Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  When she died I called Uri first. Make of that what you will. All of these years it was Uri who came when the garage door was stuck, Uri when the stupid DVD player was on the fritz, Uri when the piece-of-shit GPS system that nobody needs in a country the size of a postage stamp kept barking over and over, At the next light, turn left! Left, left, left! Fuck you, bitch, I’m going right. Yes, Uri who came over and knew the right button to silence her, so that I would be free to drive again in peace. When your mother got sick, it was Uri who drove her to the chemotherapy twice a week. And you, my son? Where were you during all of that? So tell me, why the hell would I call you first?

  Go by the house, I told him, and get your mother’s red suit. Dad, he said, his voice unraveling like a ribbon dropped from a roof. The red one, Uri, with the black buttons. Not the white buttons, that’s important. It has to be the black ones. Why did it have to be? Because there is great comfort in specifics. After a silence: But Dad, she won’t be buried in clothes. Uri and I stayed with her body the whole night. While you were waiting for a plane in Heathrow we sat with the corpse of the woman who brought you into this world, who was afraid to die and leave you alone with me.

  EXPLAIN IT to me again, I said to you. Because I want to understand. You write and you erase. And you call this a profession? And you, in your infinite wisdom, you said, No, a living. I laughed in your face. In your face, my boy! A living! and then the laughter dropped from my lips. Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence? You shrank into yourself. You pulled your head in like a little turtle. Tell me, I said, I’d really like to know. What is it like to be you?

  TWO NIGHTS before your mother died I sat down to write her a letter. Me, who hates writing letters, who would rather pick up the phone to say my piece. A letter lacks volume, and I am a man who relies on volume to make myself understood. But, OK, there was no line that would reach your mother, or maybe there was still a line but no telephone on the other end. Or just an endless ringing and no one picking up, Jesus Christ, my boy, enough with the fucking metaphors. So I sat down in the hospital cafeteria to write her a letter, because there were things I still wanted to tell her. I’m not a man who has romantic ideas about the extension of the spirit, when the body fails it’s over, finished, curtains, kaput. But I made up my mind all the same to bury the letter with her. I borrowed a pen from the over-weight nurse and sat under the posters of Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, and the ruins of Ephesus as if I were there to send your mother to a faraway place rather than no place. A gurney rattled by carrying the almost-dead, bald and shrunken, a little bag of bones that opened an eye in which all the sentience had been concentrated, and fixed me in its gaze as it rolled past. I turned back to the paper in front of me. Dear Eve. But after that, nothing. Suddenly it became impossible to write another word. I don’t know which was worse, the plea of that pathetic little eye or the rebuke of the blank page. To think that you once wanted to make a life of words! Thank God I saved you from that. You might be a big macher now, but it’s me you have to thank.

  Dear Eve, then nothing. The words dried up like leaves and blew away. All that time I’d sat by her side as she lay unconscious it had been so clear in my head, the many things I still needed to tell her. I’d held forth, I’d carried on, all in my head. But now every word I dredged up seemed lifeless and false. Just when I was ready to give up and crumple the page into a ball I remembered what Segal once told me. You remember Avner Segal, my old friend, translated into many obscure languages but never English so he always stayed poor? A few years ago we met for lunch in Rehavia. It had surprised me how old he’d gotten in the few years since I’d seen him. No doubt he thought the same of me. Once we worked side by side among the chickens, full of ideals of solidarity. The kibbutz elders had decided the best way to make use of our youthful talent was to send us to inoculate a flock of birds, then to clear up their shit in the hay. Now we sat together, the retired prosecutor and the aging writer, hair growing out of our ears. His body was bent. He confided that despite the fact that his last book had won a prize (I never heard of it), he was having a terrible time. He couldn’t get a paragraph out without condemning it to the trash. So what do you do? I asked. You want to know? he said. I’m asking, I told him. All right, he said, between you and me, I’ll tell you. He leaned across the table and whispered two words: Mrs. Kleindorf. What? I said. Just what I said, Mrs. Kleindorf. I’m not following you, I told him. I pretend I’m writing to Mrs. Kleindorf, he said. My seventh grade teacher. No one else is going to see it, I tell myself, only her. It doesn’t matter that she’s been dead already twenty-five years. I think of her kind eyes and the little red smiley faces she used to draw on my papers, and I begin to relax. And then, he said, I can write a little.

  I turned back to the paper in front of me. Dear—I wrote, but stopped again there, because I couldn’t remember the name of my seventh grade teacher Not the sixth, fifth, or fourth either. The smell of the floor polish mingling with unwashed skin I remembered, and the dry feel of chalk dust in the air, and the stench of glue and urine. But the names of the teachers were lost to me.

  Dear Mrs. Kleindorf, I wrote, My wife is dying upstairs. For fifty-one years we shared a bed. For a month she’s been lying in a hospital bed, and every night I go home and sleep in our bed alone. I haven’t washed the sheets since she left. I’m afraid that if I do I won’t be able to sleep. The other day I went into the bathroom and the maid was cleaning the hair out of Eve’s brush. What are you doing? I asked. I’m cleaning the brush, she said. Don’t touch that brush again, I said. Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Mrs. Kleindorf? And while we’re on the subject of you, let me ask a question. Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science, and God knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters?

  DO YOU LIKE THAT, my boy? I thought you would. Suffering: just the sort of thing that’s up your alley.

  Anyway, I got no further than that. I tucked the unfinished letter in my pocket and went back to the room where your mother lay among the wires and tubes and beeps and drips. There was a water-color of a landscape on the wall, a bucolic valley, some distant hills. I knew every inch of it. It was a flat and crude painting, terrible actually, like something out of one of those paint-by-numbers kits, like one of those landscapes-out-of-a-can they sell in the souvenir booths, but right then I decided that when I left that room for the last time I would take it off the wall and carry it away with me, cheap frame and all. I had stared at it for so many hours and days that in a way I can’t explain that shitty painting had come to stand for something. I had begged it, reasoned with it, argued with it, cursed it, I had gone into it, I had bored my way into that incompetent valley and by and by it had come to mean something to me. So I decided, while your mother was still clinging to the last inhumane shred of life given to her, that when it was all over I would take it down off the wall, stick it under my jacket, and make off with it. I closed my eyes and drifted off. When I woke, the nurses were gathered in a little clot around the bed. A flare of activity, and then they parted and your mother was still. Gone from this world, as they say, Dova’leh, as if there is any other. The painting was nailed to the wall. Such is life, my boy: if you think you’re original in anything, think again.

  I RODE with her body to the mortuary. It was I who looked on her last. I pulled the sheet over her face. How is this possible? I kept thinking. How am I doing this, look at my hand, it’s reaching out, now it’s taking hold of the cloth, how? The very last time I will ever look on the face that I spent a lifetime studying. Pass over it. I went to reach in my pocket for a tissue. Instead I pulled out the crumpled letter to Avner Segal’s seventh grade teacher. Without stopping to think I smoothed it out, folded it up, and slipped it in with her. I tucked it next to her elbow. I trust that she would have understood. They
lowered her into the ground. Something gave way in my knees. Who had dug the grave? Suddenly I needed to know. He would have had to spend the night digging. As I approached the abysmal hole the absurd thought crossed my mind that I had to find him to tip him.

  At some point in all of this, you arrived. I don’t know when. I turned around and there you were in a dark raincoat. You’ve gotten old. But still slim, because you always had your mother’s genes. There you stood in the cemetery, sole surviving carrier of those genes because Uri, as I don’t need to tell you, Uri always took after me. There you stood, the big-shot judge from London, holding out your hand, waiting for your turn with the shovel. And do you know what I wanted to do, my boy? I wanted to slap you. Right then and there, I wanted to slap you across the face and tell you to go find your own shovel. But for the sake of your mother who never liked a scene, I handed it over. It took everything I had to restrain myself, but I handed it over to you and watched as you bent down, drove the spade into the pile of loose dirt, and, with the slightest tremor in your hands, approached the hole.

  Afterwards everyone gathered at Uri’s house. I thought that was the most I could bear—not my house, not seven days—and even that was too much. The children were closed up in the den watching television. I looked at the guests around me and suddenly I couldn’t stand to be among them a moment longer. Couldn’t stand either the shallowness of their mourning or the depth of it—which of them had any true idea of what had been lost? Couldn’t stand the righteousness of their consolations, the idiotic justifications of the pious, nor the empathy of Eve’s old friends or the daughters of those friends, the carefully placed hand on my shoulder, the pursed lips and furrowed brow their faces so naturally assumed after years of raising children, sending them to the army, and shepherding their husbands through the dark valley of middle age. Without another word, I put down the untouched plate someone had filled, a heaping plate that could not have held a morsel more and whose slightness, in the ratio of food to grief, disgusted me, and went to the bathroom. I locked the door and sat down on the toilet.

  Soon I heard my name called. In time others joined in the search. I saw you walk across the garden, distorted through the glass, calling. You! Calling me! It almost made me laugh. Suddenly I saw you as you were at the age of ten on the trail in Ramon Crater, pacing wildly, out of breath, your little mouth agape, sweat trickling down your face, the ridiculous sun hat drooping around your head like a wilted flower. Calling and calling to me because you thought you were lost. Guess what, my boy. I was there the whole time! Crouched behind a rock, a few meters up the cliff. That’s right, while you called, while you screamed out for me, believing yourself to be abandoned in the desert, I hid behind a rock patiently watching, like the ram that saved Isaac. I was Abraham and the ram. How many minutes passed while I let you shit in your pants, a ten-year-old boy facing his smallness and helplessness, the nightmare of his utter aloneness, I don’t know. Only when at last I decided that you’d learned your lesson, that it had been made clear to you just how much you needed me, did I pop out from behind the rock and saunter down to the path. Relax, I said, what are you shrieking for, I was just taking a piss.

  Yes, that’s what I suddenly remembered while I watched you through the bathroom window thirty-seven years later. There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn’t lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular. I find these little abysses everywhere now.

  You went on calling me for twenty minutes. The children were drawn into it, too, lured away from the television by a real-life mystery, perhaps if they were lucky even an emergency. I saw the smallest one through the window, trailing my sweater across the grass. Leaving my scent for the dogs, perhaps. They are all so educated, the grandnephews and grandnieces. Pooled together, their knowledge could run a small, terrifying country. They speak with confidence; they hold the keys to the castle. I was the afikomen they searched for. A few minutes into the game I heard the pack of them scratching at the door. We know you’re in there, they called. Open up, one said in a little hoarse voice, and then the rest joined in, their little fists raining down. I tapped a giant bruise on my knee that I couldn’t remember getting. I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without. Uri arrived, calling off the beasts. Dad? he said through the door. What are you doing in there? Are you all right? Many ways to answer the question, but none sufficient. You have no toilet paper? one of the kids piped up. A pause, footsteps receding, then returning again. The sound of a struggle with the knob, and before I had time to prepare the door shuddered and sprang open. The crowd peered at me. Among the children, giggles and scattered applause. The smallest one, my little Cordelia, approached and touched my bruised knee. The others, rightly, backed away. In Uri’s face I saw a look of fear I hadn’t seen before. Relax, my son, I was just taking a piss.

  NO, I AM not a man who harbors romantic ideas about the extension of the spirit. It’s something I’d like to think I taught my sons, to partake of the physical world while it is yours to take, because that is one meaning of life with which no one can argue. To taste, to touch, to breathe in, to eat and stuff yourself—all the rest, all that takes place in the heart and mind lives in the shadow of uncertainty. But the lesson didn’t come easily to you, and you never accepted it in the end. You shot yourself in the foot, and then you spent years trying to account for the pain. It was Uri who embraced my lessons about physical appetite. You can knock on Uri’s door at almost any hour of the day or night and he’ll answer with food in his mouth.

  THAT NIGHT after the guests had gone, leaving behind the tubs of humus crusting over, the egg salad, the stinking whitefish, the pita growing stale before our eyes, I saw you and Uri huddled together in the kitchen. You’d left him alone to shoulder the burden of your aging parents—of chauffeuring us here and there, passing the time with us in waiting rooms, schlepping to our house to look into this problem, investigate that complaint, to find the pair of glasses no one could find, sort out this or that confusion with the life insurance forms, organize a roofer to come fix a leak, or, without a word to anyone, install a chairlift after he found out that I’d been sleeping on the downstairs sofa for a month because I could no longer climb the stairs. Imagine, Dovik, a chairlift, so that whenever I want I can fly up and down the stairs like an alpine skier. And if all that wasn’t enough, calling us every morning to find out how the night was, and every night to find out how the day was? All that he did without complaint, without resentment, even though he had every right to be furious with you. I looked into the kitchen and there were the two of you, head to head, two grown men speaking in hushed tones just as you did as kids, intensely discussing whatever it was you two used to discuss, girls, probably, their shiny long hair and their asses and breasts. Only this time I knew you were talking about me. Trying to figure out what to do with me now, your old man, without having a clue, just as once you had no clue what to do with a pair of tits. If it had been Uri who had been doing the figuring, that would have been fine with me, I was used to it already, he had a way of doing it that didn’t cost me my dignity. God forbid I ever lose the ability to hold my own dick while I piss, Uri will find a way to do it for me that will let me keep my dignity, with just the right joke and a funny story about something that happened to him the other day at the supermarket. That’s Uri. But the fact that now suddenly you were involved, you who for so long lived over there in silence while your mother and I fumbled and grew old, who suddenly now decided to sweep in to bestow your magnanimity, to pretend that you were part of it all, with that disgusting look of concern on your face—that was more than I could bear. What the fuck is going on here? I said. And you turned to me, and in your eyes, behind all of that false magnanimity, I thought I saw a flare of the old anger, the one you kept boiling, that yo
u stirred and stirred for me when you were seventeen, nineteen, twenty. And I was happy, my boy. I was happy to see it again, the way one is happy to see a long-lost relative.

  Nothing, you said. You were always a bad liar. We’re talking about what to do with all this food. I ignored you. I’m ready to go home, Uri, I said. Dad, he said, you sure you don’t want to stay here? Ronit can make up the guest bed, the mattress is brand-new, very comfortable, I’ve been forced to try it a few times myself, and then he cracked one of his grins, because he is a man who can make jokes at his own expense. It costs him nothing. Just the opposite: the more he jokes about himself, the more he encourages people to laugh at him, the happier he is. Does that baffle you, Dov? That a man can accept, can even invite, the mocking laughter of others? You were always too afraid of being made a fool. If anyone dared to laugh at you, you turned sour and privately registered a strike against him in your little accounting book. That was you. And look at you now: a Circuit judge. One day, if all goes well, they will ask you to sit on the High Court of England. To sit in judgment on the serious crimes, most serious of all. But you started training long ago. To sit above the rest, to judge, to condemn—all of this came naturally to you.

  Thanks all the same, I said, but I want to go home, and Uri shrugged, called to Ronit to pack up some food, and went to find the car keys. Gilad, who for the first time in ages I was seeing without an enormous pair of earphones stuck to his head, came into the room with a determined look on his face and made a beeline in my direction. I looked over my shoulder, thinking he was focused on something behind me, and when I turned back we collided. The boy, hardly a boy anymore, a fifteen-year-old man-child, was applying something to me, a kind of pumping or pressure that turned out to be a hug. An embrace, Dovik, my grandson who for years had not answered a single one of my questions with anything more than a monosyllable was now clinging to me, his eyes squeezed shut, his teeth bared. Apparently trying to hold back tears. I thumped him on the back, There, there, I said to him, Grandma loved you very much. Which was all it took for the boy to sputter, spraying me with spit, and break down into a blubbering mess. Because no one taught him anything, not even here in this country where death overlaps life, and now he is getting his first taste of it. And he isn’t crying for her, not for his grandma, he’s crying for himself: that he, too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends will die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. So there he is crying. And while I am trying wordlessly to comfort him (I have a sense that even in this weakened, alert state, the man-child is deaf to all words except those that come to him through the enormous, furry portals of the earphones), Uri returns jingling the keys. And then out of nowhere you put your hand out to stop him. You, who, as far as I was concerned, knew nothing about anything. I’ll take him, you said. Him? I almost shouted. Him? As if I were a child waiting to be taken to dance lessons. Uri glanced at me to gauge my reaction. Uri who keeps the clicker to my garage clipped to the sun visor of his car, right next to the clicker of his own garage, that’s how often he uses it. And yet what could I say? There was Gilad still clinging to me. You put me in a position. How could I tell you what I really thought of your offer with that overgrown child gripping onto me for support and comfort as he absorbed the shock that all of this, all of us, everything he has ever known, is temporary?