NicolasKrauss_HistoryofLove

LAUGHING & CRYING

I studied it for a few minutes. I added another word.

LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING

Then another:

LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING & WAITING

I crumpled it into a ball and dropped it on the floor. I put the water on to boil. Outside the rain had stopped. A pigeon cooed on the windowsill. It puffed its body, marched back and forth, and took flight. Free as a bird, so to speak. I fed another page into the machine and I typed:

WORDS FOR EVERYTHING

Before I could change my mind again, I rolled it out, laid it on top of the stack, and closed the lid of the box. I found some brown paper and packaged it up. On the front I wrote my son's address, which I know by heart. I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. No wind that swept everything away. No heart attack. No angel at the door. It was five in the morning. It would be hours before the post office opened. To pass the time, I dragged the slide projector out from under the sofa. It's something I do on special occasions, my birthday, say. I prop the projector up on a shoebox, plug it in, and flip the switch. A dusty beam lights up the wall. The slide I keep in a jar on the kitchen shelf. I blow on it, drop it in, advance. The picture comes into focus. A house with a yellow door at the edge of a field. It's the end of autumn. Between the black branches the sky is turning orange, then dark blue. Wood smoke rises from the chimney, and through the window I can almost see my mother leaning over a table. I run toward the house. I can feel the cold wind against my cheeks. I reach out my hand. And because my head is full of dreams, for a moment I believe I can open the door and go right through it. Outside, it was already getting light. Before my eyes, the house of my childhood dissolved to almost nothing. I turned off the projector, ate a Metamucil bar, and went to the bathroom. When I did all I was going to do, I gave myself a sponge bath and dug through the closet for my suit. I found the galoshes I'd been looking for, and an old radio. At last, crumpled on the floor, the suit, a white summer suit, passable if you ignored the brownish stain down the front. I dressed myself. I spat into my palm and forced my hair into submission. I sat fully dressed with the brown paper package on my lap. I checked and rechecked the address. At 8:45 I put my raincoat on and tucked the package under my arm. I looked at myself in the hall mirror one last time. Then I went out the door and into the morning.

MY MOTHER'S SADNESS

1. MY NAME IS ALMA SINGER When I was born my mother named me after every girl in a book my father gave her called The History of Love. She named my brother Emanuel Chaim after the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who buried milk cans filled with testimony in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Jewish cellist Emanuel Feuermann, who was one of the great musical prodigies of the twentieth century, and also the Jewish writer of genius Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, and her uncle Chaim, who was a joker, a real clown, made everyone laugh like crazy, and who died by the Nazis. But my brother refused to answer to it. When people asked him his name, he made something up. He went through fifteen or twenty names. For a month he referred to himself in the third person as Mr. Fruit. On his sixth birthday he took a running leap out of a second-floor window and tried to fly. He broke his arm and got a permanent scar on his forehead, but from then on nobody ever called him anything but Bird.

2. WHAT I AM NOT My brother and I used to play a game. I'd point to a chair. "THIS IS NOT A CHAIR," I'd say. Bird would point to the table. "THIS IS NOT A TABLE." "THIS IS NOT A WALL," I'd say. "THAT IS NOT A CEILING." We'd go on like that. "IT IS NOT RAINING OUT." "MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!" Bird would yell. I'd point to my elbow. "THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE." Bird would lift his knee. "THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!" "THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!" "NOT A CUP!" "NOT A SPOON!" "NOT DIRTY DISHES!" We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said.