See Under, page 21
They were right, as usual. Women are always more perceptive. I curled up in bed and thought. I had a rare moment of lucidity. I realized that for most of my life I had been making decisions by a process of elimination. It was kind of warped. I always see perfectly well what I don’t want, what frightens me and puts me off. And slowly, without noticing it, by a process of elimination, negation, contradiction, and war, someone new was born in me, a stranger I didn’t like. And then I understood: I am my own prisoner. How could this have happened to someone as aware as I am, who checks himself every step of the way, and is his own worst critic? How could such an error have occurred? I threw my blanket off. I got up and went to the telephone and dialed, hoping my mother would answer, not the nurse.
My mother answered. “Hello,” she said. Only someone who’s heard my mother say hello will understand. The fear, the failure to which she resigned herself as the telephone rang. Hello, catastrophe, come to me. I’ve been waiting so long for you to come. And I don’t have the strength to wait anymore. Come, world, be real, beat me, sometimes the blow is easier than the anticipation. Hello.
I listened a few more times to the sound of her hello’s becoming ever sharper and more terrified. I remembered how she and Papa used to argue in frightened whispers about who was going to open the door whenever there was a knock (once a year). I listened to her. They were even afraid to be with me. They tried not to hover too long around this fantastic, no doubt illusory, fulfillment of their hopes. Hello, hello, hello, Mama, it’s me, the child you yearned to love with all the joy and light in you, the child you kept at a distance so as not to tempt Fate. Hello. I put the receiver down. I told Ruth and Ayala that they were right. I begged them not to leave me. I said I’d do anything to pull myself out of this. The same week I went to Tel Aviv with Ruth and we rented a room for me. A room without a telephone. I wanted to be away from everything. And in Tel Aviv there was always the chance that Ayala would come for the night. I asked for no more than this. She never came, though. It was there that I wrote the sixth and final version of the story Anshel Wasserman told a German named Neigel.
Wait a minute. Here they come. The three fishermen from the edge of the pier. Heavy, mustachioed, waving their fists at me from the distance. Who me? What? I should clear out? What did I do? Bad luck? Me?! They’re crazy. Their faces are twisted with rage. I can’t understand what they’re saying. But I do understand they’re angry. There’s no mistaking that. But I’m not budging. It’s a free country, you know. Hey! Don’t you dare touch me, you big idiot! What are you—hellllp!! H—
They rub their hands with satisfaction. They spit at me in the water. They return triumphantly to their places at the edge of the pier. Surprisingly the water isn’t cold. It’s much colder outside. I drift this way and that on the soft waves. I’m a clump of seaweed. I wait, afraid. I haven’t dared to dip my toes in the sea since my return from Narvia. But what’s this? The fishermen are cheering. In the moonlight I see their fishing rods arch. Suddenly—around my waist a smooth viscosity melts and disappears. The sea flares up and settles down to caress and roll the happy waves—
Hi, Neuman.
Hi.
Small world, isn’t it?
[ 8 ]
WHEN DID IT START? Bruno didn’t know. Maybe while he was asleep, or during the luscious gyoya to my north, near the Orkney Islands. That’s probably where it started, because on their way south to the Scottish coast, the rippling of anticipation had, with gentle firmness, deflected him from his shoreside position in the shoal and propelled him swiftly and silently past Yorick, and past a hundred other fish in his row, till they suddenly let go and left him in an unfamiliar position in the shoal, where he heard the great ning pulsing through him vigorously.
For some time he floated mutely, adapting himself to the slow, mighty pulsing and the frightening new sensations which the salmon strangers and his new position in the shoal had given him. He had to try very hard to control the trembling in his fins, and to keep up with the new dolgan he hadn’t quite mastered yet. Only after a few hours of concentrated swimming did he dare turn his gaze seaside, and there for the first time since jumping into the water in the port of Danzig, he saw Laprik.
Laprik was the biggest salmon Bruno had ever seen in his life. He was about a hundred and twenty centimeters long and weighed no less than Bruno. He had pinkish coloring, a bolder pink than the others’, and there was a shiny mark over his right eye. His movements were economical, and at the same time lively and vigorous. On his mandible there was a cicatrix, rough and red, like an exclamation point. Bruno swallowed and swam on. His muscles began to contract. He listened to the ning in his ears and in his heart, and experienced it less intensely now, as though it were accompanied by another echo. Swiftly he rode the sea, his thoughts pouring out, and his sense of existence growing sharp as a bone exposed inside a wound. The fish surrounding him suddenly slowed down, and he slowed down with them. Strange currents passed through the shoal. Now they discerned another fish broadcasting the pulsations of a new ning. Bruno remembered how Guruk had led a quarter of the shoal to their doom near the Shetland Islands. Panic-stricken, he raised his head out of the water to look for Yorick. The little thing was nowhere to be seen. He searched in trepidation for the fish that was trying to undermine Laprik’s authority. The pulsing wasn’t coming from shoreside. And seaside there was only Laprik. What could it mean?
The shoal came to a halt and regrouped in a circle. The fish gilled faster and stared blindly ahead. A small circle, free of fish, now formed around Bruno and Laprik, within which the new ning resonated powerfully. Bruno saw thousands of mouths open-closing, and beyond them a myriad of tense green fins. He and Laprik were still side by side, and out of the corner of his eye, Bruno suddenly discerned the salmon’s lateral lines in bold relief.
A sharp fear struck him: the ning was issuing out of him. It was he who was challenging Laprik. But what for? He wasn’t at all sure he would be able to lead the shoal any better than Laprik, and besides, he didn’t want to! What did this have to do with him? He turned to Laprik in bewilderment, as though trying to explain something, and Laprik moved in closer, too. The circle of salmon widened by a hairsbreadth. Bruno listened to his ning in amazement: it was a fast, sure pulsation. Not the wild, sickly throbbing Guruk had produced. He dipped his ears in the water and listened long. It was so like Laprik’s ning—and yet it was his own. His true, unique vibration. He felt grateful to Laprik, because without him he would never have been able to hear himself. This was his most wildly irrational feeling in the split second before the life-and-death struggle began, but it was Laprik after all who had taken him into the shoal and turned him into an artist of life. Why did they have to fight each oth—
Whereupon the water eddied and raged. Like mirror images they stormed at each other. The two skulls crashed, retreated, and crashed again. The other fish’s supple body wound around Bruno’s chest and waist, and the strong, sharp teeth bit into the flesh of his shoulder. He fell with a groan of pain, repulsing Laprik, and sank down down down, weak and stupefied, till he reached the zone where even light was arrested and the red rays failed. Bruno looked around in horror and saw the wound on his shoulder streaming what appeared to be green blood. His fear saved him. He ricocheted up, trapped Laprik unprepared, and smashed him, with open arms, on both sides of his face. For a moment Laprik stayed his ground, as though nothing had happened, and then he slipped under the water and disappeared. Bruno swam circles around himself in fear, then quickly spiraled down, but couldn’t find his adversary. He rose to the surface out of breath and saw black: Laprik was attacking him, heavy as a whale, ramming into his chest. Bruno stopped breathing. His blood throbbed in his temples and filled his eyes. Without thinking, he lurched forward, pounding blindly at the air and water. Never in his life had Bruno struck anyone, and the surge of violence that overwhelmed his very being terrified him. But the fear belonged to Bruno the man, and Bruno the fish choked on blood diluted by water and sucked passion from it. He flew at Laprik over and over, and they wound around each other, slippery and fierce, a jumble of sharp teeth, abrasive side fins, and quiet rage, soundless because Bruno didn’t break the silence either, and fought quietly, like a fish. He lost count of the minutes, and time throbbed to the rhythm of their onslaughts and the violent pain of their wounds. Bruno was mutilated: Laprik’s bites had opened up big ugly holes in his chest and the sides of his neck, but he could see that the big fish was also slowly deteriorating, that his assaults were becoming lax, that he had become disjointed, cut off from the source of his vitality, and at that moment Bruno drew back. At that moment his eyes cleared and his brain shone with a pearly light: he was fighting Laprik because he could not live in the crowd, not even a crowd that was free of malice, not even to the beat of Laprik’s ning. But he didn’t want to be Death’s arms bearer either. Laprik was still floating around him blindly, struggling to hold onto his own ning, and spitting out chunks of flesh from Bruno’s arm, but Bruno had already retreated. The salmon gave him a wide berth. No, he didn’t want to lead them. He didn’t want to lead anyone. No one has a right to lead anyone else. And how close he’d come to committing a crime. He quickly drew backward. The power of his ning was good for a shoal of one only. The singular, secret body language was his alone. And only thus was it possible for him to say “I” without the tinny resonance of “we” Bruno removed himself from the circle of fish and stopped, breathing heavily, beyond the shoal. The salmon turned and looked at him vacantly. They remained in place this way for a long time. Meanwhile, Laprik had partially recovered. Echoes of his ning revived and began to reach Bruno, but they no longer penetrated him. The shoal moved slowly on. It left without him, and for one last moment, Bruno was seized with the old fear. But it was merely force of habit.
The shoal drifted away. In the course of a few hours, hundreds of thousands of fish passed him at a steady float, and he waited motionless. The only one he could distinguish among them was Yorick, but in a little while he ceased to see them as fish and saw them instead as a large complex body, dissociated from himself: his former being. All his possessions passed before his eyes, all his memories and shreds of what used to be. He waited thus for an hour after the last of them had gone, deep in the contemplation and sadness of parting from his former self. From now on, everything he would ever do, think, or create would be his by right. On the distant horizon, the last of the stiff fins could be seen. Very soon they will arrive at the great falls on the river Spey. They will leap up three, four meters against the foaming current, fall back into the water, and leap again and again. Whoever survives the waterfalls arrives exhausted at the little stream where they were born years before. For a few days they will rest, huddled together, dead tired, reduced, tortured to the limit of endurance. Above them, birds of prey will circle. The fish will cast dark shadows on the water. A few days hence they will grow a tough hump and auxiliary teeth, and then there will be bloody battles over females and territory. The survivors will fertilize the roc, and die. Bruno knew: little Yorick would not survive the falls. Laprik would make it, but he would be too exhausted to fight the younger males. In a few hours, the Spey would be filled with the mutilated corpses of salmon. All the cruelty of the journey would suddenly hit them and leave its deadly mark. Birds of prey would peck them clean.
Bruno was all alone. The old shark that tailed the shoal stopped midway. He turned from the multitudes of fish receding in the distance to look at the strange creature who gave off the smell of blood and appeared to be particularly easy prey. He decided to have it both ways. He plunged below the water and disappeared. A fast, narrow course in a beeline to Bruno, who noticed nothing.
Only, at this point, something strange occurred: something difficult to explain, the cause of a great deal of embarrassment among biographers of the sea and the conservative archivists of liquid history: suddenly, without any explanation, the shark was hurled upward like some gigantic bird-fish, and he floundered helplessly in the air, snorting two-part harmony through his grotesque, hammerhead-like snout, and landed far far away, in his usual position, at the tail end of the big shoal.
The sea churned a moment more. Bruno thought he heard a strange sound, like clapping: the small waves around the place where the shark had been hurled in the air heard, to their surprise, a fizzling sound, like an angry and particularly juicy curse, but they preferred not to believe it came from the mouth of their Lady. They rammed into each other in harmless, gay abandon, told their different accounts of the shark-spitting campaign, spoke excitedly about old steamships, about navigation by the flight of birds, about different treatments for seasickness … in short, they changed the subject.
Nicely told, Neuman.
I’m trying.
Except for the curse at the end. You know I never talk that way.
It was the shark who cursed!
The shark? He can barely swim, let alone—Right. Now I remember. Hammerhead sharks are known for their foul language.
And after a moment’s silence: You’re cute, you know. You’ve changed since then.
Are you ready for the rest of the story?
I guess you haven’t changed, after all.
Please?
Go on, feel free. I’m not listening in any case … Wait a minute! You forgot! You forgot the main thing!
Huh? What did I forget?
Bruno! The wounds! Remember? Please, please, you have to remem—
Of course. How could I forget. You’re right. Listen.
Bruno swam slowly through the waters of the North. She was his from horizon to horizon, and he didn’t know it. She pressed down on his sores. Stem-faced fish were at work in her laboratories extracting their own special substances. Waves summoned from the Caspian Sea and Dead Sea, breathless and foaming after seeping out of the abysses of landlocked waters, and passing briskly through the telegraphic currents of subterranean rivers, arrived weary and worn to maim themselves by their Lady’s decree in order to produce the rare salts required for instant recovery. Seaweed, drifting in Bruno’s path as if by chance, wrapped itself around him briefly, dabbed him with mysterious astringents, and floated on, rejoicing in her joy. There were only two sores left, two narrow sores on the sides of his neck, though in fact they were not sores at all but, rather, openings, or little mouths. Or simply: gills.
Bruno swims on, his head immersed in the water. He no longer needs to breathe the air outside. He gazes down at the abyss: the waves have ground the lenses of his eyes till they are marvelously suited to underwater vision, and objects now appear wavy, their colors breaking and winding to reveal the threads of a thousand subtle hues embroidered there and splitting on the waves, which pluck themselves like a harp made of water strings on the giant cradle marking sea time, and also a hand can leave a print on a wave where it no longer is, where it never was, and maybe a wave will carry the body’s image away, and when it returns, carry it back, the outlines of soft pacific objects giving in to the soothing waves to the slumberous sea breathing slippery sleep on the lip of the reef and the pages of dreams the sea will tally the invaders flooding it ebbing and rising among the waves there are always the gulls many more than those below and the new ones seem heavier soaking the heaviness of the sea and diaphanous with beautiful colors fanning this way and that way Bruno swims—
She doesn’t answer. The waves are smooth, the water shivers with a tender snort every second or so. I look behind me and see that the pier is already empty. Only one fisherman is left out there, tall and sturdy as a lighthouse, his cigarette flickering in the dark. Carefully, shyly, I slip across her cheek. Soon dawn will catch us and we have to hurry up and tell the end of the story of our meeting on the coast of Narvia. The gift Bruno gave me there. His verdict.
This feeling of elation, Bruno. This swelling of the heart and throbbing at the temples—I’m guessing. I can imagine what you felt as the shoal took off and you remained alone, triumphant. The only man in the vast seas. I envy you, I’m proud of you. Because what more can a mortal do than decide his own destiny? (I can say things like this with such a deep inner conviction that they sound sincere to me.) This is a desperate decision, and your chances of succeeding are slim indeed, but your chances, Bruno, no longer interest you: they belong to other realms. To the realms of the first person plural, where one is weighed on scales: “My Jew for your Jew”; “According to my calculations, I killed only two and a half million,” etc. Even the dual was too plural for you, and the truly crucial things had to be said in the singular. So you became a salmon. You stripped yourself of all attachments till you were able to put your finger on the wounded vein through which your life was flowing away. The kernel of bare existence, the hidden force you transformed on your journey into a geometric line the eye can follow and the finger can trace on the map. And you also know what I feel for you, or I would never have gone to Narvia, and racked my brains till I nearly went mad—
