Joshua Cohen - Witz

Blond and curly, His head full, frosty it seems sometimes, at other times golden — an inheritance, many have speculated, from a lover of a grandmother six times maybe great, willed to Him by some archduke or other minor noble who’d kept her, others hold, who this landed notable was sleeping also with the woman’s sister, Benjamin’s greataunt five times over. How else are we to explain, the scholars have asked, how else to explicate, to reconcile, call to account: how Benjamin received His own two eyes, as blue as a recessive flame, from a Cossack, even a Nazified Aryan, who’d perhaps raped a grandmother of His, though it’s said she’d liked it. How else to represent His full, Elvis kingfishy labial traits than as an inheritance from an Iberian peddler of fraudulent Scripture; His belly unmistakably that of a bearish Russian, hulking over the scrawny poultry limbs of a Pole; His nose that of a lusty Gypsy priest ordained in the Orthodox church, if only for the salary and shelter, or maybe that of the fake Father’s cow: a sinful snout, gigantically puffed; His heart, that of the most kindly Venetian whore, while others say her pimp, and as for His mind, O His mind — that of a rumpled, sleepless Viennese, who’d breathed feuilletons between aphorisms, his sperm a spurt of ink. As for the horns, though, that later horn in, those He gets from His mother…don’t look at me.

And so if the record above withstands judgment, the Tests, ten or no, and all its facts, names, and dates are for sure, verified, God’s honest, signed, sealed deliverance received with a profusion of thanks due to ineffably named offices as obliging as they might be obscure, then despite all the goyim involved, despite all the Prussians, the Russians, the pull and push of the Poles, His Affiliation is here proven, thus exiling any rumor, defamation, and libel outside the midst of our encampment: that though His father was not born Affiliated (how he’d allowed himself to become converted, out of love and, maybe, to get a job as an outwardly respectable lawyer with a decent firm of impeccable reputation), His mother was, was born Affiliated and, as the Law states more than once and simply, the bloodline lives and dies by the mother: this the opinion of one Rabbi Yosi the Galilean, who’s not to be confused with yet another Rabbi Yosi, whose Talmudic ruling permitting circumcision on the Sabbath would be invoked by both Hanna and Israel throughout the eight days following the Shabbos birth of their son, regaling their family, friends, and acquaintances and even those they’d meet on the street or at the store with the wisdom received — that circumcision, as a covenant that predates that of Sinai, in fact supersedes and defers the Sabbath Herself, and can indeed be thought of as more sacred, holier; how their rabbi had told them that, the same family rabbi who would’ve circumcised Him on that very Shabbos, had he been a firstborn himself, and survived. And what then, we might ask before we’re carried any further away from His origins, into the realm of history being written and rewritten today, what then of Ruth if you know her, Ruth a relative from way back then, toward the Root? Ruth that Moabite, that hardluck, hardliving gleaner, her bundling sheaves enough to last her the bitter cold of the winter that was also her womb, the widow of Mahlon, daughter-inlaw of Naomi and wife of Boaz, that almona aguna whose calling’s the confirmation of everything: her book ending with a genealogy of its own no less confused than that that’s been given above, which leaves her, through the seed of Obed and the water of Jesse, as the bubbe to end all bubbes — the grandmother of King David, and so, as tradition always tells us, the Matriarch of the Messiah: the King of Kings, if you will, May His Name be Perpetuated, Increased, to be from the upwardly mobile egg of a fallen, shellshattered mother; the Moshiach, the son of a convert, who would believe…Israel, are you there — what, if anything, does that explain?

Allow us, then, this walk down the blocks, these blocks or those that resemble them, as it doesn’t much matter, as it’s all the same nowhere, it’s home; the grid of the suburbs. Siburbia, as Israel often called it, if nowhere can be called, if nowhere can be known, the tundra, the wasteland, quarter century later how Hanna’d still laugh when he’d say it, even if he’s late home from the office and hasn’t called her ahead, heard her voice to humor it silent. It’s kept tranquil here, wherever. Our myth is affluent, it ensures quiet, permanency, solitude lit and with multiple zones of heat — whichever way you might turn in this northless, southless world, there’s this sense of perpetual arrival, at stasis, though traditions of ascent are still observed daily: up is always an option, and down is the grave.

Here are the streets, though they lead only to other streets — and all are sidewalks, if not in purpose then practice. Only the road leads out, and only the adults, the grownups, know the one street of the incomprehensibly infinite streets that are all of them sidewalks that leads to the one road leading out, to somewhere or other. Shalom in peace. O the sidewalks, the sectioned pathways here that lead nowhere, only to other pathways leading to nowhere, then intersecting in crosswalks, crossing streets and lanes and avenues, ways and even boulevards and courts in white lines — and that one road still, where is it, where does it go?

Here it’s safe, but Ima says to look both ways just to make sure.

The one road out is the one road in, into the sanctum, the penetralia — a lot where once the Development had planned to build a pool, but the depths were drowned in committee, rezoned.

Instead, His house had been raised thereupon.

And then out — the one road leading into the one wider world, it’s said, into the Unkempt, the Unmanaged, God knows.

Ima says to be careful, don’t talk to strangers.

And yet here, no one’s a stranger — as you might know where they live, with whom, what they do and even how much money they make at it, though you’ve never met them, they’re yours…

Everything inside is the domain of the Gatekeeper.

In this world there are always brotherhoods, clubs, orders, or organizations, nearly illimitable loyalties each with their own mottos, intricate insignia of the fingers secreted in handshakes, all to prove affirmation for meeting nights, dissolving between resolutions into allegiances of individual necessity — and so verily there are fraternities within fraternities, lodges within lodges, loyalties within loyalties, divided then subdivided again and again to a degree of confusion at which you just can’t, don’t, won’t keep up with them anymore and so go and give it up for mishegas, nonsense, cleaving instead to an overly simplistic interpretation of the world, your loss. Our Gatekeeper here is a member in good standing of the Gatekeeping Lodge, they all are, those of every Development — them sharing intelligence, methods, techniques, these guardians of the protocols of entrance, upholders of the rituals pertaining thereto, their loyalties perpetually divided between the efficient maintenance of the flow of traffic and persons in and out of their respective Developments, and a professional satisfaction to be found in proper inconvenience, the pride they must take in postponement, delay. An expert, this Gatekeeper knows every reason to counter excuse, and will countenance no exceptions, nor explanation. His domain is a heated, insulated lodge nearly the size of a house such as those his position’s foresworn to protect, situated parallel with the road at the landscaped mouth of this luxuriously prefab Joysey Development — this Gatekeeper’s last, most deluxe assignment, almost a retirement, he’s still getting paid. One Thousand Cedars its name, but who’s counting?