Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,110

died, he doesn’t have anyone, he comes to us. He lurks around and we can’t turn him away. What’s his name? I asked. The waiter looked at my glass, held it up to the light, noticed a smudge, and switched it with a glass from another table. What a gift, he went on, if only you could be there to see my Dina’s face when I give it to her. I’d like to know his name, I repeated. His name? Adam, the sooner I hear the last of it the better. Why did he come here? I asked. To drive me crazy, that’s why. Forget him, how about an omelet, you like an omelet, or maybe some pasta primavera? Look at the menu, anything, it’s on the house. My name is Rafi. I’ll bring you tea, take the yellow this time, you’ll see, everyone loves the yellow.

But I did not forget him, Your Honor. I did not forget the tall, thin young man in the leather jacket whose name was Adam, but who I knew was also my friend, the disappeared poet Daniel Varsky. Twenty-five years ago he was in that New York City apartment that looked as if a storm had swept through it, arguing about poetry and rocking back on his heels as if at any moment he might leap up like a pilot ejected from his seat, and then, in an instant he was gone, slipped through a hole, fallen into an abyss, and resurfaced here, in Jerusalem. Why? The answer seemed perfectly clear to me: to retrieve his desk. The desk he had left behind as collateral, which he had entrusted to me, of all people, to guard, which had lain for all these years on my conscience, at which I had enacted my conscience, and whose departure into other hands he had not wished for any more than I had wished to cease working at it. At least, that is how, in my addled mind, I allowed myself to imagine it, even as on another level I knew that such a story was no more than a hallucination.

That night in my room I contrived various reasons to give the waiter, Rafi, for needing to see Adam again: I wished to take a tour, by motorcycle, of the Dead Sea valley, and required a driver and guide, yes it absolutely had to be by motorcycle, and I could offer a generous fee for the service. Or: I needed someone to deliver an urgent package to my cousin Ruthie who lived in Herzliya, whom I had not seen in fifteen years and never liked, a package I could not trust to just anyone, and could he please send Adam, just a small favor to return the favor of the book for Dina, though of course I would be happy to offer a generous etcetera, etcetera for the service. I was not even above offering to “help” Rafi by bestowing on his wife’s errant cousin, the family black sheep, some guidance from a benevolent outsider, the writer from America, offering to take him under my wing for a little while, to lend him some wisdom, set him on the right path. All night and all the next day I schemed about how to wrangle another encounter with Adam, but in the end it was unnecessary: the following evening, walking home along Keren Hayesod lost in thought, waiting for the light to change, a motorcycle pulled up alongside the curb. It was the roar of the engine first that pierced my daydreaming, but I didn’t put it together with the young man who had flitted in and out of my thoughts all day until, still crouched on the motorcycle, he flipped up the darkened visor and gave me a long look, his eyes flashing with a joke that was either his alone or ours to share, I couldn’t yet say, while the traffic grew restless, honked, and made its way around him. He said something I couldn’t make out over the noise of the engine. I felt my breath quicken and stepped closer, I saw his lips move: Do you want a ride? The guesthouse was only ten minutes away by foot, but I didn’t hesitate, at least, not in my mind, though once I accepted the offer it was not immediately clear to me how exactly to mount the motorcycle. I stood helplessly by, staring at the remaining portion of the seat not taken up by Adam, unable