The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Author:Nicole Krauss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2011-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

Sometimes Litvinoff found himself disagreeing with someone’s argument, and in his head he delivered a brilliant rebuttal.

One night he heard a voice behind him: “Must be a good article—you’ve been reading it for the last half hour.” Litvinoff jumped, and when he looked up, the familiar face of his old childhood friend was smiling down at him. They embraced, and took in the slight changes time had enacted on the other’s appearance. Litvinoff had always felt a certain affinity with this friend, and he was anxious to know what he’d been doing the last few years. “Working, like everyone else,” his friend said, pulling up a chair. “And your writing?” Litvinoff asked. His friend shrugged. “It’s quiet at night. No one bothers me. The landlord’s cat comes and sits on my lap. Usually I fall asleep at my desk, and wake when the cat stalks off at the first sign of daylight.” And then, for no reason, they both laughed.

From then on, they met every evening at the café. With growing horror they discussed the movements of Hitler’s armies and the rumored actions being taken against the Jews until they became too depressed to speak. “But perhaps something more cheerful,” his friend would finally say, and Litvinoff would happily change the subject, eager to test out one of his philosophical theories on his old friend, or to run by him a new fast-cash plan involving ladies’ stockings and the black market, or to describe the pretty girl who lived across the street from him. His friend, in turn, occasionally showed Litvinoff bits of what he was working on. Small things, a paragraph here and there. But Litvinoff was always moved. With the first page he read, he recognized that, in the time since they had been schoolboys together, his friend had grown into a real writer.

A few months later, when it was learned that Isaac Babel had been killed by Moscow’s secret police, it fell to Litvinoff to write the obituary. It was an important assignment and he worked hard on it, trying to strike the right tone for a great writer’s tragic death. He didn’t leave the office until midnight, but as he walked home through the cold night he smiled to himself, believing the obituary was one of his finest. So often the material he had to work with was thin and paltry, and he had to patch something together with a few superlatives, clichés, and false notes of glory in order to commemorate the life, and bolster a sense of loss over the death. But not this time. This time it had been necessary to rise to the material, to struggle to find words for a man who had been a master of words, who had devoted his entire existence to resisting the cliché in the hope of introducing to the world a new way of thinking and writing; a new way, even, of feeling. And whose reward for his labors was death by firing squad.

The next day it appeared in the newspaper.

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