The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

  They were written in Yiddish. Later, with Rosa’s help, Litvinoff would translate them into Spanish. The original Yiddish manuscript, written in longhand, was lost when the Litvinoffs’ house was flooded while they were away in the mountains. All that remains is a single page that Rosa rescued from where it was floating on the surface of the water that had reached the height of two feet in Litvinoff’s study. At the bottom I caught sight of the gold cap of the pen he always carried in his pocket, she writes, and had to plunge my arm in up to the shoulder to reach it. The ink had run, and in some places the writing was illegible. But the name he had given her in his book, the name that belonged to every woman in the History, could still be made out in Litvinoff’s sloping handwriting at the bottom of the page.

  Unlike her husband, Rosa Litvinoff wasn’t a writer, and yet the introduction is guided along by a natural intelligence, and shadowed throughout, almost intuitively, with pauses, suggestions, ellipses, whose total effect is of a kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination. She describes the open window and how Litvinoff’s voice trembled with feeling as he read to her from the beginning, but says nothing about the room itself—which we are left to assume must have been Litvinoff’s, with the drafting table that had once belonged to his landlady’s son and into the corner of which was carved the words of the most important of all Jewish prayers, Shema yisrael adonai elohanu adonai echad, so that every time Litvinoff sat down to write at its sloped surface he would consciously or unconsciously utter a prayer—nothing of the narrow bed in which he slept, or the socks he’d washed and wrung out the night before, now draped like two exhausted animals over the back of a chair, nothing of the single framed photograph, turned at an angle so that it faced the peeling wallpaper (which Rosa must have looked at when Litvinoff excused himself to go down the hall to the bathroom), of a boy and a girl standing with their arms hanging stiffly by their sides, hands clasped, knees bare, stalled in place, while out the window, seen in the far corner of the frame, the afternoon was slowly getting away from them. And though Rosa describes how with time she married her dark crow, how her father died and the large house of her childhood with its sweet-smelling gardens was sold and somehow they had money, how they bought a small white bungalow on the cliffs above the water outside Valparaíso, and Litvinoff was able to give up his job at the school for a while and write most afternoons and evenings, she says nothing of Litvinoff’s persistent cough which would often send him out onto the terrace in the middle of the night where he’d stand gazing out at the black water, nothing of his long silences, or the way his hands sometimes shook, or how she was watching him grow old before her eyes, as if time were passing more quickly for him than for everything around him.

  As for Litvinoff himself, we know only what is written on the pages of the one book he wrote. He kept no diary and wrote few letters. Those he did write were either lost or destroyed. Aside from a few shopping lists and personal notes and the single page of the Yiddish manuscript Rosa managed to salvage from the flood, there is only one known surviving letter, a postcard from 1964 addressed to a nephew in London. By then, the History had been published in a modest run of a couple of thousand copies, and Litvinoff was teaching again, this time—because of the bit of esteem gained from his recent publication—a course on literature at the university. The postcard can be viewed in a display case lined with worn blue velvet in the dusty museum of the city’s history that is almost always closed when anybody thinks to visit it. On the back it says, simply:

  Dear Boris,

  I was so happy to hear that you’d passed the exams. Your mother, may her memory be a blessing, would be so proud. A real doctor! You’ll be busier now than ever, but if you want to visit there is always the extra room. Stay for as long as you like. Rosa is a good cook. You could sit by the sea and turn it into a real vacation. How about girls? Just a question. You should never be too busy for that. Sending my love and congratulations.

  Zvi

  The front of the postcard, a hand-colored photo of the sea, is reproduced on the wall placard, along with the words, Zvi Litvinoff, author of The History of Love, was born in Poland, and lived in Valparaíso for thirty-seven years until his death in 1978. This postcard was written to his oldest sister’s son, Boris Perlstein. In smaller letters, printed in the lower left corner, it says: Gift of Rosa Litvinoff. What it does not say is that his sister, Miriam, was shot in the head by a Nazi officer in the Warsaw Ghetto, or that aside from Boris, who escaped on a kindertransport and lived out the remaining years of the War, and his childhood, in an orphanage in Surrey, and later Boris’s children, who were at times smothered by the desperation and fear that accompanied their father’s love, Litvinoff had no surviving relatives. It also doesn’t say that the postcard was never sent, but any observant viewer can see that the stamp isn’t canceled.

  What is not known about Zvi Litvinoff is endless. It is not known, for example, that on his first and last trip to New York City in the fall of 1954—where Rosa insisted they go to show some editors his manuscript—he pretended to get lost from his wife in a crowded department store, wandered outside, crossed the street, and stood blinking in the sunlight in Central Park. That while she searched for him among the displays of stockings and leather gloves, he was walking through an avenue of elm trees. That by the time Rosa found a manager and an announcement was made over the loudspeaker—Mr Z Litvinoff, calling Mr Z Litvinoff. Would you please meet your wife in Ladies’ Footwear—he had reached a pond, and was watching as a boat rowed by a young couple floated towards the reeds behind which he was standing, and the girl, thinking she was hidden, unbuttoned her shirt to reveal two white breasts. That the sight of these breasts had filled Litvinoff with regret, and he hurried back through the park to the department store, where he found Rosa—her face flushed and her hair damp at the nape of her neck—talking to a pair of policemen. That when she threw her arms around him, telling him he’d scared her half to death and asking where on earth he’d been, Litvinoff answered that he had gone to the bathroom and gotten locked inside the stall. That later, in a hotel bar, the Litvinoffs met the one editor who would agree to see them, a nervous man with a thin laugh and nicotine-stained fingers who told them that though he liked the book very much, he could not publish it because no one would buy it. As a token of his appreciation, he made them a gift of a book his publishing house had just brought out. After an hour he excused himself saying he had a dinner to attend, and hurried out, leaving the Litvinoffs with the check.

  That night, after Rosa had fallen asleep, Litvinoff locked himself in the bathroom for real. He did this almost every night because he was embarrassed that his wife should have to smell his business. While he sat on the toilet, he read the first page of the book the editor had given them. Also, he cried.

  It is not known that Litvinoff’s favorite flower was the peony. That his favorite form of punctuation was the question mark. That he had terrible dreams and could only fall asleep, if he could fall asleep at all, with a glass of warm milk. That he often imagined his own death. That he thought the woman who loved him was wrong to. That he was flat-footed. That his favorite food was the potato. That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, “Good day,” Litvinoff often paused so long to weigh the evidence that by the time he’d settled on an answer the person had gone on his way, leaving him standing alone. These things were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.

  A few months after the book was published by a small publishing house in Santiago, Litvinoff received a package in the mail. At the moment the postman rang the bell, Litvinoff’s pen had been poised above a blank piece of paper, his eyes watery with revelation, filled wit
h the feeling that he was on the verge of understanding the essence of something. But when the bell rang the thought was lost, and Litvinoff, ordinary again, dragged his feet down the dark hallway and opened the door where the mailman stood in the sunlight. “Good day,” the mailman said, handing him a large, neatly wrapped brown envelope, and Litvinoff did not have to weigh the evidence for long to come to the conclusion that while a moment ago the day had verged on being excellent, more than he could have hoped for, it suddenly had changed like the direction of a squall on the horizon. This was further confirmed when Litvinoff opened the package and found the typeset of The History of Love, along with the following brief note from his publisher: The enclosed dead matter is no longer needed by us and is being returned to you. Litvinoff winced, not knowing it was a custom to return the galley proofs to the author. He wondered if this would affect Rosa’s opinion of the book. Not wanting to find out, he burned the note along with the matter, watching the embers sputter and curl in the fireplace. When his wife returned from her shopping, threw open the windows to let in the light and fresh air, and asked why he’d lit a fire on such a beautiful day, Litvinoff shrugged and complained of a chill.

  Of the two thousand original copies printed of The History of Love, some were bought and read, many were bought and not read, some were given as gifts, some sat fading in bookstore windows serving as landing docks for flies, some were marked up with pencil, and a good many were sent to the paper compactor, where they were shredded to a pulp along with other unread or unwanted books, their sentences parsed and minced in the machine’s spinning blades. Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.

  He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love (there was a flare of interest following Litvinoff’s death, and the book was briefly returned to print with Rosa’s introduction), at least one copy was destined to change a life—more than one life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. By then, Borges was completely blind and had no reason to visit the bookshop—because he could no longer read, and because over the course of his life he’d read so much, memorized such vast portions of Cervantes, Goethe, and Shakespeare, that all he had to do was sit in the darkness and reflect. Often visitors who loved the writer Borges would look up his address and knock on his door, but when they were shown in they’d find the reader Borges, who would lay his fingers on the spines of his books until he located the one he wished to hear, and would hand it to the visitor, who had no choice but to sit and read it aloud to him. Occasionally he left Buenos Aires to travel with his friend María Kodama, dictating to her his thoughts on the felicity of a hot air balloon ride or the beauty of the tiger. But he did not visit the secondhand bookstore, even though while he could still see, he had been on friendly terms with the owner.

  The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called “The Age of Silence”:

  The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

  During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

  Aside from one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of seventy-nine fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for Sometimes when the rain, another for After all these years, another for Was I wrong to love you? They were found in Morocco in 1903 by an Argentine doctor named Antonio Alberto de Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever of the dysentery that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fists and fingers trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to a hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.

  If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms—if you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body—it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

  The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvino
ff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it.

  The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window.