Joshua Cohen - Witz

How do I know this?

As if to ask, what’s red and white and bearded all over…it couldn’t have been him, no, you know, she didn’t even believe in him back when she believed, when she was supposed to — and how what you don’t believe in, it doesn’t exist…back home it’d been Jesus who’d brought them the presents, that infant martyred and not this sorry schlump.

Yes! she shrieks, forgive her, and finally sits up in bed next to her husband who’s up on his elbow suggesting remedies even more recondite between dictating nistering lists of anagrams, abbreviations, and other obscurities of formal propition, she’s telling him just yes, yes, that’s where I, no, I’m sure of it: he’d walked downstairs…

Havaleh my mamele, are you alright, say something, sh, don’t talk, don’t strain yourself, relax — you want I should fetch you a glass water, warm you some milk? Don’t tell me, speak up…

Blood, was it blood?

I’m not a mindreader, you know…

But she silences him with a thrown arm and a throwpillow, says to him God to anyone that the mensch, listen, how he crept himself his way downstairs down the stairs a little I think after midnight.

Hear me out.

I’d come upstairs to get a drink when the Underground went dry, which believe me that didn’t happen too often.

Underground where, Halvamind Hava…what are you talking, what’re you talking, you’re talking, still, are you possessed, has a dybbuk swallowed down your throat and’s speaking your tongue?

No, we met in the kitchen, that’s where we always, it was dark, always it was dark…the only light for memory this the dark of the kitchen where, and listen, that stain in the grout, guilt about my teeth, selfconscious the nick, the nook, the kitchen where Hanna she’s sitting and listen, it’s important, this is earlier, you understand, this was before, and she, how with her yogurtmouth, she’s pouring to me like another one, she said, with her dairymouth, she’d say, another one…like I don’t know whether I can go through with this with another, whether I can survive it, Wanda, him or her, whether I can you know or not handle it, manage, whether or not I can like deal.

But he wants a son, and maybe baby this one, this’ll be the One — really, like what, if any, am I supposed to offer her in return?

Israel, he really wants it, but I feel like…some sort of consolation, something Wanda’d thought, like maybe don’t worry, no, sh, not to fret — you’re no enabler, not a milkfactory, no churnerouter of babies…talking like she’s in this fancy schmancy mysticalized trance; the cheap pink curtains, minor defects in workmanship, a steal from the relative of a friend’s relative as always who knows not to ask, weeped around the opened window over the twocar garage and the driveway they swell out into stormclouds — and how I get myself to the cabinet first, she says she goes and opens it wide, that’s where they kept the liquor, high cabinet, you understand after Rubina she once, the highest left one of the two above the bedecked refrigerator, lists, magnets, photos, photomagnets, polarized lists all that dreck and, nevermind, just you listen…

If it’s liquor you want, a little l’chaim, alright so I’ll go down and kook what we have, Hava, but…

No, but I open the cabinet, and I don’t know why I don’t become a crazy person and just go shout my kopf off but no, how I don’t, I just open it, go to open it up and my hand how it’s on the handle thingie to the thing and his hand, God, this plumpery witheredly thing, icky with shvitz, and as quick as any random indignity — hear how it just swoops in, scoops up the little flask of schnapps, the only thing in there, the only thing left…

Schnapps, I don’t believe we have any schnapps, Hava.

Israel was never a shikker, you understand.

Israel? How’s your health, you’re feeling well or no, should I go get the doctor or rabbi?

Yes.

You want I should disturb them on a night like this?

No.

God, tell me what you want, Wanda-Hava Rosenkrantz, anything, anything within limits; it’s only a dream, only a dream, a dream only it’s…

And then how I let go the handle, she says she grabs onto the tiny bottle, surplus from a cousin’s barmitzvah, and how we struggle for it me and him, we pull back and forth me and him we push, which cousin I don’t know, never did, him tugging this thing, this flask of schnapps we’re wrestling for it with four hands now and he’s strong but he’s old and I’m strong and young then not anymore I pull it hard once and it comes loose from his hands, but I don’t have a hold on it lose my grip and it falls to the floor, shatters all over the place, the kitchenfloors, the tile little shards of glass stuck in a pool inground ocean of thickened red is it schnapps, everywhere just everywhere I stand there just staring at it, though I really should have been mopping it up I just, that’s what I did, my job what happened he just…

You just, Hava, I’m finished listening.

And then…

You know, some people have to work tomorrow.

You know, for a living.

I forget…it’s all over now, so long ago, how it’s ancient history getting older by the day that is night what with its stars three rolled hoch horch like eyes, falls into her pillow, her mother-inlaw’s, is soon sleeping so deeply she doesn’t even remember to snore, then next morning wakes up and her husband he regards her strangely but forgets by mincha home for linner and she herself, she has no memory whatsoever and yet come the coming of dusk that night she finds herself, why, preparing him a dunch the likes of which will destroy all hope for thought both rational and not.

The mensch leaves her there lamed, passedout on the floor, unconscious, unconscionable with her head knocked on the edge of an opened knifedrawer, mamash, believe it or not it’s the emes, rushes back up to B’s room, he’d just wanted a l’chaim, was expecting warmedgoodies, Ima’s milk, too, had been disappointed, decided then to keep his own self warm with blankets and covers, shuts the door, props the other chair up against it, Hanna’s, and B He’s awake now again, already sitting up in His bed He stares dumbly.

While downdownstairs of eternity, moons prior to moons, halves of moons, quarters, crescented slivers these falcate whatever miserly dieting wanes, Hanna pats at her swell, offers Wanda one more drink of this one doesn’t count, shot without label, nervously peeled, crumpled, and balled, she doesn’t know from liquor, anyway, neither of them do except Wanda who she wouldn’t admit, a celebration for the sake of observance, while she herself, Hanna, shouldn’t, must abstain, upon the advice of the life bottled within her.

This mensch pets with mitten His forehead thrice, then mutters again with shut eyes, holds a heart the left one as he shuckles a bissele more as he murmurs, strokes his beard, absentmindedly gripes from it all the dark hairs, curls his toes in his boots (schmuck he never took them off, left them to dry in the fireplace, he’s dirtying the house terribly inconsiderate who ever heard, how was he raised and by whom, let’s go to their house and burn the barn down, its stable for the reindeer and sleighs) then asks B, what, something, if He wants to see some pictures of his grandkinder maybe and B, iffy, was this His father, is this the mensch who’s been here seven now and one night previous, and if not, then what, if any, was the difference, and his right to sit in the Presence of, anyway nods an assent, how not to and the pictures they’re shownoff in the light of the mensch, his white, the beardhalo, balltopped cap’s gloriole, aureole, icebowed hairy halo illuminating the names of those depicted filledin-the-blanks, in red feltpen looped feminine along their snowywhite backs, where everyone was and, too, what they were doing or up to, who was married to whom and who was the whom and who else had who with whomever, what they all did to do well for themselves for a living and how they made or make out at it and the like, and how they’re all evilly elfin, small rodentlike things who don’t appear to have been made in the image of their Patriarch, if that’s what he is, but more in the opposite image, He’s thinking his under-developed, their undeveloped, the true deepest negative…until ‘Twas this knock at the door and the rednosed redeyed mensch he doesn’t rise, mouse a stir at all or even rattily twitch, merely gathers in his sack, cinches its strings tight. Hanna’s chair up against the door bolted, he’d leaned it there when he entered, came back up, it’d been purchased just last week with its twin at a discount and sugarplum soft in their vinyl upholstery, for both parents to witness their miracle they’ve never been sat in, remain unmoved, the room entire, decorated in baby’s blue for luck or hope, Mazel and filled full with stuffedanimals, pillows God everything else stuffed stomachs and heads and dinosaurs in their aeroplanes that’d seem ridiculous in a room belonging to a grown mensch, and He was grown, already, is, of B’s size by now, how the whole room is stilled: then, a softer knock pause knock knock knock at a door down the hall, the Master Bedroom maybe and the mensch stiffens, slowly rises from Israel’s chair, hesitant to go up to the door and feel a jambjammed and bleeding mitten at its fiery handle; as he rises — his chair tilts to collapse, legs knuckle, kneel, bow, Israel’s not replaced though it’s still under warranty but instead to become reassembled, weldnailed or glued perfectly together again by the Garden, in the Garden, in His own house again this one here once atop the Island atop the bay whose waters suicide themselves upon the coast of this world, as it’s known…only, then, to be burnt, to become ashed into perfection again only in the World to Come, if you’re familiar, if undead and hopeful — the covers go up again, go up over His nose, up over His eyes, blanket His forehead and hair.