See Under, page 38
“Most assuredly!” answers Wasserman, and the story continues. The doctor, he recounts, decided to find out what caused the unusual smiling and laughter. He conducted a small scientific experiment. He chuckled in a thick, exaggerated voice to make the baby laugh, but the little fellow sensed the trick immediately and grimaced. The doctor smiled despite himself, a real smile this time, and the baby beamed at him. This was so comic that Fried roared with laughter. The baby responded. Marcus: “Primordial smiles searched the baby’s body for the happy bolt hole. First his knee tried to smile. Then his elbow essayed it, disclosing a magnificent dimple.” Neigel: “Ah … why does it have to be on his elbow?” Wasserman: “Would you prefer it elsewhere, Herr Neigel?” Neigel: “Well … it’s a little silly, I know … but would you mind putting it on the right knee instead? Just above the knee? Liselotte has one there. I don’t know, I just thought …” “But of course, Herr Neigel; you see, it is there already!” “Thank you, Herr Wasserman.”
Wasserman shuts his eyes with a long flutter of pain and pleasure. It was the first time in years that a German had called him “Herr.”
The baby shook all over as he tried to find the seat of the smile. His face quivered and turned red. His bright hair glistened. Fried: “I started thinking maybe he just needed a burp, so I picked him up and gave him a little pat on the back. Marcus:”And the smile just slid into place. Then, as the baby was gaily opening his mouth, laughing and gurgling with pleasure, Fried glimpsed six white teeth in the pink gums.”
Neigel: “Six? You said four.”
Death to this baby. Death to everyone. A certain person’s powers are utterly drained. There is strength left for one last spasm of resistance to Wasserman. Only when the activity of writing takes place is there any “vitality.” In the fingertips. The rest—numb. The written pages in his hand are like a fresh leaf sprouting from a withered tree. But at least this: Wasserman’s hidden, malicious intent has been revealed, and all the necessary operational plans to frustrate it have been made. The situation is still under partial control of the writing authority. The situation is as follows: Wasserman is aiming his efforts at a certain person, trying to “provoke” him—using unbelievably cheap tactics to bring him back to “life.” But Wasserman will be assailed. Wasserman will be soundly combated!
That night, on a narrow bed in a rented room in a strange city, a dream was dreamed. Neigel was dreamed in the guise of a certain person. Neigel’s children were also in the dream, and were encountered without enmity. They were even deemed “sweet.” They were cared for gently and with devotion by Neigel (who was a certain person). In the aftermath of the dream, the dreamer awakened with the following thought: A certain person has been dreamed of as a Nazi, and all this evoked was a mild depression, which soon lifted, having nothing much to hang on to. The strange thought occurred that they always say the little Nazi in you (henceforth LNIY) with reference to the wrong things, the obvious things like bestial cruelty, for instance, or racism of one sort or another, and xenophobia, and murderousness. But these are only the superficial symptoms of the disease. The chair at the writing desk in the rented room was oppressed by a certain ambiguous load. A pen was raised in the hand and chewed by the teeth. The rented attic room in which the aforementioned activities took place had a view of the sea. Oh, sea. They always say the LNIY and they’re so wrong. They put vigilance to sleep, and pave the way for the next disaster. Yes, such thoughts revolved with astounding clarity. Total wakefulness and an acute understanding of his situation were detected, together with the inability to change what had already been fixed and determined. The broken closet mirror reflected his self. A bird face. Bright red eyes. An ugly shaving cut under ugly stubble. But the real problem, the disease, lies much deeper. And it may be incurable. And it could be that we are all no more than germs. And when here and there the LNIY is signaled, could it be that this is only a sly and cowardly act of blackmail, the goal of which is to reach a general consensus about the things it is convenient and easy to agree upon? That is, to fight whatever can be fought? But what, then, is the proper treatment? Or should we eradicate everything and start all over again? And do we have the strength?
That night things were examined: Could a certain child (who will henceforth be called Yariv) be destroyed by a certain person who also serves as his father? What about a certain person’s wife, and what about his mother?
At 0445 hours, a pair of trousers and a gray sweater were donned. The door leading out to the roof was opened. The roof was paced briskly. The feeling of awakening and recovery was experienced by a certain person. Beyond the roof, with its antennas and solar heaters, lay the blue borders of the great water reservoir. At exactly 0449 hours it became a certainty that these were not the right questions to ask, and that the mistakes, it may be ventured, had come with the questions. At this point certain questions which one had been taught to ask by a certain B. Schulz were recollected, and it became regrettably clear that they had been too much feared to be asked. They had always been feared. Now again it was recollected that questions must be asked in a different vein: Not “Would a certain person destroy X, Y, and Z?” but “Would he bring them back to life? Would they be brought back to life by him with every passing moment?” and—this may be the decisive question—“Would a certain person’s own self be brought back to life, with the same fervor, passion, and love—by a certain person—with every passing moment?”
And since no answer to this question was found, one peevish last question was posed: Which is the real horror, death or life? Real life, without reservation, life in the sense that—etc. Suddenly a certain person went running back to his desk to write. But his pen refused to write. The ink refused to flow. A certain person received a kick. A cold sweat broke out. His pen was jabbed and banged on the table as though in an attempt to wake somebody under it, beyond it. At last the ink flowed.
Wasserman is still there. He’s always there, facing Neigel. He describes the bewildered doctor, too cautious to register the baby in his notebook yet (the same one he has been using a few years now for both zoo animals and employees), because he has no name, and Fried: “It’s not my job to give my patients names, is it?”
Thus writes Fried: “Anonymous baby. Brought to me by Otto Brig at 2005 hours on 5/4/43. Wrapped in woolen blanket. No sign of parents. Sex: Male. Length of body: Impossible to measure because of resistance; an estimated 51 cm. Head measurement: Ditto; an estimated 34 cm. Weight: Ditto; an estimated 3 kg. At 2020 Otto Brig saw 2 teeth in the lower jaw. At 2110 I myself (A.F.) saw another two teeth in the upper jaw. Approximately two minutes later another two appeared in the lower jaw. All in all: six teeth.” Since the baby did not interrupt the rest of his scientific documentation, Fried returned the favor with extravagant generosity, noting: “2120. The baby is alert, and even smiling.” Fried: “And there I was, writing away, paying no attention to him till he moved on the carpet, or fell or something, and I looked and saw—ah! The baby was suddenly lying on his tummy! Poor thing. I turned him over on his back again and watched him, and believe it or not, he flipped over on his tummy again!”
Fried detested any form of fraud or deception, and there was always someone trying to deceive him, poor Fried! He lived with the sense that somebody out there had taken advantage of his momentary carelessness to change the world’s scenery from top to bottom. And in furious protest against the lies and decadence engraved on the world, Fried clung to his decency, and gripped it by his fingernails. Marcus: “And the more the world deceived him and opened up its books of legerdemain and deviltry—” Harotian: “And all the suitcases with false bottoms and trapdoors and hidden pockets—” so the doctor buttressed his hate and shame-filled faith with the necessary logic of things, and with the existence in our world of a proper order, lucid and simple, which is bound to be discovered someday, in somebody’s life.
Neigel raises a hand. “You’re wrong there,” he says to Anshel Wasserman. “There’s always a logical explanation.” Wasserman appears to object. Neigel is willing to elaborate: “Even when something seems unnatural at first, it turns out to have a logical explanation.” And Wasserman: “Herr Neigel, the role and mission of logic in our world is to divide things into categories and connect them to each other, in the manner of every winged fowl after its kind. But things in themselves,” he says sadly, “things in themselves are totally lacking in logic! And so are people. Yes, indeed. A mixed leaven of passion and fear, ai, a fine world, and what is logic? Only the divider and connector between them. Yes. Logic, for instance, is your wonderful program for transporting trains here from all over Europe. To the slaughter. Logic is the railroad tracks stretching over most of the world, and the cars that never tarry in the station. Logic, Herr Neigel, is the invisible string that binds the hand of the dutiful functionary whose signature authorizes the engine’s oil supply for the day, and the engineer who drives it over the tracks, and, if you will, logic is what conjoins the two and prevents them from meeting the corrupt stationmaster, the best of men, who in return for a purseful of mammon, which we shoved through the train window, brought a flaskful of water for my little girl when she fainted. He, too, behaved according to the logic at the root of the situation, only this logic, sir, connects things that are lacking in logic, the coils of cruelty and mercy, human beings, my daughter’s life and her death …”
Neigel, who has just heard about the death of Wasserman’s daughter for the first time, prefers to ignore it. Or maybe he doesn’t have the emotional stamina to cope with the information. He looks down with a “humph,” that seems to indicate that Wasserman should continue. Wasserman gives him a long look full of pain and bitterness, and then his face takes on an expression as close to hatred as I’ve ever seen on it. Then he nods to himself and continues.
Marcus: “And in our Fried, honesty and disillusionment were so intertwined that they developed into a permanent spasm of the throat and stomach, and Paula claimed that by this strange form of self-torture Fried was perpetrating no less an injustice than falsehood or fraud.” Paula: “But I can’t understand why people are always trying to fool my Friedchik. He’s so sensible and smart and suspicious of everyone, while me, of all people, such a dupe I’d believe a cat, they leave alone.” Harotian: “But you’ve got to hand it to our doctor, when it came to a choice between logic and the merciful lie, he chose the lie. And hope. I appreciated that very much, Fried.” Fried: “Oh, you! You’re the all-time master of camouflage!” Marcus: “Yes, indeed. And with an illogical love, Fried, with a real camouflage-love, you allowed yourself to believe in the child Paula wanted to bear.” Fried: “And I suffered. You don’t know, any of you, nor will you ever know, how I suffered. I will never let myself suffer that way again as long as I live.” Otto: “No, Fried? You won’t let yourself?” And Munin: “Hey, you! Enough with the arguments already. The baby has flipped over again!” Fried: “Pshakrev!”
He bent down and turned the baby over roughly on his back, and screamed, “This is how a baby your age is supposed to lie, get it!” and he looked away stern-faced, with arched brows, but the baby, our baby—
“Flipped over again?” asks Neigel. And Wasserman: “Exactly so! And poor Fried—” Neigel: “Screamed in terror, and quickly turned him over on his back again!” “And the baby flipped over again!” “And again! And again!”
With a sudden suspicion the eagle-doctor snatched the baby off the carpet and held him silently up to the light. “The baby, Herr Neigel, laughed contentedly, and in his mouth gleamed, ai—” Neigel: “Wait a minute! Four, six, eight teeth?” Wasserman: “Exactly so!” Neigel: “Listen! I don’t know if I’m so crazy about this, but now I’m beginning to get the whiff of a real story!” And he writes a word or two in his notebook.
Fried quickly leafs through the German medical encyclopedia he bought as a student in Berlin fifty years ago. A cloud of dust rises from the pages, and Fried coughs. The peculiar rash which had broken out that morning on his belly itches, but he ignores it. The foundling crawls at his feet, exploring the flowered carpet. The movement of his limbs, clumsy at first, is becoming more coordinated. Fried: “At four months, the first teeth appear … at eight months, eight teeth … at three months the precocious baby will try to flip over … Nu, and I looked down and saw he was trying to sit up, believe it or not, and only a few hours old, two at most, I think, and it said in the encyclopedia: ‘At four months the baby will control the cervical muscles well enough to hold its head up. At six months it will sit with a certain effort …’”
Fried cursed in alarm, and wiped the steam from his glasses. The baby sat up and examined his chubby toes. For one last minute the doctor could comfort himself that at least his head still drooped.
The baby was hungry and crying again. Fried, with sly logic, thought that if his little guest could sit up by himself, then he had already relinquished the baby-right to be bottle-fed or spoon-fed. Therefore, he poured a little Harotian-type milk into a plastic cup, put it in his hand, and showed him how to drink. Instantly the baby learned.
He finished drinking. The doctor, unthinkingly, asked, “More?” and the baby, imitating the pleasant sound, said, “More?” And Fried, who had locked every portion of his body as a last defense against wonder, said to himself, as if writing in his journal, “Started talking.” And he brought a slice of bread from the kitchen, which the baby quickly gobbled down while trying to stand on his feet.
No. Now it can be stated. The LNIY: less dangerous, it seems, than the disease at the very root of our nature which we proliferate with every move. The Nazis merely outlined it and gave it a name, an army, workers, temples, and sacrificial victims. They put it into operation, and in a sense became vulnerable to it. They relaxed their grip and dropped gently in. Because you don’t “start” to do evil, you only continue doing it. So says the undaunted Wasserman to me. But in order to fight our nature we need power. And a goal. But how vain are our goals, our ideals. They don’t seem worth fighting for. Why fight? To become a human being, as Wasserman says? Is that all? Always to fight for that? And to suffer so much? Therefore, let it stand that: Wasserman is wrong. Humanity protects itself from such barren attempts. Nature is wise, adapting her creatures to the predetermined conditions of life. This is a Darwinist existentialist process: those who can’t defend themselves will be wisely discarded. Yes, dear madam, “wisely”!
And now silence fell, a vague disquiet spread, and—how strange—a hand reached out to write the following lines, a sort of anachronistic reactionary concession by a certain person, to his forgotten past, four or five lines intended once and for all to sum up the “Old History,” or scrolls to be stored in the archives. And thus it was written: “I had been deeply immersed in ‘it’ almost from the moment I was born, from the moment I began to despair and relate to people as self-understood, when I stopped trying to invent a special language for them, with new names for every object. And from the moment I stopped being able to say ‘I’ without hearing a tinny echo of ‘we.’ And I did something to protect myself from the pain of other people, from other people. And I refused to maim myself: to become lidless and see all.”
These are the lines a certain person wrote before his strength ran out. He could “say” these fine words to himself, but he could no longer feel the sweat of life in them. He was finished in this war. This war was finished in him. There was nobody to fight for. For him it was over. He was dead now. He was ready for life.
I stood up and wanted to leave the White Room. There was nothing left to look for. I had forgotten the language spoken there. But I couldn’t find the door. That is, I touched the walls, I walked all the way around the room, but there was no door. The walls were smooth. But there had to be a door!
