The Jew and the Rooster Are One

After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth, thinking God wouldn’t mind a rooster, would he?—or thinking a rooster would look good in a green armchair with flecks of blood on his breast and thighs, his wings resting a little, their delicate bones exposed, a few of the plumes in blue against the yellow naked body, all of those feathers plucked as if by a learned butcher, and yet the head hanging down, the comb disgraced, the mouth open as if for screaming, the right front chair leg, seen from a certain angle, either a weapon or a strong right arm, a screaming arm, the arm of an agitator; and yet at the same time the chair as debonair as any, the brown mahogany polished, the carving nineteenth century, the velvet green, an old velour, as if to match the plumes a little, a blue with a green. No rabbi was present, this he knew, and no dead butcher had ever been there with his burnished knife and his bucket of sand; this was the angry rooster that strutted from one small house to another, that scratched among the rhubarb, he is the one who stopped as if he were thinking, he is upside down now and plucked. It looks as if his eye can hardly contain that much of sorrow, as if it wanted to disappear, and it looks as if his legs were almost helpless, and though his body was huge compared to the armchair, it was only more horrible that way, and though his wings were lifted it wasn’t for soaring, it was more for bedragglement and degradation. Whatever else there was of memory there had to be revenge in there, even revenge on himself, for he had to be the rooster, though that was easy, he was the armchair too, and he was the butcher, it was a way to understand, there couldn’t be another, he had to paint like that, he has to scrape the skin and put the blotches on, and though it was grotesque to put a dead rooster in an armchair his table could have been full, or he just liked the arrangement, or he was good at painting a chair and it was done first—although I doubt it—or someone brought him the bird—a kind of gift—for food was cheap then, and roosters were easy to cook; but it was more than anything else a kind of Tartar, a kind of Jew, he was painting, something that moved from Asia to Europe, something furious, ill and dreamy, something that stood in the mud beside a large wooden building and stared at a cloud, it was so deep in thought, and it had tears in a way, there was no getting around that kind of thinking even if he stood in the middle of the room holding his paintbrush like a thumb at arm’s length closing one of his eyes he still was standing in the mud shrieking, he still was dying for corn, he still was golden underneath his feathers with freckles of blood, for he was a ripped-open Jew, and organs all on show, the gizzard, the liver, for he was a bleeding Tartar, and he was a Frenchman dying on the way to Paris and he was tethered to a table, he was slaughtered.