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

too, and their lashes were so long they looked like the wings of a giant moth. All this was due to hunger; only, Harotian didn’t understand. He was isolated, suspicious and frightened. Walking through the darkened ghetto streets, he saw fabled creatures flickering before his eyes: colorful seahorses, tiny and winged; forest elves gleaming in precious light; Cinderellas, witches, unicorns, phoenixes, and Peter Pans hurried past him on the stairway. These, of course, were the phosphorescent pins made and sold by a Jew of the ghetto to help prevent people from bumping into each other on the darkened streets. Harotian knew nothing about it. He sensed vaguely that somewhere out there a greater magician than himself had arisen who, like himself, used the simplest human material, only he was crossbreeding it into something utterly grotesque. Harotian was horrified. He began to leaf feverishly through his enormous catalogue, but he was no longer sure where to find the old, simple reality he remembered. He dragged himself through the empty streets, miraculously preserved from harm. The posters he passed on the walls screamed so shrilly that he shuddered. He was almost suffocated by the stench of humiliation sent his way by a yellow patch rolling in the mire. Hebegan to sob, and a religious chant he remembered from childhood ran through his mind. At that moment he heard the approaching footsteps of the patrol, and with the instinct of a hunted animal, hid in the courtyard; at the head of the patrol marched a short, elderly citizen, one Heinrich Lamberg of Cologne, a perfumer by trade. The Germans had brought him to the ghetto in order to use his highly developed sense of smell for ferreting out the underground hiding places of the Jews, whose faint cooking odors he was able to detect. Harotian knew nothing of this. He saw the little man stride quickly at the head of the patrol, wrinkling his nose this way and that. He stopped before a certain house, sniffed attentively with flared nostrils, and gave a short cry. The patrol burst through the door, and a few minutes later returned with a little family: a father and mother and two small children. They shot them on the spot. The patrol continued to follow the perfumer with the virtuoso nose. Harotian understood that this was a catastrophe: for all his gifts, it had never occurred to him that someone could exercise the sense of smell to hunt other people, and now he knew that he would never find his old world again. His estrangement was complete. He sobbed in terror as he walked backward, one foot on the sidewalk and one on the street. His tears shone purple and phosphorescent, and they tasted cold and metallic. He had burst all his strings. Once again he was little Harotian, hiding in a deserted cave at the far end of the earth. And now, as then, he was rescued by Otto Brig, on his way home late at night from a futile and tiring tour of the Jewish ghetto, to recruit artists who “might suit us,” as he put it. Harotian threw his arms around him with relief. Otto, at least, hadn’t changed. Even the fifty years since their parting, and all the calamities in the world, could not change someone like Otto. The two embraced silently for a long time and cried without shame. Harotian tasted Otto’s tears shyly with his tongue, and wept harder for joy: they were salty, thank God. Just like tears should be. And so Harotian returned to the Children of the Heart. Incidentally, Otto continued to support him, and when things became really difficult, he cried with him, just as he allowed Fried to use his blue eyes to see Paula. Whenever the old world threatened to collapse before the Armenian’s eyes, it was enough for him to lick Otto’s salty tears awhile. This was not especially difficult for Otto, who always found it easy to cry.

HUMOR

HUMOR

The disposition or mental faculty that accentuates the ludicrous side of phenomena.

1. According to Shimon Zalmanson, editor of Little Lights, humor is not just a disposition or mental faculty but the only true religion. “If you were God, nebuch,” he said to Wasserman during a late-night chat at the editorial office, “and you wanted to reveal the potential of creation to your believers, all the coincidences and paradoxes, all the joy and reason, the ambiguity and deception your divine powers spilled out into the world every minute, and if, let us say, you wanted to be worshipped as befitting a deity, that is, without sentimentality and flattering hymns but with a clear and lucid mind instead, what method would you choose, eh?” Zalmanson (who was, incidentally, the errant son of a great rabbi) said humor was the sole means to understand God and His Creation in all its mystery, and to go on worshipping Him in gladness. Zalmanson’s God went around showering mankind with little favors of divine will. “No doubt you remember, Anshel, the sight that greeted us at the entrance to the Holy of Holies, the little gas chamber?” Wasserman remembered very well: the Germans had brought the ark curtain from a synagogue in Warsaw and hung it at the entrance to the gas chambers. Embroidered on the curtain were the words “This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter” and here Zalmanson began to laugh, and died laughing with the realization that even someone like fusty old Wasserman has his funny points. Laughter itself was the spontaneous ritual of his religion. “Every time I laugh,” he explained, “my deity, who doesn’t exist, of course, knows I cleave to Him, knows I have understood Him profoundly, if only for an instant. Because, my little Wasserman, the good Lord created the world out of nothingness, out of chaos, and He took His blueprint and building materials from that chaos … nu, what do you say to