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

throat. “Your butterfly dust, Scheherazade.” And Wasserman says, “Butterfly dust? Not butterfly dust, the learned doctor Albert Fried would answer you, but a fatty coating meant to protect the fetus from the strong waters of the womb.” Neigel: “Go to hell, Scheissemeister, now you’re really—” “Tweet tweet! Cockledoodledoo! Jug jug jug jug! He hears me, Fried!” (cries the good Otto). “The babyhears me!” Fried: “They can hear you all the way to Borislav.” Yedidya Munin: “What’s this? A baby here?” Fried: “Otto found him. As if we didn’t have enough troubles.” Munin: “What an ugly little thing!” Otto: “They’re all like that when they come out. It’ll grow up to be a beauty. It needs milk.”

Neigel, who has been waiting in ambush all along, now pounces. “What, here? In the forest?” Wasserman: “Yes, I know we have a problem, from the point of view of dry facts we have a problem. But we have no choice in the matter, and we need this milk. Help us, Herr Neigel.”

The German sits bolt upright, as if his commander had just entered the room. He puts on a soldierly expression. Wasserman repeats his request. Neigel drums the glass, leaving moist fingerprints. After a long pause he suggests that perhaps one member of the band, “Otto would be the best, because he wouldn’t be in danger,” should go into the village to buy milk from the farmers. Wasserman nods enthusiastically and pretends to write this in his notebook, and Neigel relaxes, his face smug and ruddy, till suddenly Wasserman pretends to scratch out the German’s words, declaring that “it is too dangerous, alas, because any minute the forest will grow dark, and bears may roam, and gunshots may be heard. It would be better for him not to be there at this time of day.” “Gunshots, you say?” “Oh yes. I forgot to tell you about that earlier.” “Naturally.” For a minute Neigel seals his lips with such determination that his jaws clink and his mouth reaches almost to his nose. But then suddenly, much to his own surprise, it seems, a new idea flickers in his brain, which he announces with barely contained enthusiasm, with the joy of revenge on Wasserman: “Listen! Fried can take the baby to a gazelle! There must be a gazelle somewhere in the forest. I know it. And this gazelle—well, she gave birth not long ago. I suppose I forgot to tell you about it … Anyway, she has a lot of milk in her tits, and Fried will convince her to contribute a little for the baby, no?” And the writer, somewhat tensely: “A fine idea, Herr Neigel, excellent. I doff my hat to you, in a manner of speaking, of course!” (“Esau blushed down to his oversized earlobes, and I knew I was in difficulty. I showed him that God had given him a brain with which to think and a heart with which to feel, and already he was using them with typical German efficiency, tfu! I had to gird my broken loins and give him a fight!”) “Indeed yes, Herr Neigel, a splendid idea. Itcame out fully formed from under your tongue, only the trouble is, it is too realistic. That is, too clumsily true to life, too stifled by the crude bonds of verisimilitude. We are both trying to make a small improvement here, to turn a donkey into a galloping steed, so now I will tell you what really happened …”

“I’m listening,” says Neigel, distinctly annoyed.

“Otto approached Harotian and whispered a secret in his ear. Harotian recoiled with a groan that cleft him in twain! But Otto at last prevailed upon poor Harotian, who for many years had refused to engage in real magic, as distinct from legerdemain or outright deception—because no one refuses Otto. So he asked Otto for a dish, covered it with a sack, then slipped his head and most of his body into the sack, till only his knees peeked out; and he struggled thus over the dish for a long time, emitting sighs and moans, (because with all his heart he detested the magical talents with which I had endowed him in ‘The Children of the Heart’); the sack withered about his body, it squirmed and writhed like a stormy sea, and when at last it was becalmed, Harotian stood up and revealed himself, his face as gray as the sack itself, as though he had seen the face of Satan, heaven forbid, and with a trembling hand he passed Otto the dish, now filled to the brim with a steaming white liquid, ai …” And Wasserman is silent for a moment. (“How well I remembered the taste of this milk, Shleimeleh, from the happy days when my Sarah, my treasure, nursed our lamb, Tirza … et! She, that is … you know how women are at such times … they have no shame … they are mothers … she urged me, she begged me to taste, and I refused, of course I refused … I was mortified! To you I can tell such things … but one time, in an intimate moment … I tasted a drop …”) And here Neigel, Neigel of all people, says quietly, as though to himself: “A warm white liquid, sweet, too.” And the Jewish author says tensely, deliberately, like a secret agent verifying the password, “Very sweet. It melts in your mouth.” And Neigel: “Yes, and so creamy.” And the two men, highly embarrassed, peer into each other’s eyes for a moment, then quickly look away.

At their wits’ end, they hand the dish of magic mother’s milk to Fried, hoping he will disembarrass them, but Fried only withdraws his hand, tense and suspicious, perhaps because of the baby’s rude intrusion into his life, or because of the cruel injustice of it—a live, healthy baby in such close proximity to Fried, who for two whole years had beenengulfed by a barren passion for a baby. And here, as Wasserman pronounces the