his business, Weisz hired others to do such work. But his own family’s furniture he always appeared to claim himself. The Gold Train was seized by the Allied troops near Werfen, in May of 1945. Most of its load was sent to a military warehouse in Salzburg, and later sold through army exchange stores or at auction in New York. These pieces took Weisz longer to find, often years or even decades. He made contact with everyone from the high-ranking U.S. military officers who had overseen the dispersion of goods, to the workers employed by the warehouse to move them. Who knows what he offered them in exchange for the information he wanted.
He made it his business to know personally every serious dealer of nineteenth-and twentieth-century furniture in Europe. He scoured the catalogues of every auction, befriended every furniture restorer, knew what came through London, Paris, Amsterdam. His father’s Hoffmann bookcase showed up in a shop on Herrenstrasse in Vienna in the autumn of 1975. He flew direct from Israel and identified the bookcase by the long scrape along its right side. (Other bookcases had turned up without this mark and been rejected by Weisz.) His father’s dictionary stand he tracked to a banking family in Antwerp, and from there to a store on Rue Jacob in Paris, where it lived for some time in the window under the watch of a large white Siamese cat. Leah remembered the arrival of certain of these long-lost pieces at the house on Ha’Oren Street, tense and somber events that had terrified her so much that as a small child she would sometimes hide in the kitchen when the crates were pried open, in case what popped out were the blackened faces of her dead grandparents.
About the painting, Leah wrote the following: It was so dark you had to stand at a certain angle to make out that it was of a man on a horse. For years, I was under the impression that it was Alexander Zaid. My father never liked the painting. Sometimes I think that had he allowed himself to live as he wanted to, he would have chosen an empty room with only a bed and a chair. Anyone else would have let the painting go the way of the rest that was lost, but not my father. He was burdened with a sense of duty that commanded his whole life, and later ours. He spent years tracking down the painting and paid quite a sum to convince its owners to sell it back to him. In the letter he left, he wrote that the painting had hung in his own father’s study. I nearly choked, or screamed at the absurdity. It’s possible I even laughed out loud. As if I hadn’t known that everything in his study in Jerusalem was laid out exactly as my grandfather’s study in Budapest had once been, down to the millimeter! Down to the velvet of the heavy drapes, the pencils in the ivory tray! For forty years my father labored to reassemble that lost room, just as it looked until that fateful day in 1944. As if by putting all the pieces back together he might collapse time and erase regret. The only thing missing in the study on Ha’Oren Street was my grandfather’s desk—where it should have stood, there was a gaping hole. Without it, the study remained incomplete, a poor replica. And only I knew the secret of where it was. That I refused to hand it over to him was what tore our family apart in the year when you lived with us, a few months before he killed himself. And yet he refused to acknowledge it! I thought I’d killed him with what I’d done. But it was just the opposite. When I read his letter, Leah wrote, I understood that my father had won. That at last he’d found a way to make it impossible for us ever to escape him. After he died, we went home to the house in Jerusalem. And we stopped living. Or maybe you could say that we began a life of solitary confinement, only with two of us instead of one.
The letter went on at some length about certain rooms of the house. What falls apart we stop using. We pay someone to do the shopping, and to bring us the things we need. A woman who needs the money and has seen enough in her life that she doesn’t raise