Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,121

it becomes what it must have always been on me: absurd and pathetic. With his eyes pinned on me, he digs his hand in up to the forearm and rifles through it. When he does not find what he is looking for he overturns it and the contents scatter. Quickly he leans over and plucks up my wallet. Then he throws the purse down, kicks it out of his way with his boot, and, with a final look of repugnance in my direction, walks out, slamming the door behind him. My lipstick continues to roll across the floor until it hits the wall.

The rest hardly matters, Your Honor. I only want to say that the devastation tore through me, pulling the roof down at last. What was he, after all? Nothing more than an illusion I had conjured to deliver the answer that I could not give myself, though I had known it all along. When at last I roused myself and with shaking hands filled a glass from the kitchen faucet, my eyes fell on a little dish with some loose change and Gad’s car keys. I did not hesitate. I picked them up, walked past the scattered contents of my purse, and out of the apartment. The car was parked across the street. I unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat. In the rearview mirror I saw that my face was swollen from crying, my hair matted, the gray showing through. I am an old woman now, I thought to myself. Today I have become an old woman, and I almost laughed, a cold laugh to match the coldness inside of me.

I steered the car into the road, bumping over the curb. I followed one road and then another. When I came to a familiar intersection I turned in the direction of Ein Kerem. I thought of the old man who lived on Ha’Oren Street. I did not think of going to him, but I drove toward him. Soon I lost my way. The headlights slipped over the trunks of trees, the road led into the Jerusalem Forest and fell away to one side, sloping down into a ravine. All it would have taken was a jerk of the wheel to throw the car down into the dark below. Tightening my knuckles, I imagined the headlights bouncing in the darkness, the upturned wheels spinning in silence. But I do not have whatever it is that makes a person capable of extinguishing herself. I drove on. I thought, for some reason, of my grandmother whom I used to visit on West End Avenue before she died. I thought of my childhood, of my mother and father who are both dead now, but whose child I cannot escape being any more than I can escape the nauseatingly familiar dimensions of my mind. Now I am fifty, Your Honor. I know that nothing will change for me. That soon, maybe not tomorrow or next week, but soon enough the walls around me and the roof above me will rise again, exactly as they were before, and the answer to the question that brought them down will be stuffed into a drawer and locked away. That I will go on again as I always have, with or without the desk. Do you understand, Your Honor? Can you see that it is too late for me? What else would I become? Who would I be?

A moment ago you opened your eyes. Dark gray eyes, completely alert, that caught and gripped me for a moment in their gaze. Then you closed them again and drifted away. Maybe you sense that I am coming to the end, that the story that has been hurtling toward you from the start is about to turn the bend in the road and collide with you at last. Yes, I wanted to weep and gnash my teeth, Your Honor, to beg your forgiveness, but what came out was a story. I wanted to be judged on what I did with my life, but now I will be judged by how I described it. But perhaps that is right, after all. If you could speak, perhaps you would say that is how it always is. Only before God do we stand without stories. But I am not a believer, Your Honor.

The nurse will come soon to administer another dose of morphine, touching your cheek with the gentle ease of one who has made a life of caring for others.