Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  He went on for some time while I sat listening in silence because I knew he was right, and like two people who have loved each other however imperfectly, who have tried to make a life together, however imperfectly, who have lived side by side and watched the wrinkles slowly form at the corner of the other’s eyes, and watched a little drop of gray, as if poured from a jug, drop into the other’s skin and spread itself evenly, listening to the other’s coughs and sneezes and little collected mumblings, like two people who’d had one idea together and slowly allowed that idea to be replaced with two separate, less hopeful, less ambitious ideas, we spoke deep into the night, and the next day, and the next night. For forty days and forty nights, I want to say, but the fact of the matter is it only took three. One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.

  And as we spoke a picture of myself emerged and developed, reacting to S’s hurt like a Polaroid reacting to heat, a picture of myself to hang on the wall next to the one I’d already been living with for months—the one of someone who made use of the pain of others for her own ends, who, while others suffered, starved, and were tormented, hid herself safely away and prided herself on her special perceptiveness and sensitivity to the symmetry buried below things, someone who needed little help to convince herself that her self-important project was serving the greater good, but who in fact was utterly beside the point, totally irrelevant, and worse, a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words. Yes, next to that pretty picture I now hung another: a picture of someone so selfish and self-absorbed that she had been unconcerned enough about her husband’s feelings to give him not even a fraction of the care and attention she gave to imagining the emotional lives of the people she sketched out on paper, to furnishing their inner lives, taking pains to adjust the light on their faces, brushing a stray hair from their eyes. Busy with all of this, not wishing to be disturbed, I’d hardly stopped to think of how S might have felt, for example, when he walked through the door of our home and found his wife silent, with back turned and shoulders hunched so as to defend her little kingdom, how he felt as he removed his shoes, checked the mail, dropped the foreign coins into their little canisters, wondering just how cold my mood would be when at last he tried to approach me across the rickety bridge. I had barely paused to consider him fully at all.

  After three nights of talking as we had not in many years, we arrived at the inevitable end. Slowly, like a great hot-air balloon drifting down and landing with a bump in the grass, our marriage of a decade expired. But it took us time to split apart. The apartment had to be sold, the books divided up, but really, Your Honor, there is no need to go on about this, it would take too long, and I feel I haven’t got a lot of time with you, so I won’t go into the pain of two people prying apart their lives inch by inch, the sudden vulnerability of the human situation, the sorrow, regret, anger, guilt, and disgust with oneself, the fear and suffocating loneliness, but also the relief, so incomparable, and I will only say that when it was all finished I found myself alone again in a new apartment, surrounded by my belongings and what was left of Daniel Varsky’s furniture, which followed me like a pack of mangy dogs.

  I suppose you can imagine the rest, Your Honor. In your line of work you must see it all the time, the way people continue to repeat the same story of themselves over and over, complete with the old mistakes. One would think that someone like me, with enough psychological acumen to supposedly uncover the little delicate skeleton that organizes the behavior of others, would be able to learn from the painful lessons of self-scrutiny, and correct a little, to find the way out of the maddening circular game where we are forever eating our own tails. Not so, Your Honor. The months passed, and before long I’d turned those pictures of myself to face the wall, and lost myself in writing another book.

  BY THE TIME I got back from Norfolk it was dark. I parked the car, then walked up and down Broadway, inventing various errands in order to delay returning to confront the absence of the desk for as long as possible. When at last I went home, there was a note on the hall table. Thank you for this, it said, in surprisingly small handwriting. I hope to meet you again one day. And then, below her signature, Leah had put her address on Ha’Oren Street in Jerusalem.

  I was only in the apartment for fifteen or twenty minutes—enough time to glance at the yawning emptiness where the desk had stood, fix myself a sandwich, and, full of decisive purpose, go to fetch the box containing the various worked-up sections of the new book—when I experienced the first attack. It came over me quickly, with almost no warning. I began fighting for air. Everything seemed to close around me, as if I’d been dropped into a narrow hole in the ground. My heartbeat became so rapid I wondered whether I was going into cardiac arrest. The anxiety was overwhelming—something like the feeling of having been left behind on a dark shore while everyone and everything I’d ever known in my life had departed on a great, illuminated ship. Clutching my heart and talking aloud to try to calm myself, I paced the former living room that was now also a former study, and only when I turned on the television and saw the face of the anchorman did the feeling at last begin to subside, though my hands continued to shake for ten minutes more.

  In the week that followed I experienced similar attacks daily, sometimes even twice a day. To the original symptoms were added terrible stomach pain, extreme nausea, and more varieties of terror hidden in the smallest things than I ever imagined possible. Although at first the attacks were set off by glancing at or being reminded of my work, very quickly they spread out in all directions, and threatened to infect everything. Just the idea of going out of the apartment and trying to accomplish some tiny, inane task that in my infinite wellness I would have thought nothing of filled me with dread. I stood trembling at the door, trying to think myself through it and out the other side. Twenty minutes later I would still be standing there, and all that had changed was that I was now drenched in sweat.

  None of it made sense. I’d been steadily writing and publishing books at the rate of about one every four years for half of my life. The emotional difficulties of the profession were legion, and I had stumbled and fallen again and again. The crises that had begun with the dancer and the child’s cry had been the worst, but there had been others in the past. Sometimes a depression, the result of the war writing wages on one’s confidence and sense of purpose, all but incapacitated me. It had happened often between books, when, used to having my work to reflect myself back to me, I had to make do with staring out onto an opaque nothingness. But no matter how bad it had gotten, my ability to write, however haltingly and poorly, had never abandoned me. I’d always felt the surge of the fighter in me, and had been able to drum up the opposition; to turn the nothingness into something to push, and push, and push against, until I’d broken through to the other side, still swinging. But this—this was something entirely different. This had bypassed all of my defenses, had slipped unnoticed past the halls of reason, like a supervirus that has become resistant to everything, and only once it had taken root in the very core of me had it reared its terrifying head.

  Five days after the attacks began I phoned Dr. Lichtman. After my marriage had ended I’d stopped seeing her, having slowly given up on the idea of undertaking vast renovations on the foundation of my self in order to make myself more suitable for social life. I’d accepted the consequences of my natural tendencies, letting my habits slide, not without relief, back to their ungirdled state. Since then I had seen her only from time to time, when I couldn’t find the exit to a longstanding mood; more often, because she lived in the neighborhood, I ran into her on the street, and like two people who had once been but were no longer close, we waved, paused as if to stop, but continued on our ways.

  It took a gargantuan effort for me to get myself f
rom my apartment to her office nine blocks away. At regular intervals I had to stop and grip some pole or railing, to borrow from it a sense of permanence. By the time I was sitting in Dr. Lichtman’s waiting room filled with evocative, musty books, the armpits of my shirt were soaked in sweat, and when the door opened and she appeared, light streaming through her finely spun, goldish hair that for two decades she’d worn puffed at the top in a fashion I’ve never seen on anyone else, as if she had needed quickly to hide something and had put it there, I nearly threw myself on her. Folded into the familiar gray wool couch, surrounded once again by the objects I’d stared at so often in the past that they now seemed to me landmarks on the map of my psyche, I described the past two weeks. Over the course of the hour and a half (she’d managed to clear a double session for me), a feeling of calm began slowly, tentatively, to return for the first time in days. And, even as I was speaking about being incapacitated by panic, narrating my experience of being in the grips of a monster that seemed to have sprung from nowhere and made me a stranger to myself, on another level of mind, freed from thinking about what was now being attended to by Dr. Lichtman, I began to take hold of an idea that was wholly preposterous, Your Honor, beyond that it offered me an escape. The life I had chosen, a life largely absent of others, certainly emptied of the ties that keep most people tangled up in each other, only made sense when I was actually writing the sort of work I had sequestered myself in order to produce. It would be wrong to say that the conditions of such a life had been a hardship. Something in me naturally migrated away from the fray, preferring the deliberate meaningfulness of fiction to unaccounted for reality, preferring a shapeless freedom to the robust work of yoking my thoughts to the logic and flow of another’s. When I had tried it in any sort of sustained way, first in relationships, and then in my marriage to S, it had failed. Looking back, perhaps the only reason I had been happy, for a while, with R is that he had been as absent as I had been, or even more so. We were two people locked in our antigravity suits who happened to be orbiting around the same pieces of his mother’s old furniture. And then he had drifted off, through some loophole in our apartment, to an unreachable part of the cosmos. After that there was a series of doomed relationships, then my marriage, and once S and I parted ways I’d promised myself that it was the last time I would try. In the five or six years since then I’d had only brief affairs, and when these men tried to turn it into something more I refused, and soon afterwards brought things to an end and returned alone to my life.

  And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thought—One has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon. Yes, work was that for me, an irresponsible exercise in pure freedom. And if I neglected or even ignored the rest, it was because I believed the rest conspired to chip away at that freedom, to interfere and force upon it a compromise. The first words out of my mouth in the morning spoken to S, and already the constraints began, the false politeness. Habits are formed. Kindness above all, responsiveness, a patient show of interest. But you also have to try to be entertaining and amusing. It’s exhausting work, in the way that trying to keep three or four lies going at once is exhausting. Only to be repeated tomorrow and tomorrow after that. You hear a sound and it’s truth turning in its grave. Imagination dies a slower death, by suffocation. You try to put up walls, to cordon off the little plot where you labor as something apart, with a separate climate and different rules. But the habits seep in anyway like poisoned groundwater, and all you were trying to raise there chokes and withers. What I’m trying to say is that it seems to me you can’t have it both ways. So I made a sacrifice, and let go.

  The idea I began to entertain during that first session with Dr. Lichtman took hold, so that after seeing her ten or eleven times in almost as many days, and, aided by Xanax, having managed to scale the panic down from a nightmare to a threatening menace, I announced to her that I had decided, in a week’s time, to take a trip. She was surprised, of course, and asked where I was going. A number of possible answers crossed my mind. Places I had, over the years, received invitations from that perhaps could be extended again. Rome. Berlin. Istanbul. But in the end I said what I knew I was going to say all along. Jerusalem. She raised her eyebrows. I’m not going in order to claim back the desk, if that’s what you’re thinking, I said. Then why? she asked, the light through her windows spinning her hair, the rising wave of hair drawn up high above the scalp, into something almost transparent—almost but not quite, so that it seemed like the secret to wellness, however unlikely, could still be hidden there. But my time was up, and I was excused from the need to answer. At the door we shook hands, a gesture that always struck me as strangely out of place, as if, with all one’s organs spread on the table and the allotted time in the operating room almost up, the surgeon were to wrap them each neatly in plastic wrap before putting them back and hurriedly sewing you up again. The following Friday, having given Vlad instructions to look after my apartment while I was away, taken one Xanax to get through security, and another hurtling down the runway, I was aloft on a night flight bound for Ben Gurion airport.

  TRUE KINDNESS

  I DON’T SUPPORT THE PLAN, I told you. Why? you demanded, with angry little eyes. What will you write? I asked. You told me a convoluted story about four, six, maybe eight people all lying in rooms joined by a system of electrodes and wires to a great white shark. All night the shark floats suspended in an illuminated tank, dreaming the dreams of these people. No, not the dreams, the nightmares, the things too difficult to bear. So they sleep, and through the wires the terrifying things leave them and flood into the awesome fish with scarred skin that can bear all the accumulated misery. After you finished I let a sufficient amount of silence pass before I spoke. Who are these people? I asked. People, you said. I ate a handful of nuts, watching your face. I don’t know where to begin on the problems with this little story, I told you. Problems? you said, your voice rising and cracking. In the wells of your eyes your mother saw the suffering of a child raised by a tyrant, but in the end the fact that you never became a writer had nothing to do with me.

  SO WHAT? Where to begin? After everything, after the millions of words, the endless conversations, the relentless goings on about, the phone calls, the explaining, the badgering, the emphasizing, the obfuscating and the clarifying, and then the silence of all these years—where?

  It’s almost dawn. From where I sit at the kitchen table I can see the front gate, and any minute now you’ll return from your nocturnal rambling. I’ll see you appear in your old blue windbreaker, the one you dug out of your closet, and you’ll bend over to unhook the rusted latch and let yourself in. You’ll open the door, take off your wet sneakers, ridges of mud on the edges and blades of grass stuck to the soles, and then you’ll come into the kitchen and find me waiting for you.

  WHEN YOU and Uri were very young your mother lived in fear of dying and leaving you alone. Alone with me, I pointed out. She would look three, four times before crossing the street. Every time she came home safely she had won a small victory against death. She gathered you and your brother up in her arms, but it was always you who clung to her the longest, burying your little runny nose in her neck as if you sensed what had been at risk. Once she woke me up in the middle of the night. It was soon after the Suez War, in which I fought just as I fought in ’48, just as anyone fought who could hold a gun or throw a grenade. I want us to leave, she said. What are you saying? I asked. I won’t send them into a war, she said. Eve, I said, it’s late. No, she said sitting up, I won’t let it happen. Why are you worrying, they’re babies, I said. By the time they’re old enough there will be no more fighting. Go to sleep. Three weeks earlier a guy in my battalion was walking outside our tent when a shell hit and vaporized him. He was blown to bits. The next day a dog that everyone fed their scraps to brought his hand back and sat chewing on it in the noonday sun. It fell to me to w
restle the severed hand from the hungry animal. I wrapped it in a rag and kept it under my bed until someone could send it back to his family. Later I was informed that such minimal parts were not returned. I didn’t ask what would become of it. I gave the hand over and they disposed of it as they saw fit. Did I have nightmares afterwards? Did I scream out in the night? Pass over it. What’s the use of going into these things? Don’t think about it now, I said to your mother, and turned to sleep. I’ve already thought about it, she said. We’ll move to London. And how will we live? I asked, flipping back over and grabbing her wrists. For a moment she was silent, sucking in her breath. You’ll find a way, she said quietly.

  But we did not move, I did not find a way. I came to Israel when I was five, almost everything in my life happened here. I would not leave. My sons would grow up in Israeli sunshine, eating Israeli fruit, playing under Israeli trees, with the dirt of their forefathers under their nails, fighting if necessary. Your mother knew all of this from the beginning. In the light of day, in light of my obstinacy, she went out in the street with a scarf tied around her hair, went out to battle death, and came home victorious.