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

clung to me like a fledgling, but I could not enjoy even these last few moments, I was peering around every minute to make sure the child was asleep, that no one was watching these pure, desperate embraces …”

And on another occasion Wasserman says, “Today I know that for some people the meaning of life is their work; for others, perhaps, art or love is the root of their soul and the only meaning of their existence. But it seems that I am the shlimazel type, because my Sarah was the very meaning of my existence, but it was only here that I found out. Ai, I think most creatures know how to preserve their souls from such an error. And may you preserve your soul as well, Shleimeleh, because he who is in love with love will always find someone new to love, but I pierced my ear for a single woman. I had no life after her, though I never knew how to love her as she deserved to be loved …”

Now the buffet. The arrivals notice the buffet in the simulated station. Everything is there: rolls and cigarettes and little cakes and chocolate balls wrapped in red foil. It’s always the children who discover the counter first, and beg their parents to buy them something. Wasserman says, “The display of refreshments beguiles even us. For a moment we all turn into children. To this temptation, even the most suspicious among us succumb. Et! Do you remember, Shleimeleh, that young genius of an officer named Hoppfler who chased me to Neigel’s? He is in charge of the buffet. He sells nothing, of course. He is a respectable officer, not a vendor. But he wipes away the soot of the engines and the crematoria each day, and washes the thin glass pane, and replaces the moldy rolls with fresh ones, and folds the colored paper in the crack set up for that purpose. I watch him and wonder: So young and yet so enterprising! How painstakingly he builds the lovely stack of cakes, to make it look more enticing! Happy the eye that beholds his handiwork! He steps back, studies it, and approves. An architect he shouldbe when he grows up. Or a pastry cook. The boy is clearly an artist. A very real and humble artist. Now he will take a damp towel, but not the one he uses to wipe the glass, heaven forbid, and polish the red chocolate balls and the refreshing bottle of seltzer.”

Wasserman digs holes in the ground and reckons on his blackened fingers: twenty years they lived together. About seven thousand days. Only seven thousand days. Wasserman: “That makes a thousand Thursdays … ai … how sad it is … and so much spoiled by petty quarrels and my foolish temper … I did not know, I could not bear the simple happiness, the guileless joy she tried to give me. I despised the sacrifice she made for me. The sacrifice of her youth and her talent for loving … in my mind I confected the delusion that Sarah had married me because of a mistaken ideal … her ideal of me as the gifted writer inspired by lofty thoughts, and the war between good and evil, nu yes, she, too, had swallowed my stories in her childhood, and because of them she came to me … and that is why, out of spite, I tried constantly to make her see how wrong she was about me. That this Wasserman she took for her husband was nothing but an ugly weakling and a coward, feh! I had to test her, you see, to find out when the breaking point would come and she would finally chide me and hurl disgrace at me, the disgrace of her disappointment …”

Yet: “All the same, I had no one else but her, and she, too, it seems, loved me, and we were fond of being together, and talking; that baleboosteh, my Sarah, was very clever, cleverer than I by far … and we also enjoyed doing housework together, nu, well, I am not ashamed to admit it … Sometimes, in a moment of tenderness, while baking a cake together or taking down the winter clothes and storing the summer clothes away, or scrubbing the floor, sometimes our eyes would suddenly meet, nu, you understand … the air, I tell you, the air was charged, and flowed like honey between us … Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and once we looked, we were compelled to, nu, that is—embrace, begging your pardon. Ai, like bolts of lightning were our kisses then …”

About their daughter Wasserman never speaks. Her name was Tirza, and she was born nine years after the marriage. The little I know about her comes from fragments I heard from Grandma Henny when I was five or six years old, and from my mother’s faded memories. That is all.

“And I will reveal another secret to you, Shleimeleh,” says Wasserman, his face softening. “We used at first to be silent together a great deal—my Sarah and I, that is. She—she was diffident, and I—nu, well, that suited me, for I could find nothing in my life worth telling her about in the evening. Et! a life of utter boredom, I was convinced. And did this life of mine deserve magniloquent phrases? Nu, and then came my lamb, my Sarah, and taught me the usages of connubiality, and showed me in her modest way that every moment brings wonders and no one is without a thread of grace, even a soap bubble shimmers in the sunlight; in short, she edified me, saying, ‘Everything, I want to tell you everything, Anshil’—that is how she pronounced my name: Anshil, like a kiss—‘everything, and you, too, if you met somebody and spoke with him today, please tell me what he said to you and what you said to him, and about the angle of his hat and how he laughed