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

fat, conglobated, her hair in a small bun on top of her head, putting on a performance for me, miming, What am I doing here? “And if you happen to think about something, like the victims who collaborated with the Germans, then right away—I mean right away!—all collaborators ever mentioned in books and monographs and documents, all the Quislings and Judenrats of the ghetto, all the miserable scum now frozen in the testimonies beyond the walls, are spliced by a single laser beam that dissects the collaborator that ‘you are’ inside, like this—whikkk!—the way Eve was cut out of Adam,” and she opens her eyes in bewilderment again as if to say, What-am-I-doing-here, and tells me in a clear quiet voice, shockingly sad and sincere, that this is how it must be written, this is the spirit of the book.

But I didn’t dare. Even now, after meeting you and Bruno, and after all I’ve been through, I can’t do it. Ayala was right about everything. That childish performance was only a mask for her acute vision, a vision far more penetrating than my own, with her accurate and enlightened sense of the bitterness of life. Once again I knew I was wrong.

Suddenly she wakes up. The name Bruno sends a long shiver through her. A white furrow, shaggy as a horse’s mane, is tossed along the fringe of the dark horizon. I’m boring her with my story, but those were my conditions, my petty conditions, and once and for all I’m going to tell her!

And now, Bruno. Did you hear that? I said “Bruno” again. You like this story. I heard it from you the first time in Narvia:

Suddenly, after months of riding the sea with a throbbing heart, half delirious with joy and wonder, a drop of human anguish coagulated inside him and its dark color spread through the waters of the sea.

At first he fought it. He pressed his arms to his sides and flapped with vigor, trying to echo the great ning of the shoal, and scrupulously to maintain the dolgan between himself and the fish on either side of him. He learned that the shoal that seemed to be borne so easily, actually maneuvered through constant and painstaking effort.

Or was it perhaps the ease-and-at-one-ment of a single body, healthy and harmonious? Bruno had sensed this while they were being attacked by a school of bluefish in Mälmo harbor: he hadn’t understood what was going on when his shoal was suddenly split in two and sent flying in opposite directions, leaving an empty space in the center that pulled and paralyzed, and while the surprised bluefish were fighting the suctionof the treacherous waters, the salmon came back and closed in fast like two hands clapping. The water pressure propelled the bluefish into the distance, and they beat a retreat to the north with fast slaps of their tails. Bruno was jealous of the salmon. They were whole in their way. He, fragmentary in his. He’d lost the musical flow of the first weeks. He dipped his hot forehead in the waves and let them carry him.

He listened to the sea. He heard the murmur of the waves’ caress on the sandy floor—like a constant winnowing of grain. He heard the distant rumbling of piers in a northern harbor as the shoal passed by; a pier doesn’t sound like the shore: a pier returns a slightly metallic echo while the shore returns a spongy echo. In this way he learned that in the water he could not hear the sounds directly ahead of him, but only the sounds that came at him sideways or from behind. He knew the rustling of the fins of Yorick and Napoleon—that’s what he called his neighbors—quite well, but the ripple of the anonymous fish in front was utterly lost to him. Bruno recognized in this, of course, a mocking and symbolic representation of his own helplessness: his ears were still turned backward; he was still intent on the past. Still thinking about his own life in profane terms, and—what was most disappointing of all to Bruno—still not finding within himself a single sentence he could call his own, which no one could take away and distort.

He could not stop reflecting on his former life. Again and again he rolled the years through his mind like amber beads. His father’s shop of wonders; the pleasures of childhood; the fabulous dawning of the Age of Genius; his father’s illness; the humiliation of poverty; the sale of their beloved home on Samburska Street; the beginning of the war; the waning of the Age of Genius … all enveloped him in sadness, because he realized that human beings can never appreciate the life they have been given, keenly and fervently. When first they receive life, they are not ready to understand the gift, and in the course of time they stop troubling their heads about it. For this reason they fail to sense life until it slowly takes leave of their bodies, and they slowly, steadily decline. It would be a mistake to call this “life.” An injustice to call it that: it’s death they live with caution and fear as though trying to dig their heels in the ground so they won’t slip too fast down a very steep incline. Bruno groaned in the water, and for a moment the shoal was alert.

His appetite had also been impaired. During the morninggyoya, when the salmon grazed the rich fields of the sea, or in the evening, as thegreat ning subsided and the sated shoal rested on the water like a giant fan, Bruno would float among the quiet fish gilling to cool themselves off from the day’s work, and his spirits flagged. He strained the plankton between his teeth, or plunged below to peck on juicy black seaweed and chew without pleasure, a single thought flashing through him in the abyss: Something has been misappropriated and forgotten. Something has been ruined beyond comprehension.

One morning he