Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,123

in a different place each evening. Making my way like that, with only a small rucksack, I felt a sense of freedom I hadn’t known for many years. Freedom and peace. The first trip I took was to the Lake District. A month later I went to Devon. From the village of Tavistock, I set out across Dartmoor, losing my way until at last I saw the chimneys of the prison rise up in the distance. About two months after that I took a train to Salisbury to visit Stonehenge. I stood with the other tourists under the monstrous gray sky, imagining the Neolithic men and women whose lives so frequently came to an end with blunt-force trauma to the cranium. There was some litter on the ground, shiny metallic wrappers and so on. I went around picking these things up, and when I stood up again the stones were even larger and more frightening than before. I also began to paint, a hobby I’d had when I was young, but had abandoned when I realized that I lacked talent. But talent, worshipped for all that it promises when one is young, seemed at last utterly irrelevant: nothing could be promised to me now, nor did I wish for it to be. I bought a small collapsible easel and took it with me on my trips, unfolding it whenever a particular view struck me. Sometimes someone would stop to watch and we would find our way into a conversation, and it occurred to me that there was no need to tell such people the truth about myself. I would say I was a country doctor from outside Hull, or an airman who’d flown a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, and as I said it I could actually see the pattern of fields below, opening out in all directions like a code. There was nothing sinister in it, nothing I wished to hide, only a certain pleasure in leaving myself and becoming someone else momentarily, and then a different sort of pleasure, watching the stranger’s back recede into the distance, of slipping back into myself again. I felt something similar on nights when I would wake up in some bed-and-breakfast and forget for an instant where I was. Until my eyes adjusted enough to make out the lines of the furniture, or some detail of the previous day came back to me, I hung suspended in the unknown, the unknown which, still loosely tethered to consciousness, slips so easily into the unknowable. A fraction of a second only, a fraction of pure, monstrous existence free of all landmarks, of the most exhilarating terror, stamped out almost immediately by a grasp of reality which I came to think of at such times as blinding, a hat pulled over one’s eyes, since though I knew that without it life would be almost uninhabitable, I resented it nevertheless for all it spared me.

On one such night, waking before I was able to remember where I was, an alarm rang out. Or rather it was the alarm that woke me, though there must have been a delay between the break from my sleep and an awareness of the earsplitting noise. I jumped out of bed and my arm swept the bedside lamp onto the floor. I heard the bulb shatter, and remembered that I was staying in the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. There was a smell of acrid smoke as I fumbled for the light switch and pulled on my clothes. The stench of burning in the hallway was overpowering, and I heard shouts coming from the bowels of the building. Somehow I found the stairs. On the way down I met others in various stages of dress. There was a woman holding a barefoot child, a child who was utterly still and silent, like the eye of a storm. Outside, there was a small group assembled on the green in front of the building, some with rapt faces turned upward and illuminated by the fire, others doubled over coughing. Only once I’d made it to their circle did I turn back to look. Flames were already consuming the roof and leaping out of the windows of the top floor. The building must have been more than a hundred years old, a mock Tudor with great wooden ceiling beams made from the masts of old merchant ships, according to the hotel’s brochure. It went up like dry timber. The impassive child watched