I just read the best passage I think I’ve ever read in my life.
Since I listen to ~100 books a year you can bet that this is good (edited to be shorter).
Prefer to listen instead of read? here is a link to the passage on Speechify): https://getspeechify.com/share/book/QUNENTA4MEMtMTQ4NS00OTA3LTgwOUYtOEI5MENDNTczNzAw?fbclid=IwAR3DbQHAxI5tC58h18aSsJomDHfTML3ER5S6BUcywB7QCNUr7YEFidhn_Lg)
“I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the delivery boy from the Chinese takeout. I order in four nights out of seven.
Whenever he comes, I make a big production of finding my wallet.
I try to make a point of being seen. Often when I’m out I’ll buy a juice, even if I’m not thirsty. All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.
The days pass slowly.
When I came to America, I knew hardly anyone, only a second cousin who was a locksmith, so I worked for him. If he’d been a shoemaker, I would have been a shoemaker. But he was a locksmith, and that’s what I became.
We had a little business together, and then one year he got TB. They had to cut his liver out, and he got a 106 temperature and died, so I took it over. I went on sending his wife half the profits, even after she married a doctor and moved to Bayside.
Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window-watchers of us all. I reached for the chain on the bulb and suddenly it was as if an elephant had stepped on my heart. I fell to my knees.
Twenty-five per cent of my heart muscle died. It took time to recover, and I never went back to work.
Bruno and I were friends when we were boy When I came to America, I thought he was dead, and then one day I was walking down East Broadway and I heard his voice. I turned around.
He was standing in front of the grocer’s asking the price of some fruit. I thought, You’re hearing things, you’re such a dreamer, what is the likelihood — your boyhood friend?
I stood frozen on the sidewalk. He’s in the ground, I told myself. It’s fifty years later, here you are in the United States of America, there’s McDonald’s, get a grip.
I wouldn’t have recognized his face. But the way he walked was unmistakable — skipping along like a bird. He was about to pass me. I put my arm out and grabbed his sleeve.
“Bruno,” I said. He stopped and turned. At first he seemed scared and then confused. “Bruno,” I said. He looked at me; his eyes filled with tear He touched his hand to my cheek; with the other he held a bag of plum “Bruno.”
[THIS IS WHERE THE GENIUS OF THIS PASSAGE BEGINS]
When I was a boy, I liked to write. I wrote three books before I was twenty-one. The first was about Slonim, the village in Poland where I lived. I drew a map of it for the frontispiece, labelling each house and shop: here was Kipnis the butcher, and here Pinsky the tailor, and here the village square and the field where we played, and here where the forest began, and here stood the tree from which Beyla Asch had hanged herself, and here and here.
And yet. When I gave it to the only person in Slonim whose opinion I cared about, she just shrugged and said maybe it would be better if I made things up. So I wrote a second book, and I filled it with men who grew wings, and trees with their roots growing into the sky, and people who forgot their own names, and people who couldn’t forget anything. When it was finished, I ran all the way to her house. I leaned against a wall and watched her face as she read it.
It got dark outside, but she kept reading. Hours went by. I slid to the floor. When she finished, she looked up. At first she didn’t speak. Then she said that perhaps I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything.
Another person might have given up. I started again. This time I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary thing I wrote about the only thing I knew. I made a book of my love for her. I wrote and I wrote. The pages piled up. I was saying everything for the first time. Even after the only person whose opinion I cared about had left on a boat for America, I continued to fill pages with her name.
After she left, everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn’t fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late.
The Germans pushed east. They got closer and closer. The morning we heard their tanks approaching, my mother told me to hide in the woods. I wanted to take my youngest brother, he was only thirteen, but she said she would take him herself. Why did I listen? Because it was easier? I ran out to the woods. I lay still on the ground. Dogs barked in the distance. Hours went by. And then the shots. So many shot For some reason, they didn’t scream. Or maybe I couldn’t hear their screams. Afterwards, only silence. My body was numb, I remember I tasted blood in my mouth. I don’t know how much time passed. I never went back. When I got up again, I’d shed the only part of me that had ever thought I’d find words for even the smallest bit of life.
And yet. A couple of months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I’d given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone; that was the difference. I knew it would be impossible to find the right words. And because I accepted that what I’d once believed possible was, in fact, impossible, and because I knew that I would never show a page of it to anyone, I wrote a sentence: I fell in love when I was ten.
It remained there, staring up from the otherwise blank page for days. The next week I added another. Soon there was a whole page. It made me happy. Like I said, I was doing it for myself:
Once upon a time there was a boy.
He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists.
Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. They collected the world in small handfuls, and they were never unfair to each other, not once. When the sky grew dark, they parted with burrs in their clothes and leaves in their hair.
When they were ten, he asked her to marry him. When they were eleven, he kissed her for the first time.When they were thirteen, they got into a fight and for three terrible weeks they didn’t talk.When they were fifteen, she showed him the scar on her left breast. Their love was a secret they told no one. He promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. “What if I die?” she asked. “Even then,” he said.
For her sixteenth birthday, he gave her a Polish-English dictionary and together they studied the words. “What’s this?” he’d ask, tracing his index finger around her ankle, and she’d look it up. “And this?” he’d ask, kissing her elbow. “ ‘Elbow’! What kind of word is that?” And then he’d lick it, making her giggle. When they were seventeen, they made love for the first time, on a bed of straw in a shed. Later — when things had happened that they never could have imagined — she wrote him a letter that said, “When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”
Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl whose father was shrewd enough to scrounge together all the zlotys he had to send his youngest daughter on a boat to America. At first she refused to go, but the boy also knew enough to insist, swearing on his life that he’d earn some money and find a way to follow her. So she left.
He got a job as a janitor at a hospital. At night, he stayed up writing his book. He sent her a letter into which he’d copied 11 chapters in tiny hand writing. He wasn’t even sure the mail would get through. He saved as much as he could. One day he got laid off. No one said why.
In the summer of 1941, the Einsatzkommandos drove their armies farther east, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews. On a bright, hot day in July, they entered Slonim.At that hour, the boy happened to be lying on his back in the woods, thinking about the girl. You could say it was his love for her that saved him. In the years that followed, the boy became a man who became invisible. In this way, he escaped death.
Once upon a time the man who had become invisible arrived in America. He had spent three and a half years hiding, mostly in trees but also in cellars and holes. Then the Russian tanks rolled in. For six months, he lived in a displaced-persons camp. He got word to his cousin, who was a locksmith in America. In his head, he practiced over and over the only words he knew in English. Knee. Elbow. Ear.
Finally, his papers came through. He took a train to a boat, and after a week of passage arrived in New York Harbor. Folded in his hand, was the address of the girl.
That night, he lay awake on the floor of his cousin’s room. The radiator clanged and hissed, but he was grateful for the warmth.In the morning, his cousin explained to him three times how to take the subway to Brooklyn. He bought a bunch of roses but they wilted because though his coming had explained the way three times he still got lost. At last he found he place.
Only as his finger pressed her doorbell, did the thought cross his mind that perhaps, he should have called.
She opened the door. She wore a blue scarf over her hair. He could hear the broadcast of a ballgame through the neighbor’s wall.
Once upon a time the woman who had been a girl, got on a boat to America, and threw up all the way, not because she was seasick but because she was pregnant.
When she found out, she wrote to the boy. Every day, she waited for a letter from him, but none came.
She got bigger and bigger. She tried to hide it so as not to lose her job at the dress factory. A few weeks before the baby was born, she got news from someone who heard they were killing jews in Poland. Where she asked? But no one knew where.
She stopped going to work. She couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. After a week, the son of her boss came to see her.He brought her food to eat and put a bouquet of flowers in a vase by her bed. When he found out she was pregnant, he called a midwife. A baby boy was born.
One day, the girl sat up in bed and saw the son of her boss rocking the child in a shaft of sunlight. A few months later, she agreed to marry him.
Two years later, she had another child.
The man who had become invisible stood in her living room, listening to all of this. He was 25 years old.
He had changed so much since she last saw him. And now, part of him wanted to laugh a hard, cold laugh.She gave him a small photograph of the boy, who was now five. Her hand was shaking. She said, “You stopped writing. I thought you were dead.”
He looked at the photograph of the boy who, although the man didn’t know it then, would grow up to look like him, go to college, fall in love, fall out of love, become a famous writer. “What’s his name?” he asked. She said “I called him Isaac.” They stood for a long time in silence as he stared at the picture. At last he managed three words: “Come with me.”
The sound of children shouting rose from the street below. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Come with me,” he said, holding out his hand.
Tears rolled down her face. Three times he asked her.
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. She looked down at the floor. “Please,” she said.
And so, he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
And if the man who once upon a time had promised that he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn, or even loyal. He couldn’t help it. And, having hidden for three and a half years, hiding his love for a son who didn’t even know he existed didn’t seem unthinkable. Not if it was what the only woman he would ever love needed him to do. After all, what does it mean for a man to hide one more thing when he has vanished completely?
I want to say somewhere: I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back.
I slammed the door in people’s faces. I farted where I wanted to fart. I accused cashiers of cheating me out of a penny while holding the penny in my hand. And then one day I realized that I was on my way to being the sort of schmuck who poisons pigeons. People crossed the street to avoid me. I was a human cancer. And to be honest: I wasn’t really angry. Not anymore. I had left my anger somewhere long ago. Put it down on a park bench and walked away. And yet. It had been so long, I didn’t know any other way of being. One day I woke up and said to myself, “It’s not too late.” The first days were strange. I had to practice smiling in front of the mirror. But. It came back to me. It was as if a weight had been lifted. I let go, and something let go of me. A couple of months later, I found Bruno.
I like to read. Once a month, I go to the local library. For myself, I pick a novel and, for Bruno, with his cataracts, a book on tape. At first Bruno was doubtful. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, looking at the box set of “Anna Karenina” as if I’d handed him an enema.
And yet. A day or two later I was going about my business when a voice from above bellowed, “All happy families resemble one another,” nearly giving me a conniption.
After that, he listened to whatever I’d brought him at top volume and then returned it to me without comment. One afternoon, I came back from the library with “Ulysses.” For a month straight he listened. He had a habit of pressing the stop button and rewinding when he hadn’t fully grasped something. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that.” Pause, rewind. “Ineluctable modality of the.” Pause, rewind. “Ineluctable modality.” Pause. “Ineluct.” When the due date approached, he wanted it renewed. By then I’d had it with his stopping and starting, so I went to the Wiz and got him a Sony Sportsman, and now he schleps it around clipped to his belt. For all I know, he just likes the sound of an Irish accent.”
This is an edited excerpt from Nicole Krauss’s “The History of Love”
To listen to the full book get it here on audible.
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