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

no choice, someone is bound to use it against you, and don’t love anybody too much, not even yourself. He spoke in a fever, in the tone and manner of an irascible father, regurgitating from his soul bitter advice from his own father, after a lifetime of denial; and the more convinced he was of its validity, the more he hated it and wished it proven false, and the more he wanted to speak his mother’s silent words of comfort to his son, for he had loved her so much when she and her little Albert would sit down at the piano, and the melody flowed out of their fingers like a kind of mist, till his father scoffed and said, “Who knows, maybe Albert will grow up to be an artist and bohemian,” in a tone Fried could not easily forget, and he heard it escape his own lips with a cruel precision—which pained him—when he spoke the selfsame words to Otto, after Otto started bringing his lunatics around to the zoo [see under: HEART, REVIVAL OF THE CHILDREN OF THE]. Yes, Fried had dreamed in childhood of becoming a pianist, till his mother was taken ill, and one day his father walked into Fried’s room and announced sternly that Mother had gone away on a long journey. What, for no reason at all, gone away, without saying goodbye? He asked no questions, and tried to forget her as quickly as possible and to hate her for what she had done to him. He began to avoid other children and wandered over the fields near his home. There he met little animals which, he discovered, were not afraid of him. There was no rational explanation for this: even wild rabbits waited patiently for him to touch them gently. Around this time Fried met OTTO BRIG [q.v.] and his sister, Paula, and thus began his happiest days with the Children of the Heart. But these days, too, passed. Fried grew up and became a doctor like his father and grandfather before him. Then World War I began. Fried, drafted as a physician, saw a few battles and witnessed things he had never believed man capable of. Life battered Fried on every hand [see under: BIOGRAPHY], and in revenge he lived it as though it were his booty. And now, as he sat talking to Kazik, he became sadly aware that everything his father and grandfather had told him either explicitly or with a frown of disgust had come true to the letter in his own life, and he wondered whether things might have been different if he had dared to fight courageously for the misty comfort his mother had offered with her gentleness and beauty, withthe fragrance of her body as she waved her hand, and only then did he stop talking nonsense to Kazik and begin to speak of the essence: he told him about Paula, trapping the child who squirmed and kicked in his arms, though Fried hardly noticed, he was so busy telling his story. He had never dared speak about it to anyone before, or even think about it; yes, he had never allowed himself to say a single word of love or endearment to Paula. Otto: “But she knew, Fried, I know she knew.” And Fried stared ahead, and saw nothing beyond his tears, and he told Kazik about the fierce longing for the smell of her underarms, for the wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled, for that beauty mark, his private property—he was the only one who knew of its existence, not even Paula had ever seen it “there”—and now Fried understood the depth of the loss he had suffered, because he loved Paula more than anything on earth, and loved her wonderful gift for life, her own life, and everything about her, like her way of sitting on a chair, or bandaging a sore, and at times in her presence Fried knew that he, too, was alive, that perhaps there was something in him also deserving of the good life, and Fried spoke to Kazik of this with eyes closed and cheeks burning, and he was deeply grateful, because thanks to this child born to him in his old age, he had begun to straighten out the chaos of his life, and to settle into his own time, the way a seed dry these many years is suddenly blown by the wind and dropped on fertile soil, where it begins to germinate, and Fried spoke, or—in fact—did not speak, but only growled and splattered Kazik’s face with words and groans because he sensed the brevity of TIME [q.v.], and Kazik almost suffocated under this avalanche that destroyed his quickly dwindling life, and transfused him with experience he would never be able to use, because he wanted to live his own life and make his own mistakes, and Fried opened his eyes and looked at the child with COMPASSION [q.v.] and perceived how small and weak and miserable he was, and fell sadly silent. And so they sat hugging each other for a long while. And the doctor knew that at last he was doing something truly important for his son.

CHEMLA

MERCY

See under: COMPASSION

CHASHAD

SUSPICION

An instance of mistrusting something. The supposition of negative phenomena.

While Neigel was away on LEAVE [q.v.] in Munich, his adjutant, Sturmbannführer STAUKEH [q.v.] beset Wasserman in the garden. Slyly he interrogated him, “Is it true what they say about you, that you can’t die?” (Wasserman denied it), and then asked about the Jew’s relationship to Neigel. Wasserman: “This Staukeh, may he live a long life far away from me, amen, has a look about him, merciful heavens, as if his eyelashes have been plucked out one at a time! It seems he wanted to make use of me to test the atmosphere and find out whether Neigel and I have become bosom friends, like David