Joshua Cohen - Witz

And still she launders and presses and folds clothes, now for herself and for her husband, too, and soon soon enough please stop shushkeh shushkeleh we’ve shtupped all genug for the baby inside her she’ll name whatever her husband wants, but whom she’ll secretly call Benjamin: oy, it’s a boy, to be a boy, congratulations…may he kill you in kinderbirth, may you die at kinderbed, upon it what death could be better, a hearty Mazel Tov all around.

Spit spit spit.

O Adela, she thinks as she irons the skirts she’s inherited, each of her blouses, too…O Adela back home, Over There back dead with her relations, their blood.

And Spit.

And so now in the quietly massive hours of Shtum, with her husband sleeping on the side he picked out as his long ago, long before he ever had a wife, it’s the side he clung to even in the belly of his mother olev hashalom toward the left kidneyward as if a worrying growth, while he sleeps undisturbed, exhausted, womanspent and that for the first time in his life he would remember if ever he were in the habit of memory, knowing nothing either of her Wanda’s past besides her foreign ancestry, her vague though desirable eastness, which is what had attracted him to begin with, she says to herself in her own language though she thinks it, too, in our own (she can’t help it, that’s why she has him, why she’s having him — to have someone to speak with, someone to correct her mistakes), then hides herself down in her mouth and down to her gut, to rummage for Instinct long fallow: still troubling, that she still can’t place that odd ancient whoever he was who’d attended dinner at her house, theirs, the old theirs that night, The Night, or had he, stolen in, could he have and how, and how Hanna’d seemed to think that Israel knew him and how Israel of course had seemed to think that Hanna knew him had known him maybe and how the two of them they seemed to think that if not them then perhaps the Tannenbaums they’d invited him, had they, and why, maybe he was poor, or that his wife she passed on, he didn’t have a meal that night that Sabbath when Shabboses still were temporal; pants, something about pants, maybe, or other, sockshoes…and Hava she knows she didn’t know him and doesn’t, did she or remember him leaving, and maybe it wasn’t dinner at all, after all perhaps it was after, nuzzling her head into the pink give of the pillow, the downy maw, the wishniak’s hairily soft and softening mouth whose stem feels topped with a feather: he didn’t give a name she placed or could or ever and he laughed when appropriate but too loudly, insistently didn’t say anything else, and ate almost nothing, like a bird, like a boyd (her husband), didn’t eat anything at all or even drink; had he forgotten or what, who he himself was, God, who was he and how did he get there, did he, and what part did he play in this spiel, which, if any at all? Then, she sleeps, snores an ocean of skin out of her mouth to soak along the round of her form…where’d you get that idea, going geist into her mind she’s woken again in a screamed shvitz hers or his by her husband (the mensch, he’d just been promoted at the slaughterhouse to Head Knife Inspector, which is a position equal in rank to the Inspector of the Finenesses of Sandgrains Used in Hourglasses, he’d joke, I’ve certainly put in the time — how much he’s proud he usually sleeps without calm, a drippy and dreamless neurotic), who shakes her and holds her and holds and shakes her at once to tell her it’s all a dream, reassure, just a dream he’s shouting and what to invoke to ameliorate, to go downstairs and nextdoor to grab the three friends husband or wife and kinder required for the prayer, what’s their names: I have seen a good dream, you have seen a good dream, it is good and may it become good, may the Merciful One transform it to the good, may it be decreed upon it seven times from heaven that it become good and always be good, it is good and may it become good blah blah…sleepinghand grabbing for the manifold amulets that hang from the scald of a knob at the door to their room, the Master Suite’s something anything to ward off: maybe that string of wolves’teeth, the cask of oil luggaged home from Safed, a missed enunciation of the O so many Names…

But a dream: every tradition old enough to regard a dream, any dream, all, as both prophetic and meaningless knows the spiel — gehenna, they invented it: our tradition’s a longtime wanderer of the worn road Nezach to Hod. And so the meaning, if any? Who knows from meaning anymore?

The prophecy, though, in her mind, and I’m talking retrospective, prophecy of the past, to linger its moment, becoming moist between the legs, a smell seeping up from under the lawn, and she…though it’s impossible, isn’t it, she was downstairs, she was downstairs-downstairs, no, she was Underground, doing unspeakable things for money in those days; he, her husband, should never uncover that nakedness: Israel, a passionate lover, though oftentimes a premature ejaculator, these thoughts! had kissed his son after finishing his story, and the old whoever, whitebearded, did he, peeked a chin in from the flue of the fireplace for show; she wraps herself tightly amid the tender errant down of her arms, the sheets of her mother-inlaw, her shviger’s her name warm to the tongue unlike her, struggles with the angel if it even is an angel and not Moloch Him or Itself, never quite figured that out either, Who kisses this into her mind, lips to impress rivulets, riverine valleys of wighair down her neck how she sleeps with it on so as not to forget, lapse the Eden then default on the mortgage…he’d a beard white like a billygoat’s, an old mensch she thinks, no goy, God forbid in whose house and foundationally ancient, maybe from the synagogue as old as all menschs are or once were, his beard she remembers, though, the color, or lacking color, of snow, of Nitor it’s said, a whiteness shining, a purity, a moon just like a shekel unsparing above. Had he come down through the chimney? Leave me alone! I’m a newlywed wife and a mama-to-be, not a prophet or soothsayer of secondhandom! Be gone and cast thee out yadda yadda psht.

He seemed if not at least tired then overly so, swung his watch, hanging his stockings o’er the ledge of the fireplace stuffed with varicose evidences of worry and work.

O thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder, the young lioncub and the dragonviper shalt thou trample under feet!

Is’d kissed B, Hanna’d always used words like smooch, smackeroo, how’d she expect me to learn her language like that…had to almost reach up on the tips of his toes to kiss Him and where, on the hot head, some say, upon the fevered forehead, others, lips spreading their pursy unsmiling mark to stretch love’s skin across the head of His loins…a pressure, a taut tingling in the prostate — then left to attend to his wife, their Hanna resting up from her exertions and cooking, the cookingbirth, the usual that she’d say the ush upon that Shabbat almost day, how that strange old liverish mensch, a skinned fatty garbed in warning red and pure white sashed how he’d later found Him left-overstuffed, then talked his way upstairs, upstairs-upstairs and to His room, nudged close, sat on a chair closer, B still diapered in a new white shirt fastened snugly around Him even on the second button of its adjustable cuffs, a pinpoint Oxford of His father’s, which were all of them too small for Him, too tight, bursting the buttons, rips in His torn, everything hanging out O the shame the embarrassment, Talmud says it’s worse than death: mortality, mortification is, and so why’m I raving like this, she asks herself (but she shouldn’t be too alarmed — you know how hard it is to get a Get these days, you wouldn’t believe how expensive, too), the mensch he shuckled a duchen maybe there in his chair, Israel’s up in the room how he muttered a few words more he had to shut his eyes to remember, then got himself up.