See Under, page 17
One morning he raised his head above water and looked at the fish, reflecting sadly that they were stronger than he was. From horizon to horizon the sea was flecked with salmon nearing maturity. Almost everyone except poor Yorick and a few other weaklings were already as big as Bruno himself. Their greenish fins were erect and powerful. They were bold-faced, tough, and without charm, and Bruno asked himself for the thousandth time to what end they had set off on this journey. He rolled over and swam sideways toward the shore like a man. The salmon made way for him indifferently. During the gyoya no one heeded the dolgan. Bruno searched for Laprik, but could not find him. A strange thought flickered through him briefly that perhaps Laprik didn’t even exist. That Laprik was merely the fulfillment of the wishes of half a million salmon for a Laprik to exist. Bruno, however, distinctly remembered the sight of Laprik accepting him into his shoal on the beach in Danzig, and besides, there was something about Laprik and his quiet ning which could not have been brought into being by the aspirations of the masses: Bruno did not know how to explain this exactly. There was, in Laprik’s ning, a sense of leadership through discomfort. Isolationism. Bruno had not for a single moment of the journey felt bitter that someone else was determining their rhythm and direction. In the distance, near a broad rock shelf, Bruno spied the grotesque snout of an old hammerhead shark steadily trailing the shoal and growing fat on its flesh. The salmon had become so accustomed to the shark, he no longer elicited the orga drive among them, that fast escape strategy they had put into action against the bluefish in Mälmo. Bruno was depressed. At such times—and here I venture a guess—he must have longed for a pen.
He floated around this way among the grazing salmon, like a bringer of bad news. The sky above was overcast. Clouds were piled so thick and still that sometimes the world seemed to be passing below. Soon the storms of November would commence. At night he felt the sudden contractions of a vague fear along the wake of the shoal. His heart curdled because he had been able to say it clearly to himself: he pitied the salmon for having no protection against their very existence.
So what did you want them to do? Bruno shook himself and swam out to the sidelines, muttering, How did you expect the salmon to find relief from their gritty lives? Publish books and go into business, stage theatricals and organize political parties, feign love and friendship, calculate and pull wires and go to war, play football and write poetry? He rolled over on his back and allowed the little currents of the shoal to cradle him. They are the Journey incarnate, Death with fins stuck on and two slits for gills, and oh, the colorful masquerade of Death! Oh, the gay wizards of its choreography! Bruno blew a small water bubble in a kind of toast: To your health, swift artists of Death, kindly half-drunk servants of the one true evolution—that adjusts Life to their Death so gently, nimbly, and methodically. To your infinitely rich imagination! To the light touch of your fingers, plying needle and scissors to make a thousand beguiling costumes and accessories for everyone at the ball—snouts and fangs and skins and horns, tufts of hair and tails and wings, flippers and armor, spikes, nails and claws, scales and stingers—what a wardrobe! No one need go bare! And who is this? Sound the drum. Ingenious, is it not? Here comes the cleverest guest by far, in a most deceptive costume: Death wearing spectacles and a false beard, with a book under his arm! How gay, how gaudy, how unimaginably—blaaah—
Only you, Bruno, float slowly through the recesses of the teeming hall and along its narrow gullies, borne sadly with the uninvited salmon whom the revelers excluded tactfully in order not to spoil the festive mood; but the salmon, though uninvited, are projected as a cool and constant nightmare on the dimmest screens of their brains; these salmon who pass through the streets of life as a bare, bleached fishbone, never to be fleshed with the solace of illusion and fleeting oblivion, wandering accursed—
O Lord, said Bruno (who had never been religious), to what end do you impel these millions of salmon in endless circles around the world? Why can’t you content yourself with a single salmon? A pair of salmon? Why, even human beings, Lord, the crudest of your animals, have learned the knack of using symbols. We say “God,” “man,” “suffering,” “love,” “life,” packing the whole experience into one little box. Why can’t you do that? Couldn’t you forbear as the thoughts run through your prolific mind? Why must your symbols be so intricate and extravagant? Is it because we have become more proficient than you at divining the pain and suffering in each little box, and prefer to keep the lid on?
A few weeks later, he received a kind of answer. This is not uncommon at sea: vital questions often send thick-growing fibers through the earth and down the crevices of the blackest abyss. An anonymous essence somewhere is roused from sleep, quickened by the fibers, and plucked out of its seaweed reverie to rise and float slowly upon the water. And sometimes hundreds or thousands of years go by before an answer meets the question that gave it a life and a name, though rarely if ever will they meet. Growing desperate, they slowly lose their vitality and sink into the soporific arms of the seaweed. My Bruno used to run into particles of these sensations on his journey: peels of ideas, cadavers of audacity, half of them unripe and the other half rotting. This produced in him only a mild, puzzling anguish. He wasn’t afraid of them. The sealed ocean of his writings was full of their kind.
But he, he of all people, had been granted a reply of sorts. A token. The questions he asked had not been answered directly, it’s true, but neither had they been entirely disregarded. And I have a gnawing suspicion that a certain someone used her influence in this case. Someone I know did quite a job of thinking, investigating, and organizing, out of keeping with her drowsy nature. Someone clearly transcended herself.
Because that afternoon, at the Kattegat pass between Sweden and Denmark, the shoal came to a halt for no apparent reason. It was a little early for the evening gyoya, and Bruno stirred in confusion from his drowsy afternoon float. He looked around and saw a quiet, waveless sea. A light wind—like a rustling theater curtain—disturbed the blue horizon and made it quiver. The fish finned rhythmically in place, indifferent to what was going on around them. A flock of cranes flew by overhead. Bruno finned with his hands and moved his lips as he was wont to do in moments of stress. A troublesome infection had lately erupted around the two sores on his chest. It burned more than ever now. He rubbed the strange lesions and waited expectantly.
And then, a short distance away from the salmon scouts, the sea parted for a band of dolphins leaping like lightning before the shoal. Bruno took fright, but the fish around him were unperturbed. The dolphins, big and beryl-green, now orbited in a wide semicircle, till at last they turned flank and faced the shoal. There was no bristling of fins, no bulging of lateral lines. The two shoals surveyed each other. The salmon—motionless, tough, grim, and silent—and the dolphins, corpulent, glossy, and full of life. Bruno wondered whether the dolphins had even the smallest notion of what salmon life is all about. For a moment he felt scruffy before them: not scruffy like a sea-hardy salmon, but like Bruno, the skeletal man, the eternal outcast. Perhaps because he remembered that dolphins are mammals, too.
And then it happened: the dolphins were as though transfused by a different spirit. A big ning aligned them suddenly, and pulled them together in a huddle. Then they scattered in a wide circle, and the performance began.
Because that’s what it was: as if the dolphins wished to pay homage to the salmon for their thankless voyage, or amuse them in recompense for their meaningless sacrifice. Bruno marveled: the dolphins, beloved of the sea, noble, wise, and proud, had sensed the dreadful desolation they were so adept at keeping beyond the pale of their lives. This called for action of some sort on their part—
The dolphins leaped out of the water and somersaulted gracefully in the air. Two by two, four by four, they crisscrossed each other’s wake like flashing green corposants, quickly arranged themselves in one long file, and reared up in the water, galloping on their flexible tail tips, leaving a backwash of shattered waves, chortling as they surrounded Bruno’s shoal and tumbled over each other like acrobats.
The salmon watched impassively, finning a little faster than usual. Bruno was all attention. His heart nearly burst in silent strain. Though he didn’t understand the meaning of the performance, he knew he had witnessed a pure work of art. The vastness of the sea, the joy of life, compassion and communion and defiance and the knowledge of impotence—all these were here, and the water surrounding him sizzled when it touched his skin. He wanted to go with the dolphins, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. Maybe it was because he was a non-human human, and they were non-fish fish. Or maybe it was because, however briefly, he had been able to sense that life was a gift, lawfully his, and worthy of the name. The cranes shrieked so loudly overhead they nearly broke their necks. The vastness of the sea unfurled, blue and beautiful. Light shone out of the rich waves. Bruno watched the dolphins in supplication.
They vanished just as they had appeared. Swallowed up by the waves. Bruno felt the old anguish seeping into him again. The salmon ning grew suddenly slack, and the evening gyoya set in. The fish were beginning to forget what they had seen. Forever in the present. Only a few of them—like little Yorick—stayed in formation a minute longer to search for something already erased from memory, which had left them vaguely, fleetingly distraught. What a sorry lot they seemed to him then, and venting his own self-loathing, Bruno despised them for their mechanical dullness, for the overearnestness that prevented them from finding shortcuts, and for their uninspired resignation to fate …
Yorick scraped Bruno’s rib. Bruno turned and saw the fish’s mouth open-closing energetically. He responded with a similar flourish, but without enthusiasm. For a moment he hoped the fish was indicating that he, too, had seen the dolphins and was aware of what had happened, but Yorick was only expressing his pleasure with the excellent food of the evening gyoya. Napoleon, who swam on his left—a dull, drab fellow—was already giving chase to a passing cloud of tuna roe. Bruno dove below and swallowed furious mouthfuls of fragrant plankton. He imagined himself in his rightful place—floating gaily among the happy, carefree dolphins, living the easy life of those who adapt to the fact that they can never change anything, and so devote themselves to illusion.
But when the gyoya was over, and the shoal was preparing for the evening lap, Bruno felt strangely elated all of a sudden. The salmon were finning rhythmically in one enormous column. Every face wore the same dull, earnest expression that had so disgusted him only a moment ago. But for the first time since jumping into the sea, Bruno guessed why he’d chosen the salmon and their journey. For he was a salmon among men. Even as a dolphin, he would have belonged with the salmon. Bruno took a breath that almost burst his lungs with exultant joy: just as a man must learn to love a single flesh-and-blood woman in order to become, however imperfectly, acquainted with pure and abstract love, so Bruno had had to become thoroughly salmonized in order to learn about life. The barest life of all, as the salmon drew their tangible geometric design over half the globe.
He shut his eyes and shivered with all his might. He was intensely moved, and forced himself to ignore the stabbing pains from the infection on his chest above the ribs. The pain never left him, and Bruno scratched furiously, angry with his body for thus betraying him again, in this rare moment of transcendence.
Together they lingered a moment longer, whispering wordlessly, emitting impatient, nagging questions and fast, stinging answers, and Laprik listened to the echoes their bodies returned, and they listened to him listening, till suddenly, inexplicably, the departure bulletin shot like a spark through the ning, was instantly registered in their flashing lateral lines, and before they knew it, they were on their way.
[ 5 ]
AN ETERNITY AND A HALF, as I live and breathe, he has been with the poor salmon, never stopping and never surrendering, shrinking as they grow; by now some of them are bigger than that man of mine who knows not the meaning of despair, who has endured the tempests of the North Sea, an attack by a school of barracudas (though for the life of me I can’t understand what they were doing there on the Bergen shore), and a dreadful season of Icelandic fishermen who nearly halved the shoal; yet on he swims, though his eyes burn and his bitter smile stays fixed in the water, and his chin grows sharper every day, he’s all bones, not a hair left on his body, and his skin is turning spongy and puffy from the water. Sometimes when I look at him in the moonlight, it seems he’s already succeeded in turning into a fish.
The trouble is he doesn’t stop thinking, and these thoughts are a torture both to him and to me because there’s nothing I can do for him, I just don’t have what he’s looking for, though at least I can rest assured “she” doesn’t either. It just doesn’t exist, except in himself, and I hope he has the strength to keep looking for it, and of course I try to do my best, but how can I help him, weak and frail as I am, and I pick him up and lick him and whisper that I’m not like her—blind, deaf, and dumb like her—I am all eyes and cars and tongues, and I read you, Bruno, through and through, I understand everything and I decipher you, because there’s no thought you ever thought, no man you ever met, no wistful feeling or memory or beautiful thing or sorrow that didn’t leave its mark somewhere on your sweet body, you only have to know how to read, that’s all, and the first and last place you can read, Bruno, is here inside me; don’t think I’m making this up (heavens, you know how modest I am), but once, many years ago while I was dozing near Australia, under a ship called The Beagle, I suddenly felt the moon disappear, and I woke up and saw the face of a young man leaning over the railing and gazing at me with so much love my heart nearly melted and flooded the coast of New Zealand (in Japan they call these little excitations of mine tzunam), and then this man said to another man I couldn’t see who was standing next to him, You see, Peter, the sea is the great incubator of history and all existence. We shall never live long enough to solve the riddles of the sea. And Peter laughed and said, The moon is affecting you, Charles, and my young man smiled mysteriously and said, I am not a poet, Peter, only a student of nature, and it is as a student that I speak to you: on land we find life at a depth of no more than a league or two, or at an altitude of a few score miles, but in the sea, Peter? There are deeper abysses than we can possibly conceive of! Did you know that if that mountain between Nepal and India, reckoned to be the highest in the world, were submerged in the abyss off Guam, the water would rise two miles above it? Forgive me, Bruno, for letting myself boast like this, but I wanted to show you how really deep I can be, and no one else can read the marks, the thoughts and passions that life has left on you, because everything leaves the teeniest scar or wrinkle, all you have to do is look at old human creatures who have nowhere left to hide the marks all over their faces, why look at your new friends the salmon—the passage of time and all their tribulations trace rings on their fins like the rings on a tree, a small ring for the river months and a big ring for the months in me, Laprik has his second ring already to mark his second voyage, and if you’ll forgive me for meddling, there was such an ache in my heart when I found out that the only time you ever really laughed was the time your father, Yacob, put you across his knees and gave you a spanking, but of course that was a different kind of laugh, and after that there was no more laughing, and I think it’s a shame, because I adore laughing, we could have had some good laughs together, you and I, but you, even when I tickle you “there,” you stay hard and gloomy, and it kind of hurts my feelings, Bruno.
Please forgive me for going on like this. I simply couldn’t resist acquainting you with all the claptrap I was exposed to in Narvia. That sly little fool! Amorphous liquid cow! She used her cheapest tricks to hide the things I needed. I knew she was keeping everything to herself, including the lost manuscript of The Messiah, and to me she threw only the crumbs: dried shrimp legs, empty shells, castrated quotations from his books. Ah! Ignorant opportunist, guardian of a treasure she can’t begin to appreciate. How utterly irresponsible of Bruno to leave it in her hands!
I was boiling mad at her because I had to return to Israel the following week and I hadn’t come up with anything important yet. I spent days on end inside her, talking about him to her almost bestial delight; my skin was peeling off like flowered wallpaper, and still she hadn’t agreed to give me any tips. In the evenings I used to join the widow Dombursky in the parlor. She sat there mending the sheets and linens, and squinting at me narrowly while I wrote page after page on the antique sewing machine that served as my table and read the pages over to myself. But I found out that without “her” I can’t write. I’m dependent on her, and this was the most humiliating thing.
The following day I didn’t dip my toe in from morning till night. I strolled along the sandy beach instead, studying the magnificent lilies growing there, amusing myself with the idea of launching, right here in Narvia, a modest shell collection, and pursuing my interest to the point of some expertise. Later I walked over to the lighthouse and climbed the spiral staircase all the way to the top. I don’t like to boast, but I was told in the village that there weren’t many tourists with the fortitude to make the dizzying climb to where part of the wall drops into the sea and the stairs practically wind over the water. Later I discovered that to get from the top floor to the small balcony where the light projector is you have to climb a narrow ladder that juts high over the sea. Unfortunately, it was getting late and I had to forgo this thrilling part of my little excursion.
And so I went back to the beach and spent an interminable afternoon sitting in my chair, utterly alone and freezing cold in an easterly wind, glaring at “her,” and cursing the ill luck that brought us together.
And the widow grumbles openly now. She thinks I’m crazy, or that I’m an American spy, or both. They’re very sensitive around here on account of the demonstrations in the nearby village. And she’s also angry with me for leaving the light on so late at night (I’m probably sending coded messages to American bombers), and besides, I think she saw me throw the flowers into the sea yesterday.
