See Under, page 13
Bruno swam with long strokes, drawing curtain after curtain before him. He detected a first crack in the distant horizon, where the muted slates of sea and sky collide. Through this crack he tried to escape, but his strength was fading too quickly, and when his feet hit a reef, he stopped to rest a while.
He looked back. He saw the gray docks, the rotting shingles and wind-worn harbor buildings. He saw the ships rocking and creaking sadly, round ships, pregnant with the faraway, and the figure of a gorgon on one of the dinghies, and people crowding and calling to him from the pier. Or cheering him? In any case, they could no longer join hands around him in a ring. He laughed and shivered with waves of heat and cold. He noticed that his wristwatch was still on, but his fingers were trembling so, he couldn’t remove it.
Someone out by the pier was working on the motor of a small boat but the motor would not respond. Bruno leaned back to look at the sky and take a deep breath. For the first time in years he did not feel hunted. Even if he were captured now, he would never be recognized as the man they were pursuing. They would catch an empty vessel. No police interrogator would be able to make sense of what Bruno was saying now. No writer would ever be able to record it accurately. At best they might try to reconstruct it with the aid of superficial evidence. How sad the fate of those Bruno abandoned on the shore. The whole world must have felt a pang as Bruno lowered himself into the water. Indians along the Orinoco stopped chopping rubber trees for a moment to listen. The shepherds of the Australian Fire Tribe stood suddenly still, and cocked their heads when they heard that distant sound. I did, too, and I wasn’t even born yet.
And not far from Bruno the waters parted. Something flickered and fluttered there. A greenish glare or a frozen eye, and furrows plowed in a flurry, foaming with the soft pit-a-pat of many fins. Tiny mouths surrounded him, stung him on the belly and the knees, nibbled at his buttocks and chest. Bruno froze in astonishment as he read the code tattooed upon his body. The credentials of a one-man delegation setting off on a journey. The fish wondered at his tough, skimpy flesh, investigated the veins protruding on his white feet. Silently they followed the flashing object that dropped into the depths to tell the time that was already past. The ranks broke before him, and the fish let Laprik through to regard Bruno with his piercing eyes. He was a big salmon, more developed than the rest, with a body as big as Bruno’s. For a moment he swam around him circumspectly, his tail lightly aquiver, or perhaps the ripples came from the motorboat approaching with two stevedores and a Port Authority official, all yelling at him angrily, but Laprik quickly returned to his place, the shoal folded slowly like an enormous, limp accordion, and Bruno sailed away.
[ 2 ]
THREE YEARS HAVE GONE BY since we broke up. I am healing. Just as you predicted. Sometimes, when the tension is unbearable, I take the bus to Tel Aviv. To you. I walk along the beach, stepping over shells and seaweed and dead fish, and if there aren’t too many people around, I actually speak to you out loud. I tell you that the book is coming along, that for three years the torag has been on, a relentless war between me and Bruno the fish. Meanwhile, I’ve made some headway. Here’s the list. I love lists: I did it! I finished writing Grandfather Anshel’s story, the one he told Neigel, the German; and I also finished the story of baby Kazik, that mistake Ayala was pleased to call my “crime against humanity,” bless her little heart.
But the important thing is Bruno’s story, and it’s on his account that I return to you almost every week: to shout the latest installment into your cockleshell ears, and also, of course, to pump you for the moist information in your bottomless depths, to charm you into making disclosures, into letting me sniff you till I catch the scent of Bruno, because for me the two of you are indissoluble, which is why I put you in my story in the first place, and why I’m telling you about it now, though I know it makes you furious. Oh sure, you never admit you notice me when I show up at the beach—but I know you: I hear you snarling the moment my foot touches the breakwater. I see you arch your back to snatch me away.
But I am careful. You said so yourself.
People hear I’m interested in Bruno and send me all kinds of material. You’d be surprised how much has been written about him. Mostly in Polish. And I’ve come across a number of theories concerning his lost novel, The Messiah: that it’s about how Bruno lures the Messiah into the Drohobycz Ghetto with his spellbinding prose, or that it’s about the Holocaust and Bruno’s last years under the Nazi Occupation. But you and I know better, don’t we? Life is what interested Bruno. Simple, everyday life; for him the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold …
In any case, they all praise him. They say he’s one of the greatest writers of the century; they compare him to Kafka, Proust, and Rilke. They disapprove of my writing about him. They tactfully suggest that to write about him one would have to be a writer of comparable stature at least. Well, I don’t care. It’s not their Bruno I’m writing about. I read their letters politely, and tear the papers to bits, and then, as of course you know, when I come to see you in Tel Aviv, I climb the breakwater, ho-hum, just taking a little stroll up here on the rocks, when suddenly I shake my pockets out and a heap of shredded paper hits the water, plumpety-plump, anyone notice anything? Those letters mean more to you than they do to me, anyway. Maybe you detest academic harangues, but if I know you, you’ll paste the pieces together and file them below in your benthic archives. You’re not about to part with documents like these.
And I also wanted to tell you that I’m back to my old self again. That is, I’m back to my old style. The style my poems were written in. And Bruno is slowly letting go of my pen. He’s peeling off. I have only a few notebooks left now which nobody would ever be able to identify positively as either his or mine. And of course you and I both know I was merely the vessel, the writing hand, the weak link through which his stifled energy could flow.
I can’t stop coming back to you. I come back to tell you the real story, the story I can’t put down in writing as it really happened, as it should be told: not sensibly, but ardently. From start to finish. For once you’re going to listen to something that isn’t directly about you, and you will listen patiently and quietly (I wouldn’t dream of asking you to listen eagerly) to everything that happened to me when I returned from Narvia, damn you, listen. That is, let the Bruno in you listen.
On May 25, 1980 (I remember the exact date), I received a parting gift from Ayala: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. I’d never heard of the book before, and I was even put off by the German ring of the author’s name. Anyway, I started reading it immediately, mainly because of the bitter circumstances in which it had been given to me, and because of the giver.
And then suddenly, ten pages into the book, I forgot everything and read in breathless excitement, the way you might read a letter smuggled to you over the back roads and byways, a terse communication from the brother you had assumed was dead all these years. It was the first time I ever began to reread a book as soon as I finished it. And I’ve read it a good many times since. For months it was the only book I needed. It was The Book for me in the sense Bruno had yearned for that great tome, sighing, a stormy Bible, its pages fluttering in the wind like an overblown rose—and I believe I read it as such a letter deserves to be read: knowing that what is written on the page is less significant than the pages torn out and lost; pages so explicit they were expunged for fear that they would fall into the wrong hands …
And I did something I haven’t done since I was a child: I transcribed entire paragraphs in my notebook. To help me remember, and to feel the words streaming out of my pen and collecting on the page. On the first page I copied his indirect testimony that God’s hand had passed over his face while he slept, and transformed him into one who knows what he knows not and whose drooping eyes are filled with sublime intimations of distant worlds …
Then one night, a few weeks later, I woke out of a sound sleep and knew for certain that Bruno had not been murdered in the Drohobycz Ghetto in 1942. He had escaped. When I say “escaped,” I don’t mean it in the usual sense of the word but, in the special sense Bruno might have given a word like “pensioner,” signifying someone who crosses the prescribed and generally accepted borders and brings himself into the magnetic field of a different dimension of existence, traveling light … Whenever I finished copying some passage, my pen would jiggle around a few more times and litter the page with a line or two of my own—though how shall I put it—in Bruno’s voice, by straining to hear him, having clearly perceived his desperate need to express himself, now that he was deprived of his writing hand. How well I understand the agony, the affliction of a writer in exile like him. I mean “exile” in a very broad sense, and I, as you know, proffered my hand and my pen.
How strange it is. And frightening.
Because just think, here I was—a Hebrew poet with four books out in a highly distinctive style, a style one paragon of literary criticism who crooks his little finger when he writes described as “thin-lipped,” and which Ayala called “mean and niggardly”—experiencing a veritable stampede of panting, perspiring words in my notebook like the mating dance of the peacock, or a vivid cloud of hummingbirds, as Bruno once wrote.
(Or did I write that?)
Bruno Schulz. A Jew. Possibly the most important Polish writer between the two world wars. Son of the eccentric owner of a dry-goods store. Taught drawing and technical drafting at the Drohobycz Gymnasium. A lonely man.
And in 1941, when the Germans entered the city of Drohobycz, Bruno was forced to leave his home and move to a house on Stolareska Street. Under orders from the authorities, he painted giant murals at the riding academy and catalogued libraries commandeered by the Germans. To earn a living, he also worked as a “House Jew” (light carpentry, sign painting, family portraits, etc.) at the residence of SS Officer Felix Landau.
Felix Landau had an enemy—another SS officer by the name of Karl Gunther. On November 19, 1942, on the corner of Czeczky and Miz-kewitz Streets, Karl Gunther shot Bruno and, as the story goes, went to Landau and said, “I killed your Jew.” To which Landau replied, “In that case, I will now kill your Jew.”
You’re with me, I know it: for a minute the water turned to stone. Two gulls collided with a screech. You’re here.
I killed your Jew. In that case, I will now kill—
Just like that.
I’ve hurt you, I know. It hurts me, too.
But listen. We have other things to talk about. Shall we change the subject? I don’t want to hurt anyone. There’s something I have to tell you. Listen.
For many years after Grandfather Anshel’s disappearance I used to hum his story to the German. I tried to write it down a couple of times before I went to Poland, with no success. And I grew more and more frustrated and angry with myself, filled with self-reproach mixed with wistful visions of the old man locked inside the story for so long, a ghostly ship turned away at every port, while I, his only hope of liberation, of salvaging his story, deserted him.
So I began to hunt for Grandfather’s writings. I went through old archives and the dusty libraries of remote kibbutzim. I read crumbly magazines that reminded me of prehistoric cave drawings that disintegrate under the explorer’s torch. Among the literary remains of a Yiddish writer who died in an old-age home in Haifa, I found a real trove: four yellow issues of Little Lights, the children’s magazine (Shimon Zalmanson, editor) published in Warsaw in 1912. There were four complete chapters of an adventure where the Children of the Heart rescue a Roman gladiator (“Anton the Luder”) from the lion pit. I read eagerly: by now I had begun to detect certain limitations in the narrative skills of Anshel Wasserman, but this in no way hampered my enjoyment or my nostalgic feelings for him and his archaic prose, the awe-inspiring language of a prophet of yore, and the war it seems he waged throughout his life, the “only war there is,” to quote Otto Brig, the hero of the serial.
So I did some piecing together: a few episodes from a children’s magazine called Sapling (Krakow, 1920; I wonder if Grandfather Anshel ever received royalties for the stories that were reprinted), one in which the Children of the Heart help Louis Pasteur fight rabies, one Polish translation of a story about rescuing young flood and famine victims in turn-of-the-century India, and other fragments of adventures from around the world. I traveled everywhere, combing the musty attics of persons deceased in the hopes of finding something. It was so important to me, I spent all my spare time at it.
Incidentally, around this time I came across an article about early-twentieth-century children’s magazines in Poland that mentions him: “Anshel Wasserman, Yiddish storyteller.” According to this article, “opinion is divided” on the quality and importance of his writing, “the influence of contemporaneous authors is strongly in evidence—often embarrassingly so—” and, then with the peremptoriness so typical of literary criticism, the article pronounced “the literary value of his work … scant indeed, its main aim being to acquaint the youthful reader with historical events and personages,” though the author of this article acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, that “these simple adventures called ‘The Children of the Heart’ achieved a surprising popularity among young readers, and were translated into Polish, Czech, and German, and published in a number of European illustrated children’s magazines.”
The critic further remarks—not without a hint of reproach—that my grandfather was one of the few Hebrew authors “writing at a time of national and linguistic revival (the early part of the twentieth century) to deal chiefly with universal themes, scarcely touching on the issue of Jewish nationalism, indeed, ignoring it altogether. This may account for his favor with the children of the world and his attainment of a popular success beyond the reach of more masterful Hebrew writers imbued with a sense of Zionist mission.”
I was furious at this pompous ass of a “critic”: you don’t judge a man like Anshel Wasserman according to the commonplaces of literary analysis. Couldn’t he see that?
But I didn’t write the story, the unique story of Grandfather and Herr Neigel.
When I returned from Narvia, I was eager to write again. Because of Bruno. Because of what he told me. Or rather, in spite of what he told me. I had reached an impasse with the story of Grandfather and Hcrr Neigel, so I decided to go after documentary material, quotations from books about the Holocaust, excerpts of the victims’ testimony, psychological profiles of the murderers, case notes, etc. Ruth said, But none of this is really necessary, is it? Why do you insist on making things so difficult? You’re just swamping yourself under a lot of details. Look at it this way, you have two people, your grandfather and Neigel, two human beings, and one tells the other a story. That’s it. She was only trying to help, of course, as usual, but we had reached a point in our marriage, Ruth and I, where the most innocent remark could start a fight.
Are you with me?
You shake your head at my awkward attempts to tell the story. I can just hear you muttering, If that’s how he writes, he’d better not write about me. He’d better not dry me out on his pages or plaster me all over his notebooks. Because with me, dearie, you’re going to have to write with wild abandon, in rarest ink made of pungent male and female secretions and the passions of life, not like this, sweetie pie …
But listen, will you, please?
As I tried to write the story of Anshel Wasserman, my own life became more and more circumscribed. The Greek philosopher Zeno argued that motion is impossible because a moving object has to reach the halfway point before it can reach the end, and therefore a body that traverses a finite distance must traverse an infinite number of halves in a finite time, i.e., the time it actually takes to traverse the finite distance in question. Which is exactly what happened to me: I wrote, but could not progress from one word to the next. From one idea to the next. My pen scored the page with a kind of terrible stammer. I had a regular desk at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Library by this time, and the librarians all knew me. Every morning at around ten I used to shut my books and go to the cafeteria for a snack. A roll with hard-boiled egg and tomato. Followed by coffee and the excellent yeast cake they serve there. I would sit around listening to the employees talk about their children and their paychecks, and think to myself dejectedly, Somewhere inside this edifice is an empty white room with thin, membranous walls, if only I could find it.
Ruth would pick me up at five on her way home from work in our beat-up Mini Minor. One look at me as I climbed into the car and she bit her lip to keep from saying anything that might start a fight. We had no children at the time. Yariv wasn’t born yet. Ruth was undergoing horrid, expensive gynecological treatments I didn’t want to know about. I was prepared to pay for them, sure. Have sex with her every morning at 6:30 on the dot—yes, I was prepared to do that, too. But listen to the gory details—no, thank you. And anyway, what right had she to complain? Before she married me, I warned her that when you really need me, I’m useless. That’s how it is. Nobody’s perfect. I consider this fair, though, because I don’t expect help from anyone, including her. Of course, my talking this way used to infuriate her. Coming home from her latest gynecological idol, she would attack me with a vehemence that amazed even her. I had never seen her let go of her inhibitions and lose control like that. Her broad, coarse face, poised between pretttiness and raw peasant health, would suddenly turn ugly and brutal. I, of course, would remain perfectly cool and levelheaded, my only worry being that she might do herself harm in this hysterical state. And all else failing, I was sometimes forced to give her a swift slap in the face to calm her down, after which she would throw herself on the bed and fall asleep sobbing. All this nastiness spewing out when she screamed at me made me sick, though I did remark that these outbursts often had the effect of purging her rather quickly so she could go on loving me unperturbed. There are some things I will never understand about women. Ruth would say, I know you don’t believe your own words. It’s a kind of inner conflict you’re taking out on me, and it isn’t fair, Momik.
