Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  That night I found a number for Paul Alpers in my address book. I had not spoken to him for many years and when he picked up after two short rings I almost hung up. It’s Nadia, I said, and because that did not seem like enough, I added, I’m calling from Jerusalem. For a moment he was silent, as if he were trying to get back to the place where that name—mine or the city’s—meant something to him. Abruptly, he laughed. I told him that I had gotten divorced. He told me that he had lived for some years with a woman in Copenhagen but it was over now. We did not go on for long, hurried by the long distance of the call. After we cleared the particularities of our lives aside I asked him if he sometimes thought about Daniel Varsky. Yes, he said. I was going to call you a few years back. They found out that he was kept on a boat for a while. A boat? I echoed. In the hold, Paul said, with other prisoners. One of them survived, and some years later he met someone who knew Daniel’s parents. He said they kept him alive for some months, though only barely. Paul, I said at last, Yes, he said, and I heard a lighter click, then the drag of his cigarette. Did he have a child? A child? Paul said. No. A daughter, I asked, with an Israeli woman he was with not long before he disappeared? I never heard of a daughter, Paul said. I doubt it, really. He had a girlfriend in Santiago, and that’s why he kept coming back when he shouldn’t have. Her name was Inés, I think. She was Chilean, that much I know. It’s strange, Paul said, I never met her but suddenly I remember now that a while back I had a dream about her.

  As Paul spoke it occurred to me with something like surprise that if it weren’t for the peculiar logic of Paul’s dreams I would never have met Daniel Varsky, and all these years it would have been someone else writing at his desk. After I hung up I couldn’t sleep, or perhaps I didn’t want to sleep, afraid to turn off the lights and meet whatever the dark would bring. In order to distract myself from thinking about Daniel Varsky, or worse yet about my life and the question that tormented me as soon as I let my thoughts slip, I concentrated on Adam. In extravagant detail I imagined his body and the things I would do to it and those he would do to mine, although in these fantasies I allowed myself another body, the one I had before mine began to blur and lose shape and go off in a different direction from me, the one who existed inside of it. I showered at dawn, and at seven sharp I was there when the guesthouse restaurant opened. Rafi’s face clouded over when he saw me and he retreated to the bar and occupied himself with drying the glasses, leaving the other waiter to attend to me. I lingered over my coffee, and, discovering that my appetite had returned, went back twice to the buffet. But he continued to avoid my eyes. Only as I left did he run after me in the hall. Miss! he called. I turned. He kneaded one broad hand with the other, and glanced over his shoulder to make sure we were alone. Please, he groaned, I’m asking you. Don’t get involved with him. I don’t know what he says to you, but he’s a liar. A liar and a thief. He’s using you to make a fool of me. I felt a flash of anger, and he must have seen it on my face because he hurried to explain. He wants to turn my own daughter against me. I forbid her to see him and he wants—he began to say, but at that moment the director of the guesthouse approached from the other end of the hall and the waiter bowed his head and hurried away.

  From then on I dedicated myself to seducing Adam. He was, that waiter, no more than a fly buzzing around a desire I no longer had any control over, which I did not wish to control, Your Honor, because it was the only live thing left in me, and because so long as I was consumed by it I did not have to face the view of my life that had come so sickeningly into focus. I even took a certain amused pleasure in the fact that it had taken a man less than half my age with whom I had nothing in common to awaken such a passion in me. I went back to my room and waited; I could wait all day and all night, it didn’t matter. Close to dusk the phone rang and I picked it up on the first ring. He would come for me in an hour. Perhaps he knew I’d been waiting, but I hardly cared. I waited some more. An hour and a half later he arrived and took me to a house down an alley somewhere off Bezalel. A necklace of colored lights was strung up in the fig tree and people were eating around the table beneath it. Introductions were made, folding chairs brought from inside, space created around the already tightly packed table. A girl in a thin red dress and high boots turned to me. You’re writing about him? she asked, incredulous. I looked across the table at Adam drinking a bottle of beer and felt a yearning and also the special warmth of knowing I had come with him, and it was me he would leave with. I smiled at the girl and helped myself to olives and salted cheese. They seemed nice, those kids, people who would not have tolerated a liar and a thief among them; Rafi had been unfair to him. Dessert was brought out, then tea, and eventually Adam motioned to me that it was time to leave. We said goodbye to the others and walked out with a boy who had long blond dreadlocks and delicate glasses. He ducked into an old silver Mazda, rolled down the window and waved for us to follow. But when we arrived at his apartment the desk in question was not there either, and I waited while Adam and the dreadlocked boy passed a joint back and forth in the tiny, stained kitchen under last year’s calendar showing views of Mount Fuji. They discussed something in rapid Hebrew, then the boy went away and came back jingling a set of keys on a Mogen David key chain which he tossed to Adam. Then he showed us out, waving a cloud of hashish out into the hall, and we drove to a third place, a group of tall apartment buildings overlooking Sacher Park, hewn of the same sallow stone as everything else in the city. We rode up to the fifteenth floor, thrown together in the tiny mirrored elevator. The hallway was dark and as he groped for the switch I felt a throb of longing and almost reached out and pulled him to me. But the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered awake in the nick of time, and with the keys dangling from the little metal Mogen David Adam unlocked the door to 15B.

  Inside it was dark as well, but I’d lost my nerve and so waited with arms wrapped around my waist until the lights came on again and we found ourselves in an apartment stuffed with heavy, dark furniture incongruous with the blinding desert light: mahogany vitrines with leaded-glass cabinets, Gothic high-backed chairs with carved finials, their seats upholstered with tapestry. The metal blinds were drawn over the windows as if whoever lived there had gone away for an uncertain amount of time. There was hardly a foot of exposed space left on the walls, so cluttered were they with thickly impastoed fruit and flowers, pastoral scenes so dark that they seemed to have survived the smoke of a fire, and etchings of little humped beggars or children. Improbably mixed in with the rest were cheap Plexiglas frames with blown-up panoramic shots of Jerusalem, as if the inhabitants were unaware that the real Jerusalem lay just on the other side of the blinds, or as if they had made a pact to refuse the reality outside the windows and chosen instead to go on yearning for Eretz Yisrael just as they had when they dwelled in whatever part of Jewish Siberia they’d come here from, because they had arrived too late in life and did not know how to adapt themselves to this new latitude of existence. While I studied the faded colored photographs of children that colonized the sideboard—smiling, rosy-cheeked toddlers and gawky bar-mitzvahs who by now probably had children of their own—Adam disappeared down a carpeted hall. After a few minutes he called to me. I followed his voice to a small room whose shelves were lined with paperbacks on whose cumulative surface a thick layer of dust had settled, visible even in the lamplight.

  This is it, Adam said with a sweep of his hand. It was a desk of blond wood whose rolltop had been drawn back to reveal an intricate inlaid pattern whose gleam, protected all this time from the democratizing blanket of dust, was unnerving, as if the person who had been sitting at it had only moments ago gotten up and walked away. Eh, he said, you like it? I ran my finger along the pattern of wood which felt as smooth as if it were one piece, not the many hundreds from how many different varieties of trees it must have taken to produce the revelatory geometry of cubes and spheres, collapsing and expanding spirals, of space folding in on itself before suddenly expanding to reveal a glimpse of infinity
, that hid some meaning the maker had obscured by an overlay of birds, lions, and snakes. Go ahead, he urged, sit at it. I was embarrassed and wanted to protest that I could no more work at such a desk than I could write out my grocery list with a pen that had belonged to Kafka, but I didn’t want to disappoint him and sank into the chair he had pulled out. Who does it belong to? I asked. Nobody, he said. But surely the people who live here—They don’t live here anymore. Where are they? Dead. But then why is everything still here? This is Yerushalayim, Adam smirked, maybe they’ll come back. I was seized by a feeling of claustrophobia and wanted to get out of there, but when I rose and stepped back from the desk Adam’s face fell. What, you don’t like it? I do, I said, I like it very much, So what? he said, It must cost a fortune, I said, For you he’ll make a good price, he replied with a grin and something rusted but sharp flashed in his eyes. Who will? Gad. Who is Gad? The one you met just now, But who is he to them? The grandson, he said. Why would he want to sell only the desk? Adam shrugged, and nimbly closed the rolltop. How should I know? he shrugged. He probably hasn’t had time for the rest.

  Adam took a thorough tour of the place, opening the drawers of the sideboard and turning the delicate key in a glass cabinet to inspect the little collection of Judaica. He made use of the bathroom, relieving himself in a long stream that I heard through the door left ajar. Then we left the apartment, returning it to the dark. But in the elevator down we went on discussing the desk, and, as the conversation continued in a dim bar, moving to other subjects, but always returning to the desk, I began to feel the thrill of the unspoken thing I believed we were actually negotiating, for which the desk, with its hidden meanings, was only a stand-in.

  OF THE DAYS and nights that followed, I want to spare you, Your Honor, without sparing myself:

  Here we are in an expensive Italian restaurant and Adam, in the same shirt and jeans that he has worn for four days straight, clinks my glass of wine with his beer and asks with a conspiratorial smile whether I have come up yet with the story of which he will be the hero. When we share a tiramisu with two spoons, of which I let him eat most, he returns, like an organ-grinder with a limited repertoire, to the question of the desk. Having felt out the situation, he thinks he can get Gad to come down a little, though it should not be forgotten that it is a one-of-a-kind antique, the work of a master that on the open market would fetch many times more. I play along, pretending to be swayed by his salesmanship while searching for his foot under the table. So long as I almost let myself believe what I am saying it’s fine, at least until I suddenly remember with a bolt of nausea that I don’t know if I will ever write anything again.

  Here we are having lunch in the café of the Ticho House, which Adam has heard from one of his friends is the sort of place that writers like to go. I am wearing a billowy floral dress and a purple suede drawstring purse with gold brocade that I bought the day before after seeing them in the window of a boutique. It has been a long time since I bought myself anything new, and it is exciting and strange to be wearing these things, as if changing my life could begin so simply. The shoulder straps keep falling off and I let them. Adam plays with his phone, gets up to make a call, comes back and pours the rest of the sparkling water into my glass. Someone, somewhere, has taught him the rudiments of chivalry, and he has taken these and refashioned them into his own erratic code. When we walk he hurries ahead of me. But when we arrive at a door he opens it and waits for as long it takes for me to catch up and go through. Often we go without talking. It is not talking that interests me.

  Here we are in a bar on Heleni Ha’Malka. Some of Adam’s friends arrive, the same ones I’d met around the table under the fig tree, the girl with the thin red dress (now it’s yellow) and her friend with dark bangs across her forehead. They greet me with kisses on the cheek as if I were one of them. The band swaggers onto the stage, the drums begin to thump, and at the first few notes of the guitar the straggly crowd claps, someone whistles from behind the bar, and though I know I am not one of them, that I am in every way a stranger in their midst, I am filled with gratitude to be so simply accepted. I feel an urge to take the girl in the yellow dress by the hand and whisper to her, but I can’t think of the right words. The music gets louder and more discordant, the lead singer screams in a raw voice, and though I don’t want to distinguish myself from the others I can’t help but think he’s taking it a bit far, exaggerating things a little, so I find my way to the bar to buy myself a drink. When I turn, the girl with dark bangs is standing next to me. She shouts something to me, but the music overpowers her tiny voice. What? I shout back, trying to read her lips, and she repeats it, bursting into a giggle, something about Adam, but I still can’t understand, so the third time she leans right up to my ear and yells, He’s in love with his cousin, then leans back, covering her smile, to see if I’ve heard. I scan the crowd and when my eyes find Adam making a show of holding up his lighter while the singer croons I turn back and return the girl’s smile, and with a look I tell her that if she thinks she knows the whole story she’s wrong. I walk away. I have that drink and then I have another. The singer goes back to screaming in excess, but now the music grows rounder, brighter, and suddenly Adam grabs my hand from behind and tugs me outside, and I know I won’t have to wait much longer now. We get onto his bike—it’s nothing now for me to climb on behind and fit myself to him—and I don’t need to ask where we’re going because I’ll go anywhere.

  Here we are back in the grimly lit concrete entryway of Gad’s apartment. We’re going up the stairs and Adam is singing off-key, he’s taking the steps by twos. I’m breathless. Inside everything is the same, only Gad isn’t home. Adam searches the drawers and shelves for something while I switch on the stereo and press play, so sure am I of what he is searching for and what is about to happen. The CD skips to life, the music floats out of the speakers; it’s possible I begin to sway or to dance. Turn it off, he says, coming up behind me, and before I can feel him I can smell him like an animal. Why? I ask, turning with a flirtatious smile, Because, he says, and I think, All the better in silence. I reach up and take his face in my hands. With a moan I press my body into his, searching with my groin for something hard, I part my lips and bring them to his, my tongue slips in and tastes the heat of his mouth; I was starving, Your Honor, I wanted everything at once.

  It lasts only a moment. Then he shoves me away. Get off of me, he growls. Not understanding, I reach for him again. With his palm he pushes my face and throws me down with such force that I fall back onto the sofa. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, his hand which I see now holds the keys to the apartment filled with the dead people’s furniture. From far off, the understanding arrives that they are not dead after all. Are you out of your mind? he hisses, his eyes shining with hostility and also something familiar I cannot place at first. You could be my mother, he spits, and then I realize that it is disgust.

  I lie sprawled on the sofa, astonished and humiliated. He turns to leave, but stops at the door. The purple suede purse sits in the entry where I’d left it when we came in. He picks it up. In his hands it becomes what it must have always been on me: absurd and pathetic. With his eyes pinned on me, he digs his hand in up to the forearm and rifles through it. When he does not find what he is looking for he overturns it and the contents scatter. Quickly he leans over and plucks up my wallet. Then he throws the purse down, kicks it out of his way with his boot, and, with a final look of repugnance in my direction, walks out, slamming the door behind him. My lipstick continues to roll across the floor until it hits the wall.

  The rest hardly matters, Your Honor. I only want to say that the devastation tore through me, pulling the roof down at last. What was he, after all? Nothing more than an illusion I had conjured to deliver the answer that I could not give myself, though I had known it all along. When at last I roused myself and with shaking hands filled a glass from the kitchen faucet, my eyes fell on a little dish with some loose change and Gad’s car keys. I did not
hesitate. I picked them up, walked past the scattered contents of my purse, and out of the apartment. The car was parked across the street. I unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat. In the rearview mirror I saw that my face was swollen from crying, my hair matted, the gray showing through. I am an old woman now, I thought to myself. Today I have become an old woman, and I almost laughed, a cold laugh to match the coldness inside of me.

  I steered the car into the road, bumping over the curb. I followed one road and then another. When I came to a familiar intersection I turned in the direction of Ein Kerem. I thought of the old man who lived on Ha’Oren Street. I did not think of going to him, but I drove toward him. Soon I lost my way. The headlights slipped over the trunks of trees, the road led into the Jerusalem Forest and fell away to one side, sloping down into a ravine. All it would have taken was a jerk of the wheel to throw the car down into the dark below. Tightening my knuckles, I imagined the headlights bouncing in the darkness, the upturned wheels spinning in silence. But I do not have whatever it is that makes a person capable of extinguishing herself. I drove on. I thought, for some reason, of my grandmother whom I used to visit on West End Avenue before she died. I thought of my childhood, of my mother and father who are both dead now, but whose child I cannot escape being any more than I can escape the nauseatingly familiar dimensions of my mind. Now I am fifty, Your Honor. I know that nothing will change for me. That soon, maybe not tomorrow or next week, but soon enough the walls around me and the roof above me will rise again, exactly as they were before, and the answer to the question that brought them down will be stuffed into a drawer and locked away. That I will go on again as I always have, with or without the desk. Do you understand, Your Honor? Can you see that it is too late for me? What else would I become? Who would I be?