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

predict how X would behave in situation Y. As a kid I used to be fairly good at predicting things. I was a regular Merlin. But then I grew up and everything went wrong. Everything became unpredictable and extremely dangerous. And there’s no way of knowing when to be on your guard: sometimes the treachery comes from inside yourself.

I can’t talk to Ayala anymore either. She’s living with some musician a few blocks away, and I’m not allowed to show my face there after my crime against humanity—that’s what she calls that silly business about little Kazik. The only way I can atone for something like that, she tells me, grimacing with detestation, is to write a completely different story. A story of atonement. And till then—please, don’t show your ugly face around here.

And you don’t answer. The lights are going out on the new boardwalk now. The chairs are upturned in the restaurants along the beach. Tel Aviv, late 1984. I’m out on the pier. Only three fishermen left. And you’re so dark, always in motion. And so alert, I feel you. Before you, the city shudders.

I had a child. Ten months after I returned from Narvia I had a child. Just when Ruth decided to stop the treatments, a miracle occurred. We called him Yariv, a name I always liked. A modern Israeli name. And I tried to be a good father, truly I did, but I knew from the start that I didn’t stand a chance. I always figured the parent-children business was rough, but I didn’t know just how rough. They either resemble you too much or they’re too different. And the burden of all my expectations—that he be like me or, wait a minute, like Ruth, the exact opposite of me, healthy and uncomplicated, clean-living and strong. But what a surprise he turned out to be, not like either of us. And if he did inherit anything from Ruth, it’s her bad traits. He’s painfully slow, he’s too fat, and he has a timid, awkward face. He’s totally helpless with other children, like a fat pigeon among sparrows. Only when he’s with me does he act stubborn, like a big hero. He wasn’t like that in the beginning, but something must have gone wrong. I watch him playing by himself in the corner of the day-care center and I want to scream. I can just see him thirty years from now: a big man, with the slightly hurt expression very fat people often have, standing awkwardly and helplessly among his nursery-school peers. Ruth laughs when I confess these worries. He’s going through a difficult stage, she tells me,he’s a terrific little boy. Half a year from now you’ll hardly recognize him. He’ll get used to nursery school and the other children, and even if he stays a lonely little recluse, I’ll go on loving him, because he’s my type of guy, ha ha. But she too is forced to admit that he has a couple of unpleasant characteristics. He’s bad-tempered and demanding and afraid of everything. In the days when I did my writing at home, he used to climb all over me and prevent me from getting a single word down. “Do you know what Daddy’s writing?” Ruth would ask—she was busy all day long trying to keep us apart—and he, with exasperating childish egocentricity: “Daddy write Yariv.” Cute joke, but I know that’s what he really wanted me to do, to sit there typing his glorious name from morning till night. And hearing this, Ruth laughs and says, Try to act like a grownup, Momik. And don’t attack him full-force like that. There is a slight age difference between you, you know. And then we have the usual argument: I say it has nothing to do with age, you have to train him for war. I told her this once, before he was born, if I ever had a child, the first thing I would do in the morning would be to slap his face. Just like that. So he’ll know there’s no justice in this world, only strife. I said this when we first started going together, in high school. In later years, I came to see it was a stupid, childish idea, but when Yariv was born I had the feeling it wasn’t so stupid after all. Ruth said, Someday he’ll slap you back, how will you feel then? And I said, I’ll feel great. I’ll know I’ve prepared my son for life. And she said, But he may not love you for it much. Love, I sneered maliciously, I prefer a living son to a loving son. And she: You’re taking revenge on him for what you didn’t get at home, Momik. This disgusting remark, which she is forbidden to make under any circumstances, drives me to distraction, because what I did get at home was the wisdom to survive, which is something you don’t learn in school, and which can’t be described in the polite language of Ruthy’s ever-so-enlightened parents who never knew danger, a wisdom that can only be communicated in silence, in suspicious contractions around the eyes and mouth, a thick substance that passes through the umbilical cord and is deciphered slowly over decades of life: Always stand in the middle row. Never reveal more than you have to. Remember things are seldom what they seem. Never be too happy. Don’t say “I” so freely. And in general, try to get out of the whole thing safely, with no unnecessary scars. Don’t hope for more than this.

Evening. Yariv is asleep already and I go in to look at him. He’s lying on his back. I feel shivers up my spine. “You feel it, too?” asks Ruth quietly, and her face fills the room with pleasure. I want to say something nice to her, to make her happy, to show her that I really do care for him, but my throat contracts. “It’s a good thing he can