Joshua Cohen - Witz

Through the Employees’ Gate, which is less a gate than the secret weedy mouth to an underground tunnel to probable sewers, the catacombs, the basement bodied in the form of the worms that once sustained themselves on their filth — worryingly late in punching in, Peddler and Wife of Peddler make their hurried way through the tunnel to its terminus: a gutter’s cover just beyond, a grating, heft it and descend fast down a ladder then down that passage through to their respective prep areas, there to wash, appropriately dirty and then uniform themselves as quickly as possible, to avoid being reprimanded if not penalized, having any fine deducted from pay. In their personalized lockers, all their worldly possessions — in this world: all the accoutrements of their trade, which is peddling whatever’s to peddle, husband & wifing, they’re peasants, they’ll do what they’re told. In the M’s for Mensch’s area, everyone’s already arrived, prepped and ready to work: boker tov this daily briefing…these rabbis and priests, these lepers, the schnorrer and shylock and solicitous shtadlan, a merchant and shochet, a baker and a candlemacher, this taperer who he’s also a careful eggcandler, the latter three fumbling still with the strings to their aprons. Tie me up, doubleknot, thanks. A calendar’s confirmed by an announcement over the employee PA: Plague’s scheduled for tomorrow at 1400, then a flood, to be followed by famine, next Thursday at 0845; next week, advance notice…gevalt a pogrom — Friday night, you’ve been warned. An old regime, the previous Management, which had been aged, morbidly obese, had fallen, on any last rung or step that itself was a wall, an ironcurtain; they’ve been exiled out, in favor of these pretenders, impersonals, who are only the usurping real, those who hold the true birthright to this nowhere, lately corrupted in the service of money, its pursuit and ambition, we’re just hustling, getting ahead in the newest of worlds spinning around and so fast there’s no ahead, there’s just now: the Peddler’s parents today earning more as farmers who don’t have to grow anything than ever they’d eked out as real, true farmers who really grew, for subsistence, for the good of the State…Peddler’s Wife’s mother lately working nights in a glass factory, huffing souvenirs until her lungs would give out; they once remembered, though only vaguely, and not anymore, a property once owned, that’s still owed them (but how lately they don’t have much to complain about: they’re working, finally free, how life works — made employees of existence, hired merely to be, to breathe their own native air, paid to stand around wherever scheduled and scratch, to putter around plots, to peddle itchy of finger, though stomached with guaranteed salary, door-to-door-to-door through the hotels, around their lobbies and pools). Mayor’s an excellent position, wellpaid, though the Mayor’s also the municipal Treasurer, the Second Assistant Poultry Inspector on alternate Monday afternoons, a Sunday Horse Trader, a Thursday Horse Thief, though during Carnival Time (dates vary, spring) he’s assigned to the rear of the pantomime, the equine tush, you do what you can, all the best. Horses, the real ones, here they’re mostly just showy, they don’t have to work much: they’ve been trained to neigh on demand, and when they drop, and O how decoratively they drop, out of nowhere ride the hostlers and a stable of squiring grooms, many of whom are by now too old for this work (most of the native young have already left, or — disappeared; it’s all about innocence, that of their memories: as youth’s too painful and blushing, it doesn’t reproduce so well in black & white, official colors of the frontoffice); despite their age, then, despite their knees, spines, and their ridiculous shortpants, buckled shoes, tricorner hats and flounced cravats, how they’re uniformly quick to cleanup.

Are you following, the Guide asks, any questions?

How [much is this]?

How [much is] this?

How [much] is this?

As you can imagine, everything’s been thought out well in advance, all problems have been solved for them, already — save that of language, which is unthinkable, which is unsolvable, irresolvable, what, I don’t know the word…

Good Morning/Good Day [afternoon]/Good Evening/Good Night — excuse me, do you observe afternoon…afternoon, can you say afternoon, can we say that — is there even any afternoon here?

No speak __________________

And no light.

A resolution, though, has emerged: it hasn’t been offered, only recognized, and in public (it’s been around since the very beginning). It’s money, many say, that money renders language meaningless, makes it peripheral if not unnecessary, for the pleasure of purists alone. Money speaks for them, for us, more exactly and more fluently than does anything else. No speak, pay me. I don’t understand, I’ve busted, gone broke. Here, the stores for the Tourists are invariably small interests, smalltimed husband and wife handlers their shopworn concerns hustling a double as restaurants and drinking establishments, extensively understocked: ten or so dusty cannedgoods, their provenance as obscure as their contents, if any contents at all, spaced at uneven but you can bet (a gambling parlor’s in back) exactly surveyed intervals along the rickety shelves; whereas stores for the Employees, invariably tenanting underground, are stocked like you couldn’t believe, with the newest merchandise imported available, the shiniest and most desirable that their new paychecks could ever afford. Browsing on their way back to their hotel (which is in a building formerly known as the Castle), the Lays are ignored by the Employees they pass, and those they’re actually scheduled to encounter as they pass, ignored except for the latter’s encountered litany of approved snide glances, appropriately angry sneers, willfully obscene textbook gestures, an entire repertoire of unspoken derision (in passing). I [want to purchase] this, phrasebooks Misses Lay holding up something or other, and the shopkeeper laughs: everything’s for sale except that’s what he means, and so she picks up another object, yet another thing selected and she waves it around; everything’s for sale except that, too; there are currencies within currencies she soon realizes, languages within languages, and misunderstanding abounds: anything you want or need is exactly that that’s not available, if only today; tomorrow might be different, come back then; feign disinterest, pretend disgust; anyway, who has the money or time. As they leave, out past the slovenly benched menschs and wenches employed to smoke and drink the day down — in a frenzy of folkdress, every national costume conflated: ledered in hosen, dirndled in tracht, alongside sarafans and kosovorotkas — they’re saluted from across the unlit space with toasts and flicks of ash that might be mocking, or vernacular love; to sidestep the owl feaked on a gauntlet left by the end of the bar, pecking at the foam of a beer or on the crumbs of a sausage or roll; to wind their way around a miniature bear, the bartender/shopkeeper’s pet, unmuzzled and up on two legs standing to beg for another shot, just one more, on a stool of only one leg, which falls from underneath it for the animal to gnaw planks from the floor — it’s a rug now…then, finally to nimble over the Drunk, passedout in the doorway, mind your step, and how he’s the Mayor, too, whom they’d forgotten they’d met just earlier in yet another capacity.

Outside, their Guide gathers them together again, then leads on: a lot nextdoor, in which neighbors are employed to argue goodnaturedly, next to a lot in which neighbors are employed to argue not so goodnaturedly: they’re each selling the other their daughters, their wives, their wifedaughters with breasts like umlauts over buttocks like vowels, they’re uxoriously unloading, renting out the loving labor of their tractorhorses, leasing that of their avuncular sons; the Lays are hurried past (they’ll be late even for their strongest reservations, is why, hold my hand), the Laychocks, the Laycocks, the Laycox, the Laydens, and Layes, and whoever L’s else as their Guide persists in umbrellaing out sites of a General Interest, often not as much providing information as merely reciting the facts to them directly from plaques: everything’s been labeled, of course, every property, every house, shack, field, outhouse, destabilized stable and nationalized fence, every square and alley and courtyard, every brewery/winecellar, smithy/whorehouse; there are donation plaques on just about all: This Tub Was Donated By Rabbi & Rebbetzin Mordechai Rockafella; This Trough , and yadda; This Fountain; This Pump; This Bird (oy, so they put a plaque on a familiar bird, flying low) Has Been Donated By The J.P. Morgen & Rabinowitz Co. ; everything fixed up, reinforced, all foundations set firm, all gloss removed, then reapplied, glossedover again, two coats, thrice colorless now, façades restored, insides dusted with dust, aged to a perfect decay…