Joshua Cohen - Witz

Holding the chalaf high, the Rebbe now, without hesitation, slits down, silently fast — and from blameless steel, the stream of a fountain, a gush of blood wandered with the tread of his boots toward the doorway then through it, life heeled, stepped into stain…a heavythick spurt of ice from outside, the latest sky shot through with stars, freezing on their ways down sodden, and smashing: the flow of the artery Most High severed upon the horizon’s own sharpness, it soaks through the air, its purity pouring to empty the other edge of the night: our vessel lacking a single shard and so leaking through such darkness, light…then, there’s a last clasp of thunder from lightning’s strike at the breast — the Rebbe turns on his heel as Die, limp, falls with the sun.

And the moon with Shabbos now rises.

Me, I’m still being me…I don’t have much of a choice, stuck out of the one window of the one remaining wall of a house destroyed atop a mountain, I am. Eheyeh. It’s been many hopes, this structure fallen, mostly ruined save its last windowed wall just last moon, had incarnated the dreams of untold — it’s as if their last dream’s this whitewall itself, with them willing it, from their furthest sleeps, to maintain a last stand against memory’s lapse, and so to maintain my sentinel: from most recently to its oldest origin, it’d been quartering for Affiliated Forces, then before that a warehouse, before that a stable, just prior a priory church, an orthodox chapel, then a synagogue, a shul, even earlier the home of a family of let’s say peasants, what to do: home of the husband’s parents, home of the parents’ parents, the parents’ parents’ parents’ home, I forget how far forever — their hallways dug out, leading deep into the watery past, twisted passages seeking hospitable wine and the dregs of firm rooting, the native soil of a creation story, an origin myth making much of a Garden’s two trees with their multanimous branchings of telling and told…giving way to the rooms of my others, passing into homes of their own: their own earthgraves, dwelt amidst wells only a little leap further — there at my echo’s other foot, this overlook’s opposite slope.

Enough to say, this had been the house of my ancestors, the ancestral home of my mother’s side, Ima’s, Hanna her name was; though essentially peasants, they were once the richest in this village below, or this town, from which they’d impoverished themselves enough to emigrate from, to immigrate to — and thank God for that…enough to say, this might’ve been my own home, too, think of that, only if.

Their home, it’d actually been a guardhouse, given to them in return for their work, which had been guarding, without fences or gate: these families, mine, had been Messiahkeeps, were kept always on the lookout for the Moshiach, imminent the Redeemer in Whom we believe though as we’re always so quick to say though He tarry —and so theirs was perpetual work, perpetualizing, and yet amply provided for, with a chicken every Friday and fresh milk twice a week, courtesy of those whose salvations they were ensuring, just a fall or shofar’s call down the slope: saviorseekers they were and that’s why, it’s thought, the dwell and its wall had been left atop the hill above the round valley and its settlement squared down below; maybe spared through displaced superstition, as if to destroy the thing would be to destroy future hope, and then again, perhaps it’s survived only out of a moment’s respect, or from symbol: never know when its vantage might come in handy again…O the handcup, the jubilant summons: they were supposed to wait there until the resurrection of the dead, then muster the living with primitive hoots and alarms. Disturb their mundane’s what, interrupt diaspora for an ingathering to where, they weren’t sure: how the people once here and now dead, they only engaged and supported such watchwards because the town, or the village, was located so far away from everywhere else that they were afraid the Messiah would miss them, or that they might miss Him in His coming, and so their stand and the conflict, again, as to where exactly to paradise to — whether the market city, or Jerusalem, if it’s the capital — once the day would dawn of their reckoning, if. And nu, how it was only my relatives among them who’d hoped that that light would never arise, what with the poultry, the butter churningup the holiday tips, free aliyahs and kavod galore — not the only people, though, for whom exile workedout, meant success…not the only people who’d hoped against Eden in their fortress defense of a livelihood, the health and happiness of their kinder — before relocating to America thinking they’d made it, done with all that custom and boredom, only to hope there anew and this time around with a longing that’s greater than ever: hymn, waiting on the corner for Mammon to show, streetside peddling their apples and patience.

As for me, I was hoping the window led out…mystically, hoping above the above, upstairs-upstairs-Upstairs, but no: it’s new town, old evil; new village, only the newest of ruins…eastern form razed razed razed to its very foundation; inhabitants unable to be raised despite the hurt of my howling, whether they’re in hiding or dead, hiding in death, who’s to ask. Skeletally stripped, rippedopen staircases spiraling turretwork, tower’s marrow…what’s a spire and what’s a smokestack, what’s a building or was and what’s grave or a tomb; from this vantage, resembles a cemetery. I lean, I’m leaning, to search, to find, to root amid roots, to moon amidst the maternal…deeply, too far. Finally — painfully, I birth myself from out of the window, tumbling to snow, then down the flank of the mountain, which flows into this plot’s main and only prospekt, when I have none to speak of, and that as no speech. Though even if talk I had in me how, there’d still be no words for where: bombedout, clearedout and out destroyed, then salted with ice so that nothing would grow again, ever. Fallow without jubilee. I fall from the summit of the hill behind me on down to egg the nest of its valley: as if a wedding’s lost band its circumferential containment, the ring of its bind, my mother’s and tarnished…toward its Square down its slope I’m hurtling steeply through the Square proper, which is unpaved, packed earth — only to land slammed against the pediment of a spire forlorn, a towering topple…its Plague Column, I think, what’s called a Pestsäule: a bestially marbleized swirl.

Not quite (which was Aba), have patience as Ima herself would’ve said and I’ll tell you: it’s a schlong…you know of what I’m talking, she’d say, it’s a putz, that’s what, the kind that crawls down below…without legs, to forever beg on its belly for affectionate time — it’s flaccid now and so distended from its plinth, hanging stubbily shrunken atop the dust as if lazily asleep, unaroused. A clotting of vein and frozen gray uncircumcised fleshiness, I’m looking it straight in its eye, without sense. I get myself up and stand a little, then long; entranced, waiting to expect what, I don’t know.

From sunrise on the next morning, which is the Shabbos, the holiest day of the cycle against which this dial’s intermediary shadow has been erected opposed, it begins to fill itself up, to pump stiffly with life as if sucked from below: taller and thicker it grows, its foreskin retracting, until an hour or so before the highest pitch of the day, and there as if dinged struck, stricken at the headhuge clap of the sun, ringing out the sky’s call to account, everyone rise — it’s up fully, and fat and hot, too, melting the weather from around the platform upon which it’s risen, a puddle, a pool…pulsing immaculately in the midst of the Square, and then above the village, the town — expanding hillhigh, extending mountainously and yet soon, as presently noon, casting no shade to speak of: pinkening then fully red and rashy as if alarmed angrily, made mad, and heftily hard, too, with the undiminished course of blood urged up from the earth — life spilled being absorbed again and again into time, and its telling.