Joshua Cohen - Witz

Downtown the half snow half rain are done arguing themselves to all wet: it’s agreed, a day as holy as today requires such compromise; tonight’s introspection makes this kind of weather relevant, admissible, wholly appropriate, and so God opens wide His pockets, which are deep and silverlined, drops it down, a storm. Having wandered at His own painful pace, and through a personal fog, as if privately pursued by a cloud even daytime dark and its imminent burst hovering always just over His head, a breath — the pressure, the heavy gray and threat, He’s crossexamining for dry over and around a schaft of loiterers, assembled at the base of the stairs in dripping casualwear caftans up the steps forever high, as if leading up above the sky itself, B breathless: to stand a loiter under the portico colonnaded heaven above Centre Street, hiding behind a column as wide and as tall as any of Solomon’s, waiting for judgment to cease and desist. A practice of ponchod employees stream down the steps to haul the sty of piggy pushkes inside — the Courthouse, where everything but everything smells by wet.

An overhanging freeze…a glomming gloom, a second skin, and suffocating. It’s hard to swallow. All that, and He’s getting stares from the guards. And so B goes for further shelter, within the door under the portico and the perilous, dizzying sway of its lamp never lit. He’s soaking, was what Israel would’ve said, Hanna would’ve said, drenched; His heels squishing on the atrium’s tile, don’t ask as to the socks. He sits down on a long stretch of knot, puddles the floor, rising only when a guard officialmouthed — with sadness rung around his eyes like the rings left by mugs, by cups of coffee left to sit atop the table of his face with their marks then traced in sentencing ink, with an angry fist and wagging fingers — motions for Him to rise and that’s right, follow me, sir, leads Him down halls through halls radial each poorer away from the arch of the atrium and its rotunda, tile giving way to linoleum, dustducts, cloudbursts now of exposed wiring, then through a door and into a courtroom, which is empty and cold and barrenly lit, screeching a seat out then leaving Him to decide whether or not He should sit. A straightbacked wooden chair — the chair of the defendant, cobbled together to be the most uncomfortable, the least conducive to shifty slumps, engineered for incrimination, the seat of the client who usually pays the most though gets the least; it holds Him fast, His housecoated fat bulging out the slots of the sides, catching Him unhanded. The guard leaves Him with a pat to the shoulder as what must be His lawyer, His Goldenberg, it’s been a while, too long and yet not enough, enters wet himself, and sloppy, in an untailored, seamstripped suit, and with a clammy palm without calm shakes Him a Shalom.

Glad you found it, he says, you just made it, you seem well, haven’t had the pleasure in an age.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to do much talking, no one expects you to, what with…this is just a formality, let’s hope — at least, the jury seems sympathetic, have pity. They’re too honest not to be, and pitiful: we managed to get rid of the living early on in the process…still, we need to present well, and unfortunately we haven’t had much time to prepare. Answer me this. You can nod, or shake no. Or else we could have a whole system figured out: how one finger means yes and how another means, you get it. Suss it out. What I want to know is this: do you swear to tell the truth, to me, not the whole truth, to them, God help us, I object. What I mean is, next witness. And then upon the seventh day, we’ll rest. A bailiff, who’s just the guard who’d led Him here changed into a new uniform for overtime’s sake, approaches with no recognizance whatsoever, and without a word wraps his hands around His neck and clips onto Him a bowtie, obtained from a reputable receptacle piled with all manner of neckwear worn, mildewed tongues, preknotted, knit lengths stained with shvitz. Are you with me? Look me in the eyes. Read my lips, and without moving yours. Isn’t it true that? What — is that two fingers, or just one; work with me here, you call that a signal — you’re going to have to nod better than that. What were you doing on the night of the eighth, and how was that night different from the morning of the ninth — where were you when? Do any of the following names mean anything to you…when she said that, what exactly did Miss Demeanor mean? Est-her, but I don’t even know her! Then, the lawyer for the State enters, a piercing mensch his hair not wetted slick but oilgreased, rivulets of melt flowing atop the sheen of his widowpeak, his lips thin like the most expensive and so most successful but still painful of knives — he’s a shysty son of a something…ben Ballshabayit’s what they call him naked in the shower at his countryclub, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t. Toweled then dressed in a wonderfully unconventional entirely camelhair suit, he’s much better tailored than His who in his shmatte (which his wife’s been after him to launder for a moon) the more he sits the more it’s wrinkled, rising with a sigh, such an effort to greet his colleague, his better save the two hundred more he bills per hour with extra padded for this very rising while still gripping his valise, which falls open to spill an unfinished ostensibly lean pastrami sandwich, the only contents of the dingy pleather case; as he stoops to pick up what’s left of it he smiles happens regularly, apologies to opposing counsel who’s used to all this, too: a ploy, this wry distraction, him having to address all the while the seeds of the ryebread stuck in the gaps between the teeth.

Everybody rise, is what the bailiff says as if in training for the reformed rabbinate, which he is, thanks to a correspondence class his daughter’s enrolled him in, nightseminary — and so everybody halfrises, more like stoops as if they’re too tired to care, or too cold, what happened to the heating. A door opens behind the dais and a bird, white, white, forget the species, flies in to perch on a bench in the back. An honorable I’m sure Judge, at least his intentions (and as golden, too, as the light that accompanies his head, a shining bulb as beacon), enters now, habilamenting his robe as dark as night on tight over his thickfeathered, strongstalked wings — always too cramped, everbinding; zips himself tripping over its flow, getting tangled, arranges himself then sits; instructing the bailiff with only a fluff of his beard to make himself useful, will you, and usher in the jury — laggard, haggard, and twelvestrong, a late jury here of the last twelve, the tribally lost, resurrectedly lining to their seats in the order of their deaths: Steinstein the Foremensch sits last, straightening his black, barmitzvah suit and tie he never got to wear, it’s shrouding, uncomfortable; he’s fidgeting with his collar that it keeps coming up, the fistsized knot that’s too strangling buttoned beneath, so handsome. As for the sanctuary of this courtroom’s case built against Him: worries that it was to be thrownout, desertexiled and such, are proving unfounded, at least unsubstantiated, un-transubstantiated, within the without of reasonable doubt. Rumors, excuse them into evidence. His judge clears his throat of that honorable beardness; his fist serves as a gavel, which he or it B’s thinking bangs hard to create a void in the icy air for the airing of a voice.

Has the jury reached a verdict?

How to raise my head?

The box is piled overflow with corpses.

I’m going to go with guilty, then, twelve times over — as if I don’t already feel that way myself. But the trial, if you can call this that, hasn’t even begun, is what I note without tongue. It comes out like choking. Restrain yourself, will you, to your representation — the Judge overrules all, even rule itself. He then asks, will counsel please approach the bench? and the prosecutor goes and first approaches the Goldenberg next to Him, wakes him up with a fraternal slap to the head, a light greasing of recently moisturized palm and the two lawyers one dazed and dozy approach the dais, a hunk of beaten, comingapart plywood at which they stand silently, then wink at one another, both eyes, now turn around, each to his own table, His shorter and narrower and, as it’s missing a leg, as tipsy and unevenly spoken as this Goldenberg here — guess which one of them puts his head down again and is soon lightly snoring. And so we’ll proceed directly to sentencing…what can I say: my representation’s beginning to drool. Still, I gargle and fume, spume air from my mouth, a throaty objection. Stumped. Strike that. Jury, I’ll instruct you to ignore that — whatever that was or wind, but they’re still dead, with fattish flies gathering at the wet under their eyes, wallows freezing fast…until another bailiff, this the first’s son or his brother, maybe, enters from their door and with a beaten, lipbloodied wheelbarrow, into which he begins loading their weight one by arm and leg, the courtroom clearing.