Dear Ms. Singer,
I just finished your translation of the poems of Nicanor Parra, who, as you say, “wore on his lapel a little Russian astronaut, and carried in his pockets the letters of a woman who left him for another.” It’s sitting here next to me on the table in my room in a pensione overlooking the Grand Canal. I don’t know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find almost impossible to describe, it changed me. But I won’t go on about that. The truth is, I’m writing not to thank you, but to make what might seem like an odd request. In your introduction, you mentioned in passing a little-known writer, Zvi Litvinoff, who escaped from Poland to Chile in 1941, and whose single published work, written in Spanish, is called The History of Love. My question is: would you consider translating it? It would be solely for my personal use; I don’t have any intention of publishing it, and the rights would remain yours if you wished to do so yourself. I’d be willing to pay whatever you think is a fair price for the work. I always find these matters awkward. Could we say, $100,000? There. If that strikes you as too little, please let me know.
I’m imagining your response as you read this letter —which by then will have spent a week or two sitting in this lagoon, then another month riding the chaos of the Italian mail system, before finally crossing the Atlantic and being passed over to the US Post Office, who will have transferred it into a sack to be pushed along in a cart by a mailman who’ll have slugged through rain or snow in order to slip it through your mail slot where it will have dropped to the floor, to wait for you to find it. And having imagined it, I’m prepared for the worst, in which you take me for some sort of lunatic. But maybe it doesn’t need to be that way. Maybe if I tell you that a very long time ago someone once read to me as I was falling asleep a few pages from a book called The History of Love, and that all these years later I haven’t forgotten that night, or those pages, you’d understand.
I’d be grateful if you could send your response to me here, care of the above address. In case I’ve already gone by the time it arrives the concierge will forward my mail.
Yours eagerly,
Jacob Marcus
I thought, Holy cow! I could hardly believe our luck, and considered writing back to Jacob Marcus myself with the excuse of explaining that it was Saint-Exupéry who’d established the last southern section of the mail route to South America in 1929, all the way to the tip of the continent. Jacob Marcus seemed interested in mail, and, anyway, once my mother had pointed out that it was in part because of Saint-Ex’s courage that Zvi Litvinoff, the author of The History of Love, could later receive the final letters from his family and friends in Poland. At the end of the letter I would add something about my mother being single. But I thought better of it, in case she somehow found out, spoiling what had begun so well, and without any meddling. A hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money. But I knew that even if Jacob Marcus had offered almost nothing, my mother would have still agreed to do it.
29. MY MOTHER USED TO READ TO ME FROM THE HISTORY OF LOVE
“The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma,” she’d say, the Spanish book open on her lap while I lay in bed. This was when I was four or five, before Dad got sick and the book was put away on a shelf. “Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted—wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.
“If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back, Alma! you shouted. Come back! Come back!
“But she didn’t.
“And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
“For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
“Of course there are certain cases in which the boy in question refuses to stop shouting at the top of his lungs for Alma. Stages a hunger strike. Pleads. Fills a book with his love. Carries on until she has no choice but to come back. Every time she tries to leave, knowing it’s what has to be done, the boy stops her, begging like a fool. And so she always returns, no matter how often she leaves or how far she goes, appearing soundlessly behind him and covering his eyes with her hands, spoiling for him anyone who could ever come after her.”
30. THE ITALIAN POST TAKES SO LONG; THINGS GET LOST AND LIVES ARE RUINED FOREVER
It must have taken another few weeks for my mother’s reply to arrive in Venice, and by then Jacob Marcus had most likely gone, leaving instructions for his mail to be forwarded. In the beginning, I pictured him as very tall and thin with a chronic cough, speaking the few words of Italian he knew with a terrible accent, one of those sad people who are never at home anywhere. Bird imagined him as John Travolta in a Lamborghini with a suitcase of cash. If my mother imagined him at all, she didn’t say.
But his second letter came at the end of March, six weeks after his first, postmarked from New York and handwritten on the back of an old black-and-white postcard of a zeppelin. My idea of him evolved. Instead of a cough, I gave him a cane he’d had since a car accident in his early twenties, and decided his sadness was because of his parents who’d left him alone too much as a child, then died, leaving him all of their money. On the back of the postcard, he wrote:
Dear Ms. Singer,
I was overjoyed to receive your response, and to hear that you’ll be able to begin work on the translation. Please send the details of your bank account, and I’ll wire the first $25,000 immediately. Would you agree to sending me the book in quarters, as you translate it? I hope you’ll forgive my impatience, and attribute it to my anticipation and excitement about finally getting to read Litvinoff’s book, and yours. Also to my fondness for receiving mail, and to extending, for as long as possible, an experience that I expect to move me deeply.
Yours truly,
J.M.
31. EVERY ISRAELITE HOLDS THE HONOR OF HIS ENTIRE PEOPLE IN HIS HANDS
The money arrived a week later. To celebrate, my mother took us to a French movie with subtitles about two girls who run away from home. The theater was empty aside from three other people. One of them was the usher. Bird finished his Milk Duds during the opening credits, and tore up and down the aisles in a sugar high until he fell asleep in the front row.
Not long after that, during the first week of April, he climbed up onto the roof at Hebrew School, fell, and sprained his wrist. To console himself, he set up a card table outside the house, and painted a sign that said FRESH LEMON-AID 50 CENTS PLEASE POUR YOURSELF (SPRAINED WRIST). Rain or shine, he was out there with his pitcher of lemonade and a shoebox for collecting money. When he’d exhausted the clientele on our street, he moved a few blocks away and set up in front of a vacant lot. He started to spend more and more time there. When business was slow, he’d abandon the card table and wander around, playing in the lot. Each time I passed he’d done something to improve it: dragged the rusted fencing off to one side, hacked down the weeds, filled a garbage bag with trash. When it got dark he’d come home with his legs scratched, his kippah lopsided on his head. “What a mess,” he’d say. But when I asked what he was planning to do there, he just shrugged. ?
??A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it,” he told me. “Thank you Mr. Dali Lamed Vovnik. Did Mr. Goldstein tell you that?” “No.” “Well what’s the big use you have for it?” I called after him. Instead of answering, he walked to the doorframe, reached up to touch something, kissed his hand, and went up the stairs. It was a plastic mezuzah; he’d stuck them on every doorframe in the house. There was even one on the door to the bathroom.
The next day I found the third volume of How to Survive in the Wild in Bird’s room. He’d scrawled God’s name in permanent marker across the top of every page. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY NOTEBOOK?” I shouted. He was silent. “YOU RUINED IT.” “No, I didn’t. I was careful—” “Careful? Careful? Who said you could even touch it? Ever heard the word PRIVATE?” Bird stared at the notebook in my hand. “When are you going to start acting like a normal person?” “What’s going on down there?” Mom called from the top of the stairs. “Nothing!” we said together. After a minute we heard her go back to her study. Bird put his arm over his face and picked his nose. “Holy shit, Bird,” I whispered through my teeth. “At least try to be normal. You have to at least try.”
32. FOR TWO MONTHS MY MOTHER HARDLY LEFT THE HOUSE
One afternoon, during the last week before summer vacation, I came home from school and found my mother in the kitchen, holding a package addressed to Jacob Marcus at an address in Connecticut. She’d finished translating the first quarter of The History of Love, and wanted me to take it to the post office. “Sure,” I said, tucking it under my arm. Instead, I walked to the park and worked my thumbnail under the seal. On top was a letter, one sentence, written in my mother’s tiny English handwriting:
Dear Mr. Marcus,
I hope these chapters are all you hoped for; anything less is my fault entirely.
Yours,
Charlotte Singer
My heart sank. Fifteen boring words without even the slightest hint of romance! I knew I should send it, that it wasn’t up to me, that it isn’t fair to meddle in other people’s business. But then, there are a lot of things that aren’t fair.
33. THE HISTORY OF LOVE, CHAPTER 10
During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love—about a century—until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and—like so much we no longer need but can’t give up—became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can’t always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended.
Take for example that man walking down the street. You wouldn’t notice him necessarily, he’s not the sort of man one notices; everything about his clothes and his demeanor ask not to be picked out from a crowd. Ordinarily—he would tell you this himself—he would be overlooked. He carries nothing. At least he appears to carry nothing, not an umbrella even though it looks like rain, or a briefcase though it’s rush hour, and around him, stooped against the wind, people are making their way home to their warm houses at the edge of the city where their children lean over their homework at the kitchen table, the smell of dinner in the air, and probably a dog, because there is always a dog in such houses.
One night when this man was still young, he decided to go to a party. There, he ran into a girl he’d gone up through the grades with since elementary school, a girl he’d always been a little in love with even though he was sure she didn’t know he existed. She had the most beautiful name he’d ever heard: Alma. When she saw him standing by the door her face lit up, and she crossed the room to talk to him. He couldn’t believe it.
An hour or two went by. It must have been a good conversation, because the next thing he knew Alma had told him to close his eyes. Then she kissed him. Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. He felt his body shaking. He was scared he was about to lose control of his muscles. For anyone else, it was one thing, but for him it wasn’t so easy, because this man believed—and had believed for as long as he could remember—that part of him was made of glass. He imagined a wrong move in which he fell and shattered in front of her. He pulled away, even though he didn’t want to. He smiled at Alma’s feet, hoping she’d understand. They talked for hours.
That night he went home full of joy. He couldn’t sleep, so excited was he for the next day, when he and Alma had a date to go to the movies. He picked her up the following evening and gave her a bunch of yellow daffodils. At the theater, he fought—and triumphed over!—the perils of sitting. He watched the whole movie leaning forward, so that his weight was resting on the underside of his thighs and not on the part of him that was made of glass. If Alma noticed she didn’t say. He moved his knee a little, and a little more, until it was resting against hers. He was sweating. When the movie was over, he had no idea what it had been about. He suggested they take a walk through the park. This time it was he who stopped, took Alma in his arms, and kissed her. When his knees started to shake and he pictured himself lying in splinters of glass, he fought the urge to pull away. He ran his fingers down her spine over her thin blouse, and for a moment he forgot the danger he was in, grateful for the world which purposefully puts divisions in place so that we can overcome them, feeling the joy of getting closer, even if deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences. Before he knew it, he was shaking violently. He seized his muscles to try to stop. Alma felt his hesitation. She leaned back and looked at him with something like hurt, and then he almost but didn’t say the two sentences he’d been meaning to say for years: Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.
He saw Alma one last time. He had no idea it would be the last. He thought everything was just beginning. He spent the afternoon making her a necklace of tiny birds out of folded paper strung together with thread. Right before he went out the door, he grabbed a needlepoint cushion from his mother’s couch on an impulse, and stuffed it into the seat of his pants as a protective measure. As soon as he did, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
That night—after he gave Alma the necklace, tying it gently around her neck while she kissed him, feeling only a little tremor, nothing so terrible, as she ran her fingers down his spine, and paused for a moment before slipping her hand into the seat of his pants, only to pull back as a look came over her that teetered between laughter and horror, a look that reminded him of a kind of pain he’d never not known—he told her the truth. At least he tried to tell the truth, but what came out was only half of the truth. Later, much later, he found that he was unable to relieve himself of two regrets: one, that when she leaned back he saw in the lamplight that the necklace he made had scratched her throat, and, two, that in the most important moment of his life he had chosen the wrong sentence.
For a long time I sat there reading the chapters my mother had translated. When I finished the tenth, I knew what I had to do.
34. THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE
I crumpled my mother’s letter and threw it in the trash. I ran home, and went up to my bedroom to draft a new letter to the one man I believed could make my mother change. I worked on it for hours. Late that night, after she and Bird had already gone to sleep, I got out of bed, tiptoed down the hall, and carried my mother’s typewriter into my room, the one she still likes to use for letters that are more than fifteen words. I had to type it a lot of times before I managed to do one without any mistakes. I read it over a last time. Then I signed my mother’s name and went to sleep.
FORGIVE ME
Almost everything known
about Zvi Litvinoff comes from the introduction his wife wrote in the volume of The History of Love reissued a few years after he died. The tone of her prose, tender and effacing, is colored by the devotion of one who has dedicated her life to another’s art. It begins, I met Zvi in Valparaíso, in the fall of 1951, soon after I turned twenty. I’d seen him often at the cafés along the water that I used to frequent with my friends. He wore a coat even in the warmest months, and stared moodily out at the view. He was almost twelve years older than I, but there was something about him I was drawn to. I knew he was a refugee because I’d heard his accent on the few occasions when someone he knew, also from that other world, would pause for a moment at his table. My parents had immigrated to Chile from Kraków when I was very young, so there was something about him that was familiar and moving to me. I would make my coffee last, watching him read through the newspaper. My friends laughed at me, calling him un viéjon, and one day a girl named Gracia Stürmer challenged me to go speak to him.
And so Rosa did. She spoke to him for almost three hours that day as the afternoon lengthened and the cool air came in off the water. And Litvinoff, for his part—pleased with the attention of this young woman with a pale face and dark hair, delighted that she understood bits of Yiddish, suddenly filled with a longing he hadn’t known he’d been carrying around inside of him for years—came to life, entertaining her with stories and quoting from poetry. That evening, Rosa went home filled with a giddy joy. Among the cocky, self-absorbed boys at the university with their pomaded hair and empty talk of philosophy, and the melodramatic few who had professed their love to her at the sight of her naked body, there was not one with even half as much experience as Litvinoff. The next afternoon, after her classes, Rosa hurried back to the café. Litvinoff was there waiting for her, and again they talked excitedly for hours: about the sound of the cello, silent films, and the memories they both associated with the smell of salt water. This went on for two weeks. They had a lot in common, but between them hung a dark and heavy difference that drew Rosa closer, in an effort to grasp even the smallest bit of it. But Litvinoff rarely talked about his past and all he’d lost. And not once did he mention the thing he’d begun to work on in the evenings at the old drafting table in the room where he lodged, the book that would become his masterpiece. All he said was that he taught part-time in a Jewish school. It was hard for Rosa to imagine the man sitting across from her—dark as a crow in his coat, and touched with the solemnity of an old photograph—surrounded by a class of laughing, squirming children. It wasn’t until two months later, Rosa writes, during the first moments of sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love, that Litvinoff read to me the first pages of the History.