Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,145

me then, and unable to control myself I called out: Was it him that sent you? Who? he asked. The one who gave the desk to Lotte. Is that how you found me? Yes, he said. I began to cough. My voice came out as a wretched croak. And is he still—? but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.

Weisz studied my face. He tucked the stick under his arm, reached into his breast pocket and took out a pen and a small leather case holding a pad of paper. He wrote something down, folded it in half, and handed it to me. Then he turned toward the street, but after a step he stopped and turned back to look up at the windows of the attic study. He was easy enough to find, he said quietly, once I knew where to look.

The headlights of a dark car parked in front of the neighbor’s house came to life, illuminating the fog. Goodbye, Mr. Bender, he said. I watched him walk down the front path and slide into the backseat of the car. Between my fingers I held the folded paper with the name and address of the man Lotte had once loved. I looked up at the wet, black boughs of the trees, the tops of which she had looked out at from her desk. What would she have read in them? What would she have seen in the crosshatch of black marks against the sky, what echoes and memories and colors that I could never see? Or refused to see.

I slipped the paper in my pocket, went inside, and gently closed the door behind me. There was a chill, so I lifted my sweater off the hook. I laid some logs in the fireplace, crumpled a sheet of newspaper, and crouched to blow on the fire until it took. I put the kettle on to boil, poured some milk into the tomcat’s bowl, and left it in the pool of light the kitchen cast on the garden. Carefully, I placed the folded paper on the table in front of me.

And somewhere the other one turned on his lamp. Put the kettle to boil. Turned the page of a book. Or the radio dial.

How much we might have said to one another, he and I. We who collaborated in her silence. He who never dared to break it, and I who bowed to the borders drawn, the walls erected, the areas restricted, who turned away and never asked. Who each morning stood by and watched her disappear into the cold, black depths, and pretended not to know how to swim. Who made a pact of ignorance and smothered what churned within so that things might carry on as they always had. So that the house would not flood, nor the walls come crashing down. So that we would not be invaded, crushed, or overcome by what dwelled in the silences around which we had so delicately, so ingeniously built a life.

I sat there for many long hours into the night. The fire died down. The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark. At last, near midnight I picked up the folded paper from the table. Without hesitating, I dropped it into the fire. It singed and burst into flames, for a moment the fire roared with new life, and in an instant was consumed.

WEISZ

A RIDDLE: A stone is thrown in Budapest on a winter night in 1944. It sails through the air toward the illuminated window of a house where a father is writing a letter at his desk, a mother is reading, and a boy is daydreaming about an ice-skating race on the frozen Danube. The glass shatters, the boy covers his head, the mother screams. At that moment the life they know ceases to exist. Where does the stone land?

WHEN I LEFT Hungary in 1949 I was twenty-one. I was thin, a person partially erased, afraid to stand still. On the black market I turned a gold ring I found on a dead soldier into two crates of sausages, and the two crates into twenty vials of medicine, and the twenty vials into a hundred and fifty packages of silk stockings. I sent these in a shipping container with other luxuries that were to be my livelihood in my second life, the one waiting for me in Haifa port the way a shadow waits under a rock at noon. In