Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,115

would give. I guess I’ll have to come back, I began to say, but at that moment an old man appeared, or rather lengthened like a shadow from behind the wall, holding an elegant walking stick. Ken? Ma atem rotsim? Adam answered him, gesturing to me. I asked if he spoke English. Yes, he said, gripping the silver handle of his cane which I saw now was the shape of a ram’s head. Does Leah Weisz live here? Weisz? he said, Yes, I said, Leah Weisz, she came to see me last month in New York to pick up a desk. A desk? the old man echoed, uncomprehending, and now Adam fidgeted impatiently and said some more words to the man in Hebrew. Lo, the old man said, shaking his head, lo, ani lo yodea klum al shum shulchan, He doesn’t know anything about a desk, Adam said, and the old man balanced on his cane and made no movement to unlock the gate. Maybe they gave you the wrong address, Adam said. He pulled Leah’s crumpled note out of his jeans and offered it through the bars. Unhurriedly the old man reached into his breast pocket, unfolded a pair of glasses and slipped them onto his face. It seemed to take him a long time to understand what was written there. When he finished reading, he turned it over to look at the other side. Finding it blank, he turned it back again. Ze ze o lo? Adam demanded. The old man neatly folded the note and passed it back through the bars. This is 19 Ha’Oren Street, but there is no one by that name here, he said, and I was surprised by his accent, which was fluent and refined.

Now it occurred to me that there was something cunning I had missed in Leah Weisz. That she might have deliberately given me the wrong address in case I changed my mind and tried to get back the desk. But then why give any address at all? I hadn’t asked, and the fact that she had left one had almost struck me, I realized now, as a kind of invitation. The old man stood in meticulously ironed shirtsleeves while behind him the house held its breath beneath the leaves. What was it like inside, I wondered. What did the kettle look like, was it old and dented, the cup for the tea, were there books, what hung there in the gloomy hallway, something biblical, a little etching of the binding of Isaac perhaps? The old man studied me with sharp blue eyes, the eyes of a tamed eagle, and I sensed that he, too, was curious about me, as if there were a question he wished to ask. Even Adam seemed to notice it, and looked from the old man to me, then back to the old man, and the three of us hung in the balance of the silence that surrounded the house until at last Adam shrugged, ripped off another sliver of nail with his teeth, spat it out, and turned back to the bike. Good luck, the old man said, his hand tightening around the curled silver horns of the ram, I hope you find what you’re looking for. I don’t know what possessed me, Your Honor, I blurted out, I didn’t want it back, the desk, I only wanted—but I stopped because I couldn’t say what it was that I had wanted, and a look of pain flickered across the old man’s face. Adam started up the engine behind me. Let’s go, he said. I didn’t want to leave yet, but there seemed to be no choice. I got onto the motorcycle. The old man lifted his stick in farewell and we drove away.

Adam was hungry. I didn’t care where we went, so long as he didn’t bring me back to the guesthouse. I tried to understand what had happened. Who was Leah Weisz? Why had I so blithely accepted everything she’d told me without the least bit of proof? So willing had I been to give up that desk around which I had bent my life that one might have thought I had been eager, keen to be relieved of it at last. It’s true that I’d always thought of myself as its guardian, sooner or later, I told myself, someone would come for it, but the truth was that it was merely a convenient story I told myself, a story like so many