Joshua Cohen - Witz

A rumor was, you enter America through the mouth of the Green Eve — the exit for New York is through her, you know where.

It’d been said that Columbus, the first of their kind ever to schlep to these shores, had been buried in her pedestal, which is the shul upon which Liberty stands.

The first thing these indigenes did was change coin, barbaric practice — conversion, to redeem their souls from the shadow of their passage, to give salvation another name, yet another number and face. Money in a pouch worn around the neck, a talisman: be careful, suspicious, trust no one, know not even yourself…your left hand a stranger to your right long may it be lost; brothers, cousins, a plumber in Brownsville who sponsored your visa, he happened to’ve been given the same last name as yours, no relation save that he was the only one of ten Buchalters to answer your letters sent out as blind as you’ll be soon enough: into the wide and unknown and unknowable, unreadable, just keep your mouth shut and they won’t know your language, your cries, that of a baby just arrived to meet its father remarried, refathered, and with a roomful of new daughters of sons (kitchencornered like a roach, like a rat, toilet closeted down the hall), an uncle of late only a series of letters himself, but in the wrong ink, in the wrong hand and unsigned, Dearest Yossele without love, with demands, or just silence, rejection, better to be left alone conjugating the following verbs: To conjugate, To deport, b’shalom…to be sent ashore, dashed, sundered, washed up, your money in a pouch worn round the neck, nametag which day of the week, meet me at the port in winter at the pier, I’ll be the one in the hat — to flee from the very face of their interrogating oppressors, whose faces were theirs even then and still are, clutching what they can from their klatsch, a few rags you’d never call clothes, quilt of feathers, a rye whiskey, a necklace of sausages, money in a pouch worn round the neck, the fee for their freedom and not for their life, which if we’re talking money is frankly a waste, all these dollars a head, the littlest son traveling hidden pouchswaddled, wounded round the neck; their documents in hand held out over land as bridges of bone, of skin and hair, in wagons, in carriage and britzka, cart and droshky, laundaus hauled by horses lamed and of relations, on sonback, on brotherback, and on foot, to go among swindlers, smugglers, robbers and thieves, evils both amateur and official, travel bureaus, shipping company representatives, I want a new globe…midnight flights from burning houses cool of hearth, border crossings only a matter of stepping high over an obstructing stump; swim through the fog, piss out the flame, make no more smoke than do they.

Furtively they trek overland to the ports, to the pier, money father’s money our money mine it’s all mine in a pouch wound round the neck to choke I can’t breathe it’s the air, it’s suddenly fresh! bribes and fares, trains and hay, pump trolleys, basket and blanket hides and ruses, tradetricks and secret signs and shibboli, Uwaga! Poci g, Achtung! Zug, ! , signs such signs, inns with a highest window open just enough for that to be a sign, too, lofts, luck and prayer, which if answered is luck, the prayer that is sickness and the luck that is unremitting disease: trachoma, a disease of the eye that’s treated with silver nitrate, the same compound of chemicals used to treat photographs, to develop ourselves in their image, favus, tinea favosa, a scalp infection that results in the making brittle of hair, eventually in jaundiced balding, and can only be treated with carbolic oil, which had often been tinctured into a syringe, then injected into our hearts to kill quickly, overwhelming with pain; the survivors live on lice that themselves have lice, atop cots in ship’s bowels amid the knots of intestinal hammocks, the menschs here the womenfolk there, separation by bulwark, holy freight, sacred stock, the sanctuary of an overturned lifeboat, a boat within a boat stacked atop a ship that goes somewhere upon which one can go nowhere, lolling depression in swells, seasick and hungry and thirsty with water all around — the ocean an eye tearing in salt; to drink from an eye is abominable, as your throat might be slaked but your tongue will be blinded — and then again, that enormous and rusted metal idol standing atop a pediment tiered in the excrement of tired gulls, grasping a torch and a book, which is this book and all other books, too, neither burnt, nor yet burning.

Yet another flight, a stampede, a rumpus, a regular old Kessel Garten, you know it? First and Second Classes disembarking themselves orderly first and second, thirdly the steerage last, ruddering columns buttressing cots in the bowels of the ship without limb, the sway of unsettled stomach rigged of hame, of hammock emptily swaying under the weight of unregistered ghosts, phantoms released on no one’s recognizance, specters without papers made of ashed papers, to float over the gangplank the bone of a Cossack, his horse, the hamate, the hanging halyard, the Gibbet, fallen masts a pier, the gangway to barge, the pier, walk, scuffle, drag deathmarch, todes babycrawl, the threshold, door, stairwell, into the Great Hall’s receiving, this the last station left in which to smooth out your skirts, to tuck in your shirt if shirt you have, if not your flesh, fluff your breasts, pinch your cheeks rosy; these bars and barbs, this wire, these pens, gates and their kept doctors, interpretercousins, guardbrothers, inspectors; the language of languages…take a deep breath, hold it in, let it out; you’re dead, there’s no second opinion; look at this eye chart, read the last line aloud, S Z C Z E D R Z Y K; do you know what it says, asks the doctor, know it, the immigrant says, he’s my uncle! Lipschitz, don’t give me lip, bei mir bist du sheyn fergessen, Welcome to America, Maran Hagaon Harav Avraham Halevi Moylvintldik…Shalom, Murray Gone; Hello, My Name is (Race Suicide), this naming death that’s named itself only after weeks, over months, after maybe even seasons of wait without name, not just unknown, inexistent, suffered and suffering just to enter, to be: many only to be turned away, and without their identities redeemed, sent back, RETURN TO — Isaac, or maybe Jacob — SENDER, reverted back to themselves, those unlucky few without name or a prayer, cast deep down into the real again, stowed home, lost to the generations to come; the map’s dot a speck of lint, a mote of dust, blown away, becomes a ruin, a coordinate fallen to time, desolate, wrecked, left for the waste upon which it rests. From south elevation, the Great Hall’s a mess, a mumble of lines, a jumble of Babel none too towering, instead laid vertical, fallen in every dialect’s design: Austro-Hungarian railroad shed, Ottoman slit, Russian Orthodox thrust, Parisian frill. Death by Renaissance in brick without hearth, as if tumbled from sky and only then, suntinted, threealarm red though fireproofed, the stucco façade mottled, jaundiced, its foundational limestone pissstained, its portico that limb distended from socket, wicked, a hand outstretched, to point away, to dismiss, to order, accuse…or else, arrival depending, to greet, to welcome, Shalom; to clasp warmly, give us a shake; below four massive turrets risen as lesser towers, the last survivors of the sprawl fallen below; their flags: tainted in blue, white, and red; the knives that pierce them wound, too, the mist, which is the breath of the ocean, guarding the Registry, the Island entire, from the gray occupation of clouds.