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

“Now you’re talking,” she says quietly, her eyes a little red, facing the setting sun. “At last you’re beginning to understand.” And she stretches her waves, sends them out, wide and calm, suddenly full of serene joy. We swim silently toward the small Polish town. The water is suddenly sweet in my mouth. I taste again and discover that I am not mistaken.

“Did he make it to the river?”

“You sensed it.”

“And the falls? How did he leap the high falls? How did he swim against the current?”

“The only way he knew.”

Silence. And then she asks, “And you? How will you leap the falls?”

“Don’t ask me that now.”

“You’re back to your old self again, hey, Neuman? Starting to forget already?”

“How could you think such a thing! After all I’ve told you?! For shame!”

But two small water funnels gave the impression that she was faintly smiling, with dimples in her cheeks.

“Strange,” she says, smacking her lips. “My little spies tell me that even now you’re regretting most of the things you said—ah, what does it matter. It’s your life, not mine. If you can call it a life. Too bad. Too bad. For a moment I believed you. For a moment I even … I even believed in you.” Did I detect a note of tenderness in her voice? Was that an affectionate tone I heard? She doesn’t answer. She flows off, swimming on her back. The sun caresses her with its last rays. Now she looks like Van Gogh’s palette while he painted the wheat fields of the Low Countries. So beautiful, mysterious, and mature among the cloudy scarves over the horizon. Did Bruno recognize her beauty, or was he too involved in himself, in his unceasing efforts? Did he give her little tokens of affection, her man?

She is silent. Thin bluish veins stand out on her brow. A man like Bruno probably didn’t notice her or her beauty but, rather, created his own enclosed sea to swim in. And she deserves love. She really does. Perhaps even the love of someone with far smaller claims than Bruno’s. A more modest and practical man, not lacking in a certain poetic sensibility, who would be able to distinguish her subtle nuances, a man who is, well, a mere nothing compared to our lofty, transcendental, uncompromising Bruno, but perhaps precisely because he is so involved in the petty details of daily existence because he’s such an obvious product of decadent society, and so human, such a man, I say to myself, perhaps he would be able to—“Nu, shut up, will you?” she says, and pounds me, accidentally on purpose, on a sharp rock, which was definitely not there a minute ago. “Now shut up, Neuman,” she says again, more gently, and skims my aching rib consolingly. “You’ll have a little sore there, like Bruno had. But yours will heal. Your kind heals. What’s that? Somebody’s calling you!”

“Pan Neuman! Mr. Neuman!” On the beach stands my landlady dressed in black. Waving energetically. It seems the mayor is going toGdansk. I have to get out of the water immediately and go with him. And the day after tomorrow I’ll be home in Israel. “Home”—how strange and dull the word sounds to me now.

“You’re kind of cute, you know that,” she continues our interrupted conversation, licking my rib. “But you’re not for me. No. Your territory, dearest”—she tarries while the reefs in the distant horizon shine with laughter—“your territory is the shore, yes, you like to wade in sometimes, but you prefer to stick close to ‘her,’ in case of danger, in case you suddenly feel like running away deep deep inside me. Yes, Neuman, you are a cautious one. I would say definitely a peninsular type. Oh yes.”

And I suppress a groan.

“And now”—her voice is forced as she sets the waves dancing before me—“now do me one last favor. Don’t be angry at this request of mine, and think of him for my sake, dearest, one last time think of him inside me, think of our Bruno, please, please, a moment from now we’ll be separated and there’ll be no one to tell me about him like this, about my Bruno, all alone here on the edge of the pier in Danzig, think of him, so I’ll be able to think with you, you know: a minor health problem … please, please …”

Fluttering her long seaweed lashes, flaring her nostrils and quivering. No. She will not get me with her cheap tricks, with her feminine water colors. And I will not think of him. Let her explode. She’s not going to lead me around anymore like a dizzy child, like a lover, to the port, to the edge of that pier, the rim of the old world, no!—I’m stronger than she is—no, she won’t lead me to the light rain falling on him like tears, and he’s so thin without his clothes, he has only his watch left for a moment, a watch that still tells the old time, and he jumps in, bravely and despairingly, come what may, off the tip of the nose of that huge, recumbent hag, lonely as the first pagan who ever rose from totem pole to the unseen God. What a magnificent flight, Bruno, what breadth and vision—

And she, here beside me, explodes with suppressed laughter.

By all the easterlies.

WASSERMAN

[ 1 ]

WHEN THE THIRD ATTEMPT TO KILL Anshel Wasserman came to naught, the Germans sent him running to camp headquarters with a very young officer named Hoppfler at his heels yelling, “Schnell.” I can see them now, as they leave the grounds of the lower camp, where the gas chambers are, and approach the two barbed-wire fences concealed by hedges between which new arrivals are forced to run naked past a double file of Ukrainians, who set dogs on them and pound them with clubs. The inmates call this route the Schlauch, or tube, and the Germans with their peculiar humor call it Himmelstrasse—the Heavenly