Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  WE STOOD in the hall of the house that had once been all of our house, a house that had been filled with life, every last room of it brimming with laughter, arguments, tears, dust, the smell of food, pain, desire, anger, and silence, too, the tightly coiled silence of people pressed up against each other in what is called a family. And then Uri enlisted, and, three years later, you, and after what happened you left Israel, and then it was only your mother’s and my home, and we could only occupy one, at most two rooms at a time, leaving the rest empty. And now it was mine alone. Only there you were like an awkward visitor, a weary guest, clutching your suitcase. I looked at it, and then I looked at you. You shifted it from one hand to the other. I thought—you began to say, but then stopped, following some invisible thing across the room. I waited.

  I thought maybe, you began again, if you didn’t mind, I would stay here a little while.

  I must have looked shocked because you swallowed and looked away. And I was, Dov. I was shocked. And I wanted to say, Yes. Of course. Stay with me here. I’ll make up your old bed. But I didn’t say that. What I said was, For your sake or mine? A faint but unmistakable grimace seized your face before it dissolved, leaving your features flat and lifeless again. And for a moment I thought I had lost you, that you would turn away from me again, as you have always turned away. But you didn’t. You continued to stand there, looking past me at the living room, as if you were seeing something there, a memory, maybe, the ghost of the child you once were.

  Mine, you said simply.

  I scanned your face, trying to understand.

  What about work? Don’t you have to get back? I asked, because that was your excuse all these years when you hardly ever came, always work that you couldn’t leave, that kept you away.

  You winced. The lines between your eyes deepened, and with one hand you reached up and touched your temple, just above the little blue vein that used to stand out and pulse when you were angry as a child.

  I resigned, you said.

  I thought I’d misheard. You for whom there was nothing but your work. So I asked you again: Surely they need you back again? But I saw that you weren’t really with me, standing there in the hall. You were with whatever memory it was that you saw behind me, crossing the living room floor.

  A STRANGE BOY, who grew inward from the beginning. When we asked you a question, we would sometimes have to wait half a day for an answer. God forbid you should respond without thinking, without making absolutely sure of the truth. By the time the answer came no one remembered what you were talking about. When you were four you began to have fits. You would throw yourself on the floor, pound your fists and bang your head, and hurl everything around your room. Often it was when you didn’t get your way, but other times something tiny and completely unexpected would set you off, a magic marker no one could find the cap for, the halves of your sandwich cut straight across instead of on a diagonal. Your kindergarten teacher called to express her concern. You stubbornly refused to participate in class activities. You sat to the side, holding yourself away from the others as if they were lepers, and pretended not to understand what they said when they spoke to you. You never laughed, she said, and when you cried it wasn’t a short jag and a little whimpering like the other kids, a crying that could be appealed to, soothed away. You were inconsolable. With you, it was something existential. That was her word. Your mother had to pick you up early, had to come rescue you and bring you home so often that soon she began to hide it from me, so that I wouldn’t become angry. An appointment was scheduled with the school psychologist. He invited himself to our home. He was a balding, pigeon-toed man who used a handkerchief to mop up his profuse sweat. I had to specially schedule a time when I could leave the office. Your mother served him coffee and cookies, gave you a glass of milk, and then we left you alone in the living room. For an hour the psychologist, Mr. Shatzner, pulled things out of his bag, and got you to make up stories about the little toys and action figures. We could see you through the French doors if we tiptoed past in the hallway. Afterwards, you were excused and went off to play in the garden while he interviewed us about our “home life.” Before leaving, he took a tour of the house. He seemed surprised to find the place so sunny and warm, full of plants, wooden toys, and plenty of your crayon drawings taped to the walls. Looks can be deceiving, I saw him thinking, working hard to scratch the surface to uncover the neglect and brutality beneath. His gaze rested on the woolen blanket on your bed. Your mother looked concerned, and I saw her biting her lip and kicking herself that, what? It wasn’t soft enough? She should have bought one with cars and trucks on it like Yoni had next door? It took all the control I had not to take him by the ear and throw him out on the street. You were playing outside. I could see your red shirt flashing behind the quince bush, where you’d found an ant colony two days before. May I ask, Shatzner said, if there are any problems I should know about at home? In the marriage, perhaps? It was all I could take. I grabbed the wooden Pinocchio marionette down off the shelf and shouted for you. You came inside, lumbering up the steps with dirt on your knees, and stood watching while I made the Pinocchio dance and sing then trip and fall on his face. Every time I made him collapse, you howled with laughter. Enough, your mother said, putting her hand on my arm, I’m sure Mr. Shatzner realizes our little Dovi isn’t always so serious. But I kept going, making you laugh so hard that you wet your pants, and then I crushed the balding psychologist’s hand in mine, told him he was welcome to snoop around for as long as he liked, but that I had more important things to do. I left the house, slamming the door behind me.

  Your mother couldn’t drop the matter so easily. Even a whiff of the suggestion that she was somehow doing something wrong as a mother wracked her with guilt. She beat herself up over it and tried to figure out where she had gone wrong. She put herself under the psychologist’s tutelage, and listened once a week while he explained to her what he’d gleaned from his sessions with you that continued at the school, and instructed her on how to assuage some of your “difficulties.” He developed a strategy, and laid down a set of rules that your mother clung to about how we should and shouldn’t behave with you. He even gave her his number at home, and when she was unsure of how to apply one of his rules, or what the proper reaction was to some fit of yours, she would dial him up, no matter the hour of the morning or night, and explain the problem in a low, serious tone, then listen to his response in silence, nodding grievously. Mr. Shatzner said we shouldn’t do that, she would say to me as soon as you left the room, Mr. Shatzner said we should let him do this, Mr. Shatzner said we should stand on our heads, bite our tongues, turn in circles, Mr. Shatzner, Mr. Shatzner, Mr. Shatzner, until finally I blew up at her and said I never wanted to hear that name in our house again, that I knew how to raise my own child, what did he think it was, a game of Scrabble or Monopoly, there are no rules, was she so blind that she couldn’t see that all that mental midget had done was turn her into a nervous wreck, full of doubt about something that had come naturally to her from the beginning, something any idiot could see, which was that she was a wonderful mother, full of love and patience? He’s five years old, for God’s sake, I shouted, if you treat him like a special case then that’s what he’ll always be. Have you seen any improvement at all since you started with this clown? No. Who is he to suddenly be offering himself as a source of wisdom on human behavior? You think that little prick knows better than us, than you and me? A silence passed between us. But he is a special case, she said quietly. He has always been.

  Eventually she caved in. The sessions were stopped, and you wriggled out from under Shatzner’s watch like a little animal set free who goes immediately to hide in the underbrush. But the whole experience set a certain tone. Your mother continued to hover and worry, to rigorously put every one of your moods, episodes, and tantrums through a little gauntlet of analysis, searching for a clue to your hurt and our role in it. This self-lacerating attitude drove me crazy, almost as much as your crying and car
rying on. One night, in the middle of you throwing a fit about the bathwater not reaching exactly the level you liked, I grabbed you from under your arms and held you naked and dripping above the floor. When I was your age, I shouted, shaking you so hard your head wobbled sickeningly on your neck, there was nothing to eat, and no money for toys, the house was always cold, but we went outside and played and made games out of nothing and lived because we had our lives, while the others were being murdered in the pogroms we could go out and feel the sun and run around and kick a ball! And look at you! You have everything in the world, and all you do is shriek your head off and make everyone’s life miserable! Enough already! Do you hear me? I’ve had enough! You looked at me, your eyes enormous, and reflected in your pupils, small and far away, I saw the image of myself.

  Seventy years ago I was a child, too. Seventy years? Seventy? How? Pass over it.

  NOW YOU stood holding your suitcase. There was nothing to say. You seemed no longer to need my help. Once you had perhaps, but no longer. I have a terrible headache, you said at last. The light is hurting my eyes. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go lie down. We can talk later.

  And just like that you walked back into the house that you had left so long ago. I heard your footsteps slowly ascend the stairs.

  Were they the lepers, Dov, those other kids? Is that why you held yourself apart? Or was it you? And the two of us, closed up together in this house—are we the saved or the condemned?

  A long silence while you must have stood at the threshold of your old room. Then the creak of the floorboards, and the sound of your door closing again after twenty-five years.

  SWIMMING HOLES

  THAT EVENING WE WERE READING TOGETHER, as we always did. It was one of those winter nights in England when the darkness that falls at three makes nine feel like midnight, reminding one of how far north one has staked one’s life. The doorbell rang. We looked up at each other. It was rare for anyone to visit us unannounced. Lotte put her book down in her lap. I went to the door. A young man was standing there holding a briefcase. It’s possible that the moment before I opened the door he had extinguished his cigarette, because I thought I saw a trail of smoke slip out of the corner of his mouth. Then again, it could have been just his breath in the cold. For a minute I thought it was one of my students—they all shared a certain knowing look, as if they were trying to smuggle something in or out of an unnamed country. There was a car waiting by the curb, the motor still running, and he glanced back at it. Someone—man or woman, I couldn’t say—was hunched over the steering wheel.

  Is Lotte Berg home? he asked. He had a strong accent, but I couldn’t place it immediately. May I ask who would like to see her? The young man thought, just for a moment really, but long enough for me to notice a slight twitch at the corners of his mouth. My name is Daniel, he said. I assumed it was one of her readers. She wasn’t widely known; to say she was known at all in those days would be generous. Of course it always made her happy to receive a letter from someone who admired her work, but a letter was one thing, and a stranger at the door at that hour was another. It’s a bit late—perhaps if you called or wrote first, I said, immediately regretting the lack of kindness I thought this Daniel must have heard in my words. But then he shifted something he’d been holding inside his cheek from one side to the other and swallowed. I noticed then that he had quite a large Adam’s apple in his throat. It crossed my mind that he wasn’t one of Lotte’s readers at all. I glanced down at the darkness gathered in the folds of the leather jacket where it fell around his hips. I don’t know what I thought I might see concealed. But of course there was nothing. He continued standing there as if he hadn’t heard me. It’s late, I said, and Ms. Berg—I don’t know why I called her that, it was absolutely ridiculous, as if I were the butler, but that’s what happened to come out of my mouth—Ms. Berg isn’t expecting anyone. Now his face crumpled, but just for a fraction of a second, really, resuming its former appearance so quickly that someone else might have missed it altogether. But I caught it, and as it crumpled I saw through to another face, the face one wears alone, or not even alone, the face one wears asleep or unconscious on the gurney, and in it I recognized something. This is going to sound foolish, but though I lived with Lotte and, as far as I knew, this Daniel had never met her at all, in that instant I felt that he and I were aligned in some way, aligned in our position toward her, and that it was only a matter of degrees that separated us. It was absurd, of course. After all, I was the one keeping him from whatever it was he wanted from her. It was a mere projection of myself onto this young man clutching his briefcase in front of the skeleton of my hydrangeas. But how else are we to make decisions about others? On top of which it was freezing out.

  I let him in. In our hallway, standing in his boots under our little collection of straw hats, all the shadows fell away and I saw him clearly. Arthur? Lotte called from the living room. Daniel and I locked eyes. I posed a question, and he answered. Nothing was said. But at that moment we agreed on something: Whatever happened, he would not disturb us. He would do nothing to threaten or dismantle what we had taken such pains to build. Yes, darling, I called back. Who’s there? she asked. I studied Daniel’s face once more for even a glimmer of dissent. But there was none. There was only seriousness, or an understanding of the seriousness of the agreement, and something else as well, something I took for gratitude. Just then I heard Lotte’s footsteps behind me. It’s for you, I said.

  Our lives ran like clockwork, you see. Every morning we walked on the Heath. We took the same path in and the same path out. I accompanied Lotte to the swimming hole, as we called it, where she never missed a day. There are three ponds, one for men, one for women, and one mixed, and it was there, in the last, that she swam when I was with her so that I could sit on the bench nearby. In the winter, the men came to smash a hole in the ice. They must have worked in the dark because by the time we arrived the ice was already broken. Lotte would peel off her clothes; first her coat and then her pullover, her boots and trousers, the heavy wool ones she favored, and then her body would at last appear, pale and shot through with blue veins. I knew every inch of her body, but the sight of it in the morning against the wet, black trees almost always aroused me. She’d approach the water’s edge. For a moment she would stand completely still. God knows what she thought about. Up until the last she was a mystery to me. At times the snow would fall around her. The snow or the leaves, though most often it was rain. Sometimes I wanted to cry out, to disturb the stillness that in that moment seemed to be hers alone. And then, in a flash, she’d disappear into the blackness. There would be a small splash, or the sound of splash, followed by silence. How terrible those seconds were, and how they seemed to last forever! As if she would never come up again. How deep does it go? I once asked her, but she claimed not to know. On many occasions I would even leap up off the bench, ready to dive in after her, despite my fear of the water. But just then her head would break the surface like the smooth head of a seal or an otter, and she would swim to the ladder where I would be waiting to fling the towel over her.

  Every Tuesday morning I took the eight-thirty train to Oxford, and returned to London on Thursday evening at nine. When we went out with colleagues of mine, Lotte would explain again why she couldn’t live in Oxford. The persistence of all those bells disturbed her work, she said. On top of that, one is always being tripped over, shoved, or bumped into by some student scurrying through the streets, or someone riding a bike while engaged in the life of the mind. At least once at every such dinner I would overhear Lotte tell the story of how she saw a woman knocked over by a bus on St. Giles’. One second she was crossing the street, she’d say, her voice rising, and the next she’s slumped against the wheels of a bus. It’s a crime, Lotte would go on, how they turn those children loose in the world with their heads full of Plato and Wittgenstein, but impart to them no sense of how to safely negotiate the dangers of daily life. It was a strange argument to make for someone who spe
nt most of her days closeted in her study inventing stories and searching for ways to make them plausible. But, out of politeness, no one ever pointed that out.

  The truth was more complicated, of course. Lotte liked her life in London—liked the anonymity that was hers as soon as she got off the Underground at Covent Garden or King’s Cross, and which would have been impossible in Oxford. She liked the swimming hole and our house in Highgate. And I think she liked being alone while I was off teaching the long-haired youth gathered from Winchester and the polished halls of Eton. On Thursday evenings she would be waiting for me with the car at Paddington, the windows fogged and the motor idling. In those first minutes of the drive home through the dark streets, while she still held in my eyes the clarity of something separate unto herself, I sometimes noticed in her a renewed patience—for our life together, perhaps, or for something else.