Joshua Cohen - Witz

To give you an idea — it’s month the fourth by the civil calendar, month the tenth by God; January’s being forgotten, keeping watch for future north and south, not east and west, and so the flanks are exposed, and the revolution enters through the sidedoor, the porchdoor, the basementdoor, the maid’s…is everyone with me?

And all the heads nod, if only to wake. God, there must be millions of them, heads and necks thick and thin and hairy arms and legs, wandering to the Hall from their muster on the square, to receive the newest of gospels by gossip.

To be precise, this is the Registry, historically the Great Hall’s main room and the Island’s most preserved from its previous function: plasterwalled, roofed with barreling brick; a balcony slithers around to strangle, a knife cutting the inside’s vaulting height. At one of its extremes, the east, which is the front they’re presently facing, there’s a dais, topped with the only podium to be found on the Island, fronted with the seal of this new tenant concern: David’s star revived, encircled with white in a sea of blue, a representation of the land upon which they’re being kept for observation, survival; this podium has to be schlepped from meeting to place, from gathering to session, briefing to conference — another’s in the process of being requisitioned, its sexagrammatic seal’s even now being stamped onto all. At the rear of the hall, westerly toward its door and the massing of those arrived late, laggard, and so not given shelter, made victim to the flog of the weather, a numbed mumbly muddle of disabled or otherwise ailing survivors, the incapacitated with walkers, in wheelchairs; gurneys have been rolled; they’re swarmed by devotedly uniformed, nametagged attendants, essentially strangers, and necessary medical equipment on rental.

All of them, though, they’re naked not to be humiliated, only to be cleansed. To be briefed debriefed, their clothes, underwear and socks have been outsourced to sanitation, offIsland delousing, antiseptic douse; hosed, then machine wash again and tumble dry — how much they miss their maids, their hospice nurses, caregivers, bubbes and sisters, those inlaw, daughters and wives. Garments that require drycleaning have been marked and shipped accordingly. Everything will arrive back this afternoon by barge, it’s promised, unless the water’s frozen: the Hudson’s lower bay at whose Island wharf the last stragglers of the assembled stand, one foot to test the shoring ice. Thousands before them stand and sit and lean, as unhappy and nude as birth, as paled, only to be reborn here, to become initiated into this, the newest order — mourning. Though they could’ve staggered the orientation times, divided then subdivided them into groups, there’s no time, too much work: anyway, the totality’s what interests in this endeavor already failing, failed, the way information passes as rumor, whispers down the mob. And so morning for one’s been consecrated as morning for all — a host of histories lived simultaneously, symbiotically, Creation made coeval with Law. And this despite the cycle of any profaning, daily time — that of this continent or another the same, and, too, that of any family, work, or nightly love; all ingathered to this rationed, ruinous Island and set to an ultimatum’s test: forced union in damp, moldy quarters, early woken solidarity without brunch or even coffee yet, made subject to the life of a single people, its purpose…two clocks received into millions of hands: upon the metal mountaintop, the skyline’s Manhattan beyond — two cycles cast down to asphalt earth. Rain pounds rapt at hilly windows, its rap silenced by snow. All are encouraged to save their questions for later. Don’t waste them. Keep them safe.

High above the furthest doorway, in the back of the balcony at the back of the assemblage entire, a boy just of age and only recently fatherless raises his hand out of nowhere, then shouts. Ooo Ooo Ooo, call on me…over here — what question can he have; heaven forbid us assume. There’s a great rustling, a jocose jostle, as the kid’s accommodated, he’s handed toward the front, the crowding unclothed passing him to each other, up and over one another to the railing, his feet to dangle over the balcony’s filigreed edge. Perched there as if a musing God, a philosopher, or a miniature king just resting a little, still mulling, he scratches his head as if he’s only now lost the nerve; then, after a moment clears his throat and with his voice just breaking asks his question out into space — as if a tiny planet, to be accompanied by the murmur of moons.

The kid says, when do we eat?

Suddenly, amid hushes in shushes, pshts, fingers held to lips pursed in thirst — try to behave yourself, set an example, fix your hair, look your best — two goyim have entered the Hall, coming in up the stairs then through the crowd with their escort, guardparting with elbows, prodding with nightsticks, they’re proceeding down the aisle to the steps up to the dais on risers: one Doctor Abuya trying for dapper in a dark suit blue or black they can’t tell which, white shirt, slickly red silken tie, he’s pudgy, pasty, an excess of face beset by jowls, fatty as if of plastic gulleting between where the chins should be the chin, a wad of white hair messy atop the glaringly inclusive forehead, presently adorned with the unflatteringly rectilinear metallic glasses of a goy you can only trust never to trust, and so you know him — his eyes distorting his face with squint, like dimples made by fingers, knobbily kneaded into the face of unleavenable dough; the other goy, to be known to them as the Nachmachen, is taller and leaner though for now largely inscrutable in a tight robe that flows to the heels, hermetically dark and expensively hooded: half alterebbe, half secretsociety monk (a shadow purse of lips, a crescent bone of nose); everyone thinking in whispers, how important does he have to be to get away with a uniform like that. Doctor Abuya grips the podium, uncomfortable, stiff and shifty, his knuckles pale as if he’s at stool. And then silence — until he sighs, loosens, holds his pants in his hands, hoists the band up to his waist. From his hood, the Nachmachen forces a cough that’s a signal. A swath of slate descends. Chalk is brought, a clutch of bonewhite fingers borne to Doctor Abuya atop a pillow trimmed in plaited lace; the young Arab assistant retreats, scampers back into the wings. The Doctor feints to follow him off, his hands held behind the back, his stomach sagging him hunched, but he’s only pacing, around and around the surface, suspended. A blackboard hanging unsettled with the weather inside. The stripped boys and those older, beyond death, they sit, they stand, they throng, impatient but laudably so given the circumstances, who would believe; their eyes and heads follow his pacing; their ears swell, the hairs prickle; they pay attention through the nose — sniffling, an occasional sneeze. Only silence and the goy’s fatty footfalls, until — a screech…then, erasure by a coat edge, charily pinstriped wool stained with white. A small laugh bursts out from the assembled, in odd, nervous clumps, and the Nachmachen stomps a foot on the dais, carpeted in thick blue, which mutes his reprimand to a muffle. On the board slightly swaying, blackness is quickly being covered in markings, with numbers and letters in fingernail scratches like unhealing scars, desperate scrapes either for life, or against it— the Schedule…

0600 is Reveille, meaning wakeup, they’re advised, with a rousingly roostery trumpet, the metallic horn of a mechanical ram: the morning’s sounding of the Garden’s siren, which had been made to alert to air war, to send people a lifetime since dead, their entire families and livestock and what food and drink they could and candles by now a century past eaten and drunk and kindled extinguished down into the earth deep into their bunkers, to huddle amid the graves and the dust to wait out within them the damning fire and sky — it had been looted from a town in Europa, which has since been forgotten, in Polandland it was, a village whose name in any language has gone unremembered, untongued. It sounds loudly and long once again, though this here’s just a test to make them familiar: conditioning, call it, to put the fear of governance into them, to install the alarm in their souls. Then, static pours through the PA, whose speakers, they’ll find, are rigged up and wired throughout, perched like rusted nests on the signposts, boughdeep buried in the trees, suspended from every ceiling corner, screwed under grates, secreted down crawlspaces, inaccessible ducts, under each pillow, feedback, in our very own mouths…