The History of Love (20 page)

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 the 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.

From then on, they met every evening at the café. With growing horror they discussed the movements of Hitler’s armies and the rumored actions being taken against the Jews until they became too depressed to speak. “But perhaps something more cheerful,” his friend would finally say, and Litvinoff would happily change the subject, eager to test out one of his philosophical theories on his old friend, or to run by him a new fast-cash plan involving ladies’ stockings and the black market, or to describe the pretty girl who lived across the street from him. His friend, in turn, occasionally showed Litvinoff bits of what he was working on. Small things, a paragraph here and there. But Litvinoff was always moved. With the first page he read, he recognized that, in the time since they had been schoolboys together, his friend had grown into a real writer.

A few months later, when it was learned that Isaac Babel had been killed by Moscow’s secret police, it fell to Litvinoff to write the obituary. It was an important assignment and he worked hard on it, trying to strike the right tone for a great writer’s tragic death. He didn’t leave the office until midnight, but as he walked home through the cold night he smiled to himself, believing the obituary was one of his finest. So often the material he had to work with was thin and paltry, and he had to patch something together with a few superlatives, clichés, and false notes of glory in order to commemorate the life, and bolster a sense of loss over the death. But not this time. This time it had been necessary to rise to the material, to struggle to find words for a man who had been a master of words, who had devoted his entire existence to resisting the cliché in the hope of introducing to the world a new way of thinking and writing; a new way, even, of feeling. And whose reward for his labors was death by firing squad.

The next day it appeared in the newspaper. His editor called him into his office to congratulate him on his work. A few of his colleagues also complimented him. When he saw his friend that evening in the café, he, too, praised the piece. Litvinoff ordered them a round of vodka, feeling happy and proud.

A few weeks later, his friend didn’t show up at the café as usual. Litvinoff waited an hour and a half and then gave up and went home. The next evening he waited again, and again his friend didn’t come. Worried, Litvinoff set out for the house where his friend boarded. He’d never been, but he knew the address. When he got there, he was surprised by how dingy and run-down the house was, by the oily walls in the entryway and the smell of something stale. He knocked on the first door he came to. A woman answered. Litvinoff asked after his friend. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “The big writer.” She jerked her thumb upwards. “Top floor on the right.”

Litvinoff knocked for five minutes before he finally heard his friend’s heavy steps on the other side. When the door opened, his friend stood in his bedclothes looking pale and haggard. “What happened?” Litvinoff asked. His friend shrugged and coughed, “Watch out or you’ll catch it, too,” he said, dragging himself back to bed. Litvinoff stood awkwardly in his friend’s cramped room wanting to help, but not knowing how. At last a voice came from the pillows: “A cup of tea would be nice.” Litvinoff hurried to the corner where a makeshift kitchen was set up, and banged around looking for the kettle (“On the stove,” his friend called weakly). While the water boiled, he opened the window to let in a little fresh air, and washed the dirty dishes. When he brought the steaming cup of tea to his friend, he saw that he was shivering with a fever, so he closed the window and went downstairs to ask the landlady for an extra blanket. Eventually his friend fell asleep. Not knowing what else to do, Litvinoff sat down in the only chair in the room and waited. After a quarter of an hour, a cat meowed at the door. Litvinoff let it in, but when she saw that her midnight companion was indisposed she stalked out.

In front of the chair was a wooden desk. Pages were scattered across the surface. One caught Litvinoff’s eye and, glancing over to make sure his friend was soundly asleep, he picked it up. Across the top it said: THE DEATH OF ISAAC BABEL
.

Only after they charged him with the crime of silence did Babel discover how many kinds of silences existed. When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition. And no one could accuse him of not being prolific in his chosen métier. Daily, he turned out whole epics of silence. In the beginning it had been difficult. Imagine the burden of keeping silent when your child asks you whether God exists, or the woman you love asks if you love her back. At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.

Even after they arrested him and burned all of his manuscripts, which were all blank pages, he refused to speak. Not even a groan when they gave him a blow to the head, a boot tip in the groin. Only at the last possible moment, as he faced the firing squad, did the writer Babel suddenly sense the possibility of his error. As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There’s no match for the silence of God.

Litvinoff dropped the page. He was furious. How could his friend, who could have his pick of what to write about, steal the one subject about which he, Litvinoff, happened to have written something of which he was proud? He felt mocked and humiliated. He wanted to drag his friend out of bed and demand what he’d meant by it. But after a moment he cooled down and read it again, and as he did he recognized the truth. His friend hadn’t stolen anything that belonged to him. How could he have? A person’s death belongs to no one but the one who’s died.

A feeling of sadness came over him. All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He’d prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in the bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species. It was obvious, Litvinoff thought. All you had to do was look at how each had approached the same subject. Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow. Litvinoff’s life was defined by a delight in the weight of the real; his friend’s by a rejection of reality, with its army of flat-footed facts. Looking at his reflection in the dark window, Litvinoff believed something had been peeled away and a truth revealed to him: He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in any way original. And though he was wrong in every way about this, after that night nothing could dissuade him.

Beneath THE DEATH OF ISAAC BABEL was another page. With tears of self-pity stinging his sinuses, Litvinoff read on.

FRANZ KAFKA IS DEAD

He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. “Because then you’ll stop asking for me.” The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children’s hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers’ shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see the man who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one, families broke off with a goodnight and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of clothes being dropped to the floor, of lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking under the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.