might not be able to say the words. They begin to talk and I go with them back to their childhoods, before the War. Between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. The way he lined his soldiers up under the hem of the curtain. How she laid out the little toy teacups. I am there with him under the table, Weisz continued. I see his mother’s legs move about the kitchen, and the crumbs the housekeeper’s broom missed. Their childhoods, Mr. Bender, because it is only the ones who were children who come to me now. The others have died. When I first started my business, he said, it was mostly lovers. Or husbands who had lost their wives, wives who had lost their husbands. Even parents. Though very few—most would have found my services unbearable. The ones who came hardly spoke at all, only enough to describe a little child’s bed or the chest where he kept his toys. Like a doctor, I listen without saying a word. But there’s one difference: when all of the talking is through, I produce a solution. It’s true, I can’t bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept.
I studied his features. No, I thought now. I had been mistaken. He could not have been the one. I don’t know how I knew, but looking at his face, I knew. And to my surprise I felt the bitter taste of disappointment. There is so much we might have said to one another.
There is an amazement that comes over each one, Weisz continued, when at last I produce the object they have been dreaming of for half a lifetime, that they have invested with the weight of their longing. It’s like a shock to their system. They’ve bent their memories around a void, and now the missing thing has appeared. They can hardly believe it, as if I’d produced the gold and silver sacked when the Romans destroyed the Temple two thousand years ago. The holy objects looted by Titus that mysteriously disappeared so that the cataclysmic loss would be total, so that there would be no evidence left to keep the Jew from turning a place into a longing he could carry with him wherever he wandered, forever.
We sat in silence. That window, he said at last, gazing behind me. How did it break? I was surprised. How did you know? I asked. For a moment I wondered whether there was not something sinister I’d missed in him. The glass is new, he said, and the caulking is fresh. Someone threw a stone through it, I told him. His sharp features became softened by a thoughtful expression, as if my words had awakened a memory in him. The moment passed, and he began to speak again:
But the desk, you see—it isn’t like the other pieces of furniture. I admit that there were times when it was impossible to find the exact table, chest, or chair that my clients were seeking. The trail reached a dead end. Or never began at all. Things don’t last forever. The bed that one man remembers as the place where his soul was overwhelmed is, to another man, just a bed. And when it breaks, or goes out of style, or is no longer of use to him, he throws it away. But before he dies, the man whose soul was overwhelmed needs to lie down in that bed one more time. He comes to me. He has a look in his eyes, and I understand him. So even if it no longer exists, I find it. Do you understand what I’m saying? I produce it. Out of thin air, if need be. And if the wood is not exactly as he remembers, or the legs are too thick or too thin, he’ll only notice for a moment, a moment of shock and disbelief, and then his memory will be invaded by the reality of the bed standing before him. Because he needs it to be that bed where she once lay with him more than he needs to know the truth. You understand? And if you ask me, Mr. Bender, whether I feel guilty, whether I feel I am cheating him, the answer is no. Because at the moment that man reaches out and runs his hand across the rail, for him there are no other