See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

in one of the boats stands looking out at the ocean. Her long, brittle hair flies around her face in the fierce wind. The sleepy gallery guard jumped up in alarm and blew the whistle. Another guard joined him and they dragged Bruno out of the painting zone and into their own. There they thrashed him silently, dispassionately, it seemed. A spot of dribble remained on the picture. Bruno had missed the mouth on the screaming figure and kissed one of the wooden posts on the bridge instead. But it was enough for him. First aid: mouth-to-mouth respiration. And Bruno was saved.

He opens his eyes now and sees that his feet are leading him to the bow-shaped jetty curving out to sea. With a sinewy tongue the sea probes the driftwood stuck between its rocky teeth. The many eyes of the sea follow Bruno from the holes in a reef.

Bruno reflected on the unfinished manuscript in his briefcase. After his forcible removal from the gallery, the trams and automobiles on Langasse had splashed him with puddle water. Surreptitiously he reached out to touch the tall wooden lampposts, then licked his fingertips. He seemed to be savoring the taste of the bridge posts. Every time he did so, a tortured muscle inside him contracted. He thought about his life, a life which had never been his. Not really his. Because force of habit had always deprived him of it. People lived by robbing each other’s lives. Before the war, they had at least shown some tact, taking care not to inflict more pain than necessary, with a sense of humor, in fact, but nowadays nobody even made an effort to pretend. He had come to understand lately that his first two books, and this third one, The Messiah, in which he had been drowning and floundering for the past four years, were merely the clumsy scaffold he had built with his own two hands around a creature unknown. As yet unknown. He realized he had spent most of his life as a daring trapeze artist on that high scaffold, and that he had always been careful not to look down, because looking downward and inward would have frightened him and made him recognize, much to his sorrow, that he wasn’t a trapeze artist after all but a jailor. That somewhere along the line force of habit, fatigue, and negligence had turned him into the accomplice of the people with their hands joined around him.

And so he was making his last escape. He was not afraid of theGermans or the Poles, nor was this a protest against the war. No. At last he was running away to meet something new, not the tenses and verbs by the dozen he had served as junction for till now.

Bruno already knows he’s going to die. An hour from now, a day from now. So many are dying. There is an air of silent resignation in the streets of the Drohobycz Ghetto. Bruno has succumbed to it: perhaps he really is guilty of something. Of looking as he does. Of being the Jew he is. Of writing as he does. The question of justice lapsed long ago, of course, but there is a different question now, Bruno thinks, walking faster, to which I must address myself, the question of life; the life I have lived and the life I have failed to live because of my shortcomings and my fears. And I have neither the strength left nor the time to wait for a miracle. Bruno smiles inwardly, a wry, impassioned smile. His bruised face lights up for an instant. Was it Lenin who said that one death is a tragedy, a million are statistics; yes, it must have been Lenin who said that, and now Bruno wishes to salvage the one tragedy of his life out of the million, to comprehend, however briefly, what he has been inscribing in the big book of life. And in his heart he cherishes the even deeper hope that by being split off from that final, crystallized truth, he may yet learn what sent the Supreme Creator coursing through an infinity of pages.

Bruno removes his tattered overcoat and throws it on the concrete. His eyes are blank. What is he thinking? I don’t know. I’ve lost his train of thought. Maybe he’s thinking about Mirabeau, the revolutionary poet turned thief, or Thoreau, the recluse of Walden Pond?

Bruno shudders. No. Such protests will not do: the thief robs people. The recluse is reclusive from people. He gauges his solitude in proportion to their fellowship. But more than this is needed: an uprising that will banish your inner self. He trembles, hypnotized by the rich, dark waves rolling by, the waves that can sense in him the tension of one who has reached the brink, and whose extremities are even now in the process of being transformed into another substance, midway between flesh and longing.

The old woman in the boat looks on motionlessly. She guesses what is about to happen. But this is the way of the world, and death is more than the opposite of life. Death has dominion over all our schemes. Two stevedores catch sight of him in the distance and start to scream.

Bruno throws off his shirt and trousers. With moist, airy fingers the sea probes the emaciation and fatigue that rack his body. The sea doesn’tcare: an eager merchant spits at the submissive customer. The sea buys everything. Who knows when all the junk in the cellar will come in handy. Bruno opens his anguished eyes. Someone inside him is still trying to save the frail body: the writer in him must be quailing at the thought that he, too, will be lost if his host is drowned. Then suddenly he realizes that it was the prisoner in him who planned the escape. The jailor—trapeze artist is now the hostage. And in his terror he tries this last pitiful ploy: why not at least leave your