Heroic love wears the faces of sustenance and grief in Danny Scheinmann’s debut novel, “Random Acts of Historic Love.” Two seemingly unrelated narratives play out in contrapuntal rhythm, their connection gradually revealed.
Leo Deakin awakes in an Ecuadorean hospital, in April 1992, to tragedy. The English postgraduate student and his Greek girlfriend, Eleni, have been traveling through Latin America. But there has been a bus accident, and Eleni is dead.
The subsequent days unfold with the unreality of a waking nightmare. Once released from the hospital, Leo must make arrangements for shipping the body back to Greece.
Scheinmann quietly captures the details of what will become Leo’s new reality. When Leo returns to the room he shared with Eleni, to select his lover’s burial clothes, “He went to the wardrobe and pulled out her favorite top; a short-sleeved pale blue cotton shirt with flowers embroidered around the neckline. He brought it to his nostrils and breathed in deeply, and for a moment there she was, with her arms wrapped around his neck, kissing him.”
He cannot get his emotions around the fact that Eleni is gone. In his dreams, “Eleni is alive, she returns to play with him, and the nightmare is so real that he actually believes it to be true.”
Leo returns to London and to his studies, enveloped in a grief that is further complicated by guilt. He holds close the feeling that his decision to sit at the front of the bus cost Eleni her life. His life spirals down, to a point of delusion. He sees Eleni everywhere, talking to birds and insects as though her soul inhabits the bodies of the smaller animals. He cannot be reached, not by his parents and not by his friends.
The narrative of Moritz Daniecki, talking to his son Fischel, offsets Leo’s story. It’s set in Berlin, three weeks after Kristallnacht, and while it isn’t clear why Fischel isn’t speaking to his father, it is very clear that Moritz doesn’t have long to live. And that he has an exceptional story to share with his son.
Moritz and Lottie are teens in love in 1914, in the town of Ulanow, in the Ukraine. Lottie is the daughter of a furrier, Moritz the son of a cobbler and the two are as separated by class as they are determined to be together.
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand ignites World War I. Moritz goes off to fight, and Lottie promises to wait for him. After facing battles through a brutal winter, Moritz is taken prisoner by the Russians and interned in a Siberian prison camp.
Confidence in Lottie’s love sustains him, both in the camp and, after his escape, through his journey home. It takes three years to travel from Siberia to Ulanow, traveling through a Russia that was decimated first by war and then by the communist revolution. All through this time, he writes letters to Lottie, letters that he carries with him because they can’t be mailed.
Leo writes as well, in journal entries that seek to understand the universal and timeless nature of love. As a biologist, he is studying ant behavior, and he finds himself engaged by a wider vista of animal behavior. In Entry No. 36, he writes, “Every year the Arctic Tern undertakes an epic love journey. After sojourning in the Antarctic it circumnavigates the globe to breed in the Arctic.” And, “The oceans echo with the calls of whales sending messages under the sea to their loved ones hundreds of miles away. Come home, I miss you.”
The combined meditations on love, heightened by the destructive power of grief, come together in a thoughtful and thought-provoking story. Moritz’s determined travel back to his love is driven by a determination surely equal to that of an arctic tern. What exactly is the difference between instinct and passion? When the link between Moritz’s life and Leo’s is finally made — and it is clear that there must be a link, why else weave the two narratives — it is one both satisfying and redemptive.
Scheinmann writes with a confidence and clarity unusual in a first-time author. His story is carefully structured, nicely paced and well-imagined. The reader is fully with Leo in the irrationality of grief, and with Moritz in the bitter Siberian cold. Both share stories of amazing survival, moving forward when any movement at all seems next to impossible. And the ultimate, unifying impetus is love, emerging in heroic proportion.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
Fiction
Random Acts of Heroic Love, by Danny Scheinmann, $24.95
