to a course of silence until the brunt of it had passed and she’d begun to retreat inward. At that moment there was a break or opening. A moment earlier and the gesture meant to calm and make amends would only stoke her fury. A moment later, and she would already have crawled into herself and shut the door, taking up residence in that obscure chamber where she could survive for days or even weeks without so much as a word for me. It took me many years to put my finger on that moment, to learn to see it coming and seize it when it arrived, to save us both from that punishing silence.
She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them. But often I did—with time I learned where to look—and tried to fit them together. It pained me that she felt she couldn’t come to me with it, but I knew it would hurt her more to know that I’d uncovered what she hadn’t intended for me to find. In some fundamental way I think she objected to being known. Or resented it even as she longed for it. It offended her sense of freedom. But it isn’t possible to simply look upon a person one loves in tranquility, content to regard her in bafflement. Unless one is happy to worship, and I never was. At the heart of any scholar’s work is the search for patterns. You may think it sounds cold to suggest that I took a scholarly attitude toward my wife, but then I think you would be misunderstanding what drives a true scholar. The more I’ve learned in my life, the more acutely I’ve felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I’ve felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness. At times I’ve felt myself to be clinging onto the rim—of what I can hardly say without the risk of sounding ridiculous—only to slip and find myself deeper in the hole than ever. And there, in the dark, I find again in myself a form of praise for all that continues to crush my certainty.
IT’S FOR YOU, I said to Lotte, but I didn’t turn around. I kept my eyes fixed on Daniel, and so I missed the expression on her face when she saw him that first time. Later on I came to wonder whether it had given anything away. Daniel stepped forward toward her. For a moment he seemed at a loss for words. I saw something in his face that I hadn’t seen before. Then he introduced himself as one of her readers, as I’d expected. Lotte invited him inside, or further inside. He let me take his jacket, but held tightly to the briefcase—I assumed it held a manuscript inside that he wanted to show to Lotte. The jacket smelled, sickeningly, of cologne, though as far as I could tell, relieved of the coat Daniel himself smelled of nothing. Lotte led him to the kitchen, and as he followed her he looked around at everything, the pictures on our walls, the envelopes on the table waiting to be mailed, and when his eyes met his own reflection in the mirror I thought I saw the hint of a smile. Lotte gestured at the kitchen table, and he sat, placing the briefcase delicately between his feet, as if a small, live animal were contained inside of it. From the way he watched Lotte fill the battered kettle with water and put it on the stove I could tell that he hadn’t expected to get so far. Perhaps he’d hoped to come away with an autographed book at best. And now he was inside the house of the great writer! About to drink tea from her cups! I remember thinking that perhaps this was just the encouragement Lotte needed: She said little about her work while in the throes of it, but I could tell from her mood exactly how things were going, and for some weeks she’d seemed listless and depressed. I excused myself politely, saying I had work to do, and went upstairs. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I felt a pang of regret for the child we’d never had who might have been almost Daniel’s age by now, who might have come in from the cold, like him,