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

And I took a broken-down bus to Narvia, and rented a room in the cottage of the widow Dombursky, who dressed in black and had three hairy warts on her cheek. She cleared out a room for me, with a picture of Mary and baby Jesus on the wall above the bed, and a photographof Mr. Dombursky in his postman’s uniform and mustache on the wall facing it. The afternoon of my arrival in the village, I changed into my gray bathing trunks and sat down on a derelict chair on the empty beach, in the keen wind of an unusually cool July day, feeling lonely and tense—and I waited.

Little by little, things began to change. All day long, I waited on the beach. I watched the fishermen set off in the morning, and I was still there when they returned in the evening and called their families out to the quay to help them pull in the boats with a primitive kind of crane and divide the day’s catch on a long, wooden table; only then would I head back to eat the “Cyclops fish,” or sole, the widow Dombursky cooked—the way all village women cooked it in the evenings—and then I would sit down to write or, rather, to erase. I had by now brought Bruno as far as Danzig; I had smuggled him there by train, past the police and literary authorities. Now I was obliged to wait patiently. To vacate myself and serve as his writing hand, or even more than that: who could say what he would demand of me in return for re-creating his lost work, The Messiah? I toned down, and listened. In nearby Gdansk, the Solidarity people were rioting, and here in the village there were frequent power failures. At times I had to write by the light of a smoky oil lamp. Some mornings there was no bread on the table. I wrote not a single word to Ruth or Ayala, nor did I send my mother any letters. For the first time since my brief affair with Ayala, I felt I was in love. I didn’t quite know with whom yet, but at any rate, I was ready for love. Maybe that was why things turned out so well

… Ah, now we’re getting there. You’re flouncing impatiently, you’re gushing all over me. Listen: my fourth morning in Narvia I went in the water. The smooth waves bore me gently. Already you seemed to know. The story made it necessary for me to go to the sea and wait. Ever since I first read Bruno and began to transcribe those passages of his works, I had attached a special significance to what my hand would write. I constantly expected an important message.

But the sea in my story was a cunning old giant, kindly and gruff, with a wet beard like Neptune’s, and I could not understand why I didn’t feel right about him. I floated patiently in the water all day, my back turning lobster-red, till at around five o’clock in the afternoon I discovered that my old man of the sea was actually—a woman. A woman’s psyche in a body of water. An immense blue mollusc, asleepmost of the time because it can’t satisfy its own immense demands for energy, enveloped by the runny, medusa-like essence of her infinitesimal soul, surging, billowing, a thousand petticoats in green, white, and blue; and she sleeps, deep in one of a thousand lunar basins, her face upturned like a giant sunflower and her liquid body softly sustaining the reflexive motion in wavy contractions, foamy shivers, surrealistic reveries, fashioning fantastical creatures out of her depths; but beware, make no mistake about her serene and dignified appearance, because underneath it all she’s nothing but a cheap little slut, utterly shameless, not to say primitive in her wanton cravings, a typical specimen of paleontological times, with hardly the education one might expect in view of her advanced age and experience and her travels over the globe, no, rather, like certain women—one of whom I encountered several years ago and came to know intimately—she has learned a way of blithely combining little bits of knowledge with a thousand-and-one amusing stories and “piquant” anecdotes to win her listener over, though on the whole I would say she is equipped with keen intuition and the instincts of a hunter, all of which tends to mislead certain people, yes, you see you can’t hide anything from me anymore, I know you now, down to the last cranny in your blackest depths, and it seems I have succeeded where other men failed, other less daring men or, rather, men who were not “obliged” to be so daring; because (not that you’d ever admit it) I succeeded in catching something elusive about you and compressing it into a single iridescent gleam of endless forms and colors and fields of blue light in a delirium of flickering expanses whose greatest magic is that they never exist enough to be recalled, to be recorded—

These and other things I whispered to you there, on the beach in Narvia. My lips touched the water and my body was very hot. It’s about “him,” I said, but it’s also about me. It’s about my family and what the Beast did to us. And I spoke about fear. And about Grandfather, whom I can’t seem to bring back to life, not even in the story. And about being unable to understand my life until I learn about my unlived life Over There. And I told you that, for me, Bruno is the key: an invitation and a warning. And I quoted his stories from memory …

“Hey, you there”—an eerie, nasal voice addressed me crossly. I raised my head but saw no one. The sand was white and bare except for my beach chair with the torn canvas flapping in the wind. But then an unusually