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

life to cross the line and reveal itself. And since there was no law forbidding Jews to draw lines in the dirt, Dr. Albert Fried, who was a Jew, had been doing this with the same grim determination every morning now for three years.”

Thus Wasserman reads to Neigel. But as I peek behind him, I see that there is still only one word there, a word I can’t make out, in the notebook he reads from so fluently. Now he puts his notebook down and pauses. He’s waiting for me. He wants me to help him sketch the figure of the doctor. I still remember Sarah Wasserman’s illustrations from the late editions, showing a tall boy, shoulders slightly hunched, with a serious, sensitive face, but now I also have to forget in order to remember him as he is today, and look at the face Wasserman calls “grimly determined,” moving his foot again and again in that strong, defiant movement. It seems to me the shoulders should be placed a little higher, in a threatening posture that conveys his defensiveness, and the eyebrows should look a little more ferocious, and be joined over the bridge of the nose … A pipe? No, not Fried. But a cane—definitely. The kind he agreed to only after walking became utterly impossible for him without it. The kind he carried with reluctance, with loathing, by way of punishment. Now I have to think: What is it that our Fried calls “life”? Or maybe, after one look at him, I should put it the other way around: What does he not call “life”?

An easy question. The answer flows: Various events in his life, most of the people he’s known since childhood, all of his relationships; in short, everything that once seemed almost unbearable and had become totally unbearable since the war began, and which seemed to him onlythe prelude to what must soon begin, but never soon enough. The old doctor refused to accept the idea that a man could pass his entire lifetime without once being vouchsafed the taste of life. He felt this way because he had a great respect for life and refused to believe in the drafts his own life constantly tried to push into his hands.

“Well spoken,” says Wasserman to me, his face aglow. “And now listen: only once did the taciturn doctor reveal his thoughts, in a confidential moment, to Otto. Raising his enormous bear-paw hands in wonder, he called the life he was living ‘camouflage.’ With that, it seems, he had told all, all he endured till after several months’ agony he had come to believe in the wonderful desperate act of illusion performed by his beloved Paula.”

“What desperate act?” asks Neigel suspiciously. “Do explain.” “Later, later, if you please,” Wasserman scolds him. “Soon enough you will know and understand, but now you must listen patiently. Where were we? Ai … nu, yes. For three years since the day his Paula left him and went to her grave, the doctor has been drawing a determined line in the dirt with the tip of his shoe. And only Otto Brig, who can see deep into the heart, knows all Fried’s secrets and understands what lies at the root of this strange act. But life, Herr Neigel, real life, simple, worthy life, did not hear his cry, and the doctor began to suspect that the silence of his adversary was not so simple as it seemed, or perhaps—that it was a condemnation …”

Wasserman is still “reading,” but by now he senses that Neigel’s silence isn’t so simple either. Therefore, he raises his head and meets the contemptuous eyes of the German. “What are you dribbling on about, Scheissemeister? Who did you copy all that philosophy from?” (Wasserman: “Ai, if I could, I would have rent him asunder like a fish! But I contained my rage and waited for my Adam’s apple to stop bobbing, and spoke to him with shining countenance.”) “I did not copy it, Herr Neigel. I wrote it with my heart’s blood. Our Fried is about to become the cornerstone of a new story, you see.” And Neigel says, “But really! You’re not going to fool me like this. You used to write so … differently!” “Indeed I did.” “I don’t like this new style one bit.” “Ai, would that you blessed me with your patience, sir.” And Neigel, weary, almost whining, says, “I like simple stories!” To which the writer, with a trace of cruelty, replies, “There are no simple stories anymore. And now, be silent and listen, and stop interrupting all the time.

“A greenish eczema had erupted around the doctor’s navel one morning,and when he looked in the journal where he used to note his symptoms and diseases, not because he was a hypochondriac by nature, heaven forbid, but due to his simple curiosity about the portents of his demise, he found that both the year before and the year before that, on the anniversary of Paula’s death, the same strange vegetation had erupted in the same spot. Two years ago he had described it as a ‘light skin rash,’ and last year as a ‘greenish fungus,’ and this year it was ‘a moss-like acne.’ At first he tried to scrape it off with borax, and later with alcohol, and then finally he tried to pull it off with his fingers, only it was like plucking hair, and he screamed in agony. Just then the quite uncharacteristic thought crossed his mind that perhaps it was not so simple. At the same time he experienced a strange delight, verging on giddiness or perhaps despair, and made a decision not to remove the eczema until evening. For the time being he merely touched it secretly under his shirt, with a kind of private pleasure, as though it had been a perfumed letter smuggled through to him in his prison.”

Wasserman inhales deeply, and quietly waits for something. (“Nu, what do you say, Shleimeleh? The old tailor still remembers