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

raised his head above water and looked at the fish, reflecting sadly that they were stronger than he was. From horizon to horizon the sea was flecked with salmon nearing maturity. Almost everyone except poor Yorick and a few other weaklings were already as big as Bruno himself. Their greenish fins were erect and powerful. They were bold-faced, tough, and without charm, and Bruno asked himself for the thousandth time to what end they had set off on this journey. He rolled over and swam sideways toward the shore like a man. The salmon made way for him indifferently. During the gyoya no one heeded the dolgan. Bruno searched for Laprik, but could not find him. A strange thought flickered through him briefly that perhaps Laprik didn’t even exist. That Laprik was merely the fulfillment of the wishes of half a million salmon for a Laprik to exist. Bruno, however, distinctly remembered the sight of Laprik accepting him into his shoal on the beach in Danzig, and besides, there was something about Laprik and his quiet ning which could not have been brought into being by the aspirations of the masses: Bruno did not know how to explain this exactly. There was, in Laprik’s ning, a sense of leadership through discomfort. Isolationism. Bruno had not for a single moment of the journey felt bitter that someone else was determining their rhythm and direction. In the distance, near a broad rock shelf, Bruno spied the grotesque snout of an old hammerhead shark steadily trailing the shoal and growing fat on its flesh. The salmon had become so accustomed to the shark, he no longer elicited the orga drive among them, that fast escape strategy they had put into action against the bluefish in Mälmo. Bruno was depressed. At such times—and here I venture a guess—he must have longed for a pen.

He floated around this way among the grazing salmon, like a bringer of bad news. The sky above was overcast. Clouds were piled so thick and still that sometimes the world seemed to be passing below. Soon the storms of November would commence. At night he felt the sudden contractions of a vague fear along the wake of the shoal. His heartcurdled because he had been able to say it clearly to himself: he pitied the salmon for having no protection against their very existence.

So what did you want them to do? Bruno shook himself and swam out to the sidelines, muttering, How did you expect the salmon to find relief from their gritty lives? Publish books and go into business, stage theatricals and organize political parties, feign love and friendship, calculate and pull wires and go to war, play football and write poetry? He rolled over on his back and allowed the little currents of the shoal to cradle him. They are the Journey incarnate, Death with fins stuck on and two slits for gills, and oh, the colorful masquerade of Death! Oh, the gay wizards of its choreography! Bruno blew a small water bubble in a kind of toast: To your health, swift artists of Death, kindly half-drunk servants of the one true evolution—that adjusts Life to their Death so gently, nimbly, and methodically. To your infinitely rich imagination! To the light touch of your fingers, plying needle and scissors to make a thousand beguiling costumes and accessories for everyone at the ball—snouts and fangs and skins and horns, tufts of hair and tails and wings, flippers and armor, spikes, nails and claws, scales and stingers—what a wardrobe! No one need go bare! And who is this? Sound the drum. Ingenious, is it not? Here comes the cleverest guest by far, in a most deceptive costume: Death wearing spectacles and a false beard, with a book under his arm! How gay, how gaudy, how unimaginably—blaaah—

Only you, Bruno, float slowly through the recesses of the teeming hall and along its narrow gullies, borne sadly with the uninvited salmon whom the revelers excluded tactfully in order not to spoil the festive mood; but the salmon, though uninvited, are projected as a cool and constant nightmare on the dimmest screens of their brains; these salmon who pass through the streets of life as a bare, bleached fishbone, never to be fleshed with the solace of illusion and fleeting oblivion, wandering accursed—

O Lord, said Bruno (who had never been religious), to what end do you impel these millions of salmon in endless circles around the world? Why can’t you content yourself with a single salmon? A pair of salmon? Why, even human beings, Lord, the crudest of your animals, have learned the knack of using symbols. We say “God,” “man,” “suffering,” “love,” “life,” packing the whole experience into one little box. Why can’t you do that? Couldn’t you forbear as the thoughts run through your prolific mind? Why must your symbols be so intricate and extravagant?Is it because we have become more proficient than you at divining the pain and suffering in each little box, and prefer to keep the lid on?

A few weeks later, he received a kind of answer. This is not uncommon at sea: vital questions often send thick-growing fibers through the earth and down the crevices of the blackest abyss. An anonymous essence somewhere is roused from sleep, quickened by the fibers, and plucked out of its seaweed reverie to rise and float slowly upon the water. And sometimes hundreds or thousands of years go by before an answer meets the question that gave it a life and a name, though rarely if ever will they meet. Growing desperate, they slowly lose their vitality and sink into the soporific arms of the seaweed. My Bruno used to run into particles of these sensations on his journey: peels of ideas, cadavers of audacity, half of them unripe and the other half rotting. This produced in him only a mild, puzzling anguish. He wasn’t afraid of them. The sealed ocean of his writings was full of their kind.

But he, he of