Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,129

bell. He was a fan of Lotte’s books and wanted to meet her. For a few weeks he became part of her life. At the time I didn’t understand what it was about him that moved her—normally so private and introverted a person—to give so much of herself. I became jealous. One day I came back from a trip and discovered that she’d given him the desk. At the time I was baffled. The desk she had clung to and refused to give up, had dragged with her ever since I’d met her. Only much later did I come to understand that the young man, Daniel Varsky, was the same age as the son she gave away. How he must have reminded her of her own child, and what it would have been like with him. How moving those days with Daniel must have been for her, in ways he himself could never have grasped. He, too, must have wondered what she saw in him, and why she gave him so much of herself. All those years she had submitted to that monstrous piece of furniture that her lover had given her, with which he had bound her to him—to him and later to the dark secret of their child she gave up. All those years she had borne it as she had borne her guilt. How right it must have seemed to her, in the mysterious poetry of the mind’s associations, to give it away at last to this boy who reminded her of her own son.

I turned to look out the window, tired after saying so much. Gottlieb shifted in his chair. They’re cut from a different cloth than us, he said quietly, by which I took him to mean women, or our wives, and I nodded, though what I wished to say is that Lotte was made of something else entirely. Give me a few weeks, he said. I’ll see what I can find.

THAT AUTUMN the frost came late. A week after I planted the spring bulbs, I packed my bag, locked up the house, and took a train to Liverpool. It had taken Gottlieb less than a month to track down the name of the couple who had adopted Lotte’s child and to find an address. One evening he dropped round to hand me a piece of paper with the information. I didn’t ask him how he’d come by it. He had his ways—his work led him to know people in every walk of life, and as he was someone who went out of his way for others there were plenty who owed him favors he was not above returning one day to collect. Perhaps I, too, am one of those people. Are you sure you want to do this, Arthur? he asked, brushing a thatch of silver hair from his forehead. We stood in the hallway, the collection of unworn straw hats assembled on the wall like the costumes of another, more theatrical life. The motor of his car was still idling outside. Yes, I said.

But for some weeks I did nothing. A part of me had remained convinced that all traces of the child had vanished, and so I hadn’t adequately prepared myself to receive the names of his parents, the ones he’d gone through life with. Elsie and John Fiske. John who perhaps went by Jack, I thought on my knees as I divided the hostas a few days later, and I imagined a burly man hunched at the bar in the pub, a chronic cougher, extinguishing his cigarette. Separating the tangled roots with my fingers, I imagined Elsie, too, scraping food off a dirty plate into the bin, dressed in a robe with her hair still in curlers, lit by the grim light of a Liverpool dawn. It was only the child that I couldn’t fathom, a boy with Lotte’s eyes or her expressions. Her own child! I thought, placing my rucksack on the rack above my seat, but as the train pulled out of Euston Station I imagined in the windows of a passing train the flickering faces of those Lotte had said goodbye to in her life—her mother and father, brothers and sisters, school friends, eighty-six homeless children bound for the unknown. Could she really be blamed for encountering in her own depths a refusal—the refusal to teach a child to walk, only to watch him walk away from her? In a way I’d never thought of before, her loss