KAZIK, MOTO SHEL
KAZIK, THE DEATH OF
Occurred at 1827 hours, at the age of sixty-four years and four months, according to Dr. Fried’s calculations. Cause of death: SUICIDE [q.v.]. Contributing factor in the death of Obersturmbannführer Neigel.
Kazik’s last years were ones of prolonged agony for him and his old friends. Neigel suffered unendurably when he heard this. Wasserman had been telling the story without any appreciable logic or trace of plot, without concern for the sacred unities of time and place. His characters moved constantly between the Warsaw zoo and the extermination camp. This highly regrettable lapse of control over his story seemed to pass unnoticed by Neigel, who never uttered a word of complaint. Onthe desk before him were his gun and the two bullets left by his adjutant Sturmbannführer STAUKEH [q.v.]. Neigel seemed unaware of the gun. All his attention was directed toward Kazik, only a few years before a boy with a passion for life [see under: PAINTER], who declared that even a life of suffering was preferable to non-life, and now an embittered old man [see under: TORTURE]. His life, as he saw it, was a web of injustice perpetrated against him through no fault of his own. He searched wearily, hatefully, for a way to unload a little of the anguish of his life and the fear of his approaching end. Kazik: “I-feel-bad-I-feel-bad-I-want-you-to-feel-bad-too.” Otto, gently: “What do you want to happen to us, child?” And Kazik: “Don’t-know-want-you-gone-want-you-in-cages-like-them.” Fried: “But they’re animals!” And the hideous little old man: “Want-want.” Otto looked at him with sorrow, Fried with shock. The ARTISTS [q.v.] waited for Otto’s verdict. No one had the strength to decide anything. All they asked was that Otto should burst this bad dream like a bubble. Yet they knew they had nothing save the dream. And Otto, calmly: “Help him, HAROTIAN [q.v.].” Fried screamed: “But, Otto!” and the director of the zoo: “We brought this child here and taught him things. We have a RESPONSIBILITY [q.v.] toward his ART [q.v.], and he’ll do everything he has to do. That’s the custom around here, Fried, as you know.” And the doctor: “I’m afraid, Otto.” And Otto: “Yes. So am I. Harotian, help him, please!” Harotian wanted to refuse, but in Otto’s blue eyes was a look that barred refusal. And so Harotian was forced to do what he hated most of all, and with the help of the magic power Wasserman had endowed him with fifty years before in a small cave in his native village, he erected a big net cage around Otto Brig’s artists. Neigel listened and groaned. He wanted to ask for something, for MERCY [q.v.] on the artists, but Wasserman would not be stopped: the story surged out of him. (Wasserman: “I will not deny that the story, with its unhappy ending, gushed out of me like a fountain, whereas to invent a pleasant happy ending for the Children of the Heart I would have had to spit blood, heaven forbid! A thousand agonies I endured in my time to contrive a lot of ‘sounding brass and tinkling cymbals’ and now, et, flowing like water! Terrible, frightening words danced on my tongue like seventy-seven little witches, enticing me: Come on, be bad, tell more, harden your heart like a stone, for you are only telling the truth, after all, ai, indeed so. A thousand and one times I lived and died before I learned thatevery horror is but a caricature of what we are already accustomed to, an exaggeration of the known and familiar … feh!”) Kazik circled the cage a few times and looked at the artists imprisoned inside it. Then he walked away and disappeared in the zoo. Wasserman presented a rather tedious, childish description at this point of the things Kazik did in the zoo—of the wild animals he set free, of cases of cruel depredation that followed, of baby Tojnika staggering like a drunkard, his young tusks dripping red and a piece of deer flesh in his mouth … in brief: Wasserman was carried away, milking the situation for more than it was worth. Out of all this verbiage a single passage stands out in which he describes the zoo an hour later, when the wild animals were satiated and a viable balance of sorts had been restored: lively monkeys clustered around the artists’ cage, chattering. Several of them removed the bars on the cage and stared in curiously. The rhinos began to munch the roses Paula had tended all her life. Two old elephants, Tojnika’s parents, waddled by, fretfully measuring the ground with their trunks before setting their feet down. And the zoo with its empty cages, animals, and artists locked together, and the elderly baby scurrying hither and thither in the evening mist, seemed under the first stars like the stopover of an ancient caravan, wandering accursed from place to place, presenting the created
