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

the Children of the Heart this time, and they need all the help they can find!” “And what task is that, if I may ask?” “How should I know, your honor, the story is barely conceived inside me, though I assure you it will be an unparalleled adventure, else why drag them out of oblivion and raise their ghosts in this manner?”

Neigel reflects for a moment. Perhaps he is feeling a passing anxiety, which he dismisses with a vigorous shrug. Then he orders Wasserman to leave and goes back to business.

Wasserman: “Whereupon I dragged my old bones up the ladder, made a kind of resting place in this my new atelier, and reflected: Ai, what a day! First they take my friends to die in the gas chambers, poor innocents, and then it transpires that I am not fit for death, and then finally this calamity called Neigel befalls me, Neigel with his tempting offers. Feh! I took the notebook in my hands and looked down at it. Anshel, Anshel, I said to myself, here you are about to write a story. And though it will be, to my deep regret, a one-volume edition, why grumble when the sales are guaranteed? And under the wings of theNazi eagle, may its feathers molt, I wrote in handsome characters, in our Holy Tongue: The Last Adventure of the Children of the Heart.”

[ 2 ]

SLOWLY ANSHEL WASSERMAN’S LIFE unfolds before me. He often mentions his wife, “my Sarah,” but never speaks of his daughter, Tirza. He loved Sarah, but I sometimes wonder whether he wasn’t a confirmed bachelor at heart. He had been forty years old when he married her, and she twenty-three. Just five years old when Wasserman first published the stories she loved so well, like other children her age, she continued to think of them on different occasions till one day, years later, she happened to see a new edition of “The Children of the Heart” in a Warsaw magazine. With uncharacteristic audacity she sent the editor some of her wonderful illustrations for the stories. The drawings floated around for some time before they reached Zalmanson, and he, calculated and sly, brought her and Wasserman together, chafing his palms with pleasure at the flowering of the timid couple’s love affair …

And thus, through Wasserman’s remarks in passing, I learn something of his way of life. About how he loved to sit at home wearing an ironed shirt and tie, even when he was alone. How he indulged himself with spectacular little treats in the years of his bachelorhood—a ride in a ricksha on Sunday on grand Marshalkovska Boulevard, a slow and pleasurable stroll over the Kravedjeh Bridge, and from there through Saksy Park, with its statues and poplars and plane trees. And when it grew dark he would go to the cinema for what always seemed to him a stolen pleasure, a motion picture that touched him to the quick. From this point of view, Sarah seems to have been the ideal partner: like him, she was enchanted by the cinema. They were not selective: any picture would do, as long as it was about people having exciting adventures. They would sit together in the darkened hall like a couple of open-mouthed children watching Frankenstein, and King Kong, and The Masked Spy with Hanka Ordonovna. Wasserman told me with curious pride that he and his Sarah had seen Greta Garbo in Queen Christina four times, and Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel three times. They even liked Westerns and saw every cowboy picture in Warsaw (Wasserman’s excuse for this predilection is that he needed to learn aboutthe cowboy life in case he ever wanted to write about it). The couple had no friends to speak of, and their weekly visits to the cinema were minor celebrations. They delighted in discussing the pictures together, and weeks later Sarah might say something like “How sad that she lacked faith in him,” and Wasserman would understand at once what she meant. They also enjoyed the popular Tuesday radio program Play of the Week, which brought great works of drama and literature into their lives; they would listen in bed, side by side, their eyes to the ceiling, not touching in the dark, but very close. Another exciting activity they shared was visiting the Warsaw zoo: Wasserman would stand for hours in front of the exotic animals from Burma and India, nodding in wonder. By the way, Sarah had been born on the same day as Tojnika, the baby elephant (so named because Tojnika means “Twelver,” and he was the twelfth elephant born in a European zoo), and she was therefore entitled to a free ride on the elephant once a year on her birthday. Wasserman could not help becoming excited about this, for some reason; over and over he asked Sarah to describe those moments now faded from memory. “Like a Queen of India, a Jewish princess of the elephants!” he would murmur in undiminished wonder.

Wasserman rejoiced in his daily routine. I have listened countless times to the descriptions of his fastidious rites, how he would polish his shoes and keep house. Once, he recounted the varied pleasures of his spectacles: the polishing motions large and small, the different ways of taking them off, and the satisfaction of the frames going down behind the cars, or of resting your hand on your eyes and losing yourself in thought. (Perhaps I should explain here that his spectacles had been taken away immediately upon his arrival in the camp.) He would describe his favorite method of boiling an egg as earnestly as he described his work among the dentists. One evening he told me—uncon-strainedly—how he used to make “a steaming hot glass of coffee” back in Warsaw, from the moment he put the water in the kettle and set the glass on the spout “to warm it up a little from the hot steam,” till he poured the coffee into the glass. I also