Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Excuse me, do you know what time it is?

  The beautiful girl didn’t know the time, she was in a hurry, she said, “Good luck,” I smiled, she hurried off, her skirt catching the air as she ran, sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living. In this life, I’m sitting in an airport trying to explain myself to my unborn son, I’m filling the pages of this, my last daybook, I’m thinking of a loaf of black bread that I left out one night, the next morning I saw the outline of the mouse that had eaten through it, I cut the loaf into slices and saw the mouse at each moment, I’m thinking of Anna, I would give everything never to think about her again, I can only hold on to the things I want to lose, I’m thinking of the day we met, she accompanied her father to meet my father, they were friends, they had talked about art and literature before the war, but once the war began, they talked only about war, I saw her approaching when she was still far away, I was fifteen, she was seventeen, we sat together on the grass while our fathers spoke inside, how could we have been younger? We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things, we pulled fistfuls of grass, and I asked her if she liked to read, she said, “No, but there are books that I love, love, love,” she said it just like that, three times, “Do you like to dance?” she asked, “Do you like to swim?” I asked, we looked at each other until it felt like everything would burst into flames, “Do you like animals?” “Do you like bad weather?” “Do you like your friends?” I told her about my sculpture, she said, “I’m sure you will be a great artist.” “How can you be sure?” “I just am.” I told her I already was a great artist, because that’s how unsure of myself I was, she said, “I meant famous,” I told her that wasn’t what mattered to me, she asked what mattered to me, I told her I did it for its own sake, she laughed and said, “You don’t understand yourself,” I said, “Of course I do,” she said, “Of course,” I said, “I do!” She said, “There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself,” she saw through the shell of me into the center of me, “Do you like music?” Our fathers came out of the house and stood at the door, one of them asked, “What are we going to do?” I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I liked chess, I asked her if she liked fallen trees, she went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn’t explain my need to myself, and that’s why it was such a beautiful need, there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself. The next day, I walked half an hour to her house, fearing someone would see me on the road between our neighborhoods, too much to explain that I couldn’t explain, I wore a broad-brimmed hat and kept my head down, I heard the footsteps of those passing me, and I didn’t know if they were a man’s, woman’s, or child’s, I felt as if I were walking the rungs of a ladder laid flat, I was too ashamed or embarrassed to make myself known to her, how would I have explained it, was I walking up the ladder or down? I hid behind a mound of earth that had been dug up to make a grave for some old books, literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it, and if he couldn’t find a worthy recipient, he buried it, I looked for her all day but didn’t see her, not in the yard, not through a window, I promised myself I would stay until I found her, but as night began to come in, I knew I had to go home, I hated myself for going, why couldn’t I be the kind of person who stays? I walked back with my head down, I couldn’t stop thinking about her even though I hardly knew her, I didn’t know what good would come of going to see her, but I knew that I needed to be near her, it occurred to me, as I walked back to her the next day with my head down, that she might not be thinking of me. The books had been buried, so I hid this time behind a group of trees, I imagined their roots wrapped around books, pulling nourishment from the pages, I imagined rings of letters in their trunks, I waited for hours, I saw your mother in one of the second-floor windows, she was just a girl, she looked back at me, but I didn’t see Anna. A leaf fell, it was yellow like paper, I had to go home, and then, the next day, I had to go back to her. I skipped my classes, the walk happened so quickly, my neck strained from hiding my face, my arm brushed the arm of someone passing—a strong, solid arm—and I tried to imagine whom it belonged to, a farmer, a stoneworker, a carpenter, a bricklayer. When I got to her house I hid beneath one of the back windows, a train rattled past in the distance, people coming, people leaving, soldiers, children, the window shook like an eardrum, I waited all day, did she go on some sort of trip, was she on an errand, was she hiding from me? When I came home my father told me that her father had paid another visit, I asked him why he was out of breath, he said, “Things keep getting worse,” I realized that her father and I must have passed each other on the road that morning.

  “What things?” Was his the strong arm I felt brushing past me? “Everything. The world.” Did he see me, or did my hat and lowered head protect me? “Since when?” Perhaps his head was down, too. “Since the beginning.” The harder I tried not to think about her, the more I thought about her, the more impossible it became to explain, I went back to her house, I walked the road between our two neighborhoods with my head down, she wasn’t there again, I wanted to call her name, but I didn’t want her to hear my voice, all of my desire was based on that one brief exchange, held in the palm of our half hour together were one hundred million arguments, and impossible admissions, and silences. I had so much to ask her, “Do you like to lie on your stomach and look for things under the ice?” “Do you like plays?” “Do you like it when you can hear something before you can see it?” I went again the next day, the walk was exhausting, with each step I further convinced myself that she had thought badly of me, or worse, that she hadn’t thought of me at all, I walked with my head bowed, my broad-brimmed cap pushed low, when you hide your face from the world, you can’t see the world, and that’s why, in the middle of my youth, in the middle of Europe, in between our two villages, on the verge of losing everything, I bumped into something and was knocked to the ground. It took me several breaths to gather myself together, at first I thought I’d walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her, and she saw that it was me, “Hello,” I said, brushing myself off, “Hello,” she said. “This is so funny.” “Yes.” How could it be explained? “Where are you going?” I asked. “Just for a walk,” she said, “and you?” “Just for a walk.” We helped each other up, she brushed leaves from my hair, I wanted to touch her hair, “That’s not true,” I said, not knowing what the next words out of my mouth would be, but wanting them to be mine, wanting, more than I’d ever wanted anything, to express the center of me and be understood. “I was walking to see you.” I told her, “I’ve come to your house each of the last six days. For some reason I needed to see you again.” She was silent, I had made a fool of myself, there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself and she started laughing, laughing harder than I’d ever felt anyone laugh, the laughter brought on tears, and the tears brought on more tears, and then I started laughing, out of the most deep and complete shame, “I was walking to you,” I said again, as if to push my nose into my own shit, “because I wanted to see you again,” she laughed and laughed, “That explains it,” she said when she was able to speak. “It?” “That explains why, each of the last six days, you weren’t at your house.” We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?”

  Do you know what time it is?

  He told me it’s 9:38, he looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter? I just told myself the time,
and I’m thinking of your mother, how young and old she is, how she carries around her money in an envelope, how she makes me wear suntan lotion no matter what the weather, how she sneezes and says, “God bless me,” God bless her. She’s at home now, writing her life story, she’s typing while I’m leaving, unaware of the chapters to come. It was my suggestion, and at the time I thought it was a very good one, I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then came home and sat in her big chair and stared at her magazines, not at them but through them, she let the dust accumulate on her shoulders. I pulled my old typewriter from the closet and set her up in the guest room with everything she’d need, a card table for a desk, a chair, paper, some glasses, a pitcher of water, a hotplate, some flowers, crackers, it wasn’t a proper office but it would do, she said, “But it’s a Nothing Place,” I wrote, “What better place to write your life story?” She said, “My eyes are crummy,” I told her they were good enough, she said, “They barely work,” putting her fingers over them, but I knew she was just embarrassed by the attention, she said, “I don’t know how to write,” I told her there’s nothing to know, just let it come out, she put her hands on the typewriter, like a blind person feeling someone’s face for the first time, and said, “I’ve never used one of these before,” I told her, “Just press the keys,” she said she would try, and though I’d known how to use a typewriter since I was a boy, trying was more than I ever could do. For months it was the same, she would wake up at 4 A.M. and go to the guest room, the animals would follow her, I would come here, I wouldn’t see her again until breakfast, and then after work we’d go our separate ways and not see each other until it was time to fall asleep, was I worried about her, putting all of her life into her life story, no, I was so happy for her, I remembered the feeling she was feeling, the exhilaration of building the world anew, I heard from behind the door the sounds of creation, the letters pressing into the paper, the pages being pulled from the machine, everything being, for once, better than it was and as good as it could be, everything full of meaning, and then one morning this spring, after years of working in solitude. She said, “I’d like to show you something.” I followed her to the guest room, she pointed in the direction of the card table in the corner, on which the typewriter was wedged between two stacks of paper of about the same height, we walked over together, she touched everything on the table and then handed me the stack on the left, she said, “My Life.” “Excuse me?” I asked by shrugging my shoulders, she tapped the page, “My Life,” she said again, I riffled the pages, there must have been a thousand of them, I put the stack down, “What is this?” I asked by putting her palms on the tops of my hands and then turning my palms upward, flipping her hands off mine, “My Life,” she said, so proudly, “I just made it up to the present moment. Just now. I’m all caught up with myself. The last thing I wrote was ‘I’m going to show him what I’ve written. I hope he loves it.’” I picked up the pages and wandered through them, trying to find the one on which she was born, her first love, when she last saw her parents, and I was looking for Anna, too, I searched and searched, I got a paper cut on my forefinger and bled a little flower onto the page on which I should have seen her kissing somebody, but this was all I saw:

  I wanted to cry but I didn’t cry, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, or buried under the salt of my evaporated tears, I remembered, just then and far too late, that years before I had pulled the ribbon from the machine, it had been an act of revenge against the typewriter and against myself, I’d pulled it into one long thread, unwinding the negative it held—the future homes I had created for Anna, the letters I wrote without response—as if it would protect me from my actual life. But worse—it’s unspeakable, write it!—I realized that your mother couldn’t see the emptiness, she couldn’t see anything. I knew that she’d had difficulty, I’d felt her grasp my arm when we walked, I’d heard her say, “My eyes are crummy,” but I thought it was a way to touch me, another figure of speech, why didn’t she ask for help, why, instead, did she ask for all of those magazines and papers if she couldn’t see them, was that how she asked for help? Was that why she held so tightly to railings, why she wouldn’t cook with me watching, or change her clothes with me watching, or open doors? Did she always have something to read in front of her so she wouldn’t have to look at anything else? All of the words I’d written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to her at all? “Wonderful,” I told her by rubbing her shoulder in a certain way that we have between us, “it’s wonderful.” “Go ahead,” she said, “Tell me what you think.” I put her hand on the side of my face, I tilted my head toward my shoulder, in the context in which she thought our conversation was taking place that meant, “I can’t read it here like this. I’ll take it to the bedroom, I’ll read it slowly, carefully, I’ll give your life story what it deserves.” But in what I knew to be the context of our conversation it meant, “I have failed you.”

  Do you know what time it is?

  The first time Anna and I made love was behind her father’s shed, the previous owner had been a farmer, but Dresden started to overtake the surrounding villages and the farm was divided into nine plots of land, Anna’s family owned the largest. The walls of the shed collapsed one autumn afternoon—“a leaf too many,” her father joked—and the next day he made new walls of shelves, so that the books themselves would separate inside from outside. (The new, overhanging roof protected the books from rain, but during the winter the pages would freeze together, come spring, they let out a sigh.) He made a little salon of the space, carpets, two small couches, he loved to go out there in the evenings with a glass of whiskey and a pipe, and take down books and look through the wall at the center of the city. He was an intellectual, although he wasn’t important, maybe he would have been important if he had lived longer, maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside. The day Anna and I made love for the first time, he met me in the yard, he was standing with a disheveled man whose curly hair sprang up in every direction, whose glasses were bent, whose white shirt was stained with the fingerprints of his print-stained hands, “Thomas, please meet my friend Simon Goldberg.” I said hello, I didn’t know who he was or why I was being introduced to him, I wanted to find Anna, Mr. Goldberg asked me what I did, his voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street, I told him, “I don’t do anything,” he laughed, “Don’t be so modest,” Anna’s father said. “I want to be a sculptor.” Mr. Goldberg took off his glasses, untucked his shirt from his pants, and cleaned his lenses with his shirttail. “You want to be a sculptor?” I said, “I am trying to be a sculptor.” He put his glasses back on his face, pulling the wire ear-pieces behind his ears, and said, “In your case, trying is being.” “What do you do?” I asked, in a voice more challenging than I’d wanted. He said, “I don’t do anything anymore.” Anna’s father told him, “Don’t be so modest,” although he didn’t laugh this time, and he told me, “Simon is one of the great minds of our age.” “I’m trying,” Mr. Goldberg said to me, as if only the two of us existed. “Trying what?” I asked, in a voice more concerned than I’d wanted, he took off his glasses again, “Trying to be.” While her father and Mr. Goldberg spoke inside the makeshift salon, whose books separated inside from outside, Anna and I went for a walk over the reeds that lay across the gray-green clay by what once was a stall for horses, and down to where you could see the edge of the water if you knew where and how to look, we got mud halfway up our socks, and juice from the fallen fruit we kicked out of our way, from the top of the property we could see the busy train station, the commotion of the war grew nearer and nearer, soldiers went east through our town, and refug
ees went west, or stayed there, trains arrived and departed, hundreds of them, we ended where we began, outside the shed that was a salon. “Let’s sit down,” she said, we lowered ourselves to the ground, our backs against the shelves, we could hear them talking inside and smell the pipe smoke that seeped between the books, Anna started kissing me, “But what if they come out?” I whispered, she touched my ears, which meant their voices would keep us safe. She put her hands all over me, I didn’t know what she was doing, I touched every part of her, what was I doing, did we understand something that we couldn’t explain? Her father said, “You can stay for as long as you need. You can stay forever.” She pulled her shirt over her head, I held her breasts in my hands, it was awkward and it was natural, she pulled my shirt over my head, in the moment I couldn’t see, Mr. Goldberg laughed and said, “Forever,” I heard him pacing in the small room, I put my hand under her skirt, between her legs, everything felt on the verge of bursting into flames, without any experience I knew what to do, it was exactly as it had been in my dreams, as if all the information had been coiled within me like a spring, everything that was happening had happened before and would happen again, “I don’t recognize the world anymore,” Anna’s father said, Anna rolled onto her back, behind a wall of books through which voices and pipe smoke escaped, “I want to make love,” Anna whispered, I knew exactly what to do, night was arriving, trains were departing, I lifted her skirt, Mr. Goldberg said, “I’ve never recognized it more,” and I could hear him breathing on the other side of the books, if he had taken one from the shelf he would have seen everything. But the books protected us. I was in her for only a second before I burst into flames, she whimpered, Mr. Goldberg stomped his foot and let out a cry like a wounded animal, I asked her if she was upset, she shook her head no, I fell onto her, resting my cheek against her chest, and I saw your mother’s face in the second-floor window, “Then why are you crying?” I asked, exhausted and experienced, “War!” Mr. Goldberg said, angry and defeated, his voice trembling: “We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight!” She said, “It hurt.”