See Under, page 14
Maybe she’s right, I don’t know. Sometimes I want to make it up to her. I could cry when I think about the day she’ll be lying there in critical condition and I walk in to donate a kidney that saves her life. It’s hard to imagine a nobler sacrifice. Sometimes I actually look forward to it. Then she’ll see: her whole life with me will take on a different meaning. She will understand the truth and her heart will bleed. Oh, my darling, the hell you must have lived through.
I tried another tack. The trial of Rudolf Hoess, commander of Auschwitz, in the winter of 1946. For a few weeks I considered reconstructing the trial: Anshel Wasserman vs. Rudolf Hoess. I’d worked out some fairly good segments of the case. Would Anshel Wasserman send Hoess “back to Chelm”? Grandfather rises in the witness stand and hurls a curse at Hoess, may his face take on a striking resemblance to the antiSemitic cartoons in Die Stürmer. “And now, Herr Hoess,” says Grandfather Anshel, pronouncing his verdict, “you are free to wander the earth, and may God have mercy on your evil soul.” I worked on this story for the better part of two months. I wrote in a fever. The humming inside me grew louder. It was unmistakably the old, monotonous story-tune Grandfather used twenty-five years ago, though it was still a tune without any words. I sometimes wondered if anyone else could hear it.
But this story, too, ground to a halt. I could not bring Anshel Wasserman to look Hoess in the face. I suppose there are certain things you shouldn’t demand of your own characters. This had never occurred to me when I was writing poetry, maybe because I never brought two people together in a poem. Maybe, said Ruth, but your grandfather and the German are just that, two people, so let something happen between them. If only I knew what, I said. I’ll have to go back to the facts. People I’ll never understand. Nobody’s perfect, okay?
I searched through back issues of the Times. Our Warsaw correspondent reports on the trial of the decade: “Spectators at the trial were seated two to a desk. Rudolf Hoess, the accused, with sad, intelligent eyes, wore a light green uniform.” Snowflakes fell on the windows of the Praga School in Warsaw. Incidentally, the snow in the concentration camps had a peculiar smell on account of the ash. I can’t think what will happen to me someday when I explode with all these facts. I want to write, but I can’t get rid of my blocks and inhibitions. Every step becomes impossible because of the half step that must precede it. I’m trapped in Zeno’s paradox. The prosecutor said to Hoess, “It will not be possible at this time to read all the charges against you, because they fill twenty-one volumes, three hundred printed pages in each, with the descriptions of your crimes. Therefore we open this trial with a simple question: You are charged with the murder of four million human beings. Do you plead guilty?” The accused reflected a moment, wrinkled his forehead, raised his eyes to the judge, and said, “Yes, your Honor. I plead guilty. Though according to my calculations, I murdered only two and a half million.”
“Damn it,” cried Ayala, flushing the way she does when she gets excited. “Think how many times that man must have murdered himself to come out with a statement like that.”
“He must have been dead inside,” cried Ruth, appalled, “a million and a half—the difference—the man must have been dead.”
“I can’t go on like this,” I sobbed to each in turn. “I just can’t take it anymore. It’s so horrifying. How can you go on living and believing in humanity once you know?”
“Ask your grandfather,” said Ayala in exasperation. “He’s the one to ask, can’t you see that now?”
“But I don’t know anything about him, or the story.”
“He was an old man, he told a story to a Nazi. He survived. Nazi kaput. If you want to stick to the facts, these are your facts. From now on, write ardently. Not sensibly.”
She was referring to the White Room, the one she told me about the first time we met. I had said, “When you’re writing about things that happened Over There, you have to stick to the facts. Otherwise, what right do I have to touch the sore?”
“Write in human terms, Shlomik,” said Ayala. “Which is enough. Almost like poetry.”
I was still sidestepping, I recall. “Adorno says after Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible.”
“But there were human beings at Auschwitz,” said Ruth in her heavy, deliberate way, “and that’s exactly what makes poetry possible, I mean—”
“I mean”—Ayala beamed, her round cheeks shining red—“not poetry with rhyme and meter and all that, just two people trying to connect in a faltering, self-conscious way. You don’t need much.”
But you need courage, which I, of course—
Oh, bravo!
For the past few moments I have been trying to work out my exact location on the breakwater. I felt you tensing in the dark, and I made the mistake of hoping my story had touched your heart at last. And then I saw you throw a basin of briny water from your cool, cool cellars at the fishermen on either side of me, and I heard them curse in amazement, and call out to each other, Bitch of a sea tonight! And I couldn’t understand what was happening to you.
How puny your weapons seem to the people on the shore! Oh well, I’m soaking wet anyway, what have I got to lose, so as a token of my generosity, of my largesse as opposed to your pettiness, I will now tell you about Bruno, and—more particularly—about you. I know you’ll love that.
And I’ll skip the parts that don’t concern you—like the letters I sent to Warsaw, my credentials and references, the many appeals, the strings my publisher pulled, and the list of instructions from my mother, who was so anxious about my trip Over There she furnished me with twenty-one self-addressed envelopes to make sure I would send her a sign of life every day; and the ten pairs of nylon stockings to sell on the black market (“in case you run out of money”) she smuggled into my suitcase with ancient cunning; and my sad leave-taking from Ruthy (“I hope you find what you’re looking for so we can start living again”), and the flight to Poland, the suitcase “lost” in customs and returned two days later (minus the nylon stockings).
The necessary permits took four days to arrive. Meanwhile, I wandered around Warsaw alone in the big, silent city: it was as if somebody had turned off the sound. I saw a long queue in front of a store displaying a lone tomato. In a café I found the Franzuski pastries Papa once mentioned nostalgically, so I ate them in his memory, not that they were any good. I saw pictures of clowns with scarves and colorful butterflies on the houses, symbols of the Solidarity movement, and I had an exciting meeting with Julian Strikowsky, the Polish Jewish writer, who told me stories about the shtetl in fluent Hebrew and—yes! Yes! All right! I’ll get to the point! And then after the permits arrived—the train ride to Danzig, the scenery, Motl’s villages, forests of linden trees and slender birches, barns and silos—and all the while I had the strongest impression “he” was moving toward me from the opposite direction, from Drohobycz, now under Russian rule. Just as I had felt while transcribing passages into my notebook: as though I could hear him rapping out answers from the opposite side of the page; as though we were two miners tunneling from opposite sides of a mountain …
And finally to the edge of the pier.
Facing the waves I knew I was right: Bruno hadn’t been murdered. He had escaped. And I use “escape” here not in the ordinary sense but as Bruno and I might have used it, to mean one who has pulled himself relentlessly toward the magnetic field of—you recite with me like a little girl finishing a sentence. I hear you whisper before I can even say, “A man who defected to a form of existence largely given to vague guesses, demanding great effort and goodwill from his neighbors. A man who travels light …”
And I took a broken-down bus to Narvia, and rented a room in the cottage of the widow Dombursky, who dressed in black and had three hairy warts on her cheek. She cleared out a room for me, with a picture of Mary and baby Jesus on the wall above the bed, and a photograph of Mr. Dombursky in his postman’s uniform and mustache on the wall facing it. The afternoon of my arrival in the village, I changed into my gray bathing trunks and sat down on a derelict chair on the empty beach, in the keen wind of an unusually cool July day, feeling lonely and tense—and I waited.
Little by little, things began to change. All day long, I waited on the beach. I watched the fishermen set off in the morning, and I was still there when they returned in the evening and called their families out to the quay to help them pull in the boats with a primitive kind of crane and divide the day’s catch on a long, wooden table; only then would I head back to eat the “Cyclops fish,” or sole, the widow Dombursky cooked—the way all village women cooked it in the evenings—and then I would sit down to write or, rather, to erase. I had by now brought Bruno as far as Danzig; I had smuggled him there by train, past the police and literary authorities. Now I was obliged to wait patiently. To vacate myself and serve as his writing hand, or even more than that: who could say what he would demand of me in return for re-creating his lost work, The Messiah? I toned down, and listened. In nearby Gdansk, the Solidarity people were rioting, and here in the village there were frequent power failures. At times I had to write by the light of a smoky oil lamp. Some mornings there was no bread on the table. I wrote not a single word to Ruth or Ayala, nor did I send my mother any letters. For the first time since my brief affair with Ayala, I felt I was in love. I didn’t quite know with whom yet, but at any rate, I was ready for love. Maybe that was why things turned out so well
… Ah, now we’re getting there. You’re flouncing impatiently, you’re gushing all over me. Listen: my fourth morning in Narvia I went in the water. The smooth waves bore me gently. Already you seemed to know. The story made it necessary for me to go to the sea and wait. Ever since I first read Bruno and began to transcribe those passages of his works, I had attached a special significance to what my hand would write. I constantly expected an important message.
But the sea in my story was a cunning old giant, kindly and gruff, with a wet beard like Neptune’s, and I could not understand why I didn’t feel right about him. I floated patiently in the water all day, my back turning lobster-red, till at around five o’clock in the afternoon I discovered that my old man of the sea was actually—a woman. A woman’s psyche in a body of water. An immense blue mollusc, asleep most of the time because it can’t satisfy its own immense demands for energy, enveloped by the runny, medusa-like essence of her infinitesimal soul, surging, billowing, a thousand petticoats in green, white, and blue; and she sleeps, deep in one of a thousand lunar basins, her face upturned like a giant sunflower and her liquid body softly sustaining the reflexive motion in wavy contractions, foamy shivers, surrealistic reveries, fashioning fantastical creatures out of her depths; but beware, make no mistake about her serene and dignified appearance, because underneath it all she’s nothing but a cheap little slut, utterly shameless, not to say primitive in her wanton cravings, a typical specimen of paleontological times, with hardly the education one might expect in view of her advanced age and experience and her travels over the globe, no, rather, like certain women—one of whom I encountered several years ago and came to know intimately—she has learned a way of blithely combining little bits of knowledge with a thousand-and-one amusing stories and “piquant” anecdotes to win her listener over, though on the whole I would say she is equipped with keen intuition and the instincts of a hunter, all of which tends to mislead certain people, yes, you see you can’t hide anything from me anymore, I know you now, down to the last cranny in your blackest depths, and it seems I have succeeded where other men failed, other less daring men or, rather, men who were not “obliged” to be so daring; because (not that you’d ever admit it) I succeeded in catching something elusive about you and compressing it into a single iridescent gleam of endless forms and colors and fields of blue light in a delirium of flickering expanses whose greatest magic is that they never exist enough to be recalled, to be recorded—
These and other things I whispered to you there, on the beach in Narvia. My lips touched the water and my body was very hot. It’s about “him,” I said, but it’s also about me. It’s about my family and what the Beast did to us. And I spoke about fear. And about Grandfather, whom I can’t seem to bring back to life, not even in the story. And about being unable to understand my life until I learn about my unlived life Over There. And I told you that, for me, Bruno is the key: an invitation and a warning. And I quoted his stories from memory …
“Hey, you there”—an eerie, nasal voice addressed me crossly. I raised my head but saw no one. The sand was white and bare except for my beach chair with the torn canvas flapping in the wind. But then an unusually warm, slick viscosity enveloped me, only to vanish, and returned a moment later. “Listen,” you said tentatively, coolly, “you talk like somebody I used to know.” My heart nearly burst with joy in the water, but I went on floating as if nothing had happened.
“Oh yes?—and who would that be?”
You studied me briefly, raised a sudden blue screen between me and the shore, and licked me all over, smacking your lips, and then you lowered the screen again, peering over your shoulder at the shore.
“I’m certainly not going to tell you about it here.”
“In my room, then?” I asked politely.
“Ha!!”
It was there, for the first time, that I heard your snort of contempt, a wave snuffed into a maelstrom which has been your derisive greeting to me ever since. I don’t suppose you’ll ever give it up. Although you’re sound asleep when I arrive at the beach in Tel Aviv, you terrify bathers and fishermen for miles around with that irritating sound. They don’t realize, of course.
“I’ll take you there, far away,” you said, indicating the horizon with an arching of the waves.
“And will you bring me back again?”
“Come hell or high water.”
“I’ve heard about people who never return.”
“Scared?”
“That’s interesting. You talk like somebody I know, too.”
“Shut up, will you? Do you always talk so much? Okay, let’s go.”
Again you licked me, with obvious reluctance, and howled in rage and amazement. “Couldn’t be! So different! Just the opposite, in fact! Still, he does know things nobody else … hmm, we’ll soon find out.” And you retreated into your inmost self, and vanished with a whistle and a gurgle, leaving me disappointed and dazed.
But only for a moment.
Because an angry breaker came along, whinnied, and knelt at my feet while I climbed on its sinewy back and grabbed its ears—and away we went.
[ 3 ]
I’LL NEVER FORGET IT, BRUNO, the burning sensation when you jumped off the pier and the warmth flowing out of you, but there was something else then, I didn’t know quite what, and at first I thought it was the rutting smell you creaturelings give off; later, though, I realized it was only the scent of despair, that you have this gland, I still hadn’t figured where yet, and there was this awful awful burning and a slash down my middle, like a birth pang maybe, and then I coiled around you, I rolled into you on every side, and galloped furiously on the strongest waves I could catch just then, from Madagascar, which is where I happened to be sleeping at the time (snoozing, really, I don’t sleep much), and by the shortest route to the Cape of Good Hope, where the Malagasy waves crashed under me, so I picked up some new ones, fresh ones, and went on through a squall to the gulf of Guinea, and from there to the Strait of Gibraltar, a mistake of course, because I should have turned right at the English Channel instead, I always do that, and before I realized it and made the turn, my waves had fainted on me, the little weaklings, and I could barely tow them back to the Atlantic, where they broke down completely, crying and begging for mercy, and I went on alone to Biscay, where I found the kind of waves I really like, seventeen-meter breakers roaring and spuming with ne’er a whiff of land, and I picked a garland of long morays and brandished them over the waves, crying, Faster, faster, and the morays squirmed furiously in my hand and butted each other with their mighty snake heads, and everywhere we went the water heaved and vomited fantastical creatures out of my blackest depths; it overflowed and flooded entire beach colonies of cormorants, the poor darlings, and caused the most ter-ri-ble torag in a gam of blue whales, and stole the color from a vast shoal of red mullets. What a trip, Bruno, what a trip! A million years from now I will still be amazed, I will still laugh at myself for not recognizing the pain of you inside me, for how I whisked over thousands of miles propelled by rage at my rude awakening and on my way to you, no less, somewhere off the island of Bornholm, I’d sent my scouts out, the little Baltic runners, my sprightly wavelings, and they galloped ahead and touched you and hurried back to me, gasping and choking on the carcasses of fish they’d hit and the planking of the ships they’d sunk, and they raced out to my chariot and offered themselves to me for a lick, and phewww! I tasted them, and spat in a giant arc because my little wavelings were bitter as puffers, and now I was rip-roaring mad and I galloped ahead, spitting foam and fish and curses I learned from sailors, and I could feel myself heaving this nuisance the way a sea cucumber spits its guts out together with the pearl fish inside it.
And I drew nearer and nearer, but cautiously, because you have to be ready for anything with a being even my successful sister has trouble with, and I have to admit, especially now that I know him better, I’m not at all surprised she threw him out, poor thing, because a creature like that is more than she can bear, the little darling, she can’t stand anything more complicated than a volcano or more spectacular than snow, because—and by the way, this is a well-known fact, and I would tell her so to her face—she loves simplicity. She really, I mean really, appreciates order and reason and everything in its place. I’m sure she’d slam the door on most of my creaturelings on grounds of “reason” and “aesthetics,” as if a sea horse were any less beautiful than a land horse, though it’s true that those who became dissatisfied with the topsy-turvy life I had to offer got out and went to her, and it’s also true that the solid, civilized ones live with her, and the adventurers and sailors and crazy romantics come to me, and we sort of divided things up between us like that without a plan or anything and now we have this curious problem all of a sudden, this human creature comes along, a speck, a crumb, who starts making more trouble for her than a volcanic ulcer. So what do you do with him? Right: send him to me. Oh, she won’t mind, she tells herself, my kindhearted sister, she probably won’t even notice, and if she ever does, she’ll be thrilled to pieces because he’s exactly her type, this Bruno, perfect for her romantic temperament, and though she’s about four million years old, deep down inside she’s just a girl, isn’t it marvelous—says my sister—how young at heart and playful she is and uh—well, adventurous, ye-es … (You’ve got to hear the way she says “adventurous.” It’s so adorable she starts sprouting warty lemon groves in India.)
