Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,102

of a laugh in my belly: imagine what they’d have done with such a desk. They’d have swooped down on it like vultures on the carcass of a lion—what a bonfire it would have made, enough wood for days—and now I actually chortled out loud, biting my nails and practically grinning at that poor, overgrown desk that had so narrowly escaped becoming ash, had risen to the heights of Lorca, or at the very least of Daniel Varsky, and now had been abandoned to the likes of me. I ran my fingers along the nicked surface and reached up to caress the knobs of its many drawers as it stooped under the ceiling, because now I began to see it in a different light, the shadow it cast was almost inviting, Come, it seemed to say, like a clumsy giant who reaches out its paw and the little mouse jumps up into it and away they go together, over hills and plains, through forests and vales. I dragged a chair across the floor (I still remember the sound it made, a long scrape that gouged the silence), and was surprised to discover how small it appeared next to the desk, like the chair of a child or the baby bear in the story of Goldilocks, surely it would break if I tried to sit in it, but no, it was just right. I placed my hands on the desk, first one hand and then the other, while the silence seemed to strain against the windows and doors. I lifted my eyes up and I felt it, Your Honor, that secret quiver of joy, and either then, or soon enough, the immutable fact of that desk, the first thing I saw each morning when I opened my eyes, renewed my sense that a potential in me had been acknowledged, a special quality that set me apart and to which I was beholden.

Sometimes the doubt receded for months or even years, only to return and overwhelm me to the point of paralysis. One night, a year and a half after the desk arrived at my door, Paul Alpers called on the phone: What are you doing? he asked, Reading Pessoa, I said, though the truth was that I had been asleep on the sofa, and as I uttered this lie my eyes fell on a dark spot of drool. I’m coming over, he said, and fifteen minutes later he was standing at my door, looking pale and clutching a wrinkled brown bag. It must have been some time since I’d last seen him, because I was surprised at how much thinner his hair was. Varsky disappeared, he said, What? I said, though I’d heard him perfectly well, and then we both turned at the same time to stare at the towering desk, as if at any moment our tall, thin friend with the big nose might leap out, laughing, from one of the many drawers. But nothing happened except that a trickle of sadness began to leak into the room. They came to his house at dawn, Paul whispered. Can I come in? and without waiting for a reply walked past me, opened the cupboard, and returned with two glasses that he filled from the bottle of scotch in the paper bag. We raised our glasses to Daniel Varsky, and then Paul refilled the glasses and we toasted again, this time to all the kidnapped poets of Chile. When the bottle was finished and Paul sat hunched in his coat in the chair across from me, a hard but vacant look in his eyes, I was overwhelmed by two feelings: one, the regret that nothing ever stays the same, and two, the sense that the burden I labored under had now gotten immeasurably heavier.

I became haunted by Daniel Varsky and had difficulty concentrating. My mind would wander back to the night I met him, when I stood looking at the maps on the walls of all of the cities he’d lived in, and he told me about places I’d never heard of—a river outside of Barcelona the color of aquamarine where you could dive down through an underwater hole and surface in a tunnel, half-air, half-water, and walk for miles listening to the echo of your own voice, or the tunnels in the Judean Hills no wider than a man’s waist where the followers of Bar Kochba lost their minds waiting out the Romans, through which Daniel had slid with nothing but