Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,127

one in particular. I knew nothing about him except that he must have been the most serious of all, most serious to her, because he alone had been allowed to leave behind a trace. You have to understand that in Lotte’s life, a life reduced to fit the smallest possible space, there was almost no trace of her past at all. No photographs, no keepsakes, no heirlooms. Not even any letters, or none that I ever saw. The few things she lived among were entirely practical, and held no sentimental value to her. She made sure of this; it was a rule by which she lived in those days. The only exception to it was her desk.

To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its allotted space with humility. Well, I told Gottlieb, you can cancel that image immediately. This desk was something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers. Perhaps you think I’m making a caricature of it. I don’t blame you. You’d have to have seen the desk with your own eyes to understand that what I’m telling you is perfectly accurate. It took up almost half of her rented room. The first time she allowed me to stay the night with her in that tiny pathetic bed that cowered in the shadow of the desk, I woke up in a cold sweat. It loomed above us, a dark and shapeless form. Once I dreamed that I opened one of the drawers to find that it held a festering mummy.

All she would say was that it had been a gift; there was no need, or perhaps it would be better to say she saw no need, or resisted the need, to say from whom. I had no idea what had become of him. Whether he had broken her heart, or she his, whether he was gone for good or whether he might still come back, whether he was alive or dead. I was convinced she had loved him more than she could ever love me, and that some impossible obstacle had come between them. It tore me apart. I used to fantasize about encountering him in the street. Sometimes I gave him a limp or dirty collar, just so he would leave me alone and let me get some sleep. It struck me, the gift of that desk, as an act of cruel genius—a way to stake his claim, to insinuate himself into the unreachable world of her imagination, so that he might possess her, so that every time she sat down to write it would be in the presence of his bestowal. Sometimes I would roll over in the dark to face a sleeping Lotte: Either he goes or I do, I imagined saying. During those long, cold nights in her room there was no distinction in my mind between him and the desk. But I never had the courage to say it. Instead I would slip a hand under her nightdress and begin to stroke her warm thighs.

In the end it all came to nothing, I told Gottlieb, or almost nothing. With each passing month, I became more confident of Lotte’s feelings for me. I asked her to marry me, and she agreed. He, whoever he was, was part of her past, and like the rest it had sunk away into the dark, irretrievable depths of her. We learned to trust each other. And for the better part of fifty years the suspicions I sometimes harbored, the ridiculous idea that she might betray me with another man, proved unfounded. I don’t believe that Lotte was capable of doing anything that would have in any way threatened the home we two had so carefully built together. I think she knew that she couldn’t have survived in another life, one of unknown specifications. Nor do I think she had the stomach to hurt me. In the end, my doubts always fizzled out on their own, without the need for confrontation, and in my mind things again returned to the way they’d always