Activity

And now it's too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, in the spring of 1938, on a rainy day that gave way to a break in the clouds, I lost you. You'd gone out to collect specimens for a theory you were hatching about rainfall, instinct, and butterflies. And then you were gone. We found you lyi…

On the other side of the wall, Misha's mother shouted something at his father. Misha propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me. I thought of the time, the summer before, when we were thirteen and stood on the roof of his building, the tar soft under our feet, our tongues in each other's…

It came back to me then. That day, sixty years ago, when I'd left her house in tears and caught sight of him standing against a tree holding a notebook, waiting to go to her after I'd gone. A few months earlier, we'd been the closest of friends. We'd stay up half the night with a couple of other bo…

I never did it again. I'd proven it to myself, and that was enough. From time to time I'd find myself passing the entrance of a certain private club, I won't name names, and I'd think to myself, Shalom, shit-heads, here's a Jew you can't keep out. But after that night, I never pushed my luck again.…

[...] Across the top it said: THE DEATH OF ISAAC BABEL.

Only after they charged him with the crime of silence did Babel discover how many kinds of silences existed. When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. When he read a book he gave himself over entir…