The History of Love (7 page)

Alone in that roomful of books, I held my son’s book in my hands. It was the middle of the night. Past the middle. I thought: Poor Bruno. By now he’s probably called the morgue to find out if anyone brought in an old man with an index card in his wallet that says: MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.

I turned my son’s book over to look at his photograph. We met once. Not met, but stood face to face. It was at a reading at the 92nd Street Y. I bought tickets four months in advance. Many times in my life I’d imagined our meeting. I as his father, he as my son. And yet. I knew it never could happen, not the way I wanted. I’d accepted that the most I could hope for was a place in the audience. But during the reading something came over me. Afterwards, I found myself standing in line, my hands shaking as I pressed into his the scrap of paper on which I’d written my name. He glanced at it and copied it into a book. I tried to say something but there was no sound. He smiled and thanked me. And yet. I didn’t budge.
Is there something else?
he asked. I flapped my hands. The woman behind me gave me an impatient look and pushed forward to greet him. Like a fool I flapped. What could he do? He signed the woman’s book. It was uncomfortable for everyone. My hands danced on. The line had to move around me. Occasionally he looked up at me, bewildered. Once, he smiled at me the way you smile at an idiot. But my hands fought to tell him everything. At least as much as they could before a security guard firmly grasped my elbow and escorted me out the door.

It was winter. Fat white flakes drifted down under the street lamps. I waited for my son to come out but he never came. Maybe there was a back door, I don’t know. I took the bus home. I walked down my snow-covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren’t there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed. That night before I went to sleep, I opened the book, which I’d put on my bedside table. TO LEON GURSKY
,
it said.

I was still holding the book when the man whose door I’d unlocked came up behind me.
You know it?
he asked. I dropped it and it landed with a thud at my feet, my son’s face staring up. I didn’t know what I was doing. I tried to explain.
I’m his father,
I said. Or maybe I said:
He’s my son.
Whatever it was, I got the point across because the man looked shocked and then he looked surprised and then he looked like he didn’t believe me. Which was fine with me, because after all who did I think I was, showing up in a limousine, picking a lock, and then claiming to be the progenitor of a famous writer?

Suddenly I was tired, more tired than I’d been in years. I leaned over, picked the book up, and put it back on the shelf. The man kept looking at me, but just then the car honked outside which was lucky because I’d had enough of being looked at for one day.
Well,
I said, making my way toward the front door,
I’d better be going.
The man reached for his wallet, took out a hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to me.
His father?
he asked. I pocketed the money and handed him a complimentary peppermint. I stuffed my feet into my wet shoes.
Not really his father
, I said. And because I didn’t know what else to say, I said:
More like his uncle
. This seemed to confuse him enough, but just in case I added:
Not exactly his uncle.
He raised his eyebrows. I picked up my toolbox and stepped out into the rain. He tried to thank me again for coming but I was already on my way down the stairs. I got into the car. He was still standing in the doorway, looking out. To prove that I was off my rocker, I gave him the Queen’s wave.

It was three in the morning when I got home. I climbed into bed. I was exhausted. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back, listening to the rain and thinking about my book. I’d never given it a title, because what does a book need with a title unless someone is going to read it?

I got out of bed and went to the kitchen. I keep my manuscript in a box in the oven. I took it out, set it on the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. For a long time I sat looking at the blank page. With two fingers I picked out a title:

LAUGHING & CRYING

I studied it for a few minutes. It wasn’t right. I added another word.

LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING

Then another:

LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING & WAITING

I crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on the floor. I put the water on to boil. Outside the rain had stopped. A pigeon cooed on the windowsill. It puffed up its body, marched back and forth, and took flight. Free as a bird, so to speak. I fed another page into the machine and typed:

WORDS FOR EVERYTHING

Before I could change my mind again, I rolled it out, laid it on top of the stack, and closed the lid of the box. I found some brown paper and packaged it up. On the front I wrote my son’s address, which I know by heart.

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. No wind that swept everything away. No heart attack. No angel at the door.

It was five in the morning. It would be hours before the post office opened. To pass the time, I dragged the slide projector out from under the sofa. It’s something I do on special occasions, my birthday, say. I prop the projector up on a shoebox, plug it in, and flip the switch. A dusty beam lights up the wall. The slide I keep in a jar on the kitchen shelf. I blow on it, drop it in, advance. The picture comes into focus. A house with a yellow door at the edge of a field. It’s the end of autumn. Between the black branches the sky is turning orange, then dark blue. Wood smoke rises from the chimney, and through the window I can almost see my mother leaning over a table. I run toward the house. I can feel the cold wind against my cheeks. I reach out my hand. And because my head is full of dreams, for a moment I believe I can open the door and go right through it.

Outside, it was already getting light. Before my eyes, the house of my childhood dissolved to almost nothing. I turned off the projector, ate a Metamucil bar, and went to the bathroom. When I did all I was going to do, I gave myself a sponge bath and dug through the closet for my suit. I found the galoshes I’d been looking for, and an old radio. At last, crumpled on the floor, the suit, a white summer suit, passable if you ignored the brownish stain down the front. I dressed myself. I spat into my palm and forced my hair into submission. I sat fully dressed with the brown paper package on my lap. I checked and rechecked the address. At 8:45 I put my raincoat on and tucked the package under my arm. I looked at myself in the hall mirror one last time. Then I went out the door and into the morning.

MY MOTHER’S SADNESS

1. MY NAME IS ALMA SINGER

When I was born my mother named me after every girl in a book my father gave her called
The History of Love
. She named my brother Emanuel Chaim after the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who buried milk cans filled with testimony in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Jewish cellist Emanuel Feuermann, who was one of the great musical prodigies of the twentieth century, and also the Jewish writer of genius Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, and her uncle Chaim, who was a joker, a real clown, made everyone laugh like crazy, and who died by the Nazis. But my brother refused to answer to it. When people asked him his name, he made something up. He went through fifteen or twenty names. For a month he referred to himself in the third person as Mr. Fruit. On his sixth birthday he took a running leap out of a second-floor window and tried to fly. He broke his arm and got a permanent scar on his forehead, but from then on nobody ever called him anything but Bird.

2.
WHAT I AM NOT

My brother and I used to play a game. I’d point to a chair. “THIS IS NOT A CHAIR,” I’d say. Bird would point to the table. “THIS IS NOT A TABLE.” “THIS IS NOT A WALL,” I’d say. “THAT IS NOT A CEILING.” We’d go on like that. “IT IS NOT RAINING OUT.” “MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!” Bird would yell. I’d point to my elbow. “THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE.” Bird would lift his knee. “THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!” “THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!” “NOT A CUP!” “NOT A SPOON!” “NOT DIRTY DISHES!” We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: “I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!” “But you’re only seven,” I said.

3.
MY BROTHER BELIEVES IN GOD

When he was nine and a half, he found a little red volume called
The Book of Jewish Thoughts
inscribed to our father, David Singer, on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah. In it, Jewish thoughts are gathered under subheadings such as “Every Israelite Holds the Honor of His Entire People in His Hands,” “Under the Romanoffs,” and “Immortality.” Soon after he found it, Bird started to wear a black velvet
kippah
around everywhere, not caring that it didn’t fit right and puffed up in the back giving him a dopey look. He also got in the habit of following Mr. Goldstein, the janitor at Hebrew School who mumbled in three languages, and whose hands left behind more dust than they cleaned away. There were rumors that Mr. Goldstein slept only an hour a night in the basement of the shul, that he had been in a labor camp in Siberia, that his heart was weak, that a loud noise could kill him, that snow made him cry. Bird was drawn to him. He followed him around after Hebrew School while Mr. Goldstein vacuumed between the rows of seats, cleaned the toilets, and rubbed curses off the blackboard. It was Mr. Goldstein’s job to take out of circulation the old
siddur
s that were torn or ripped, and one afternoon, with two crows as big as dogs watching from the trees, he pushed a wheelbarrow full of them out behind the synagogue, bumping over rocks and tree roots, dug a hole, said a prayer, and buried them. “Can’t just throw them away,” he told Bird. “Not if it has on it God’s name. Has to be buried properly.”

The next week Bird started to write the four Hebrew letters of the name no one is allowed to pronounce and no one is allowed to throw away on the pages of his homework. A few days later I opened the hamper and found it written in permanent marker on the label of his underwear. He wrote it in chalk across our front door, scribbled it across his class photograph, on the bathroom wall, and, before it came to an end, carved it with my Swiss Army knife as high as he could reach on the tree in front of our house.

Maybe it was because of that, or his habit of putting his arm over his face and picking his nose as if people couldn’t tell what he was doing, or the way he sometimes made strange noises like a video game, but that year the couple of friends he’d had stopped coming by to play.

Every morning he wakes early to
daven
outside, facing Jerusalem. When I watch him from the window, I regret having taught him to sound out the Hebrew letters when he was only five. It makes me sad, knowing it can’t last.

4.
MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS SEVEN

What I remember, I remember in parts. His ears. The wrinkled skin on his elbows. The stories he used to tell me about his childhood in Israel. How he used to sit in his favorite chair listening to music, and liked to sing. He spoke to me in Hebrew, and I called him
Abba.
I’ve forgotten almost everything, but sometimes words will come back to me,
kum-kum
,
shemesh, chol, yam, etz, neshika, motek,
their meanings worn off like the faces of old coins. My mother, who is English, met him while she was working on a kibbutz not far from Ashdod, the summer before she started Oxford. He was ten years older than she was. He’d been in the army, and afterwards traveled through South America. Then he went back to school and became an engineer. He liked to camp outside, and always kept a sleeping bag and two gallons of water in his trunk, and could start a fire with a piece of flint if he had to. He picked my mother up on Friday nights while the other kibbutzniks lay on blankets under a giant movie screen on the grass, petting dogs and getting high. He drove her to the Dead Sea where they floated strangely.