Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,143

beds in the world.

Weisz reached up, rubbed his hand across his forehead, and kneaded his temple. I saw now how tired he looked, despite the keen sharpness of his eyes.

But the one searching for this desk isn’t like the others, he said. He doesn’t have the capacity to forget just a little. His memory cannot be invaded. The more time passes, the sharper his memory becomes. He can study the strands of wool on a rug he sat on as a child. He can open a drawer of a desk he hasn’t seen since 1944 and go through its contents, one by one. His memory is more real to him, more precise, than the life he lives, which becomes more and more vague to him.

You can’t imagine how he hounds me, Mr. Bender. How he calls and calls. How he torments me. For him, I traveled from city to city, I made inquiries, I called, I knocked on doors, I scoured every conceivable source. But I turned up nothing. The desk—enormous, unlike any other—had simply vanished like so much else. He wouldn’t hear it. Every few months he would call me. Then once a year, always on the same day. And always the same question: Nu? Anything? And always I had to give him the same answer: Nothing. Then a year came when he didn’t call. And I thought, not without relief, that maybe he had died. But a letter from him arrived in the mail, written on the date he always called. An anniversary, of sorts. And I understood then that he could not die until I found the desk. That he wanted to die, but he could not. I became afraid. I wanted to be through with him. What right did he have to burden me with this? With the responsibility of his life if I didn’t find it, and his death if I did?

And yet I couldn’t forget about him, Weisz said, lowering his voice. So I began to search again. And then one day, not long ago, I received a tip. Like a tiny bubble of air rising from the depths of an ocean where leagues below something is breathing. I followed it, and it led me to another. And another. Suddenly the trail was alive again. For months I’ve been following it. And at last it led me here, to you.

Weisz looked at me, waiting. I shifted under the burden of the news I would have to give him: that the desk that had haunted us both was long gone. Mr. Bender—he began to say. It belonged to my wife, I said, only my voice came out as a whisper. But it isn’t here. It hasn’t been here for twenty-eight years.

His mouth twisted and a tremor seemed to clench his face for a moment, then dropped away, leaving his expression painfully blank. We sat in silence. Far off, the church bells chimed.

She lived alone with it when I first met her, I said quietly. It hovered above her, and took up half the room. He nodded, his dark eyes glassy and bright, as if he, too, was seeing it rise up before him. Slowly, as if with a black pen and simple lines, I began to draw for him a picture of the desk and the room that was its dominion. And as I spoke, something happened. I sensed something hovering on the far edge of my understanding that Weisz’s presence brought near, something I could feel but not quite grasp. It sucked up all the air, I whispered, groping for an understanding just out of my reach. We lived in its shadow. As if she had been lent to me from out of its darkness, I said, to which she would always belong. As if—and then something flared hotly within and when it faded to black again I felt the sudden coolness of clarity. As if death itself were living in that tiny room with us, threatening to crush us, I whispered. Death that invaded every corner, and left so little room.

It took me a long time to tell him the story. The live, pained look in his eyes and the way he listened, as if memorizing every word, drove me onward, until at last I arrived at the story of Daniel Varsky who rang our bell one evening, who tormented my imagination, and then receded as quickly as he had come, taking with him the terrible, over-bearing desk. When I was finished we