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

the blood of afterbirths drying slowly on the cubs, the frightening stench of corpses, milk heavy in mammalian teats, and old Fried, with great feeling, though as yet self-consciously and cautiously, joined this quiet chorus, murmuring, “Paula,” and then, with a strangled cry, ancient and terrible, like any man calling out his woman’s name, he stood up, screaming because they had taken her away from him, screaming because this mad war was keeping them apart like a steel cage, screaming so that—Otto: “Hey, all the peacocks started screeching, and the newly widowed tiger lamented with him, and the owls and foxes joined in too, and all that noise woke me up, and for a minute I could have sworn the animals were rioting against us, against the war, against everything that was going on at the zoo.” Marcus: “And the zoo was inundated by a thick, desperate sweetness, a cloying sweetness that had to be purged or there would have been an explosion, heaven forbid!” In fact, the steel cage bars had begun to shake and bend. Wasserman reports that tiny parrots swelled up as if with some exotic disease, till they resembled brightly colored turkeys, or ostriches with their little cages dangling from their necks like charms. “The zoo,” says Wasserman, “respired like a mighty lung.” Afterward, the artists concurred that unless something was done immediately, the unbearable agony would cause the zoo to pull itself out by the roots and fly up to the sky. Fortunately, however, Otto grasped what was going on just in time and woke Paula. (Otto: “You think that was easy? Jesus and Mary, our Paula sure can sleep!”) She listened closely for a moment, understood, and ran out to the cages in her flowered nightgown (Fried: “The one I hate”), laughing and crying, falling and rising, and shouting from afar: “I’m coming, Fried, I’m coming,” galumphing up the small stairs and crashing into him with the full force of her clumsy body, then lying on the balcony with him till Fried forgot to be ashamed.

BEDIYA

FICTION

Falsehood. A fabricated story.

Wasserman confessed his “emotional need for fiction” after Neigel had told him, at Wasserman’s request, about the first man he killed, an Indian soldier in the British Army whom he shot in combat during World War I. Wasserman was not satisfied with this. He asked Neigel to tell him about the murders that followed, and what he had felt at the time. Neigel reluctantly agreed, but when Wasserman began to interrogate him (“Have you ever asked yourself how you of all people came to be the murderer of this particular person?” “Did you sleep soundly the night after the battle?” etc.), Neigel lost his temper and declared roundly that (1) when he killed, he was only following orders; (2) he never killed for pleasure, though killing did not disgust him either; in any case (3) he couldn’t understand what Wasserman wanted with all this Kwatz mit sauze (nonsense in sauce). Here Wasserman turned pale and said that he was “obliged, obliged, am I, Herr Neigel, to believe that even you have pangs of conscience and prickings of the heart!” And Neigel: “Why? So I’ll be a little more interesting to your pathetic literary mind?!” And Wasserman: “No, Herr Neigel. Not for literary reasons! For my sake. For the sake of my wife and daughter. Yes, it is what I have beheld with mine own eyes, a kind of egoism, begging your pardon, that makes me believe you did not coolly kill us the way you would remove a nail from the wall. Because the soul recoils, your honor, the soul boils with rage! And all my wretched life within me weeps, the little I have gathered in my wretched lifetime, the fears I feared, and my complexities and ignoble passions, the small amount of love I have known, and even, please forgive me, my God-given gifts and abilities, this ugly character of Anshel Wasserman, fortunate we are perhaps that there is not another such to blemish the beauteous world, and yet, that soul is mine … my only possession, and how unthinkable that it should be so callously destroyed, you did not even ask our names before killing us, and now, let me amuse myself and seek contrition in you, a single twinge or scruple, let me endow you with the idea of compassion, because I need this little fiction, and then you may do as you wish.” Neigel: “Do whatever you want, Wasserman. But don’t expect something like this to have any effect on me.”

BECHIRA

CHOICE

The voluntary selection of one possibility out of many.

In Wasserman’s view, the act of choice is the fulfillment of the truly human in man. He expressed this view in the course of an argument with Neigel about the future of little Kazik, who had reached maturity at 0130 hours, upon awakening at the age of eighteen from ADOLESCENT DORMANCY [q.v.], and having reentered the flow of time, and demanded that Fried tell him who he was. “Whoever you choose to be,” answered the doctor, cautiously adding that he hoped Kazik would choose to be a human being. “Perhaps the worthy doctor can teach me how one chooses to be a human being?” asked Neigel scoffingly. “I always thought one was born so, no?” which sparked off the argument. In Wasserman’s opinion, one became a human being as a result of choosing to uphold certain values and precepts. Neigel, on the other hand, argued, “But I did choose!” Wasserman: “Pardon?” Neigel: “I chose to uphold the values of the party, and obey my orders to kill. Does that make me any less of a human being than you are? If a person can do something, that’s human, isn’t it? What do you and your dreck Jude morality have to say about that?” And Wasserman: “Herr Neigel! It should be evident that by ‘choice’ I mean choosing the higher