world with the fantasies of its creator: people, dreams, animals, sky, tentative first drafts of a more successful creation; or else like a case of PLAGIARISM [q.v.] committed out of longing, strangled but—doubtless—inept, painfully slipshod, a colossal effort doomed to perpetual failure, banished forever to the universal junkyard, that gigantic amusement park of ideas and hopes that rust and fall apart and turn up again and again in the service of a new generation of children. And now Kazik reappeared out of the mist as a bowed old man, trailing ruffles of albino hair, farting incontinently, a real wreck. Wasserman looked at Fried, who was looking at Kazik. The doctor blamed himself for everything. He had spent so little time in the company of the child—he still called him the child—yet even in so brief a time he had managed to transmit the seeds of ruin. Fried: “Maybe not in what I said to him, and maybe not in what I did for him, because I tried so hard, but—” Marcus: “But the heaviest legacies of all are wordlessly transmitted, my good Albert. Those legacies beyond time … take less than a minute to transmit …” Munin: “God in heaven! Look at his face! It’s all bloody!” Fried: “He’s been wounded.” Wasserman: “He has devouredprey.” And Kazik: “You-there-don’t-be-there.” Otto gently: “But where do you want us to go, Kazik?” And Kazik: “Don’t-be-there-maybe-I-eat-you,” and Otto: “No. I fear not.” And old Kazik: “I-ate-this-little-thing-with-long-cars-not-good-oh-no.” He collapsed on the ground by the cage groaning loudly. Kazik: “I-feel-bad-I-feel-bad-why-oh-why?” Wasserman: “What could we tell him, Herr Neigel? The forces of life and death were cruelly raging in his little body. Kazik banged his head against the fence and wept bitterly. Then he trudged this way and that, waving his hands, screeching, passing wind, defecating, urinating, pleading, ai, he found no rest.” Suddenly Kazik stood still. His eyes were red and dim, and he panted like a dog. “Want-to-be-with-you,” he said. Everyone looked at Otto. Otto nodded and Harotian tore an opening in the fence, a tiny opening that disappeared as soon as Kazik entered. The aged boy limped haltingly and stood among them. They gathered around him, giant demons, stone idols gnawed with sadness and disillusionment, silently watching the little creature they had dreamed, had fabricated out of their despair. At this point Wasserman paused, and Neigel asked how all this had come to be. “Where did we fail?” he asked, and Wasserman answered him gravely [see under: MIRACLE 3]. Kazik stood motionless and broke down all at once, as though his strength had given out. Feebly, voicelessly, he told them again that he felt bad, and asked them to suffer, too. This was the last thing on his mind, which was rapidly losing its grip on everything else. (Munin chuckled bitterly: “He’s sharing all he has with us. A Communist maybe?”) Growing more and more decrepit before their eyes, he chanted, “Bad-you-fel-bad,” and Otto, Otto who was seemingly obliged to pursue this revolting experiment to the bitter end, as though swallowing the last drop of medication against the disease of his faith in man, even now Otto hid nothing: “We feel bad about many things, Kazik. Many things. For instance, we feel bad when we get old and sick.” Zeidman, quietly: “And when we’re beaten and starved.” Marcus: “And humiliated.” Hannah Zeitrin: “And when our hopes are taken away. And when they’re restored.” Harotian: “And when we’re deprived of our illusions.” Fried: “And when we’re alone and when we’re together.” Paula: “And when we’re killed.” Wasserman: “Or when we stay alive.” Marcus: “And we feel bad when we do evil.” Zeidman: “And we’re so fragile.” Munin: “Yes, it’s true. One little toothache and life is not worth living.” Fried: “If someone we love dies, we are neverreally happy again.” Marcus: “Our happiness depends on such perfection …” “Bitte, Herr Wasserman,” asked Neigel suddenly, taking Wasserman’s hand (Wasserman: “There was no death in his hand. It was a human hand. Five warm fingers, moist with fear, perhaps. Fingers which have touched tears, the tears of the child he was, and the mouth of a baby, and even, indeed yes, the thighs of a woman”). “It is not a miracle we need,” whispered Wasserman, his face close to Neigel’s, “but the touch of a living person, to gaze at the blue of his eyes and taste the salt of his tears.” And Neigel, whose face was by then distorted, every muscle dancing in convulsive effort, begged Wasserman not to let the Children of the Heart die. Not to let Kazik kill them. Wasserman, smiling wearily: “They will not die. You know them better than that by now, do you not? They are all made of the same imperishable stuff. They are artists, Herr Neigel. Partisans …” Neigel nodded slowly. His eyes were glazed and distant. “Tell me about him. About his death, Scheherazade. Quickly.”
Wasserman described how Kazik collapsed on the ground. He could no longer bear his life. He asked Otto to help him see the world in which he had lived. The untasted life beyond the fence. At a nod from Otto, Harotian tore an opening in the cage bars. Instead of the zoo, the opening revealed a view of Neigel’s camp. [Editorial comment: No wonder. The camp had always been waiting there.] Kazik saw the high, gloomy watchtowers and the electrified barbed-wire fences, and the train station which leads nowhere but to death. And he smelled the smell of human flesh burned by human beings, heard the screaming and snorting of a prisoner hanged all night long by his feet, and the tortured groans of one Obersturmbannführer Neigel, who was imprisoned with him. Wasserman told him—his voice utterly monotonous—how in his first days at work cremating bodies in the camp, his overseers had found that women burn best, especially fat women, so they instructed the gravediggers to put fat women at the bottom of the pile. This saves a lot of fuel, Wasserman explained.
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