Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,113

we found the place he was searching for, a kind of horn, perhaps, though it might also have been a weapon. At last the dream found its way into a room. But by then the case was gone, and while I watched Adam or Daniel slowly removed his clothes and folded them on the bed with the obsessive neatness of a man who has lived for many years under a severe authority, in a prison, perhaps, where he was schooled in a precise way to fold his clothes. The sight of his nakedness was tormenting, sad, and sweet, and I woke filled with tenderness and longing.

At four forty-five the following afternoon I was waiting in the lobby, having looked at myself too many times in the mirror, chosen a strand of red beads and dangling silver earrings. He was twenty-minutes late and I began to pace, sick at the thought of what awaited me in my room if he changed his mind and didn’t come, the interminable night ahead, tearing myself to pieces. But at last I heard the bike in the distance and he appeared around the bend, and the ill feeling was drowned in a flat lake of shining pleasure, nothing could dim it, not even the spare helmet he held out this time, a sparkling red one that no one needed to tell me usually fit onto the heads of girls his own age who listened to the same bands and spoke his language, girls who could undress in daylight, with feet smooth as a baby’s.

We made our way through the streets, coasting downhill, and I was happy, Your Honor, happy as I had not been for months or even years. When he leaned into a turn I felt his waist shift beneath my hands and that was enough, more than enough for someone who had so little left, and I did not think much about what I would say when we arrived at the house of Leah Weisz, the girl who had come five weeks ago to take away the desk. When we arrived in the sleepy village of Ein Kerem, Adam stopped to ask for directions. We sat down in a café and he ordered for us in blunt, quick Hebrew, joking with the young waitress, cracking his knuckles, tossing his phone onto the table. A mangy dog limped across the street, but even it couldn’t darken my mood or detract from the beauty of the place. Adam stirred a sugar into his coffee and sang along with the pop song drifting out of the café speakers. The light hit his face and I saw how young he was. Behind the cocky, off-tune singing, I caught the nervous shadow of uncertainty and understood that he didn’t know what to say to me. Tell me about yourself, I said. He straightened up, lit a cigarette, grinned and licked his lips. So you’re going to write about me after all? That depends, I said. On what? What I find out about you. He tipped back his head and exhaled a column of smoke. Go ahead, he said. You can use me in your book. I’m free. What do you want to know?

What did I want to know? What it looked like, the place he went home to at night. What hung on the walls and whether he had a stove that had to be lit with a match, whether the floors were tile or linoleum and whether he wore shoes when he walked across them, and the expression he wore when he looked in the mirror to shave. What his window looked out on, and what did his bed look like, yes, Your Honor, already I was imagining his bed, with its rumpled blankets and cheap pillows, his bed which, on the nights he spent alone, he sometimes slept across diagonally. But I didn’t ask about any of it. I could wait, I could bide my time. Because he was singing, you see, and the evening would be coming on soon, and now I saw that something was different, yes, he had washed his hair.

He finished the army two years ago, he said. First he got a job with a security agency, but the boss accused him of certain things (he didn’t say what) so he quit, and then he got a job painting houses with a friend of his who started a business, but the fumes got to him so he had to stop. Now he