Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  But when I got back home it was exactly the same. The next day was worse. My judgment of all I’d written over the last year or more took on a sickening solidity. In the days that followed, all I accomplished at the desk was to box up the manuscript and notes, and empty the drawers of their contents. There were old letters, scraps of paper on which I’d written things now incomprehensible, scattered odds and ends, remaindered parts of objects long ago thrown away, assorted electrical transformers, stationery printed with the address where I’d lived with my ex-husband, S—a collection of mostly useless things, and, underneath some old notebooks, Daniel’s postcards. Lodged at the back of one drawer I found a yellowed paperback Daniel must have forgotten so many years ago, a collection of stories by a writer named Lotte Berg, inscribed to him from the author in 1970. I filled a large bag with things to be thrown out; everything else I put away in a box except for the postcards and paperback. Those I placed, without reading them, into a manila envelope. I emptied all the many drawers, some very small, as I said, and some of average size, except for the one with a small brass lock. If you were sitting at the desk the lock would be located just above your right knee. The drawer had been locked for as long as I could remember, and though I’d looked many times I’d never found the key. Once, in a fit of curiosity, or maybe boredom, I tried to break the lock open with a screwdriver, but only managed to scrape my knuckles. Often I’d wished that it were a different drawer that was locked, since the one on the top right was the most practical, and whenever I went to look for something in one of the many drawers, I always instinctively reached for it first, awakening a fleeting unhappiness, a kind of orphaned feeling that I knew had nothing to do with the drawer but that had somehow come to live there. For some reason I always assumed that the drawer contained letters from the girl in the poem Daniel Varsky once read to me, or if not her then someone like her.

  The following Saturday at noon Leah Weisz rang my bell. When I opened the door and saw the figure standing there I caught my breath: it was Daniel Varsky, despite the intervening twenty-seven years, exactly as I’d remembered he’d stood that winter afternoon when I rang his bell and he opened the door for me, only now everything was reversed as in a mirror, or reversed as if time had suddenly come to a halt then begun to hurtle backwards, undoing everything it had done. The same thinness, the same nose, and, despite it, the underlying delicateness. This echo of Daniel Varsky now extended her hand. It was cold when I shook it, despite the warmth outside. She wore a blue velvet blazer scuffed at the elbows and a red linen scarf around her neck, the ends slung over her shoulders in the rakish way of a college student bent under the burden of her first encounter with Kierkegaard or Sartre, battling the wind to cross a quadrangle. She looked as young as that, eighteen or nineteen, but when I did the math I realized Leah must have been twenty-four or twenty-five, almost exactly the age Daniel and I had been when we’d met each other. And, unlike a fresh-faced student, there was something foreboding about the way her hair fell in her eyes, and the eyes themselves, which were dark, almost black.

  But inside I saw that she was not her father. Among other things, she was smaller, more compact, almost puckish. Her hair was auburn, not black as Daniel’s had been. Under the overhead lights of my hallway, Daniel’s features fell away enough that had I passed Leah in the street I might not have noticed anything familiar about her.

  She saw the desk immediately and walked slowly toward it. Stopping in front of the hulking mass, more present to her, I imagine, than her father could ever have been, she put her hand to her forehead and sat down in the chair. For a moment I thought she might cry. Instead she laid her hands on the surface, ran them back and forth, and began to fiddle with the drawers. I stifled my annoyance at this intrusion, as well as those that followed, as she wasn’t content to open only one drawer and look inside, but proceeded to look in three or four before she seemed satisfied that they were all empty. For a moment I thought I might cry.

  To be polite, and in order to put a halt to any further inquisition of the furniture, I offered her tea. She rose from the desk and turned to look around the room. You live alone? she asked. Her tone, or the expression on her face as she glanced at the leaning stack of books next to my stained armchair and the dirty mugs collecting on the windowsill, reminded me of the pitying way friends had sometimes looked at me when they came to see me in the months before I met her father, when I lived alone in the apartment emptied of R’s things. Yes, I said. How do you take your tea? You never married? she asked, and perhaps because I was taken aback by the bluntness of the question, before I could think I answered, No. I don’t plan to either, she said. No? I asked. Why not? Look at you, she said. You’re free to go wherever you want, to live as you please. She tucked her hair behind her ears and took in another sweeping glance across the room, as if it were the whole apartment or maybe even the life itself that was about to be transferred to her name, not just a desk.

  It would have been impossible, at least for the moment, to ask all that I wanted to about the circumstances of Daniel’s arrest, where he was detained, and whether anything was known about how and where he had died. Instead, over the course of the next half hour, I learned that Leah had lived in New York for two years, studying piano at Juilliard, before she decided, one day, that she no longer wished to play the giant instrument she had been chained to since she was five, and a few weeks later she went home to Jerusalem. She had been living there for the past year, trying to figure out what it was she wanted to do now. She had only come back to New York to pick up some of the things she had left behind with friends, and she planned on shipping it all, along with the desk, back to Jerusalem.

  Perhaps there were other details that I missed, because as she spoke I found myself struggling to accept the idea that I was about to hand over the single meaningful object in my life as a writer, the lone physical representation of all that was otherwise weightless and intangible, to this waif who might sit at it from time to time as if at a paternal altar. And yet, Your Honor, what could I do? Arrangements were made for her to return the following day with a moving truck that would bring the furniture directly to a shipping container in Newark. Because I couldn’t bear to watch the desk being carted away, I told her that I would be out, but that I would make sure that Vlad, the gruff Romanian superintendent, was there to let her in.

  Early the next morning I left the manila envelope with Daniel’s postcards on the empty desk, and drove up to Norfolk, Connecticut, where S and I had rented a house for nine or ten summers, and to which I hadn’t returned since we’d separated. It was only once I’d parked next to the library, stepping out of the car to stretch my legs in view of the town green, that I realized any reason I had for being there shouldn’t be indulged, and, moreover, I desperately wanted to avoid running into anyone I knew. I got back into the car and for the next four or five hours drove aimlessly along the country roads, through New Marlborough to Great Barrington, beyond to Lenox, tracing routes S and I had taken a hundred times before we looked up and noticed that our marriage had starved to death.

  As I drove, I found myself thinking of how, four or five years after we’d gotten married, S and I were invited to a dinner party at the home of a German dancer then living in New York. At the time S worked at a theater, now closed, where the dancer was performing a solo piece. The apartment was small and filled with the dancer’s unusual possessions, things he had found on the street, or during his tireless travels, or that he had been given, all arranged with the sense of space, proportion, timing, and grace that made him such a joy to watch onstage. In fact, it was strange and almost frustrating to see the dancer in street clothes and brown house slippers, moving so practically through the apartment, with little or no sign of the tremendous physical talent that lay dormant in him, and I found myself craving for some break in this pragmatic façade, a leap or turn, some explosion of his true energy. All the same, once I got used to this and became absorbed in looking at his many little collect
ions, I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another’s life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life. At some point I got up from the dinner table to use the bathroom, and in the hall I passed the open door of the dancer’s bedroom. It was spare, with only a bed and wooden chair and a little altar with candles set up in one corner. There was a large window facing south through which lower Manhattan hung suspended in the dark. The other walls were blank except for one painting tacked up with pins, a vibrant picture from whose many bright, high-spirited strokes faces sometimes emerged, as if from a bog, now and then topped with a hat. The faces on the top half of the paper were upside down, as if the painter had turned the page around or circled it on his or her knees while painting, in order to reach more easily. It was a strange piece of work, unlike the style of the other things the dancer had collected, and I studied it for a minute or two before continuing on to the bathroom.

  The fire in the living room burned down, the night progressed. At the end, as we were putting on our coats, I surprised myself by asking the dancer who had made the painting. He told me that his best friend from childhood had done it when he was nine. My friend and his older sister, he said, though I think she did most of it. Afterwards they gave it to me. The dancer helped me on with my coat. You know, that painting has a sad story, he added a moment later, almost as an afterthought.

  One afternoon, the mother gave the children sleeping pills in their tea. The boy was nine and his sister was eleven. Once they were asleep, she carried them to the car and drove out to the forest. By this time it was getting dark. She poured gasoline all over the car and lit a match. All three burned to death. It’s strange, the dancer said, but I was always jealous of how things were in my friend’s house. That year they kept the Christmas tree until April. It turned brown and the needles were dropping off, but many times I nagged my mother about why we couldn’t keep our Christmas tree up as long as they did at Jörn’s.

  In the silence that followed this story, told in the most straightforward manner, the dancer smiled. It’s possible that it was because I had my coat on, and the apartment was warm, but suddenly I began to feel hot and light-headed. There were many other things I would have liked to ask about the children and his friendship with them, but I was afraid I might faint, and so after another guest had made a joke about the morbid end to the night, we thanked the dancer for the meal and said goodbye. As we rode down in the elevator I fought to steady myself, but S, who was humming quietly, seemed not to notice.

  At that time, S and I were thinking of having a child. From the beginning both of us had imagined that we would. But there were always things we felt we had to work out first in our own lives, together and separately, and time simply passed without bringing any resolution, or a clearer sense of how we might go about being something more than what we were already struggling to be. And though when I was younger I believed I wanted to have a child, I was not surprised to find myself at thirty-five, and then forty, without one. Maybe it seems like ambivalence, Your Honor, and I suppose in part it was, but it was something else, too, a feeling I’ve always had, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that there is—that there will always be—more time left for me. The years went by, my face changed in the mirror, my body was no longer what it had been, but I found it difficult to believe that the possibility of having my own child could expire without my explicit agreement.

  In the taxi home that night I continued to think about that mother and her children. The wheels of the car softly rolling over the pine needles on the forest floor, the engine cut in a clearing, the pale faces of those young painters asleep in the backseat, dirt under their fingernails. How could she have done it? I said aloud to S. It was not really the question I wanted to ask, but it was as close as I could get just then. She lost her mind, he said simply, as if that were the end of it.

  Not long afterwards I wrote a story about the dancer’s childhood friend who had died asleep in his mother’s car in the German forest. I didn’t change any of the details; I only imagined more of them. The house the children lived in, the buoyant smell of spring evenings seeping through the windows, the trees in the garden that they had planted themselves, all rose up easily before me. How the children would sing together songs that their mother had taught them, how she read the Bible to them, how they kept their collection of birds’ eggs on the sill, and how the boy would climb into the sister’s bed on stormy nights. The story was accepted by a prominent magazine. I didn’t call the dancer before it was published, nor did I send him a copy of the story. He lived through it, and I made use of it, embellishing it as I saw fit. Seen in a certain light, that is the kind of work I do, Your Honor. When I received a copy of the magazine I did wonder for a moment if the dancer would see it and how it would make him feel. But I did not spend very long on the thought, basking instead in the pride of seeing my work printed in the illustrious font of the magazine. I didn’t run into the dancer for some time afterwards, nor did I think about what I would say if I did. Furthermore, after the story was published, I stopped thinking about the mother and her children who had burned to death in a car, as if by writing about them I had made them disappear.

  I continued to write. I wrote another novel at the desk of Daniel Varsky, and another after that, largely based on my father who had died the year before. It was a novel I could not have written while he was alive. Had he been able to read it, I have little doubt that he would have felt betrayed. Toward the end of his life he lost control of his body and was abandoned by his dignity, something he remained painfully aware of until his final days. In the novel I chronicled these humiliations in vivid detail, even the time he defecated in his pants and I had to clean him, an incident he found so shameful that for many days afterwards he was unable to look me in the eye, and which, it goes without saying, he would have pleaded with me, if he could have brought himself to mention it, never to repeat to anyone. But I did not stop at these torturous, intimate scenes, scenes which, could my father momentarily suspend his sense of shame, he might have acknowledged as reflecting less on him than the universal plight of growing old and facing one’s death—I did not stop there, but instead took his illness and suffering, with all of its pungent detail, and finally even his death, as an opportunity to write about his life, and more specifically about his failings, as both a person and a father, failings whose precise and abundant detail could be ascribed to him alone. I paraded his faults and my misgivings, the high drama of my young life with him, thinly disguised (mostly by exaggeration) across the pages of the book. I gave unforgiving descriptions of his crimes as I saw them, and then I forgave him. And yet even if in the end it was all for the sake of hard-won compassion, even if the final notes of the book were of triumphant love and grief at the loss of him, in the weeks and months leading up to its publication a sickening feeling sometimes took hold of me and dumped its blackness before moving on. In the publicity interviews I gave, I emphasized that the book was fiction and professed my frustration with journalists and readers alike who insisted on reading novels as the autobiographies of their authors, as if there were no such thing as the writer’s imagination, as if the writer’s work lay only in dutiful chronicling and not fierce invention. I championed the writer’s freedom—to create, to alter and amend, to collapse and expand, to ascribe meaning, to design, to perform, to affect, to choose a life, to experiment, and on and on—and quoted Henry James on the “immense increase” of that freedom, a “revelation,” as he calls it, that anyone who has made a serious artistic attempt cannot help but become conscious of. Yes, with the novel based on my father if not flying then at least migrating off the shelves in bookstores across the country, I celebrated the writer’s unparalleled freedom, freedom from responsibility to anything and anyone but her own instincts and vision. Perhaps I did not exactly say
but certainly implied that the writer served a higher calling, what one calls only in art and religion a vocation, and cannot worry too much about the feelings of those whose lives she borrows from.

  Yes, I believed—perhaps even still believe—that the writer should not be cramped by the possible consequences of her work. She has no duty to earthly accuracy or verisimilitude. She is not an accountant; nor is she required to be something as ridiculous and misguided as a moral compass. In her work the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.

  SOME MONTHS after the novel about my father was published, I was out walking and passed a bookstore near Washington Square Park. Out of habit, I slowed as I reached the window to see whether my book was on display. At that moment I saw the dancer inside at the register, he saw me, we locked eyes. For a second, I considered hurrying on my way without remembering exactly what it was that made me so uneasy. But this quickly became impossible; the dancer raised his hand in greeting and all I could do was wait for him to get his change and come out to say hello.

  He wore a beautiful wool coat and a silk scarf knotted around his throat. In the sunlight I saw that he was older. Not by much, but enough that he could no longer be called young. I asked how he was, and he told me about a friend of his who like so many in those years had died of AIDS. He spoke of a recent breakup with a long-term boyfriend, someone he had not yet met the last time I saw him, and then about an upcoming performance of a piece he had choreographed. Though five or six years had passed, S and I were still married and lived in the same West Side apartment. From the outside, not very much had changed, and so when it was my turn to offer news I simply said that everything was fine and that I was still writing. The dancer nodded. It’s possible he even smiled, in a genuine way, a way that always makes me, with my unrelenting self-consciousness, feel slightly nervous and embarrassed when I encounter it, knowing I could never be so easy, open, or fluent. I know, he said. I read everything you write. Do you? I said, surprised and suddenly agitated. But he smiled again, and it seemed to me that the danger had passed, the story would go unmentioned.