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

for more gas chamber apparatus, as a result of which thousands of Jews would be arriving in transports the following week by day and by night to fill the original camp quota, because Berlin was satisfied that a man like Neigel would be able to carry the load, and even now they were preparing a “small token” for Neigel’s services to the Reich and the Führer. Again, it is possible that Neigel was in fine fettle for all the above reasons, which he did not want to risk by shooting Wasserman in the head. The Jew insisted, however, and a brief dispute followed, in the course of which Neigel’s mood was spoiled. His face turned ashen down to the tip of his nose, which was a bibulous bright red. During the quarrel, the German had, in fact, gulped down three glasses of 87 proof, the third of these raised by a no longer steady hand, and his expression of proud disdain was replaced by a veiled look of what one might risk calling horror. All of a sudden he jumped up, drew his gun, and without a word handed it, pointed at himself, to Wasserman. “Here’s a gun!” he screamed hoarsely. “Do whatever you want. I’m through. Do whatever you want.” He sat down again, swiveled his chair decisively till he was facing Wasserman, and said mysteriously, “I won’t even look at you. Aim, pull the trigger. Only please hurry.” Wasserman, a Jew who had never held a weapon in his life, did not take advantage of this uniqueopportunity. He did not shoot the German in the neck, although Neigel’s posture seemed to demand it; nor did he take him hostage to get Reichsführer Himmler into the camp so he could kill him; he did not rush outside and shoot the guards and start a rebellion among the prisoners. None of these simple, obvious ideas occurred to him. For a moment he held the gun to his own temple, but his knees were knocking so hard he nearly collapsed. He did not shoot. He set the gun down on the desk and politely cleared his throat. Only after a moment did Neigel turn around in his chair: he looked dead. He had been holding the blue envelope in his hand all this time. It was crumpled and damp. “You are a coward,” he said. “Pity. Pity.” But, said Wasserman to himself, the wise will understand that I did not want to shoot him once, and poof! For Neigel I had another fate in mind, and besides, am I, Shleimeleh, a man to spoil a good story in the middle?

2. The suicide of Kazik: see under: KAZIK, THE DEATH OF

HITBAGRUT, TARDEMAT HA

ADOLESCENT DORMANCY

Kazik’s childhood was marked by his alert, lively, and rather rowdy character [see under. CHILDHOOD], which exhausted poor Fried, forever chasing him through the house. And then at 0108 hours, the doctor found a few moments’ respite, if not pleasure, when Kazik reached the approximate age of sixteen and a half and suddenly, just as he was dashing through the corridor making those loud noises with his lips Fried called “utterly barbaric,” he abandoned the chase abruptly, felt his limbs grow heavy, and—Fried: “Well, I was sure that was that. Kaput.” In the dim lamplight the doctor thought he saw a silvery luminescence spread over the boy’s body. When he put his glasses on, he discovered fine, semitransparent threads, sticking out all over Kazik. Aaron Marcus supposed these were “physical manifestations of adolescence and related complexes,” but Fried insisted, “No, no, he’s beginning to rot.” Much to his amazement, however, he soon realized that the child was simply “pupating,” like an enormous butterfly inside the fibers; that before Fried’s very eyes Kazik was under the domination of impervious adolescent glands common to all, and that he would shortly break out of this cocoon as a mature adult. The doctor regretted this, because he had always viewed childhood as a period of specialinspiration—that’s how his own childhood seemed to him—as opposed to adulthood, which doomed one to shameful conformity. Even the surface characteristics—the toughening of skin and hair, the ossification of the bones, the increasing sex drive—seemed to him like the bars around the cell in which the adult imprisons child. But as he watched the sleeping boy, Fried was filled with wonder, because for the first time this evening, or maybe in his life, he felt in awe of the mighty stream of life that held sway in this room, so close to Fried, and it may also have been the first time Fried had ever been steeped in time—according to Wasserman—as befitting the stream of “Grandfather Time,” that human flux in which you are assigned to your place “between your parents and your own progeny.” And Fried reflected with astonishment that what he had always believed—that the father gave life to the child—was basically erroneous; that the father needed the child to help him out of his prison and remind him of all he had forgotten. Fried: “Ah, very well, it’s true, but the important thing was that during those moments of sleep my Kazik was beyond time. For maybe a quarter of an hour he didn’t grow at all, and it was also the only time since he first came to me that I had a moment to think about what had happened up to now and what was going to happen in the future, but then he woke up, he woke up fast …”

Kazik woke up. He tore at the strange fibers, and they vanished. His period of adolescent dormancy was over in thirteen minutes, and once again he waded in the “river of time.” He was confused and angry. It should be mentioned that despite the process of physical maturation he had now completed, Kazik’s head did not yet reach the seat of the chair. Till the last second of life he remained milky: his diaper wet, his