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

zone. This, of course, until his famous last experiment, at which time he disappeared under suspicious circumstances [see under: PROMETHEUS].

INUYIM

TORTURE

The infliction of intense physical or mental suffering.

Kazik’s torture. Looking back when he neared the end of his life, Kazik discovered that the years had passed with a suffering which was in essence inexplicable. His desires, his hopes, his strengths, and his anxieties—in short, most of his personal resources—had been bestowed on him in such quantity and with such intensity, they seemed to have been intended for natural phenomena like storms and oceans, rather than human beings like Kazik, on whom they wreaked their vengeance. So, for example—Kazik’s self-loathing toward the end of his life was so fierce it might have split the planet from pole to pole, but it could only turn inward, against Kazik and the ARTISTS [q.v.] surrounding him. It would probably have taken thousands of years to dilute the instinctual needs and drives his small body had been burdened with, but without the diluting waters of time he stood no chance of happiness. His anguish and passion pained and humiliated him and extinguished any flicker of grace. No demand of his tortured soul, not a single one of his powerful urges ever sprouted, matured, and declined in its season, so that Kazik could turn into a real CREATION [q.v.], into that which is called, longingly, the crown of creation. Wasserman: “He was lost, Herr Neigel, lost from the start … Better that he had never been born

… What are these few hours we call ‘the life of man’? What could he do with them? How much could he know of himself and his world? Et! And do you think Old Methuselah in his dying days knew any more than Kazik at twenty minutes past six o’clock on the evening of that day?”

Wasserman asked this in a tired, broken voice the last evening hetold his story. Kazik was by now very close to the end of his life. So was Obersturmbannführer Neigel, who had returned from leave in Munich [see under: CATASTROPHE]. When Neigel heard this description of the torture Kazik underwent, he muttered, “A little more compassion, Herr Wasserman.” He leaned his head on his arm, his other arm flung across the desk. Wasserman told him how Kazik had attacked the remainder of life with fury: he demanded to be told by the artists who he was and to what end he had been created. But they had no answers. He was constantly being carried away by various embarrassing compulsions. There was absolutely nothing stable or predictable about him. To the artists, his short life appeared like a medley of impulses and conflicting whims. Wasserman: “His enthusiasms and depressions, ah, a revolting stew!” Not until a few months before his death [see under: KAZIK, THE DEATH OF], at around 1823 hours, did he begin to settle down. This may have been due to his physical weakness, or perhaps he was subdued because he grasped the meaninglessness and despair of his life. And then he looked back and was astounded to discover that what had always struck him as an ordinary life, depressing but stable, was, in fact, only a series of clownlike antics. Marcus: “His tastes seem to change from one moment to the next, and, just as quickly, his many and various beliefs and permanent convictions …” Sadly he realized that he had, in fact, accumulated no genuine experience, that his entire life may have been nothing but a kind of preparation. Marcus: “That’s the thing, dear Kazik: in return for a lifetime of experience, you have to pay with your life … It’s like, l‘havdil, selling your hair to buy a comb.” In his final hours he was unbearable. His body began to putrefy while he was still alive. For moments on end he was filled with remorse and love for everyone, which he radiated in burning waves not unlike his attacks of meanness and hate. One minute he clung tenderly to Fried and covered his face with warm kisses, and the next he crouched down and maliciously flung a handful of dust in the doctor’s eyes. Wasserman: “And Fried, a broken old demiurge, did not brush himself off but stood motionless, studying the poor little creature whose body and soul were being torn thus to shreds.” And the worst of it was their sense of waste, Kazik and the artists’: the bitter knowledge, clear beyond a doubt, that very close at hand was the chance they had not been able to find. And it was altogether possible that happiness had joined them at some point and thenabandoned them. They felt they had betrayed something, but they didn’t know what.

PLAGIAT

PLAGIARISM

Literary theft.

The crime of Obersturmbannfuhrer Neigel was exposed the eve of his departure on LEAVE [q.v.] to Munich through the following sequence of events: Neigel asked Wasserman to tell him the rest of the story of Kazik’s life, which had been interrupted at the point when Kazik was about to separate from HANNAH ZEITRIN [q.v.] in his thirtieth year. Wasserman—surprisingly—refused, and made the continuation of the story contingent on Neigel’s agreeing to listen to the part of the story he had skipped earlier because it was not well enough developed yet. Neigel wanted to know which part of the story he meant, and Wasserman replied that it was the chapter about the REVIVAL OF THE CHILDREN OF THE HEART [q.v.]. Neigel looked at his watch: his train to Berlin was leaving at 0600. At 0400 his driver was due to pick him up and take him to the station in Warsaw. He had three whole hours left, and he decided to be generous to Wasserman and let him proceed with the unimportant chapter of the story. Wasserman thanked him and began telling the story. Neigel listened in angry silence to the “anti-German provocations,” as he called them. By the way, that evening