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

that following the brief exchange between Neigel and Staukeh, surprisingly indifferent on Neigel’s part, Staukeh took Ncigel’s revolver out of his holster and left two bullets in it, one for Neigel and the other for Wasserman. Before turning to leave, he expressed the hope that Neigel would at least do his honor-bound duty. But when the door closed behind Staukeh, Neigel said feverishly, “Let’s continue. There’s still time. He was a painter of the imagination, our Kazik, wasn’t he? Let’s continue.”

Also see under: CARICATURIST

ZEAKA

THE SCREAM

A loud cry of pain or grief, a plea for help, etc.

The Scream is the title of the complicated mechanism of soldered drainpipes erected in the empty pigsty, another experiment conducted by SERGEI [q.v.]. A scream was imprisoned in these tin drainpipes in August 1942. It drove most of the zoo inhabitants—who were a little loony to begin with—out of their minds. Marcus: “We couldn’t followthe simplest thought to its conclusion in those days! That horrible noise upset our thinking, devoured our ideas! But Otto—ah. Otto—he would never agree to set it free from the maze. Our Otto is extremely zealous concerning the rights of his artists.” Otto: “You’ll get used to it.” And they did, in fact, get used to it. They became so used to it that by and by they stopped hearing it altogether. Or rather, for one last time they noticed its existence, the night old Fried swore he would give meaning to Kazik’s life [see under: PRAYER] when Kazik was very young. So very young. For a single moment after Fried had bravely resolved never to despair, the scream mounted till—for an instant—it became a piercing, defiant shriek. Otto, innocently asleep in his pavilion, smiled in a dream and said, “You hear, Fried? That’s your scream, I believe. You have just been born.” Kazik first encountered the scream during the VOYAGE OF THE LUNATICS [q.v.]. He did not understand what the assemblage of tin was doing in the empty cage, but everyone could see he was strangely agitated. His face twitched. Strong winds seemed to be blasting him. Again he tried to approach the cage—and again he was blasted. He ran away. He stopped and turned back, hesitant, suspicious. Something was evidently paining him. He tugged at Fried’s sleeve and demanded an explanation. Aaron Marcus was the one who told him in his gentle way what the system was for. Sergei had used the pig cage (after the pigs had been killed in the bombings) to build this tin network of passages and meanders straight and angular, wavy and spiraling. Otto: “What, half the zoo budget I spent on that scrap tin and aluminum from the junkyards near the Vistula. Sergei said aluminum would work best, because it produces excellent echoes, and it wasn’t cheap, believe me, but you don’t waste things like that in wartime.” Sergei had planned the maze in such a way that not only would the echo inside retain its volume, but after someone had screamed into the tubes, the sound grew louder and louder: it doubled its volume at a fantastic speed, it trebled it, and within a few seconds filled the entire system with screams and scream fragments and scream echoes, a thick, dense acoustic energy, highly charged and oscillating—according to the inventor at least—in the physical no-man’s-land between sound and mass. Fried: “The poor screwball. Back home we call his type a ‘pickholtz.’ What a dolt!” Marcus: “But how intensely he talked to himself about the invention! He used to walk along lecturing himself, and if he happened to spot one of us, he disappeared! Now you seehim, now you don’t.” Otto: “He had one sensitive eye that would fill with tears whenever you looked into it, and he would blush and stammer, poor man.” Paula: “At least if we’d had some idea of what happened to him in the fifty years since we disbanded, maybe—who knows?—we might have been able to help him. But—not him. He kept to himself. Acted like a stranger. Like a real fonieh. A Russian. Or maybe, heaven forbid, an enemy?” Otto: “With me sometimes he talked. I don’t know why me of all people. He used these scientific terms to explain the complicated phases of his ideas to me.” Fried: “The vocal tension of the scream, that’s what he was always going on about with poor Otto, and Otto would come to me later and ask what that tension was, but of course I didn’t understand any of it either.” Marcus: “It was only months after he performed that experiment with the mirrors [see under: PROMETHEUS] and disappeared that we began to understand, yes. He dreamed of a tremendous tension developing among the amplified shock waves of echoes multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold; nu, what do you think of that?” Sergei would walk around the zoo tracing scream waves refracting into each other with accruing inertia, infinite bifurcations of collisions and intersections smashing against the tin and aluminum walls, and returning thence to explode into little echoes of their own. Fried: “And the tension! Don’t forget the vocal tension! Ach! What a pickholtz he was!” Otto: “And what about the hydrogen, have you forgotten? He insisted on introducing hydrogen into his system, because he said echoes run more smoothly in hydrogen … That was getting a little dangerous, but I let him do it anyhow.” Munin: “And the splitting? All that talk about ‘splitting,’ I thought the strain might split an egg in there!” Marcus: “Nu yes. Afterward that, too, was clarified. The poor wretch talked about splitting. Yes, splitting the scream into acoustic energy and human anguish.” And indeed, judging by the mad inventor’s calculation sheets, discovered shortly after he himself had disappeared, Sergei believed the human scream consisted of two separate elements. Since it was impossible to increase the quantity of human anguish in a scream, he decided to concentrate his efforts on the infinite proliferation of its vocal