The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

  9. THE MAN WHO SEARCHED FOR A STONE

  A week went by after I sent my letter, or my mother’s letter, or whatever you want to call it. Another week went by and I wondered if maybe Jacob Marcus was out of the country, possibly Cairo, or maybe Tokyo. A week went by and I thought maybe he’d somehow figured out the truth. Four days went by and I studied my mother’s face for signs of anger. It was already the end of July. A day went by and I thought maybe I should write to Jacob Marcus and apologize. The next day his letter came.

  My mother’s name, Charlotte Singer, was written across the front in fountain pen. I slipped it into the waist of my shorts just as the telephone rang. “Hello?” I said impatiently. “Is the Moshiach home?” said the voice on the other end. “Who?” “The Moshiach,” the kid said, and I heard muffled laughter in the background. It sounded a little like Louis, who lived one block over, and used to be Bird’s friend until he met other friends he liked better, and stopped talking to Bird. “Leave him alone,” I said, and hung up, wishing I’d thought of something better.

  I ran up the block to the park, holding my side so the envelope wouldn’t slip. It was hot out and I was already sweating. I tore the letter open next to a trash can in Long Meadow. The first page was about how much Jacob Marcus liked the chapters my mother had sent. I skimmed it until, on the second page, I got to the sentence that read: I still haven’t mentioned your letter. He wrote:

  I’m flattered by your curiosity. I wish I had more interesting answers to all your questions. I have to say, these days I spend a lot of time just sitting here and looking out the window. I used to love to travel. But the trip to Venice was harder than I thought, and I doubt I’ll do it again. My life, for reasons beyond my control, has been pared down to the simplest elements. For example, here on my desk is a stone. A dark gray piece of granite cut in half by a vein of white. It took me most of the morning to find it. Many stones were rejected first. I didn’t set out with a particular idea of the stone in my mind. I thought I’d recognize it when I found it. As I searched I developed certain requirements. It had to fit comfortably in the palm, be smooth, preferably gray, etc. So that was my morning. I’ve spent the last few hours recovering.

  It wasn’t always like this. It used to be that a day was worthless to me if I hadn’t produced a certain amount of work. That I noticed or didn’t notice the gardener’s limp, the ice on the lake, the long, solemn outings of my neighbor’s child who appears to have no friends—these things were beside the point. But that’s changed now.

  You asked if I was married. I was once, but that was a long time ago, and we were clever or stupid enough not to have a child. We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it. I guess you could say that I wear a little Russian astronaut on my lapel, too. I live alone now, which doesn’t bother me. Or maybe just a little. But it would take an unusual woman to want to keep me company now that I can hardly walk down to the bottom of the driveway and back to pick up the mail. I still do it, though. Twice a week a friend brings by some groceries, and my neighbor looks in once a day with the excuse of wanting to check on the strawberries she planted in my garden. I don’t even like strawberries.

  I’m making it sound worse than it is. I don’t even know you yet, and I’m already fishing for sympathy.

  You also asked what I do. I read. This morning I finished The Street of Crocodiles for the third time. I found it almost unbearably beautiful.

  Also, I watch movies. My brother got me a DVD player. You wouldn’t believe how many movies I’ve watched in the last month. That’s what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

  Enough. I loved your book. Please send me some more.

  JM

  10. I READ THE LETTER ONE HUNDRED TIMES

  And each time I read it, I felt I knew a little less about Jacob Marcus. He said he spent the morning looking for a rock, but he never said anything more about why The History of Love was so important to him. Of course it didn’t escape me that he’d written: I don’t even know you yet. Yet! Meaning he was expecting to get to know us better, or at least our mother, since he didn’t know about Bird and me. (Yet!) But why could he hardly walk to the mailbox and back? And why would it take an unusual woman to keep him company? And why was he wearing a Russian astronaut on his lapel?

  I decided to make a list of clues. I went home, closed my bedroom door, and took out the third volume of How to Survive in the Wild. I turned to a new page. I decided to write everything in code, in case anyone decided to snoop around in my things. I remembered Saint-Ex. At the top I wrote How to Survive if Your Parachute Fails to Open. Then I wrote:

  1. Search for a stone

  2. Live near a lake

  3. Have a gardener with a limp

  4. Read The Street of Crocodiles

  5. Need an unusual woman

  6. Have trouble just walking to the mailbox

  Those were all the clues I could come up with from his letter, so I snuck into my mother’s study while she was downstairs and got his other letters out of her desk drawer. I read these for more clues. That’s when I remembered that his first letter began with a quote from my mother’s introduction about Nicanor Parra, the one about how he wore a little Russian astronaut on his lapel and carried in his pockets the letters of a woman who left him for another. When Jacob Marcus wrote that he also wore a Russian astronaut, did it mean that his wife had left him for someone else? Because I wasn’t sure, I didn’t put this down as a clue. Instead I wrote:

  7. Take a trip to Venice

  8. A long time ago, have someone read to you from The History of Love while you’re falling asleep.

  9. Never forget it.

  I looked over my clues. None of them helped.

  11. HOW I AM

  I decided that if I really wanted to find out who Jacob Marcus was, and why it was so important to him to have the book translated, the only place left to look was The History of Love.

  I snuck upstairs to my mother’s study, to see if I could print the chapters she’d translated off her computer. The only problem was that she was sitting in front of it. “Hello,” she said. “Hello,” I said, trying to sound casual. “How are you?” she asked. “Finethank-youhowareyou?” I answered, because that’s what she taught me to say, as well as how to hold my knife and fork properly, how to balance a teacup between two fingers, and the best way to dig out a piece of food between my teeth without drawing attention to myself, on the off chance that the Queen happened to invite me for high tea. When I pointed out that no one I know holds their knife and fork properly, she looked unhappy and said she was trying to be a good mother, and if she didn’t teach me, who would? I wish she hadn’t, though, because sometimes being polite is worse than being not-polite, like the time Greg Feldman passed me in the hall at school and said, “Hey, Alma, what’s up?” and I said, “Finethankyouhowareyou?” and he stopped and gave me a look like I’d just parachuted down from Mars, and said, “Why can’t you ever just say, Not much?”

  12. NOT MUCH

  It got dark out, and my mother said there was nothing to eat in the house, and did we want to order some Thai food, or maybe West Indian, or how about Cambodian. “Why can’t we cook?” I asked. “Macaroni and cheese?” my mother asked. “Mrs. Shklovsky makes a very good Chicken L’Orange,” I said. My mother looked doubtful. “Chili?” I said. While she was at the supermarket, I went up to her study and printed out chapters one through fifteen of The History of Love, which was as far as she’d gotten. I took the pages downstairs and hid them in my survival backpack under the bed. A few minutes later my mother came home with one pound of ground turkey, one head of broccoli, three apples, a jar of pickles, and a box of marzipan imported from Spain.

  13. THE ETERNAL DISAPPOINTMENT OF LIFE AS IT IS

  After a dinner of microwaved fake-meat chicken nuggets, I went to bed early an
d read what my mother had translated of The History of Love under the covers by flashlight. There was the chapter about how people used to talk with their hands, and the chapter about the man who thought he was made of glass, and a chapter I hadn’t read called “The Birth of Feeling.” Feelings are not as old as time, it began.

  Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe. Or maybe it was the body of a girl named Alma. Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.

  It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it—just to name it—must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

  (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)

  Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It’s possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.

  Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.

  All of the chapters were sort of like this, and none of them really told me anything about why the book was so important to Jacob Marcus. Instead I found myself thinking about my father. About how much The History of Love must have meant to him if he gave it to my mother only two weeks after they met, even though he knew she couldn’t read Spanish yet. Why? Because he was falling in love with her, of course.

  Then I thought of something else. What if my father had written something inside the copy of The History of Love he gave to my mother? It hadn’t ever occurred to me to look.

  I got out of bed and went upstairs. Mom’s study was empty and the book was next to her computer. I lifted it up and opened to the title page. In handwriting I didn’t recognize, it said: For Charlotte, my Alma. This is the book I would have written for you if I could write. Love, David

  I went back to bed and thought about my father, and those twenty words, for a long time.

  And then I started to think about her. Alma. Who was she? My mother would say she was everyone, every girl and every woman that anyone ever loved. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that she also must have been someone. Because how could Litvinoff have written so much about love without being in love himself? With someone in particular. And that someone must have been named—

  Under the nine clues I’d already written, I added one more:

  10. Alma

  14. THE BIRTH OF FEELING

  I raced down to the kitchen, but it was empty. Outside the window, in the middle of our backyard overgrown and full of weeds, was my mother. I pushed open the screen door. “Alma,” I said, catching my breath. “Hmm?” my mother said. She was holding a gardening trowel. I didn’t have time to stop and think about why she was holding a gardening trowel since it was my father, not her, who’d gardened, and since it was already nine-thirty at night. “What’s her last name?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” my mother said. “Alma,” I said impatiently. “The girl in the book. What’s her last name?” My mother wiped her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt. “Actually, now that you mention it—one of the chapters does mention a surname. But it’s strange, because while all the other names in the book are Spanish, her surname is—” My mother frowned. “What?” I said, excited. “Hers is what?” “Mereminski,” my mother said. “Mereminski,” I repeated. She nodded. “M-E-R-E-M-I-N-S-K-I. Mereminski. Polish. It’s one of the few clues Litvinoff left about where he came from.”

  I ran back upstairs, climbed into bed, turned on my flashlight, and opened the third volume of How to Survive in the Wild. Next to Alma, I wrote Mereminski.

  The next day, I started to look for her.

  THE TROUBLE WITH THINKING

  If Litvinoff coughed more and more as the years passed—a hacking cough that shook his whole body, causing him to bend over double, and made it necessary for him to excuse himself from dinner tables, refuse phone calls, and turn down the occasional invitation to speak—it wasn’t so much because he was ill, as that there was something he wished to say. The more time passed, the more he longed to say it, and the more impossible saying it became. Sometimes he woke in a panic from his dreams. Rosa! he’d shout. But before the words were out of his mouth he’d feel her hand on his chest, and at the sound of her voice—What is it? What’s wrong, sweetheart?—he’d lose his courage, overcome with fear of the consequences. And so instead of saying what he wanted to say, he said: It’s nothing. Just a bad dream, and waited for her to fall back asleep before pushing off the covers and stepping out to the balcony.

  When he was young, Litvinoff had a friend. Not his best friend, but a good one. The last time he saw this friend was the day he left Poland. The friend was standing on a street corner. They’d already parted ways, but both turned back to see the other go. For a long time they stood there. His friend’s cap was gathered in a fist held to his chest. He raised his hand, saluted Litvinoff, and smiled. Then he pulled his cap down over his eyes, turned, and disappeared empty-handed into the crowd. Not a day went by now that Litvinoff did not think about that moment, or that friend.

  On nights when he couldn’t sleep, Litvinoff would sometimes go to his study and take out his copy of The History of Love. He’d reread the fourteenth chapter, “The Age of String,” so many times that now the binding opened to it automatically:

  So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeof

  glassI’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgive me . . .

  There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

  The practice of attaching cups to the ends of the string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.

  When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.

  Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all th
e string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.

  Litvinoff coughed. The printed book in his hands was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, which no longer existed, except in his head. Not the “original” as in the ideal book a writer imagines before sitting down to write. The original that existed in Litvinoff’s head was the memory of the manuscript handwritten in his mother tongue, the one he’d held in his hands the day he’d said goodbye to his friend for the last time. They hadn’t known it was going to be the last. But in their hearts, each had wondered.

  In those days, Litvinoff had been a journalist. He’d worked at a daily, writing obituaries. From time to time, in the evening after work, he went to a café populated by artists and philosophers. Because Litvinoff didn’t know many people there, he usually just ordered a drink and pretended to read a newspaper he’d already read, listening to the conversations around him:

  The thought of time outside of our experience is intolerable!

  Marx, my ass.

  The novel is dead!

  Before we declare our consent we must carefully examine—

  Liberation is just the means of attaining freedom; it’s not synonymous

  with it!

  Malevich? My snot is more interesting than that butthole.

  And that, my friend, is the trouble with thinking!

  Sometimes Litvinoff found himself disagreeing with someone’s argument, and in his head he delivered a brilliant rebuttal.

  One night he heard a voice behind him: “Must be a good article—you’ve been reading it for the last half hour.” Litvinoff jumped, and when he looked up, the familiar face of his old childhood friend was smiling down at him. They embraced, and took in the slight changes time had enacted on the other’s appearance. Litvinoff had always felt a certain affinity with this friend, and he was anxious to know what he’d been doing the last few years. “Working, like everyone else,” his friend said, pulling up a chair. “And your writing?” Litvinoff asked. His friend shrugged. “It’s quiet at night. No one bothers me. The landlord’s cat comes and sits on my lap. Usually I fall asleep at my desk, and wake when the cat stalks off at the first sign of daylight.” And then, for no reason, they both laughed.