Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,117

other prisoners. One of them survived, and some years later he met someone who knew Daniel’s parents. He said they kept him alive for some months, though only barely. Paul, I said at last, Yes, he said, and I heard a lighter click, then the drag of his cigarette. Did he have a child? A child? Paul said. No. A daughter, I asked, with an Israeli woman he was with not long before he disappeared? I never heard of a daughter, Paul said. I doubt it, really. He had a girlfriend in Santiago, and that’s why he kept coming back when he shouldn’t have. Her name was Inés, I think. She was Chilean, that much I know. It’s strange, Paul said, I never met her but suddenly I remember now that a while back I had a dream about her.

As Paul spoke it occurred to me with something like surprise that if it weren’t for the peculiar logic of Paul’s dreams I would never have met Daniel Varsky, and all these years it would have been someone else writing at his desk. After I hung up I couldn’t sleep, or perhaps I didn’t want to sleep, afraid to turn off the lights and meet whatever the dark would bring. In order to distract myself from thinking about Daniel Varsky, or worse yet about my life and the question that tormented me as soon as I let my thoughts slip, I concentrated on Adam. In extravagant detail I imagined his body and the things I would do to it and those he would do to mine, although in these fantasies I allowed myself another body, the one I had before mine began to blur and lose shape and go off in a different direction from me, the one who existed inside of it. I showered at dawn, and at seven sharp I was there when the guesthouse restaurant opened. Rafi’s face clouded over when he saw me and he retreated to the bar and occupied himself with drying the glasses, leaving the other waiter to attend to me. I lingered over my coffee, and, discovering that my appetite had returned, went back twice to the buffet. But he continued to avoid my eyes. Only as I left did he run after me in the hall. Miss! he called. I turned. He kneaded one broad hand with the other, and glanced over his shoulder to make sure we were alone. Please, he groaned, I’m asking you. Don’t get involved with him. I don’t know what he says to you, but he’s a liar. A liar and a thief. He’s using you to make a fool of me. I felt a flash of anger, and he must have seen it on my face because he hurried to explain. He wants to turn my own daughter against me. I forbid her to see him and he wants—he began to say, but at that moment the director of the guesthouse approached from the other end of the hall and the waiter bowed his head and hurried away.

From then on I dedicated myself to seducing Adam. He was, that waiter, no more than a fly buzzing around a desire I no longer had any control over, which I did not wish to control, Your Honor, because it was the only live thing left in me, and because so long as I was consumed by it I did not have to face the view of my life that had come so sickeningly into focus. I even took a certain amused pleasure in the fact that it had taken a man less than half my age with whom I had nothing in common to awaken such a passion in me. I went back to my room and waited; I could wait all day and all night, it didn’t matter. Close to dusk the phone rang and I picked it up on the first ring. He would come for me in an hour. Perhaps he knew I’d been waiting, but I hardly cared. I waited some more. An hour and a half later he arrived and took me to a house down an alley somewhere off Bezalel. A necklace of colored lights was strung up in the fig tree and people were eating around the table beneath it. Introductions were made, folding chairs brought from inside, space created around the already tightly packed table. A girl in a thin red dress and high boots turned to me. You’re writing