See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

of salmon skin, the roughness of fins and the rings embroidered there, ye-es, how easy to understand fish compared to human creatures, and they returned to me directly, my swift, secret fish, and I read the cruel story of those salmon in a single lick, their birth in a sweetwater river in Scotland or Australia (these particular salmon happened to be from the river Spey in Scotland), and their wanderings to me, the salty sea, and then, roughly three years later, the return voyage spanning tens of thousands of my miles, in giant shoals, fifty knots per day, seldom resting, with fishermen and predators and storms in pursuit, and finally the return to their native river, swimming against the current, leaping the falls, higher and higher, with all their remaining strength, and I hear there are places where human creatures build special locks for them like passages around the falls to ease the journey, but no, they have to leap against the mighty current, till finally they reach their birthplace, I mean their exact birthplace, and at last their strength gives out and they spawn and die, leaving one or two survivors from each shoal to lead the newborn to me for another round, and the others—

But there was no time to drown myself in misery, because “he” was there, swimming and spurting bitterness, giving me the shivers wherever he went, and I sent my wavelings back to learn everything they could about him, but I hate to wait, so I dived down to my blackest depths where the fish have eyes like saucers, and the corals glow with a pale light, and the floor is cluttered with petrified yet living fish and petrifiedforests and huge loamy swamps under a constant rain of fish scurf and clouds of plankton from the upper zones, and I felt as if I was suffocating there and shot up to the zone I love the best, the chiaroscuro near the surface, but not too near, where I grow those ra-vi-shing coral reefs, and fish you have to see to believe, and where would you find a gorgeous creature like the blue, green, and red cichlid on her I’d like to know, I mean does she have anything to offer as majestic as the mature emperor angelfish decked out with arabesques of purple, yellow, and black?

And with these annoying thoughts running through me I spent the next eternity and a half drumming on the rocks and taunting every passing fish, till my wavelings returned a second time, but they still couldn’t tell me anything about him, and they threw themselves down, wriggling and trembling before me like seal puppies, saying, We doodint understid what goed on, O Lady, the creature had a yuck-yuck tasty like a hornfish and a speeching we doodint anyvus understid, and so hot’s scare us to touch and burnier than actinias, O Lady, and then I bellowed, Back to him, I bellowed, Fly to the man and learn him inside out, be reckless and cruel, drag him, roll him, tickle him, taste his excrement and the bile flowing out of him, render his saliva and lick his urine, and copy the wrinkles around his eyes and the tiny follicles where his hair fell out; run now, fly now, a-way!!!

Ye-es, that was a fab-u-lous show of me in a rage, though I seldom get really angry, but this time I was very curious and eager and alert, and I was also a little frightened and, as usually happens in such cases, I blew myself into giant waves, and gushed high in the air out of the spout of a blue whale, and squirted out of a squid in an inky cloud, till my wavelings came back to me, tired and worn and buffeting each other, crying, All’s well, O Lady, we founded out the story, and’s no wonder, O Lady, we doodint understid right away ’cause that he neveven dreamed a thought in the speeching of human creachies and that he trieded and trieded to think up the words for him just only, O Lady, but we crackered his secret, soon because the rest of the story we moreless founded out like that this one is a kind they call the Jews because of his piece of snorkeling and where he was borned is Drohobycz and that this creachy writed a lot and now he runned away from something and said words in a speeching we doodint understid like a music always the same, I killed your Jew. In that case, I will now kill your Jew, you see, O Lady, we understid it through the full and now we fly back to him to learn more more and more ever so to please you, O Lady—

Please me? Ah! I was thrilled. Night had fallen, and I lay on my belly the way I sometimes do, like a tiny baby girl unique in all the galaxies and solar systems, and you have to look at her from the proper perspective so you can appreciate how cute and small she really is, like a little pearl, and my face was turned to the abyss and the wind caressed my bottom, and there were stars in the sky shining and I smoothed the waves so the light would shine through me bright and clear, and I was beautiful.

So, he invented a language, my man. How marvelous. To talk to himself without being understood by anyone else. Without being able to tell anyone about it later, because there would be no words. Really, where does he get these sublime ideas?

Yes, from the start he fascinated me, though I could never quite understand why he had to submit himself to so many worries and miseries when he could just have enjoyed himself with me, oh yes, in such matters I’m not unlike his mother, Henrietta, whom I now know intimately though we never met, and I’m sure would have gotten along just fine—she also used to