See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

say about that and started to laugh. I felt different with her, and different things were evoked in me. I had never known I could turn a woman into an urn, etc., before. The amazing thing is, though, that with regard to us, I guessed what would happen even before she did, because I knew myself,I knew I had no hope whatsoever of fitting into her dreams. And a few weeks later I could see that Ayala was beginning to tire of me. Handles still curved out on her body, with the fine fluting, the pouting oval lips of the urn; sounds still issued from her body—I don’t know from where exactly—like little chirrups: “Drink me, drink me!” but the undulations were definitely becoming awkward. Zeno’s spirit of destruction was upon me even then. And later, all was lost: I was rarely able to conjure the little green leaves around her neck anymore, or transform her skin into a shimmering strawberry-flavored surface of crunchy red grains. She would gaze at me with sorrow and pity in her eyes. Sorrow for us both, and the chance we’d missed. Around that time I had been making frantic attempts to write in a systematic way the story Grandfather Anshel told Herr Neigel, but, of course, the harder I tried, the worse I fared. Ruth knew about Ayala and she suffered terribly. I hated her for not making me choose between them, and for the quiet wisdom that taught her to wait it out. To suffer and wait: not once during those horrid months did she turn on me with hatred or rage. But she was not submissive either, she never let me feel she was degraded. Quite the contrary: I was the sweaty male in rut, sniffing around two females. And all Ruth’s strength and wisdom showed in her unpretty face: her movements were slower than ever. She emitted a silent warning: she was extremely powerful; she—like everyone, in fact—was endowed with dangerous powers, hence she had to practice self-control; in order not to injure others, she had to restrain herself and wait: to intimate, not scream; to suggest, not decree.

I hated myself for the suffering I was causing her, yet I was afraid that if I left Ayala I would never be able to write again. And sometimes I think Ayala stayed with me out of some weird sense of duty toward Grandfather Anshel’s story, not because she especially cared for me. In her eyes I was a coward, a traitor even, and though I had every reason and every opportunity in the world to write the story as it should be written, I lacked the courage and the daring. Ayala does not write, but she does write her life. She told me that first night that the White Room was the “real testing-ground for anyone who wants to write about the Holocaust. Like the riddling Sphinx. And you go there to present yourself willingly before the Sphinx, understand?” I didn’t understand, of course. She sighed, rolled her eyes, and explained that for the past forty years people had been writing about the Holocaust and wouldcontinue to do so, only they were doomed to failure, because while other tragedies can be translated into the language of reality as we know it, the Holocaust cannot, despite that compulsion to try again and again, to experience, to sting the writer’s living flesh with it, “and if you want to be honest with yourself,” she said gravely, “you’ll have to try the White Room.”

I didn’t show her what I really thought of her, I wanted her so badly. I thought, How different people are from each other. I understood—long before she did—that she chose me only because she’d never come across anyone like me in her circles: a poet who wrote the poems she’d read yet was utterly sane. Who loved his wife and was generally faithful. No, she doesn’t know very much about life or me, I thought at the time, and she prefers to see what she believes rather than believe in what she sees. “Illusive”—that’s the word I was looking for. And yet—

“And in this room you find the essence of those days,” she said, her eyes still distant, “but the wonderful thing is that there are no ready-made answers there. Nothing is explicit. It’s all merely possible. Merely suggested. Merely liable to materialize. Or likely to. And you have to go through everything all over again, by yourself. Without a double or stunt man to play the dangerous parts. And if you don’t answer the Sphinx correctly, you’ll be eaten up. Or you will leave without having understood. And in my eyes that almost amounts to the same thing.”

Oh, Ayala. If I could only write all the stories and ideas she comes up with in a single day, I would have enough material for the rest of my life. Perhaps I would also become a different sort of writer. There is nothing in the White Room. It’s empty. But everything that exists beyond its membranous walls, everything that flows out of the corridors of Yad Vashem is projected into it: “By way of, call it inspiration. Yes. I’m not too up on physics, but I know that’s what it’s like. With each new movement or thought, you create a new compound. Your own formula, made up of gray matter and personality and your own genetic code and personal biography and conscience—along with everything else projected from behind the walls: the facts about mankind. The entire human, animal inventory, fear and cruelty and pity and despair, glory and wisdom, and all the pettiness and love of life, all that halting poetry, Shlomik, and you sit there as if you were inside a giant kaleidoscope, but this time the glass fragments are you, the different parts of you, and light reaches them from beyond the walls—” Her eyes are dreamy. She gets up and, wearing only my shirt, walks around theroom, looking brown,