Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  A year or so after we moved, Lotte sold her first collection of stories, Broken Windows, to a small publishing house in Manchester dedicated to experimental work (a label she objected to, but not enough to refuse the offer of publication). There wasn’t a single reference in the book to Germany. All she allowed for was a mention in the brief biography on the last page of the place and date of her birth—Nuremberg, 1921. But there was a story buried near the end that touched on the horror. It was about a landscape architect in an unnamed country, an egoist so taken with his own talent that he is willing to collaborate with the officials of the country’s brutal regime in order to see that a large park he has designed is built near the center of the city. He commissions appropriately fascist-looking bronze busts in each of their images, scattered among the rare and tropical plants. He names an alley of palm trees after the dictator. When the secret police begin to bury the bodies of murdered children under the park’s foundations in the middle of the night, he turns a blind eye. People flock from all over the country to see the enormous blooms and admire the rare beauty of the place. The title of the story was “Children Are Terrible for Gardens”—a line the landscape architect had tossed off many years earlier to a young female journalist who obviously was in love with her subject—and for a long time after I read it I would catch myself staring at my wife, feeling a little bit afraid.

  THAT NIGHT Daniel first appeared I didn’t hear the front door open and close again until well past midnight. Another quarter of an hour passed before Lotte came upstairs. I was already lying in bed. I watched her undress in the dark. The revelation of her body twice a day was one of the great pleasures of my life. She slipped under the covers. I reached out and put my hand on her thigh. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. Instead she slid on top of me. Everything in silence, but there was a special tenderness about the way she bent her head to touch mine. Afterwards, we went to sleep. The next morning a smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the kitchen, but otherwise nothing was out of the ordinary. I left for Oxford, and nothing more was said about Daniel.

  But when I came home on Thursday night and went to hang up my coat I was hit by the powerful stench of cologne. It took me a moment to connect it to Daniel’s jacket, and when I did I expected to find it hanging there, forgotten. But there was no sign of it. I might not have thought about it again if, settling into the sofa to read after dinner, I hadn’t noticed a metal lighter resting near a cushion. Weighing it in my hand, I thought of how to phrase the question to Lotte. But what, exactly, was the question? Has that boy been back to see you? So what if he had? Wasn’t she allowed to see whomever she pleased? She had made it clear to me from the beginning that I had no claims on her freedom, nor did I wish to have any. There was much she didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. Once, in a bitter argument over our late mother’s affairs, my sister said she thought I liked being married to a mystery because it turned me on. She wasn’t right—she never understood the first thing about Lotte—but perhaps she wasn’t entirely wrong either. At times it seemed to me that my wife was built around a Bermuda Triangle, for God’s sake! Send something in and you might never hear from it again. All the same, I wanted to know—had the boy been back, and what was it about him that made her immediately accept him in? To say she was not a sociable person would be to put it mildly. And yet, no sooner had a stranger at the door introduced himself than she was brewing his tea in the kitchen.

  We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

  Lotte was reading in the chair across from me. I meant to ask, I said, where was Daniel from? She looked up from her book. Always the same rumpled expression when I disturbed her from her reading. Who? Daniel, I said. The boy who rang the bell the other night. I heard an accent, but couldn’t quite place it. Lotte paused. Daniel, she repeated, as if she were testing the durability of the name for one of her stories. Yes, where was he from? I repeated. Chile, she said. All the way from Chile! I exclaimed. Isn’t that remarkable! That your books have reached as far as that. For all I know, he picked one up at Foyles, Lotte said. We didn’t talk about it. He’s read a lot, and he wanted someone to discuss books with, that’s all. You’re being modest, I’m sure, I said. He seemed quite amazed to find himself in your presence. He probably could quote whole paragraphs of your work. A pained look crossed Lotte’s face, but she remained silent. He is alone here, that’s all, she said.

  The next day the lighter was gone from where I’d left it on the coffee table. But over the next few weeks I continued to find signs of the boy—cigarettes in the rubbish bin, a long black hair on the white antimacassar, and once or twice when I called Lotte from Oxford I thought I sensed in her voice an awareness of someone else’s presence. Then one Thursday night, putting something away at my desk, I found a leather diary, a small black book, warped and badly worn. Inside, it had days of the week on each page, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on the left, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday/Sunday on the right, and every box was filled to its edges with tiny handwriting.

  It was only when I saw Daniel’s handwriting that the jealousy brewing hit me with full force. I remembered him walking down the hall after Lotte, and now, along with the curt little smile he’d exchanged with himself in the mirror, I thought I remembered a certain swagger. Alone here! I thought. Alone here with a leather jacket, a silver lighter, a self-congratulatory grin, and something pressing zipped into his tight jeans. I’m embarrassed to admit to this now, but that’s what came to me. He was almost thirty years younger than she. It’s not that I suspected that Lotte had gone to bed with him—the thought itself was simply too far afield from the laws that governed our little universe. But if she hadn’t welcomed his advances, she hadn’t turned him away either—she had entertained them, or him, some intimacy had been allowed, and I saw, or thought I saw, that this young man in a leather jacket who had made himself comfortable at my desk had brazenly made a fool of me.

  I knew that anything I said to Lotte at that point would be met with anger—the idea that I harbored suspicions and had been keeping tabs on her would strike her as an intolerable infringement. What right did I have? You see, my hands were tied. And yet I was certain that something was going on behind my back, even if it was only desire.

  I began to form a plan, a plan that might seem counterintuitive but which at the time made perfect sense. I would go away for four days, to leave them alone together as a test. I would remove myself, the tiresome obstacle in their way, and give Lotte every opportunity to betray me with this swaggering youth with his leather and his tight jeans and his lines from Neruda, which no doubt he tossed off breathlessly with his face inches from hers. As I write this all these years later, in the long shadow of that boy’s tragic fate, it sounds ridiculous, but at the time it felt real. In my desperation, with wounded pride, I wanted, or thought I wanted, to force her to do what I was convinced she longed for, to realize her desires instead of harboring them in secret, and to deliver us both to the terrible consequences that would follow. Though the truth was that all I was really searching for was proof that she wanted only me. Don’t ask me with what evidence I intended to prove things either way. When I return, I told myself, everything will be clear.

  I informed Lotte that I was going to attend a conference in Frankfurt. She nodded, and her face gave away nothing, though later, lying in my miserable hotel room while nothing happened and things got worse and worse, I thought I recalled seeing a little glint in her eyes. Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind—the relief and the horror. Lotte rarely accompanied me on these trips, preferring not to have her work interrupted, and for this reason I always turned down the invitations I received to conferences
held on other continents, in Sydney, Tokyo, or Johannesburg, whose native Wordsworth or Coleridge experts longed to host their friends and colleagues. Yes, I would refuse these invitations because they would have taken me away from Lotte for too long.

  I don’t remember why I chose Frankfurt. Perhaps a conference had recently taken place or was scheduled to take place there at some point in the near future, so that should any of my colleagues run into Lotte and the subject of a conference in Frankfurt came up, no one would think twice about it. Or perhaps, never very good at lying, I’d chosen Frankfurt because the name was so commanding, and at the same time it was a sufficiently uninteresting city that it wouldn’t invite suspicion, like Paris, say, or Milan, although the idea of Lotte being suspicious was, in any case, absurd. So perhaps I chose it because I knew that Lotte would never, under any circumstances, return to Germany, and could be sure that she would not offer to accompany me.

  The morning of my departure I got up very early, dressed in the suit I always wore when I flew, and drank my coffee while Lotte was still asleep. Then I took one last look around our house as if I might have been seeing it for the last time: the wide-plank floors smooth from use, Lotte’s pale yellow reading chair with the tea stains on the left arm, the groaning bookshelves with their endless, unrepeating pattern of spines, the French doors leading out to the garden, the trees skeletal under the frost. I saw it all and felt it like an arrow in me, not in my heart but in my gut. Then I closed the door and got into the taxi waiting at the curb.

  Almost as soon as I arrived in Frankfurt I regretted the choice. The flight was plagued by turbulence, and during the rocky descent through the storm an ominous silence overtook the few passengers huddled in their coats, or perhaps it only seemed ominous as background to the loud moans of an Indian woman in a violet sari, clutching a small, terrified child to her breast. The sky outside the baggage claim was dark and immobile. I took the train to the main station and from there I walked to the hotel where I’d made a reservation, on a small street off Theaterplatz, which turned out to be a grim and anonymous-looking place whose only effort at conviviality was the red-striped awnings above the windows of the lobby and restaurant, an effort that had obviously been made long ago in a spirit since lost or forgotten, as the awnings were dingy and stained with bird droppings. A bored, pimpled bellboy showed me to my room and handed me the key attached to a large paddle, making it impractical to carry around and thus ensuring that the residents of that miserable place would deposit their keys at the reception whenever leaving the building. After switching on the heater and opening the curtains to reveal a view of the concrete building across the street, the bellboy waited around, even going so far as to make sure the minibar was stocked with the appropriate combination of tiny bottles and cans, before I finally remembered to tip him and he bid me a good morning and left.

  As soon as the door closed behind him I felt overwhelmed by loneliness, a cavernous loneliness I had not felt for many years, perhaps since my student days. To calm myself I unpacked the few items I had in my suitcase. At the bottom was Daniel’s black diary. I took it out and sat down on the bed. Until then I had only paged through it without trying to decipher the dwarfed Spanish, but now with nothing else to do I tried to make sense of it. From what I could tell, it seemed to be a rather dull account of his life: what he ate, what books he read, who he met, and so on, a long list lacking in any reflection about these activities, a banal march against oblivion, as ineffectual as every other. Obviously I searched for Lotte’s name. I found it six times: on the date he had first rung the bell, then five more times, always on days when I was away at Oxford. I began to sweat, a cold sweat, since the heater had yet to have any effect, and helped myself to a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Then I turned on the television, and soon enough I fell asleep. In my dreams I saw Lotte on all fours being taken from behind by the Chilean. When I woke only half an hour had passed, though it seemed like much more. I washed my face and went downstairs, relinquished my key to the receptionist who was busy counting great wads of German marks, and went out into the gray street where it had just begun to rain. A few blocks from the hotel I passed a woman leaning against the buzzers of a beige apartment block and sobbing. I thought of stopping to ask her what was wrong, maybe even taking her out for a drink. I slowed down as I approached her, close enough to notice the rip in her stockings, but in the end it was too out of character for the person I have been all my life, whether I’ve liked it or not, and I kept walking.

  Those days in Frankfurt passed with excruciating slowness, like the descent of something lifeless through the fathoms of the ocean, darker and darker, colder and colder, more and more hopeless. I spent my time walking up and down the quays of the river Main, because as far as I could tell the whole city was gray, ugly, and full of miserable people, and there was no point in venturing beyond those banks where the Franks had first stepped ashore with their javelins, and because in that whole city only the trees by the riverside, large and beautiful, had any kind of calming effect on me. Away from them, I imagined the worst. Lying in my hotel room, too agitated to read, the enormous paddle hanging from the lock, I saw Varsky strutting shirtless around the kitchen, or going through my wardrobe to choose a clean shirt, dropping those he didn’t care for on the floor, or sliding into bed, the one we had shared for almost twenty years, next to a naked Lotte. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I forced myself back out onto the grim, colorless streets.

  On the third day it began to pour and I ducked into a restaurant, a cafeteria really, populated by zombies, or so it seemed in that muted light. It was while sitting there, feeling sorry for myself over a plate of oily pasta I didn’t have the stomach to eat, that a realization suddenly hit me. For the first time it occurred to me that I might have misunderstood Lotte. I mean utterly and grossly misunderstood her. All these years that I’d thought she’d needed regularity, routine, a life uninterrupted by anything out of the ordinary, maybe the opposite had actually been true. Maybe she had been longing the whole time for something to come along and smash all that carefully maintained order to pieces, a train through the bedroom wall or a piano falling out of the sky, and the more I did to protect her from the unexpected, the more stifled she felt, the wilder her longing, until it had become unbearable.

  It seemed possible. Or at least, in that purgatorial cafeteria, not impossible, more or less as likely as the other scenario, the one I’d believed the whole time, priding myself on how well I understood my wife. Suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the center, the always-moving center of the woman I loved. I sat at the table staring into the greasy food and waited for the tears to come, even wishing them to come, so that I might unburden myself of something, because as things stood I felt so heavy and tired that I couldn’t see any way to move. But they didn’t come, and so I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte’s and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions upon millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and the tracks and the glass roof stay still while everything else rushes through it, no, it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?

  At last my waitress approached. I hadn’t noticed that the cafeteria had emptied, nor that the waiters had clear
ed the tables and were laying them with white cloths for the evening when the place apparently transformed itself into something respectable. The lunch shift ends at four, she said. We’re closed until dinner starts at six. She was no longer wearing her black and white uniform, and had changed into her street clothes, a blue miniskirt and yellow sweater. I apologized, paid my bill and a large tip, and stood. Perhaps the waitress, who was not more than twenty, saw a grimace on my face as I did so, the grimace of a man lifting a tremendously heavy weight, because she asked me if I had far to go. I don’t think so, I said, because I didn’t know exactly where I was. I’m going to Theaterplatz. She said she was going that way, too, and to my surprise asked me to wait while she got her bag. I don’t have an umbrella, she explained, and pointed at mine. While I waited for her I was forced to reassess my opinion of the cafeteria, which now had candles on each table that a waiter was setting out one by one, and which, as I couldn’t help but admit when the girl returned with a smile, employed such a pretty and friendly waitress.

  We huddled under my umbrella and set off into the storm. Her nearness immediately softened my mood. The walk was only ten minutes, and mostly we discussed her classes at the art school, and her mother who was in the hospital with a cyst. To anyone who passed, we might have been father and daughter. When we reached Theaterplatz I told her to keep the umbrella. She tried to refuse but I insisted. May I ask you a personal question? she said just as we were about to part ways. All right, I said. What were you thinking about at the restaurant all that time? You had the most miserable look on your face, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any more miserable it did. About train stations, I said. Train stations and circuses, and then I touched the girl on the cheek, very gently, as I thought her father might, the father she should have had if the world were just, and went back to the hotel where I packed my bag, checked out, and caught the next plane back to London.