Kazik’s eyes grew wide. A tear burst through so fiercely that it made his eye bleed. He muttered something, and Fried leaned over to hear him better. Then the doctor stood up with a look of horror. “He wants to die, Otto. Now. His strength is gone.” Fried looked at his watch: according to his calculations, Kazik had another two hours and thirty-three minutes to complete his life cycle. But it seemed that even this brief span wasmore than he could bear. Fried implored him, “Wait a little, Kazik. It’s only a short while. Wait. Maybe you’ll get stronger. Maybe you’ll pull through. It’s just a phase. Please.” He felt the banality of his words and the wretched lie in them, and was silent. Otto shook his head. “If he wants to die, Albert,” he said slowly, “we’ll help.” Fried covered his face with his hands and made a strange sound. The artists turned away. Then Fried bent over and lifted Kazik in his arms. The little body emitted the stench of rotting. Crooked yellow teeth dropped out of his mouth with every movement. Fried, his body’s foliage smelling like fresh rosemary, carried Kazik in his arms to the big lawn. Two tearstained eyes gleamed briefly out of the thick bush. The old doctor bent over and gently laid Kazik inside the circle of mirrors [see under: PROMETHEUS] erected by the Russian physicist SERGEI [q.v.]. The doctor seemed intent on going in after him, but Otto sensed this in time and dragged him out by the sleeve. Fried turned to him and said angrily, “Let me go, let me go! We’re the guilty ones!” But Otto held on tightly, till the doctor calmed down. Kazik was left alone. Then a small storm broke out among the mirrors. Kazik expanded and contracted. He was sucked into time and belched forth again: he was finding it difficult indeed to be digested by vanishing existence. His image flashed and faded from mirror to mirror. The infinite possibilities of his fate were reflected there. Later Otto was willing to swear that some of the side mirrors had created a kind of underground—fast variations of indescribable beauty. But the major movement of reflection caught only his deterioration and demise. A few of the mirrors cracked and shattered with the overwhelming effort. Perhaps they, too, had a limited capacity for containing the dark matter of mankind. The artists stood motionless and watched. Approaching death had roused the same feeling in most of them: it was the right thing. And all of life is a free ticket, but in the end we are returned against our will to the domain of some invisible force, grave and inevitable, which collects its rightful debt, without MERCY [q.v.] or solace. To all of them, suddenly life, their own lives, seemed wrong and dreary and senseless [see under: LIFE, THE MEANING OF], and even those who weren’t religious felt a sudden awe of God, while unfamiliar thoughts of sins committed and punishments deserved ran through their minds. Only Aaron Marcus thought sadly that perhaps death was as arbitrary and inexplicable as life itself. And now, as soon as the old boy disappeared for the lasttime, the 360 mirrors collapsed in quick succession, like wilted flower petals hit by a gust of wind.
Wasserman: “Yes, Shleimeleh, this is what I told him in the late hours of that fateful night. And when I had finished, dawn was opening its eyes. A few minutes later, Neigel left me. When he shot the bullet into his head, I walked out of the room, because a man has a right to die in privacy. And then the shot reverberated, and I heard the barracks door open quietly, and Staukeh coughed politely and stepped in.”
CATASTROPHE
CATASTROPHE
A sudden disaster. Unforeseeable tribulation.
What Neigel called that which transpired during his final LEAVE [q.v.] in Munich with his family. He departed on a forty-eight-hour leave but returned a day later. Wasserman: “I was working in my lovely garden, enjoying the first sprouts—I never realized I had the talents of a tiller of the soil—when suddenly Neigel returned, his face the face of disaster. It looked as if death had climbed in through the windows. I saw him, and my heart turned to stone, this silly, Chelm-like fancy in my mind: His wife, I thought to myself, did not like my tale, and she threw him out! Ai, at that moment I was like an author with a rejected manuscript … Dear God, I said softly, it is true what they say, that when you bury a shlimazel the spade breaks! Ai, I sobbed, anything, dear God, but not this, because what have I besides the story in this life?”
The story of this miserable “leave” only became known to Wasserman two days later, until which time Neigel avoided him. He stayed in the barracks all day, and toward evening, when Wasserman came in, Neigel went out to make his rounds of the camp and vent his anger on the guards. They did not meet the second day, either. Wasserman heard furious screaming from the barracks throughout the day as staff officers went in and out with scowling faces. And then, on the second day, at 2300, when Wasserman was already resting on his sack in the attic and Neigel below had just finished giving hell to a young officer requesting special leave, Wasserman heard Neigel call his name. Wasserman: “I was filled with dread! My knees began to knock!” Wasserman hurried down the ladder (“Young Samuel never ran so promptly to Eli thePriest!”) and stood before Neigel. The officer’s face was ashen, and according to Wasserman, he looked “like the living marker of his own grave.” Neigel instructed him to sit down, cleared his throat, and said harshly: “There is no more story, Scheissemeister! Not for Christina!” And when Wasserman remained silent, Neigel explained in the same tone, “She’s left me. For good.”
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