Witz полностью

New York, New York again, as it’s said: an invocation…as if a blessing, a benediction, for luck it’s always said twice: once shining in the marquee of the mind, the second instance and final invoked over the grave. Nu York, He says to the driver, nu, York! Manchattan! once the hometeam town, I’m sure you’ve received the postcards and sent them, hymn, bought the snoglobes and tshirts and magnets and pins — the land of the rottenmost apples, fallen hard from every tree in the world, as the earth tilts away from a season of the sun and all of them roll their oddest wormed ways down to us…the land of the locusteaters, drinking the blood of their neighbors for overpriced brunch, fighting ground of the bears and the bulls, the stage for a waiter acting out The best cheesecake in town…for B, though, it’s been this walking endless walking, hitching walking and hitching again, caravanrigged, this trading up from camelbacked britzkas to landaus, then from pitiable droshkys to piteous drays, a stretch of troika and telga and tarantas, once handsome hansoms, too, and even a saintly because free, nocharge fiacre up from the wilds of Wishniak Hill — and then before that, God and His fiery chariot, think of the time, of the change: there’d been the nation, Him trudging His wander through acres of nowhere, walking jochs and jucharts, these versts of waste, morgens and milyas, halfhorse towns the rear half mostly; stubborn and bucking, now brokenwilled — who knew the United States of Affiliation, if that’s the name nowadays, even stretched out that far, into such contiguous sameness, too long?

Why here? Why, nowhere else. B hitching a hayride at the mouth of the tunnel, He’s offered to pay the toll plus an epes extra for hay — a cart laden with a couple of subsubcontinental emmigrunts, with their dreams hitchedup, hauling in the persons of their innumerable kinder whom they hope to sell as housegoyim or indenture as glaziers’ apprentices, their worldly possessions piled atop and around Him hidden hush under the straw past the cops with their customs and emergency checks: in traffic, stalled amid the whinnying honk of horses, the bleating of goats — they’re stopped in the tunnel’s middle for prayers, extolling ashrey yoshvey — the two of them husband and wife, or husband and sister, or brother and mother, spitting away in indeterminate what language that is, Him thinking He’s always hearing His name, wipes it from His face with a palm. Shalom, good luck, by which they mean mazel, mincha finishesup, they roll forward to drop Him Downtown, wish Him away with much phlegm. Though the streets are empty for the holiday, such is the familiar severe — a formation of metalworked winter; Liberty’s dimmed, His Island’s lost shrouded in weather.

What a day to arrive, B’s thinking, up from Joysey on a life like this: the wind, then the fast, its prayers pouring out a hush from the gusts, Him privated with what, to go without money, without purpose save go, apologize to the gutters and grates. It’s the people, though, they’re the unaskable, the unanswering why — the Other, these others, and nu, fill us in…how can you stay in Joysey living the life of the mind? As the Greeks once said, don’t know if you know: show us a mensch without a city, and we’ll show you what’s either a beast or a God — that’s if the secular isn’t already banned, or otherwise censured. In the name of the Ramjohn, is what Johannine’s calling himself lately, we’re asked the following, what we’ll be asking ourselves for generations to come — what does He have to return to, He doesn’t know anywhere else? How dumb is this? How dumb is this. Hymn. He should have stayed quiet in Joysey and small.

At the Stateline, in the midst of the Holland, verily, the waters are divided — and then, there’s a sign at the exit, a billboard that blinks:

— 12° F

— BLIN — — KING -

COLD ENOUGH FOR YOU?