Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,100

yellow vests, always the first there to hold the dying as they go in shocked silence, to gather up the child without limbs. True kindness, because the dead cannot repay the favor. Yes, it was you I spoke to when I woke with nightmares. You I addressed when I looked at myself to shave in the mirror. I found you everywhere, hiding in the most unlikely places, and though at first I wondered why, soon enough I realized it was because I believed I could learn something from you, from your example. You who had always been so gifted at giving up, of letting go, of making yourself lighter and lighter, less and less, one friend at a time, one father less, one wife less, and now you have even given up being a judge, there is almost nothing anymore to tether you to the world, you’re like a dandelion with only one or two hairs left, how easy it would be for you, with a little cough, a little sigh, to blow the last one away—

Suddenly I’m frightened, Dov. I feel a shiver, a coldness is seeping into my veins. For once I think I understand. What do I understand? Is it possible you’ve come to say goodbye again? That you intend to put an end—at last?

Wait, Dovik. Don’t go. Remember how I used to put you to sleep at night, always you wanted one more question? Where does the sun go at night? What do wolves eat? Why is there only one of me?

One more question, Dovik. One more song. Five more minutes.

What would she do?

Where are you? All your life I’ve been asking.

I’ll put on my shoes. I’ll get down on my knees. I’ll never mention it again.

I’ll do what your mother would have done. I’ll call every hospital.

ALL RISE

YOUR HONOR, IN THE DARK AND STONY COOLNESS of my room I slept like someone rescued from a typhoon. A restless disquiet, the awareness of some misfortune, fluttered at the edge of my dreams, but I was too exhausted to investigate it. It gathered and coalesced over long hours of sleep, until at the moment I opened my eyes it burst into consciousness as an almost fanatical dread. Just beyond my reach was an insistent question that needed an answer, but what was the question? I felt a terrible thirst and fumbled in the dark for the little glass bottles of cold water. I had no sense of the time, but through the crack under the shutters I saw that it was still light out, or had become light again. The question pressed up more insistently, but when I tried to grasp it it eluded me. I groped for the key to open the door to the veranda, knocking over a bottle that shattered on the floor. The lock stuck then gave way to the violent light of Jerusalem. I looked out at the walls of the Old City, deeply moved by the view, and yet still the question was there, and my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a missing tooth: it hurt but I wanted to know. When the sun went down and darkness slipped over the hills like a hood, everything in my head became amplified as if in a theater with perfect acoustics, a wretched clamminess seeped back in, and the urgent question rose up again, but what was it, what, until with a shock of nausea it surfaced at last:

What if I had been wrong?

YOUR HONOR, for as long as I can remember I set myself apart. Or rather I believed that I had been set apart from others, chosen out. I won’t waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents’ marriage, under the reign of my father’s rage, after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive that dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself. I didn’t grant myself magical powers or believe myself to be under the watch of some beneficent force—it was nothing so tangible as that—nor did I ever lose sight of the immutable reality of my situation. I simply came to believe that one, the factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental