Joshua Cohen - Witz

Goddamnit, General Support yells to himself, he yells everything, can you believe? Their dreck stunk in a week. We didn’t even have to fight over Shabbos…turns to his driver idling their Merc: you ever look deep into those eyes, son, I mean deep, cold and blue, unfeeling, stupid, I’m talking animaldumb? Nothing’s there, empty, knockknock, nobody’s home. He opens his door and jumps out to what’d been base camp HQ, his paunch wobbling crazily on impact, he’s put on twenty pounds since assuming command. He spits another thick wad, on a boot, then steadies himself amid the swirly dust and the skeletal sky, places that boot dripping on the tush of an old pair of uniform pants, issued by the renewed Levi-Strauss. He scans the goy’s number from the label — the name’s “Dowd, Peter Paul,” then radios into the SS, those Scrimpers & Savers, an unofficially cracked, ragbony platoon flown in from Upper Merion’s King of Prussia and Affiliate malls up and down the Siburban seaboard, northeast; the emes, a squad made up of the cheapest rattiest bastards ever raised by the most mental of mothers Rodentia: I’ve got clothes to cash, he says, I’ve got your pants here, your jeans, denim, real nice, say, tenthousand pair, decent condition, need a bit mending, shirts, too, size (checks a few collars from Dowd’s fellow grave) mostly XtraLarge, socks and shoes salvageable, Over, why not. Why’d we bother to clothe them, don’t ask me. Or bathe them and house them or what. I don’t give orders, I follow. Wallets and watches are mine, Over, but you better get here right quick for the organs — this Dowd’s passable young, liver and kidneys’ve got years.

At the further curve of their furthest circumambulation, way past the perimeter fence, into the spill of latterdays’ death — last nights ordered a rush, a mad frothing into morning’s calm bed, strawstrewn with dawn’s reddish strandlings, its braided rivers of blood…how they’d been directed to martyr quickfast, doubletime before that doubling month of Adar returned, and with it its moon ordaining that newest of holidays, the festival of Purim rededicated, with the Sanhedrin proclaiming it V-Day — the impassioned observance of our most recent miracle lately usurping an olden salvation, the random succor of lots (who gets to scavenge, who goes without); then beyond…Zaol I–VII, each encampment circumscribing the victory in an inset of rings, as if targets rippling out from camp to camps over fields that are field, plod after plot of this soaked, soaking earth, anything but plain — matted a rasp in barbarous curls, ringlets, snips, spikes, licks, and locks; a harvest wildly wilted this devastatingly untonsured spanse of wildform growth, this if not yet thinning, blondbrowning ground. A scatter of jaundice, scalps expressionlessly blank as picked clean of features…and then atop this all, red heifers, which are less prized nowadays considering they’ve been bred by the hundreds of heads, leaning to fat from their previous starve, they’ve been engineered to graze hereupon, to grave, teething up the crown of the crop: this yellowed to blond, this dark ginger darkening in its tear to dreck’s brown, exposed, with highlights of light henna, last dye grown out, still growing out even in death, lightest red streaked skylike with peroxide. Hair, coming up from the fields, as if grown by the very bald of the earth: there are heads buried down there, they’re up to their necks in it, mouthed nosedeep, at the eyes and then deeper toward the brittle crown, the pastured scalp; not screaming or shouting for help, not even blinking eyes or crinkling ears with wrinkly foreheads, no pain, and not much face left to time or interpret with: worms make their wriggly hurtles from nostril to nostril, socket to whistle of air between what teeth remain. Bodies planted, many suspect they’ve been purposefully planted: be patient, your certificate must be still in the mail…as a reminder to whatever fight might remnant a muster, a Resistance, Underground the underground, a.ny a.cronym that might never have had any name, whether boulder or bold, under which to wig or disguise (it was all, it’s been said, this sick Kapo’s idea, the work of the Austiner Rebbe, unofficially held to be one of the most vicious schmucks ordaining around).

Now, heifers don’t teethe — they tear by shaking their heads, No…denial, declination, as if they’re answering the only question they know: are you yet sated; meaning, hasn’t this been enough…they shake their own heads to shake the heads up and out of the ground, all recognizably mangled, a few still necking onto torso or limb, but most severed, decapitated, bulbously without body — corpses to be zipped up in unmarked shrouds then sold backcountry, to General Support’s old fratfriend, the Rebbe, who it’s been said brokers the deal with his brother, socalled, in truth that’s a rumor a ninetyyearold Palesteinian woman who keeps herself in a suite at the King David Hotel equipped for OR, vitals to be transplanted, alien blood contaminant, an impurity, spreading…as for the heifers, they don’t bite, son, they chew, I mean with their teeth, those dozens of them — they munch at the skull to swallow it all mealy and mushed, on down to the rumen, the reticulum, which is the ruminant’s primary stomach of many, too many; as many stomachs as there are heavens and more, there where these heads would further soften, loosening skin, bone and brain if only for all to be sent back up as cud, cycled, as if to return sustenance back to the earth, as if kvetching, not warm enough, overdone, a petty complaint, says General Support — it’s bitching, forgive them: then, they’d be chewed again, he goes on explaining to anyone he’s ordered to listen — how he’d raised cattle back home on the farm, remembering to his menschs a ranch out in Texas with a hundred head as he tells it, twice that on another occasion, down by the border I’m talking, a youth spent at Mexico’s edge…by the molars, he says, then swallowed back down to the reticulorumen, that’s its name, there past the papillæ, don’t ask, they resemble fingers, like tickling, you know, the acids, a giggling like, then the omasum, you with me, that’s where the water’s absorbed, the abomasum next, finally, the true stomach, the last in the ebb and flow of digestion until the intestine (right here — and he traces its snake down and around the stomach of a teenaged girl who’d died preggers), down that tract then muscled out the other end, he says, dreck and so forth, and then everything begins again, the cycle, sustenance and waste, the most intimate kind of return. Goddamnit, he says, ain’t it gorgeous? Nature, what nachas. This time of year daddy’d be preparing for spring. Insemination time, breeding the chattel. He was the first in the state to give up his pigs. We’re all very proud.

Heads litter the fields of the field as far as the wind. Aeroplanes, they’re no longer surveilling, they’re bombing again, friendlyfire, not quite: clearing the air to the east, destroying what evidence (of just one mensch’s interpretation of inhumanity, we’re talking the Rebbe’s, Protector of this particular quarter), along the way racking up not a few casualties civilian and service; besides the ostensibly humanitarian quorum of motherly maids, airdropped earlier and presently busy at their stations of triage, dusting at pants, removing pants, with their retractable rollers removing lint from garments deemed particularly valuable (at least with solid potential for resale: ostensibly unisex sweaters, sportsjackets, women’s wear, skirts and sundresses wrapped in unlabeled plastic, then hummered on out), nominally Affiliated peasants of almost every precarity’s allegiance are being exploded high from the earth that birthed them in what’ll have to be described as a regrettable instance of pilot error, or mechanical failure, whatever else the addressing of would help us improve what we do while at the same time justifying our taking the lives of these witnessing wretches — more work for the burntembered cows, whose own sacrifice, it’s argued, remains sacred only in how it might, through the absolution of their digestion, obliterate any ashed traces of this operation, our officialized sin the only merit of which has been the thoroughlessness of its execution: to breakdown, ferment then calm with muscles and water, this wasting away, to a soil, to soil — only to grow, which is to dissent, yet again…honorary menschs promoted poor of family, of language and nation, withered stalks impoverished by order and fear into ghastling groups, then assigned to their own dizzying but dwindling clocks of clearing and wood, equipped with pointed staves to pick up sharpfirst what inhuman trash’s been left behind from the camps and, offtime, as slaves, tolerated, to gather for their own any blown crust — what even the heifers won’t low to consume.