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

And the revelation. The doctor lifts the baby up in the air and the tiny hands fly forward. Their movements are still haphazard, uncoordinated. They touch the big bald head and drop down to the trimmed, silver mustache and, suddenly filled with animation, flutter gaily above the two pouchy checks and the great red nose, the winepress of tears, becoming more intelligent by the moment as they explore the doctor’s garden of life with slow curiosity. Yes, they all held their breath and watched: the tiny fingers rested on his large, pale lips, coaxing a sensuality long dead in them. Magic writing loomed large and quickly faded on the cool wall of Fried’s face, and the doctor groaned one of his bitter groans. “Poor child,” he said, and Neigel: “It will be difficult for him to start his life this way.” And Otto: “Some story.” And Fried answered stiffly: “Such things happen.”

Fried had made a resolution never to be surprised. He had decided simply to banish surprise. Wasserman: “Unlike Mr. Marcus, who always did his best to adopt fresh feelings, the doctor spent his life trying to reduce his feelings to the bare minimum.” But the decision to eschew surprise did not bring the doctor satisfaction or relief. On the contrary, the older he grew and the more wisdom and experience he accumulated, the more difficult it became to stick to his decision.

Now comes the moment when Otto announces that the baby will spend tonight with Fried. “And tomorrow, we’ll sec.” He ignores Fried’s alarmed protests, argues wisely that “babykin needs a doctor’s care, right?” And together with the other Children of the Heart he leaves the hall, after first advising Fried to make some diapers for the baby out of an old sheet or shirt. The pounding of the mad doctor’s heart is almost audible.

They departed, and Fried was left alone with the baby. But not alone: an enormous white butterfly suddenly alighted from one of the thick roots of the oak tree and drifted through the half-darkened hall. The butterfly glided slowly down before Fried’s eyes, as though trying to understand him. It studied him so carefully, the doctor felt embarrassed. He noticed, meanwhile, that the butterfly’s wings were shaped like a heart, and this brought back an old memory: In the past, whenever Otto wanted to send the Children of the Heart on a rescue mission, he would draw hearts on the trees and fences outside their homes. This was the signal. The butterfly now fluttered over the baby’s eyes. It seemed to be blowing the first breath of life upon them, and upon Fried’s eyes as well, perhaps. He did not stir as the strange dance continued. Once again the butterfly hovered, traced a circle around the two of them, and flew up and away through the tunnels. The silvery traces of its wings in flight were still visible weeks later on the sooty walls.

Suddenly the doctor noticed that the baby was breathing faster, and that it was wriggling restlessly. A fearful premonition made him peek at the baby’s tummy: there were no signs of clotted blood on the navel. In fact, there were no signs of tearing or cutting on the navel: in fact, there was no navel.

Much else took place that night, both in the story and in the barracks, and it is difficult sometimes to distinguish between them. Did Fried examine the baby on an army cot in the office of the commander of the extermination camp and discover that the baby’s pulse was very fast indeed, almost ten times faster than a normal baby’s? Did the telephone suddenly ring in the hall of friendship with a call from “a very important personage” in Berlin, and moreover, did the speaker from Berlin extol Neigel’s recent work in the camp to such an extent that he had recourse to bright musical imagery, comparing “your work and creative power, my dear Neigel,” to the operas of Wagner and “the greatest National Socialist composers of our day.” And later, when Neigel, blushing with pleasure, signaled to Wasserman to be quiet and guess from the expression on his face what was being said, he asked Reichsführer Himmler to send him everything necessary for the setting up of three more gas chambers (“We must accelerate, Commander, accelerate more and more!”), Himmler promised to give the request his sympathetic consideration, though he couldn’t promise anything for now (“No doubtyou’ve heard, my dear Neigel, about certain temporary exigencies in the East”); again he commended the “excellent tempo” of extermination in the camp, hinted something about the rank of Standartenführer soon to be bestowed upon a certain dear somebody, and ended the conversation with a crescendo of compliments, and the crowning touch (by the way, this quotation, too, like the previous one, is borrowed from Himmler’s night call to his protégé, Jürgen Stroop, the night of the Gross Aktion in the Warsaw Ghetto): “Keep playing like that, Maestro, and our Fuhrer and I will never forget it.”

Wasserman, who had listened in fear to the conversation, sat up straight when it was over, denying Neigel his moment of glory and the opportunity to divulge the identity of the distinguished caller. He continued in an anxious stream to recount how Fried, who had been left alone with the baby, scurried from wall to wall in the little hut, abstractedly tweaking the tip of his big red nose and stopping from time to time for a look at the baby, asleep on the couch with his fists clenched, “as though he held the secret of life in his hands.”

“Tatatatata!” Neigel iterates smugly. “What do you mean ‘couch’? What’s this ‘little hut’ doing here all of a sudden? Did I miss something while I was speaking to Reichsführer Himmler on the phone?” Wasserman coughs, smiles hollowly, and apologizes for “my annoying slack-wittedness! I almost forgot to tell you that …