Читаем Witz полностью

A strongly outstretched arm of blocks Uptown, the menschs in the looted, holocausted Library they’re still sitting still scribbling, untouched and alone: glosses and marginalia, obscured references to menschs who might never have lived, rejoinders and reprimands to the mensch sitting just next to them and scribbling still, points and ripostes that would’ve been more easily spoken — but here these menschs have no voices, and no sight either, nor smell neither hearing, no touch, not haptic. Nowadays, they merely disagree, the only sense left to them is disagreement and, nu, very funny surely they won’t agree on that either, have your laugh…hymn. These are the Garden’s menschs from goys, the Administration’s, Shade’s, humorless, incorrupt, and altogether brilliant, who’ve been fully invested with the power to Selekt; menschs lately forgotten, too — will the last one to leave please kill the lights, make it hurt. And so only one dark decision in all this year, almost, has it been that long, only one decision has emerged from their void to be voided itself in due time, process, neglect…drool hangs loose and hot from their lips, the uppers fattened ripe, the lowers furried mold: and no, their decision’s not death, that’s too simple, too evident (though they haven’t yet ruled that out — or have they?), not exactly excommunication either, at least not in the way we understand it: not a putting outside of the midst, not a giving of Him over to the wilderness of bridge & tunneled Joysey, it’s more like a total forgetting, a denial, an assertion that B simply, evidently, just isn’t, that He never even was; it’s just a recommendation.