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Once, it was a long time ago, I found Bruno lying in the middle
of
the living room floor next to an empty bottle of pills. He'd had
enough.
All he wanted was to sleep forever. Taped to his chest was a
note with
three words:
GOODBYE, MY LOVES. I shouted
out. NO, BRUNO, NO, NO,
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!
I slapped his face. At last his eyes
fluttered open. His
gaze was blank and dull.
WAKE UP, YOU DUMKOP!
I shouted.
LISTEN TO
ME NOW: YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP!
His eyes drifted closed again. I dialed
911. I filled a bowl with cold water and threw it on him. I put
my ear to
his heart. Far off, a vague rustle. The ambulance came. At the
hospital
they pumped his stomach.
Why did you take all those pills?
the doctor asked.
Bruno, sick, exhausted, coolly raised his eyes.
WHY DO YOU THINK I
TOOK ALL THOSE PILLS?
he shrieked. The recovery room turned
silent;
everyone stared. Bruno groaned and turned toward the wall. That
night
I put him to bed.
Bruno,
I said.
So sorry,
he said.
So selfish.
I sighed and
turned to go.
Stay with me! he cried.
We never spoke of it after that. Just as we never spoke of our
childhoods,
of the dreams we shared and lost, of everything that happened
and
didn't happen. Once we were sitting silently together. Suddenly
one of us
began to laugh. It was contagious. There was no reason for our
laughter,
but we began to giggle and the next thing we were rocking in our
seats
and howling,
howling with laughter, tears
streaming down our cheeks. A
wet spot bloomed in my crotch and that made us laugh harder, I
was
banging the table and fighting for air, I thought: Maybe this is
how I'll
go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and
crying, laughing
and singing, laughing so as not to forget that I am alone, that
it is the
end of my life, that death is waiting outside the door for me.
When I was a boy I liked to write. It was the only thing I
wanted to
do with my life. I invented imaginary people and filled
notebooks with
their stories. I wrote about a boy who grew up and got so hairy
people
hunted him for his fur. He had to hide in the trees, and he fell
in love
with a bird who thought she was a three-hundred-pound gorilla. I
wrote
about Siamese twins, one of which was in love with me. I thought
the sex
scenes were purely original. And yet. When I got older I decided
I
wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things.
I wanted to
describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was
too
lonely. I wrote three books before I was twenty-one, who knows
what
happened to them. The first was about Slonim, the town where I
lived
which was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia. I drew a map of
it
for the frontispiece, labeling the houses and shops, here was
Kipnis the
butcher, and here Grodzenski the tailor, and here lived Fishl
Shapiro
who was either a great
tzaddik
or an idiot, no one could decide, and
here
the square and the field where we played, and here was where the
river
got wide and here narrow, and here the forest began, and here
stood
the tree from which Beyla Asch 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 she liked it better when
I made
things up. So I wrote a second book, and I made up everything. I
filled
it with men who grew wings, and trees with their roots growing
into the
sky, people who forgot their own names and people who couldn't
forget
anything; I even made up words. When it was finished I ran all
the way
to her house. I raced through the door, up the stairs, and
handed it to
the only person in Slonim whose opinion I cared about. I leaned
against
the wall and watched her face as she read. It grew dark out, but
she kept
reading. Hours went by. I slid to the floor. She read and read.
When
she finished she looked up. For a long time she didn't speak.
Then she
said maybe I shouldn't make up
everything,
because that made it hard to
believe
anything.
From The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Copyright Nicole Krauss 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the WW.Norton. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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