Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,124

it quietly, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder. The night porter appeared with a list of guests and began a roll call. The child’s mother answered to the name of Auerbach. I wondered if she was German, perhaps even Jewish. She was alone, there was no husband or father, and for a moment, as the fire raged and the firefighters pulled up in their trucks and my belongings, the easel and my paints and what clothes I’d brought, went up in smoke, I imagined placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder and guiding her and the child away from the burning building. I pictured the grateful look on her face as she turned to me, and the placid, accepting expression of the child, both of them aware that my pockets were full of crumbs and from then on, from forest to forest, I would guide them, protect them, and care for them as my own. But this heroic fantasy was interrupted by a murmur of excitement that shot through the group: One guest was missing. The porter went down through the roll again, calling each name in a loud voice, and this time everyone became hushed, touched by the seriousness of the task at hand and the luck of their salvage. When the porter arrived at the name Rush no one answered. Ms. Emma Rush, he called again, but it was met with silence.

It was another hour before the fire was put out entirely and her body was discovered, brought out to the driveway covered in a black tarp. She’d jumped from the top floor and broken her neck. Only one other guest remembered her, and described her as middle-aged, always in possession of a pair of binoculars that she’d used, presumably, for bird-watching in the valleys, gorges, and woods of the Brecon Beacons. One ambulance left for the morgue and the other, carrying those suffering from smoke inhalation, to the hospital. The rest of us were divided up for various inns in nearby towns on the edge of the park. The Auerbach woman and her child were assigned to Brecon, and I to Abergavenny in the opposite direction. The last I saw of them was the child’s matted hair as she disappeared into the van. The following day there was a piece about the fire in the local paper, in which it said that the fire had been electrical, and the deceased a primary school teacher from Slough.

A few weeks after Lotte died, my old friend Richard Gottlieb had come round to see how I was getting on. He was a lawyer, and years before he had persuaded Lotte and me to draw up our wills—neither of us had ever been practical in that regard. He’d lost his own wife some years earlier, and since then he had met someone else, a widow eight years younger than he who took care of her appearance and hadn’t let herself go. A force of life, he said of her, stirring the milk into his tea, by which I knew he meant that it’s terrible to die alone, to grow old and fumble with one’s pills, to slip in the bath and crack one’s skull, that I should think about my future, to which I replied that I thought I might travel a bit when the weather got warmer. Either way, he let the subject, so briefly raised, drop. Before he left he laid a hand on my shoulder. Might you want to think about revising your will now, Arthur? he asked. Right, I said, of course, but at the time I had no intention of doing as much. Twenty years ago when we’d drawn up the wills, Lotte and I had each left everything to the other. In the case that both of us died in a single stroke, we’d divided things up among various charities, nieces, and nephews (mine, of course; Lotte had no family). The rights to Lotte’s books, which earned a pittance, we left to our dear friend Joseph Kern, an old student of mine who had promised to act as her executor.

But on the train ride back from Wales, my clothes still reeking of smoke and ash, the photo of the dead teacher from Slough gazing up at me from the paper folded in my lap, it was as if death’s iron door had swung open and through it, for an instant, I glimpsed Lotte. Deep within herself, as the poem goes, Filled with her vast