Joshua Cohen - Witz

Through the weather, left light overflowing their sills and the winded wafts the smells of a Shabbos that’ll go on way past the sunset of any wintry night, the dark dawning forever — streets stained with wax, the stain of His tears…these streets and avenues the once fattened arteries of this city, the past’s hardened plenty of late become lean, gaunt, heir to a why enforced hollow: a whiff of smoke as if flicked up from under the chins in its coming, the seethe of its anger, and then the sound of the mob approaching again from behind, led now by those two puny, pugnosed kinder, improbably the two posterboychicks from Downtown called up here to identify whatever it is they think they encountered, they who only know the distraction that are streets at all from their passage to and from school, shul, wherever holy, presently stalking this ritzier, glitzier, who knew from it neighborhood why, to keep the scare in the people, maybe, how He flatters Himself — it’s a gift, to keep the myth of His terror alive, and perhaps, too, to remind them of His own remembrance, how He taints, always sullies their efforts, renders impure, how He ridicules them, and without ever intending to, how the provision of His every existence itself precludes their very own. He stands still an orphan on the island untrafficked, not knowing what to do or not, and making little quiet grunting appeals with His mouthstub at those just passing in advance of the throng: their heads bowed chins to guts, most hurrying past without looking up, murmuring prayers (which: the blessing over avoiding a puddle, the blessing over averting the dreck of a dog or a pigeon, the bracha for concrete and breath), and reciting, also, a host of recently memorized passages of Torah no longer mere quoth endquoth Scripture, not wanting to waste even a moment, especially not on what has to be just another homeless mooch impersonating mensch, a lay leydikgeyer in search of nightly food and drink, lodging, warmth, anything you’d be generous to give. A handful throw Him windscattery bits of old currency, shredded as feed for their livestock they keep on their fireescapes, elevatored and in alleys, where not their cawing and clucking and pecking all night, who can sleep; Him bending down to defraud a defaced quarter from the freeze just as the mob approaches…across the street they’re waiting with no traffic’s law for the light to change to alight on the island, to visit upon His head and hunch a garden’s variety of the graceless, insults, murder — He’s turning from them and hiding His face, slips on the ice and falls.

A small, professionally neat mensch in a pinched derby, suit and tie, his face scandalously shaved, accosts impulsively from the opposite direction, the eastern, leans over, takes His arm and tries to help Him up but He’s too heavy and the mensch almost falls himself, withdraws, folds his arms and waits for Him to aright at the foot of the mob quickly massing.

I have to thank you, the mensch says in a calm, polished voice, making a mess of their iddishy idiom to the two boychicks bringingup the head and holding torches, flaming newspaper rolled for the fire, inky smoke billowing, blackening as imageless as Him…what luck, you found Him for me. My shabbosgoy, a runaway — I’m in your debt. Tell me, how much do I owe you?

Your shabbosgoy, one says, I don’t think so…just look at Him, says another, you know who He is. A gonif, says the first again, a thief in the nightly murderer, not quite a goy more like an animal we’re dealing with or worse, Unaffiliated with anything, spit spit grit and soulless — then to Him, explain yourself…they’re asking while being asked by those behind them, you’re presuming It can talk?

Hymn, you’re right, says the mensch, you got me — Baruch Hashem, you boychicks are smart…it’s only a joke, that and a poke in the evil eye, keyne hore, you’re no match for me. But He is — for her, is what I’m saying. A murmur’s mumbled rising. I’m bringing Him home for my daughter; it’s high time He converts — those two have been making eyes at each other long enough, and then he rolls his, from the smoke. Her, she’s aging…disgusted groans, a pick at a mole, a rashy nostril — let’s leave it at that, He’s not so young Himself; she’s a good cook, a pleasant personality, nu, so a hump, too, that and there’s a tumult of refusal, a slight limp while we’re at it, this slow shuffling dispersal losing one-by-one-by-two, but you should taste her latkes such as you’ve never had. A giver. Any takers. Only a scattering of punches and kicks for the loitering homeless, a few shots drunk from flasks of the hip, lchaimlchaim a zay get going…he was saying, how they’re always served up with a little something extra: some sweet sauce, some sourcream, a little love, or lying through her weakened teeth (how the latkes are frozen, storebought’s the blushing truth). A cigarette licked loosely of bad tobacco, found in pockets their pickings passed around…though, this mensch he’s not yet finished, if He’s not ready to make an honest woman out of her, let’s just say I’m prepared to consider any other offers; that of the mob heading south into night. Ot azoy. You wouldn’t happen to both be single — I’ve got a cousin, too…but they’re gone Downtown the paperers, separately if brothers.

As he and B head westward toward the river, there’s a final ploy if only for the pleasure of the wind: I’m a proctologist, it’s a decent living…but of course, I’d have to examine you first, my future son-inlaw, whomever; then, a last call over his shoulder, a gesture parting, a hand tipped to the hat: don’t worry, boys — it’s as simple as bowing, he laughs into his other glove, is what I’m always being told.

It’d been a clutch of thatchy, fireperfect hovels at the thinning vale of the forest, now a lonesome field salted with the melt of snow — a plain without crop, a barren threshedover, naked earth, pocked in a vast ruin, the remnant of wars, without jubilee, left fallow until failed…it was here, in the midst of this village whose menschs had all been killed, their synagogue defiled then set aflame (which set their houses aflame, then their livestock and harvest), their womenfolk raped and their kinder enslaved, that the seed had been winded from far in the east, had fallen with spring, to take plant then root deep within the scar of this flesh, this weathered pale — a wound that had once been a basement, the library of their yeshiva. Under the tromp tromp trampling of every weary army, the seed sprouted; as it was watered from the waters above and the water below, a shoot began to grow; to begin with, a small sapling, the reflection of its taproot: tromped by maddened Franks, the Plague of Rhenish mobs, hephep, the Mongols, a motley mob of crusading barbarians, mercenary warriors of who knows what allegiances, only later the civilized and civilizing Swedes, their immaculate soldiers marching in impeccable ranks, trampled by horses and hauling carts, by the feet, too, of their merchants, those fleeing the furfisted Tatars, the east in perpetual pursuit, the Cossacks are coming and with them, their hetman, O the fury of Polyn…becoming brushed in more peaceful times by summery courses, by foxes, by hounds; this tree watered by young love in the Lorelei spring, Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten —growing higher, against all that’s human and, evil: an axe, a sword, attempted it once, a mace lodged in its trunk at the height of a head…generations shading the green grown below, it’d kept guard over Kinderspielen, picnics with Mutter and the governess of hundred of years’ duration, perpetrated upon a cloth torn from a chuppah, in its basket the shewbread, the risen loaves — until just last week: it’d been sawed down then shipped express to the Garden…the schwarzwald fallen, its trunk to bridge the cold of the ocean, arriving with its memories intact, imprinted deep on its leaves, resident in the very air breathed out from its ageheavy boughs: the birds, the crows and the ravens, the hand and eye knowledge of falconry exercises, training the seasonal goshawk on the hood and the gauntlet, the bells and the jesses; arrows bearing quivering messages (to be read into the wrinkles of wood), bows curved into branches, the withered bark faces of witches, souls trapped in knots; then, once clearing Customs, it’s erected in the Great Hall of the Island, within its arched vault, snipped only a berry’s pit to fit a breath from the crown of the ceiling, majestic.