Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  Either then or later we kissed.

  SHE INJECTED another dose of morphine into your drip, and fixed a loose electrode on your chest. Out the window, dawn was spreading over Jerusalem. For a moment she and I watched the green glow of your EKG rise and fall. Then she drew the curtain and left us alone.

  OUR KISS was anticlimactic. It wasn’t that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than sexual passion or even love. Daniel’s lips were bigger than I expected, not big on his face but big when I closed my eyes and they touched mine, and for a split second I felt as if they were smothering me. More than likely it was just that I was so used to R’s lips, thin non-Semitic lips that often turned blue in the cold. With one hand Daniel Varsky squeezed my thigh, and I touched his hair, which smelled like a dirty river. I think by then we’d arrived, or were about to arrive, at the cesspool of politics, and at first angrily, then almost on the edge of tears, Daniel Varsky railed against Nixon and Kissinger and their sanctions and ruthless machinations that were, he said, trying to strangle all that was new and young and beautiful in Chile, the hope that had carried the doctor Allende all the way to Moneda Palace. Workers’ wages up by 50 percent he said, and all these pigs care about is their copper and their multinationals! Just the thought of a democratically elected Marxist president makes them shit in their pants! Why don’t they just leave us alone and let us get on with our lives, he said, and for a minute his look was almost pleading or imploring, as if I somehow held sway with the shady characters at the helm of the dark ship of my country. He had a very prominent Adam’s apple, and every time he swallowed it bobbed around in his throat, and now it seemed to be bobbing continuously, like an apple tossed out to sea. I didn’t know much about what was happening in Chile, at least not then, not yet. A year and a half later, after Paul Alpers told me that Daniel Varsky had been taken in the middle of the night by Manuel Contreras’ secret police, I knew. But in the spring of 1972, sitting in his apartment on 99th Street in the last of the evening light, while General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was still the demure, groveling army chief of staff who tried to get his friends’ children to call him Tata, I didn’t know much.

  What’s strange is that I don’t remember how the night (by then it was already an enormous New York City night) ended. Obviously we must have said goodbye after which I left his apartment, or maybe we left together and he walked me to the subway or hailed me a cab, since in those days the neighborhood, or the city in general, wasn’t safe. I just don’t have any recollection of it. A couple of weeks later a moving truck arrived at my apartment and the men unloaded the furniture. By that time Daniel Varsky had already gone home to Chile.

  Two years passed. In the beginning I used to get postcards. At first they were warm and even jovial: Everything is fine. I’m thinking of joining the Chilean Speleological Society but don’t worry, it won’t interfere with my poetry, if anything the two pursuits are complementary. I may have a chance to attend a mathematics lecture by Parra. The political situation is going to hell, if I don’t join the Speleological Society I’m going to join the MIR. Take good care of Lorca’s desk, one day I’ll be back for it. Besos, D.V. After the coup they became somber, and then they became cryptic, and then, about six months before I heard he’d disappeared, they stopped coming altogether. I kept them all in one of the drawers of his desk. I didn’t write back because there was no address to write back to. In those years I was still writing poetry, and I wrote a few poems addressed, or dedicated, to Daniel Varsky. My grandmother died and was buried too far out in the suburbs for anyone to visit, I went out with a number of men, moved apartments twice, and wrote my first novel at Daniel Varsky’s desk. Sometimes I forgot about him for months at a time. I don’t know if I knew about Villa Grimaldi yet, almost certainly I hadn’t heard of 38 Calle Londres, Cuatro Alamos, or the Discoteca also known as Venda Sexy because of the sexual atrocities performed there and the loud music the torturers favored, but whatever the case I knew enough that at other times, having fallen asleep on Daniel’s sofa as I often did, I had nightmares about what they did to him. Sometimes I would look around at his furniture, the sofa, desk, coffee table, bookshelves, and chairs, and be filled with a crushing despair, and sometimes just an oblique sadness, and sometimes I would look at it all and become convinced that it amounted to a riddle, a riddle he had left me that I was supposed to crack.

  From time to time, I’ve met people, mostly Chileans, who knew or had heard of Daniel Varsky. For a short time after his death his reputation grew, and he was counted among the martyred poets silenced by Pinochet. But of course the ones who tortured and killed Daniel had never read his poetry; it’s possible they didn’t even know that he wrote poetry at all. Some years after he disappeared, with the help of Paul Alpers, I wrote letters to Daniel’s friends asking if they had any poems of his that they could send to me. I had the idea that I could get them published somewhere as a kind of memorial to him. But I only received one letter back, a short reply from an old school friend saying he didn’t have anything. I must have written something about the desk in my letter, otherwise the postscript would have been too strange: By the way, it said, I doubt Lorca ever owned that desk. That was all. I put the letter in the drawer with Daniel’s postcards. For a while I even thought of writing to his mother, but in the end I never did.

  Many years have passed since then. I was married for a while, but now I live alone again, though not unhappily. There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible. And that’s where I’d arrived, Your Honor. If it weren’t for the events I’m about to describe, I might have gone on not thinking about Daniel Varsky, or very rarely, though I was still in possession of his bookshelves, his desk, and the trunk of a Spanish galleon or the salvage of an accident on the high seas, quaintly used as a coffee table. The sofa began to rot, I don’t remember exactly when but I had to throw it away. At times I thought of getting rid of the rest, too. It reminded me, when I was in a certain mood, of things I would rather forget. For example sometimes I am asked by the occasional journalist who wishes to interview me why I stopped writing poetry. Either I say that the poetry I wrote wasn’t any good, perhaps it was even terrible, or I say that a poem has the potential for perfection and this possibility finally silenced me, or sometimes I say that I felt trapped in the poems I tried to write, which is like saying one feels trapped in the universe, or trapped by the inevitability of death, but the truth of why I stopped writing poetry is not any of these, not nearly, not exactly, the truth is that if I could explain why I stopped writing poetry then I might write it again. What I am saying is that Daniel Varsky’s desk, which became my desk of more than twenty-five years, reminded me of these things. I’d always considered myself only a temporary guardian and had assumed a day would come, after which, albeit with mixed feelings, I would be relieved of my responsibility of living with and watching over the furniture of my friend, the dead poet Daniel Varsky, and that from then on I would be free to move as I wished, possibly even to another country. It isn’t exactly that the furniture had kept me in New York, but if pressed I have to admit this was the excuse I’d used for not leaving all those years, long after it became clear the city had nothing left for me. And yet when that day came it sent my life, at last solitary and serene, reeling.

  It was 1999, the end of March. I was at my desk working when the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the voice that asked for me on the other end. Coolly, I inquired who was calling. Over the years I’ve learned to guard my privacy, not because so many people have tried to invade it (some have), but because writing demands that one be protective and adamant about so much that a certain a pr
iori unwillingness to oblige spills over even to situations where it isn’t necessary. The young woman said that we’d never met. I asked her the reason for her call. I think you knew my father, she said, Daniel Varsky.

  At the sound of his name I felt a chill through me, not only from the shock of learning that Daniel had a daughter, or the sudden expansion of the tragedy I’d perched on the edge of for so long, or even the certain knowledge that my long stewardship had come to an end, but also because some part of me had waited for such a phone call for years, and now, despite the late hour, it had come.

  I asked how she’d found me. I decided to look, she said. But how did you know to look for me? I only met your father once, and it was a very long time ago. My mother, she said. I had no idea who she was referring to. She said, You once wrote her a letter asking if she had any of my father’s poems. Anyway, it’s a long story. I could tell it to you when I see you. (Of course we would be seeing each other, she knew perfectly well that what she was about to ask for couldn’t be denied, but all the same her assurance threw me.) In the letter you wrote that you had his desk, she said. Do you still have it?

  I looked across the room at the wooden desk at which I had written seven novels, and on whose surface, in the cone of light cast by a lamp, lay the piles of pages and notes that were to constitute an eighth. One drawer was slightly ajar, one of the nineteen drawers, some small and some large, whose odd number and strange array, I realized now, on the cusp of their being suddenly taken from me, had come to signify a kind of guiding if mysterious order in my life, an order that, when my work was going well, took on an almost mystical quality. Nineteen drawers of varying size, some below the desktop and some above, whose mundane occupations (stamps here, paper clips there) hid a far more complex design, the blueprint of the mind formed over tens of thousands of days of thinking while staring at them, as if they held the conclusion to a stubborn sentence, the culminating phrase, the radical break from everything I had ever written that would at last lead to the book I had always wanted, and always failed, to write. Those drawers represented a singular logic deeply embedded, a pattern of consciousness that could be articulated in no other way but their precise number and arrangement. Or am I making too much of it?

  My chair was turned slightly away, waiting for me to return and swivel it back to attention. On such an evening I might have stayed up half the night working, writing and staring out at the blackness of the Hudson, as long as the energy and clarity lasted. There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet, no one toward whom I had to bend. Had the caller been almost anyone else, after hanging up I would have returned to the desk that over the course of two and a half decades I’d physically grown around, my posture formed by years of leaning over it and fitting myself to it.

  For a moment I considered saying that I had given it away or thrown it out. Or simply telling the caller that she was mistaken: I’d never been in possession of her father’s desk. Her hope was tentative, she had offered me a way out—Do you still have it? She would have been disappointed, but I would have been taking nothing away from her, at least nothing that she had ever had. And I could have continued writing at the desk for another twenty-five or thirty years, or however long my mind stayed agile and the pressing need didn’t subside.

  But instead, without pausing to consider the repercussions, I told her that, yes, I had it. I’ve looked back and wondered why I so quickly uttered those words that almost immediately derailed my life. And though the obvious answer is that it was the kind and even the right thing to do, Your Honor, I knew that wasn’t the reason I’d said it. I’ve wronged people I’ve loved far more gravely in the name of my work, and the person asking something of me now was a complete stranger. No, I agreed to it for the same reason I would have written it in a story: because saying yes felt inevitable.

  I’d like to have it, she said. Of course, I answered, and, without pausing to give myself a moment to change my mind, asked her when she wanted to come for it. I’m only in New York for another week, she said. How about Saturday? That, I calculated, would leave me five more days with the desk. Fine, I said, though there couldn’t have been a greater discrepancy between the casual tone of my voice and the distraught feeling taking hold of me as I spoke. I have a few other pieces of furniture that belonged to your father, too. You can have them all.

  Before she hung up, I asked her name. Leah, she said. Leah Varsky? No, she said, Weisz. And then, matter-of-factly she explained that her mother, who was Israeli, had lived in Santiago in the early seventies. She’d had a brief affair with Daniel around the time of the military coup, and soon afterwards had left the country. When her mother had found out that she was pregnant, she’d written to Daniel. She’d never heard back from him; he had already been arrested.

  When, in the silence that followed, it became clear that we had run out of all the small manageable bits of the conversation, leaving only the pieces too unwieldy for such a phone call, I said, that, yes, I’d been holding on to the desk for a long time. I always thought someone would come for it one day, I told her, though of course I’d have tried to return it sooner had I known.

  After she hung up I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When I came back into the room—a living room I used as a study, because I had no need for a living room—I walked over and sat down at the desk as if nothing had changed. But of course something had, and when I looked at the computer screen to the sentence I’d abandoned when the telephone rang I knew it would be impossible to go any further that night.

  I got up and moved to my reading chair. I picked up the book from the side table, but found, somewhat uncharacteristically, that my mind was wandering. I stared across the room at the desk, as I had stared at it on countless nights when I’d reached an impasse but wasn’t ready to capitulate. No, I don’t harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it’s work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I’ve always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I’ve never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded café, or so I’ve always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. No, what I was distraught to be losing was the familiar conditions of my work; it was sentimentality speaking and nothing else.

  It was a setback. Something melancholy clung to the whole business, a melancholy that had begun with the story of Daniel Varsky, but now belonged to me. But it was not an irreparable problem. Tomorrow morning, I decided, I would go out to buy a new desk.

  It was past midnight by the time I fell asleep, and, as always when I go to bed entangled in some difficulty, my sleep was uneven and my dreams vivid. But by morning, despite the receding sense that I had been dragged through something epic, I only remembered a fragment—a man standing outside my building, freezing to death in the glacial wind that blows down the Hudson corridor from Canada, from the Arctic Circle itself, who, as I passed, asked me to pull a red thread that was hanging from his mouth. I obliged, bullied by the pressure of charity, but as I pulled the thread continued to pile up at my feet. When my arms tired the man barked at me to keep pulling, until over a passage of time, compressed as it only can be in dreams, he and I became joined in the conviction that something crucial lay at the end of that string; or maybe it was only I who had the luxury to believe or not, while for him it was a matter of life and death.

  The next day I did not go out to look for a new desk, or the day after that. When I sat down to work, not only was I unable to muster the necessary concentration, but when I looked over the pages I’d already written I found them to be superfluous
words lacking life and authenticity, with no compelling reason behind them. What I hoped had been the sophisticated artifice that the best fiction employs, I now saw was only a garden-variety artifice, artifice used to draw attention away from what is ultimately shallow rather than reveal the shattering depths below the surface of everything. What I thought was a simpler, purer prose, more searing for being stripped of all distracting ornament, was actually a dull and lumbering mass, void of tension or energy, standing in opposition to nothing, toppling nothing, shouting nothing. Though I had been struggling with the mechanism behind the book for some time, unable to work out how the pieces fit together, I’d believed all along that there was something there, a design that if I could only dislodge and separate it from the rest would prove to have all the delicacy and irreducibility of an idea that demands a novel, written in only one way, to express it. But now I saw that I had been wrong.

  I left the apartment and went for a long walk through Riverside Park and down Broadway to clear my mood. I stopped at Zabar’s to pick up some things for dinner, waving to the same man in the cheese department who’d been there since the days when I visited my grandmother, weaving past the old, heavily powdered hunchbacks pushing a jar of pickles around in a cart, standing in line behind a woman with an eternal and involuntary nod—yes, yes, yes, yes—the exuberant yes of the girl she once was, even where she meant no, no, enough already, no.