See Under, page 20
“Make a little effort with him, will you?” she says later at night, her face and mine to the ceiling. “You may be causing long-term damage. That would be a shame.” Inwardly I scream: Stop me. Throw me out. Give me an ultimatum. Aloud I say that the story I’m currently working on, the story Grandfather Anshel told Neigel the German, must be having a big impact on me. That and all I’ve been reading and learning in connection with it. Ruthy knows me well enough not to suggest that I stop writing. She would never say anything like that outright. Ruthy believes that we all possess great powers, powers beyond our control, and we have to be careful not to harm others with our advice or attempts to influence them. She’s so mature. Why is it that everything she does feels like hard work to me? We lie in bed talking about the difference between writing a poem and writing a novel. A poem is like a love affair, she says, smiling in the dark, a novel is more like marriage: you stay with your characters long after the initial passion has worn off. It was strange that she said that. It’s not like her. I’m the one who says the naughty things around here. For some reason I was scared for a moment. A novel, I say quietly, is like a marriage: two people love each other and hurt each other, because who else is there to hurt? We’re both silent. I try to remember whether she locked the bottom lock on the front door. But if I ask her she’ll be annoyed. She probably locked it. I’ll just have to believe she locked it and stop letting it worry me. Sometimes, I tell her, I want to pack my bags and go live somewhere else. Start all over. Without the past. Just the two of us. “And Yariv,” she reminds me, and adds that there’s no running away anymore. This is the last haven. Well, I reply, that’s a dumb thing to say. There’s no such thing as a “last haven.” You can’t let yourself become so attached to any one place, or any one person. “You’ll never find peace, Momik,” she says. “It isn’t places you fear, it’s people.” Her voice is soothing, serene, what’s got into her all of a sudden? “You’re afraid of everybody. What do you see in us, Momik? What could be worse than what we already know?” And I say, “I don’t know. I don’t have the strength for any more of these questions.” There, I should have asked her if she locked the bottom lock, too. I missed my chance. She usually remembers to lock the bottom lock on the way to bed after she turns off the gas. Wait a minute: did she turn off the gas? And suddenly I’m talking about the Holocaust again. I don’t even know how I got back to it. I can get there from anywhere. I’m a regular Holocaust homing pigeon. And for the thousandth time, in a voice that doesn’t carry much conviction, I ask, “How can life go on after we’ve seen what a human being is capable of?” “Some people are able to love,” she says (at last a bit impatiently). “Some people reach the opposite conclusion. There are two possible conclusions after the Holocaust, aren’t there? And there are people who love and feel compassion and do good without any connection to the Holocaust. Without thinking about it day and night. Because maybe it was a mistake? Why not look at it like that, Shlomik?” “You don’t believe that yourself anymore.” “Sure. I’ve been living with you for a few years, and your point of view has rubbed off on me. It’s easier to become like you than it is to stay like me. I don’t like myself when I start to think like you. I have to fight you.” “You know I’m right. Even if you say there are people who think differently and get along fine, you won’t console me. I’m one of those unfortunates who see the backstage. And the skull beneath the skin.” “And what do you see there? Damn it, what do you see there that’s so different from what the rest of us see?! What tidings do you bring?” (She’s getting angrier by the minute, and I so seldom succeed in ruffling her.) “I don’t bring any tidings. It’s the same old thing: people killing each other, only the process is projected decorously in slow motion which is why it isn’t so shocking. Everybody killing everybody. The death machine has gone through a few more rounds and slipped into the underground, but I can hear the motor running all the time. I’m getting ready, Ruthy. As you well know.” “A little birdy told me.” She smiles. “Go on, laugh. Someday we’ll all be in the convoys again. Only unlike the rest of you, I will not be shocked or humiliated. And I won’t suffer the pains of separation. There’s nothing I’ll be sorry to leave behind.” “It so happens I know something about that, too. It was my husband the poet who wrote The Object Cycle everyone raved about. Have you read it?” “I leafed through it.” “Yes, my husband never allows me to buy him birthday presents, and he can’t stand ceremonies that hint at anything permanent—oh yes, I know the man.” “I want to be free of attachments.” “And people, Momik?” “Ditto.” “Even me and Yariv?” Shut up, dummy. Lie, tell her you want to be free of others, but not her. Because without her, without her faith and innocence, your life has no meaning. “Yes, even you and Yariv. Look, maybe I won’t be able to stop missing you, but I’d like to think I’ll be strong enough. I’d be disappointed with myself if I couldn’t stand the pain.” Ruth is silent. And then she says brightly, “If I believed any of this, I would get right up and leave you. But I’ve been hearing this stuff for almost ten years now, ever since we met, in fact. Sometimes you pull yourself out of it and see things a little differently, but in my opinion, you speak this way out of fear, my darling.” “Cut the ‘my darling,’ okay? We’re not starring in some Turkish melodrama, you know.” Her white-toothed smile spreads through the darkness. You have to turn the key four times in the bottom lock. I’m pretty sure I only heard two clicks. I feel her smile float through the room. Her mouth is the loveliest feature in her potato-ish face. Her complexion is raw, permanently inflamed around the nostrils and under the eyes. When we were sixteen and first started going together, people used to laugh at us behind our backs. We weren’t the best-looking couple in the class, to put it mildly. So I had to get my own nasty digs in. Ruth, however, quietly and wisely, steered us to where only the two of us mattered, not what people said about us. But I still hear an echo of their mockery sometimes. And Ruth says, “I do know you pretty well after all this time. We’ve been together through thick and thin. I’ve read your poems, including the ones you didn’t publish because you were afraid they would spoil your image as an angry young poet. I’ve known you since you started shaving. I see you when you’re sleeping and laughing and angry and quiet and sad and coming inside me. We’ve slept together side by side for a million nights like teaspoons. Or knives sometimes. And when you’re thirsty at night I bring you water in my mouth. I know the way you like to kiss, and how you hate it when I try to hug you in public. I know a lot about you. Not everything, but a lot. The things I know about you are very important to me. Just as the characters you write about are important to you. Our life, yours and mine—and now with Yariv—is the simple creation I work at every hour of every day. Nothing very big or daring. Or very original either. Millions of women have done it before me, probably a lot better, too. But this is mine, and I live it with all my might and main. No, let me talk now. I saw how happy you were when your affair with Ayala began. I suffered terribly. But in spite of the humiliation and hatred I felt toward you, I sometimes thought (when I managed to collect my thoughts) that someone with your talent for love, even if he tried to bury it, would eventually give himself away. And I was willing to wait. Not because of my Solveg syndrome, as you call it, but out of pure simple egoism, in fact.” “And what if another woman pulls out the plum in the end, excuse the expression?” “Well, maybe another woman will pull it out. But only for a little while. I know.” “What do you know?” “That we need each other, even if you won’t admit it, you immature male chauvinist pig. You really are immature, you know, a real adolescent. We’re two such different people, yet we want the same things. Only we have different ways of getting there. We’re like two different keys to the same lock. But forgive me for waxing poetic. My husband is the poet around here, and now he’s something of a novelist, too.” “By the way, did you lock the door?” “The bottom lock, too, you can relax.” I say nothing (I forgot to ask about the gas!). Love conquers nothing, I tell her in my heart. Only in fiction do writers compulsively have love conquering in the end. But it isn’t like that in real life. A lover coolly leaves the deathbed of his contagious sweetheart. People rarely commit suicide with their dying partners. The mighty, tyrannical stream of life keeps us apart. Carries us forward slowly and selfishly like animals. Love conquers nothing. Ruth nestles closer to me. She caresses me gently, but I’m reserved. I need to talk a little more, all right? “All right.” Ruth sighs and smiles. “I should have married that wild Circassian who wanted to buy me for seven camels: he wouldn’t need to talk a little more.”
“You know, the horrible thing for me about the Holocaust is the way every trace of individuality was obliterated. A person’s uniqueness, his thoughts, his past, his characteristics, loves, defects, and secrets—all meant nothing. You were debased to the lowest level of existence. You were nothing but flesh and blood. It drives me mad. That’s why I wrote ‘Bruno.’” “And Bruno taught you how to fight the obliterators?” “Yes. In a hypothetical way, though Bruno doesn’t solve a thing for me in the day-to-day. Bruno is a nice dream. But he’s more than that, too. What he revealed to me was very frightening, and I felt a tremendous resistance to it. I can feel it even now, when I get stuck in the story of Wasserman and the German. I feel I have to defend myself against what Bruno showed me. I’m fighting it a little even now.” “You’re fighting yourself.”
“Maybe. Maybe. But when I can’t stop. Listen. Don’t smile. I can hear you smiling in the dark. I want to be ready next time it happens. Not just so I’ll be able to break away with a minimum of pain from others, but so I’ll be able to break away from myself. I’d like to be able to erase everything inside that could bring me excruciating pain if it were obliterated or degraded. It’s impossible, I know that, but sometimes I plan it step by step. I’ll cancel out all my traits, desires and passions, and my talents, too—just think what a superhuman feat that would be: I’ll get the Nobel Prize for human physics, huh?” “How horrifying.” “No, seriously: I’ll simply sink into death without suffering. Without pain or humiliation. And without disappointment. I’ll—” “Then you might as well have been dead to begin with. With so many defenses up against people you’ll never be able to enjoy them. You’ll never know a moment’s relief from hatred and suspicion. You’ll live by the sword. And the more you continue, the more convinced you’ll be that everyone else is like you are, because that’s all you’ll know. And people who think like you will kill each other without remorse, because there won’t be any value left to life or death. Like the land of the dead, Momik.” “You’re exaggerating as usual. But I might try living there. The alternative isn’t always easy for me either.” “You mean life here? Ordinary, simple love?” “Simple, yes. Very simple.” “Doesn’t your writing help? You always say that’s what saves you.” “No. I’m stuck. Wasserman tricked me. He brought baby Kazik into the story.” “Maybe you should take the baby out, then.” “No no. If the baby’s there, there must be some good reason for its being there. You know how I write. I always feel as if I’m quoting. But this time I don’t know. I don’t understand what the baby wants from me. It’s hard enough with my first baby. Terrible things have been happening to me lately. I’m afraid to talk about them. Sometimes I don’t have the strength to go on from one minute to the next. People disgust me. It’s not my usual disgust: it’s real hatefulness. I don’t have the guts to face their lives. I walk down the street and feel powerful forces at work drowning me. Like tears, for instance.” “What?” “I look at people’s faces, and I know that a tenth of a millimeter down in the tear ducts there are tears.” “People don’t cry so easily.” “But the tears are there. Sometimes, when the bus stops suddenly in the street, I can almost hear the tears rattling. But the crying stays inside. And the pain, too. We’re so frighteningly frail. And all our desires, yes, desires that have to be consummated. That’s a lot of dangerous baggage for one little body to carry around. How do you face it? Do you understand what I’m saying? Don’t answer me. I haven’t got the stamina to understand the life of a single human being anymore. If it weren’t for the story of Grandfather Anshel, I would go back to my object poems.” “As long as you know that I love you very much.” “In spite of all this?” I ask her ruefully. “Maybe even because of all this.” “And I love you, too. Even though sometimes you drive me crazy with your Jesuit naivete.” “You know very well it isn’t naïveté. How could I stay naive living with you? This is a decision. And besides—you can always punish me: the day the stampede starts and I’m there with my two babies and one on the way, you’ll run off all by yourself and I won’t be able to say you didn’t warn me.” “That’s a deal,” I say. “Did you turn off the gas?” “I think so. Who cares? Now come to me. Admit I won you fair and square tonight.” And I turn to her, our faces touching in the dark, but only our faces, slowly, in resignation, like old letters reread, and then I burrow into her with all my might, and for one moment I have peace, I have a home, there is someone I can touch, there is someone I’m not afraid of, and we move together cautiously, conserving tenderness, rising and falling like a long, tired caravan, but when Ruth bites my lip and quivers, I return to a land devoid of love, I see those pictures on the tattered screen of my brain. Mankind. And when I come, I remember to make the right noises, though for the past few weeks I haven’t really enjoyed it: it’s meaningless. Like spitting.
Life was slowing down. I had turned into a sloughed skin. Even channels previously open to me were closed now and nothing flowed. Around this time I stopped writing the story of Grandfather Anshel and took up another project: collecting material for a young people’s encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The first of its kind. To spare our children having to guess or reconstruct it in their nightmares. I had a list of some two hundred main entries already: murderers and victims, the main extermination camps, literary works on the subject written during that period and later. I discovered that filing, writing, and editing the material in this way was helpful.
But I dropped the idea because I couldn’t find a backer. I couldn’t handle the PR work myself. It annoys me and I start shouting at people, and they ask me to leave. At home, too, I was becoming unbearable, but I couldn’t help it. I felt awful. Ruth went to meet Ayala, and they talked for four hours. I guess they decided what’s best for me. This was disturbing: neither one would tell me what they had discussed. Was I a child or something? At exactly the same time (why does everything happen synchronously), my mother’s sclerosis took a turn for the worse. I refused to drive her to the hospital for those disgusting tests. I couldn’t bring myself to go with her. Ruth went. I reminded myself cynically that my mother never took care of Grandfather Anshel either, and that when Papa lay dying, she wouldn’t touch him, and now it was her turn. The disease—like a beast of prey—had isolated the weakest animal in the herd, and closed in fast: the rest of the animals ran on, their eyes on the horizon. The way of the world, I told myself, but that wasn’t the truth. Actually I was afraid something bad would happen to her. I was afraid of what would happen to me once she was gone. For a few years now I had lost all patience with her. I became annoyed after five minutes’ conversation. Everything she said, all her primitive notions and suspicions, drove me crazy. But now that I felt I was losing her, I was filled with anxiety and remorse and a sense of loss and injustice.
The doctors released Mama from the hospital and said everything would be okay, meaning there was nothing they could do. They recommended that she come live with us. This time it was Ruth who put her foot down. She told them things were so bad it was all she could do to take care of me and Yariv. So you admit it, then, I screamed at her, wickedly rejoicing in my own calamity, you admit it’s just as I always said: even in families you find nothing but petty opportunism and egotism? Yes, said Ruth serenely, but, Momik, this is a problem money can solve: my father will help out and we can hire a nurse for her. Don’t lose your sense of proportion, and do me a favor, admit it isn’t the gas chamber every time somebody swears at you at an intersection!
So said my gentle wife.
Hey, you’re getting impatient. You’re finally starting to react: you snort and spit in all directions. No doubt you think I’m drawing this out interminably, that I’m dwelling on the details out of disgust for the story. You mustn’t be so hard on me. But you don’t care. I’m sure you don’t: you, too, protect yourself from pain. Isn’t that why they build breakwaters?
And then one day there was a knock on the door and in walked Ayala. Summery as ever, her hair wild, smelling of sea and sunburn. Ruth met her with a smile, rather tensely. How nice to see you. They touched each other. I went to the bedroom and lay down. My head was splitting. They sat in the kitchen and spoke in whispers. My mother used to whisper in Yiddish with Grandma Henny when she was saying things about Papa. Later I heard Ayala approach and rolled over on my stomach with my eyes closed. “Get up and stop feeling so sorry for yourself,” said Ayala. “If you really want to pull yourself out of this, start making an effort. Don’t poison the atmosphere. You don’t know how good you have it.” She spoke casually, with the mild contempt that used to make me double over. “We think you should rent a room somewhere,” said Ruth, turning in the doorway. “And you can stay there quietly on your own and write. No excuses. You can’t keep torturing everyone around you like this. World War II only lasted six years, yours has been going on for thirty-five. Enough already.”
I looked at the two of them, joined in the doorway like the pretty pieces of a mosaic. I found myself wishing they would both come over and get into bed with me. Why not? It happens to other men. What more can one person wish for? Physical contact. There are so many things a man can solve with a woman. Any woman. The important thing is to have a woman under you. Isn’t that what women are for? I looked at them standing there, and played around with the mosaic: Ayala’s heavy round breasts on Ruth’s elongated torso. Not bad. If only it were really possible. Ayala wears those tiny lace bikini panties. Ruth wears the old-fashioned kind. A few years ago I actually thought of asking her to buy the sexy kind, but I knew she’d only give me a dirty look. It would be beneath her to tempt me with her body. That side of our relationship has always been weak: for some reason we were still like two high-school students together. And now I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I fixed my lecherous eyes on Ayala. Nothing happened: no urns, no strawberries. I had lost my touch. “Make up your mind,” said Ayala. “Now!”
