See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

woman in order to become, however imperfectly, acquainted with pure and abstract love, so Bruno had had to become thoroughly salmonized in order to learn about life. The barest life of all, as the salmon drew their tangible geometric design over half the globe.

He shut his eyes and shivered with all his might. He was intensely moved, and forced himself to ignore the stabbing pains from the infection on his chest above the ribs. The pain never left him, and Bruno scratched furiously, angry with his body for thus betraying him again, in this rare moment of transcendence.

Together they lingered a moment longer, whispering wordlessly, emitting impatient, nagging questions and fast, stinging answers, andLaprik listened to the echoes their bodies returned, and they listened to him listening, till suddenly, inexplicably, the departure bulletin shot like a spark through the ning, was instantly registered in their flashing lateral lines, and before they knew it, they were on their way.

[ 5 ]

AN ETERNITY AND A HALF, as I live and breathe, he has been with the poor salmon, never stopping and never surrendering, shrinking as they grow; by now some of them are bigger than that man of mine who knows not the meaning of despair, who has endured the tempests of the North Sea, an attack by a school of barracudas (though for the life of me I can’t understand what they were doing there on the Bergen shore), and a dreadful season of Icelandic fishermen who nearly halved the shoal; yet on he swims, though his eyes burn and his bitter smile stays fixed in the water, and his chin grows sharper every day, he’s all bones, not a hair left on his body, and his skin is turning spongy and puffy from the water. Sometimes when I look at him in the moonlight, it seems he’s already succeeded in turning into a fish.

The trouble is he doesn’t stop thinking, and these thoughts are a torture both to him and to me because there’s nothing I can do for him, I just don’t have what he’s looking for, though at least I can rest assured “she” doesn’t either. It just doesn’t exist, except in himself, and I hope he has the strength to keep looking for it, and of course I try to do my best, but how can I help him, weak and frail as I am, and I pick him up and lick him and whisper that I’m not like her—blind, deaf, and dumb like her—I am all eyes and cars and tongues, and I read you, Bruno, through and through, I understand everything and I decipher you, because there’s no thought you ever thought, no man you ever met, no wistful feeling or memory or beautiful thing or sorrow that didn’t leave its mark somewhere on your sweet body, you only have to know how to read, that’s all, and the first and last place you can read, Bruno, is here inside me; don’t think I’m making this up (heavens, you know how modest I am), but once, many years ago while I was dozing near Australia, under a ship called The Beagle, I suddenly felt the moon disappear, and I woke up and saw the face of a young man leaning over the railing and gazing at me with so much love my heart nearly melted and flooded the coast of New Zealand (in Japanthey call these little excitations of mine tzunam), and then this man said to another man I couldn’t see who was standing next to him, You see, Peter, the sea is the great incubator of history and all existence. We shall never live long enough to solve the riddles of the sea. And Peter laughed and said, The moon is affecting you, Charles, and my young man smiled mysteriously and said, I am not a poet, Peter, only a student of nature, and it is as a student that I speak to you: on land we find life at a depth of no more than a league or two, or at an altitude of a few score miles, but in the sea, Peter? There are deeper abysses than we can possibly conceive of! Did you know that if that mountain between Nepal and India, reckoned to be the highest in the world, were submerged in the abyss off Guam, the water would rise two miles above it? Forgive me, Bruno, for letting myself boast like this, but I wanted to show you how really deep I can be, and no one else can read the marks, the thoughts and passions that life has left on you, because everything leaves the teeniest scar or wrinkle, all you have to do is look at old human creatures who have nowhere left to hide the marks all over their faces, why look at your new friends the salmon—the passage of time and all their tribulations trace rings on their fins like the rings on a tree, a small ring for the river months and a big ring for the months in me, Laprik has his second ring already to mark his second voyage, and if you’ll forgive me for meddling, there was such an ache in my heart when I found out that the only time you ever really laughed was the time your father, Yacob, put you across his knees and gave you a spanking, but of course that was a different kind of laugh, and after that there was no more laughing, and I think it’s a shame, because I adore laughing, we could have had some good laughs together, you and I, but you, even when I tickle you “there,” you stay hard and gloomy, and it kind of hurts my feelings, Bruno.

Please forgive me for going on like this. I simply couldn’t resist acquainting you with all the claptrap I was exposed to in Narvia. That sly little fool! Amorphous liquid cow! She used her cheapest tricks to hide the