Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  The letter went on at some length about certain rooms of the house. What falls apart we stop using. We pay someone to do the shopping, and to bring us the things we need. A woman who needs the money and has seen enough in her life that she doesn’t raise an eyebrow. We used to venture out sometimes, but now hardly at all. A kind of inertia has taken hold. We have the garden, and Yoav goes outside a little, but it’s been months since he last left the house.

  She came to the point of her letter: It can’t go on like this or we really will stop living. One of us will do something terrible. It’s as if my father is luring us closer to him every day. It gets harder to resist. For a long time now I’ve been working up the courage to leave. But if I go, I can’t ever come back, and I can’t tell Yoav where I am. Otherwise we’ll get sucked back in, and I don’t think I’ll be able to escape again. So he doesn’t know anything about it. If you haven’t figured it out already, Izzy, I’m writing to ask you to come here. To him. I don’t know the first thing about your life now, but I know how much you loved him then. What you two meant to each other. You’re still alive in him, and there isn’t much else that is. I was always jealous of what you let him feel. That he had found someone who made him feel what I’d never been allowed to.

  At the end of the letter, she wrote that she couldn’t leave unless she knew for sure that I would come to him. She didn’t want to think about what would happen to him alone. She said nothing about where she planned to go. Only that she would call me for my answer in two weeks.

  Her letter awakened a tidal wave of feeling—sadness, anguish, joy, and also anger that Leah would think I would drop everything for Yoav after all these years, that she would put me in such a position. It also made me afraid. I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I’d spent being only partly alive, and how easily I’d accepted a lesser life. I had a job like anyone, even if I disliked it, I even had a boyfriend, a gentle, kind person who loved me and evoked in me a kind of tender ambivalence. And yet the moment I finished the letter, I knew that I would go to Yoav. In light of him, everything—the inky shadows, the dirty dishes, the tarred roofs outside the window—took on a different look, became more acute, altered by a rush of feeling. He awakened a hunger in me—not just for him, but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has been given to us to feel. A hunger and also courage. Later, looking back at how easily I’d closed the door on one life and slipped away to another, to him, it seemed that all those years I’d just been waiting for that letter, and that everything I’d built up around me had been made of cardboard, so that when it finally arrived I could fold it up and throw it away.

  Waiting for Leah’s call, I couldn’t think of anything else. I barely slept at night, and couldn’t pay attention at work, forgetting things I was supposed to do, losing papers, getting in trouble with my boss who always took his anger out on me anyway, when he wasn’t staring at my legs or breasts. When the day finally arrived that Leah was supposed to phone, I called in sick to work. I didn’t even take a shower, afraid that I would miss her call. Morning turned into afternoon turned into evening turned into night, and still it didn’t ring. I thought she had changed her mind and vanished again. Or that she couldn’t find my number, even though it was listed. But then, at quarter to nine (the very early hours of the morning in Jerusalem), the phone rang. Izzy? she said, and her voice was exactly the same as it has always been, pale, if you can describe a voice like that, and quavering a little as if she were holding her breath. It’s me, I said. He’s sleeping upstairs, Leah said. He doesn’t fall asleep until two or three in the morning, and I had to wait to call. We both fell silent, during which, without saying a word, she reached into me and took out my answer. At last she exhaled. When you come, don’t bother ringing. He won’t answer. I’ll leave the key for you, taped to the back of the buzzer on the gate. I nodded, too choked to speak. Izzy, I’m sorry that we—that he never—She broke off. It was so terrible, she said. There was tremendous guilt. For years we punished ourselves. And Yoav’s way of punishing himself was giving you up. Leah—I said. I have to go, she whispered. Take care of him.

  THEY HAD LIVED everywhere. Their mother had died when Yoav was eight and Leah seven, and after that, without his wife to anchor him, haunted by grief, their father had wandered with them from city to city, sometimes staying months, sometimes a few years. Wherever he was, he worked. According to Yoav, his fame in the field of antiques became legendary during those years. He never had need for a store; his clients always knew where to find him. And the furniture they so coveted, the desks or bureaus or chairs they longed for, had long ago sat in and thought they would never sit in again, all that furnished the lives they lost or the lives they dreamed of living, arrived into George Weisz’s possession via sources, channels, and coincidences that remained the secrets of his trade. When Yoav was twelve he used to have a reoccurring dream that his father, his sister, and he lived together on a wooded shore and every night the tide would wash furniture onto the beach, four poster beds and sofas dressed with seaweed. They dragged these under the cover of the trees and assembled them in rooms demarcated by lines their father drew on the forest floor with the toe of his shoe, rooms upon rooms that began to take over the woods, without roofs or walls. The dreams were sad and eerie. But once Yoav dreamed that Leah found a lamp with the bulb still screwed in. They ran back with it to their father, who placed it on a mahogany side table and plugged it into Yoav’s mouth. Crouched on the floor, his mouth clamped shut, Yoav watched the canopy of leaves illuminate. Shadows rippled in the boughs. Years later, traveling through Norway with a backpack, Yoav stumbled across a stretch of shoreline he recognized as the one from his dreams. He took a photograph of it and when he got back to Oslo he had the film developed. Then he sent the photograph to his sister without a note, because between them there was no need for explanation.

  Their father took them to Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Madrid, Munich, London, New York, Amsterdam. When they arrived at the new apartment it would already be filled with furniture. The pieces would be sold until the apartment was almost empty, and then they would leave for another city. Or it was the opposite: upon arriving, the new apartment would be bare and smell of fresh paint. As the months passed it would slowly fill up with a rolltop desk, a set of nesting tables, a daybed that arrived through the window or door, on the backs of men breathing heavily through the nose, or sometimes as if on its own, materializing while Yoav and Leah were away at school or playing at the park, making itself at home in some unnoticed corner as if it had been there all its inanimate life. Yoav told me that one of his earliest memories from those transitory years was hearing the doorbell ring, going to open the door, and finding a Louis XVI chair in the stairwell. The blue damask was ripped, and the horsehair stuffing exploded through. When the apartment became too crowded, or when the memory of his wife caught up with George Weisz, or for reasons Yoav and Leah understood but couldn’t explain, they would be on their way again to another city. In the new place, they would wake in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and, believing themselves still in the old apartment, in the prior city, would crash into walls. On the inside of the medicine cabinet on the third floor of the house in Belsize Park, one or both of them had carved a list of all the addresses they’d lived at: 19 Ha’Oren, Singel 104, Florastrasse 43, 163 West 83rd Street, 66 Boulevard Saint-Michel… There were fourteen of them altogether, and one afternoon when I was alone in the house I copied them into my notebook.

  PARANOID THAT something might happen to his children, Weisz was strict about what they were allowed to do, where they were allowed to go, and with whom. Their lives were monitored by a series of humorless nannies with a firm grasp that accompanied them everywhere, long after they were
old enough to be allowed a certain freedom of movement. After their tennis, piano, clarinet, ballet, or karate lessons they were chaperoned directly home by these muscular women in thick stockings and health clogs. Any change or amendment to their daily schedule had to be first run past their father. Once, when Yoav meekly pointed out that other children did not have to live by the same rules, Weisz snapped back that perhaps such children were not so loved as his sister and he. If there was any protest at all about life under their father’s rule, it came, in a muted form, from Yoav. Weisz crushed these protests with disproportionate power. As if to ensure that Yoav would never grow confident enough to stand up to him, he found ways to constantly belittle him. As for Leah, she had always done what her father asked because she lived with the special burden of knowing that she was her father’s favorite, and that to stand up to him, or God-forbid disobey him, would be a betrayal of the highest order, akin to a physical assault.

  When Yoav turned sixteen and Leah fifteen, their father decided to send them to board at the International School in Geneva. By then the nannies had been replaced by a driver who shadowed them everywhere just as the women had done, only from the leather-upholstered interior of a Mercedes-Benz. But Weisz could no longer ignore how ingrown his children had become. They spoke in a pidgin of Hebrew, French, and English that only they understood, and, despite their worldliness, naturally accepted and even sought a position of isolation among others their age. He recognized that they couldn’t be kept on such a tight leash for much longer. It’s not impossible that he sensed, as even the most blind and misguided parents can sometimes do, that the way he had chosen to raise his children might hurt or even cripple them in the end, in ways he couldn’t yet imagine.

  He called the headmaster, Monsieur Boulier, and had a long conversation with him about the school, how his children would be cared for, and what he expected them to find there. Experience had taught him that people behave in your favor when they feel bound to you in some way, if only through a handshake or friendly conversation. Even better if they think there is something you can do for them in return, and so by the end of the phone call Weisz had assured Boulier that he would find him a match for his Ming vase, the other of which had fallen and shattered some years ago during a dinner party thrown by his wife. Weisz didn’t believe it had broken during a dinner party, but it was enough for him to know that it had broken under circumstances that still disturbed Boulier, and only a perfect replacement of the vase would allow the memory of the incident to recede.

  Weisz himself did not drive—whenever possible he walked, and otherwise he took the metro like everybody else—but he insisted on accompanying Yoav and Leah in the chauffeured car from Paris to Geneva. They stopped for lunch in Dijon, and after the meal in a dark tavern on a narrow medieval street named after a seventeenth-century theologian, Weisz left Yoav and Leah to browse in a bookshop under the driver’s watch while he went to see someone about some business. There was nowhere Weisz went where he did not have business of some kind; where he had none, he invented some. There was a gesture his father always made, raking his fingers across his closed eyes as if trying to wipe something from his eyelids, that was so particular to him that it seemed to Yoav a kind of identifying mark. When Yoav was young, he used to believe that at those moments his father was listening to something outside the range of human hearing, like a dog.

  When they arrived in Geneva, Weisz brought his children directly to the house of the headmaster, Monsieur Boulier. They waited in the living room with Madame Boulier and her asthmatic French bulldog, helping themselves to a plate of butter cookies while their father spoke to the headmaster behind the closed door of his study. When the two men finally emerged from the paneled study, the headmaster accompanied them to the boys’ dormitory where Yoav would live, and made a point of drawing the curtains to point out the view of the wooded park. After embracing his son, Weisz accompanied Leah across town to the house of a retired English teacher where she was to live with two older girls. One was the daughter of an American businessman and his Thai wife, and the other the daughter of the man who had once been the royal engineer to the shah. When Leah got her period for the first time, the Iranian girl gave her a pair of her tiny diamond studs. Leah displayed them in a small box on her windowsill along with other souvenirs she had acquired in her travels. That year was the first and, at least until the point when I knew them, the last that Yoav and Leah lived apart.

  Without his children, Weisz grew even more restless. He sent Yoav and Leah postcards from Buenos Aires, St. Petersburg, and Kraków. The messages on the backs of the cards, written in handwriting that will die with his generation (shaky, mangled by its forced leaps from language to language, dignified in its illegibility), always ended in the same way: Take care of each other, my loves. Papa. During the holidays, and sometimes even on weekends, Yoav and Leah would take the train to Paris, Chamonix, Basel, or Milan to meet their father, either in an apartment or a hotel. On these journeys they were sometimes mistaken for twins. They traveled in the smoking car, Leah with her head against the window and Yoav resting his chin on his hand as the silhouette of the Alps hurtled past, the butts of their cigarettes, held between long, thin fingers, glowing brighter from time to time in the near dark.

  Two years after his children began school in Geneva, nine years after he had fled from it, Weisz suddenly decided to return to the house on Ha’Oren Street. He gave his children no explanation. There were many things they simply didn’t talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to coexist in a family. Though he still traveled, the trips always came to an end with Weisz carrying his small suitcase up the overgrown path to the stone house that his wife had once loved.

  As for Yoav and Leah, they enjoyed the new freedom they were allowed at school, but in other ways little changed for them. If anything, being forcefully submerged in school life and living so closely with their peers only underscored their separateness, and entrenched them more deeply in their isolation. They ate lunch alone together, and spent their free time in each other’s company, wandering the city or taking boat rides on the lake during which they lost all sense of time. Sometimes they shared an ice cream at one of the cafés near the water, each staring off in the opposite direction, lost in their own thoughts. They didn’t make many friends. During their second year, one of the boys who lived in the dorm with Yoav, an arrogant Moroccan, tried to cajole Leah to go out with him, and when he was coolly rebuffed, he began to spread a rumor that the siblings were having an incestuous affair. They did what they could to encourage the rumor, making a show of lying in each other’s laps and stroking one another’s hair. The affair became an accepted fact among the student body. Even their teachers began to look at them with a mix of fascination, horror, and envy. At a certain point things reached a boil, and Monsieur Boulier felt it was his duty to inform their father about what was going on between his children. He left a message for Weisz, who promptly returned his call from New York. Boulier cleared his throat, tried to approach from one angle, retreated, approached from another, fell into a coughing fit, asked Weisz to hold, was rescued by his wife, who rushed in with a glass of water and a stern look, a look that restored his sense of necessity, and he returned to the phone and told Weisz what everyone else knew about his own children. When he was finished Weisz was silent. Boulier raised his eyebrows and shot his wife an anxious glance. Do you know what I’m thinking? Weisz said at last. I can only imagine, said Boulier. I’m thinking of how rarely I am mistaken about people, Monsieur Boulier. Judgment of character is essential in my line of work, and I pride myself on the acuity of my own. And yet I see now that I erred with you, Monsieur Boulier. I admit that I never took you for an intelligent man. But neither did I take you for a fool. Here the headmaster began to cough again, and also to sweat. Now if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I have someone waiting, said Weisz. Good afternoon.

  Mostly it was Yoav who told me these storie
s, often when we were lying naked together in his bed, smoking and talking in the dark, his penis resting against my thigh, my hand tracing the protrusion of his collarbone, his hand behind my knee, my head in the crook of his shoulder, feeling the special, hair-raising excitement of being newly thrown into the fragile position of intimacy. Later, when I got to know Leah, she sometimes told me things as well. But the stories were always left incomplete, something about their atmosphere elusive and unexplained. Their father was a figure only partially sketched, as if to draw him fully would threaten to blot everything else, even themselves, from view.

  IT ISN’T EXACTLY true that I met Yoav at a party, at least not for the first time. I first encountered him three weeks after I arrived at Oxford, at the house of a young don who had once been a student of one of my college professors in New York. But we didn’t speak more than a few words to each other that night. When we met again, Yoav tried to convince me that I’d made an impression on him at the dinner, enough that he had even considered finding a way to see me again. But as I remember it, he looked alternately bored and preoccupied throughout the meal, as if, while one part of him was drinking Bordeaux and cutting his food into bite-sized morsels, the other half was engaged with shepherding a herd of goats across a bone-dry plain. He didn’t talk much. All I knew about him was that he was a third-year undergraduate reading English. After dessert, he was the first to leave, explaining that he had to catch a bus back to London, though when he said goodbye to our host and his wife it was clear that, when he wanted to, he could be charming.