And though Rosa describes how with time she married her dark crow, how her father died and the large house of her childhood with its sweet-smelling gardens was sold and somehow they had money, how they bought a small white bungalow on the cliffs above the water outside Valparaiso, and Litvinoff was able to give up his job at the school for a while and write most afternoons and evenings, she says nothing of Litvinoff’s persistent cough which would often send him out onto the terrace in the middle of the night where he’d stand gazing out at the black water, nothing of his long silences, or the way his hands sometimes shook, or how she was watching him grow old before her eyes, as if time were passing more quickly for him than for everything around him.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
