See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

of The Messiah inside. Four years of thinking and writing. It was a mistake that spread malignantly before he realized the Messiah would never come in writing, would never be invoked in a language suffering from elephantiasis. A new grammar and a new calligraphy had first to be invented. He glanced anxiously at the Port Authority buildings. Two soldiers stood talking in the alleyway nearby. Bruno clenched his fists unconsciously, as he had been training himself to do ever since it became illegal for a Jew to put his hands in his pockets in the presence of a uniformed German. He walked quickly, making himself small: the gait of an unattractive man. Rain dripped down his tight-skinned, sallow face—

How well I know that face: I often find it peering at me from his grotesque drawings, surrounded by other dwarfed and miserable men under the patent-leather heel of Adela, the beautiful servant girl, or some other disdainful female. (But notice the sea, Bruno: the gray sea shaking out its bedding for the night, popping dumps of kelp that bob up to the light for an instant and sink back into the foam again.)

They displayed Munch’s painting in the farthermost corner of thegallery (so disturbing was it to them), in the midst of his milder, more colorful works. It was cordoned off, with a sign in Polish and German saying: DO NOT TOUCH.

Idiots. They should have protected the public from the painting, not the other way around. That figure on the wooden bridge, mouth open in a scream, had deeply touched him. Kissing it there in the gallery, Bruno felt infected. Or perhaps the kiss had brought a latent infection to life. Now Bruno walks past the heavy boats, rolling his eyes and twisting his lips as the scream from the painting makes its way from heart to mouth, like a fetus whose time has come. He shivers: Bruno is the weak link in the chain. Take care of him. The great Zofia Nal-kowska once beseeched her friends, “Look after Bruno, for his sake and for ours.”

Now he fell down. He tripped over a coil of algae-covered rope and almost dropped into the water. For a moment he lay on the dock, doubled over with pain. The rips under his arms and elbows were exposed. He scrambled to his feet. Get up. Mustn’t be a sitting duck. They’re after him. The SS and Polish police are after him for leaving the ghetto in Drohobycz and taking the train, strictly forbidden to Jews, and then daring to attend the Munch exhibit in Danzig, where he did what he did before they threw him out. But Bruno fears neither the SS nor the Polish police, his latest persecutors. He fears only the great searchlights that converge inside and chastise him to be-like-everybody-else, to live the gray life he can never redeem with a touch of his pen.

The moment Bruno saw The Scream at the Artus Hopf Gallery, he knew: the artist’s hand must have slipped on the canvas. Munch could not have planned such perfection. He would not have dared to. He may have had intimations of it, he may have had aspirations, but he could never have achieved it intentionally. Bruno recognized this with a grieving heart: all his life he had been longing for—as he called it—“the day the world would shed its scales like a fabulous lizard.” “The Age of Genius,” he called that day, and till that day he cautioned us never to forget that the words we use are but fragments of primeval stories; that we have built our homes—like barbarians—out of shattered idols, the graven images of archaic gods, snatched from mighty mythologies.” The question remains, however, Will the Age of Genius ever dawn? This is difficult to answer. Bruno is not certain either. “Because some things never happen to the full. They are too immense to be contained in theturn of events. They try to happen, they try the groundwork of reality out to see if it will hold, but they retreat, afraid to lose their integrity through a faulty materialization, leaving behind those pale marks in our biographies, the fragrant tokens or faded silver footprints of barefoot angels, sporadic giant steps across our days and nights …” So he wrote in Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. I know the book by heart.

A little yolk of a sun was blotted up by leaden clouds, and the light faded. Slowly God put his toys away. Bruno knew: the kind of perfection Munch discovered was either a mistake or a case of serendipity. Because someone had bungled it. Someone somewhere distracted momentarily had leaked the truth out in the wrong quarters. Bruno wondered how many pictures Munch had dashed off in a panic to blur the strong impression of his intrusion into that forbidden zone. Munch himself, thought Bruno (stepping into an oily puddle and shattering a series of iridescent arabesques with the heel of his shoe), must have been staggered by his catch.

Atoms of indivisible truth. An ultimate, crystalline truth. Bruno sought this high and low: in the people he met, in snatches of conversation that drifted to his ears, in cases of synchronicity, in himself; in the books he read he sought the one phrase, the pearl, which launched the writer on a voyage hundreds of pages long. The bite of truth. He rarely found it. A masterpiece sometimes yielded two, three such phrases to record in his notebook: bits of solid evidence, collected with the greatest of effort and care, out of which one day to piece together the original mosaic. The truth. Coming across these passages later, he often mistook the writing for his own. And no wonder, he told himself, it’s all from the same source.

Bruno had perceived that Munch was a weak link, too. He’d guessed as much long before, on finding reproductions of The Scream in art books back in Drohobycz. But seeing the original with his own eyes convinced