Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,146
the container, folded among the other items, were five silk shirts cut to fit me like a second skin, my initials monogrammed on the breast pocket. I arrived, but the container never did. The Turk in customs who stood under the Carmel claimed to have no record of it. Behind me the boats rocked on the waves of the sea. A sliver of shadow slipped out from a rock near the Turk’s enormous right foot. A woman in a thin dress was bent over kissing the scorched ground, crying. Perhaps she had found her own shadow under a different stone. I saw something glint in the sand and picked up a half lira. A half can become a whole can become two can become four. Six months later I rang the doorbell of a man’s house. The man had invited his cousin, and his cousin, my friend, had brought me along. When the man opened the door he was wearing a silk shirt and sewn above the breast pocket were my initials. His young wife brought out a tray of coffee and halva. When the man reached over to light my cigarette the silk of his sleeve brushed my arm, and we were like two people pressing on either side of a window.
MY FATHER was a scholar of history. He wrote at an enormous desk with many drawers, and when I was very young I believed that two thousand years were stored in those drawers the way Magda the housekeeper stored flour and sugar in the pantry. Only one drawer had a lock, and for my fourth birthday my father gave me the little brass key. I couldn’t sleep at night, trying to think of what to put in the drawer. The responsibility was crushing. In my mind I went over my most prized possessions again and again, but all of them suddenly seemed flimsy and grossly insignificant. In the end I locked the empty drawer and never told my father.
BEFORE MY wife fell in love with me, she fell in love with this house. One day she brought me to the garden of the Sisters of Zion convent. We had tea under the loggia, she tied a red scarf around her hair, her profile against the cypress trees dated from ancient times. She was the only woman I’d ever met who didn’t want to bring the dead back to life. I pulled my white handkerchief from my pocket and laid it down on the table. I surrender, I whispered. But my accent was still heavy. You remember what? she asked. Afterwards we walked back to the village and on the way she stopped in front of a large stone house with green shutters. There, she pointed, under that mulberry tree, our children will play one day. She was only flirting, but when I turned to look where her finger was pointing I saw a streak of light flash in the shadows under the boughs of the old tree, and I felt pain.
My business grew, the one I started with a carved walnut commode I bought cheaply from the Turk in customs. Later he sold me a drop-leaf table, a porcelain mantel clock, a Flemish tapestry. I discovered I had certain talents; I developed an expertise. Out of the ruins of history I produced a chair, a table, a chest of drawers. I made a name for myself, but I didn’t forget the streak of light under the mulberry tree. One day I went back to the house, knocked on the door, and offered the man who lived there a sum he couldn’t refuse. He invited me in. We shook hands in his kitchen. When I came here, he said, the floor was still littered with pistachio shells the Arab had eaten before he fled with his wife and children. Upstairs, I found the little girl’s doll, he said, with real hair that she had lovingly braided. For some time I kept it but one day the glass eyes began to look at me in a strange way.
Afterwards the man let me walk through the house that would be our house, hers and mine. I walked through room after room, searching for the one. None were right. And then, opening a door, I found it.
WHEN I RETURNED to the house in Budapest where I grew up, the War was over. The place was filthy. The mirrors were smashed, there were wine stains on the carpets, on the wall someone had