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

defect. He learned that so often when a person says “my fate,” he is in fact referring to a hunk of maimed flesh. It was Aaron Marcus the apothecary who suggested that after thousands of years of existence on the face of this earth, man was perhaps the only living creature not yet fully adapted to his body and frequently ashamed of it. And sometimes, the apothecary remarked, it seems that man is naïvely waiting for the next phase of evolution, during which he will separate from his body and become two distinct beings. Wasserman believes that physical defects and suffering (he had them both in abundance) are merely the reins by which God controls man, pulling them ever tighter, to make man remember Him. It should be mentioned that Neigel understood little of what was said regarding man in relation to his body; perfect health was requisite for SS candidates, who could be disqualified because of a single dental filling. The wound Neigel had suffered at Verdun was viewed as a decoration for bravery, not a flaw. With great pride he informed Wasserman that he for one had fully accepted his body, and had never “entertained such twisted thoughts.”

GEHENOM, HAGERUSH MIN HA

HELL, THE EXPULSION FROM

According to Wasserman, this was one crime the Germans would never be forgiven: “God expelled man from Eden, and you harried him out of hell.” Neigel: “Explain!” Wasserman (“Esau has a singular way of saying that word: his face glowers and his eyebrows jump at each other like two billy goats, or like a soldier clicking his heels Heil!”): “Nu, well … you see, you deprived us of the illusion, the illusion of hell … Hell, too, calls for illusion, and some ignorance and secrecy too … for only then can hope exist, the hope that things may not be so bad as all that … you see, we always pictured hell with boiling lava and pitch bubbling in barrels, until you came along, begging your honor’s pardon, and showed us how paltry our pictures were …”

GINZBURG, ILYA

A street person from the city of Warsaw. The rejected son of a wealthy timber merchant, he never held a steady job. He was wizened, with apencil-like neck and gangly elbows, and his appearance was thoroughly repulsive: he did not wash, and gobs of filth collected in the corners of his eyes and nostrils. He was also afflicted with an ugly skin infection. The only impressive feature in his crooked black face were his heavy eyebrows, which lent him the appearance of an anguished prophet. Wasserman remembered Ginzburg back from the days when (Wasserman:) “He would wander the streets, chased by gangs of children chanting, ‘Ilya, Ilya/The yellow moon is asking/Who are you, Ilya/Who are you, Ilya?/The yellow moon is asking/Ilya Ilya/The white colt is asking/Who are you, Ilya/Who are you, who are you?’” … Aaron Marcus claimed that Ilya was not insane, that he was full of heart, “and not so stupid as people may think”—a highly doubtful speculation in view of the fact that when Ginzburg inherited a fortune from a remorse-stricken relation, he turned it down. Marcus the apothecary, held to be an adept in the mysteries of the soul because of his ministrations to the miserable man, described Ginzburg rather picturesquely. Ginzburg, he felt, had refused the money because, in his own way, he was a man of principle who believed it preferable to live one’s life without property or family connections. Though this view generally met with skepticism, Marcus nevertheless considered Ginzburg a lamed vavnik [one of the legendary thirty-six just men], or hidden philosopher. Incidentally, it was Marcus, the spiritual apothecary, who affectionately nicknamed Ginzburg “Diogenes,” though much to his regret the name stuck to the madman as a taunt. Ginzburg may not have gone as far as the Greek mortifying his body and soul by stripping in winter to embrace a cold bronze statue, but he, too, courted indignity, annoying everyone—always underfoot, always turning up at unsuitable moments, and on his lips—like a monotonous chant—the perennial question: “Who am I? Who am I?” When anyone bothered to answer him, he would merely repeat the question in the same monotonous chant, and when kicked, he would hobble away, his face cast down, his arms spread out in the same inquiring pose. Had it not been for kindly souls like Aaron Marcus, who saw to it that he had an occasional piece of bread, he would have starved to death, but more than Ginzburg needed food, he needed a listening car, and this he found but seldom. How long, after all, can a person stand there listening to the question “Who am I?” Wasserman said that on a few occasions he decided to listen to Ilya Ginzburg out of pity, but changed his mind. He was ashamed of himself for havinggiven up so easily, not because of the madman’s stench, which did not present any real difficulty to Wasserman, who had no sense of smell, but because the monotonous question, always steeped anew in a deep, absurd-seeming despair, made him vaguely uneasy. Aaron Marcus, Ginzburg’s chief patron, kept him in food and clothing for a full twenty years, admitted him into his shining apothecary’s shop, and listened long hours with laudable patience to Ginzburg’s question. Often, when the two were left alone in the shop, and Marcus was busy preparing his medicines (he was the first apothecary in the city of Warsaw to sell natural remedies), Ginzburg would wax silent, and Marcus would speak about his life, hinting painfully at difficulties with Mrs. Marcus (he would not have dared tell anyone but Ginzburg), and it was during one such conversation that he mentioned the fact that Diogenes had lived in a barrel. He never imagined that the madman had understood anything, but the following day Ginzburg quit the park bench where he spent the summer nights and went to sleep in