Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,103

a match to light his way—while I who have always suffered from a mild claustrophobia nodded meekly, and soon afterwards listened to him recite his poem which he did without blinking or looking away. Forget Everything I Ever Said. It really was quite good, Your Honor, the truth is that it was an astounding poem, and I never forgot it at all. There was a naturalness about it that it now seemed to me I would never possess. It was painful to acknowledge, but I’d always suspected it about myself, this little lie beneath the surface of my lines, how I piled the words on like decoration while for him it was like stripping everything away, more and more until he lay utterly exposed, writhing like a little white larva (there was something almost indecent about it which made it all the more breathtaking). Remembering it as I sat across from Paul, who by that point had fallen asleep, I felt a pain in my stomach just below my heart, like a deep stab from a tiny pocketknife, and I doubled over on his sofa, the sofa on which I had so often fallen asleep thinking about nothing, about little things, on what day of the week my birthday would fall, how I needed to buy a bar of soap, while somewhere in the desert, plains, or basements of Chile Daniel Varsky was being tortured to death. After that the sight of the desk every morning made me want to cry, not just because it embodied the violent fate of my friend, but also because now it only served to remind me that it had never really belonged to me, nor would it ever, and that I was only an accidental caretaker who had foolishly imagined that she possessed something, an almost magical quality, which, in fact, she’d never had, and that the true poet who was meant to be sitting at it was, in all likelihood, dead. One night I had a dream in which Daniel Varsky and I were sitting on a narrow bridge above the East River. For some reason he was wearing a patch over one eye like Moshe Dayan. But don’t you feel, deep down, that there’s something special about you? he asked me, carelessly swinging his legs while down below us swimmers, or perhaps dogs, tried to make their way against the current. No, I whispered, trying to hold back tears, No, I don’t, while Daniel Varsky looked at me with a mixture of bewilderment and pity.

For a month I wrote almost nothing. At that time one of my many odd jobs was folding origami birds for a Chinese caterer owned by the uncle of one of my friends, and I outdid myself folding birds, cranes of every color, until my hands were first numb, then so stiff I couldn’t curl my fingers around a cup and had to drink right from the faucet. Yet I didn’t mind, there was something almost comforting about the way I began to see every object in the world as a variation on the eleven folds it took to make a crane, the flock of cranes a thousand strong that I packed into boxes that took up what little space there was not occupied by the desk. In order to get to the mattress where I slept I had to squirm between the boxes and the desk, so that for a moment my whole body was pressed against it and inhaling the smell of the wood, at once unplaceable and painfully familiar, I felt a bolt of misery so acute that I gave up the mattress and slept on the sofa until the day the man came to pick up the boxes of cranes (he let out a low whistle of surprise, then proceeded to count out the money), and my apartment was empty once again. Or rather, empty but for the desk, sofa, chest, and chairs of Daniel Varsky. After that, I did my best to ignore the desk, but the less attention I paid to it the more it seemed to grow, and soon I began to feel claustrophobic and took to sleeping with the windows open despite the cold, which lent my dreams a strange austerity. Then, passing the desk one night, I caught sight of a sentence on a page I’d written some months before. The sentence stayed in my head as I continued on to the bathroom, something about it was off, and