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

a little girl left, Abigail. She was eight years old. And together we had a son. We called him … oh, never mind.” Wasserman: “And this baby, too, was killed, in his sister’s arms when she came home with him one nightfrom the café, and a Polish sentry shot them both, for his own amusement … only a few moments before the curfew, nu well … All night long they lay on the pavement, the innocent children, and Hannah and Yisrael Barkov could not come down to get them … and that night ‘the cup passed over unto her’ and she received her punishment, our Hannah …” Hannah: “Barkov and I were like hungry animals that night. We gave birth to my son Dolek, and my Rochka, and then Nechemia, and Ben-Zion, and Abigail. And our last child. And Barkov lay with me again and again. And we scratched and bit each other till we bled. And we sweated buckets and drank buckets to have more and more moisture. And my womb was a giant funnel, a cornucopia. Seas and mountains and forests and land. And children flowed out of Barkov and me and filled the streets, and the ghetto, and all of Warsaw. And our passion knew no bounds. And our children were murdered outside. And we made new children. And then we heard shots outside again. So we made more children. And toward dawn we knew we could never stop. And then we felt everything move with us, the bed and the room and the house and the street. Everything rose and fell and writhed and sweated and groaned. And when dawn broke, all the world was with us, all the world was dancing our dance. People and trees and cats and stones. A dance. Even the sleepers did it in their dreams. Dreams. God was giving in. His terrible secret had been found out. That He can create only one thing. That He has doomed us to passion. To love this life. Love this life at any cost. Love without reason. And faith in life. And longing. A lowly craftsman. Deplorable. He stamped us with His only creation, He impressed it on our souls. He set it everywhere, in the trees and in the mountains. In the sea and in the wind. He spat it out of Himself like a curse. He made this world to unload His problems in. His guilt. His disease. And Yisrael Lev tore himself from me. He dragged himself to the window and threw himself out. And then I knew what I had to do. I did not go down to the street. Not the street. I stayed home. In front of the mirror. And I painted and adorned myself. All over. My body. And people came and talked to me. Words. They thought I was sick. They thought I was insane. They understood nothing. Only Otto. As soon as he saw me, Otto understood. I decided to be beautiful. So beautiful I would catch His eye, the hungry eye of God Almighty. His ever-searching eye. So He would see me as He sees the steppes. The jungles. The oceans. The Himalayas. So that He wouldsee me.” Otto: “I took her from the women’s shelter, where I also went to look for fighters, and I was right. The caretaker told me secretly that before Hannah came to them, she had been wandering the streets for months, raped by Poles and Jews and everybody, but she laughed as if she didn’t feel it, and luckily she didn’t become pregnant because of anemia and malnutrition. And here in the zoo no one would dream of hurting her, except Mr. Munin, who sneaks up behind her from the bushes to watch, and performs his art in a quiet and inconspicuous way as she wanders naked all night long, in the heat and cold, up and down the paths near the carnivore cages, trying to seduce God, fighting her war with Him, and believe me, this was no easy war.” Wasserman: “Ai, sometimes on a sultry evening we could feel Him struggling with Himself up there … The curtains of heaven seem to part, and He pecks out between them, shamed and trembling with excitement. Et! The whole universe was filled with His sweat and trembling then, and the blood in our veins burned and flowed, and above the seven firmaments, cloaked in cloudy raiment, we heard Him bang His hoary head against the wall and moan with pain.” Marcus: “On nights like these, Mrs. Zeitrin tempts Him with all her charms. She slinks around the zoo, twirling the curls of her blond wig, shamelessly tinkling her feet. Yes, God in His heaven bellows like a bull. Arches like a mighty tomcat. The moon turns red, and the wind forgets to blow. No, the air is still, full of fragrant yellow pollen that befuddles the mind. The animals mate in a frenzy. Old animals reduced to skin and bones fall passionately upon each other. The dry trunks of trees felled in the bombings four years ago burgeon with red and purple flowers. The earth trembles: it flexes underfoot. And then our Hannah, loveliest of women, dances her dance, whirls with eyes shut, with a soft, enchanting smile upon her lips, her body dripping honey that leaves mysterious signs on the earth—love letters of a sort—and wherever she drips, thick bushes of lilac and jasmine grow, and He reads them, half-insane. And not only He, I fear …” Munin: “Ha ha! The saint who worships the Lord, blessed be He, with his evil inclination is of a higher order than the saint who worships the Holy One without the evil inclination, so we find in The Chronicles of Jacob Josef, and the Magid reinforces this: I created the evil inclination and I created the Torah as its spice, and the gist is the meat and not the spice, och!! On a night like this Mrs. Zeitrin is