Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,106

at the house of a couple we knew. I don’t even remember their names: the kind of people who enter easily into your life, then leave it just as easily. The Seder started late, after the couple had put their two young children to sleep, and we—all the guests—were talking and joking, maybe fifteen of us around the long table, in the sheepishly embarrassed and so overly jocular way of Jews who are reenacting a tradition they are far enough removed from to cause a painful self-consciousness, but not far enough to give up. Suddenly, into this raucous roomful of adults enters this child. We were all so busy with each other that we didn’t notice her at first; she couldn’t have been more than three, dressed in those pajamas with the feet, her bottom still saggy with a diaper, and clutching a sort of cloth or rag, the shredded remains of a blanket, I suppose, to her cheek. We had woken her from sleep. And suddenly, bewildered by this sea of strange faces and the clamor of voices, she let out a cry. A wail of pure terror that cut through the air, and silenced the room. For a moment everything froze as the scream hung above us like the question to end all the questions that particular night, of all nights, is designed to pose. A question which, because wordless, has no answer, and so must be asked forever. Perhaps it was only a second, but in my mind that scream went on, and still goes on somewhere now, but there, on that night, it ended when the mother stood, knocking over her chair, and in a single fluid motion rushed to the child, gathered her in, and held her aloft. In an instant the child quieted. For a moment she tipped her head back and looked up at her mother, and her expression was illuminated with the wonder and relief of finding, again, the only comfort, the infinite comfort, she had in the world. She buried her face in her mother’s neck, in the smell of her mother’s long lustrous hair, and her cries slowly grew dimmer and dimmer as the conversation around the table started up again, until at last she became silent, curled against her mother like a question mark—all that was left of the question that, for the time being, no longer needed to be asked—and fell asleep. The meal went on, and at some point the mother rose and carried the limp body of the sleeping child back down the hallway to her room. But I hardly noticed the conversation that swelled around me, so absorbed was I by the expression I’d glimpsed the moment before the girl had buried her face in her mother’s hair, which filled me with awe and also grief, and I knew then, Your Honor, that I would never be that to anyone, the one who in a single motion could rescue and bring peace.

S, too, had been moved by what had happened, and that night after we arrived home he began to talk about having a child again. The conversation led, as it always did, to the old obstacles, the name and shape of which I can no longer remember exactly, beyond that they were well known to both of us, and, as we had identified them, required solutions before we could proceed with bringing our child, the one we imagined separately and together, into the world. But under the spell of that mother and little girl, that night S argued harder. There might never come a right time, he said, but despite the grief the child’s expression had torn open in me, or maybe because of it, because I was afraid, I argued just as hard against it. How easy it would be to make a mess of it, I said, to crush the child as we had each been crushed by our parents. If we were going to do it we had to be ready, I insisted, and we weren’t ready, far from it, and as if to prove the point—it was already dawn now, sleep was out of the question—I walked away, closed the door to my study, and sat down at the desk.

How many arguments and difficult conversations and even moments of great passion over the years ended the same way? I have to work, I’d say, untangling myself from the bedsheets, separating from his limbs, leaving the table, and as I walked