Free The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Page B

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.”
27. ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
     
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life. When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, “One day you’re going to fall in love.” I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years.
The only boy I’d ever kissed was Misha Shklovsky. His cousin taught him in Russia, where he lived before he moved to Brooklyn, and he taught me. “Not so much tongue,” was all he said.
28. A HUNDRED THINGS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE; A LETTER IS ONE
     
Five months passed and I’d almost given up on finding someone to make my mother happy. Then it happened: in the middle of last February a letter arrived, typed on blue airmail paper and postmarked from Venice, forwarded to my mother from her publisher. Bird saw it first, and brought it to Mom to ask if he could have the stamps. We were all in the kitchen. She opened it and read it standing up. Then she read it a second time, sitting down. “This is amazing,” she said. “What?” I asked. “Someone wrote to me about The History of Love. The book Dad and I named you after.” She read the letter aloud to us.
Dear Ms. Singer,
I just finished your translation of the poems of Nicanor Parra, who, as you say, “wore on his lapel a little Russian astronaut, and carried in his pockets the letters of a woman who left him for another.” It’s sitting here next to me on the table in my room in a pensione overlooking the Grand Canal. I don’t know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find almost impossible to describe, it changed me. But I won’t go on about that. The truth is, I’m writing not to thank you, but to make what might seem like an odd request. In your introduction, you mentioned in passing a little-known writer, Zvi Litvinoff, who escaped from Poland to Chile in 1941, and whose single published work, written in Spanish, is called The History of Love . My question is: would you consider translating it? It would be solely for my personal use; I don’t have any intention of publishing it, and the rights would remain yours if you wished to do so yourself. I’d be willing to pay whatever you think is a fair price for the work. I always find these matters awkward. Could we say, $100,000? There. If that strikes you as too little, please let me know.
I’m imagining your response as you read this letter —which by then will have spent a week or two sitting in this lagoon, then another month riding the chaos of the Italian mail system, before finally crossing the Atlantic and being passed over to the US Post Office, who will have transferred it into a sack to be pushed along in a cart by a mailman who’ll have slugged through rain or snow in order to slip it through your mail slot where it will have dropped to the floor, to wait for you to find it. And having imagined it, I’m prepared for the worst, in which you take me for some sort of lunatic. But maybe it doesn’t need to be that way. Maybe if I tell you that a very long time ago someone once read to me as I was falling asleep a few pages from a book called The History of Love , and that all these years later I haven’t forgotten that night,