The History of Love (32 page)

It wasn’t until he got to the third page that Alma’s name appeared. He paused. He had already changed a Feingold from Vilna to a De Biedma from Buenos Aires. Would it be so terrible if he switched Alma to Rosa? Three simple letters—the final “A” could remain. He’d already gone so far. He brought the pen to the page. Anyway, he told himself, Rosa was the only one who’d read it.

But if, when he went to write a capital R where there had been a capital A, Litvinoff’s hand stalled, perhaps it was because he was the only person, aside from its true author, to have read
The History of Love
and known the real Alma. In fact, he’d known her since they were both children, having gone up through the grades with her before he’d left to study at yeshiva. She was one of a group of girls he’d observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity. Alma left an indelible impression on his mind, as had the six or seven other girls whose transformations he’d witnessed, and, in the throes of his own puberty, had all taken turns as the object of his desire. Even all those years later, sitting at his desk in Valparaíso, Litvinoff could still remember the original catalogue of bared thighs, inner elbows, and backs of necks that had been the inspiration for countless frenetic variations. That Alma had been taken by someone else in an on-and-off-and-on-again sort of way didn’t distract from her participation in Litvinoff’s reveries (which relied heavily on the technique of montage). If he ever envied her being taken, it wasn’t out of any special feeling for Alma, but out of a wish to be likewise singled out and loved alone.

And if, when he tried a second time to replace her name with another, for the second time his hand froze, perhaps it was because he knew that to remove her name would be like erasing all the punctuation, and the vowels, and every adjective and noun. Because without Alma, there would have been no book.

With his pen stalled above the page, Litvinoff remembered the day, early in the summer of 1936, when he’d returned to Slonim after two years away at yeshiva. Everything looked smaller than he remembered. He walked down the street with his hands in his pockets, wearing the new hat he’d bought with money he’d saved, and which he thought lent him an air of worldly experience. Turning onto a street that led away from the square, he felt that much more time had passed than two years. The same chickens were laying eggs in their coops, the same toothless men were arguing over nothing, but somehow everything seemed smaller and shabbier. Litvinoff knew that inside him something had changed. He had become something else. He passed a tree with a hole in the trunk in which he’d once hidden a dirty picture he’d stolen from the desk of his father’s friend. He’d shown it to five or six boys before word got back to his brother, who’d confiscated it for his own purposes. Litvinoff walked toward the tree. And that’s when he saw them. They were standing about ten yards away. Gursky was leaning against a fence, and Alma was leaning against him. Litvinoff watched as Gursky took her face in his hands. She paused, and then lifted her face to meet his. And as Litvinoff watched them kiss, he felt that everything that belonged to him was worthless.

Sixteen years later, he watched as each night another chapter of the book written by Gursky reappeared in his own longhand. For the record, he copied it word for word, except for the names, all but one of which he changed.

CHAPTER 18, he wrote on the eighteenth night. LOVE AMONG THE ANGELS.

HOW ANGELS SLEEP.
Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the Living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude. The first time a girl named
—here Litvinoff paused to crack his knuckles—
Alma puts her hand just below your bottom rib: about this feeling, they have only theories, but no solid ideas. If you gave them a snow globe, they might not even know enough to shake it.

Also, they don’t dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.

At this point, Litvinoff got up to piss, flushing before he was finished in order to see if he could empty his bladder before the bowl refilled with fresh water. Afterwards, he glanced at himself in the mirror, took a pair of tweezers out of the medicine chest, and plucked a stray nose hair. He crossed the hall to the kitchen and rooted around in the cabinet for something to eat. Finding nothing, he put the kettle on to boil, sat down at his desk, and continued copying.

PRIVATE MATTERS
. It’s true that they don’t have a sense of smell, but angels, in their infinite love for the Living, go around smelling everything in emulation. Like dogs, they don’t feel bashful about going up and sniffing each other. Sometimes, when they are unable to sleep, they lie in bed with a nose in their armpits, wondering what they smell like.

Litvinoff blew his nose, crumpled the tissue, and dropped it at his feet.

THE ARGUMENTS BETWEEN ANGELS
. Are eternal and lack hope of solution. This is because they argue about what it means to be among the Living, and because they don’t know they can only speculate, much the way the Living speculate about the nature (or lack thereof)—
here the kettle began to scream
—of God.

Litvinoff got up to make a cup of tea. He opened the window and threw away a bruised apple.

BEING ALONE.
Like the Living, angels sometimes get tired of each other and want to be alone. Because the houses they live in are crowded, and there’s nowhere to go, the only thing an angel can do at such moments is shut his eyes and put his head down on his arms. When an angel does this, the others understand that he is trying to fool himself into feeling alone, and they tiptoe around him. To help things along, they might talk about him as if he weren’t there. If they happen to bump into him by accident, they whisper: “It wasn’t me.”

Litvinoff shook his hand, which had begun to cramp. Then he continued writing:

FOR BETTER OR WORSE.
Angels don’t get married. To begin with they are too busy, and secondly they don’t fall in love with each other. (If you don’t know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?)

Litvinoff paused to imagine Rosa’s smooth hand on his ribs, and was pleased to find that it gave him goose bumps.

The way they live together is not unlike a fresh litter of pups: blind and grateful and denuded. This is not to say that they don’t feel love, because they do; sometimes they feel it so strongly that they think they’re having a panic attack. In these moments, their hearts race uncontrollably and they worry that they are going to throw up. But the love they feel is not for their own kind, but for the Living, who they can neither understand, nor smell, nor touch. It is a general love for the Living (though being general doesn’t make it any less potent). Only from time to time does an angel find in herself a defect that causes her to fall in love, not in general, but in the specific.

On the day Litvinoff reached the last page, he gathered up his friend Gursky’s manuscript, shuffled the pages around, and threw them in the trash bin under the kitchen sink. But Rosa often came over, and it occurred to him that she might find them there. So he took them out again and disposed of them in the metal trash cans behind the house, hidden under a few garbage bags. Then he got ready for bed. But half an hour later, plagued by the fear that someone might find them, he was up again, digging through the bins to retrieve the pages. He stuffed them under his bed and tried to sleep, only the stench of garbage was too bad, so he got up, found a flashlight, took a gardening trowel out of his landlady’s shed, dug a hole next to her white hydrangea, dropped the pages in, and buried them. By the time he got into bed again in his muddy pajamas, the sky was already getting light.

That might have been the last of it, if it weren’t for the fact that every time he saw his landlady’s hydrangea from his window, Litvinoff was reminded of what he wished to forget. When spring arrived, he began to watch the bush obsessively, half expecting it to bloom with the news of his secret. One afternoon he watched in aggravated suspense as his landlady planted some tulips around the base of it. Whenever he would close his eyes to sleep, the huge white flowers would appear in his mind to taunt him. Things only got worse, his conscience tormented him more and more, until the night before he and Rosa were to get married and move to the bungalow on the cliff, Litvinoff got up in a cold sweat, snuck out in the middle of the night, and dug up his burden once and for all. From then on he kept it in a drawer of his desk in the study of the new house, locked with a key he thought he’d hidden.

We always woke at five or six in the morning,
Rosa wrote in the final paragraph of her introduction to the second and last printing of
The History of Love
.
It was a blazing hot January when he died. I wheeled his bed to the open window upstairs. The sun streamed in on us, and he threw back the covers and stripped off everything and got brown in the sun, as we always did every morning, because the nurse came in at eight o’clock, and then the day would become rather hideous. Medical questions, which were not interesting to either of us. Zvi was not in pain. I asked him, “Are you in pain?” And he said, “I’ve never been so comfortable in my life.” And on that morning, we looked out at the sky, which was cloudless and brilliant. Zvi had opened the book of Chinese poems he was reading to a poem he said was for me. It was called “Don’t Set Sail.” It’s very short. It begins,
Don’t set sail! / Tomorrow the wind will have dropped; / And then you can go, / And I won’t trouble about you
. On the morning he died there’d been a tremendous gale, a storm in the garden all night, but when I opened the window there was the clear sky. Not a drop of wind. I turned and called to him. “Darling, the wind has dropped!” And he said, “Then I can go, and you won’t trouble about me?” I thought my heart would stop. But it was true. It was just like that.

But it wasn’t just like that. Not really. The night before Litvinoff died, as the rain pounded on the roof and coursed through the gutters, he’d called out to Rosa. She’d been washing the dishes, and hurried to him. “What is it, darling?” she asked, putting her hand on his forehead. He coughed so hard she thought he was going to spit up blood. When it passed, he said, “There’s something I want to tell you.” She waited, listening. “I—” he began, but the cough returned, sending him into convulsions. “Shh,” Rosa, said, covering his lips with her fingers. “Don’t speak.” Litvinoff took her hand and squeezed it. “I need to,” he said, and for once his body complied and was quiet. “Don’t you see?” he said. “See what?” she asked. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. She was still there, looking at him with tenderness and care. She patted his hand. “I’m going to go make you some tea,” she said, getting up to go. “Rosa!” he called after her. She turned. “I wanted you to love me,” he whispered. Rosa looked at him. He seemed to her, just then, like the child they never had. “And I did love you,” she said, straightening a lampshade. Then she went out the door, closing it softly behind her. And that was the end of the conversation.

It would be convenient to imagine that those were Litvinoff’s last words. But they weren’t. Later that night he and Rosa talked about the rain, and Rosa’s nephew, and whether or not she should buy a new toaster, since the old one had already caught fire twice. But there was no more mention of
The History of Love
, or its author.

Years before, when
The History of Love
had been accepted by a small publishing house in Santiago, the editor had made a few suggestions, and, wanting to be agreeable, Litvinoff tried to make the requested changes. Sometimes he could even almost convince himself that what he was doing wasn’t terrible: Gursky was dead, at least the book would finally be published and read, wasn’t that something? To this rhetorical question, his conscience answered with a cold shoulder. Desperate, not knowing what else to do, that night he also made one change the editor hadn’t asked for. Locking the door to his study, he reached into his breast pocket and unfolded the piece of paper he had been carrying around with him for years. He took a fresh sheet of paper out of his desk drawer. At the top he wrote, CHAPTER 39: THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY. Then he copied the page word for word, and, to the best of his ability, translated it into Spanish.