Witz полностью

Under its previous management, this land had been neglected, had fallen into disrepair, as it’s said. Then, and only after extensive foreign reinvestment, restoration, and the involvedly grantgranted international like…it’s been reopened, and expanded, only now as Polandland (an Americanization of Polyn, it’s said, a word easterly derived from the holy tongue rededicated to meaning: Po, meaning Here, and Lyn, meaning Stay a while, won’t you?), having annexed everything from ocean to ocean, the Atlantic to its other, having displaced its inhabitants at the pleasure of invasion, its new owners presently engaged in turning it into one of the top tourist spots in the world, second only to what Palestein had been, had tried to be, if only for a sun’s slower season — enjoyable, though forcedupon; an excellent final destination; as far as terminus goes, you could do worse for a grave…yesterday’s arrivals monorailed through the outskirts of Polandland, their faces held up against the speed of the glass with the ice and the misting, condensed webs and fiery cracking — though it’s been said that Polandland itself is only an outskirt of Polandland; its outskirts mark the arrowed Meeting Point of all Eternal Returns, past warehouses of factories, processing plants, industrial temples in which it’s said imperfection’s maintained: here the Wechselstube made of weather, Imbiss, Auskunftsplatz, everything rung around its Appell, there plaques screwed to the sky, Zimmer frei, advertising all species of dead, deadening, entertainment…

At one hotel or another, which are really fashionable barracks, doneup Nouveau Beaux, neoArt Deco, in the lobby — its floor underneath the mound of skirts, shoes, and stockings, inlaid with a cruciform mosaic of gold trimmed lavishly in silver and bulletholes — the wives strip for delousing; then, they’re shorn; some opt for a pedicure, others for only a gruff buff of their calluses; as bodied, they’re blushing; there’s a great washing of armpit and feet. Husbands, having been separated into yet another line, are mustered in an adjoining ballroom, its walls hung with tarps over heterodox tapestries and arras. Today’s the first the Sandersons have ever beheld each other naked, it’s more silly than sorry; they avert their eyes; paunches hang over endowments, a money pouch, their testicles, then contracting, broke; water rushes onto them, interrupting the triple winds, triple strings, much brass, a musical revival of the Romantically destructive: their happy shrieks are piped into the Square; the water’s halfway to ice, it opens up everything: like the air amid the airs, this water is both separate and one, both water liquid and water solid, of the ocean and not of the ocean, of the above and of the below. Then, once the ballroom and lobby have been depopulated, they’re deloused further, cleansed more completely, and with better service: they’re remanded to individual luxury stalls, marble, with floors heated, mirrors un-fogging; their pants, shirts, skirts, and panties, underwear, purses, wallets and watches, namedesigner, are left unattended on hooks, socks stuffed into the throats of their shoes gaggingly tied together then piled to one side for the rack expected in a matter of professional expediency: the bellhop’s on it; don’t bother, he’ll pick their pockets for tips. Management Assumes No Responsibility For The Safety Of Personal Effects.

There is an Ocean around Land, there are lands around a Land, there’s land around a village, there’re villages around land, there’s land around towns, there’re towns around villages, there’re villages around hills, there’re hills around a wall: the walls are walls…there are walls inside walls inside, in sediment layers, strata, concreting calcite, limestone hauled up from out the earth then stood on end around the settle. They-who-went-to-the-right, we need a name for them, the Rechts, let’s say, those righteous Righters of way…they’re at the westernwall, the outermost wall of walls, the westernmost limitation of the wall’s because circular infinite limit.

What’s the wall protecting, a Mister Dapper asks; these people, you know these Rechters…they’re always asking questions, to impress the others he asks the Guide in a loud sleepless voice — the inside from the out, he asks, or is it the outside from the in?

The Guide snorts, leads on.

A mensch reels in the ladders from the wall. Impregnable.

This is ritual. Everything is.