The History of Love (24 page)

What do you mean?

Your book,
he said.

What about it?

Go get it back.

I knelt on the floor and began to gather up the pages.

Not this one!

Which one?

Oy vey!
Bruno said, slapping his forehead.
Do I have to tell you everything?

A slow smile spread on my lips.

Three hundred and one,
said Bruno
.
He shrugged and looked away, but I thought I saw him smile.
It’s not nothing.

FLOOD

1.
HOW TO MAKE A FIRE WITHOUT MATCHES

I did a search on the internet for Alma Mereminski. I thought someone might have written about her, or that I might find information about her life. I typed in her name and pressed return
.
But all that came up was a list of immigrants who’d arrived in New York City in 1891 (Mendel Mereminski), and a list of Holocaust victims recorded at Yad Vashem (Adam Mereminski, Fanny Mereminski, Nacham, Zellig, Hershel, Bluma, Ida, but, to my relief, because I didn’t want to lose her before I’d even begun to look, no Alma).

2.
ALL THE TIME MY BROTHER SAVES MY LIFE

Uncle Julian came to stay with us. He was in New York for as long as it took him to do the final research for a book he’d been writing for five years on the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti. Aunt Frances stayed behind in London to take care of the dog. Uncle Julian slept in Bird’s bed, Bird slept in mine, and I slept on the floor in my one-hundred-percent down sleeping bag, even though a real expert wouldn’t need one, since in emergency conditions she could just kill some birds and stuff their feathers under her clothing for warmth.

Sometimes at night I would hear my brother talking in his sleep. Half phrases, nothing I could make out. Except for once, when he spoke so loudly I thought he was awake. “Don’t step there,” he said. “What?” I said, sitting up. “It’s too deep,” he muttered, and turned his face to the wall.

3.
BUT WHY

One Saturday, Bird and I went with Uncle Julian to the Museum of Modern Art. Bird insisted on paying for himself from his lemonade profits. We wandered around while Uncle Julian went to talk to a curator upstairs. Bird asked one of the security guards how many water fountains there were in the building. (Five.) He made weird video game noises until I told him to be quiet. Then he counted the number of people with exposed tattoos. (Eight.) We stood in front of a painting of a bunch of people collapsed on the floor. “Why are they lying there like that?” he asked. “Someone killed them,” I said, even though I didn’t really know why they were lying there, or if they were even people. I went to look at another painting across the room. Bird followed me. “But why did someone kill them?” he asked. “Because they needed money and robbed a house,” I said, and got on the escalator going down.

On the subway home, Bird touched my shoulder. “But why did they need the money?”

4.
LOST AT SEA

“What makes you to think this Alma in
History of Love
is real person?” Misha asked. We were sitting on the beach behind his apartment building with our feet buried in the sand, eating Mrs. Shklovsky’s roast beef and horseradish sandwiches. “ ‘A,’ ” I said. “A what?” “
A
real person.” “OK,” Misha said. “Answer the question.” “Of course she’s real.” “But how do you know?” “Because there’s only one way to explain why Litvinoff, who wrote the book, didn’t give her a Spanish name like everyone else.” “Why?” “He couldn’t.” “Why not?” “Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But
why
?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was
in love
with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.” Misha chewed a bite of roast beef. “I’m thinking you watch too many movies,” he said. But I knew I was right. It didn’t take a genius to read
The History of Love
and guess that much.

5.
THE THINGS I WANT TO SAY GET STUCK IN MY MOUTH

We walked down the boardwalk toward Coney Island. It was boiling hot and a trickle of sweat dripped down Misha’s temple. When we passed some old people playing cards, Misha greeted them. A wrinkled old man wearing a tiny bathing suit waved back. “They think you’re my girlfriend,” Misha announced. Just then my toe caught and I tripped. I felt my face get hot, and thought, I am the most awkward person on earth. “Well I’m not,” I said, which wasn’t what I wanted to say. I looked away, pretending to take interest in a kid dragging a blow-up shark toward the water’s edge. “
I
know,” Misha said. “But they don’t.” He’d turned fifteen, grown almost four inches, and started to shave the dark hairs above his lip. When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn’t an ache but something different.

“I bet you a hundred dollars she’s listed,” I said. There was no part of me that actually believed this, but it was all I could think of to change the subject.

6.
LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO MOST LIKELY DOESN’T EXIST

“I’m looking for a number for Alma Mereminski?” I said. “M-E-R-E-M-I-N-S-K-I.” “What borough?” the woman said. “I don’t know,” I said. There was a pause and I heard the clicking of keys. Misha watched a girl in a turquoise bikini Rollerblade past. The woman on the phone was saying something. “Excuse me?” I said. “I said I have an A. Mereminski on 147th in the Bronx,” she said. “Hold for the number.”

I scrawled it on my hand. Misha walked over. “So?” “Do you have a quarter?” I asked. It was silly, but I’d already gone so far. He raised his eyebrows, and reached into the pocket of his shorts. I dialed the number written on my palm. A man answered. “Is Alma there?” I asked. “Who?” he said. “I’m looking for Alma Mereminski.” “There’s no Alma here,” he told me. “You got the wrong number. This is Artie,” he said, and hung up.

We walked back to Misha’s apartment. I went to the bathroom, which smelled of his sister’s perfume and was crowded with his father’s grayish underwear drying on a line. When I came out, Misha was shirtless in his room, reading a book in Russian. I waited on his bed while he took a shower, flipping through the pages of Cyrillic. I could hear the water falling, and the song he was singing, but not the words. When I lay on his pillow, it smelled of him.

7.
IF THINGS GO ON LIKE THIS

When Misha was young his family went to their dacha every summer, and he and his father would take the nets down from the attic and try to catch the migrating butterflies that filled the air. The old house was filled with his grandmother’s china that really came from China, and the framed butterflies three generations of Shklovskys had caught as boys. Over time their scales fell away, and if you ran barefoot through the house the china would rattle and your feet would pick up wing dust.

A few months back, the night before his fifteenth birthday, I’d decided to make Misha a card with a butterfly on it. I went online for a picture of a Russian butterfly, but instead I found an article reporting that most butterfly species had declined in numbers over the last two decades, and that their extinction rate was about 10,000 times higher than it should be. It also said that an average of seventy-four species of insects, plants, and animals become extinct every day. Based on these and other frightening statistics, the article reported, scientists believe that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on earth. Almost a quarter of the world’s mammals face extinction within thirty years. One out of eight species of birds will soon be extinct. Ninety percent of the world’s largest fish have disappeared in the last half century.

I did a search on mass extinctions.

The last mass extinction happened about 65 million years ago, when an asteroid probably collided with our planet, killing all the dinosaurs and about half of the marine animals. Before that was the Triassic extinction (also caused by an asteroid, or possibly volcanoes), which wiped out up to ninety-five percent of the species, and before that was the Late Devonian extinction. The current mass extinction will be the quickest in earth’s 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike those other extinctions, isn’t caused by natural events, but by the ignorance of human beings. If things go on like this, half of all species on earth will be gone in a hundred years.

For this reason, I did not put any butterflies on Misha’s card.

8.
INTERGLACIAL

The same February my mother got the letter asking her to translate
The History of Love
it snowed almost two feet, and Misha and I built a snow cave in the park. We worked for hours, and our fingers turned numb, but we kept digging. When it was finished, we crawled inside. A blue light came in through the entrance. We sat shoulder to shoulder. “Maybe one day I’ll bring you to Russia,” said Misha. “We could go camping in the Ural Mountains,” I said. “Or just the Kazakh Steppes.” Our breath made little clouds when we spoke. “I’ll take you to the room where I lived with my grandfather,” said Misha, “and teach you to skate on the Neva.” “I could learn Russian.” Misha nodded. “I’ll teach you. First word.
Dai
.” “
Dai.
” “Second word.
Ruku
.” “What does it mean?” “Say it first.” “
Ruku
.” “
Dai ruku
.” “
Dai ruku
. What does it mean?” Misha took my hand and held it.

9.
IF SHE’S REAL

“What is giving you idea Alma came to New York?” Misha asked. We’d played the tenth round of gin rummy and now we were lying on the floor of his bedroom looking up at the ceiling. There was sand in my bathing suit and between my teeth. Misha’s hair was still wet, and I could smell his deodorant.

“In the fourteenth chapter, Litvinoff writes about a string stretching across the ocean held by a girl who left for America. He was from Poland, right, and my mom said he escaped before the Germans invaded. The Nazis killed pretty much everyone in his village. So if he hadn’t escaped, there’d be no
History of Love.
And if Alma was also from the same village, which I bet you a hundred dollars she was—”

“You already owe me hundred dollars.”

“The point is that in the parts I’ve read, there are stories about Alma when she was very young, like ten. So if she’s real, which I think she is, Litvinoff must have known her as a child. Which means they were probably from the same village. And Yad Vashem doesn’t list any Alma Mereminski from Poland who died in the Holocaust.”

“Who is Yad Vashem?”

“The Holocaust museum in Israel.”

“Okay so maybe she’s not even Jewish. And even if she is—even if she’s real, and Polish, and Jewish, AND came to America—how do you know she didn’t go to some other city? Like Ann Arbor.” “Ann
Arbor
?” “I have one cousin there,” Misha said. “Anyway, I thought you were looking for Jacob Marcus, not this Alma.”

“I am,” I said. I felt the back of his hand brush my thigh. I didn’t know how to say that even though I’d started out looking for someone who could make my mother happy again, now I was looking for something else, too. About the woman I was named after. And about me.

“Maybe the reason Jacob Marcus wants the book translated has something to do with Alma,” I said, not because I believed it, but because I didn’t know what else to say. “Maybe he knew her. Or maybe he’s trying to find her.”