See Under, page 16
And I, too, am like that. Here on the sandy beach in Narvia, by the quiet sea in the month of July 1981, that same smell I keep encountering in so many unexpected places, when I walk past a bench where old people gather to tell their stories; in the cool damp cave I found near my army base in the Sinai; in my laboratory at the university between the rat cages on especially warm days; between the pages of every copy of The Street of Crocodiles; in the secret hollow under Ayala’s arm (after she decided not to sleep with me anymore, she had the decency to let me sniff her when necessary), and of course the question is: Could it be that I still carry that smell inside me, that it spurts out of me at certain points? Does my own body produce it to compensate for some deep-seated need? I analyze the ingredients: the dean smell of Grandma Henny’s cheeks; the thick smell of animals, fur and sweat; the sour smell of Grandfather Anshel; the sweat of a young boy, not the familiar locker room smell but a ranker smell, evoking embarrassment and disagreeable thoughts of glands more ancient than a boy, secreting—
Sea? Are you sleeping?
Sea?!
She’s sleeping. Back in Narvia and here, too. Whenever I start talking to myself, she takes the opportunity to fall asleep, saving her strength for later, when I talk about Bruno. Hell, why do I let that frivolousness, that childish egocentric superficiality of hers, make me so—angry, so infuriated without a way—
Ah, there I go again.
Listen, sea. I don’t care if you are asleep.
The first time we met, Ayala told me about the White Room at the end of one of the subterranean corridors of Yad Vashem. I told her that I had never come across such a room, though I spent a certain amount of time there, and none of the staff had ever mentioned it to me. And Ayala, who even then smiled indulgently at my limitations, explained that it wasn’t designed by an architect, Shlomik, or built by a builder, and the staff, it’s true, knows nothing about it—“A kind of metaphor, then?” I ventured, and immediately felt stupid, and she, patiently: “Exactly.” With each ensuing moment I could see in her eyes the growing conviction that a very grave error had been committed here, that her keen intuition had let her down for once: I was definitely not the man to entrust with such a secret, or any secret, for that matter. This was the night we met, at a lecture about the last days of the Lodz Ghetto, which I had attended out of habit, and Ayala because she never misses lectures or happenings of this sort (her parents are survivors of Bergen-Belsen). She was the one who took the initiative right away, and—that night which turned out to be the first since my marriage that I didn’t go home to sleep—I made the discovery that, my many limitations notwithstanding, I had an amazing and quite thrilling power to transform Ayala into an urn, a strawberry, and even, in surpassing moments, a woolly mess of pink cotton candy, the kind they sell at fairs. It likewise turned out that, despite my regrettable limitations, the mere touch of my hands on her taut, warm brown skin could launch a thousand strange shivers that seeped through and tensed her soft, comfortable body like a bow and released us both from our frozen, anxious expectations, when at last from her unplumbed depths came the sharp sound, mournful and high-pitched, like a gull being pierced by an arrow, and presently we could resume our cultured conversation for another spell. We repeated this many times throughout our first night together.
“And this White Room,” explained Ayala in one of the lulls, “was squeezed into being. It isn’t a room at all, in fact, but a kind of tribute, yes”—she shut her large, delicately rounded eyelids, enraptured with herself—“a tribute from all the books, all the pictures and words and films and facts and numbers about the Holocaust at Yad Vashem to that which must remain forever unresolved, forever beyond our comprehension. And that’s the essence of it, Shlomik, isn’t it?”
I didn’t understand. I looked at her with sad fascination, because it was becoming clear to me that we shared a rare, ill-fated “backward love,” you might say, now in its last throes, and as Ayala woke up and discovered how utterly different we were, she was certain to banish me from her magic castle. She knew nothing about me. She had read my first book of poems and thought it “not a bad start.” This annoyed me somewhat, because people generally liked the first book even better than my later three, and several critics had praised its “controlled inner tension” and all that, but Ayala said that you could sense in my writing how scared I am of myself and of what I have to say about life in general, and Over There in particular. She asked me to promise to be more daring in future, and when I promised, she told me about the White Room.
I was enchanted with her body, so lithe and free, so self-contained, rolling and rippling with carnal pleasure; I was enchanted with her small apartment, with her tiny bedroom, which was—you might say—illusive. I don’t know why I say it was illusive, but it was somehow, I don’t know, illusive. I had never gone to bed with a woman so quickly before: two hours and twenty-five minutes from the moment we met (I know that exactly, because I kept looking at my watch wondering what I was going to tell Ruth when I got home). Two hours and twenty-five minutes went by from the moment we left the lecture, distressed by what we’d heard there, until we fell into each other’s arms (and I mean literally) with a passion I had never known before. It was only after we cooled down that I remembered I didn’t even know her name! I felt like a real Casanova: having sex with a woman before she even told me her name! And at that moment she drew the palm of my hand to her mouth and whispered, “Ayala,” which I swear I heard “through my hand.” I know it sounds suspicious: I wouldn’t believe something like that either, but with Ayala, anything can happen.
From the ceiling in the corner hung cobwebs so thick they looked like tangled balls of hair, and when she explained what it was (she wasn’t about to destroy this creation out of self-righteous notions of cleanliness), I wondered what my mother would have to say about that and started to laugh. I felt different with her, and different things were evoked in me. I had never known I could turn a woman into an urn, etc., before. The amazing thing is, though, that with regard to us, I guessed what would happen even before she did, because I knew myself, I knew I had no hope whatsoever of fitting into her dreams. And a few weeks later I could see that Ayala was beginning to tire of me. Handles still curved out on her body, with the fine fluting, the pouting oval lips of the urn; sounds still issued from her body—I don’t know from where exactly—like little chirrups: “Drink me, drink me!” but the undulations were definitely becoming awkward. Zeno’s spirit of destruction was upon me even then. And later, all was lost: I was rarely able to conjure the little green leaves around her neck anymore, or transform her skin into a shimmering strawberry-flavored surface of crunchy red grains. She would gaze at me with sorrow and pity in her eyes. Sorrow for us both, and the chance we’d missed. Around that time I had been making frantic attempts to write in a systematic way the story Grandfather Anshel told Herr Neigel, but, of course, the harder I tried, the worse I fared. Ruth knew about Ayala and she suffered terribly. I hated her for not making me choose between them, and for the quiet wisdom that taught her to wait it out. To suffer and wait: not once during those horrid months did she turn on me with hatred or rage. But she was not submissive either, she never let me feel she was degraded. Quite the contrary: I was the sweaty male in rut, sniffing around two females. And all Ruth’s strength and wisdom showed in her unpretty face: her movements were slower than ever. She emitted a silent warning: she was extremely powerful; she—like everyone, in fact—was endowed with dangerous powers, hence she had to practice self-control; in order not to injure others, she had to restrain herself and wait: to intimate, not scream; to suggest, not decree.
I hated myself for the suffering I was causing her, yet I was afraid that if I left Ayala I would never be able to write again. And sometimes I think Ayala stayed with me out of some weird sense of duty toward Grandfather Anshel’s story, not because she especially cared for me. In her eyes I was a coward, a traitor even, and though I had every reason and every opportunity in the world to write the story as it should be written, I lacked the courage and the daring. Ayala does not write, but she does write her life. She told me that first night that the White Room was the “real testing-ground for anyone who wants to write about the Holocaust. Like the riddling Sphinx. And you go there to present yourself willingly before the Sphinx, understand?” I didn’t understand, of course. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and explained that for the past forty years people had been writing about the Holocaust and would continue to do so, only they were doomed to failure, because while other tragedies can be translated into the language of reality as we know it, the Holocaust cannot, despite that compulsion to try again and again, to experience, to sting the writer’s living flesh with it, “and if you want to be honest with yourself,” she said gravely, “you’ll have to try the White Room.”
I didn’t show her what I really thought of her, I wanted her so badly. I thought, How different people are from each other. I understood—long before she did—that she chose me only because she’d never come across anyone like me in her circles: a poet who wrote the poems she’d read yet was utterly sane. Who loved his wife and was generally faithful. No, she doesn’t know very much about life or me, I thought at the time, and she prefers to see what she believes rather than believe in what she sees. “Illusive”—that’s the word I was looking for. And yet—
“And in this room you find the essence of those days,” she said, her eyes still distant, “but the wonderful thing is that there are no ready-made answers there. Nothing is explicit. It’s all merely possible. Merely suggested. Merely liable to materialize. Or likely to. And you have to go through everything all over again, by yourself. Without a double or stunt man to play the dangerous parts. And if you don’t answer the Sphinx correctly, you’ll be eaten up. Or you will leave without having understood. And in my eyes that almost amounts to the same thing.”
Oh, Ayala. If I could only write all the stories and ideas she comes up with in a single day, I would have enough material for the rest of my life. Perhaps I would also become a different sort of writer. There is nothing in the White Room. It’s empty. But everything that exists beyond its membranous walls, everything that flows out of the corridors of Yad Vashem is projected into it: “By way of, call it inspiration. Yes. I’m not too up on physics, but I know that’s what it’s like. With each new movement or thought, you create a new compound. Your own formula, made up of gray matter and personality and your own genetic code and personal biography and conscience—along with everything else projected from behind the walls: the facts about mankind. The entire human, animal inventory, fear and cruelty and pity and despair, glory and wisdom, and all the pettiness and love of life, all that halting poetry, Shlomik, and you sit there as if you were inside a giant kaleidoscope, but this time the glass fragments are you, the different parts of you, and light reaches them from beyond the walls—” Her eyes are dreamy. She gets up and, wearing only my shirt, walks around the room, looking brown, fat, conglobated, her hair in a small bun on top of her head, putting on a performance for me, miming, What am I doing here? “And if you happen to think about something, like the victims who collaborated with the Germans, then right away—I mean right away!—all collaborators ever mentioned in books and monographs and documents, all the Quislings and Judenrats of the ghetto, all the miserable scum now frozen in the testimonies beyond the walls, are spliced by a single laser beam that dissects the collaborator that ‘you are’ inside, like this—whikkk!—the way Eve was cut out of Adam,” and she opens her eyes in bewilderment again as if to say, What-am-I-doing-here, and tells me in a clear quiet voice, shockingly sad and sincere, that this is how it must be written, this is the spirit of the book.
But I didn’t dare. Even now, after meeting you and Bruno, and after all I’ve been through, I can’t do it. Ayala was right about everything. That childish performance was only a mask for her acute vision, a vision far more penetrating than my own, with her accurate and enlightened sense of the bitterness of life. Once again I knew I was wrong.
Suddenly she wakes up. The name Bruno sends a long shiver through her. A white furrow, shaggy as a horse’s mane, is tossed along the fringe of the dark horizon. I’m boring her with my story, but those were my conditions, my petty conditions, and once and for all I’m going to tell her!
And now, Bruno. Did you hear that? I said “Bruno” again. You like this story. I heard it from you the first time in Narvia:
Suddenly, after months of riding the sea with a throbbing heart, half delirious with joy and wonder, a drop of human anguish coagulated inside him and its dark color spread through the waters of the sea.
At first he fought it. He pressed his arms to his sides and flapped with vigor, trying to echo the great ning of the shoal, and scrupulously to maintain the dolgan between himself and the fish on either side of him. He learned that the shoal that seemed to be borne so easily, actually maneuvered through constant and painstaking effort.
Or was it perhaps the ease-and-at-one-ment of a single body, healthy and harmonious? Bruno had sensed this while they were being attacked by a school of bluefish in Mälmo harbor: he hadn’t understood what was going on when his shoal was suddenly split in two and sent flying in opposite directions, leaving an empty space in the center that pulled and paralyzed, and while the surprised bluefish were fighting the suction of the treacherous waters, the salmon came back and closed in fast like two hands clapping. The water pressure propelled the bluefish into the distance, and they beat a retreat to the north with fast slaps of their tails. Bruno was jealous of the salmon. They were whole in their way. He, fragmentary in his. He’d lost the musical flow of the first weeks. He dipped his hot forehead in the waves and let them carry him.
He listened to the sea. He heard the murmur of the waves’ caress on the sandy floor—like a constant winnowing of grain. He heard the distant rumbling of piers in a northern harbor as the shoal passed by; a pier doesn’t sound like the shore: a pier returns a slightly metallic echo while the shore returns a spongy echo. In this way he learned that in the water he could not hear the sounds directly ahead of him, but only the sounds that came at him sideways or from behind. He knew the rustling of the fins of Yorick and Napoleon—that’s what he called his neighbors—quite well, but the ripple of the anonymous fish in front was utterly lost to him. Bruno recognized in this, of course, a mocking and symbolic representation of his own helplessness: his ears were still turned backward; he was still intent on the past. Still thinking about his own life in profane terms, and—what was most disappointing of all to Bruno—still not finding within himself a single sentence he could call his own, which no one could take away and distort.
He could not stop reflecting on his former life. Again and again he rolled the years through his mind like amber beads. His father’s shop of wonders; the pleasures of childhood; the fabulous dawning of the Age of Genius; his father’s illness; the humiliation of poverty; the sale of their beloved home on Samburska Street; the beginning of the war; the waning of the Age of Genius … all enveloped him in sadness, because he realized that human beings can never appreciate the life they have been given, keenly and fervently. When first they receive life, they are not ready to understand the gift, and in the course of time they stop troubling their heads about it. For this reason they fail to sense life until it slowly takes leave of their bodies, and they slowly, steadily decline. It would be a mistake to call this “life.” An injustice to call it that: it’s death they live with caution and fear as though trying to dig their heels in the ground so they won’t slip too fast down a very steep incline. Bruno groaned in the water, and for a moment the shoal was alert.
His appetite had also been impaired. During the morninggyoya, when the salmon grazed the rich fields of the sea, or in the evening, as the great ning subsided and the sated shoal rested on the water like a giant fan, Bruno would float among the quiet fish gilling to cool themselves off from the day’s work, and his spirits flagged. He strained the plankton between his teeth, or plunged below to peck on juicy black seaweed and chew without pleasure, a single thought flashing through him in the abyss: Something has been misappropriated and forgotten. Something has been ruined beyond comprehension.
