See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

I was promised by the Fuhrer and the Reich. Yes, Scheherazade,” he says, lifting the curtain and looking out, “what we took upon ourselves for the Reich is being carried out for reasons you will never be able to grasp. You and your Jew morality, with your notions of justice. I’m not so good at explaining myself. For that we have philosophers who use their noggins. I am paid to carry out their ideas. And I like my job. At officers’ school in Braunschweig, I was excused by the Reichsführer himself from our ideology course to attend to the cavalry formations for the commencement exercises. I’m better with horses, you see. Still, something got through my noggin, all the same, and I know that you and I belong to different species. Your kind will cease to exist in two or three years’ time, when our plan has been carried through. We’ll survive. The strong will survive and they will determine everything,” he vociferates at the window, and Wasserman’s head nods vigorously on his spindly neck. Neigel turns to him, sees him, and is filled with inexplicable rage. “It will be our country, our air, our idea of justice and what you call morality. We’ll be around for a thousand years, and that’s only the beginning. If anyone comes along with different ideas, they’ll have to fight us. And if we are defeated, itwill mean they were right. That’s how it is. And in this war you’re on the losing side. We’re the winners. That’s what they’ll say in the history books my son will read: that we’re the winners.”

Wasserman can contain himself no longer. He jumps to his feet, his beard bristling. He looks pretty ridiculous, I must say. His (slightly muddled) answer is that Neigel is “bitterly mistaken.” In the first place, there is no such thing as old mankind, so how can you speak of new mankind. “Mankind is always mankind, and it’s only mankind’s astrologers who change.” And he and Neigel are both on the same side, the losing side, only Neigel and his friends are willing to “sell themselves for this ephemeral mess of pottage, the illusion of defeating the weak,” whereas, in fact, he, Wasserman, has always known (“The knowledge has been engraved upon my heart and body for thousands of years”) that the bottom line of the cryptic ledger—he does not bother to explain who the accountant is—shows him and Neigel both on the losing side.

Neigel smiles wanly. “You have the nerve—or should I say, the idiocy?—to make such a statement here?”

And the Jew replies, “It is here in this place that you are being defeated with every passing minute. And how terrible, Herr Neigel, that you have made me feel more hopeless than I have ever felt before. Yes, perhaps you know that the soul is a wonderful apparatus, and in it are various courses and passages, all of them irreversible, indeed yes.” And Neigel: “I don’t understand. Please explain.” Wasserman squirms, gets entangled in illustrations, and at length explains that “cruelty, indeed, cruelty, for instance, once you learn it, you may find it difficult to wean yourself thereof. Just as once you learn to swim in the river, you never forget how, or so I have been told by those who swim in the river, and about cruelty, or evil, or the doubt in man, nu, a person cannot be cruel by turns, or evil every third time, or suspicious of his fellow man every fourth, as though evil were an object man carried with him, to take out and use when he pleases, or leave in his pocket if he so prefers, and peace be unto you, my soul. No, I am certain that you, too, have witnessed the fact that cruelty, suspicion, and evil infect all of life. Once you open a loophole for them, they infest the soul like mildew.”

“Ah, this is a waste of words,” says Neigel. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” But his mocking smile looks strangely hollow (“The smile was a slough, I observed!”), so it is difficult to understand his need to pursue this philosophical discussion, which is beginning to boreme. “Are certain passages—I mean—do you think any passages of the, um, soul might be reversible?” “You can easily get rid of grief, of compassion, Herr Neigel, and the love of mankind, the wonderful capacity of fools to believe in mankind, in spite of everything. And the operation will be almost painless.” “But can you bring them back again?” asks Neigel, his eyes fixed on Wasserman. “I hope so,” Wasserman replies, and to himself, or to me, he says these unintelligible words: “After all, this is my mission, Shleimeleh, for this I am staging my comedy here.”

There’s no time to absorb this and respond. The plot continues of its own accord. Neigel at this point will be forced to say—in answer to what Wasserman said about love and compassion—what we all expect him to say, namely, the old cliché. “You’d be surprised, Wasserman, but we in the SS, or most of us anyway, are model family men, we love our wives and children—”

“For now,” says Wasserman wearily, “for now you love them.” (“Oy, how sick I was of Keizler’s heartrending professions of love for his wife and their three little cherubs, and the sweet canary in the cage. How thoroughly repulsive it was!”) But Neigel, a missionary explaining the principles of the new religion to a savage, is undaunted. “We pledge our love to the Führer, the Reich, and the family. In that order. These three loves sustain us when we carry out our orders.” And again the Jew jumps up, waving his hand and screaming in a whiny, broken voice, “Someday—when the order comes—your people will rise up and slaughter their wives and families!” And he cackles convulsively, “The order! The order!”

Neigel regards him with a trace of mockery, but he controls himself, and waits for the outburst to pass. He then explains