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

all people, had been granted a reply of sorts. A token. The questions he asked had not been answered directly, it’s true, but neither had they been entirely disregarded. And I have a gnawing suspicion that a certain someone used her influence in this case. Someone I know did quite a job of thinking, investigating, and organizing, out of keeping with her drowsy nature. Someone clearly transcended herself.

Because that afternoon, at the Kattegat pass between Sweden and Denmark, the shoal came to a halt for no apparent reason. It was a little early for the evening gyoya, and Bruno stirred in confusion from his drowsy afternoon float. He looked around and saw a quiet, waveless sea. A light wind—like a rustling theater curtain—disturbed the blue horizon and made it quiver. The fish finned rhythmically in place, indifferent to what was going on around them. A flock of cranes flew by overhead. Bruno finned with his hands and moved his lips as he was wont to do in moments of stress. A troublesome infection had lately erupted around the two sores on his chest. It burned more than ever now. He rubbed the strange lesions and waited expectantly.

And then, a short distance away from the salmon scouts, the sea parted for a band of dolphins leaping like lightning before the shoal. Bruno took fright, but the fish around him were unperturbed. The dolphins, big and beryl-green, now orbited in a wide semicircle, till at last they turned flank and faced the shoal. There was no bristling offins, no bulging of lateral lines. The two shoals surveyed each other. The salmon—motionless, tough, grim, and silent—and the dolphins, corpulent, glossy, and full of life. Bruno wondered whether the dolphins had even the smallest notion of what salmon life is all about. For a moment he felt scruffy before them: not scruffy like a sea-hardy salmon, but like Bruno, the skeletal man, the eternal outcast. Perhaps because he remembered that dolphins are mammals, too.

And then it happened: the dolphins were as though transfused by a different spirit. A big ning aligned them suddenly, and pulled them together in a huddle. Then they scattered in a wide circle, and the performance began.

Because that’s what it was: as if the dolphins wished to pay homage to the salmon for their thankless voyage, or amuse them in recompense for their meaningless sacrifice. Bruno marveled: the dolphins, beloved of the sea, noble, wise, and proud, had sensed the dreadful desolation they were so adept at keeping beyond the pale of their lives. This called for action of some sort on their part—

The dolphins leaped out of the water and somersaulted gracefully in the air. Two by two, four by four, they crisscrossed each other’s wake like flashing green corposants, quickly arranged themselves in one long file, and reared up in the water, galloping on their flexible tail tips, leaving a backwash of shattered waves, chortling as they surrounded Bruno’s shoal and tumbled over each other like acrobats.

The salmon watched impassively, finning a little faster than usual. Bruno was all attention. His heart nearly burst in silent strain. Though he didn’t understand the meaning of the performance, he knew he had witnessed a pure work of art. The vastness of the sea, the joy of life, compassion and communion and defiance and the knowledge of impotence—all these were here, and the water surrounding him sizzled when it touched his skin. He wanted to go with the dolphins, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. Maybe it was because he was a non-human human, and they were non-fish fish. Or maybe it was because, however briefly, he had been able to sense that life was a gift, lawfully his, and worthy of the name. The cranes shrieked so loudly overhead they nearly broke their necks. The vastness of the sea unfurled, blue and beautiful. Light shone out of the rich waves. Bruno watched the dolphins in supplication.

They vanished just as they had appeared. Swallowed up by the waves. Bruno felt the old anguish seeping into him again. The salmon ninggrew suddenly slack, and the evening gyoya set in. The fish were beginning to forget what they had seen. Forever in the present. Only a few of them—like little Yorick—stayed in formation a minute longer to search for something already erased from memory, which had left them vaguely, fleetingly distraught. What a sorry lot they seemed to him then, and venting his own self-loathing, Bruno despised them for their mechanical dullness, for the overearnestness that prevented them from finding shortcuts, and for their uninspired resignation to fate …

Yorick scraped Bruno’s rib. Bruno turned and saw the fish’s mouth open-closing energetically. He responded with a similar flourish, but without enthusiasm. For a moment he hoped the fish was indicating that he, too, had seen the dolphins and was aware of what had happened, but Yorick was only expressing his pleasure with the excellent food of the evening gyoya. Napoleon, who swam on his left—a dull, drab fellow—was already giving chase to a passing cloud of tuna roe. Bruno dove below and swallowed furious mouthfuls of fragrant plankton. He imagined himself in his rightful place—floating gaily among the happy, carefree dolphins, living the easy life of those who adapt to the fact that they can never change anything, and so devote themselves to illusion.

But when the gyoya was over, and the shoal was preparing for the evening lap, Bruno felt strangely elated all of a sudden. The salmon were finning rhythmically in one enormous column. Every face wore the same dull, earnest expression that had so disgusted him only a moment ago. But for the first time since jumping into the sea, Bruno guessed why he’d chosen the salmon and their journey. For he was a salmon among men. Even as a dolphin, he would have belonged with the salmon. Bruno took a breath that almost burst his lungs with exultant joy: just as a man must learn to love a single flesh-and-blood