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- MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER
She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.
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[...] The door of Eldridge's office was open, and the lights were on. Inside, a very old man with white hair was standing next to a filing cabinet under a poster that said: HENCE WITHOUT PARENTS, BY SPONTANEOUS BIRTH, RISE THE FIRST SPECKS OF ANIMATED EARTH--ERASMUS DARWIN. "Well to be honest I hadn't thought of that option," the old man said into the phone. "I doubt he'd even want to apply. Anyway, I think we already have our man. I'll have to talk to the department, but let's just say things are looking good." He saw me standing at the door and made a gesture that he'd be off in a moment. I was about to say it was OK, I was waiting for Dr. Eldridge, but he turned his back and gazed out the window. "Good, glad to hear it. I better run. Right, then. All the best. 'Bye now." He turned to me. "Terribly sorry," he said. "What can I help you with?" I scratched my arm and noticed the dirt under my fingernails. "You're not Dr. Eldridge are you?" I asked. "I am," he said. My heart sank. Thirty years must have passed since the photograph on the book was taken. I didn't have to think for very long to know that he couldn't help me with the thing I had come about, because even if he deserved a Nobel for being the greatest living paleontologist, he also deserved one for being the oldest.
I didn't know what to say. "I read your book," I managed, "and I'm thinking of becoming a paleontologist." He said: "Well don't sound so disappointed."
lmao
[...] 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 entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition. And no one could accuse him of not being prolific in his chosen metier. Daily, he turned out whole epics of silence. In the beginning it had been difficult. Imagine the burden of keeping silent when your child asks you whether God exists, or the woman you love asks if you love her back. At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.
Even after they arrested him and burned all of his manuscripts, which were all blank pages, he refused to speak. Not even a groan when they gave him a blow to the head, a boot tip in the groin. Only at the last possible moment, as he faced the firing squad, did the writer Babel suddenly sense the possibility of his error. As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There's no match for the silence of God.
wait i love this
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. If they threw me in jail, they'd find out the truth: I'm no Houdini. And yet. In my loneliness it comforts me to think that the world's doors, however closed, are never truly locked to me.
lmao
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 boys, smoking and arguing about books. And yet. By the time I caught sight of him that afternoon, we were no longer friends. We weren't even talking. I walked right past him as if he weren't there.
Just one question, Bruno said now, sixty years later. I always wanted to know.
What?
He coughed. Then he looked up at me. Did she tell you you were a better writer than I?
No, I lied. And then I told him the truth. No one had to tell me.
There was a long silence.
It's strange. I always thought-- He broke off.
What? I said.
I thought we were fighting for something more than her love, he said.
Now it was my turn to look out the window.
What is more than her love? I asked.
moved by this
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 mouths while he gave me a lesson in the Shklovsky school of Russian kissing. Now we'd known each other for two years, the side of my calf was touching his shins, and his stomach was against my ribs. He said, "I don't think it's end of world to be my girlfriend." I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn't, so he leaned down and kissed me.
not sure if there's an intentional reference to Russian formalism or not but this made me laugh
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 lying under a tree, your face splashed with mud. We knew you were free then, unbound by disappointing results. And we buried you in the cemetery where your father was buried, and his father, under the shade of a chestnut tree. Three years later, I lost Mameh. The last time I saw her she was wearing her yellow apron. She was stuffing things in a suitcase, the house was a wreck. She told me to go out into the woods. She'd packed me food, and told me to wear my coat, even though it was July. "Go," she said. I was too old to listen, but like a child I listened. She told me she'd follow the next day. We chose a spot we both knew in the woods. The giant walnut tree you used to like, Tateh, because you said it had human qualities. I didn't bother to say goodbye. I chose to believe what was easier. I waited. But. She never came. Since then I've lived with the guilt of understanding too late that she thought she would have been a burden to me. I lost Fritzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh--someone who knew someone told me he'd last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I'd taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else's. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn't also lose my mind?
My book was nowhere to be found. Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.
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- THE SITUATION
That night while my mother was upstairs translating The History of Love for the man whose name she thought was Jacob Marcus, I finished a book, about a character named Jacob Marcus, by a writer named Isaac Moritz, who was the son of the character Alma Mereminski, who also happened to have been real.
- I SHOULD
Get out more, join some clubs. I should buy some new clothes, dye my hair blue, let Herman Cooper take me on a ride in his father's car, kiss me, and possibly even feel my nonexistent breasts. I should develop some useful skills like public speaking, electric cello, or welding, see a doctor about my stomachaches, find a hero that is not a man who wrote a children's book and crashed his plane, stop trying to set up my father's tent in record time, throw away my notebooks, stand up straight, and cut this habit of answering any question regarding my well-being with a reply fit for a prim English schoolgirl who believes life is nothing but a long preparation for a few finger sandwiches with the Queen.
Today the rain stopped and the firemen took down my ark because they said it was a fire hazard. The way this made me feel was sad. I tried not to cry because Mr. Goldstein says that what G-d does is for the best, and also because Alma said I should try to push down my feelings so that I can have friends. Something else Mr. Goldstein says is What the eyes don't see the heart doesn't feel, but I had to see what happened to the ark because all of a sudden I remembered that I had painted mm on the back, which no one is allowed to throw away. I made Mom call the firemen to ask where they'd put all the pieces. She told me they'd piled them on the sidewalk for the garbage man, so I made her take me there, but the garbage man had already come and everything was gone. Then I cried and kicked a stone and Mom tried to hug me but I wouldn't let her because she shouldn't have let the firemen take down the ark, and also she should have asked me before she threw away everything that belonged to Dad.
lmao