Читаем Witz полностью

It’d been a clutch of thatchy, fireperfect hovels at the thinning vale of the forest, now a lonesome field salted with the melt of snow — a plain without crop, a barren threshedover, naked earth, pocked in a vast ruin, the remnant of wars, without jubilee, left fallow until failed…it was here, in the midst of this village whose menschs had all been killed, their synagogue defiled then set aflame (which set their houses aflame, then their livestock and harvest), their womenfolk raped and their kinder enslaved, that the seed had been winded from far in the east, had fallen with spring, to take plant then root deep within the scar of this flesh, this weathered pale — a wound that had once been a basement, the library of their yeshiva. Under the tromp tromp trampling of every weary army, the seed sprouted; as it was watered from the waters above and the water below, a shoot began to grow; to begin with, a small sapling, the reflection of its taproot: tromped by maddened Franks, the Plague of Rhenish mobs, hephep, the Mongols, a motley mob of crusading barbarians, mercenary warriors of who knows what allegiances, only later the civilized and civilizing Swedes, their immaculate soldiers marching in impeccable ranks, trampled by horses and hauling carts, by the feet, too, of their merchants, those fleeing the furfisted Tatars, the east in perpetual pursuit, the Cossacks are coming and with them, their hetman, O the fury of Polyn…becoming brushed in more peaceful times by summery courses, by foxes, by hounds; this tree watered by young love in the Lorelei spring, Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten—growing higher, against all that’s human and, evil: an axe, a sword, attempted it once, a mace lodged in its trunk at the height of a head…generations shading the green grown below, it’d kept guard over Kinderspielen, picnics with Mutter and the governess of hundred of years’ duration, perpetrated upon a cloth torn from a chuppah, in its basket the shewbread, the risen loaves — until just last week: it’d been sawed down then shipped express to the Garden…the schwarzwald fallen, its trunk to bridge the cold of the ocean, arriving with its memories intact, imprinted deep on its leaves, resident in the very air breathed out from its ageheavy boughs: the birds, the crows and the ravens, the hand and eye knowledge of falconry exercises, training the seasonal goshawk on the hood and the gauntlet, the bells and the jesses; arrows bearing quivering messages (to be read into the wrinkles of wood), bows curved into branches, the withered bark faces of witches, souls trapped in knots; then, once clearing Customs, it’s erected in the Great Hall of the Island, within its arched vault, snipped only a berry’s pit to fit a breath from the crown of the ceiling, majestic.

This is their tree, let us trim it.