nocturnal animals whose large eyes belie their terrible eyesight. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing, as Archilochus said, but what was it? Time passed and then I heard her calling me from the bedroom. Yes, my love, I called, still looking out at the garden. Here I come.
LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN
I MET AND FELL IN LOVE with Yoav Weisz in the fall of 1998. Met at a party on Abingdon Road, farther down that road than I’d ever been. Fell in love, which was still something new for me. Ten years have passed, and yet that time stands out in my life as few others do. Like me, Yoav was at Oxford, but he lived in London, in the house in Belsize Park that he shared with his sister, Leah. She was studying piano at the Royal College of Music, and often I could hear her playing from somewhere behind the walls. Sometimes the notes would stop abruptly and a long silence would pass, punctuated by the scrape of the piano bench or footsteps across the floor. I thought she might appear to say hello, but then the music would start up again from inside the woodwork. I was at the house three or four times before I finally met Leah, and when I did I was surprised by how much she looked like her brother, only more elfin, and less reliable to still be there if you happened to look away.
The house, a large and dilapidated brick Victorian, was too big for the two of them, and filled with darkly beautiful furniture that their father, a famous antiques dealer, kept there. Every few months he came through London, and then everything would be magically rearranged according to his impeccable taste. Certain tables, chairs, lamps, or settees were crated up and removed and others arrived to take their place. In this way the rooms were always changing, taking on the mysterious, dislocated moods of houses and apartments whose owners had died, gone bankrupt, or simply decided to bid farewell to the things they had lived among for years, leaving it to George Weisz to relieve them of their contents. Occasionally potential buyers came to the house to see one of the pieces in person, and then Yoav and Leah had to clear up whatever dirty socks, open books, stained magazines, and empty glasses had accumulated since the cleaner’s last visit. But most of Weisz’s clients had no need to see for themselves what they were buying, either because of the antiques dealer’s world-class reputation, or because of their wealth, or because the pieces they were buying held a sentimental value that had nothing to do with their appearance. When he wasn’t traveling to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or New York, their father lived on Ha’Oren Street in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, in the stone house choked with flowering vines where Yoav and Leah had lived as children, whose shutters were always closed to keep out the punishing light.
The house where I lived with them from November of 1998 to May of 1999 was a twelve-minute walk from 20 Maresfield Gardens, the home of Dr. Sigmund Freud from September of 1938, after he fled the Gestapo, until the end of September 1939, when he died of three doses of morphine administered at his request. Often, heading out for a walk, I’d find myself there. When Freud fled Vienna almost all of his belongings were crated up and shipped to the new house in London, where his wife and daughter lovingly reassembled, down to the last possible detail, the study he’d been forced to abandon at 19 Berggasse. At the time I didn’t know anything about Weisz’s study in Jerusalem, and so the poetic symmetry of the house’s nearness to Freud’s was lost on me. Maybe all exiles try to re-create the place they’ve lost out of their fear of dying in a strange place. And yet, during the winter of 1999, when I would linger on the worn Oriental rug in the doctor’s study, comforted by the hominess of the place and the sight of his many figurines and statuettes, I was often struck by the irony that Freud, who shed more light than anyone onto the crippling burden of memory, had been unable to resist its mythic spell any better than the rest of us. After he died, Anna Freud preserved the room exactly as her father left it, down to the glasses he removed from