See Under, page 19
And the real torag was on. Not as sometimes happens during the gyoya, when fish fight over food, and not even as happens when two rival shoals collide. No, this torag was totally insane. The salmon bit anything that met their teeth, and there were some who even bit themselves, because they believed Guruk wanted it, and I was filled with pieces of fish, with gills and eyes and fins, and fish were flying in the air in an ecstatic dream of leaping up the falls of the river Spey, ye-es, it was fluttering fins and snapping jaws and plopping in the water, and Bruno let out a high-pitched, husky scream. “All together now,” he screamed, ah, he was one brawny muscle contracting, and his eyes—you should have seen them—they were bloodshot and bulging like the telescope eyes of the box fish in my blackest depths, and his little snorkle was hard as the armor on a scorpion fish, he couldn’t even remember his own name, and he was certain that Guruk was the right name, yes, if he owes me an apology, it’s for turning into a blood-filled, hate-filled shell, and was I scared; in my heart I shouted, Bruno, Bruno, but he didn’t hear me, he suddenly saw the fish you call Yorick, or whatever, this Yorick who was smaller and weaker than the other fish, I can’t understand how he made it as far as he did, and Bruno suddenly glared at him screaming with hatred, grinding his bared teeth and snorting, can you believe it? Because sud-den-ly he despised this Yorick, this disgrace to the pride inflating them all and making them strong and glorious (so they thought), and before I managed to see who or what, he pounced on him with a roar, with an open mouthful of teeth, and luckily a great big wave came along, a cold, extremely salty wave I’d been storing in my deepest cellars, and smacked him in the face, not too hard, of course, because it had orders, and it threw him back, far away from Yorick, and only then did Bruno shake himself as if remembering something, and pushed his eyes back into his head with his two hands, and a fast little waveling was already on its way to me, one you can always count on to bring you the most important news—and if you have an especially delicate mission, like returning a bouquet of violets, for instance, then this is the wave for it—and this was the one that brought me the news that Bruno had calmed down, that his muscles had stopped trembling, and a few minutes later he started to swim a human stroke in Yorick’s direction, and he saw the little fish floating in the water like a corpse thinking this was it, his end was near, at Bruno’s hand yet, and Bruno swam toward him, and I, still a little worried, was about to release another cold, extremely salty wave from a distance just in case, but there was no need after all, because Bruno stopped in front of Yorick, and started open-closing to show the little fish he no longer had anything to fear, and again his heart was filled with compassion (I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the Shetland Islanders for the sudden flood: at that moment I simply lost control). And so they faced each other, and overhead the sky was full of flying fish whose heads were barely connected to their bodies now, showing the island side, and Bruno dipped his head in and looked with open eyes at a convoy of small electric eels passing very slowly and illuminating the water below with a pale, quiet blue light, and what luck, I think now, what luck that I happened to bring them here just then, and with his head still in the water, Bruno could hear Laprik’s voice loud and clear again, and he was calming down and breathing slowly, and the clearest sign that he was himself again was the pain of the infection on both sides, above the ribs, and he finned with his hands shoreside, and Yorick finned with him, and thus, with all hell breaking loose around them, the two began to set up a proper dolgan, and moments later other fish also organized, and Bruno saw that the fish you call Napoleon hadn’t returned, and there was a different fish in his place swimming shoreside—and do me a favor, don’t name that one, you read too many animal stories—and now more fish were returning out of the darkness, some of them looked terrible, their faces were bloody and their jaws were crooked, and they came quietly to a halt there and just finned and calmed themselves down and waited for the big ning to organize, sensing that the location of the ning inside them had shifted a little, more to one side, it seemed, because nearly a quarter of the shoal was torn out and galloping with Guruk, but maybe this is what made Laprik all the stronger with those that remained. They felt him in the water and in their blood and in every gill and scale, and I listened with them and inhaled so deeply I made a mistake with the ebb tide off the coast of Spain, which I didn’t even notice till the shattered moon turned red (she does most of the work, it’s true, because I can’t be expected to handle everything), but I didn’t have the patience to listen to the angry chattering of that albino ninny, because I was so tense on account of my present to Bruno, and believe me, Neuman, if he had so much as raised a finger against Yorick, I never would have given it to him, and you should have seen how little Yorick suddenly forgot the dolgan, and swam past Bruno open-closing fast, and Bruno answered Yorick’s open-close, but didn’t understand what the fish wanted from him because their open-close can mean such a variety of things, salmon language is so meager, go know what they want, but Yorick wouldn’t come back to his place, and he stayed in front of Bruno, where he started jumping higher and higher, and he even swam backward when the shoal took off, and only then, when my Bruno suddenly felt himself moving faster in the water than before, did everything become clear to him too, and he rolled over on his back and stared in open-mouthed amazement, and you can imagine how happy I was …
So let me in on it, why don’t you? I’m not a mind reader like you, and I don’t have waveling spies. What did Bruno see?
You don’t get it? You really don’t? Ha! Okay, I’ll tell you. I don’t want you to think I’m hiding things. Listen: there, on either side of his ribs waved two perfect little side fins newly sprouted. So help me, it was the best work I’ve done since I learned to make seaweed: two fins fluttered in the water like sea butterflies, fanning my Bruno with a happiness he’d never known … he was so … hic! Excuse me … so … happy … I’m so excited … excuse me … oops!
Late that night she took me back to shore. According to my watch (a waterproof watch I never take off) I had spent three hours safe inside a little water nest in the middle of a sudden squall which hit the region. Yes, she really was excited that evening; over and over she savored the memory of Bruno learning to use his fins and navigate with their help, like a baby learning to crawl. Again he throbbed with life. Only the experience with the dolphins came close to this feeling. Never more was Bruno parted from Yorick, even during the gyoya. He always needed him around. She chattered on and on about it. It made her deliriously happy to remember, but also very soft. Her fringe of foam glistened, and again I was just a stranger grateful for a few crumbs. Arms bearer of the great love, chronicler of the lover.
Ah, you’re angry again. Disgusted with me for being such a crybaby. I see the poor Tel Aviv fishermen out on the pier: their pails have been empty all evening. You steal the bait on the tips of their rods and tic their hooks together. I know your style. That childish temper. They don’t understand, of course. They’re amazed and furious. I see them looking at each other in disbelief, hear their curses carried on the wind. Most of them gave up and went home. But those who stayed cast their rods more and more obstinately, as if to provoke you. They search everywhere for the culprit: the moon? The noise of passing planes? Now they’re looking at me. They don’t know the storm was all my fault …
Listen. You still don’t know what happened to me that night, the night of the fins—
Back on shore in Narvia, the widow Dombursky awaited me with the village policeman. The policeman was holding a bicycle in his muscular arms, and the widow was turning the pedals to make the lamp shine. They beamed it out at the stormy sea, calling my name in all directions. When I suddenly appeared soaking wet out of the waves, they crossed themselves and began to scream at me for giving them such a fright. I paid them five zloty each, and asked to be left alone. They went away, and I sat down on the rough sand in the cold wind, my head in my hands. I felt hollow and defeated. Now I understood how far I was from real talent and courage. I dressed wearily and dragged myself back to the cottage. The widow served me fish and potatoes, cold by now, and grumbled incessantly. I looked at the fish, and for the first time since my arrival in Narvia, I pushed my plate away. Later on, in the parlor, by the light of a smelly oil lamp (there had been another power failure), I briefly recorded the rest of her story: Before dawn the shoal learned what had happened to those who went with Guruk. While the remaining salmon swam in their sleep with Laprik, they had received a shock, as if their muscles and ligaments were being torn. Beyond the horizon just then, to the east, the drunk, seceding shoal had run amok on the rocky reefs of the Shetland Islands. Bruno’s shoal came to a sudden halt, and floated quietly, perceiving with a thousand senses what had happened in the distance. Suddenly they were all seized with convulsions: threads of blood went out to the distant waters. Bruno looked at Yorick out of the corner of his eye. In his heart again he thanked him for being who he was. For suffering his difference like a humpback that kept him from passing through with everyone else.
When day broke, the waves were strewn with thousands of corpses borne south and west. The shoal passed through them. Their smell was fiercer than usual, and the expressions on their faces made them look as if they were in shock. In the distance small fishing boats sailed out from the islands. Bruno felt no grief over the dead. He had to save his grief for Yorick, or the one or two other fish he was somewhat acquainted with in the crowd. He finned vigorously with his new fins. He was as proud as a boy with the beginnings of a mustache. Dimly he felt he had earned them: that for one moment he had been worthy of the life he sought.
[ 7 ]
YOU STILL WON’T TALK TO ME. You’re ignoring me, but I know you’re out here by the pier, listening to my every word. I’m talking to you because I have no one else to talk to. Ruth and Yariv are in Jerusalem, and I need to get away from them, both of them, every few days till I finish straightening myself out. I may never straighten myself out. Things used to seem so clear-cut and predictable to me. I was convinced that with enough information you could always predict how X would behave in situation Y. As a kid I used to be fairly good at predicting things. I was a regular Merlin. But then I grew up and everything went wrong. Everything became unpredictable and extremely dangerous. And there’s no way of knowing when to be on your guard: sometimes the treachery comes from inside yourself.
I can’t talk to Ayala anymore either. She’s living with some musician a few blocks away, and I’m not allowed to show my face there after my crime against humanity—that’s what she calls that silly business about little Kazik. The only way I can atone for something like that, she tells me, grimacing with detestation, is to write a completely different story. A story of atonement. And till then—please, don’t show your ugly face around here.
And you don’t answer. The lights are going out on the new boardwalk now. The chairs are upturned in the restaurants along the beach. Tel Aviv, late 1984. I’m out on the pier. Only three fishermen left. And you’re so dark, always in motion. And so alert, I feel you. Before you, the city shudders.
I had a child. Ten months after I returned from Narvia I had a child. Just when Ruth decided to stop the treatments, a miracle occurred. We called him Yariv, a name I always liked. A modern Israeli name. And I tried to be a good father, truly I did, but I knew from the start that I didn’t stand a chance. I always figured the parent-children business was rough, but I didn’t know just how rough. They either resemble you too much or they’re too different. And the burden of all my expectations—that he be like me or, wait a minute, like Ruth, the exact opposite of me, healthy and uncomplicated, clean-living and strong. But what a surprise he turned out to be, not like either of us. And if he did inherit anything from Ruth, it’s her bad traits. He’s painfully slow, he’s too fat, and he has a timid, awkward face. He’s totally helpless with other children, like a fat pigeon among sparrows. Only when he’s with me does he act stubborn, like a big hero. He wasn’t like that in the beginning, but something must have gone wrong. I watch him playing by himself in the corner of the day-care center and I want to scream. I can just see him thirty years from now: a big man, with the slightly hurt expression very fat people often have, standing awkwardly and helplessly among his nursery-school peers. Ruth laughs when I confess these worries. He’s going through a difficult stage, she tells me, he’s a terrific little boy. Half a year from now you’ll hardly recognize him. He’ll get used to nursery school and the other children, and even if he stays a lonely little recluse, I’ll go on loving him, because he’s my type of guy, ha ha. But she too is forced to admit that he has a couple of unpleasant characteristics. He’s bad-tempered and demanding and afraid of everything. In the days when I did my writing at home, he used to climb all over me and prevent me from getting a single word down. “Do you know what Daddy’s writing?” Ruth would ask—she was busy all day long trying to keep us apart—and he, with exasperating childish egocentricity: “Daddy write Yariv.” Cute joke, but I know that’s what he really wanted me to do, to sit there typing his glorious name from morning till night. And hearing this, Ruth laughs and says, Try to act like a grownup, Momik. And don’t attack him full-force like that. There is a slight age difference between you, you know. And then we have the usual argument: I say it has nothing to do with age, you have to train him for war. I told her this once, before he was born, if I ever had a child, the first thing I would do in the morning would be to slap his face. Just like that. So he’ll know there’s no justice in this world, only strife. I said this when we first started going together, in high school. In later years, I came to see it was a stupid, childish idea, but when Yariv was born I had the feeling it wasn’t so stupid after all. Ruth said, Someday he’ll slap you back, how will you feel then? And I said, I’ll feel great. I’ll know I’ve prepared my son for life. And she said, But he may not love you for it much. Love, I sneered maliciously, I prefer a living son to a loving son. And she: You’re taking revenge on him for what you didn’t get at home, Momik. This disgusting remark, which she is forbidden to make under any circumstances, drives me to distraction, because what I did get at home was the wisdom to survive, which is something you don’t learn in school, and which can’t be described in the polite language of Ruthy’s ever-so-enlightened parents who never knew danger, a wisdom that can only be communicated in silence, in suspicious contractions around the eyes and mouth, a thick substance that passes through the umbilical cord and is deciphered slowly over decades of life: Always stand in the middle row. Never reveal more than you have to. Remember things are seldom what they seem. Never be too happy. Don’t say “I” so freely. And in general, try to get out of the whole thing safely, with no unnecessary scars. Don’t hope for more than this.
Evening. Yariv is asleep already and I go in to look at him. He’s lying on his back. I feel shivers up my spine. “You feel it, too?” asks Ruth quietly, and her face fills the room with pleasure. I want to say something nice to her, to make her happy, to show her that I really do care for him, but my throat contracts. “It’s a good thing he can sleep through all the noise,” I say finally. “He may have to sleep with tanks passing in the streets someday. Or on his feet, trudging through the snow. Or in a crowded cell block maybe, with ten more like him to a bunk. Or on a—” “Stop it,” says Ruth, and leaves the room.
I’m always testing him. He’s taller and sturdier than most children his age, and that’s good, but he’s afraid of them. He’s afraid of everything. I have to climb the slide because he refuses to move without me. I climb down again and leave him there crying that he’s afraid he might fall. Some kindly soul walks over to inform me that he’s afraid. I smile, coldly beatific, and tell her that out in the forests children his age were used as sentinels and made to sit guard for hours high in the treetops. She recoils in horror. Let’s see her kid when the time comes. The other mothers on the bench stop chattering to stare at me and the little idiot on the ladder. He screams and carries on. I light a cigarette and watch him. If someday we’re caught in a bunker with soldiers searching for us, how will I shut the kid up? There won’t be any choice, I think. I only hope I can teach him to do the same if I ever get in his way. Come here, you little coward, I say out loud, feigning nonchalance, stubbing my cigarette out on the heel of my shoe, and then I climb up to get him. But when his mouth sticks to my neck and trembles with a mournful sob, I feel the heavy pendulum of childish shame swing from his heart to mine with such force it almost knocks me off the ladder. Forgive me, my child, I say inwardly, forgive everything, be wiser and more patient than I am, because I don’t have the strength, they didn’t teach me how to love. Be strong enough to tolerate me, love me. And stop crying like a girl, I whisper out loud.
No more tender moments. Ruth knows how to play with him. I want to teach him. To prepare him. To make the most of these precious years when the brain is alert and open. Ruth loves to play with him. She draws him cars and tick-tocks and models for him in clay. When they play, their gentle voices blend together. I teach him to read numbers. She melts when he makes a mistake like “Mommy and Daddy good bye-bye.” I too am amused, but I correct him. There’s no time for mistakes. He stands up on our bed to follow a fly on the window, and suddenly reaches out, and accidentally catches, and crushes it. Then he looks at his hand in amazement and asks why the fly isn’t flying anymore. Ruth, a little tensely, says the fly is sleeping, and looks at me. I tell him the truth. I also go into detail. “You killed it,” Yariv repeats after me, tasting the new word in his soft, fresh mouth. In my head I feel a kind of dullness spreading. I ought to be happy now, but there’s nothing to be happy about. There’s nothing to hope for.
