See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

every evening she prepares it, thick as porridge; only, she died. Yes, I am afraid so. How sad it is. She is dead, yet still among us in her way. And not only she. All of us are. Living and dead. And one can no longer discern who among us are the living and who are the dead, ai …”

In a fury Neigel says, “Give me a simple story, Wasserman! Give me something straight out of life! My life! Something even a man like me who never went to a university can understand and feel! And don’t kill anyone!”

To which Wasserman replies, “What right have you to ask me that, Herr Neigel?”

A long silence ensues. Wasserman’s quiet words, said not in anger but in poignant bewilderment, seem to fill the room. Only when the impression fades is Neigel able to speak again. He says he knows exactly what the Jew thinks of him (“It’s written all over your forehead”), but if Wasserman wants to go ahead and “keep our bargain or little understanding,” he must, even under these conditions, “show some flexibility,” and Neigel rises from his chair and storms around the room. His large, authoritative face, determined to the point of cruelty, is now stretched to its limits. “The time has come to speak frankly,” he says, rhythmically pounding his open palm with his fist. “True, fantastic things were always happening in The Children of the Heart,’ but in the old stories it was ‘cute,’ not like modern writing, ‘the kind you’re trying so hard to imitate,’ by writers who are out-and-out misanthropes. That’s right! They enjoy confusing us, and what do they give us in return? Nothing! I’m telling you: only grief and disappointment!” And Wasserman refrains from asking him where he learned so much about modern writing. Wasserman feels, as I do, that this speech is just the prelude to more important things. And Neigel is indeed approaching his main point. You can tell by the way he picks up speed now, suckinghis checks and punching his palm again and again. “That’s what they give us, these modern writers, unlike the good old stories I remember fondly to this day, which must say something for them, no?” Of course, he understands nothing about writing, and doesn’t pretend to be a judge of “literature,” let alone stories he read maybe thirty-five or forty years ago, but Christina, his wife, whom he visited on his last leave in Munich, has a better understanding of literary things. And she has a better memory than he does, too. “Christina doesn’t forget, there are people like that,” he says gravely, and Wasserman listens attentively. “No, don’t get the wrong impression—she isn’t educated” (Wasserman: “Esau has his own special way of pronouncing ‘educated,’ like someone spitting out the rotten half of an apple”). “And she never attended a university either. A simple woman, that is, a normal woman. But with a certain—well, I don’t know how to say it—something like a nose, a sense, a sense for what’s real and what’s phony.” Neigel continues to speak, turning away from Wasserman, clearly it is a great effort for him to arrange his thoughts in such an orderly fashion. “She has a healthy instinct, I mean she really does,” he repeats, suddenly propelled away from his gray office cabinet toward Wasserman, before whom he stands with a kind of primitive candor or sense of duty compelling him to look directly into the eyes of the Jew and exclaim, “I told her you’re here. I spoke about you on my last leave. She remembers the Scheherazade stories from her childhood.” And Wasserman sits up and blushes. (“You understand, Shleimeleh, I was all ears, this was no trifling matter, two admirers in one stroke!”) “My wife says you were a lousy writer, Wasserman. That your stories were pretty boring, in fact, except for the hocus-pocus stuff with the time machine and flights to the moon, and even that sounded a little too familiar. You hear, Wasserman? My wife says you were just a curio. That’s what she called you. A curio who was fortunate enough to find a publisher. I just wanted to tell you.”

Neigel is silent. He has the unexpected decency to turn away from Wasserman, now wincing. I regard the pitiable little Jew. I should have made him more talented, more successful.

And Neigel says quietly, his face averted, “But I stood up for you, Wasserman. I defended you for the sake of my happy memories. How do you like that?” Yes, these words pain little Wasserman even more than the previous ones. Suddenly he grasps that ObersturmbannführerNeigel may be the last person in the world to remember and appreciate his miserable creations. That perhaps simpleminded Neigel, who did not read the venomous criticism leveled against him, regarded Wasserman as Wasserman wished to be regarded. That only with Neigel could Wasserman’s most cherished dreams come true.

“And now that you know,” says Neigel, “there’s something else I’d like to tell you. Not just about your story, but about this experiment.” He starts pacing around the room again and speaks into his clenched fist. One could imagine that he was forcing the words out of his mouth. “You know,” he says at last, “I’ve done some thinking about this over the past few days. About me and you, I mean. This is new for me, and I’d like to understand what’s happening.” And for a moment he stops pacing nervously and stands at his desk, neatly arranging his papers and notebooks. “You despise me,” he says, his back to Wasserman. “It’s like this: you’re a writer and in your eyes I’m a murderer. No, don’t speak now! Naturally in the old world you come from, someone like me was considered a murderer. But the world has changed over the past few years. Maybe you’ve failed to notice, Wasserman. The old world has died and old mankind has died with it. I live in the new world, the future