Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,122

She said they will wake you tomorrow, and now tomorrow has almost come. She washed the blood from my hands. She took a brush out of her purse and ran it through my hair, just as my mother used to do. I reached up and stilled her hand. I’m the one who—I began to say, but stopped there.

You stood pinned in the headlights, so still that I thought, in the fraction of a second left for me to think, that you were waiting for me. Then the screech of brakes, the body blow. The car skidded and was still. My head hit the wheel. What have I done? The road was empty. How long until I heard the abysmal moan of pain, and understood that you were alive? Until I found you crumpled in the grass and took your head in my hands? Until the wail of the siren, the red splash of lights, gray dawn through the window in which I saw, for the first time, your face? What have I done, what have I done?

They swarmed around you. They hung you back up on life, like a coat that has fallen from its hook.

Talk to him, she said, fixing the electrode that had come loose from your chest. It’s good for him to hear you. Good? She said, It’s good for you to talk. About what? Just talk. For how long? I asked, though I knew I would sit by your side for as long as they let me, until your true wife or lover arrived. His father is on the way, she said, and drew the curtains around us. For a thousand and one nights, I thought. More.

SWIMMING HOLES

LOTTE REMEMBERED ME until the very last. It was I who often felt I could no longer remember the person she had once been. Her sentences began easily enough, but quickly faltered and became submerged in oblivion. Nor did she understand me. At times she gave the impression of understanding, but even if some combination of words I struck on had ignited a glimmer of sense in her mind, by the next moment she’d lost it. She died quickly, without pain. On the 25th of November we celebrated her birthday. I bought a cake from the bakery she liked in Golders Green, and the two of us blew out the candles together. For the first time in weeks I saw a flush of happiness in her cheeks. The following night she came down with a very high fever and had trouble breathing. Her health wasn’t good, and she was frail by then; in the last years of her life she had aged a great deal. I called our doctor, who came to see her at the house. Her condition worsened, and some hours later we brought her to the hospital. The pneumonia came over her rapidly and overwhelmed her. In her last hours she begged to be let to die. The doctors did everything they could to save her, but when there was nothing more to do they left us in peace. I climbed onto the narrow bed with her and stroked her hair. I thanked her for the life she’d shared with me. I told her that no one could have been happier together than we had been. I told her again the story of the first time I saw her. Soon after that she lost consciousness and slipped away.

About forty people came to Highgate Cemetery on the afternoon I buried her. Long ago, we had decided to be buried together there, where we had walked so many times among the overgrown lanes, reading the names on the toppled gravestones. That morning I was flustered and nervous. Only as the rabbi began to say Kaddish did I realize that some part of me believed her son might attend. Why else had I published the small announcement in the newspaper? Lotte would certainly have disapproved. To her, private life was exactly that. Through eyes blurred by tears, I scanned the trees for a figure in the landscape. Hatless. Coatless, perhaps. Quickly drawn, as the masters sometimes drew a portrait of themselves hidden in a dark corner of the canvas or concealed in a crowd.

Three or four months after Lotte died I began to travel again, as I had been unable to do while she had been unwell. Mostly in England or Wales, and always by train. I liked to go where I could walk from village to village, staying