Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,114

was working in a mattress store, but what he really wanted was to become an apprentice to a carpenter because he had always been good with his hands and liked to build things. And your family? I asked. He stubbed out his cigarette, glanced around distractedly, checked his phone. He didn’t have any, he said. His parents died when he was sixteen. He did not say where or how. He had an older brother he had not spoken to for many years. Sometimes he thought of trying to look him up, but he never did. What about Rafi? I asked. I told you, he said, he’s an asshole. The only reason I bother with him is because of Dina. If you met her you’d never be able to figure out how someone so beautiful came from that baboon. Tell me about her, I said, but he said nothing and turned away to hide the contortion that seized his face, a split second only in which all of his features collapsed and another face came through, a face he quickly wiped away with his sleeve. He stood up and threw some coins on the table, called goodbye to the waitress who smiled at him. Please, I said, reaching for my wallet, let me. But he clucked his tongue, swung his helmet up and pulled it down over his head, and at that moment, for some reason, I thought of his dead mother, of how she must have bathed him as a child, how she must have lifted him out of his crib at the bottom of the night and felt his wet lips on her face, unwrapped his little fingers from her long hair, sung to him, imagined his future, and then the needle of my mind slipped and it was Daniel Varsky’s mother I was imagining, and as if in a mirror image it was the son who was dead and the mother who went on living. For the first time in the twenty-seven years I had been writing at his desk the magnitude of his mother’s loss dawned on me, a window swung open and I saw out to the unutterable nightmare of her grief. I stood next to the motorcycle. The wind was still. There was the smell of jasmine. What is it, I thought, to go on living after your child is dead? I climbed onto the bike and gently clasped his waist in my hands, and each of my hands were those mothers’ hands, the one who couldn’t touch her child because she was dead, and the one who couldn’t touch her child because she went on living, and then we arrived at Ha’Oren Street.

We did not immediately find the house because the number was hidden behind a riot of vines that grew up along the wall that surrounded it. There was an iron gate locked by a chain, but through it, half obscured by the trees, we could see a large stone house with green shutters, almost all of which were closed. To imagine the girl, Leah, living there was to give her an entirely new dimension, a profundity I hadn’t sensed. Peering into the dusty garden, I was myself filled with a sadness that came from the uncanny feeling of being in a place that had been touched, however obliquely, by Daniel Varsky: inside that shuttered house lived a woman, or so I believed, who had once known and most likely loved him. What had Leah’s mother thought about her daughter’s search, and how had she felt when the desk of the man, the father of her child, who had been so brutally ripped from the world, had arrived home to her like a giant wooden corpse? As if that weren’t enough, now I was here to deliver his ghost. I considered making up an excuse, telling Adam I’d made a mistake, this wasn’t the place, but before I could he found the bell under the leaves and rang it. A tinny electric rasp sounded. Somewhere a dog barked. When there was no answer he pressed it again. You have a telephone number maybe? he asked, but I did not so he held it down for a third time and the lack of even the faintest stirring, the paralysis of the stones and the shutters and even the leaves came back as sheer stubbornness. They know you’re coming? Yes, I lied, and Adam shook the bars of the gate to see if the chain