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

hours of concentrated swimming did he dare turn his gaze seaside, and there for the first time since jumping into the water in the port of Danzig, he saw Laprik.

Laprik was the biggest salmon Bruno had ever seen in his life. He was about a hundred and twenty centimeters long and weighed no less than Bruno. He had pinkish coloring, a bolder pink than the others’, and there was a shiny mark over his right eye. His movements were economical, and at the same time lively and vigorous. On his mandible there was a cicatrix, rough and red, like an exclamation point. Brunoswallowed and swam on. His muscles began to contract. He listened to the ning in his ears and in his heart, and experienced it less intensely now, as though it were accompanied by another echo. Swiftly he rode the sea, his thoughts pouring out, and his sense of existence growing sharp as a bone exposed inside a wound. The fish surrounding him suddenly slowed down, and he slowed down with them. Strange currents passed through the shoal. Now they discerned another fish broadcasting the pulsations of a new ning. Bruno remembered how Guruk had led a quarter of the shoal to their doom near the Shetland Islands. Panic-stricken, he raised his head out of the water to look for Yorick. The little thing was nowhere to be seen. He searched in trepidation for the fish that was trying to undermine Laprik’s authority. The pulsing wasn’t coming from shoreside. And seaside there was only Laprik. What could it mean?

The shoal came to a halt and regrouped in a circle. The fish gilled faster and stared blindly ahead. A small circle, free of fish, now formed around Bruno and Laprik, within which the new ning resonated powerfully. Bruno saw thousands of mouths open-closing, and beyond them a myriad of tense green fins. He and Laprik were still side by side, and out of the corner of his eye, Bruno suddenly discerned the salmon’s lateral lines in bold relief.

A sharp fear struck him: the ning was issuing out of him. It was he who was challenging Laprik. But what for? He wasn’t at all sure he would be able to lead the shoal any better than Laprik, and besides, he didn’t want to! What did this have to do with him? He turned to Laprik in bewilderment, as though trying to explain something, and Laprik moved in closer, too. The circle of salmon widened by a hairsbreadth. Bruno listened to his ning in amazement: it was a fast, sure pulsation. Not the wild, sickly throbbing Guruk had produced. He dipped his ears in the water and listened long. It was so like Laprik’s ning—and yet it was his own. His true, unique vibration. He felt grateful to Laprik, because without him he would never have been able to hear himself. This was his most wildly irrational feeling in the split second before the life-and-death struggle began, but it was Laprik after all who had taken him into the shoal and turned him into an artist of life. Why did they have to fight each oth—

Whereupon the water eddied and raged. Like mirror images they stormed at each other. The two skulls crashed, retreated, and crashedagain. The other fish’s supple body wound around Bruno’s chest and waist, and the strong, sharp teeth bit into the flesh of his shoulder. He fell with a groan of pain, repulsing Laprik, and sank down down down, weak and stupefied, till he reached the zone where even light was arrested and the red rays failed. Bruno looked around in horror and saw the wound on his shoulder streaming what appeared to be green blood. His fear saved him. He ricocheted up, trapped Laprik unprepared, and smashed him, with open arms, on both sides of his face. For a moment Laprik stayed his ground, as though nothing had happened, and then he slipped under the water and disappeared. Bruno swam circles around himself in fear, then quickly spiraled down, but couldn’t find his adversary. He rose to the surface out of breath and saw black: Laprik was attacking him, heavy as a whale, ramming into his chest. Bruno stopped breathing. His blood throbbed in his temples and filled his eyes. Without thinking, he lurched forward, pounding blindly at the air and water. Never in his life had Bruno struck anyone, and the surge of violence that overwhelmed his very being terrified him. But the fear belonged to Bruno the man, and Bruno the fish choked on blood diluted by water and sucked passion from it. He flew at Laprik over and over, and they wound around each other, slippery and fierce, a jumble of sharp teeth, abrasive side fins, and quiet rage, soundless because Bruno didn’t break the silence either, and fought quietly, like a fish. He lost count of the minutes, and time throbbed to the rhythm of their onslaughts and the violent pain of their wounds. Bruno was mutilated: Laprik’s bites had opened up big ugly holes in his chest and the sides of his neck, but he could see that the big fish was also slowly deteriorating, that his assaults were becoming lax, that he had become disjointed, cut off from the source of his vitality, and at that moment Bruno drew back. At that moment his eyes cleared and his brain shone with a pearly light: he was fighting Laprik because he could not live in the crowd, not even a crowd that was free of malice, not even to the beat of Laprik’s ning. But he didn’t want to be Death’s arms bearer either. Laprik was still floating around him blindly, struggling to hold onto his own ning, and spitting out chunks of flesh from Bruno’s arm, but Bruno had already retreated. The salmon gave him a wide berth. No, he didn’t want to lead them. He didn’t want to lead anyone. No one has a right to lead anyone else. And