Man Walks Into a Room

by Nicole Krauss

  This bird’s-eye view comforted him, the assurance that beyond the walls of his bedroom the night was also breathing, Mr. Shreiner winding up his nine-iron, his mother dreamily spinning across a floor, taken not so much with her dance partner or the band or the pattern of other whirling bodies, but with her own loveliness. He would continue on, pulled by a gentle, watchful gravity, tumbling above mountains and plains, across the patterned country. He would pass over countless lives like the spinning dial of a radio tuning toward the lone signal of one voice.

  It was one of his earliest memories, listening to his father speak. Samson had been convinced that he would have been able to recognize his father’s voice if he ever heard it again. Once, toward the end of a Little League game, lunging for a ball in the outfield, he was sure he’d heard his father shout his name. The ball landed with a soft thud into his mitt and, heart pounding, he turned triumphantly, holding it in the air. He scanned the bleachers, squinting through the almost submarine light. But there was no sign of anyone who resembled the man in the photographs. He walked back toward the bases still searching the crowd, the ball in his mitt. After the game Samson waited, watching the thinning crowd until the last cars pulled away. When everyone had gone he walked up to the plate and took a few practice swings. He heard the proud crack of the bat meeting the ball and—as the imaginary ball vanished into the inky air above the ballpark—an ecstatic cheer led by his father, whose voice rose buoyantly above the rest. Atta boy, Sammy. Atta boy! He made a victory round of the bases and touched home plate. Then he kept running through the empty parking lot and down the street. Later at night, after he’d made his local tour above the rooftops, he fell asleep traveling on toward that voice.

  Now he was on his way back, reversing through space. He watched the ocean slip in and out of view from the taxi window. The driver had a sour look on his face and was hunched over the wheel. He had deep-set eyes and wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.

  Samson had found his great-uncle Max listed in the address book in his bag. Discovering what blows the passage of time had delivered him seemed a wrenching prospect. But aside from Anna, Max was the only person Samson could think of who would know where his mother was buried. He was living, if he was still alive, at a place called Fairview Homes on Monte Rosa Avenue in Menlo Park, and for a hundred and fifty dollars paid in advance, the taxi driver had agreed to take Samson there. He’d handed over the money and the driver had greedily wet his fingertips and counted it out. Then they’d set off, the driver keeping one hand on the radio as he drove, scrupulously adjusting the volume every few seconds. He played the dial as if it were an instrument, a counterpoint to the gas pedal he jerkily pumped. He chortled whenever there was a song he especially liked. Samson wondered whether it had been a good idea to sit up front. He wondered if the man’s bludgeoning instruments were in the trunk. He considered taking Pip’s Bible out and making a show of reading it. Come unto me, all ye that labor, he’d tremulously announce, and if the driver seemed receptive Samson would tell him that he was a pilgrim who had given up all his earthly possessions. In a voice as inspired as the preacher’s Pip had heard over the radio, he’d explain how he had given up the woman he’d loved, and not only her but all his memories of her too. He would tell the driver how he’d surrendered his past for a plot of emptiness.

  Feeling emboldened, chastened by his own sanctity, Samson took the Bible out and arranged it on his lap. The driver bore down on the road and took no notice, manning the wheel and pumping the gas pedal with disturbing rapture. Samson removed the slides from the other pocket one by one, lining them up on the cover of Pip’s Bible. Either the man didn’t notice or he didn’t care. He twisted the radio up to full pitch. Probably he wouldn’t give a hoot if Samson fished a severed finger out of his pocket and laid it down on the dash.

  He would tell the driver, should he happen to ask, that he was a pilgrim. He would say that he was on his way home, having been gone for years. This would capture the man’s sympathies and he would lower the volume and lean in to hear each word as Samson told him the story of his travails, all ending now as he sped him homeward to his mother. The driver’s eyes would fill with tears and he would speak of the importance of his task. To ensure safe passage, Samson would tweak the truth a bit and say that his mother was dying and not already dead.

  When they got off the highway at Menlo Park they couldn’t find Monte Rosa Avenue. They stopped for directions but got even more lost. The driver’s face darkened and he hunched farther over the wheel. He drove like a man possessed, making jerky turns whenever the urge struck him. Samson ignored him. He was consumed by the uncanny spectacle of streets he remembered from his childhood. That they still existed and that he remembered them was exoneration: proof that his memory had served him right. They drove down quiet streets lined with stucco houses. The late-afternoon light fell like dust on the leaves. Samson stuck his head out of the window and felt the warm air. A vertiginous feeling came over him.

  Within a few minutes they miraculously found themselves on Monte Rosa Avenue. The nursing home was marked with a discreet sign in gilded script that said Fairview Homes, plural despite the singular brick structure perched on a hill set back from the road. The man didn’t bother to turn up the drive, just dumped Samson at the curb and reached over to pull the door shut.

  “Hey!” Samson flashed his wallet in the window. “How much for you to wait?”

  The driver paused, licking his lips. “It would cost you.”

  “But how much?”

  “Depends what we’re talking about.”

  “Half an hour. An hour tops. Definitely not longer than an hour.”

  The man fiddled with the radio.

  “How much would that be?” Samson repeated.

  “A hundred.”

  “Fifty.”

  The man snorted and jacked up the volume. Samson leaned in and lowered it.

  “Seventy-five,” he said, and before the driver could answer he turned and jogged up the hill. Behind him there was a blast of music, a signal that a deal had been struck.

  SOMETIMES THERE IS an image that outlasts all the others, though one never knows what it will be. He would have been no more than six or seven, standing in the door of Uncle Max’s study. A smell of pipe smoke, the light shuttered, falling in slats. The adults were out on the patio; he could hear the occasional glissando of laughter and the clink of cutlery on the plates. The sound of the afternoon passing slowly, according to a design beyond his grasp.

  The study was filled with books. Many were in German. Max had escaped to America just before war had broken out and got a job teaching at the university. Samson walked along the wall of shelves, running his finger across the spines. He heard the high pitch of his aunt’s voice exclaiming something he couldn’t make out. He was aware of the faint pleasure of privacy. He came across an old photograph, unframed. It was black and white, or more yellow than white, printed on thick pa per. It showed a family, eight or nine children standing stiffly around the parents. The clothes were high-necked and pompous. He studied the faces with a cruel attentiveness and found them ugly. He had no idea who they were, only that they somehow belonged to Max’s past, and this vaguely annoyed him. Max had never mentioned them, and Samson felt a secret had been kept from him. He must have stood there holding it for a while, because then someone was coming down the hall looking for him. When Max walked into the room and saw him holding the picture an inscrutable expression passed across his great-uncle’s face. Samson looked at him dully, but in his heart he felt the small irreparable injury of a child whose trust has been broken. Wordlessly he returned the photograph to the shelf. Then he passed Max and walked out of the room into what was left of the afternoon.

  At the front desk Samson was told that Max was watching TV in the common room. The attendant, a man in a skinny tie, seemed surprised that the old man had a visitor. Samson had wondered whether the attendant might recognize him—surely he must have been there before
to visit Uncle Max, especially when he’d come back to California during his mother’s illness. Maybe it was even he who had first brought Max to Fairview. But the man only looked Samson over with suspicion: the last surviving relative who probably looked disheveled and filthy, reeking of sweat and the stink—so disgustingly human—of despair.

  Samson warily pushed his license across the desk. The attendant held it pinched between two fingers and studied the picture. He entered Samson’s name in the visitors’ book.

  “I guess you’re probably itching to see your—”

  “Great-uncle.”

  “Your great-uncle. Great-Uncle Max,” the attendant repeated as Samson followed him down the hall. They entered a large sunny room with a linoleum floor. A few residents were seated at one end in front of a large-screen TV on which a woman was demonstrating how to prepare a chicken dish.

  “There he is,” the attendant announced cheerfully, as if he were pointing out a rosy newborn and not an old man in a ratty terry-cloth robe. “Great-Uncle Max!” the attendant sang out, bounding up to the stooped figure in a wheelchair. “Look who’s here to see you!”

  With great effort, the old man turned at the waist as if the vertebrae of his neck had been soldered together. The wry expression was clouded by senility, but unmistakable.

  Samson had to restrain himself from leaping forward and lying prostrate before the wheelchair, from sideswiping the smug attendant and tackling the old man in an embrace that might crush his brittle, porous bones. Max’s thin hair had receded to a scraggly garland around his head, leaving the high dome of his scalp completely bald. The polished shine was extraordinary. The ears that in Max’s younger days, when there was still enough hair to frame them, had merely stuck out as if registering dissatisfaction or a lively inner life, now shot out from both sides at an angle well over ninety degrees. They had hinged forward over the years, and while the rest of him had shrunk, the ears had grown in size to reach nothing short of prizewinning.

  Max looked the attendant over, then sleepily shifted his gaze to Samson.

  Uncle Max had loved children, and could always make them laugh with a trick or a joke, but never had any of his own because of an illness his wife had as a child that had made it impossible for her to conceive. Sitting in his bathrobe was what was left of the man who, after listening to Samson sing the praises of Hunter Froubuck’s fishing trip with his father, had made two fishing poles out of sticks, out of sticks for crying out loud, strung with fishing line with a brass hook knotted at the end, and taken Samson to a little stagnant body of freshwater. They’d caught nothing but eels.

  “Do you recognize this young man?” the attendant asked, raising his eyebrows in mock suspense. In the heavy pause that followed, Samson half expected the attendant to throw wide his arms and announce in a canned baritone, “Max Kleinzer, this is yooour life!” while the geriatrics did jazz fingers in their wheelchairs.

  “Who?” Max asked, the sound muffled and inhuman, like the distant query of an owl.

  Samson stepped forward in an attempt to cut the attendant off.

  “Uncle Max, it’s Sammy. Sammy Greene, your nephew. Remember?”

  “Sammy Greene!” the attendant boomed, grabbing Max’s wheelchair by the handles and rolling him over to the window. Samson trotted after them. Max kept his eyes trained ahead.

  “Sammy?” Max said in a groggy voice. “Sure, I remember.” The attendant whirled Max around and backed him up against the window so that the late-afternoon light streamed in from behind, illuminating the ears like lamps.

  “Sammy Greene! Ta-daaa!” the attendant echoed again. Then he turned and made off down the hall before Samson could club him with the jawbone of a donkey.

  The old man’s hands were clasped stiffly on his lap as if he were waiting for the curtain to go up at a play. They sat in silence, looking at each other.

  “Who did you say you were?” Max finally asked.

  “Sammy. Beth’s son.”

  “Who?”

  “Beth’s son.”

  “Edison?”

  “Your great-nephew. Samson.”

  Max stared at him blankly.

  “You remember?” Samson asked.

  “Can’t say I do.”

  He studied Max’s face, wondering what his great-uncle saw. He remembered how during the first days back in New York, those clear spring days when the light was thin and impartial, Anna had appeared to him as a distant and indivisible whole, the way a bird is reduced to a spot of blackness in the sky. Even her desire for him to remember her did not lessen this elemental quality of self-containment. But as the days passed, the appearance came unraveled. He began to notice the small details she was made up of: the way she made a small popping noise with her lips when she was about to say something difficult, or played with the ends of her hair when she was watching TV, or drank her coffee with the spoon still in the mug, and so on. Eventually he found he could only see her as a collection of such fragments.

  Max’s face registered nothing.

  A year or so after he’d found the photograph in Max’s study, a man from Max’s boyhood in Germany had come to visit. He was a little man with a limp and a high-pitched laugh, whose thick hair shone with pomade. Samson was sure he’d never seen him before, but the man embraced him with great affection. He smelled of pine, of a place thickly forested. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked in a grating accent. Everyone turned to Samson, waiting. The man smiled expectantly. A whole minute passed, but Samson could conjure no recollection. Feeling his face flush with shame, he turned and fled the room. He refused to even look at the man during the rest of his visit.

  Samson smiled weakly and pulled up a chair.

  “How are you, Uncle Max?”

  Max seemed relieved to change the subject. “Fine. I can’t complain really. Still can eat. The food is terrible, but I can eat it. To think, all those years Clara—do you know my wife, Clara?—all those years I ate Clara’s cooking like an ungrateful wretch. Now I eat, I don’t even know what you would call it. A nice word for the food here I can’t think of. I watch the cooking show every day on TV. Cordon bleu. What I wouldn’t give for a taste of that.”

  “I knew Clara,” Samson offered.

  “You knew Clara?”

  “Sure.”

  “You ate her cooking?”

  “Plenty of times.”

  It was true: she had been a good cook, if a little heavy-handed. Everything she produced had a sort of glazed quality, not greasy but actually appearing as if coated in melted glass or sugar. The roasted chicken, the carrots, the pineapple turnover, all looking hard and shiny as gems.

  “Tell me she isn’t an excellent cook,” Max said, lost in the twilight of the present tense.

  “She was excellent. She was a very good cook.”

  “The best.”

  “You look good, Max,” Samson lied.

  “I feel okay. There was a time you could say I looked good. Back in the day. That’s what people used to say. I’d walk into a room and they’d look and say, ‘Now that’s a handsome man.’ I could have had my pick of the girls.”

  Max fell silent and Samson wondered what vision of female beauty his great-uncle had stumbled across in the murkiness of his mind. A submerged moment and then Max surfaced again.

  “But I loved Clara. Right off, first time I saw her, I knew she was the one. She was sitting outside in the sun, unwrapping a sandwich from wax paper. Wearing a gray dress.”

  “Really.”

  “Gray, I said. Cinched at the waist.” Max patted his knee and ebbed back into silence.

  It seemed unwise to bully him into remembering, to risk confusion and panic. But if there was any chance at all that Samson was going to discover where his mother was buried he would have to prod Max in the right direction. He pulled his chair closer and laid a hand on Max’s, applying a slight pressure. The sun dipped behind a cloud and the old man’s ears dimmed and went out.

  “You say you knew my wi
fe?” Max asked, looking up.

  Samson tried to guide the conversation toward his mother. He reminded Max of how she had been his favorite niece, how they had shared a love for sweet things and also for musicals. His mother would play the piano and Max would accompany her in his rich tenor. They sang duets by Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hammerstein, entertaining anyone who would listen but mostly themselves. Long after everyone else had turned in they kept at it, the bright chords mingling with their laughter. There had been many nights when Samson had fallen asleep on the couch, his dreams threaded with melodies from A Chorus Line or Anything Goes. Later his mother would pick him up and carry him to the car, still humming beneath her breath.