Joshua Cohen - Witz

The two menschs behind their sawhorse desk cleaning their glasses without glass with their ties, which are untied one starred the other striped, and frayed loose at lesser ends: their unfocused squint as if they’re always thinking, never not; then, replacing their glasses of only frames and then their ties, too, the greater end of each’s thrown back over their shoulders as if silken wings or the pursy ears of sows; they sit unsettled, hunched over their common desk of the converted door with its knob still installed at middle, which they both take turns touching at and turning, then both have a hand on it at the same time, on each other’s and how they’re stroking almost in reassurance, shvitzy to stoop forward and even nearer to one another, then to B, with their other hands holding up their heads: the listening position, it’s known as; futz conversate, though, the consultation’s theirs.

Stand up, please, the skinny says, come closer. And loosen your belt, says the fat…don’t worry, we don’t bite. Your shver, the tuchus doctor — he didn’t pay for that.

B approaches the desk, standing it feels to both a floor tall above the seated lawyers, staring out through the extensive glass behind them, with its view to Mitteltown’s rushhour…at the snow falling in a whitewashing squall (as if provender to livestock), at the sacrificial animals specied to servile dray: the mules, donkeys, oxen, horses hamed; the carts certified push, pull, and peddling, then those of the milkmenschs, too, the trundling delivery boychicks, the streetside prophets and the unrelieved, allrevealed schnorrers, the roiling moil of forms clad in daily black…and as the skinny he’s saying, nu, so drop them, a clattering comes dull from just behind — one of the two menschs standing amid the gusts of the doorway has let go of his pistol, and holds up his hands in defense; the other, however, ignores the order and the response of his partner, ranges his aim wildly around the room at the lawyers then at the tushy mensch between them with His hands on His corrugated belt, as if about to let loose with whipping…hymn, Hymies, they have to be — at least operative under an Affiliate acronym. As the first one who’s the second in command, he thinks, his partner’s assured him, backs himself from the room slowly with his hands still raised bearing too much white mortifying the cuff of his shirt against the suit’s black, dynastically classic and official as hell…the other’s still yelling at them all to get down, mutterfutzer, don’t move, freeze — it’s already frozen, makes no sense, this fall yourselves down upon your face, humble, scrape prostrate already shoeless, they’re stood on hopeless ground…and so the two lawyers lie themselves flat on the carpet unvaccuumed, their hands held behind their backs, the two of them yelling at the other two whichever variant of We gave at the office. Shut the futz up, which one of you’s which. B doesn’t lie down or even turn around, rollover, and this despite their orders armed with aim. Rather, He cradles His blackboard as if it’s His newborn, and then with head bowed down to chest as if to deference its breasty idols, vaults up and almost over the desk doored before Him but goes through the thing instead and flying, only to shatter Himself, too, stumbled through the window amid a nimbose explosion of glass, to fall through the air then down a floor giving way to floors after floors down through the weather and its own floating fall — to land unharmed atop a snowdrift, within it as an oversized flake foundered upon a swaddle soft and loosely packed. B to rise up gevalt the knees amid slateshards, the window’s wood and glass scattered across the walk, to leave His broken board, His bitten chalk, and huddle disappeared — seethed into Park Avenue and its heedless herds, the Mitteltowning swarm.

Though many think, all are right. And though many know, all are wrong. To think through His disappearance, to ask amid everything questioning else where He disappears to, when He does, and how exactly might He do it — that is, to create. It follows thusly — to purport to know Why? is only to destroy. To answer, therein lies the sin, unequivocal. Here, we’re creating a canon of our own, at the very least updating the one we’ve been born with, were born into, and so giving it life, a future if only in His death. Let there be a negative tradition. An inheritance owed. And it was, and still is. A living life against. Be not discouraged, though; interpretation’s acceptable to any question asked, is actually encouraged, rewarded in its own time, even if it be posthumous, praise be to He, Hallelujah…however, answers are still forbidden: they shall be destroyed, scorched by the sun of days, left in the valley to blacken the beaks of our vultures.

History is His, is ours, and not as a fixed sum, a known, but as a continuum, if darkened, a forever beginning, an unvoided void. And so it’s with a mind for this history, this past we might date and time by the deaths, inevitably, joyously, of our many martyrs, that B plots an end of His own. A Zionless plotz. Without these losses, no gains might be ours. Immortality is abominable to memory, also to banks and to the capacities of even our greatest synagogue and shuls, their oppugnant schools. But how to have an end to call His own, having been forbidden from calling, without tongue, His mouth the grave of a name. A death itself shrouded in the as yet unknown, graven upon tomorrow, buried in future, a coffin if falsely bottomed to the day before that…the thought now is Polandland, far toward the east, it having become too dangerous over here, too hostile, exposed. America, what’s next. America, vot ken you mach …and there, what — to begin again, to honor your self and your stubborn ambition with the perpetual promise of newness, the always novel, the once failed now all over again, there on the other older side of the ocean, here upon the olden, othered side of the sidereal deep in which His parents lie, and His sisters, His people fallenflung in a tangle of millions, sunken and yet still twinkling however many depths down or above, only to become swallowed up into the netted bellies of the fish swallowed by the fish that constellated constant Leviathan will upon the arrival of the next Flood swallow down into its belly of net, the underside of the moon without rainbow.

Polandland, where everything began, there it would end, if only for Him, if only for now…spin the globe, point a finger; on a long Shabbos afternoon to idly flip through an atlas, then stop and, po or sham, that’s where history hails from, promise. Polandland, where everything’s, what’s the idea I’m thinking here, the ideal I’m saying, the word without chalk or board…where He can get Himself perspective that’s what, a sensibility, distance, remove — the wart of the word on the tip of the tongue, the pickled silver sliver of flesh, fishlike if headless, stilled, mounted in its setting of gold, having been excavated from the ruins of His house, dug from the scorched mouth of the earth — only for it to leave its limited time only exhibition in the Museum in the Park north from the Temple’s conversion, to make the rounds of every major metropolis, wandering city to city in its lingual stump, an equatorial twisting…to outlive infamy, outlasting even reality, on its way to becoming a symbol — with the mensch to whom it belonged to be remembered as a relic Himself, to be embraced but only in His toothy demise, its humiliation, whiteshrouded. A sickly veil. To then ask with this severance of His for another, if only He could, to wag its length into a question, to curl it, even at this remove, at such a sunder, around what appeal: to ask with it permission to leave, for leave to escape, to beg, beseech, bow down, to humble myself in the midst — a tongue that would be the brother of the snake of Eden treed before its Fall, a tongue with knees, I’m talking. Think of it, how to leave affairs all up in the air, rain-bowlike and at their highest arc, promising only the undecided unmade, the still unthought and forever unknown…redemption necessary to any expatriation, Him needing to be released from this bondage before He binds Himself anew (don’t begin when you haven’t finished, or — Hanna would often harangue along these lines); it’s maybe pitiful, perhaps abject, but faithful, respectful, honoring — this seeking of maternal permission, this wanting of a brotherly consent. To obtain His freedom from any Pharaoh with a heart significantly unhardened, melted to any sympathetic wet. To ask with a burnt, coalslowed tongue the only question to which an answer might be permitted, the answer of — do what you want, what you will, up to you. Affirming maturity. Independence. You’re on your own, grown up. I have a response. Anyone have a query? And if none would oblige? I’ll let myself go. Even more than I already have.