See Under, page 35
The baby drank and drank, then gurgled “Ah” contentedly, and spat up a little milk on the doctor’s trousers. Fried screamed, “Call somebody! Report it to the authorities!” Yes, Fried was frightened. He paced the room like a camel, howling with rage. Otto, with awkward cunning, handed Fried the contented baby. Fried threw him an angry look. He knew perfectly well that Otto was trying to tempt him to love life. (“Or, if you prefer, Shleimeleh, to walk him back to Chelm.”) The two had been disputing this wordlessly ever since Paula’s death. Or perhaps since the first time they met in the distant past of their childhood. Suddenly, with firm resolve, Otto pushed the baby into Fried’s arms.
But who is this peeking into the darkened hall, dressed in filthy gabardine, so haggard and worn, her face wrinkled, caked with dirt and strangely blotched, a frumpy blond wig on her head? She peeks into the hall for only a moment and says—she says nothing, because Neigel interrupts and asks, “Please introduce me to our new friend, Wasserman!” And the writer replies, “Gladly, Herr Neigel. She is another new member of our band, and her name is Hannah Zeitrin, the bewitched and lovesick Hannah, the daring, despairing fighter; she is, um, indeed, the most beautiful woman in the world.”
And he ignores Neigel’s protests (“The most beautiful woman in the—? But you said she was wrinkled!”) and again declares that no woman in the world is as beautiful as Hannah Zeitrin, though she is also miserable, it is true, sick with love and longing, and when Hannah hears from Otto that “we have a new baby, Hannah,” she flinches and hurries away. These people have their caprices, Herr Neigel, each one, and his pack of woes, as they say, and Hannah cannot yet look at babies. The memories are too fresh, and you will have to understand this, Herr Neigel.
But, scolds Wasserman, while we were heeding Hannah, we nearly missed the main thing! Fried, daring at last to approach the baby, lays a tentative finger on the soft part of the skull, strokes it, and lingers anxiously for a moment above the forehead. Neigel: “The membrane over the hole between the bones? Yes, I know. I never dared touch him there.” And soon they are deep in conversation about that spot, the soft spot where (Neigel:) “you can almost feel the brain breathe. There’s a pulse there, too, like a heartbeat.” And also (Wasserman:) “you can feel the throbbing of life at your fingertips.” And Wasserman takes this opportunity to mention a bird he once read about, a tiny bird that lives at the South Pole (or is it the North Pole?), so delicate that if you touch it lightly on the chest, its heart stops beating. “I do not wish to hold such a bird in my hand, Herr Neigel.” “Yes,” says the German. “It could be irksome.”
And the revelation. The doctor lifts the baby up in the air and the tiny hands fly forward. Their movements are still haphazard, uncoordinated. They touch the big bald head and drop down to the trimmed, silver mustache and, suddenly filled with animation, flutter gaily above the two pouchy checks and the great red nose, the winepress of tears, becoming more intelligent by the moment as they explore the doctor’s garden of life with slow curiosity. Yes, they all held their breath and watched: the tiny fingers rested on his large, pale lips, coaxing a sensuality long dead in them. Magic writing loomed large and quickly faded on the cool wall of Fried’s face, and the doctor groaned one of his bitter groans. “Poor child,” he said, and Neigel: “It will be difficult for him to start his life this way.” And Otto: “Some story.” And Fried answered stiffly: “Such things happen.”
Fried had made a resolution never to be surprised. He had decided simply to banish surprise. Wasserman: “Unlike Mr. Marcus, who always did his best to adopt fresh feelings, the doctor spent his life trying to reduce his feelings to the bare minimum.” But the decision to eschew surprise did not bring the doctor satisfaction or relief. On the contrary, the older he grew and the more wisdom and experience he accumulated, the more difficult it became to stick to his decision.
Now comes the moment when Otto announces that the baby will spend tonight with Fried. “And tomorrow, we’ll sec.” He ignores Fried’s alarmed protests, argues wisely that “babykin needs a doctor’s care, right?” And together with the other Children of the Heart he leaves the hall, after first advising Fried to make some diapers for the baby out of an old sheet or shirt. The pounding of the mad doctor’s heart is almost audible.
They departed, and Fried was left alone with the baby. But not alone: an enormous white butterfly suddenly alighted from one of the thick roots of the oak tree and drifted through the half-darkened hall. The butterfly glided slowly down before Fried’s eyes, as though trying to understand him. It studied him so carefully, the doctor felt embarrassed. He noticed, meanwhile, that the butterfly’s wings were shaped like a heart, and this brought back an old memory: In the past, whenever Otto wanted to send the Children of the Heart on a rescue mission, he would draw hearts on the trees and fences outside their homes. This was the signal. The butterfly now fluttered over the baby’s eyes. It seemed to be blowing the first breath of life upon them, and upon Fried’s eyes as well, perhaps. He did not stir as the strange dance continued. Once again the butterfly hovered, traced a circle around the two of them, and flew up and away through the tunnels. The silvery traces of its wings in flight were still visible weeks later on the sooty walls.
Suddenly the doctor noticed that the baby was breathing faster, and that it was wriggling restlessly. A fearful premonition made him peek at the baby’s tummy: there were no signs of clotted blood on the navel. In fact, there were no signs of tearing or cutting on the navel: in fact, there was no navel.
Much else took place that night, both in the story and in the barracks, and it is difficult sometimes to distinguish between them. Did Fried examine the baby on an army cot in the office of the commander of the extermination camp and discover that the baby’s pulse was very fast indeed, almost ten times faster than a normal baby’s? Did the telephone suddenly ring in the hall of friendship with a call from “a very important personage” in Berlin, and moreover, did the speaker from Berlin extol Neigel’s recent work in the camp to such an extent that he had recourse to bright musical imagery, comparing “your work and creative power, my dear Neigel,” to the operas of Wagner and “the greatest National Socialist composers of our day.” And later, when Neigel, blushing with pleasure, signaled to Wasserman to be quiet and guess from the expression on his face what was being said, he asked Reichsführer Himmler to send him everything necessary for the setting up of three more gas chambers (“We must accelerate, Commander, accelerate more and more!”), Himmler promised to give the request his sympathetic consideration, though he couldn’t promise anything for now (“No doubt you’ve heard, my dear Neigel, about certain temporary exigencies in the East”); again he commended the “excellent tempo” of extermination in the camp, hinted something about the rank of Standartenführer soon to be bestowed upon a certain dear somebody, and ended the conversation with a crescendo of compliments, and the crowning touch (by the way, this quotation, too, like the previous one, is borrowed from Himmler’s night call to his protégé, Jürgen Stroop, the night of the Gross Aktion in the Warsaw Ghetto): “Keep playing like that, Maestro, and our Fuhrer and I will never forget it.”
Wasserman, who had listened in fear to the conversation, sat up straight when it was over, denying Neigel his moment of glory and the opportunity to divulge the identity of the distinguished caller. He continued in an anxious stream to recount how Fried, who had been left alone with the baby, scurried from wall to wall in the little hut, abstractedly tweaking the tip of his big red nose and stopping from time to time for a look at the baby, asleep on the couch with his fists clenched, “as though he held the secret of life in his hands.”
“Tatatatata!” Neigel iterates smugly. “What do you mean ‘couch’? What’s this ‘little hut’ doing here all of a sudden? Did I miss something while I was speaking to Reichsführer Himmler on the phone?” Wasserman coughs, smiles hollowly, and apologizes for “my annoying slack-wittedness! I almost forgot to tell you that … anyway …” In short, he’d moved the story elsewhere.
Neigel, half stewed with the pleasure of the call from Berlin, half frozen with hostility toward Wasserman, explodes with a rage-choked scream to remind him of “the humiliation I underwent for you in Borislav … health spas … lies …” and he is not prepared to listen to the writer’s explanation that “such sacrifices are unavoidable in the creative process, pray take no offense, sir … It transpires sometimes that a writer will suddenly become aware of a change of course that must occur, and so will wend his way back, or leap into the distance …” And Neigel slams the desk with his hand, proclaiming, “We will stop this game here and now.” Much to the surprise of both of us, however, he does not send Wasserman back to Keizler in the lower camp but demands to know why “you artists always have to complicate the simplest things, and ruin art!” He then preaches a long and exhausting sermon about the purpose of art, which is, if anyone cares to remember, “to entertain people, to make them feel good, and even to educate them, yes, definitely!” But under no circumstances to “encourage doubt, to make people feel awkward or confused, and to accentuate the negative, the sick, and the perverse!” And after this speech—in which there is a certain obvious element of truth—he sinks down again, in a rage and in a sweat, confused and bitter, but still does not banish Wasserman, signaling him instead to go on with the story! And Wasserman, bewildered, wonders whether this is “the first time in his life that Esau has had use for such deep thoughts about the nature of art, et! I kept this to myself.” But he does not succeed in guessing why Neigel is so intent on hearing the rest.
He resumes in a hesitant voice. It seems he has relocated the story in the Zoological Gardens, or zoo, of Warsaw, where he spent such lovely hours with Sarah. Neigel, whose bitterness has sharpened his tongue, guesses scornfully that the writer’s purpose is to “take us with dreck Jude slyness into a little fable about human beings who turn into animals, eh, Wasserman?” Wasserman denies this, staunchly disagrees with the German that any story which takes place in a zoo must be childish, and introduces his cast of characters in their new location (Fried—veterinary doctor, Otto—zookeeper, Paula—in charge of zoo administration and domestic arrangements for both Otto and Fried). And the rest of the band? “Zoo employees all, of course! The regular workers, you see, were called up when the war began” (Neigel: “Hah!”), he says, and returns us to the doctor, busy taking the baby’s rapid pulse. He prolongs his description, in anticipation of Neigel’s inevitable question (“What does a veterinary doctor know about babies?”), so he can tell the German the marvelous story of Paula, Fried’s life companion, who in 1940 made up her mind to have a baby, yes, she filled the house with longing for a child and sweet resolve and popular notions, like the preferability of breast-feeding over bottle-feeding, and she even embroidered dainty didees with gaily capering figures; indeed, she became the artist of the only child, and made her body over into a battlefield against the tyranny and narrow-mindedness of nature, and with all her tremendous creative force, and despite the fact that certain doctors warned her against it and laughed at her behind her back, she never lost faith in her powers and the justness of her cause, and she lay with Fried at all hours of the night and day. Otto: “I mean we used to catch them at it in every place imaginable; on the elephant’s haystack, among the rotten cabbages in the storeroom, and by moonlight in the empty crocodile pool, and even at my house, in my bed! They just got the love bite and couldn’t stop!” Fried: “She was the one.” Otto: “It was kind of annoying at first, I tell you, Friedy mine, while we’re on the subject, because who would have believed that my sister Paula had men on the brain? At the age of nearly seventy? But then, a few weeks later we understood, yes, she’d simply caught the infection from our other resident artists, the new members of our band, and though at first she was as much against them as you were, Fried, she caught the infection and wanted to try out her special talent, nu, and then it stopped being annoying, quite the contrary, wherever the two of you went to you-know-what, it was as if you’d sprinkled holy water and exorcised a ghost, and I knew our zoo was saved.” And Wasserman: “Yes indeed, Herr Neigel, it was fortunate for Paula and Fried that they were never caught in the act by your friends the guards in Warsaw, when they posted the strict laws forbidding the holding of Jewish rituals in public, which is precisely what Fried was doing!”
Neigel is silent. He stares at Wasserman and doesn’t respond. His lips are parted. Wasserman makes use of this interval to quote Otto pityingly. “Our poor Fried, he’s practically exhausted.” “Yes, yes,” admits Fried. “I was sixty-seven years old at the time, and Paula was two years older,” and so for the space of at least two years, day and night, most assiduously (“And with great feeling!”), the two made love. “You nearly broke my record, Pani Fried!” chuckles Mr. Yedidya Munin, exhaling the foul-smelling smoke of a cigarette prepared from the dried turds of zoo animals, his eyes twinkling slyly behind two pairs of glas—
But Neigel shakes himself. He stops Wasserman with a loud bark and a hand raised in negation. “Explanations,” he demands, “explanations, Wasserman, this instant!” And slyly Wasserman allows Munin himself to explain what he means by “my record.” “What is there to explain here, Mr. Neigel?” (explains Yedidya Munin). “In love as in prayer, in prayer as in love. In the words of Rabbi Leib Melamed of Brody, while praying, imagine a female before you and you will attain the highest rung.” And Neigel: “More of your Jewish pornography, Scheissemeister?” And Munin: “Heaven forbid, Mr. Neigel, speak not abomination but only purity. Transcendence. And man must worship the Lord, blessed be He, with a fervor drawn from the evil inclination, so said the Magid of Mazeritz, whose own flesh may have taught him the power of the evil inclina—” And Neigel raises his arms, in jest or in despair, revealing two shameful perspiration stains. “Go on like this, Scheissemeister, and not even I will listen to you anymore. I have the feeling you’ve lost control over your characters.” And when Wasserman ignores the comment and describes how Fried and Paula made feverish love near the baby elephant’s cage, Neigel rubs his red eyes and makes a note in his black notebook. It isn’t the first time he’s done so this evening, and in fact he docs so every evening when Wasserman sits with him, and Wasserman has been planning to look offended and mention it to him. (“Because I am not a musician, you know, playing for diners at a cabaret.”) But he forbears and keeps his silence. He paints for Neigel the small, sweet are of Paula’s belly, which had begun to swell of late under her withered flesh. Paula stood before the mirror, smiling her quiet smile, without the faintest trace of humor or irony, a good and simple smile, because she had always believed in this baby and had chosen a name for the child already—Kazik she would call him—and when Neigel interrupts to point out without much hope that Paula is seventy years old, the writer agrees with him wholeheartedly: she is sixty-nine, to be exact, and we, too, he says, all of Otto’s artists, all of Otto’s fighters, were astonished. And he asks Neigel to imagine how excited they were, how they never ceased talking about little Kazik, and how they all hoped he would change everything, everything. “And someday give us the final proof we had sorely hoped to find when Otto gathered us together for our last adventure,” because this Kazik was meant to be the first victory of the band. Otto took Paula to a friend of his, a Dr. Wertzler. Otto: “A fellow you could count on not to talk too much.” And the honorable doctor examined Paula and then sent her behind the screen to dress. Otto: “And then he led me by the hand to the window and showed me the darkened city in the curfew, and said, Hard times are coming, Brig, some will be able to hold out and others will not, and he looked at me sourly and whispered, Surely you know what’s happening to our poor Paulina, that’s what he said, Our poor Paulina.” Aaron Marcus: “She smiles happily to herself behind the screen, weighing her swelling breasts in her hands.” Otto: “—and he told me that I, as her brother, would have to have a serious talk with her and warn her that at the age of sixty-nine the body is no longer fit for pregnancy, even an imaginary pregnancy, and he said it was my duty to protect her not only from physical injury but also from the disappointment which would be sure to follow, and of course I did no such thing, leaving it to Fried to decide what to do; it was his, after all, this imaginary pregnancy—”
But Fried didn’t want to tell Paula what Dr. Wertzler had said, because he’d already begun to understand, and wanted to believe—in direct contrast to his temperament and point of view—that her work of art was bigger than people like Wertzler, and he began to care for her in keeping with her special condition. Wasserman: “He would walk with her of an evening along the Lane of Eternal Youth, and place cool compresses on her forehead when her head hurt, and Otto went to great lengths to find the foods and sweetmeats she fancied on the black market, and once”—Wasserman smiles, remembering—“and once our Paula craved a fresh grapefruit, but go find grapefruits in Warsaw in ’41! Superhuman initiative was called for this time, but all the Children of the Heart together could not find a solution, and Paula almost sobbed with the intensity of her craving, ah, who could see this adorable woman without melting—”
“Just a minute,” says Neigel dryly. “I’m beginning to understand what you’re driving at now. Please write down: Officer Neigel was the one who brought Paula the grapefruit.” “From where, if I may be permitted to ask?” asks Wasserman, his clever little eyes smiling gratefully. “The Quartermaster Corps sent me a food package. A big grapefruit, direct from Spain. With greetings from General Franco.”
For a moment they are silent. Amused, but also a little disturbed by the thread of excitement suddenly quivering in the room. The invisible grapefruit looms between them and spreads its fragrance. Wasserman cannot understand why Neigel, despite his angry outbursts, will not let the story stop for a single moment, but he wastes no time and continues. Fried: “And at night I put my hand on her belly and felt the baby kicking. Boom! Boom! He kicked like a little Hercules.” Silence. And Neigel, swallowing his words: “You have children, too, eh, Wasserman?” Wasserman looks down at his notebook, a white whip lashing his face. (“Esau did not know what coals he was heaping on the tablets of my heart with this question.”) “One daughter, your honor,” he answers at length. “I ask, because only someone who has children knows this kind of thing.” “You have two, you said.” “Yes. Karl and Lise. Karl is three and a half. Liselotte is two. They’re both war babies.” And reflecting briefly: “I rarely have a chance to see them.” And Wasserman, with unsteady voice: “You are not a young father, if I may say so, Herr Neigel.” And Neigel, inclined at first to interrupt this “impudent prying,” stops himself and, suddenly looking around the room, at Wasserman, at the curtained windows, he rubs his tired, red-rimmed eyes, and says in a dry voice without a trace of aggression: “We couldn’t have children for a long time. We tried for over seven years.” And Wasserman, in a quiet whisper: “Neither could we, Herr Neigel, eight years we … nu, well.” And in the heavy silence that envelops them both like a thick scarf Wasserman grits his teeth to hold back a scream. “Nu,” he reflects sadly later on, with tired, defeated anger not directed at Neigel, “there is nothing more to say.”
