Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,144

sat in silence. Then I remembered something. Just a minute, I said, and went to the other room where I opened the drawer of my own desk and took out the small black diary that I’d kept for almost thirty years, filled with the tiny handwriting of the young Chilean poet. When I returned to the living room, Weisz was staring absently at the window the glazier had replaced. After a moment he turned to me. Mr. Bender, are you familiar with the first-century rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai? Only the name, I said. Why? My father was a scholar of Jewish history, Weisz said. He wrote many books, all of which I read years later, after he was dead. In them I recognized the stories he used to tell me. One of his favorites was about ben Zakkai, who was already an old man when the Romans besieged Jerusalem. Fed up with the warring parties within the city, he staged his own death, Weisz said. The corpse bearers carried him through the gates for the last time, and delivered him to the tent of the Roman general. In return for his prophecy of Roman victory, he was permitted to go to Yavne to open a school. Later, in that small town, he received the news that Jerusalem had burned. The Temple was destroyed. Those that survived were sent into exile. In his agony, he thought: What is a Jew without Jerusalem? How can you be a Jew without a nation? How can you make a sacrifice to God if you don’t know where to find him? In the torn clothes of the mourner, ben Zakkai returned to his school. He announced that the court of law that had burned in Jerusalem would be resurrected there, in the sleepy town of Yavne. That instead of making sacrifices to God, from then on Jews would pray to Him. He instructed his students to begin assembling more than a thousand years of oral law.

Day and night the scholars argued about the laws, and their arguments became the Talmud, Weisz continued. They became so absorbed in their work that sometimes they forgot the question their teacher had asked: What is a Jew without Jerusalem? Only later, after ben Zakkai died, did his answer slowly reveal itself, the way an enormous mural only begins to make sense as you walk backwards away: Turn Jerusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book, a book as vast and holy and intricate as the city itself. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form. Later his school became known as the Great House, after the phrase in Books of Kings: He burned the house of God, the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.

Two thousand years have passed, my father used to tell me, and now every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned in that fire, so vast that we can, each one of us, only recall the tiniest fragment: a pattern on the wall, a knot in the wood of a door, a memory of how light fell across the floor. But if every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one, the House would be built again, said Weisz, or rather a memory of the House so perfect that it would be, in essence, the original itself. Perhaps that is what they mean when they speak of the Messiah: a perfect assemblage of the infinite parts of the Jewish memory. In the next world, we will all dwell together in the memory of our memories. But that will not be for us, my father used to say. Not for you or me. We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door.

I handed Weisz the diary. Perhaps this will help you, I said. He held it for a moment in his palm, as if measuring its weight. Then he slipped it into his pocket. I walked him to the door. If I can ever do anything for you in return, he said. But he did not offer me his card or any way to contact him. We shook hands and he turned to go. Something seized