See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

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