the bridge of his nose and laid on the desk for the last time. From twelve to five, Wednesday through Sunday, you can visit the room stalled forever at the moment the man who gave us some of our most enduring ideas of what it is to be a person ceased to be. In the leaflet given out by an elderly docent who sits in a chair by the front door, the visitor is encouraged not only to consider her tour as one through an actual house, but also, given the various exhibits and collections on display in its rooms, as a tour through that metaphorical house, the mind.
I say the house where I lived with them rather than our house, because though I resided there for seven months it in no way ever belonged to me, nor could I ever have been considered anything more than a privileged guest. Aside from me, the only regular visitor was a Romanian cleaner named Bogna, who fought the ever-encroaching chaos that seemed to threaten the siblings like a squall on the horizon. After what happened she left, either because she couldn’t battle the mess any longer or because no one paid her. Or maybe she sensed that things were headed in a bad direction and wanted to get out while she could. She had a limp, water on the knee, I think, a cup of the Danube that sloshed around as she thumped from room to room with her mop and feather duster, sighing as if freshly reminded of a disappointment. She kept the knee thickly bandaged under her housecoat, and bleached her hair with a home brew of dangerous chemicals. If you got close enough, she smelled of onions, ammonia, and hay. She was an industrious woman, but sometimes she would pause in her work to tell me about her daughter in Constanţa, a horticultural expert poorly paid by the state whose husband had left her for another woman. Also her mother, who owned a small piece of land that she refused to sell and suffered from rheumatism. Bogna supported them both, sending money each month and clothes from Oxfam. Her own husband had died fifteen years earlier of a rare blood disease; now there was a cure for it. She called me Isabella, instead of my real name, Isabel, or Izzy, as most people call me, and I never bothered to correct her. I don’t know why she talked to me. Perhaps she saw an ally in me, or at the very least someone who was an outsider, not being part of the family. Not that I saw myself that way, but back then Bogna knew more than I did.
Once Bogna was gone the house went to seed. It slumped and turned in on itself as if to protest the abandonment of its only advocate. Dirty plates piled up in every room, spilled food was left where it had scattered or congealed, the dust thickened, achieving a fine gray fur in the wilderness under the furniture. Black mold colonized the fridge, windows were left open to the rain, souring the curtains and leaving the sills to peel and rot. When a sparrow flew in and became trapped, batting its wings against the ceiling, I made a joke about the ghost of Bogna’s feather duster. It was met with a sullen silence, and I understood that Bogna, who had looked after Yoav and Leah for three years, was not to be mentioned again. After Leah’s trip to New York, and the beginning of the terrible silence between the siblings and their father, they stopped leaving the house altogether. Then I was the only one they had to bring them what they needed from the outside. Sometimes, scraping dried egg yolk from a pan so that I could cook some breakfast, I thought of Bogna and hoped that one day she would retire to a cottage by the Black Sea as she had longed to do. Two months later, at the end of May, my mother became sick, and I went back home to New York for almost a month. I called Yoav every few days and then, abruptly, the siblings stopped answering the phone. Some nights I would let it ring thirty or forty times while my stomach tied itself into knots. When I returned to London in early July the house was dark and the locks had been changed. At first I thought Yoav and Leah were playing a trick