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

understand now, Shleimeleh, what a critical moment this was! But I took aim and did not miss! I stood up on my two feet and stretched my neck out to Esau uttering these words: ‘Come then, slaughter me! Slaughter me now, please, Herr Neigel, but never ask me to betray my art!’”

And Neigel is in fact impressed: his big face expresses amazement and embarrassment, and even confusion. (Wasserman: “Such scenes my mother, may she rest in peace, your great-grandmother, used to make whenever Mr. Lansky, our landlord in Bolichov, may his nose run like the blood he spilled, raised the rent. The more urgent my mother’s excuses, the farther she stretched her neck out to him and the louder she wailed ‘Butcher!’ I used to hide under her apron and want to die of shame. But who was a prophet then to know that one day I, too, would debase myself like that; only, artistic integrity was at stake this time!”)

He sits down. Still overly excited, the way he gets when he feels unjustly insulted (I think he enjoys feeling that way), and again he stands up and says in a quaking voice, “Herr Neigel, the important thing here is not myself, Anshel Wasserman-Scheherazade! Who and what am I, after all? Dust and ashes. A mere nothing. I only ask to redress the honor of art, your honor, pure, unadulterated art! Pristine literature! Because here we sit, the two of us, planning a singular experiment. Think of it, a writer is writing a story for a one-man public! And everything concealed in his heart, the anguish in his soul and its illusions, will all be testimony for a single man! Who would have believed it possible?”

This idea immediately wins Neigel over. Perhaps because nothing flatters a tyrant more than control of the mysterious channels of artistic creation. Wasserman senses this, too. “And when we have finished our little experiment, you, Herr Neigel, will hold in your hand the only remaining copy of a story by Scheherazade-Wasserman! And someday, God willing, the war will be over, and you can sit in comfort with your honorable wife and children around the spitting hearth, reading the story aloud to them, and I am certain that she, too, your honorablewife, that is, will appreciate all you endured to fan the embers of creativity even here, in such a place as this, in the midst of a terrible war, nu? What do you say to that?”

The German answers simply that he only hopes Wasserman really means what he says. The more he thinks about “our situation,” the more he believes that they should, as far as possible, “behave like civilized people. Yes, civilized people.” (Wasserman: “He tastes the words on his tongue as though about to say a blessing over them. Nu, beyond the curtained windows three columns of smoke rose over the camp by night and by day, and I heard the sound of the machine that stirred the corpses, and the big shovel squeaking as it lifted them and took them to the fires. And with all my might and main, I nodded my heavy head in a sign of ‘Yes.’”)

“A location,” says Wasserman in a barely audible voice, “we need a location for our friends.” Silence. The two rest their heads on their hands and think. Wasserman, though he does not yet know the form the story should take, has an idea that the plot will unfold someplace where the war is raging. (“That is, Poland or Russia, or perhaps—even wicked Germany, though I preferred the story in my location, not his, for you understand I had to guide my actions wisely and with a sure hand, because I had hidden motives from the start, and it was not entertainment I was planning for Neigel here, but, in order for my plan to succeed, I had to resort to every weapon that came to hand, and they alas were few, so I faced him almost empty-handed! Only words did I have for slings.”)

They continue the search for a location. The story, explains Anshel Wasserman, should take place in a distant, but not too distant, land. (“Perhaps you have remarked, Herr Neigel, that writers like to set their stories on desert islands?” “What good does that do?” “Ah, nu, that turns everything into a great parable!”) And it should also take place in the midst of nature, where Albert Fried can show his famous skill with animals (“That was one of the more fantastic elements in my stories”). And they return to their musings: Neigel popping his knuckles, Wasserman tearing at his wispy beard and twisting an imaginary earlock around his finger. Suddenly a smile breaks out over Wasserman’s face and he cries, “Lepek! The lepek mine!”

Neigel doesn’t know what lepek is, and neither do I. Wasserman’s explanation carries so much conviction, though, that I begin to thinkhe’s making the whole thing up. Lepek, he says, is a by-product of oil, with a special economic importance for Jews in the area of Borislav, in the Lubov region: oil, as everyone knows, is piped from the drill area to the giant refineries. Only, in many cases the pipes do not fit each other (“One pipe is the size of Chupim and the other the size of Mupim”). Or else they are old and riddled, and sometimes burst and the crude oil, known as lepek, flows over the road. “This no longer happens today,” explains Wasserman. “It used to happen many years ago. Thirty or even forty years ago!” When a pipe burst, the Jews, who were the lepek workers, called “lavaks,” would hurry over with their barrels and buckets and rags to collect the spilled oil and sell it cheaply to the oil company. According to Wasserman, hundreds of Jewish families eked out a living this way, as had his own brother, Mendel, before he disappeared in Russia: day and night the lavaks hovered, praying the pipes would burst. Wasserman: “I had kept the