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

the Praga School in Warsaw. Incidentally, the snow in the concentration camps had a peculiar smell on account of the ash. I can’t think what will happen to me someday when I explode with all these facts. I want to write, but I can’t get rid of my blocks and inhibitions. Every step becomes impossible because of the half step that must precede it. I’m trapped in Zeno’s paradox. The prosecutor said to Hoess, “It will not be possible at this time to read all the charges against you, because they fill twenty-one volumes, three hundred printed pages in each, with the descriptions of your crimes. Therefore we open this trial with a simple question: You are charged with the murder of four million human beings. Do you plead guilty?” The accused reflected a moment, wrinkled his forehead, raised his eyes to the judge, and said, “Yes, your Honor. I plead guilty. Though according to my calculations, I murdered only two and a half million.”

“Damn it,” cried Ayala, flushing the way she does when she gets excited. “Think how many times that man must have murdered himself to come out with a statement like that.”

“He must have been dead inside,” cried Ruth, appalled, “a million and a half—the difference—the man must have been dead.”

“I can’t go on like this,” I sobbed to each in turn. “I just can’t take it anymore. It’s so horrifying. How can you go on living and believing in humanity once you know?”

“Ask your grandfather,” said Ayala in exasperation. “He’s the one to ask, can’t you see that now?”

“But I don’t know anything about him, or the story.”

“He was an old man, he told a story to a Nazi. He survived. Nazi kaput. If you want to stick to the facts, these are your facts. From now on, write ardently. Not sensibly.”

She was referring to the White Room, the one she told me about the first time we met. I had said, “When you’re writing about things that happened Over There, you have to stick to the facts. Otherwise, what right do I have to touch the sore?”

“Write in human terms, Shlomik,” said Ayala. “Which is enough. Almost like poetry.”

I was still sidestepping, I recall. “Adorno says after Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible.”

“But there were human beings at Auschwitz,” said Ruth in her heavy, deliberate way, “and that’s exactly what makes poetry possible, I mean—”

“I mean”—Ayala beamed, her round cheeks shining red—“not poetry with rhyme and meter and all that, just two people trying to connect in a faltering, self-conscious way. You don’t need much.”

But you need courage, which I, of course—

Oh, bravo!

For the past few moments I have been trying to work out my exact location on the breakwater. I felt you tensing in the dark, and I made the mistake of hoping my story had touched your heart at last. And then I saw you throw a basin of briny water from your cool, cool cellars at the fishermen on either side of me, and I heard them curse in amazement, and call out to each other, Bitch of a sea tonight! And I couldn’t understand what was happening to you.

How puny your weapons seem to the people on the shore! Oh well, I’m soaking wet anyway, what have I got to lose, so as a token of my generosity, of my largesse as opposed to your pettiness, I will now tell you about Bruno, and—more particularly—about you. I know you’ll love that.

And I’ll skip the parts that don’t concern you—like the letters I sent to Warsaw, my credentials and references, the many appeals, the strings my publisher pulled, and the list of instructions from my mother, who was so anxious about my trip Over There she furnished me with twenty-oneself-addressed envelopes to make sure I would send her a sign of life every day; and the ten pairs of nylon stockings to sell on the black market (“in case you run out of money”) she smuggled into my suitcase with ancient cunning; and my sad leave-taking from Ruthy (“I hope you find what you’re looking for so we can start living again”), and the flight to Poland, the suitcase “lost” in customs and returned two days later (minus the nylon stockings).

The necessary permits took four days to arrive. Meanwhile, I wandered around Warsaw alone in the big, silent city: it was as if somebody had turned off the sound. I saw a long queue in front of a store displaying a lone tomato. In a café I found the Franzuski pastries Papa once mentioned nostalgically, so I ate them in his memory, not that they were any good. I saw pictures of clowns with scarves and colorful butterflies on the houses, symbols of the Solidarity movement, and I had an exciting meeting with Julian Strikowsky, the Polish Jewish writer, who told me stories about the shtetl in fluent Hebrew and—yes! Yes! All right! I’ll get to the point! And then after the permits arrived—the train ride to Danzig, the scenery, Motl’s villages, forests of linden trees and slender birches, barns and silos—and all the while I had the strongest impression “he” was moving toward me from the opposite direction, from Drohobycz, now under Russian rule. Just as I had felt while transcribing passages into my notebook: as though I could hear him rapping out answers from the opposite side of the page; as though we were two miners tunneling from opposite sides of a mountain …

And finally to the edge of the pier.

Facing the waves I knew I was right: Bruno hadn’t been murdered. He had escaped. And I use “escape” here not in the ordinary sense but as Bruno and I might have used it, to mean one who has pulled himself relentlessly toward the magnetic field of—you recite with me like a little girl finishing a sentence. I hear you whisper before I can even say, “A man who defected to a form of existence largely given to vague guesses,