Love and War and all the Things in between

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I'm nearing the end of Everything is Illuminated. There is a chapter dedicated to Jonathan's grandfather (Safran) and the Gypsy girl he loves but doesn't love. He is Jewish and has a dead right arm, she is a snake charmer, their love is forbidden, especially for him.

They exchanged notes, like children. My grandfather made his out of newspaper clippings and dropped them in her woven baskets, into which he knew only she would dare stick a hand. Meet me under the wooden bridge, and I will show you things you have never, ever seen. [This is what she told him the first time they met, sitting next to each other in a dark theater.] The "M" was taken from the army that would take his mother's life: GERMAN FRONT ADVANCES ON SOVIET BORDER; the "eet" from their approaching warships: NAZI FLEET DEFEATS FRENCH AT LESACS; the "me" from the peninsula they were blue-eyeing: GERMANS SURROUND CRIMEA; the "und" from too little, too late: AMERICAN WAR FUNDS REACH ENGLAND; the "er" from the dog of dogs: HITLER RENDERS NONAGGRESSION PACT INOPERATIVE ... an so on, on so on, each note a collage of love that could never be, and war that could.

The Gypsy girl carved love letters into trees, filling the forest with notes for him. Do not forsake me, she removed from the bark of a tree in whose shade they had once fallen asleep. Honor me, she carved into the trunk of a petrified oak. She was composing a new list of commandments, commandments they could share, that would govern a life together, and not apart. Do not have any other loves before me in your heart. Do not take my name in vain. Do not kill me. Observe me, and keep be holy.

I'd like to be wherever you are in ten years, he wrote her, gluing clips of newspaper headlines to a piece of yellow paper. Isn't that a nice idea?

A very nice idea, he found on a tree at the fringe of the forest. And why is it only an idea?

Because -- the print stained his hands; he read himself on himself -- ten years is a long time from now.

We would have to run away, carved in a circle around a maple's trunk. We would have to leave behind everything but each other.

Which is possible, he composed the fragments of the news of imminent war. It's a nice idea, anyway.

....

For all of his liaisons, for all of the women who would undress for him at the show of his dead arm, he had no other friends, and could imagine no loneliness worse than an existence without her. She was the only one who could rightly claim to know him, the only one he missed when she was not there, and missed even before she was absent. She was the only one who wanted more of him than his arm.

I don't love you, he told her one evening as they lay naked in the grass.

She kissed his brow and said, I know that. And I'm sure you know that I don't love you.

Of course, he said, although it came as a great surprise -- not that she didn't love him, but that she would say it. In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women had said I love you without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that stranger didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

My parents have arranged a marriage, he said.

For you?

With a girl named Zosha. From my shtetl. I'm seventeen.

And do you love her? she asked without looking at him.

He broke his life into its smallest constituent parts, examined each, like a watchmaker, and then reassembled it.

I hardly know her. He also avoided eye contact, because like Pincher P. who lived in the streets as a charity case, having donated even his last coin to the poor, his eyes would have given away everything.

Are you going to go through with it? she asked, drawing circles in the earth with her caramel fingers.

I don't have a choice, he said.

Of course.

She would not look at him.

You will have such a happy life, she said. You will always be happy.

Why are you doing this?

Because you are so lucky. Real and lasting happiness is within your reach.

Stop, he said. You're not being fair.

I would like to meet her.

No you wouldn't

Yes I would. What's her name? Zosha? I would like very much to meet Zosha and tell her how happy she will be. What a lucky-girl. She must be very beautiful.

I don't know.

You've seen her, haven't you?

Yes.

Then you know if she's beautiful. Is she beautiful?

I guess.

More beautiful than I am?

Stop.

I would like to attend the wedding, to see for myself. Well, not the wedding, of course. A Gypsy girl couldn't enter the synagogue. The reception, though. You are going to invite me, aren't you?

You know that isn't possible, he said, turning away.

I know it isn't possible, she said, knowing that she had pushed it too far, been too cruel.

It isn't possible.

I told you: I know.

But you have to believe me.

I do.

They made love for the last time, unaware that the next seven months would pass without any words between them. He would see her many times, and she him -- they had come to haunt the same places, to walk the same paths, to fall asleep in the shade of the same trees -- but they would never acknowledge each other's existence. They both wanted badly to go back seven years to their first encounter, at the theater, and do it all again, but this time not to notice each other, not to talk, not to leave theater, she leading him by his dead right arm through a maze of muddy alleys, past the confectioners' stands by the old cemetery, down the Jewish/Human fault line, and so on and so on into the blackness. For seven months they would ignore each other at the bazaar, at the Dial, and at the fountain of the prostrate mermaid, and they were sure they could ignore each other anywhere and always, sure they could be complete strangers, but where proven wrong when he returned home one afternoon from work only to pass her on her way out of his house.

What are you doing here? he asked, more afraid that she had revealed their relationship -- to his father, who would surely beat him, or his mother, who would be so disappointed -- than curious as to why she was there.

Your books are arranged by the color of their spines, she said. How stupid.