See Under, page 24
Suddenly he stopped talking and peered at me suspiciously. Perhaps he wondered whether what I had said pertained to him in some way. His small figure darted back and forth from the exterior of the boy to that of the fish. My eyes were disturbed for a minute by a blinding glare, the shiny scales of a shoe or a passing fish, Adela’s shoe or the fold of a gleaming wave sent my way perhaps to distract me, and when I looked again I saw that Bruno was in convulsions, throughout which he was shrinking more and more, not in size, perhaps, but in essence, his existence becoming more airy, more abstract …
For an instant he materialized again: half his face, the cleft of his mouth, one eye, and a throbbing gill. With a terrible smile he said, “In our new world, Shloma, even death will belong to man, and when a person wishes to die, he will only have to whisper his body code to his soul, which will know how to dismantle the person’s unique existence, the secret of the individual’s authentic essence, and there will be no more mass death, Shloma, just as there will be no more mass life!”
“Wait a minute!” I shouted. “Don’t leave me! Not after you’ve infected me with such unendurable passions! You can’t leave me now!”
“You could always do what I did,” he said. “Come with me, or choose your own way.”
“Bruno,” I groaned, “I deceived you. I’m weak … I’m a prisoner by nature … I love my fetters … yes, Bruno, humbled and shamefaced I stand before you and confess: I am a traitor and a coward … with a pathetic Retitia-like attitude … Now you know … I wasn’t born for the Age of Genius … If Adela’s shiny shoe were here, I would take my chance and steal it and run away from you, as I did … as I always do … Help me, stay with me … I’m scared, Bruno.”
Suddenly he fluttered, floundered, stretched his thin body into palpability, and was drawn backward by a tremendous force, sucked up with a whistle. “Bruno!” I screamed, “wait a minute!” He froze. The world held its breath. The sea turned steely blue. “Bruno,” I cried humbly, “forgive me for detaining you at such a moment, but this is very important. Do you by any chance know the story Anshel Wasserman told the German called Neigel?”
Bruno swiveled a gill and shut his eyes with concentration. “It’s a fabulous story, oh yes,” he said, and his strange face lit up. “Only there’s … ha! The devil take it! I’ve forgotten!” And with a smile, as though remembering suddenly, he added, “But of course! That was the essence of his story, Shloma, you forget it and you have to recall it afresh every time!”
“And could someone who never knew it, had never heard it in his life, remember it?”
“Just as a person remembers his name. His destiny. His heart. No, my Shloma, there is no one who doesn’t know that story.”
His voice faded. His whole body convulsed. I hid my face in my hands. I heard a strange sound, as if something big were being swallowed up by an invisible mouth. A heart-wrenching groan sounded through the sea, and a moment later Bruno was no longer with us.
Despondently I turn to her now, and she doesn’t answer. I was frightened. I was really terrified at the thought of her leaving me now, now of all times, when I need her so much; when I grow weaker and weaker and don’t feel like going home and lack the strength to write this story in a language suffering from elephantiasis. Come, I sob weakly, imploringly, Come, I want to cuddle you, to forget myself; so hard and obstinate was Bruno’s loneliness that we all became the lost and lonely … we sank into a bas relief carved by a cunning but not ingenious sculptor, or perhaps ingenious but certainly not merciful, and we suffer pangs of insatiable hunger, or worse still: we have lost even the passion to satisfy our hunger. Oh, I whisper to her, into her little waves, the folds of her flesh, if our life is only in the ebbing, then anything that helps that ebbing is the hidden collaborator of death, and we ourselves are accomplices to murder. We are responsible murderers, albeit, looking out for our own welfare, polite and anxious, but murderers nonetheless. Under the guise of defending our interests, they are committing a crime against us, a crime against humanity, all those we ourselves appoint to defend us, who strangle our happiness little by little; I mean the authorities, authorities of any kind who inflict the few on the many, or the many on the few, and the judicial system that usually forces compromises between different kinds of justice and religion, based on the imperative of not raising questions, and our complacent morality, and time’s obedient flock, the hands of the clock gathering the minutes in like sheep, and the fear and loathing that exist in us, the forceps with which we extract every crumb of closeness and love, and our tyrannical sanity, what are these if not the filthy canal down which we flow supinely to our death, and from time to time we find the miserable consolation of narrow-eyed pity and cautious love, and happiness ltd. and skeptical passion, canned bait, even I understand that man—man in the sense that Bruno and I say man—is capable of greater comfort and joy, of an incomparably richer color scale …
“Now you’re talking,” she says quietly, her eyes a little red, facing the setting sun. “At last you’re beginning to understand.” And she stretches her waves, sends them out, wide and calm, suddenly full of serene joy. We swim silently toward the small Polish town. The water is suddenly sweet in my mouth. I taste again and discover that I am not mistaken.
“Did he make it to the river?”
“You sensed it.”
“And the falls? How did he leap the high falls? How did he swim against the current?”
“The only way he knew.”
Silence. And then she asks, “And you? How will you leap the falls?”
“Don’t ask me that now.”
“You’re back to your old self again, hey, Neuman? Starting to forget already?”
“How could you think such a thing! After all I’ve told you?! For shame!”
But two small water funnels gave the impression that she was faintly smiling, with dimples in her cheeks.
“Strange,” she says, smacking her lips. “My little spies tell me that even now you’re regretting most of the things you said—ah, what does it matter. It’s your life, not mine. If you can call it a life. Too bad. Too bad. For a moment I believed you. For a moment I even … I even believed in you.” Did I detect a note of tenderness in her voice? Was that an affectionate tone I heard? She doesn’t answer. She flows off, swimming on her back. The sun caresses her with its last rays. Now she looks like Van Gogh’s palette while he painted the wheat fields of the Low Countries. So beautiful, mysterious, and mature among the cloudy scarves over the horizon. Did Bruno recognize her beauty, or was he too involved in himself, in his unceasing efforts? Did he give her little tokens of affection, her man?
She is silent. Thin bluish veins stand out on her brow. A man like Bruno probably didn’t notice her or her beauty but, rather, created his own enclosed sea to swim in. And she deserves love. She really does. Perhaps even the love of someone with far smaller claims than Bruno’s. A more modest and practical man, not lacking in a certain poetic sensibility, who would be able to distinguish her subtle nuances, a man who is, well, a mere nothing compared to our lofty, transcendental, uncompromising Bruno, but perhaps precisely because he is so involved in the petty details of daily existence because he’s such an obvious product of decadent society, and so human, such a man, I say to myself, perhaps he would be able to—“Nu, shut up, will you?” she says, and pounds me, accidentally on purpose, on a sharp rock, which was definitely not there a minute ago. “Now shut up, Neuman,” she says again, more gently, and skims my aching rib consolingly. “You’ll have a little sore there, like Bruno had. But yours will heal. Your kind heals. What’s that? Somebody’s calling you!”
“Pan Neuman! Mr. Neuman!” On the beach stands my landlady dressed in black. Waving energetically. It seems the mayor is going to Gdansk. I have to get out of the water immediately and go with him. And the day after tomorrow I’ll be home in Israel. “Home”—how strange and dull the word sounds to me now.
“You’re kind of cute, you know that,” she continues our interrupted conversation, licking my rib. “But you’re not for me. No. Your territory, dearest”—she tarries while the reefs in the distant horizon shine with laughter—“your territory is the shore, yes, you like to wade in sometimes, but you prefer to stick close to ‘her,’ in case of danger, in case you suddenly feel like running away deep deep inside me. Yes, Neuman, you are a cautious one. I would say definitely a peninsular type. Oh yes.”
And I suppress a groan.
“And now”—her voice is forced as she sets the waves dancing before me—“now do me one last favor. Don’t be angry at this request of mine, and think of him for my sake, dearest, one last time think of him inside me, think of our Bruno, please, please, a moment from now we’ll be separated and there’ll be no one to tell me about him like this, about my Bruno, all alone here on the edge of the pier in Danzig, think of him, so I’ll be able to think with you, you know: a minor health problem … please, please …”
Fluttering her long seaweed lashes, flaring her nostrils and quivering. No. She will not get me with her cheap tricks, with her feminine water colors. And I will not think of him. Let her explode. She’s not going to lead me around anymore like a dizzy child, like a lover, to the port, to the edge of that pier, the rim of the old world, no!—I’m stronger than she is—no, she won’t lead me to the light rain falling on him like tears, and he’s so thin without his clothes, he has only his watch left for a moment, a watch that still tells the old time, and he jumps in, bravely and despairingly, come what may, off the tip of the nose of that huge, recumbent hag, lonely as the first pagan who ever rose from totem pole to the unseen God. What a magnificent flight, Bruno, what breadth and vision—
And she, here beside me, explodes with suppressed laughter.
By all the easterlies.
WASSERMAN
[ 1 ]
WHEN THE THIRD ATTEMPT TO KILL Anshel Wasserman came to naught, the Germans sent him running to camp headquarters with a very young officer named Hoppfler at his heels yelling, “Schnell.” I can see them now, as they leave the grounds of the lower camp, where the gas chambers are, and approach the two barbed-wire fences concealed by hedges between which new arrivals are forced to run naked past a double file of Ukrainians, who set dogs on them and pound them with clubs. The inmates call this route the Schlauch, or tube, and the Germans with their peculiar humor call it Himmelstrasse—the Heavenly Way.
Anshel Wasserman wears a gown of gorgeous silk, and a large watch on a chain that bounces against his chest as he runs. He is bowed and wizened, with a wispy beard and an incipient hump on the back of his neck. Though I’ve looked through hundreds of pictures of concentration-camp prisoners, I never saw anyone dressed like that before. Now they pass the parade grounds and stop in front of the commander’s barracks. Wasserman is panting. The barracks are a grim-looking wooden structure, two stories high, with curtained windows. A small brass sign on the door says CAMP COMMANDER, and another, on the outer wall, CONSTRUCTION—SCHOENBRUN INC., LEIPZIG, AND SCHMIDT INC., MÜNSTERMAN. I know countless details of this sort. What I need, though, are the essentials. Hoppfler says something to the Ukrainian sentry at the door. Now Anshel Wasserman turns and sees me. It’s only a side glance, but I feel reborn: after the gloom and fog of recent months, his glance is like a clap on the back that makes all the seemingly unrelated pieces of the mosaic fall neatly into place. Grandfather Anshel recognized me, I sensed him. He was terror-stricken. Behind the door, Camp Commander Obersturmbann-führer Neigel awaited him. Maybe I shouldn’t be putting Grandfather through this, I reflected, maybe it was wrong of me to bring him back Over There, but I knew that he was my only chance since he had been there personally and was, I daresay, one of the few who knew the way out again, so having made up my mind to go in, I decided it would be better for me to go in with him.
The door opens and they enter the barracks. And there stands Herr Neigel. Well, well. Not at all as I imagined him over the years—fat and bestial, a butcher with a cruel grin. He is rugged-looking, though: tall and muscular, with a well-developed cranium, visibly balding, despite his close-cropped black hair, with two deep inlets over the forehead. His face is unusually large, his features elongated, with dark patches of stubble where the razor missed. His mouth is small and tense, and there’s a kind of aggressive contempt in the corners of his eyes. The overall impression he makes is of a strong man who wishes to avoid attention. In my childhood, Grandfather always called him by his civilian title, Herr Neigel. A certain rapport must have been struck between them at some point, or was it a bargain? And what did Neigel call Grandfather? Dreck Jude? No, I don’t think so. His face attests a dry pragmatism incompatible with dreck Jude. He looks up from his orderly desk, suppressing an ill-humored scowl at this interruption. “Yes, Untersturmführer Hoppfler?” he says, his voice loud and measured. Hoppfler reports a strange case. Neigel quickly interrogates him (“Did you try shooting?” “Yes, Commander.” “Did you try the truck?”
“Yes, Commander.” “And gas, you say you tried gas?” “Yes, Commander, it all began with the gas.” “And what about the others? Maybe the gas was defective?” “But no, Commander! The others died as usual. No irregularities, except for him”).
Neigel groans at this waste of his time, stands up, smooths his trouser creases, and begins to fiddle absentmindedly with the silver medal on his lapel. Somewhat wearily he asks, “Is this some kind of joke, Untersturmführer Hoppfler?” But when the younger officer launches into a garbled explanation, Neigel dismisses him with a wave of the finger and an order to return a few minutes later after the short examination has been completed, “to remove the body.” Neigel watches the young man leave the way people of a certain age watch an ambitious young man who never does anything right.
He draws a gun from his holster. A shiny black toy with a mag—Wait! Oh no! He’s going to shoot Grandfather! I turn away. I look at the military placards on the wall behind the desk: THE FÜHRER COMMANDS—WE OBEY, RESPONSIBILITY DOWNWARD, OBEDIENCE UPWARD. And then Neigel steps forward and puts the gun to Grandfather’s temple and I hear myself scream out in fear with Grandfather, and the gun goes off, and Grandfather says inwardly, “It was like a fly buzzing between my cars,” and the wooden stag head over the door falls down, nebuch, and one of its horns cracks. “Sholem aleichem, Shleimeleh, how you have changed, though I recognize you all the same. Hush, not a word. Time is running out and we have much to do. We have a story to tell.”
This is how he addressed me. Not in his own voice, of course. I wrote “Grandfather says inwardly” because it’s more accurate. His voice sounded like the voice I heard under water: like the faint crinkling of a thousand broken shells. Not like speech exactly, more like a steady flux of drab gray verbiage without the vigor of speech, yet closely resembling written language. Grandfather Wasserman spoke to me in the language he wrote, in the words that crumbled out of that torn yellow sheet of an old children’s magazine, preserved since the beginning of the century among Grandma Henny’s belongings. This was the first time I had ever heard him speak about his story. The story was really his life, and he always had to write it again from the beginning. Once when he was a little discouraged he told me he was rolling the story uphill like Sisyphus. Then he apologized for never having enough time or energy to listen to my story, but as he saw it, all stories were cut from the same cloth, “except that sometimes you have to push the stone uphill, and at other times you yourself are the cumbersome stone.”
But now the German is incredulous: he looks from Grandfather to the gun, and twists the old man’s head this way and that in search of a bullet hole. Later Neigel asks dryly in fluent Polish (his mother was Polskdeutsch, and, of course, the SS language course), “Are you getting smart with me, farshivy zhid?”
Let me clarify: he mumbled the epithet, scarcely moving his lips, in an effort to hide his discomfiture so conspicuous in the simple contours of his face. And Anshel Wasserman replied, “I do not understand either, sir. This is the fourth time already, and if your honor would be good enough to shoot me again in such a way that I can die, heaven forbid, because the pain is unbearable.” Neigel turned a little pale and stepped back, and Anshel Wasserman whined, “Does the commander think I enjoy this?”
The humming I’ve known since childhood fills the silence: Anshel Wasserman is talking to himself, arguing, writing his story. And now I offer my pen to one whose needs are greater than my own, who has waited these many years for his story to be written. “Nu,” he says. “So Esau was beside himself, beside himself, but I spoke the truth. Oh yes, I wanted death, may its bones rot. Why, even this morning, with the gas and the shooting and the truck, I desired it, choleria, and I wish it even now, but what happens? Nu, it seems I have a problem, perhaps I should consult a doctor? Ah well, I suffered, I tell you, and I tried to die. Zalmanson gazed at me wistfully in the gas chambers. He was already on the floor, nebuch, but he managed to give me a little sign, like, What is going on here, Wasserman? And, nu, what could I do? I stooped down and whispered so the others would not hear me—why vex them?—that I was sorry, but this was perhaps a defect from birth, may you never know. Nu, they were writhing and groaning, the dentists I had lived among for three months, and only I, Anshel Wasserman, was left standing like a lulav, and Zalmanson started laughing then, would that I had never heard him, snorting and weeping, such a laugh, till suddenly he died. He was the first to die! And it is important you should know this, Shleimeleh: Shimon Zalmanson the Jew, my only friend, editor of Little Lights, the children’s magazine, died laughing in the gas chamber, a fitting death for a man like him, who believed that God reveals Himself through humor.”
