools and synagogue dinner fundraisers balls and benefits in boxy carlike foursquare catering halls with the parquetfloor still out for dancing the bearpolka the trained sealquadrille the Katzetnik kazatzka the bard of the czardas mazurka the Parademarsch drumajor the brute master of the ceremonial Ring because how do you whether as a committee or one say testify true to all of that relevant work experience skills set to call it to cry it to name is to lie to yeshivas oceans of audiences Atlantics of public rapt tight in our speech to publicschools dayschools nightschools and once even I spoke to the senate the real live one in Washington the Heights of D.C. the New Jerusalem the whitehoused home of President Rumkowski the Presess of the Rat and the roaches a minority AIDS epidemic that’s where we were reborn and not say the Mount of Olives the pits or sloughs of Despond preaching Peter Eremit of Amiens the alms treasurer of Arqa disbursing generous ragehate giving forth light to the Diaspora’s already overlit underventilated rooms hall after utilitarian halls of conferencerooms meetingrooms boardrooms old age home women groups geriatric tzedakah benevolent charities and university lecture halls after hall and all as part of an annual subscription series the serialized telling of the same anthologized story of mine every time It was August 1944 over and over telling again and again memory machines how we’d been piled into the trains the boxes were the cars for the cattle the kith and the kine going south to go north by northeast through every nowhere town or village we couldn’t name as if children kinder as if one thing and only one thing ever happened in their lives to mine and not children or grandchildren and old widowed love new surgical leases on lifetime guaranteed stents and transylplants my old friends and family in the Appellight the primetimeplatz the drivetimerats racing a rush Floridian south to go north the roaches scurry across me like heartscars like stitches medical alerts advanced leakage protection diapers and bedrails and bathroom benches and eighteen hour mastectomy bras cupped with colostomy plates in their skulls and prosthetics fingers frozen one to another webbed the spinneret ice of SSpiders their rapturous captures the turdpellets the Spanishdirectionsforuse goatpills Elderpryl Gelderpryl Sinemet Levodopa sounds like a shtetl in Polyn im Polen is that Yiddish or Hebrew a language that possesses no superlatives rather doubles itself up like a medication regimen has formulas of formulas instructions for parody satire jokes just the setups forgotten which songs we sang early vs. the songs we sang late what jokes were jokes and where sung the silence über alles die Wacht am Rhein the Horst-Wessel-Lied die Fahne Hochdeutsch Roten und Welschen bangen feigen Wichten humming the tantz the rathskellerdance the harp my Mutter once played the Obermayer with that Babylon sound of her breath by the rivers of the Vistula the Wisła this much is clear Oma’s tears she didn’t make it in the ghetto a month before that Radogoszcz tumult when they closed the doors we shrieked when they opened the doors were corpses already bacillusbones resembling the portraits we drew with fingernail on the walls counting turns and the junctions with thumbs taking pulses the veintrack the nervetract narrow ironmarrow of what did they call it Aussiedlung Umsiedlung which embarkation which disembarkation which the first memory station and which the second or lesser which games we played with memorized cards what jokes weren’t jokes and what originals were better translations Ikh ver alt ikh ver alt un der pupik vert mir kalt is that from America or Auschwitz you’ll never know the problem with truth is that whatever you say suddenly is and God proved it with dung in the lungs with a shout with a scream an Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel exhortative yell at the first sight of Auschwitz the minor chimneys this prophet cried the first he saw smoke as if not from a moving trainwindow but the nest of a boat and the fire not land but an omen his preaching the shriek of the telephonevision downstairs in the stairwell a drugdeal head peals extensions away Riverdale hills past Scarsdale pale Whitest Plains on which nothing exists outside Moab leave it all to hump the gasmaskcamels the mammalian rats the feral catsandogs moving in with their Amalek slaves the nuclear roaches must think I’m already dead the dread Roberts of Normandy and Flanders at the Gate of Flowers for Herod they’re circling me circumambulating me as if for an encore of Jericho warring Godfrey and Tancred and Raymond of Toulouse scurrying down the summit of Mount Zion with the tails of his horses held between legs sniffing me out sounding a low w
histling wind the passage of trains A B and C below me floors underground closing in on my islandbed’s watery walls a slow Torahora around this Manhattanroom a synagogue not a studio shul shtibl a Temple temped on the von Roonstrasse Moonstreeted the Luneroad we called them the Psalms and Hashem the Lord Our Gott im Himmelkommando where my barmitzvah was married off to a Son of the Commandments to observe without benefit of commemorative plaque a socialhall party and jestering badchany band get the strudel off the ketubah I never signed for my one hundred and eight Christmas Carnival birthdayburn candles a thin slice of Zyklonyellow crumbly cake too late for the caterers they baked themselves already gassed then hanged why not starved to a rope’s death a wick with a clutch of antediluvian roaches and rats a private simcha for me coopedup carboxedin trying to die celled and alone yet still breathing this deathbed confession this candlebed blessing the meltingwax face of this brownstone gravestone raintoes the snowindow the fall of the first flake in midsummer the ash or soot on my cheek to my taste on the buds of my lips to speak of the first kiss I ever had from Doris on Zgierska Street ul. Hohensteinerstrasse her cousin informing on us he died in Floridian Israel Tel Aviv Kibbutz Sasa Arad the land that once had been Promised where last I heard on the radio television saw ten years ago on the ten o’clock news nothing’s changed just the frequency the channel those two Gods they’re still Crusading the history right the hell out of each other I had relations there relatives cousins I haven’t loved them since Łódź expecting her every day every night to ring bell a knock at the door ding dong rung the swell of her hips the hug around the nooseneck the spine as thin as a hiss the train a snakepiss slither a puffhuff quiver and we’re whistling off south from northeast through Poland for nighthours for days until we pull into Radegast Litzmannstadt Auschwitz Explicit Itinerarium Hierosolimitanorum the words have no awe for me the nameterms just worms squirming lines of the Law to the left to the right to the last I knew of Doris she was a step pushed out of the car out of our boxed as if the present to a gift and thrown as if a bow into the air rapped with its billowing pillows of smoke she was pulled from my arms and my hands shoved away from my finger into the opposite line