Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,140

be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can’t protect her child—not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

With time I thought of her less and less. But when he died she returned to me. He was twenty-three when it happened. I thought that in the whole world, only she could fathom the depth of my grief. But then I realized that I was wrong, said Mrs. Fiske. She couldn’t know. She didn’t know the first thing about my son.

SOMEHOW I MADE IT back to the railway station. It was difficult to think clearly. I took the train back to London. Every station we passed through I saw Lotte on the platform. What she had done, the cold-bloodedness of it, filled me with horror, a horror amplified by the fact that I had lived with her for so long without having the faintest idea of what she was capable. Everything she had ever said to me I now had to consider in this new light.

That evening I returned to Highgate to find that the front window of the house had been smashed. From the large hole a magnificent, delicate web of cracks radiated outwards. It was something to behold, and a feeling of awe came over me. On the floor inside, lying among the broken glass, I found a rock the size of a fist. Cold air filled the living room. It was the special stillness of the scene that shook me, the kind that comes only in the wake of violence. At last I saw a spider crawling very slowly across the wall and the spell was broken. I went to get the broom. When I had finished cleaning up, I taped a sheet of plastic over the hole. The rock I saved and put on the living room table. The next day, when the glazier arrived, he shook his head and said something about rowdy kids, hoodlums, the third window they’d broken that week, and I felt a sudden pang and realized I had wanted that rock to be meant for me, the work of someone who wished to throw a rock through my window, and mine alone, not just any window. And when the little feeling of pain passed, I began to resent the glazier with his loud and gleeful voice. Only after he left did I understand how lonely I was. The rooms of the house sucked me in and seemed to scold me for having left them. You see? they seemed to say. You see what happens? But I did not see. I had the feeling of understanding less and less. It was becoming difficult to remember—or not to remember, but to believe what I remembered of what Lotte and I used to do in those rooms, how we passed our time, where and how we used to sit. I sat in my old chair, and tried to summon Lotte as she used to sit across from me. But it all became touched with absurdity. The plastic rippled over the gaping hole, and the spectacular cracked glass hung suspended. One heavy step or gust of wind, it seemed, and the whole thing would fall into thousands of pieces. The following day when the glazier returned I excused myself, and went out to the garden. When I came back the window was whole again, the glazier smiling at his handiwork.

I understood, then, what deep within myself I had always understood: that I could never punish her as much as she had already punished herself. That it was I, after all, who had never admitted to myself just how much I knew. The act of love is always a confession, Camus wrote. But so is the quiet closing of a door. A cry in the night. A fall down the stairs. A cough in the hall. All my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin. Imagine myself into her loss. Trying and failing. Only perhaps—how can I say this—perhaps I wanted to fail. Because it kept me going. My love for her was a failure of the imagination.

ONE EVENING the doorbell rang. I was not expecting anyone. There is no longer anyone or anything to expect. I put down my book, carefully marking the page with a bookmark. Lotte had