More Than I Love My Life

by David Grossman

  But Vera, with one last surge of resistance, persists. “I’m not still a hundred percent that you’re—that you have what you say. You don’t! Look how fine you are! Where would you get this thing? This is something that’s hereditary, and I have fantastic memory—”

  Nina—I can see that Vera’s stubborn skepticism is costing her in health. She holds herself back. “But maybe it’s from Dad?”

  “How could it be from your father? Milosz knew maybe a hundred poems by heart!”

  “But he died young, and we couldn’t know.”

  Then suddenly Vera’s hand flies up to her mouth. “Oy, his father, Milosz’s father…Your grandfather…When I got back from Goli…”

  “What happened to him?”

  “It happened. Never mind. It’s nothing.” Vera gives a dry spit, this time to her left side. One day I’ll write up a whole dictionary of her spitting.

  “Mom, what happened to him?”

  “Well, that’s just it, he used to get a little lost, but not very far, and only in the village…”

  “Bingo,” says Nina, and her face falls.

  “And his wife tied a bell around him…”

  “Do me a favor.”

  Vera leans against the wall. Rafael goes into Kavana Royal to pee. Washes his hands, washes his face. Looks in the mirror. The door is slightly ajar, so we can see him in the rectangle of light, leaning on the sink with both hands. His head drops, as if he’s been beheaded. He’s crying. He is doing what Vera and Nina and I are incapable of doing at this moment, each because of her own private defect.

  “Shall we?” Nina asks when he comes back. She suddenly has a new power over us. Not only the knife effect of the disease that separates her from us, but also this thing she’s doing here. It’s as though she’s put on something else, a thin layer of a different existence.

  Something ghostly.

  If I’m going to make a film about her—

  Am I going to make a film about her?

  Rafael takes the camera from me. “Nina, I’m ready when you are.” Nina has her back to the wall again, shoulders drooping. Now, G, this is work; now the professionalism will talk. I stand before her rearranging her collar. It was twisted to the right before, and the twist should be the same. The little pedantries of a script girl. Nonsense—it’s my hand’s need to run over her cheek.

  She constantly looks me in the eye.

  Evening falls. A streetlamp lights up above us. It’s a little town in Croatia, where I will certainly never be again. A peculiar sense of being unmoored. Of drifting in no-place. Perhaps this is similar to what awaits Nina not long from now. I have a momentary grasp of the terror she is living in: every wrong sentence, every mistake, every little confusion and forgetfulness, might be used as evidence against her.

  Who am I without hating Nina?

  * * *

  —

  “Intro, Nina, take three,” Rafi mumbles to himself.

  Nina takes a deep breath. Shuts her eyes. The vertical wrinkle on her forehead deepens, then softens. She opens her eyes. “Hello, Nina,” she says to the camera, “today we’re going to tell you a story. It’s a beautiful and moving story, and it’s about you, and about the great love that brought you into this world, and also about what—”

  But we are doomed not to make this movie, because Vera suddenly pivots in a semicircle, like a puppet in a clock tower, and faces Nina with her back to the camera. “Why are you talking to her like that?” she asks in a whisper, as if the woman in the camera can hear her.

  Nina is taken aback by the interruption. “Like what?”

  “Like she’s a bit dumb.”

  “She really is dumb,” Nina says, so quietly that it’s bloodcurdling. “I told you. She’ll be totally erased by the time she sees this. Pause for a second,” she orders Rafi, who keeps filming, “and do me a favor, Vera, don’t direct me. You’ve directed enough!”

  Like a whip the words lash out of her mouth.

  “Gili, write it down,” Rafi mutters.

  “But that’s how you talk to little child,” Vera insists, “someone who doesn’t have children, that’s how they talk to little child.”

  “Maybe I didn’t have enough experience with children?” Nina suggests. “Maybe you could give me some private tutoring?”

  Vera goes back to her position. They stand beside each other.

  It later turned out that I did still have some gray matter somewhere, because I found the following line in my notebook: “Something in the way they both stand with their backs to the wall, like they’re facing a firing squad.”

  “My Nina, hello, hi, sweetheart,” Nina says to the camera, and with these words I feel she is in fact responding to Vera’s (appropriate) stage direction. “I want to tell you a story today, and it’s a story that is connected to you, and it’s a good story, don’t be afraid, it’s a love story. You know, Nina, there was a lot of love around you, and you were made with great love.” She breathes deeply. “Here is your mother next to me. Her name is Vera, she’s waving hello at you…” Vera waves a rigid hand at the camera. “And she will now tell you, together with me, the story of your life, from the beginning.” There is relief in Nina’s voice, as if she’s found the right tone. “And if by any chance you don’t remember me, or Vera, that’s okay, it happens. Just know that the woman standing next to me is your mother, Vera, who loves you very much. Who always watches over you. And now she will tell you how she met her beloved Milosz, who was your father. Go ahead, Mom.”

  * * *

  —

  Vera rubs her cheeks with both hands. She stands up straight. In my body I remember those awakening movements of hers. That old lioness fought for me once, and she won.

  “I’m ready, children.”

  “Take four,” Rafi whispers to himself, “action.”

  “It was at the party for end of high school here in Croatia, in my city of Čakovec, which was once belonged to Hungary and was called Csáktornya…”

  “Talk to her,” Nina whispers out of the corner of her mouth, “and smile at her, keep smiling at her, keep thinking how much she needs you.”

  “I’m trying, Nina, but it’s confusing a little, all this.”

  “I know. But think about her, how confused she is.”

  “I was a young girl, seventeen and something, and I dance with everyone, I’m the belle in the ball, and this and that, and then along comes this young man who asks me to dance.”

  “Talk a little slower. So she’ll understand. No rush. We have time.”

  “And he says to me, this man, ‘Listen, gospođica’—that’s like when they say ‘miss,’ ” she explains to the camera, “ ‘there’s something I want you to know about me right from the start: I was born in a small village, in a stable, on straw, together with pig and chicken and sheep. My parents are farmers, but with no land, and we are very much poor, and every month I send them half my salary.”

  From one word to the next, her voice opens up. Nina, beside her, listens with her head bowed. Sometimes she looks up and gives the camera a big grin. I ask myself what that other Nina, the future one, will grasp out of all this information. Out of these two women.

  She’s not going to get any of it.

  “And he sees that I don’t get scared at all by his poverty, and he tells me they had the muster, and commander general told him: ‘Mr. First Lieutenant, your collar is ripped.’ And this young man says to him: ‘This is my collar also for going to church and also for dying! I have no other collar! I am the son of a farmer without land!’ ”

  Nina confirms to Vera with a nod and a smile: Yes, go on that way. Talk to her, to her…

  “And we dance, and I see that dancing he does know, and I also like very much to dance, to this day, and you know, Nina, when they play music at lunchtime on ‘Magical Moments’? Ra
dio show? I dance around with transistor in my hand…”

  She demonstrates for the camera how she dances with the radio, as if she were born in a disco, shimmying with unbelievable ease (she’s ninety!), humming “Bella Ciao,” the song of her youth that was sung by Italian and Yugoslavian partisans. “And while we dance he speaks almost nothing to me, Milosz. Only holds me nicely, like a gentleman, doesn’t take advantage, and only if I ask, then he talks. So he tells me that he finished military academy, and he was outstanding pupil, and they put him in our town, and he doesn’t know anyone here, and he’s alone…” She stops, embarrassed. “Is this okay?” she whispers to Nina and Rafi. “Are you recording me well?”

  “It’s great, Mom, don’t worry about the filming, Rafi and Gili will edit everything later, so it’ll be even easier for her to understand.” My stomach still turns every time Nina says “her” or “she” about her future self. As if there really are two people whom she cut away from each other, and they each doffed their hat and walked off in opposite directions.

  But why should that surprise me? Cutting away is her forte.

  * * *

  —

  I forgot to write this before: ever since Rafi called to tell me about her disease, I’ve been spending every free moment digging up information. I read mostly at night, when I can’t fall asleep, and then I can’t fall asleep because I’ve been reading. I read research about how fast the mind gets erased and which regions of the brain decline. Language goes. Memory, of course. The capacity to recognize faces. To orient oneself in space and time, to comprehend situations. To draw conclusions. Perception of self becomes vague.

  I look at Nina’s head, that pretty little box. Such drama is occurring in there now. A fight to the death.

  In all my searches I did not find any studies showing how fast or in what order feelings like remorse, shame, and guilt disappear.

  * * *

  —

  “So talk about what you thought when you saw him, when you saw Dad, for the first time. What impression did he make?”

  “I had no impression from him!”

  “No impression?” Nina laughs. “Just like that?”

  “Your father, Nina, was not a man who made impression. Not a handsome man at all—I mean, yes, handsome, in fact very handsome, like his entire family—all Novak men are handsome, women not so much, but men—yes! Very! And manly! But he was not a specially manly Novak, and not specially handsome, and that was what I also liked in him, that he was both tough and soft, and strong and weak, like lots of men in one man. And he was very thin, like Windhund. He was maybe one hundred twenty pounds with five feet eight. So in body and figure, almost nothing was there. Just there was character—so much!”

  “More, tell her more.”

  Vera looks straight at the camera: “I am in general not a person who thinks much of impressions, Nina, but I felt him, do you understand? I felt him, and that made the impression on me. I didn’t think: Oh, what a handsome man! Oh, what muscles!”

  I sit on the sidewalk, writing. Of the four of us, Vera speaks the fastest. (Rafi slurs the most, and his beard muffles things, too.) I keep wondering what the other Nina, the future one, will be able to understand of the things Vera is recounting. We’ll have to add subtitles, to make it easier for her. If she can even read.

  But maybe that’s not what will be important to her, in the film we make.

  Not the words, not the facts, but rather something that cannot be put into words.

  * * *

  —

  “…I right away saw he has open mind and he is a free soul. In his seriousness I saw that he is a man who no one in the world will tell what to think. And how he talked about injustice, and how he talked about his parents! And I thought: This man is a goy, he is Serbian, he is a soldier—how can I be with him? If you look at us based on politesse, nothing connects to anything else. But there he was, a soul that came into the world for me.”

  A tenderness lights up Nina’s face. A childish tenderness I’ve never seen in her. For an instant, the child she used to be stands opposite the child I used to be, and in my eyes a thought slowly passes: our thin skin.

  But then, like a slap on the cheek, I am hit by what she told my father when they last met, five years ago. About her boyfriends. She was living in New York at the time. “Penelope’s suitors,” she called them, and also, with peculiar affection, “my lechers.” “And it happened just when she started feeling something for me again,” Rafael told me that morning, five years ago, after Nina had flown back to New York. He was sitting in my kitchen, in our house on the moshav, needing to talk with me even though we both knew it was a mistake that would pollute us. He held his head in his hands as if what he had found out was too heavy to bear. “She and I were so close at that moment, before she told me about them,” he said, and held two fingers up with a tiny gap between them, “and then, like a punch.”

  “Like punches,” I corrected him, as affable as only a toxic and loving daughter can be. “To be precise, Daddy, one-two-three-four punches.”

  He hadn’t even heard what I said. “You know, Gili, when we were together, Nina and I, in those years in Jerusalem, I never called her ‘my love,’ always ‘my beloved.’ I had a few other loves after her, but she was my only beloved.”

  * * *

  —

  “So like that, one dance and one more,” Vera continues, “and suddenly it’s a little frightening to me. Frightening but I want more, more, more. And I keep looking at him and thinking: Who is this person? Who is this that came from nothing and takes my heart in one moment?”

  Nina, on her tiptoes, moves out of the frame.

  “Milosz’s father,” she goes on, “when Milosz was at high school in town, even before he was in the army, twice a week his father walked almost ten miles each side, so that Milosz will eat bread from their home, and corn from their field, and a piece of cheese his mother made. You understand, Ninaleh?” she asks the camera.

  Ninaleh. I’ve never heard her call Nina that. I see that Nina also freezes.

  “I looked at him while he talked, and I thought: How much courage. He was twenty-two and looked so young! I asked what his mother’s name was, and he said: Nina. I said: Such a pretty name. If I have a daughter one day, I will name her Nina.”

  Nina shudders, hunched over with her back arched, holding her hands between her knees.

  “And he asked me: What are you doing tomorrow, gospođica? I said: Tomorrow is Sunday, I take the train to my friend and come back home by the train.

  “He asked: When will you be home?

  “In evening.

  “And that’s it, goodbye, thank you, gospođica. He bowed over like knight, walked backward out of the party place, here, he left from this door. And I already knew.”

  With those words she falls silent, dives into herself.

  “That’s that. Yes. That is how it was. What were we saying?”

  “That you knew,” Nina whispered.

  “Yes.” She sighs. “Milosz. Correct. I went home from the party and I said to Mother: ‘Mama, today I met a young man who came to this world for me and I came for him.’ And Mother said: ‘What is so special in him?’ I said: ‘Mama, he is so proud of his poverty! People want to hide their poverty and lie about it, and he gets every month one kvadrat of wood for heat, and he sells half so he can send money to his parents, and he’s so cold, Mama.’

  “The next evening I come back on the train from my friend Jagoda, and my mother is suddenly there at the station. ‘Mama, what are you doing here?’ And Mother: ‘I knew he would come here!’ So I look around, and there on the side stands, next to a bicycle, sort of looking out, this Milosz…”

  Nina smiles. Seeing her smile, and the way her parched face drinks in the story, I suspect this must be the first time she’s heard it.

  Dozens of times
—I’m not exaggerating—Vera has told me this story about the first time she met Milosz. And who knows how many more times she told it at all sorts of events with Tuvia’s family. Plus at least ten times for each of Tuvia’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren when they reached their bar and bat mitzvahs and did their family-tree projects. How can you deprive your own daughter of such a story? I seriously almost yell at Vera: If I had a story like that, I’d have kids just so I could tell it to them!

  Nina looks stricken, bereaved. “A thousand times you told me about Goli, about the beatings and the torture, about the bedbugs and the swamps and the rocks. And I never heard how you and Dad met.”

  “It is possible.” Vera’s mouth twists into a scythe. “You were little, there was Goli. There was war.”

  “Well then,” Nina whispers with a crestfallen face, “tell me now. Tell her. Me too, actually.”

  “That’s it, that’s how I met Milosz, here in this house. And from then until he died—”

  “Wait,” Nina calls out, “not so fast, there’s still time before he dies.”

  “Since then until he died,” Vera insists, “we almost were never apart. I waited nearly five years for him until army gave permission for him to get married. In ’36 we met, in ’41 we married, and in ’51 he died. Altogether fifteen years we had.”

  Nina flutters her fingers at Rafi, draws the camera and cameraman to her, laughing desperately. “Did you notice how I’m not included in the important family dates?”

  “Oh really, Nina,” Vera grumbles, “will you always look for just my mistakes? I’m telling you now there are many, you don’t have to try so hard.”

  Rafi and I exchange looks. We both think Vera is wrong: there are not many mistakes, not at all, but there is one that suffices for a whole lifetime. And what choice did I have? Vera retorts in a sharp look at me and Rafi.

  Nina’s eyes—the three of us notice now—dart back and forth between us. She’s like a fearful animal sensing that its masters are sealing its fate.