See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

its bitter caricaturist, and your own no less? And what for? Why did you do that to us?

“Silly questions! He wanted to find an even richer world,” she says suddenly, jolting me again, swiftly reading the water and rubbing it out, but not completely, gathering it up in two sheer wavy handkerchiefs, rather, and removing it from sight, then flowing on, a little uncertainly.

“I can’t talk to you about Bruno,” I say sharply. “You won’t listen to a single word of criticism.”

“You mean I’m biased,” she says, winking with a wave that flashes in the sun. “I couldn’t agree with you more, dearest, because I will not deny myself the right to be blindly, totally in love, yes yes,” she says, tossing a wavy scarf with silver-blue embroidery and swimming with me close to the shore. “With unconditional love, Neuman, which I’m sure you know a lot about—from books.”

She bounces a salty little wave into my mouth.

I swallowed my humiliation in silence. I had important matters to attend to, and only a few hours left with her. The mayor of Narvia was about to leave for Gdansk that night in his ancient motorboat and he had agreed to take me along. The following day I was supposed to be in Warsaw, from there—to fly to Paris, and then home. I was extremely pressed for time, but I didn’t want her to notice. I whispered in her ear about the view from the water, the simple architectural style of the church in Narvia, the interesting structure of the cottages … She was restless. She was holding something back. I waited patiently. I turned over and doggy-paddled, whistling a little tune, all ears.

Stringy, jellylike tendrils, strangely twisted, and the spittle of shame and anger filled the water. Then a great wave arched under me, reared back—and tossed me high in the air, and there she was, at my side.

“You’re right, you’re so right. Damn you for the way you hurt me every time. He did want to murder language, it’s true. He wanted to make it fulsome, offensively replete with cloying, um—” (She was trying to sneak a quotation in, the cow, and I didn’t recognize this one, but I knew she couldn’t have made it up. How many hundreds of rare quotations had she hidden in her cellars?)

“Thousands,” she corrected me with a malicious smile and continued: “After all, even when Bruno was a little boy he understood this, yes, and he longed not merely for a new world but for a totally new language that would enable him to describe it, because even then, long before he came to me, he guessed … he knew, yes …”

“Guessed what? Knew what?”

She rolls over and spews a small fountain, circling faster and faster. I look down at the water below, to keep from getting dizzy. “At the ghetto in Drohobycz,” she circles me, quoting, “Bruno was employed by an SS officer named Landau, who had an enemy, also an SS man, named Gunther. And one day Gunther shot Bruno, and went to Landau and said, I killed your …” and she whirls around, forming a vortex that sucks me in and drains all my thoughts, till I sink helplessly down into the depths, and reflect that the explanation must be that Bruno, sensitive as he was, had guessed everything years before it actually happened. And for that reason, perhaps, he had begun to write, to train himself in the new language and the new grammar. He understood humanity and knew; he heard the rumbling long before anyone else heard it. He had always been the weak link. Yes. He knew that alanguage that will admit a sentence like “I killed your Jew … In that case, I will now kill,” etc., a language where such verbal constructs do not turn to poison in the speaker’s mouth—is not the language of life, human and moral, but a language infiltrated many ages past by evil traitors, with one intention—to kill.

“But it wasn’t only language,” she says in passing, and I skid to a halt with the screeching waves that throw me up again on a cold water spout. “It wasn’t only language,” she whispers again, letting me flounder in the air before letting me down gently a moment later in her generous arms, freckled with sand and aglow in the light of the sun. “It was the whole world Bruno wanted to change, yes, everything based on timeworn rules and traditions, and belonging to the petrified, mechanical systems of the past … ah, my Bruno, the nihilist …” she gurgles and departs with strange haste, her head held high, leaving two briny furrows behind her.

I lunged after her and caught her by the throat, rasping furiously, “The Messiah, The Messiah, you hear! This instant or I’ll—” She boggled at this and smiled fearfully, suddenly humbled by my rage. “Oh, all right,” she muttered, “but don’t think it’s because of your silly performance. It’s only because I know that you, too, love him, yes,” and she opened up a long, narrow abyss below and plunged me into it for an eternity and a half, till I landed in a dim and viscous watery deposit, and then from out of the whirling clouds of primeval dust I wandered dizzily over immense underwater jungles, and galloped along forking trails, on the banks of which grew dense gloomy bushes bearing the withered fruit of barren speculations, and giant ferns of first drafts that flourished halfway and froze, and clustered vines of legendary folk, and I cleared a path through the filmy foliage, so tangled it strangled me, and looking around, I shrieked these are not the important things, this is not yet a “book,” the authentic life-size creation, in all its natural depth, precision, and complexity, this is not the inimitable brilliance of the Age of Genius my Bruno envisioned in childhood, one wild spring day a long long time before the world began to warp and die