See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

warm, slick viscosity enveloped me, only to vanish, and returneda moment later. “Listen,” you said tentatively, coolly, “you talk like somebody I used to know.” My heart nearly burst with joy in the water, but I went on floating as if nothing had happened.

“Oh yes?—and who would that be?”

You studied me briefly, raised a sudden blue screen between me and the shore, and licked me all over, smacking your lips, and then you lowered the screen again, peering over your shoulder at the shore.

“I’m certainly not going to tell you about it here.”

“In my room, then?” I asked politely.

“Ha!!”

It was there, for the first time, that I heard your snort of contempt, a wave snuffed into a maelstrom which has been your derisive greeting to me ever since. I don’t suppose you’ll ever give it up. Although you’re sound asleep when I arrive at the beach in Tel Aviv, you terrify bathers and fishermen for miles around with that irritating sound. They don’t realize, of course.

“I’ll take you there, far away,” you said, indicating the horizon with an arching of the waves.

“And will you bring me back again?”

“Come hell or high water.”

“I’ve heard about people who never return.”

“Scared?”

“That’s interesting. You talk like somebody I know, too.”

“Shut up, will you? Do you always talk so much? Okay, let’s go.”

Again you licked me, with obvious reluctance, and howled in rage and amazement. “Couldn’t be! So different! Just the opposite, in fact! Still, he does know things nobody else … hmm, we’ll soon find out.” And you retreated into your inmost self, and vanished with a whistle and a gurgle, leaving me disappointed and dazed.

But only for a moment.

Because an angry breaker came along, whinnied, and knelt at my feet while I climbed on its sinewy back and grabbed its ears—and away we went.

[ 3 ]

I’LL NEVER FORGET IT, BRUNO, the burning sensation when you jumped off the pier and the warmth flowing out of you, but there was something else then, I didn’t know quite what, and at first I thoughtit was the rutting smell you creaturelings give off; later, though, I realized it was only the scent of despair, that you have this gland, I still hadn’t figured where yet, and there was this awful awful burning and a slash down my middle, like a birth pang maybe, and then I coiled around you, I rolled into you on every side, and galloped furiously on the strongest waves I could catch just then, from Madagascar, which is where I happened to be sleeping at the time (snoozing, really, I don’t sleep much), and by the shortest route to the Cape of Good Hope, where the Malagasy waves crashed under me, so I picked up some new ones, fresh ones, and went on through a squall to the gulf of Guinea, and from there to the Strait of Gibraltar, a mistake of course, because I should have turned right at the English Channel instead, I always do that, and before I realized it and made the turn, my waves had fainted on me, the little weaklings, and I could barely tow them back to the Atlantic, where they broke down completely, crying and begging for mercy, and I went on alone to Biscay, where I found the kind of waves I really like, seventeen-meter breakers roaring and spuming with ne’er a whiff of land, and I picked a garland of long morays and brandished them over the waves, crying, Faster, faster, and the morays squirmed furiously in my hand and butted each other with their mighty snake heads, and everywhere we went the water heaved and vomited fantastical creatures out of my blackest depths; it overflowed and flooded entire beach colonies of cormorants, the poor darlings, and caused the most ter-ri-ble torag in a gam of blue whales, and stole the color from a vast shoal of red mullets. What a trip, Bruno, what a trip! A million years from now I will still be amazed, I will still laugh at myself for not recognizing the pain of you inside me, for how I whisked over thousands of miles propelled by rage at my rude awakening and on my way to you, no less, somewhere off the island of Bornholm, I’d sent my scouts out, the little Baltic runners, my sprightly wavelings, and they galloped ahead and touched you and hurried back to me, gasping and choking on the carcasses of fish they’d hit and the planking of the ships they’d sunk, and they raced out to my chariot and offered themselves to me for a lick, and phewww! I tasted them, and spat in a giant arc because my little wavelings were bitter as puffers, and now I was rip-roaring mad and I galloped ahead, spitting foam and fish and curses I learned from sailors, and I could feel myself heaving this nuisance the way a sea cucumber spits its guts out together with the pearl fish inside it.

And I drew nearer and nearer, but cautiously, because you have to be ready for anything with a being even my successful sister has trouble with, and I have to admit, especially now that I know him better, I’m not at all surprised she threw him out, poor thing, because a creature like that is more than she can bear, the little darling, she can’t stand anything more complicated than a volcano or more spectacular than snow, because—and by the way, this is a well-known fact, and I would tell her so to her face—she loves simplicity. She really, I mean really, appreciates order and reason and everything in its place. I’m sure she’d slam the door on most of my creaturelings on grounds of “reason” and “aesthetics,” as if a sea horse were any less beautiful than a land horse, though it’s true that those who became dissatisfied with the topsy-turvy life I had to offer got out and went to her, and it’s also true that the solid, civilized ones