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

him: Munch was a weak link, too. Like Kafka and Mann and Dürer and Hogarth and Goya and the others gracing his notebook. A fragile network of weak links across the world. Look after Munch. Look after Bruno for his sake, for ours. Cherish thine artist, but guard him well. Ring him round with love, join hands and circle him. Study his paintings. Cheer him. Rejoice in his stories, but remember to be shocked on occasion, and thank him for his beautiful expression of blah-blah-blah, and join hands around him to let him feel your sympathy and your toughness, too, and your iron-door-like impenetrability.Spread your fingers while you clap, suggesting prison bars, and always love him, because that is the bargain: your love for his prudence. His loyalty for your aplomb.

Munch turned traitor. He allowed himself to be unraveled, and the scream burst rudely into your midst. And now it is here, so quickly patch the hole. And they loved Munch all the more! Gather round him and let him feel your breath on his face: he who failed once may fail again. Join hands and cordon him off with a red sign warning: DO NOT TOUCH.

Bruno is still running. Hewing the wind with his sharp features, rounding his lips in an effort to case the pain; oh, the fullness in Bruno, and his fear of that fullness. Look after him, for his sake, and for ours. Don’t let his dangerous passions tempt him to forgo your trusty, threadbare words. Do not allow him to write in body code, to a rhythm unmeasured by clock or metronome. And for heaven’s sake, don’t let him talk to himself in that unintelligible language he had to invent because of “those sly merchants we know who are only too eager to lead him by the hand to their filthy stalls of human speech, so they can open up their odious display cases and offers him their wares with a truckling smile; oh, no, sir, it’s absolutely free of charge, yes yes, a brand-new language, and it’s all yours. Still in its cellophane wrapping complete with your very own, very private dictionary, the pages of which appear to be blank but are covered in fact with invisible writing you have to smear with bile, your own pungent essence, in order to read and, no sir, no sir, we will not take a single penny from you! It isn’t often a customer stumbles—happens by, so we would be daft to scare him away with vulgar talk of costs and spending, rather let us say, dear sir, that me consider you a kind of modest investment, a down payment, as it were, ha-ha, a foot in the door of markets at present closed to us, and would you be kind enough to sign here and here and here.”

Munch signed, Kafka signed, Proust signed, and Bruno signed too, it seems. He can’t remember when exactly, but it seems that something was signed. Because his sense of loss grew deeper. And then the war came, and he began to think he’d made a mistake: people were turning treacherous, and the stalls of the sly merchants concealed “untrod markets, dark and deep, corrupt streets curbed with the debris of crumbling walls like rows of crocodile teeth …”

So Bruno ran away.

From the Drohobycz he loved. From the house on the corner of Samburska and Market Streets, Olympus of his private mythology,dwelling place of gods and angels in human form, or—forms less than human … ah, Bruno’s house! What pleasure pervades him at the thought of this ordinary-looking house, so utterly insignificant, yet transformed by the architectural wonders of Bruno’s imagination into a fabulous mansion with halls and labyrinthine corridors and gardens filled with life and color. On the ground floor was the family dry-goods store, Henrietta, named after his mother and bunglingly mismanaged by Bruno’s father, Yacob Schulz, “the secret poet, singlehandedly parrying the mighty forces of boredom, his father, brave explorer of mutable existence, who used his will and vision to transform himself into a bird, an insect, a crab, his father, forever dead-and-alive …”

And over the store—the living quarters. And Mother Henrietta. Plump, soft, devoted to Yacob the seer who was suffering from cancer, and whose business deteriorated before his wandering, unseeing eyes; and Mother is especially attuned to Bruno, this tender shoot of their declining years. This hypersensitive child, struggling against foes she can’t begin to imagine …

(One hazy, melancholy evening, she entered his room to find him feeding sugar crystals to the last flies of a chilly autumn.

“Bruno?”

“To give them strength for winter.”)

He has no friends. Not that he isn’t a gifted pupil, our Bruno. In fact, his teachers are quite astounded. Particularly the drawing master, Adolf Arendt. Bruno has been drawing in this mature fashion since the age of six. How puzzling he is. First he went through his coach phase, drew nothing but coaches, or drushkas. A fast coach with a folding top. Again and again he drew the coach with a “team of black horses sallying forth from the woods at midnight, its passengers unclad, their eyes dusted silver with sylvan reveries.” Then later he started to draw automobiles. Like most children, but not like children draw them. He drew horses, and he drew runners, too. Always motion. Yet the drawings are suffused with age and death and bitterness.

And he has no friends. “Nyedoenga,” the boys call him. A shlimazel.

And at home Adela the servant girl.

Her legs. Her body. Her female smell. Her combs. And the combings all over the house. Adela dispelling father Yacob’s chimeras with threats of a sound tickling, and Adela provocatively strutting on dainty heels; notice the shoes, Bruno!

The rhythmical movement of his lips and his slight, swift-movingbody give Bruno the appearance of a fish. He walks along the pier, with eyes shut, reviewing his actions back at the gallery: a quick hop over the chain with the warning sign, and a kiss on the picture. An old woman