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

live with her, and the adventurers and sailors and crazy romantics come to me, and we sort of divided things up between us like that without a plan or anything and now we have this curious problem all of a sudden, this human creature comes along, a speck, a crumb, who starts making more trouble for her than a volcanic ulcer. So what do you do with him? Right: send him to me. Oh, she won’t mind, she tells herself, my kindhearted sister, she probably won’t even notice, and if she ever does, she’ll be thrilled to pieces because he’s exactly her type, this Bruno, perfect for her romantic temperament, and though she’s about four million years old, deep down inside she’s just a girl, isn’t it marvelous—says my sister—how young at heart and playful she is and uh—well, adventurous, ye-es … (You’ve got to hear the way she says “adventurous.” It’s so adorable she starts sprouting warty lemon groves in India.)

What can I tell you—she’s right. She’s right, she’s right, she’s right. That’s how I am. And the same evening, I flew in breathless to the Danzig coast from Madagascar and saw this little man here for the first time, slapping the water like an old manatee that spreads its wings, flies out of the water, and lands with a terrible thud (that’s how they calve), and when I saw how desperately he was trying to swim deeper and deeper into me to get away from her, I suddenly felt something, I could swear I was dancing inside, I’m like that sometimes, and then my island chains clattered in the Pacific, icebergs creaked in Antarctica, and I said to myself, Come now, don’t lose your head, remember how it ended with Odysseus and Marco Polo and Francis Drake, you know theyalways leave you in the end and go back where they came from, they only need you when they’re beyond despair, but once you’ve patched them up, they leave without a word of gratitude, icy and insensible, never to discover who and what you are beneath all that water …

And then I said, Hell, I said, what’s the sense of living if I have to be hemmed in and choked by continents and coasts and isthmuses, when all I know about the world is what the rivers tell me with their cloying tongues, or what the gulls shriek at each other overhead, or what the silly little raindrops get so flustered about, and what’s the sense of living if I can’t get a little loving and a heartache once in a while, yes that’s right, a heartache, by all the easterlies, and, oh, how sweet it is, like the time I held the Red Sea in for an eternity and a half to let the Jews pass through and I thought I’d go crazy (it’s unbelievably hard to hold it in like that, and between two banks, no less), and I took one look at the small, strong, concentrated man, at his slightly triangular head, his thin white physique, and I knew there and then that I would be his, that I would give myself to him in wild abandon, from my heights down to my blackest depths, and without a moment’s thought about where this was leading, and how he would go back to her when he finished poisoning me and stirring me up, once he unburdened himself inside me and crumbled into the many components which I—and only I—can offer him, all the shimmers and colors and loops of longing and madcap waves, and suddenly I was hot and cold and flushed all over, because that’s how I am in these situations, everything shows, and you might have thought I brought the whole Red Sea to Danzig by mistake, but I managed somehow to remember the errands and things I had to attend to, but where was I going to find the patience for any of that now—temperature maintenance and fixing a precise arc for the Gulf Stream, and a steady rate for the glaciers to drift, and all that bureaucratic stuff about high tide and low tide I could never get straight though the bitter truth is that I just didn’t care anymore, I only knew I would follow that man of mine forever, che sarà sarà, as the Italians say (I simply adore Venice, which in my opinion is the most brilliant idea my sister ever had), and believe it or not, it was only then that I noticed my man was not alone, in fact he was surrounded by about a million salmon on the way back to their river, and I must confess I couldn’t remember exactly what kind of life cycle the salmon have; that is, I used to know, but I forgot.

That’s the kind of thing that goes in one ear in Panama and out the other in the Bosphorus, because how are you supposed to remember all the details about fish and seaweed and sponges and shrimps and corals and monsters and sirens, a million stories, a million troubles, though in this particular instance I decided not to indulge in ignorance, and I dispatched my speedy cubs, my quick, pliable wavelings, my boon companions, my bond slaves, who promptly circled the salmon and touched their fins, brushing past them as if by chance, and then headed for the beach, because … how shall I explain it … it’s so silly really … you see, I have this minor health problem, temporarily of course, on account of which I can only understand what my wavelings tell me after they’ve touched the shore, or a reef or an island or any other land object like a ship, it’s nothing really, just a flaw in the plan I know will be corrected before long, after which I’ll be able to do it alone, but who cares about that now, the important thing is that my sweet little wavelings had finished rendering the feel