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

me with him to visit the holy places of our country. We even went as far as the monks’ cells in Switzerland and Lourdes … Father hoped I would grow up to be a priest. And I myself was as ardent a believer as any young boy could be.”

Again I will have to bore myself with a few quotations from Neigel about his home and upbringing: (1) My parents were strict with us, but it was for our own good. Does Krupp make steel out of butter?(2) Very early on, we were taught self-reliance. (3) We were expected to show respect to our elders, even the servants in our home. (4) I was expected to obey the wishes of my elders, all my elders, unconditionally.

The countryside where Neigel grew up? Green hills, dark Bohemian forests, barley fields, vineyards, and, looming in the background, the “King,” the Zugspitze, the tallest mountain in the fatherland. By the age of seven he had climbed the peak on an expedition with his father. Heinz had decided to stay behind in the village …

He reports these things in a dry, matter-of-fact tone. The German language suits him: he cuts the hard consonants and inflects at the end of the sentence, where the verb is. This gives his every utterance, however personal, a peremptory tone.

He wants to talk about horses. Please. In my own way I, too, am close to the subject. In the village they had a horse his mother used for delivering milk. A mangy horse, but Neigel has been “crazy about horses” ever since. And now? He doesn’t ride anymore. His body is too stiff, and the wound from Verdun is troublesome, too, but he still knows how “to approach a horse like a master.” We discuss this interesting, amusing coincidence, my also liking horses. I’ve never actually mounted a horse—it doesn’t look very comfortable to me somehow—but one summer when I was a boy I worked at a riding stable near the flour mill in Jerusalem for three or four days. I was forced to quit for some silly reason (asthmatic sensitivity to horse manure), but I still remember the warm smell of the beautiful horses, their raddled sinews, the male movement of muscles under the skin; ah, Neigel, I could talk about horses for hours with you, about the sharp smell of the oil they rub on the harnesses, about galloping, about the shiny whips hanging in the stalls, the simple pat of the groom on the horse’s neck—I still remember the beautiful poster that hung in the manager’s office with pictures of the different breeds, Franconians, Schwabians, Westphalians, Parisians, Hungarians, Polesians and Detmolds and Arabians—truly a man’s animal.

“Humph,” mutters Neigel in my direction, with a strange expression on his face, changing the subject and declaring rather tactlessly, “I’m not exactly wild, you know. I mean, I never get drunk, and I don’t, well, how shall I put it, fool around with women, and in fact—” He hesitates for a moment, and finally admits with a kind of relief, “In fact, I don’t have many friends. I don’t need them either. In a word, youcan’t really trust anyone, and I prefer it like this. I find satisfaction in my work, and also with my family, of course. And generally speaking, you could say that, yes, I do enjoy living. I simply enjoy living.”

And after these last words, I feel Wasserman’s breath on my car. I turn around and see him wince, as though he’s suffered a heavy blow. And much to my surprise, I understand that this agony is due to his complex system of attitudes toward everything the word “living” represents. But Wasserman is not content with this expression of pain, and he turns to me as arbiter or judge or whatever, and demands that until it is proven that Neigel has the “inalienable right” (!) to use this word: “he will not be allowed to abuse it any way he likes.” I try therefore to explain to Wasserman that even from a simple technical standpoint I can’t prevent a character in my story from using a normal vocabulary to express himself, but Wasserman covers his ears with his wrinkled hands and shakes his head in the negative. I try to be clever with him and ask what he, as a writer, would do in a similar situation, and without a moment’s doubt, he says, “Herring. And onions if you like.” And when I ask if he would mind explaining, he answers impatiently, “Instead of having him say ‘I enjoy living,’ from now on Esau will say, ‘I enjoy herring,’ or even ‘I enjoy onions.’ This will not impoverish him, and it will certainly be a relief for me.”

I turn to Neigel hesitantly, and take his words down: “I find satisfaction in my work, and also with my family, of course. And generally speaking you could say that, yes, I do enjoy onions. I simply enjoy onions. Oh yes.”

I squint at the German: he doesn’t react. It’s as if he never noticed the substitution! How strange. In any case, I see that in contrast to Neigel, Anshel Wasserman lives totally in a world of words, which means, I imagine, that every word he utters or hears has for him a sensual quality which I cannot perceive. Is it possible, then, that the word “supper” is enough to satisfy his hunger? That the word “sore” cuts his flesh? That the word “living” enlivens him? These thoughts, I admit, are a bit over my head. Could it be that Grandfather Anshel became a fugitive from human language in order to protect himself from all the words that cut his flesh?

But Wasserman is unwilling to answer my probings, and instead says furiously that they, the Germans, are “artists of merciful translation,” so why not make use of their talent and extract the pain found in certainwords? And when I still don’t understand what he’s talking about, he disgorges one German word after another,