Joshua Cohen - Witz

Regarding the occupants of Room Number Six, it’s been related: how they aren’t processed, aren’t to be trained to a camp, and — gedenk gedenk, there’s no time for that: we have schedules for such things, please, playful though they are, timetables based on contingency alone, there are interpretations to respect, goddamnit, adherence to the earth’s spin, you know, deadlines dwindled two-by-two, to one then none and, anyway, it’s quicker without that fuss. Mishegaseous, foolishkeit. Ludicrous. Say what you will still the menschs ascend, they come up tall and slim, fairhaired and eyed, two-by-two in an endless doubled row bowing to double back down the stairs to the lobby; holding their uzis and assaultrifles, Palesteinianmade, like they know what they’re doing, they probably do. Topquality, highcaliber, I can get you a steal. As for the starstriped, pitystripped mensch leading them, let’s introduce: he’s the Austiner Rebbe, Rav Schmearson’s his name, son-inlaw of the Maggid of Rome, a cousin to the Butcher of Bakersfield, the Seer of Waco, the Gaon of South Central Texas. He holds a revolver in a glove said to be made from the hide of his parents, whom he’d sacrificed atop an extemporaneous altar, his sister, itself oblated upon the Polandland plains (which action had earned him his rep, such as it is): it swaddles so well that the hand beneath might as well be holy, Godguided. One of his own sons-inlaw, an iluy known as Tavarish, or the Light of Bukhara, follows to his side, a step behind. This squadron has its orders they’re just following’s the line they’re now leading (less directive than inspiration, makeshifty do: a line they’re butting and cutting, no respect for its delivery, no respect for its time), up up and winding up the stairs, death to mass on the landing, then wait. The Austiner Rebbe gloves a knock, that most ancient knock, wait for it, knock, knock, knock, a warning as presentation, appropriate, taken as given: this the oldest ritual of late middle night, that of respect tendered to death, the honor due anyone with a door so properly marked with mezuzah, be you prophet, profiteer, or innocent wretch. Inside the room, all seems suicided, spare of heart, stripped to rib…skeletonly tossed with what must follow flesh, a sullied strewing of plots: scuffed luggage, unlaundered clothes, stacks of cash; though humanly empty, it appears, and too much so: the emptiness of them alive more void than that of them in death, is the thought, with an ear hushed to the wood and a nose that’s fit for a key — the Rebbe’s, he’s patient, and stroked. A silence broken only by the treble of their tremble — too, it’s the clocktick, the rattle of the handle, it’s locked. To fit a finger, to try with the other hand, but it’s from the inside it’s locked, and no neysim are left us. The Rebbe takes a step back, gives his nod for the door’s slamming, to be rammed down a trample of Shalom and schlub manners: a not yet sacrificial Ovis aries is led up the stairs, its noisy leash of bare chain passing from mensch to mensch; it’s then muzzled in the right direction, thwacked on the tush with the butt of a gun…to scurry, to scamper: its testicles afling, its wool spattered in dreck then the glint of its horn and the door, it’s flattened down to the floor, hinges ripped from their frame in an explosion of air — they’ve been running the heatingbills way up, as if to prewarm what World’s to Come. A clouding, a balm. Their Rebbe dismisses the ram, kisses at the mezuzah remaining enjambed. He steps into the room, his boots trooping out over the wood, marking each step stiff with a whip of his crop to the thigh; making rigid starkdark paces across the worn planks, he then turns to hold up a hand to prevent his followers from doing what it is they do best, which is following: henchmenschs wait, as if ordered to disorder on the landing; they’re shuckling, jostling one another back and forth they’re whining what they think’s silent suggestion as their Rebbe heels out a chair, hardbacked, from the cedar desk unassuming, and sits down to face the bed barren, settling his crop across his chest as if in the burial of the Pharaoh he’s trying his damnedest here to impression.

Shalom, he says, finally, they’re meeting at last, hello Die, or should I say Keiner or Keyn Or, the Keeper, or whatever you want to be called…takes a schmeck tabak from a pocket’s pouch: it’s an honor to do this in person, I’ll tell you, hand to God, I have nothing but the utmost respect…he sneers deep from his drool, crosses his boots, then goes on: we didn’t want you to be a statistic, a number, a figure, not you, not like the good doctors Tweiss, Abuya, the Nachmachen, not like them. But one thing bothers me (and it’s not my rheumatism, though thank you for asking), if you’d be so kind as to enlighten me, I’d love to know how you people think. Why not accept destiny, that’s what I want to know, fate — why not Affiliate?

I know you’re there, you have to be, this is how it goes down…I had this dream, last night, or the night before last, what does it matter: there were seven beds for seven brothers, a hotel was burning and in the lobby there were cows servicing crows with the faces of inlaws, I think they were mine, that and a droughty famine in Sheboygan, or Oshkosh, or…I know how it all happens, don’t ask, I just don’t get why.

We admit, we had our suspicions…but we knew you weren’t yourself a firstborn once Passover passed. That proved it, sealed your goyishness with the New Year, and, as such, the gates. You’ve been trapped. Cornered. Put to bed. Nowhere left. He scratches at his breath of a beard, tugs payos, waits, takes his hat, all ten gallons of it from his head and leaves it on the desk to bare the yarmulke beneath, which is black and leather, expensive. I’ve been asked, nevermind by Whom, to attempt to save you one last time. You’ll have no further opportunities after this — are we understood…and he rubs the cap down over his skull, the kippah keppied between the eyes as a third eye, negativedark as if omniscient of everything wrong with the room: you’re here, you’re still alive, this I know…

He shpritzes tabakinate spit through his teeth to the floor, no matter, no one has to live here much longer…his mouth, a host of gold caps, dulled with black cud, whose essence is humming, Hatikvah — softly, it’s more for himself.

Enough already, there’s a voice from under the sag as if it’s the fisted talk of a last lost sock — and after all I did for that schmuck, that ingrate, B…

We don’t speak that name anymore, says the Rebbe, He’s not one of us. He’s the only.

I’ll be the first to admit it: we once were misled, a mistake, we relent and repent the required, the slichus and vidui by the minhag most recent, most true, but listen, it’s this…we realized it was our responsibility to further the nation, ours and none others’—not only to keep them, but to keep their memory, too, I mean burning…let’s speak honestly, though, the ninth commandment, I’m told: The millennium was upon us, the whole West was at stake, God was being debased, if not forgotten whether as He, She, It, or ideal, the entire world, you might remember, was going insane…and amid all this, you just can’t let a people like ours come to nothing, and only for power, only for profit — neither of you were to be trusted…

And now you want to destroy Him, the only inheritance left…Die rolls over to face his voice out into the room, hits his head on a spring unwound into nail, improvident, dull, gives a rusty gasp that knocks the frame’s knees, unsteadies the paws upon which everything rests, uneasily: God how He angers you, gets under your skin, on your nerves and not in your veins, no matter how much you suck, graft or grasp; anyway you slice it, I’m saying, He’s in the way, He’s too much the symbol, it pricks, how it hurts — the memory vex: His very existence, it reminds you of your own…