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

SS, that after so many years of odd jobs I finally had steady work in the movement and a good salary, too, and I would come home in the evening, yes, she didn’t even join the party, she’s a little like your Paula that way—it’s funny, you know, I remember now that when I was young I always looked for girls like Paula, the kind with … you know what I mean—and Tina doesn’t understand politics, no, the things that are going on these days, she doesn’t understand … Once I stopped her just in time from mailing an admiring letter to a writer you mayhave heard of, Thomas Mann—I knew the name from our blacklist, can you believe it? In ’41 she wanted to send him a letter, and he was in America, the traitor! Or sometimes she would go out wearing a woolen hat and scarf, both red! I mean this was late in ‘41, while we were spitting blood against Voroshilov’s divisions in Leningrad! Luckily nobody suspected her, she isn’t the talkative type, and she has no friends other than me, we’re both loners. And then there was that business with Karl’s fingers.” “What business, Herr Neigel?” “He broke two fingers on his right hand and she put them in a splint, she’s a nurse, you know; she set them in the shape of a ‘V,’ and for a whole month while I was at the front, I had a little Churchill walking around my house, you see what she does? Or the petunias.” “The petunias, Herr Neigel?” “We have window boxes. Tina loves flowers. She can gaze at a single flower for hours at a time …” They looked at each other and, without wishing to, smiled. “Yes. Just like her. But after her visit here she began to do even stranger things: she threw out the brown petunias and planted yellow, pink, and red ones so my window boxes in Munich now sprout yellow, pink, and red blooms. She says it’s just for color, but I know she’s trying to remind me of the Jews and homos and Communists in the camp. That’s her revenge, you see? Because when I asked her why, yes, why she had to go out wearing the red hat and scarf, why she was doing this to me, she told me without compunction that she had worn that hat and scarf the first time we went out together, to see a Charlie Chaplin picture. Tina loves comedy, and I love to hear her laugh. Anyway, she wore that Bolshevik getup in ’41 because of that night! And she refused to give me her word never to do it again; she said it was getting pretty hard to keep up with the styles these days—and she wasn’t talking about dresses, Wasserman—one day you’re allowed to wear red and the next day you’re not, one day it’s all right to like Thomas Mann and the next day it’s not, yes, now you know, and she’s living alone with the children in Munich in a tiny apartment she rented for herself, and she refuses to talk to me. At most she allows me to visit the children for a few hours on my leave, but with her—nothing. One word about Tina to anyone and it would be all over for her!” Wasserman, derisively: “Why do you not do it, then?” Neigel looks down in silence. Wasserman nods in silence. “She told me,” says Neigel at last, “that she’s still living with me, but she means somebody else. The man I used to be, the one she wore the red scarfand hat for, and hung a picture of Chaplin in the bedroom for, can you believe it?—Chaplin, after that film he made about the Führer! She hasn’t changed her hairstyle in years, and God knows hairstyles have changed since Adolf came to power, and next to her bed she keeps stacks of books I can’t imagine how she ever found, by writers whose names I’m not even allowed to pronounce out loud, and when I look at her I feel a kind of shock, Wasserman, because she’s frozen her life, yes, even the expression on her face is different from everyone else’s. Hers is a slow expression, if you know what I mean. She lives and looks exactly the way she did in 1930 when I joined the movement. My wife is unfaithful to me—with me. What do you say about that?” Wasserman didn’t answer. He wondered how flowers can sometimes go on blooming under a blanket of snow. Neigel kept talking. He couldn’t seem to stop himself anymore. (Wasserman: “Like an inexperienced drinker dizzy with his first taste of the intoxicating power of words!”) “And it isn’t like she’s a Communist or anything. Not at all. She’s a woman, she has no political convictions. She doesn’t read the newspaper or understand what’s going on, but she’s afraid of crowds, and she’s afraid of violence, very sensitive, you understand, she‘s—” He laughed awkwardly, and for a moment appeared so foolish and helpless Wasserman had to wince. “And you brought a woman like that here?” he asked. Neigel: “It was all a mistake. Sheer stupidity. It was supposed to be a surprise, you see, they brought the officers’ wives out here for a visit last year before Christmas. We had no idea they were coming, and they arrived just as the latest consignment of Jewish prisoners ran through the Himmelstrasse, blue with cold in the snow. Tina fainted before she had a chance to say anything, luckily for me. Two other women fainted, too, though. But after that, you can imagine, it was even more imperative to show them I was tough, so they wouldn’t start talking behind my back.” He stopped speaking and spread his fingers in a weak, defeated gesture. “You see, Herr Wasserman, never, not even in my letters, did I tell her exactly what my duties here were. I didn’t want