Witz полностью

Me, I’m still being me…I don’t have much of a choice, stuck out of the one window of the one remaining wall of a house destroyed atop a mountain, I am. Eheyeh. It’s been many hopes, this structure fallen, mostly ruined save its last windowed wall just last moon, had incarnated the dreams of untold — it’s as if their last dream’s this whitewall itself, with them willing it, from their furthest sleeps, to maintain a last stand against memory’s lapse, and so to maintain my sentinel: from most recently to its oldest origin, it’d been quartering for Affiliated Forces, then before that a warehouse, before that a stable, just prior a priory church, an orthodox chapel, then a synagogue, a shul, even earlier the home of a family of let’s say peasants, what to do: home of the husband’s parents, home of the parents’ parents, the parents’ parents’ parents’ home, I forget how far forever — their hallways dug out, leading deep into the watery past, twisted passages seeking hospitable wine and the dregs of firm rooting, the native soil of a creation story, an origin myth making much of a Garden’s two trees with their multanimous branchings of telling and told…giving way to the rooms of my others, passing into homes of their own: their own earthgraves, dwelt amidst wells only a little leap further — there at my echo’s other foot, this overlook’s opposite slope.

Enough to say, this had been the house of my ancestors, the ancestral home of my mother’s side, Ima’s, Hanna her name was; though essentially peasants, they were once the richest in this village below, or this town, from which they’d impoverished themselves enough to emigrate from, to immigrate to — and thank God for that…enough to say, this might’ve been my own home, too, think of that, only if.

Their home, it’d actually been a guardhouse, given to them in return for their work, which had been guarding, without fences or gate: these families, mine, had been Messiahkeeps, were kept always on the lookout for the Moshiach, imminent the Redeemer in Whom we believe though as we’re always so quick to say though He tarry—and so theirs was perpetual work, perpetualizing, and yet amply provided for, with a chicken every Friday and fresh milk twice a week, courtesy of those whose salvations they were ensuring, just a fall or shofar’s call down the slope: saviorseekers they were and that’s why, it’s thought, the dwell and its wall had been left atop the hill above the round valley and its settlement squared down below; maybe spared through displaced superstition, as if to destroy the thing would be to destroy future hope, and then again, perhaps it’s survived only out of a moment’s respect, or from symbol: never know when its vantage might come in handy again…O the handcup, the jubilant summons: they were supposed to wait there until the resurrection of the dead, then muster the living with primitive hoots and alarms. Disturb their mundane’s what, interrupt diaspora for an ingathering to where, they weren’t sure: how the people once here and now dead, they only engaged and supported such watchwards because the town, or the village, was located so far away from everywhere else that they were afraid the Messiah would miss them, or that they might miss Him in His coming, and so their stand and the conflict, again, as to where exactly to paradise to — whether the market city, or Jerusalem, if it’s the capital — once the day would dawn of their reckoning, if. And nu, how it was only my relatives among them who’d hoped that that light would never arise, what with the poultry, the butter churningup the holiday tips, free aliyahs and kavod galore — not the only people, though, for whom exile workedout, meant success…not the only people who’d hoped against Eden in their fortress defense of a livelihood, the health and happiness of their kinder — before relocating to America thinking they’d made it, done with all that custom and boredom, only to hope there anew and this time around with a longing that’s greater than ever: hymn, waiting on the corner for Mammon to show, streetside peddling their apples and patience.