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

to tell the story. I can just hear you muttering, If that’s how he writes, he’d better not write about me. He’d better not dry me out on his pages or plaster me all over his notebooks. Because with me, dearie, you’re going to have to write with wild abandon, in rarest ink made of pungent male and female secretions and the passions of life, not like this, sweetie pie …

But listen, will you, please?

As I tried to write the story of Anshel Wasserman, my own life became more and more circumscribed. The Greek philosopher Zeno argued that motion is impossible because a moving object has to reach the halfway point before it can reach the end, and therefore a body that traverses a finite distance must traverse an infinite number of halves in a finite time, i.e., the time it actually takes to traverse the finite distance in question. Which is exactly what happened to me: I wrote, but could not progress from one word to the next. From one idea to the next. My pen scored the page with a kind of terrible stammer. I had a regular desk at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Library by this time, and the librarians all knew me. Every morning at around ten I used to shut my books and go to the cafeteria for a snack. A roll with hard-boiled egg and tomato. Followed by coffee and the excellent yeast cake they serve there. I would sit around listening to the employees talk about their children and their paychecks, and think to myself dejectedly, Somewhere inside this edifice is an empty white room with thin, membranous walls, if only I could find it.

Ruth would pick me up at five on her way home from work in our beat-up Mini Minor. One look at me as I climbed into the car and she bit her lip to keep from saying anything that might start a fight. We had no children at the time. Yariv wasn’t born yet. Ruth was undergoing horrid, expensive gynecological treatments I didn’t want to know about. I was prepared to pay for them, sure. Have sex with her every morningat 6:30 on the dot—yes, I was prepared to do that, too. But listen to the gory details—no, thank you. And anyway, what right had she to complain? Before she married me, I warned her that when you really need me, I’m useless. That’s how it is. Nobody’s perfect. I consider this fair, though, because I don’t expect help from anyone, including her. Of course, my talking this way used to infuriate her. Coming home from her latest gynecological idol, she would attack me with a vehemence that amazed even her. I had never seen her let go of her inhibitions and lose control like that. Her broad, coarse face, poised between pretttiness and raw peasant health, would suddenly turn ugly and brutal. I, of course, would remain perfectly cool and levelheaded, my only worry being that she might do herself harm in this hysterical state. And all else failing, I was sometimes forced to give her a swift slap in the face to calm her down, after which she would throw herself on the bed and fall asleep sobbing. All this nastiness spewing out when she screamed at me made me sick, though I did remark that these outbursts often had the effect of purging her rather quickly so she could go on loving me unperturbed. There are some things I will never understand about women. Ruth would say, I know you don’t believe your own words. It’s a kind of inner conflict you’re taking out on me, and it isn’t fair, Momik.

Maybe she’s right, I don’t know. Sometimes I want to make it up to her. I could cry when I think about the day she’ll be lying there in critical condition and I walk in to donate a kidney that saves her life. It’s hard to imagine a nobler sacrifice. Sometimes I actually look forward to it. Then she’ll see: her whole life with me will take on a different meaning. She will understand the truth and her heart will bleed. Oh, my darling, the hell you must have lived through.

I tried another tack. The trial of Rudolf Hoess, commander of Auschwitz, in the winter of 1946. For a few weeks I considered reconstructing the trial: Anshel Wasserman vs. Rudolf Hoess. I’d worked out some fairly good segments of the case. Would Anshel Wasserman send Hoess “back to Chelm”? Grandfather rises in the witness stand and hurls a curse at Hoess, may his face take on a striking resemblance to the antiSemitic cartoons in Die Stürmer. “And now, Herr Hoess,” says Grandfather Anshel, pronouncing his verdict, “you are free to wander the earth, and may God have mercy on your evil soul.” I worked on this story for the better part of two months. I wrote in a fever. The humminginside me grew louder. It was unmistakably the old, monotonous story-tune Grandfather used twenty-five years ago, though it was still a tune without any words. I sometimes wondered if anyone else could hear it.

But this story, too, ground to a halt. I could not bring Anshel Wasserman to look Hoess in the face. I suppose there are certain things you shouldn’t demand of your own characters. This had never occurred to me when I was writing poetry, maybe because I never brought two people together in a poem. Maybe, said Ruth, but your grandfather and the German are just that, two people, so let something happen between them. If only I knew what, I said. I’ll have to go back to the facts. People I’ll never understand. Nobody’s perfect, okay?

I searched through back issues of the Times. Our Warsaw correspondent reports on the trial of the decade: “Spectators at the trial were seated two to a desk. Rudolf Hoess, the accused, with sad, intelligent eyes, wore a light green uniform.” Snowflakes fell on the windows of