See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

splitting on the waves, which pluck themselves like a harp made of water strings on the giant cradle marking sea time, and also a hand can leave a print on a wave where it no longer is, where it never was, and maybe a wave will carry the body’s image away, and when it returns, carry it back, the outlines of soft pacific objects giving in to the soothing waves to the slumberous sea breathing slippery sleep on the lip of the reef and the pages of dreams the sea will tally the invaders flooding it ebbing and rising among the waves there are always the gulls many more than those below and the new ones seem heavier soaking the heaviness of the sea and diaphanous with beautiful colors fanning this way and that way Bruno swims—

She doesn’t answer. The waves are smooth, the water shivers with a tender snort every second or so. I look behind me and see that the pier is already empty. Only one fisherman is left out there, tall and sturdy as a lighthouse, his cigarette flickering in the dark. Carefully, shyly, I slip across her cheek. Soon dawn will catch us and we have to hurry up and tell the end of the story of our meeting on the coast of Narvia. The gift Bruno gave me there. His verdict.

This feeling of elation, Bruno. This swelling of the heart and throbbing at the temples—I’m guessing. I can imagine what you felt as the shoal took off and you remained alone, triumphant. The only man inthe vast seas. I envy you, I’m proud of you. Because what more can a mortal do than decide his own destiny? (I can say things like this with such a deep inner conviction that they sound sincere to me.) This is a desperate decision, and your chances of succeeding are slim indeed, but your chances, Bruno, no longer interest you: they belong to other realms. To the realms of the first person plural, where one is weighed on scales: “My Jew for your Jew”; “According to my calculations, I killed only two and a half million,” etc. Even the dual was too plural for you, and the truly crucial things had to be said in the singular. So you became a salmon. You stripped yourself of all attachments till you were able to put your finger on the wounded vein through which your life was flowing away. The kernel of bare existence, the hidden force you transformed on your journey into a geometric line the eye can follow and the finger can trace on the map. And you also know what I feel for you, or I would never have gone to Narvia, and racked my brains till I nearly went mad—

And so, in the name of everything that has happened between us these last few days, I demand an immediate answer: I demand a refutation of something I just heard from “her” lips. Words she blurted out against her will, like a burning hiccup from her depths straight to the pen that writes on your behalf. I wrote the words, and read them later in amazement: “Bruno, that sly, fatal enemy of language.” And with a malicious laugh she added: “Bruno the Nihilist.”

Now I write with a steady pen: Bruno Schulz. Ingenious architect of a singular linguistic experience, the magic of which lies in its fertility, a plethora almost rotting with verbal juices. Bruno who knows how to say everything in ten different ways, each as accurate as the compass needle. A Don Juan of language, conquering with a mad, almost immoral passion, audacious explorer of linguistic geography … Could it be that you, Bruno, reached the limits of this world, and ran around like a madman on the beach when you couldn’t find a suitable verbal vessel to sail you into the misty horizon? Is it possible that the last shore was the Danzig shore in ’42? Answer me frankly. I will not tolerate cleverness. Did you, standing on the edge of the pier, panting with exhaustion and foaming at the mouth, look back at the fantastic topography you had left behind—all the twisted ravines and molten lava quarried with your pen from the walls of a simple schoolchild’s notebook—did you laugh triumphantly and with relief for having led usall astray through your intricate labyrinths, slyly destroying the very language of humanity?

You’re not answering me. And she is also silent. But it isn’t her usual silence: it’s a kind of self-control.

I put my pen and notebook down on the beach with a stone on top so they won’t fly away in the wind, and I go into the water. I wade in over my head, open my eyes in the stinging saltiness, and try to see you from a different vantage point. In the illusive light. The light of the water.

And now tell me: must I charge you with treachery of a very specific kind? Should I write that the sweet frenzied coupling of your despair with your talent for human language engendered one of the greatest frauds in culture and literature, only no one understands?

I write with my finger in the water: Was it in order to perpetrate this fraud that you fertilized language with your seed, so that it proliferated wildly all double chins, and you multiplied its circulatory systems and gave it seven hearts to pump conflicting bloodstreams, and reduplicated its nervous system till it went crazy with morbid sensitivity?

I stare at the water in amazement: the letters daubed on the waves are still there. I continue to write: And when this elephantine language began to sag under its own weight, did you go even further with your skills, using them like germs to decompose the corpse? I look at the letters in the water and wait to see if she’ll erase this suspicious writing. She doesn’t. I continue: Would you admit to me, Bruno, that from a painter of language you turned into