Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,128

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It was only in the final months of Lotte’s life, I told Gottlieb, that I discovered there was something enormous she had kept from me all those years. It happened quite by accident, and many times since then I’ve been struck by how close she came to keeping her secret until the end. And yet she didn’t, and though her mind was failing her, I can’t help but believe that in the end she made a choice not to. She chose a form of confession that suited her, that made, in her obscure state of mind, a kind of sense. The more I’ve thought about it, the less it has seemed to me an act of desperation, and the more it has seemed the culmination of an oblique logic. Alone, she found her way to the magistrate. God knows how. There were times when she could hardly find her way to the lavatory. And yet, there were still moments of lucidity when her mind suddenly reassembled itself, and then I was like a sailor at sea who suddenly sees the lights of his hometown illuminate on the horizon, and begins to make wildly for shore, only to see them go out again a moment later and find himself alone again in the infinite dark. It must have been in such a moment, I told Gottlieb, who sat unmoving in his chair, that Lotte rose from the sofa where she had been watching TV, and, while the nurse was busy talking on the phone in another room, quietly left the house. Some ancient reflex would have reminded her to pick up her bag from the hook in the front hall. Almost certainly she took the bus. She would have had to change once, something too complex for her to have worked out on her own, and so I have to imagine that she put herself in the driver’s hands, asking him to show her the way, just as we did as children. I still remember my mother putting me on the bus in Finchley at the age of four, and asking the conductor to see me off on Tottenham Court Road where my aunt would be waiting for me. I remember the sense of wonder I had as we drove through the wet streets, the view I had of the back of the driver’s muscular neck, the shiver of joy I felt at the privilege of traveling alone, combined with a shiver of fear brought on by disbelief that at the end of all of those seemingly random turns of the driver’s enormous black wheel my aunt, with her ruddy cheeks and funny red-brimmed hat, would actually materialize. Perhaps Lotte felt the same. Or perhaps, determined as she must have been, she felt no fear at all, and, as the driver signaled to her the right stop, and which bus to take next, she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.

As I told Gottlieb what had taken place between Lotte and the magistrate, then described the hospital certificate and lock of hair I found among her papers, I felt a sense of relief, of a tremendous unburdening, knowing that I would no longer be the only one responsible for her secret. I told him that I wished to find her son. Gottlieb straightened up in his chair and let out a long sigh. Now it was I who waited to hear what would come next, knowing I had put myself in his hands and would proceed only as he decided. He took off his glasses and his eyes shrank and became reduced again to the sharpened eyes of a lawyer. He rose from the table, left the room, and returned a moment later with a pad of paper, then took out the fountain pen he kept at all times in his pocket. He asked me to repeat to him the information on the hospital certificate. He also asked exactly when Lotte had arrived in London on the kindertransport, and the addresses of the places she had lived before she met me. I told him what I knew, and he made a note of everything.

When he finished writing, he put down the pad. And the desk? he asked. What happened to the desk? One night in the winter of 1970, I said, a young man, a poet from Chile, rang our