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

told him of the time in his boyhood when his father had whittled the Zugspitze. He had worked at it every day for many months, and produced a magnificent piece of art. The night little Neigel lost his first tooth, his father had fastened it to one of the peaks of the wooden Zugspitzc, and promised him that this would be an eternal bond between him and the mountain. Four years later, when they climbed the mountain together for the first time, Neigel slipped and almost fell into an abyss. By some miracle his trousers caught on a rock and he was saved. He and his father looked silently into each other’s eyes and knew what had saved his life. That moment, the intense look that had passed between him and his father in their loneliness on the mountain peak, is what Neigel would bring to Sergei. The artists were asked to describe such moments on a piece of paper which the eccentric physicist then passed slowly before the mirrors till the words fell off the paper and crumbled lifelessly in a heap.

But Kazik did not understand this explanation either. “Time-time,” he said. “What-is-this-time-you-talk-about,” he snapped, and they realizedthat he was no more capable of understanding time than they were of understanding the blood flowing in their veins or the oxygen they breathed. Kazik looked at the artists surrounding him and asked which one of them was Sergei. An embarrassed silence ensued. Aaron Marcus told him gently that one night the scientist had come alone to the mirror system and presented his own body to one of the mirrors. No one knows what became of him, but it is conceivable that all the moisture of time was extracted from his body and soul. Toward dawn Otto had found Sergei’s clothes and shoes on the lawn, together with a few broken mirrors. The artists were sure he was dead, but in the months that followed strange rumors began to reach the zoo: Sergei, or someone resembling him, had been spotted on Nizka Street in the northwestern section of the ghetto, leading a Waffen SS unit; then he—or his twin brother—was sighted in the uniform of the Polish police supervising the extermination of Jews in hiding at the Transway plant; then he—or his double—appeared in all the newspapers in photographs of the mass executions; they began to identify him even in pictures taken a few years back while he was still in Russia, only he was always somewhere else again, busy with murder of one variety or another. It seems he had gained control over the backward and forward flow of time, but could only fill a single role. A satisfactory explanation for all this has never been found.

Also see under: KAZIK, THE DEATH OF; THE SCREAM

ZEDEK

JUSTICE

See under: POWER

ZEITRIN, HANNAH

The most beautiful woman in the world. Artist of love.

When the band of lunatics [see under: LUNATICS, VOYAGE OF THE ] reached Otto’s pavilion, and Fried, Marcus, Zeidman, and Munin engaged in a lively dispute about the best way to teach Kazik “the principles of life,” in Fried’s words, and proposed reading aloud to him from the Old and New Testaments, or discoursing on the great philosophies, or playing him the most sublime music (Aaron Marcus recommendedBeethoven’s Fidelio), Otto said quietly, “He needs a woman,” and at once suggested that they take the boy to Hannah Zeitrin. Hannah Zcitrin at this hour (0525) was keeping her nightly vigil in the winding lane by the carnivores. Hannah Zeitrin: “During the bombings in Warsaw, I lost my oldest son, Dolek.” Wasserman: “And she was indeed the most beautiful woman in the world. And under her wrinkles and heavy kohl and the paint she smeared all over her face, and under the obscene pictures she drew on her body with pieces of charcoal and colored chalk, and the arrows adorning her arms and legs, some in ink she stole from Fried’s desk drawer, some etched with a sharp knife that left white scars, arrows even a blind man could follow home, begging your pardon, under all these guises, our Hannah is very beautiful indeed.” Hannah: “And my little one, Rochka, they took her just like that in April of ‘41.” Wasserman : “She used to work at Somcr’s Café, where my Sarah and I went sometimes on special occasions—holidays, birthdays—and Hannah, nu, she smiled at you in a way that made your heart expand. She was friendly to everyone, a real baleboosteh with her tray full of cups, fortunate the eye that beheld her! Ah, like a dancer she moved as she whispered in your ear that the strudel, nebuch, is getting old, but if you wait a little, stingy Somer will finish frying the blintzes for his son’s bar mitzvah and sell a few pieces at the café, you can trust him not to give away his hard work for nothing to the greedy guests …” Hannah: “And my husband, Yehuda-Efraim, was taken in the Gross Aktion of August ’42. And I was left alone. Without parents or husband or children. My native village, Dinov, was razed at the beginning of the war. I had nothing left. Nothing. And a month later, just one month, I decided I didn’t want to be half alive anymore, and I married Yisrael Lev Barkov. He was the baker at Somer’s. He played the accordion and loved to sing Russian songs. Once, two years before, after he lost his wife and two sons, Nechemia and Ben-Zion, he told me that in spite of all that happened to him, this war and the Germans, he still loved life so much he wouldn’t mind dying so long as life went on for good and for bad, so long as people like him continued to feel this joy in their hearts. And the lust for life. That’s what he said to me, and I wanted him. He had