Great House

by Nicole Krauss

  I’ve intruded on you, he said, I’m sorry. And yet he spoke with a composure that belied his words, with a confidence that was almost intimidating. His accent was Israeli, though tempered, I thought, by the vowels and accents of elsewhere. He looked as if he were in his late sixties, perhaps seventy, which would have made him a few years younger than Lotte. Then it dawned on me. How could I not have guessed before? One of her charges on the Kindertransport! A boy of fourteen, perhaps fifteen. Sixteen at most. In the beginning those few years might have seemed like a lot. But as time passed, less and less. When he was eighteen she would have been twenty-one or twenty-two. They would have shared an unbreakable bond, a private language, a lost world condensed into blunt syllables that each had only to utter for the other to understand completely. Or no language at all—a silence that stood for all that could not be spoken aloud.

  His appearance was impeccable: not a hair out of place or a speck of lint on his dark suit. Even the soles of his shoes looked unscuffed, as if he hardly touched the ground. Just a few minutes of your time, he said. Then I promise to leave you in peace.

  In peace! I almost cried out. You who tormented me all these years! My enemy, the one who occupied a corner of the woman I loved, a corner of her like a black hole that, through some sorcery I never understood, contained the deepest volumes of her.

  I find it difficult to describe my work to others, he began. I’m not in the habit of talking about myself. My business has always been to listen. People come to me. At first they don’t say much, but slowly it comes out. They look out the window, at their feet, at some point behind me in the room. They don’t meet my eyes. Because if they were to remember that I was there, they might not be able to say the words. They begin to talk and I go with them back to their childhoods, before the War. Between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. The way he lined his soldiers up under the hem of the curtain. How she laid out the little toy teacups. I am there with him under the table, Weisz continued. I see his mother’s legs move about the kitchen, and the crumbs the housekeeper’s broom missed. Their childhoods, Mr. Bender, because it is only the ones who were children who come to me now. The others have died. When I first started my business, he said, it was mostly lovers. Or husbands who had lost their wives, wives who had lost their husbands. Even parents. Though very few—most would have found my services unbearable. The ones who came hardly spoke at all, only enough to describe a little child’s bed or the chest where he kept his toys. Like a doctor, I listen without saying a word. But there’s one difference: when all of the talking is through, I produce a solution. It’s true, I can’t bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept.

  I studied his features. No, I thought now. I had been mistaken. He could not have been the one. I don’t know how I knew, but looking at his face, I knew. And to my surprise I felt the bitter taste of disappointment. There is so much we might have said to one another.

  There is an amazement that comes over each one, Weisz continued, when at last I produce the object they have been dreaming of for half a lifetime, that they have invested with the weight of their longing. It’s like a shock to their system. They’ve bent their memories around a void, and now the missing thing has appeared. They can hardly believe it, as if I’d produced the gold and silver sacked when the Romans destroyed the Temple two thousand years ago. The holy objects looted by Titus that mysteriously disappeared so that the cataclysmic loss would be total, so that there would be no evidence left to keep the Jew from turning a place into a longing he could carry with him wherever he wandered, forever.

  We sat in silence. That window, he said at last, gazing behind me. How did it break? I was surprised. How did you know? I asked. For a moment I wondered whether there was not something sinister I’d missed in him. The glass is new, he said, and the caulking is fresh. Someone threw a stone through it, I told him. His sharp features became softened by a thoughtful expression, as if my words had awakened a memory in him. The moment passed, and he began to speak again:

  But the desk, you see—it isn’t like the other pieces of furniture. I admit that there were times when it was impossible to find the exact table, chest, or chair that my clients were seeking. The trail reached a dead end. Or never began at all. Things don’t last forever. The bed that one man remembers as the place where his soul was overwhelmed is, to another man, just a bed. And when it breaks, or goes out of style, or is no longer of use to him, he throws it away. But before he dies, the man whose soul was overwhelmed needs to lie down in that bed one more time. He comes to me. He has a look in his eyes, and I understand him. So even if it no longer exists, I find it. Do you understand what I’m saying? I produce it. Out of thin air, if need be. And if the wood is not exactly as he remembers, or the legs are too thick or too thin, he’ll only notice for a moment, a moment of shock and disbelief, and then his memory will be invaded by the reality of the bed standing before him. Because he needs it to be that bed where she once lay with him more than he needs to know the truth. You understand? And if you ask me, Mr. Bender, whether I feel guilty, whether I feel I am cheating him, the answer is no. Because at the moment that man reaches out and runs his hand across the rail, for him there are no other beds in the world.

  Weisz reached up, rubbed his hand across his forehead, and kneaded his temple. I saw now how tired he looked, despite the keen sharpness of his eyes.

  But the one searching for this desk isn’t like the others, he said. He doesn’t have the capacity to forget just a little. His memory cannot be invaded. The more time passes, the sharper his memory becomes. He can study the strands of wool on a rug he sat on as a child. He can open a drawer of a desk he hasn’t seen since 1944 and go through its contents, one by one. His memory is more real to him, more precise, than the life he lives, which becomes more and more vague to him.

  You can’t imagine how he hounds me, Mr. Bender. How he calls and calls. How he torments me. For him, I traveled from city to city, I made inquiries, I called, I knocked on doors, I scoured every conceivable source. But I turned up nothing. The desk—enormous, unlike any other—had simply vanished like so much else. He wouldn’t hear it. Every few months he would call me. Then once a year, always on the same day. And always the same question: Nu? Anything? And always I had to give him the same answer: Nothing. Then a year came when he didn’t call. And I thought, not without relief, that maybe he had died. But a letter from him arrived in the mail, written on the date he always called. An anniversary, of sorts. And I understood then that he could not die until I found the desk. That he wanted to die, but he could not. I became afraid. I wanted to be through with him. What right did he have to burden me with this? With the responsibility of his life if I didn’t find it, and his death if I did?

  And yet I couldn’t forget about him, Weisz said, lowering his voice. So I began to search again. And then one day, not long ago, I received a tip. Like a tiny bubble of air rising from the depths of an ocean where leagues below something is breathing. I followed it, and it led me to another. And another. Suddenly the trail was alive again. For months I’ve been following it. And at last it led me here, to you.

  Weisz looked at me, waiting. I shifted under the burden of the news I would have to give him: that the desk that had haunted us both was long gone. Mr. Bender—he began to say. It belonged to my wife, I said, only my voice came out as a whisper. But it isn’t here. It hasn’t been here for twenty-eight years.

  His mouth twisted and a tremor seemed to clench his face for a moment, then dropped away, leaving his expression painfully blank. We sat in silence. Far off, the church bells chimed.

  She lived alone with it when I first met her, I said quietly. It hovered above her, and took up half the room. He nodded, his dark eyes glassy and bright, as if he, too, was seeing it rise up before him. Slowly, as if with a black pen and simple lines, I began to draw for him a picture of the desk and the room that was its dominion. And as I
spoke, something happened. I sensed something hovering on the far edge of my understanding that Weisz’s presence brought near, something I could feel but not quite grasp. It sucked up all the air, I whispered, groping for an understanding just out of my reach. We lived in its shadow. As if she had been lent to me from out of its darkness, I said, to which she would always belong. As if—and then something flared hotly within and when it faded to black again I felt the sudden coolness of clarity. As if death itself were living in that tiny room with us, threatening to crush us, I whispered. Death that invaded every corner, and left so little room.

  It took me a long time to tell him the story. The live, pained look in his eyes and the way he listened, as if memorizing every word, drove me onward, until at last I arrived at the story of Daniel Varsky who rang our bell one evening, who tormented my imagination, and then receded as quickly as he had come, taking with him the terrible, over-bearing desk. When I was finished we sat in silence. Then I remembered something. Just a minute, I said, and went to the other room where I opened the drawer of my own desk and took out the small black diary that I’d kept for almost thirty years, filled with the tiny handwriting of the young Chilean poet. When I returned to the living room, Weisz was staring absently at the window the glazier had replaced. After a moment he turned to me. Mr. Bender, are you familiar with the first-century rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai? Only the name, I said. Why? My father was a scholar of Jewish history, Weisz said. He wrote many books, all of which I read years later, after he was dead. In them I recognized the stories he used to tell me. One of his favorites was about ben Zakkai, who was already an old man when the Romans besieged Jerusalem. Fed up with the warring parties within the city, he staged his own death, Weisz said. The corpse bearers carried him through the gates for the last time, and delivered him to the tent of the Roman general. In return for his prophecy of Roman victory, he was permitted to go to Yavne to open a school. Later, in that small town, he received the news that Jerusalem had burned. The Temple was destroyed. Those that survived were sent into exile. In his agony, he thought: What is a Jew without Jerusalem? How can you be a Jew without a nation? How can you make a sacrifice to God if you don’t know where to find him? In the torn clothes of the mourner, ben Zakkai returned to his school. He announced that the court of law that had burned in Jerusalem would be resurrected there, in the sleepy town of Yavne. That instead of making sacrifices to God, from then on Jews would pray to Him. He instructed his students to begin assembling more than a thousand years of oral law.

  Day and night the scholars argued about the laws, and their arguments became the Talmud, Weisz continued. They became so absorbed in their work that sometimes they forgot the question their teacher had asked: What is a Jew without Jerusalem? Only later, after ben Zakkai died, did his answer slowly reveal itself, the way an enormous mural only begins to make sense as you walk backwards away: Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form. Later his school became known as the Great House, after the phrase in Books of Kings: He burned the house of God, the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.

  Two thousand years have passed, my father used to tell me, and now every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned in that fire, so vast that we can, each one of us, only recall the tiniest fragment: a pattern on the wall, a knot in the wood of a door, a memory of how light fell across the floor. But if every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one, the House would be built again, said Weisz, or rather a memory of the House so perfect that it would be, in essence, the original itself. Perhaps that is what they mean when they speak of the Messiah: a perfect assemblage of the infinite parts of the Jewish memory. In the next world, we will all dwell together in the memory of our memories. But that will not be for us, my father used to say. Not for you or me. We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door.

  I handed Weisz the diary. Perhaps this will help you, I said. He held it for a moment in his palm, as if measuring its weight. Then he slipped it into his pocket. I walked him to the door. If I can ever do anything for you in return, he said. But he did not offer me his card or any way to contact him. We shook hands and he turned to go. Something seized me then, and unable to control myself I called out: Was it him that sent you? Who? he asked. The one who gave the desk to Lotte. Is that how you found me? Yes, he said. I began to cough. My voice came out as a wretched croak. And is he still—? but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

  Weisz studied my face. He tucked the stick under his arm, reached into his breast pocket and took out a pen and a small leather case holding a pad of paper. He wrote something down, folded it in half, and handed it to me. Then he turned toward the street, but after a step he stopped and turned back to look up at the windows of the attic study. He was easy enough to find, he said quietly, once I knew where to look.

  The headlights of a dark car parked in front of the neighbor’s house came to life, illuminating the fog. Goodbye, Mr. Bender, he said. I watched him walk down the front path and slide into the backseat of the car. Between my fingers I held the folded paper with the name and address of the man Lotte had once loved. I looked up at the wet, black boughs of the trees, the tops of which she had looked out at from her desk. What would she have read in them? What would she have seen in the crosshatch of black marks against the sky, what echoes and memories and colors that I could never see? Or refused to see.

  I slipped the paper in my pocket, went inside, and gently closed the door behind me. There was a chill, so I lifted my sweater off the hook. I laid some logs in the fireplace, crumpled a sheet of newspaper, and crouched to blow on the fire until it took. I put the kettle on to boil, poured some milk into the tomcat’s bowl, and left it in the pool of light the kitchen cast on the garden. Carefully, I placed the folded paper on the table in front of me.

  And somewhere the other one turned on his lamp. Put the kettle to boil. Turned the page of a book. Or the radio dial.

  How much we might have said to one another, he and I. We who collaborated in her silence. He who never dared to break it, and I who bowed to the borders drawn, the walls erected, the areas restricted, who turned away and never asked. Who each morning stood by and watched her disappear into the cold, black depths, and pretended not to know how to swim. Who made a pact of ignorance and smothered what churned within so that things might carry on as they always had. So that the house would not flood, nor the walls come crashing down. So that we would not be invaded, crushed, or overcome by what dwelled in the silences around which we had so delicately, so ingeniously built a life.

  I sat there for many long hours into the night. The fire died down. The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark. At last, near midnight I picked up the folded paper from the table. Without hesitating, I dropped it into the fire. It singed and burst into flames, for a moment the fire roared with new life, and in an instant was consumed.

  WEISZ

  A RIDDLE: A stone is thrown in Budapest on a winter night in 1944. It sails through the air toward the illuminated window of a house where a father is writing a letter at his desk, a mother is reading, and a boy is daydreaming about an ice-skating race on the frozen Danube. The glass shatters, the boy covers his head, the mother screams. At that moment the life they know ceases to exist. Where does the stone land?

  WHEN I LEFT Hungary in 1949 I was twenty-one. I was thin, a person partially erased, afraid to stand still. On the black market I turned a gold ring I found on a dead soldier into two crates of sausages, and the two crates into twenty vials of medicine, and the twenty vials into a hundred and fifty packages of silk stockings. I sent these in a shipping c
ontainer with other luxuries that were to be my livelihood in my second life, the one waiting for me in Haifa port the way a shadow waits under a rock at noon. In the container, folded among the other items, were five silk shirts cut to fit me like a second skin, my initials monogrammed on the breast pocket. I arrived, but the container never did. The Turk in customs who stood under the Carmel claimed to have no record of it. Behind me the boats rocked on the waves of the sea. A sliver of shadow slipped out from a rock near the Turk’s enormous right foot. A woman in a thin dress was bent over kissing the scorched ground, crying. Perhaps she had found her own shadow under a different stone. I saw something glint in the sand and picked up a half lira. A half can become a whole can become two can become four. Six months later I rang the doorbell of a man’s house. The man had invited his cousin, and his cousin, my friend, had brought me along. When the man opened the door he was wearing a silk shirt and sewn above the breast pocket were my initials. His young wife brought out a tray of coffee and halva. When the man reached over to light my cigarette the silk of his sleeve brushed my arm, and we were like two people pressing on either side of a window.

  MY FATHER was a scholar of history. He wrote at an enormous desk with many drawers, and when I was very young I believed that two thousand years were stored in those drawers the way Magda the housekeeper stored flour and sugar in the pantry. Only one drawer had a lock, and for my fourth birthday my father gave me the little brass key. I couldn’t sleep at night, trying to think of what to put in the drawer. The responsibility was crushing. In my mind I went over my most prized possessions again and again, but all of them suddenly seemed flimsy and grossly insignificant. In the end I locked the empty drawer and never told my father.