BEFORE MY wife fell in love with me, she fell in love with this house. One day she brought me to the garden of the Sisters of Zion convent. We had tea under the loggia, she tied a red scarf around her hair, her profile against the cypress trees dated from ancient times. She was the only woman I’d ever met who didn’t want to bring the dead back to life. I pulled my white handkerchief from my pocket and laid it down on the table. I surrender, I whispered. But my accent was still heavy. You remember what? she asked. Afterwards we walked back to the village and on the way she stopped in front of a large stone house with green shutters. There, she pointed, under that mulberry tree, our children will play one day. She was only flirting, but when I turned to look where her finger was pointing I saw a streak of light flash in the shadows under the boughs of the old tree, and I felt pain.
My business grew, the one I started with a carved walnut commode I bought cheaply from the Turk in customs. Later he sold me a drop-leaf table, a porcelain mantel clock, a Flemish tapestry. I discovered I had certain talents; I developed an expertise. Out of the ruins of history I produced a chair, a table, a chest of drawers. I made a name for myself, but I didn’t forget the streak of light under the mulberry tree. One day I went back to the house, knocked on the door, and offered the man who lived there a sum he couldn’t refuse. He invited me in. We shook hands in his kitchen. When I came here, he said, the floor was still littered with pistachio shells the Arab had eaten before he fled with his wife and children. Upstairs, I found the little girl’s doll, he said, with real hair that she had lovingly braided. For some time I kept it but one day the glass eyes began to look at me in a strange way.
Afterwards the man let me walk through the house that would be our house, hers and mine. I walked through room after room, searching for the one. None were right. And then, opening a door, I found it.
WHEN I RETURNED to the house in Budapest where I grew up, the War was over. The place was filthy. The mirrors were smashed, there were wine stains on the carpets, on the wall someone had drawn with charcoal a man sodomizing a donkey. And yet never had it been more my home than in its desecration. On the floor of her ransacked closet, I found three strands of my mother’s hair.
I BROUGHT my wife to the house she had loved before she loved me. It’s ours, I said. We walked through the halls. A house built so that people could become lost in it. Neither of us mentioned the cold. There’s one thing I ask, I said. What? she said, distracted, breathless. Let me have one room, I said. What? she said again, more faintly. One room that is mine alone, that you will never enter. She looked out the window. The silence unspooled between us.
WHEN I WAS a boy, I wanted to be in two places at the same time. It became an obsession of mine, I spoke of it endlessly. My mother laughed, but my father, who carried two thousand years with him wherever he went the way other men carry a pocket watch, saw it differently. In my childish desire he saw the symptom of a hereditary disease. Sitting by my bed, wracked by a cough he couldn’t shake, he read me the poems of Judah Halevi. With time, what began as a fantasy transformed into a deeply held belief: while I lay in bed, I sensed my other self walking down an empty street in a foreign city, taking a boat at dawn, driving in the back of a black car.
MY WIFE died and I left Israel. A man can be many more places than two. I took my children from city to city. They learned to close their eyes in cars and trains, to fall asleep in one place and wake in another. I taught them that no matter the view from the window, the style of the architecture, the color of the evening sky, the distance between oneself and oneself remains immutable. I always put them to sleep together in the same room, I taught them not to be afraid when they woke in the middle of the night not knowing where they were. So long as Yoav called out and Leah answered, or Leah called out and Yoav answered, they could put themselves back to sleep without needing to know. A special bond developed between them, my only daughter and my only son. While they slept I rearranged the furniture. I taught them to trust no one but themselves. I taught them not to be afraid when they went to sleep with the chair in one place, and woke up with it in another. I taught them that it doesn’t matter where you put the table, against which wall you push the bed, so long as you always store the suitcases on top of the closet. I taught them to say, We’re leaving tomorrow, just as my father, a scholar of history, taught me that the absence of things is more useful than their presence. Though many years later, half a century after he died, I stood on top of a sea wall watching the undertow and thought, Useful for what?
YEARS AGO, when I first began my business, I received a phone call from an old man. He wanted my services, and mentioned the name of a mutual acquaintance who had recommended me. He told me he no longer traveled; indeed, he rarely left the room where he lived on the edge of the desert. It happened that I was going to be passing not far from the town where he lived, so I told him I would come to see him in person. We sat drinking coffee. In the room was a window, and on the floor beneath was a dark half-moon from years of forgetting to close the window in the rain. The man saw me looking at the stain. I didn’t always live this life, he said. I used to live a different life, in other countries. I met many people, and discovered that each had his own way to cope with reality. One man needs to reconcile a floor stained by rain in a room of a house on the edge of the desert, he said. But for another, the contradiction itself is the form the reconciliation takes. I nodded and drank my coffee. But all I understood was that his regret was a stain on the floor from the rain falling in a city he hadn’t been to in years.
MY FATHER died fifty years ago on a death march to the Reich. Now I sit in his room in Jerusalem, a city he only imagined. His desk sits locked in a storage room in New York City, and my daughter holds the key. I admit that I did not foresee this. I underestimated her courage and will. Her cunning. She thought she was denying me. In her eyes I saw a hardness I had never seen before. She was terrified, but her mind was made up. It took me some time, but soon the sense in it dawned on me. I could not have invented a more fitting end myself. She had found a solution for me, though it was not the one either of us had intended.
The rest was simple. I flew to New York. From the airport I took a taxi to the address where I’d sent my daughter to retrieve the desk. I spoke to the superintendent. He was a Romanian, I knew how to make myself understood to him. I offered him fifty dollars to remember the name of the moving company that had taken away the desk. He drew a blank. I offered him a hundred, and still he couldn’t remember. For two hundred dollars his memory came back to him with dazzling clarity; he even looked up the phone number. From his small dingy office in the basement where his street clothes hung on a pipe, I made the call. I was put through to the manager. Sure I remember, he said. The lady said a desk, I sent two men, it nearly broke their backs. I told him I wanted to know where to send the tip they deserved. The manager gave me his name and address. Then he gave me the address of the storage warehouse where his men had delivered the desk. The Romanian hailed me another taxi. The tenant who owned that desk, he said, she went on a trip. I know, I said. How do you know? She came to see me, I said, and then the driver pulled away, leaving the surprised Romanian standing in the street.
The warehouse stood near the river. I could smell the silt and in the dingy grey sky gulls were carried aloft by the wind. In the office at the back I found a young woman painting her nails. She screwed the top on the polish when she saw me. I sat down in the chair on the other side of her desk. She straightened up and turned down the radio. One of the units in this facility is registered under the name of Leah Weisz, I said. The only thing it contains is a desk. I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you let me sit at it for one hour.
SHE WILL never have children of her own, my daughter. I’ve known that for a long time. The only thing she ever let escape from herself were notes. She began when she was a child: pling plong pling plong. Nothing else can come of her. But Yoav—there is something unanswered in Yoav, and I know there will be a woma
n for him, perhaps many women, in whom he will spill himself in order to seek the answer. One day a child will be born. A child whose provenance is the union of a woman and a riddle. One night as the infant sleeps in the bedroom, his mother will sense a presence outside the window. At first she will think it is just her own reflection, haggard in her milk-stained robe. But a moment later she will sense it again, and suddenly afraid, she will switch off the lights and hurry to the baby’s room. The glass door of the bedroom will be open. On top of the pile of the child’s tiny white clothes his mother will find an envelope with his name, written in small, neat handwriting. Inside the envelope will be a key and the address of a storage room in New York City. And outside, in the dark garden, the wet grass will slowly straighten up again, erasing my daughter’s footsteps.
I OPENED the door. The room was cold, and had no window. For an instant I almost believed I would find my father stooped over the desk, his pen moving across the page. But the tremendous desk stood alone, mute and uncomprehending. Three or four drawers hung open, all of them empty. But the one I locked as a child, sixty-six years later was locked still. I reached out my hand and ran my fingers across the dark surface of the desk. There were a few scratches, but otherwise those who had sat at it had left no mark. I knew the moment well. How often I had witnessed it in others, and yet now it almost surprised me: the disappointment, then the relief of something at last sinking away.
Nicole Krauss, Great House
(Series: # )
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