The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Page A

weeks after his first, postmarked from New York and handwritten on the back of an old black-and-white postcard of a zeppelin. My idea of him evolved. Instead of a cough, I gave him a cane he’d had since a car accident in his early twenties, and decided his sadness was because of his parents who’d left him alone too much as a child, then died, leaving him all of their money. On the back of the postcard, he wrote:
Dear Ms. Singer,
    I was overjoyed to receive your response, and to hear that you’ll be able to begin work on the translation. Please send the details of your bank account, and I’ll wire the first $25,000 immediately. Would you agree to sending me the book in quarters, as you translate it? I hope you’ll forgive my impatience, and attribute it to my anticipation and excitement about finally getting to read Litvinoff’s book, and yours. Also to my fondness for receiving mail, and to extending, for as long as possible, an experience that I expect to move me deeply.
    Yours truly,
J.M.
     
31. EVERY ISRAELITE HOLDS THE HONOR OF HIS ENTIRE PEOPLE IN HIS HANDS
     
The money arrived a week later. To celebrate, my mother took us to a French movie with subtitles about two girls who run away from home. The theater was empty aside from three other people. One of them was the usher. Bird finished his Milk Duds during the opening credits, and tore up and down the aisles in a sugar high until he fell asleep in the front row.
Not long after that, during the first week of April, he climbed up onto the roof at Hebrew School, fell, and sprained his wrist. To console himself, he set up a card table outside the house, and painted a sign that said FRESH LEMON-AID 50 CENTS PLEASE POUR YOURSELF (SPRAINED WRIST) . Rain or shine, he was out there with his pitcher of lemonade and a shoebox for collecting money. When he’d exhausted the clientele on our street, he moved a few blocks away and set up in front of a vacant lot. He started to spend more and more time there. When business was slow, he’d abandon the card table and wander around, playing in the lot. Each time I passed he’d done something to improve it: dragged the rusted fencing off to one side, hacked down the weeds, filled a garbage bag with trash. When it got dark he’d come home with his legs scratched, his kippah lopsided on his head. “What a mess,” he’d say. But when I asked what he was planning to do there, he just shrugged. “A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it,” he told me. “Thank you Mr. Dali Lamed Vovnik. Did Mr. Goldstein tell you that?” “No.” “Well what’s the big use you have for it?” I called after him. Instead of answering, he walked to the doorframe, reached up to touch something, kissed his hand, and went up the stairs. It was a plastic mezuzah; he’d stuck them on every doorframe in the house. There was even one on the door to the bathroom.
The next day I found the third volume of How to Survive in the Wild in Bird’s room. He’d scrawled God’s name in permanent marker across the top of every page. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY NOTEBOOK?” I shouted. He was silent. “YOU RUINED IT.” “No, I didn’t. I was careful—” “Careful? Careful? Who said you could even touch it? Ever heard the word PRIVATE?” Bird stared at the notebook in my hand. “When are you going to start acting like a normal person?” “What’s going on down there?” Mom called from the top of the stairs. “Nothing!” we said together. After a minute we heard her go back to her study. Bird put his arm over his face and picked his nose. “Holy shit, Bird,” I whispered through my teeth. “At least try to be normal. You have to at least try .”
32. FOR TWO MONTHS MY MOTHER HARDLY LEFT THE HOUSE
     
One afternoon, during the last week before summer vacation, I came home from school and found my mother in the kitchen, holding a package addressed to Jacob Marcus at an address in Connecticut. She’d finished translating the first quarter