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

frightened fishes roundly fusing with your human terror veered suddenly colliding into the ranks approaching the skulls cracking jaws smashing and the dolgan unsettled suddenly this is the natural law of maintaining distance this is the natural law of loneliness in the crowd and the water foamed now slashed to snippets swarming with dagger fins and somewhere in the margins he was compelled to the detachable calm of his greatness with the fish and ever so slowly they fell in line from head to tail and for the first time you recognized the ning, the string extending from the back of your neck to the bottom of your soul, and you listened in wonder to the steady hum as on and on it drew you lonely in the crowd of the lonely and the silent and you were filled with a strange sudden joy you flipped over on your back thenBruno sweetly wafted this way and that on the whispering on the chattering rim of the waves you were buoyed up and you smiled down at the abyss with the twin folds behind your knees and the gulls cried out in wonder at the sight of your white belly and your right armpit became a green jungle till it freed itself and drifted away a silky tangle of seaweed the water has a smell and you smell it then not the smell a man on a beach or riverbank would notice the water has a smell that is unlike any other as the sounds in the sea are unlike any other as the colors as the thoughts are stolen by nimble higglers the slaves of the sea the rustling of the waves returning like a kind of echo spiraling in the tumult of the spuming watery bazaar like an aromatic fair because the water has a smell Bruno a smell that isn’t breathed through the nostrils not through the nose except perhaps in the homesick season when inside a fish mind is a smell of water the smell of the sea the river on a night of fish smells and rocks in the deep and spongy plants in the dark and the smell of the remains of the big beasts of the sea and the spittle of oyster lips and the vapor of toothy coral puffed through the night of savage times and the deep secret smell of the far seafloor and the aroma of a hundred rivers and the bouquet of the currents and now even as you waken from your trance in the cradle of the sea to-and-fro Bruno floating with the wise slow ripples you too come to know that all the others floating about you have not a quibble or doubt that the thread of smell is sprayed by a river current far away whence they hatched into the world so long ago and whither they return to die never again to breathe the myriad smells of the sea every moment now they sense only the thread the flickering call of fate of a yearning come to me what counts is the way come to me and death will sever you from life come to me you hear the salmon fixing on it with all their might and Bruno stays among them for weeks and for months he tries to guess he listens to the murmuring waters the strange smells he smells continuously he relishes for hours and for days on end he seeks the whiff of his current the scent of his way and the flickering of his life and meanwhile the sun browns his back his shoulders turn sinewy and he learns the taste of plankton and the softness the sponginess not for a minute does he stop listening because before you didn’t know Bruno what this thing you were looking for was you dimly guessed there was just the longing that made you plunge into the final journey and suddenly you felt a shock in the middle of the sea you floated past Bornholm island and the fields kissing the shore with the gleaming white churchyou felt such a shock that a curlicue of remembered smell wafted by you crooked your nostril hovered an instant and then a fragile curlicue floated by and you were wide awake and you crossed your senses like swords and sparks of memories shot out of your heart into the water they fizzled it was the familiar smell the beloved smell and you wanted to turn back and search for it but the big ning was stretched inside you till it hurt and it bound you and would not let you turn back because salmon go onward onward while death drops in their wake and you almost sobbed with grief what was that smell all of a sudden Bruno what was it maybe the cheap perfume Adela the servant wore or the smell of the great rolls of cloth in your father’s magical store or the smell of cherries shining and brimming with a dark liquor under their skins which Adela used to bring home in late August gleaming drunk with light and warmth or the smell so cloyingly sweet it made you dizzy of the longed-for book the wind was leafing through, its riddled pages rotting like an overblown rose?

And I, too, am like that. Here on the sandy beach in Narvia, by the quiet sea in the month of July 1981, that same smell I keep encountering in so many unexpected places, when I walk past a bench where old people gather to tell their stories; in the cool damp cave I found near my army base in the Sinai; in my laboratory at the university between the rat cages on especially warm days; between the pages of every copy of The Street of Crocodiles; in the secret hollow under Ayala’s arm (after she decided not to sleep with me anymore, she had the decency to let me sniff her when necessary), and of course the