Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,141

always put her books down open-faced and when we first met I used to tell her that I could hear the little high-pitched cry as its spine was broken. It was a joke, but later when she left the room or went to sleep I would pick up her book and slip a bookmark in, until one day she lifted her book, ripped the bookmark out, and dropped it on the floor. Don’t ever do that again, she said. And I understood that there was one more place that belonged to her that I would be now and forever barred from. From then on I no longer asked about her reading. I waited until she volunteered something—a sentence that moved her, a bright passage, a character vividly drawn. Sometimes it came and sometimes it didn’t. But it was not for me to ask.

I walked the few paces down the hallway to the door. Hoodlums, I thought, the word of the glazier coming back to me. But through the eyehole I saw it was a man close to my own age dressed in a suit. I asked who was there. He cleared his throat on the other side of the door. Mr. Bender? he asked.

He was a small man, dressed with simple elegance. The only flourish was a walking stick with a silver handle. It seemed unlikely that he was there to bludgeon or rob me. Yes? I said, standing in the open doorway. My name is Weisz, he said. Forgive me for not calling in advance. But he did not offer any excuse. There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, Mr. Bender. If it isn’t too much of an imposition—he looked past me, into the house—may I come in? I asked what it was about. A desk, he said.

A weakness came into my knees. I was paralyzed, certain that it could only be he: the one she had loved, in whose shadow I had eked out a life with her.

As if in a dream, I showed him into the living room. He moved without hesitation, as if he knew his way. A coldness slid through me. Why had it never occurred to me that he might have been here before? He walked directly to Lotte’s chair and stood waiting. I gestured for him to sit as my legs began to crumple under me. We sat face to face. I in my chair, he in hers. As it had always been, I thought now.

I’ve intruded on you, he said, I’m sorry. And yet he spoke with a composure that belied his words, with a confidence that was almost intimidating. His accent was Israeli, though tempered, I thought, by the vowels and accents of elsewhere. He looked as if he were in his late sixties, perhaps seventy, which would have made him a few years younger than Lotte. Then it dawned on me. How could I not have guessed before? One of her charges on the Kindertransport! A boy of fourteen, perhaps fifteen. Sixteen at most. In the beginning those few years might have seemed like a lot. But as time passed, less and less. When he was eighteen she would have been twenty-one or twenty-two. They would have shared an unbreakable bond, a private language, a lost world condensed into blunt syllables that each had only to utter for the other to understand completely. Or no language at all—a silence that stood for all that could not be spoken aloud.

His appearance was impeccable: not a hair out of place or a speck of lint on his dark suit. Even the soles of his shoes looked unscuffed, as if he hardly touched the ground. Just a few minutes of your time, he said. Then I promise to leave you in peace.

In peace! I almost cried out. You who tormented me all these years! My enemy, the one who occupied a corner of the woman I loved, a corner of her like a black hole that, through some sorcery I never understood, contained the deepest volumes of her.

I find it difficult to describe my work to others, he began. I’m not in the habit of talking about myself. My business has always been to listen. People come to me. At first they don’t say much, but slowly it comes out. They look out the window, at their feet, at some point behind me in the room. They don’t meet my eyes. Because if they were to remember that I was there, they