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

you three times that such things are inevitable in a putrefying culture.” He swam a few circles around himself, dived down, and floated up to me again, steering with his tail like a lusty sperm. “And now everyone will understand,” he said, “that whosoever kills another human being destroys a uniquely idiosyncratic work of art which can never be reconstructed … a whole mythology, an infinite Age of Genius …”

Suddenly he stopped talking and peered at me suspiciously. Perhaps he wondered whether what I had said pertained to him in some way. His small figure darted back and forth from the exterior of the boy to that of the fish. My eyes were disturbed for a minute by a blinding glare, the shiny scales of a shoe or a passing fish, Adela’s shoe or the fold of a gleaming wave sent my way perhaps to distract me, and when I looked again I saw that Bruno was in convulsions, throughout which he was shrinking more and more, not in size, perhaps, but in essence, his existence becoming more airy, more abstract …

For an instant he materialized again: half his face, the cleft of his mouth, one eye, and a throbbing gill. With a terrible smile he said, “In our new world, Shloma, even death will belong to man, and when aperson wishes to die, he will only have to whisper his body code to his soul, which will know how to dismantle the person’s unique existence, the secret of the individual’s authentic essence, and there will be no more mass death, Shloma, just as there will be no more mass life!”

“Wait a minute!” I shouted. “Don’t leave me! Not after you’ve infected me with such unendurable passions! You can’t leave me now!”

“You could always do what I did,” he said. “Come with me, or choose your own way.”

“Bruno,” I groaned, “I deceived you. I’m weak … I’m a prisoner by nature … I love my fetters … yes, Bruno, humbled and shamefaced I stand before you and confess: I am a traitor and a coward … with a pathetic Retitia-like attitude … Now you know … I wasn’t born for the Age of Genius … If Adela’s shiny shoe were here, I would take my chance and steal it and run away from you, as I did … as I always do … Help me, stay with me … I’m scared, Bruno.”

Suddenly he fluttered, floundered, stretched his thin body into palpability, and was drawn backward by a tremendous force, sucked up with a whistle. “Bruno!” I screamed, “wait a minute!” He froze. The world held its breath. The sea turned steely blue. “Bruno,” I cried humbly, “forgive me for detaining you at such a moment, but this is very important. Do you by any chance know the story Anshel Wasserman told the German called Neigel?”

Bruno swiveled a gill and shut his eyes with concentration. “It’s a fabulous story, oh yes,” he said, and his strange face lit up. “Only there’s … ha! The devil take it! I’ve forgotten!” And with a smile, as though remembering suddenly, he added, “But of course! That was the essence of his story, Shloma, you forget it and you have to recall it afresh every time!”

“And could someone who never knew it, had never heard it in his life, remember it?”

“Just as a person remembers his name. His destiny. His heart. No, my Shloma, there is no one who doesn’t know that story.”

His voice faded. His whole body convulsed. I hid my face in my hands. I heard a strange sound, as if something big were being swallowed up by an invisible mouth. A heart-wrenching groan sounded through the sea, and a moment later Bruno was no longer with us.

Despondently I turn to her now, and she doesn’t answer. I was frightened. I was really terrified at the thought of her leaving me now,now of all times, when I need her so much; when I grow weaker and weaker and don’t feel like going home and lack the strength to write this story in a language suffering from elephantiasis. Come, I sob weakly, imploringly, Come, I want to cuddle you, to forget myself; so hard and obstinate was Bruno’s loneliness that we all became the lost and lonely … we sank into a bas relief carved by a cunning but not ingenious sculptor, or perhaps ingenious but certainly not merciful, and we suffer pangs of insatiable hunger, or worse still: we have lost even the passion to satisfy our hunger. Oh, I whisper to her, into her little waves, the folds of her flesh, if our life is only in the ebbing, then anything that helps that ebbing is the hidden collaborator of death, and we ourselves are accomplices to murder. We are responsible murderers, albeit, looking out for our own welfare, polite and anxious, but murderers nonetheless. Under the guise of defending our interests, they are committing a crime against us, a crime against humanity, all those we ourselves appoint to defend us, who strangle our happiness little by little; I mean the authorities, authorities of any kind who inflict the few on the many, or the many on the few, and the judicial system that usually forces compromises between different kinds of justice and religion, based on the imperative of not raising questions, and our complacent morality, and time’s obedient flock, the hands of the clock gathering the minutes in like sheep, and the fear and loathing that exist in us, the forceps with which we extract every crumb of closeness and love, and our tyrannical sanity, what are these if not the filthy canal down which we flow supinely to our death, and from time to time we find the miserable consolation of narrow-eyed pity and cautious love, and happiness ltd. and skeptical passion, canned bait, even I understand that man—man in the sense that Bruno and I say man—is capable of greater comfort and joy, of an incomparably richer color scale