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Nov. 21, 2016
Wilhelm Schmendrick, who in the last local election had been appointed President of the Nose Party and had previously served two years as the Minister of Nasal Affairs, was sitting at his desk sorting through the papers for which he would be prosecuted when the officers came. The fat paperwork stacks held listings of all sorts of noses—Caucasian, Italian, Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, homosexual, Estonian, Pakistani, Mexican—that had been collected by the Ministry. They were organized further by their components: cartilage, base, midpoint, bridge, flesh cluster, phlegmrod, nostrils. All that this noble ministry had gathered, for the good of distributing noses among the general populace that were free of racial bias, and that the institution had so fastidiously documented, was to be brought to nothing by two officers in dunce caps.
The first officer, Belbog, was a massive man, having been a heavyweight boxer as a schoolboy, who was terrifically scared of intimidating anyone with his bulk and thus always feigned a full-body limp. The second was Troy, a tiny cracker of wisdom who was more impressed by, and duly more suited for, his job.
“Your Nosiness,” sputtered Belbog nervously when he intruded into Schmendrick’s office, leaning heavily on one knee; his voice was deep and barely audible. “I would like to have a word with you.”
“The preferred nomenclature nowadays,” interjected Troy, “is Your Nasality.”
“Irregardless, Your Nasality, I must have a word.”
“You’ve already told me over ten,” President Schmendrick replied, irascible. “What harm can one more do?” He knew the answer to his own question.
“More specifically,” Troy specified, “we must read to you aloud in a cautious, condescending, and pedantic monotone the intricacies of the interanatomic public law practiced in the town of Katzenellenbogen, as expressed in the region’s landmark consensus-written text, The Intricacies of the Interanatomic Public Law Practiced in the Town of Katzenellenbogen.”
“What crime have I committed?” President Schmendrick asked. “What statute have I violated?”
“In accordance with the Verbal Flogger Handbook,” mumbled Belbog, “we must tell him, regrettably, the truth.”
“The whole truth?” his partner responded. Even Troy was uneasy.
“And nothing, bar nothing, but the truth.”
“The truth does not concern me,” Schmendrick said, eagerly flipping through papers. “Just tell me what the law says I did and I will account for it.”
“That’s brave, mighty brave of him,” Belbog whispered to Troy. “Isn’t that brave?”
“I didn’t confess to anything,” Schmendrick said. “I just want to know what I did, then maybe I’ll confess.”
“Well, sparing you nothing, it says here that you did everything,” Belbog declared. He grabbed his pancreas painedly.
“Everything?”
“The Ministry of Nasal Affairs, under your administration, has broken every law, every statute offered by The Intricacies of the Interanatomic Public Law Practiced in the—”
“And what has that, pray tell me, to do with me?”
“It says here,” said Troy, pointing at a statute somewhere in the early forties of those listed in The Intricacies, one which, going by the look on President Schmendrick’s face, he had neglected to read, “that there must not be more than two Jewish noses to a village, due to spatial concerns, in the case of a Jewish population of between three and four in a village of six to eight, given that the Jewish noses in question are of average size, i.e., eight to twelve cubits long, assuming height and width to be conventional with the other races, supposing the possibility that any substantial number of persons, i.e., some adequate and indeed formidable number, purchase nose insurance in ample amounts, with an emphasis on Jewish nosery, such that their revenues in the case of a village with a disproportionately high Jewish nose concentration lead to the rhinal bankruptcy of other villages, causing the olfactory market to rapidly plummet. . .”
President Wilhelm Schmendrick was not listening anymore. He had never listened to any inferior officer in his life and he was not going to start now. He harked back to the time of his election, the first one, not to the nasal presidency, but to the Ministry, after he had won the Gogol scholarship at university and put a pair of fancy goggles on that pertinent nose of his. He had buried his nose in books, if the pun be pardoned, about the nature of judicial and inter corporate and interanatomic law, but there were shallow insights and oversights. He realized, with more than a sorry, snotty pang of regret, that in reading The Intricacies of the Interanatomic Public Law Practiced in the Town of Katzenellenbogen, he had given up on page nine.
