the morning, and I had to wait to call. We both fell silent, during which, without saying a word, she reached into me and took out my answer. At last she exhaled. When you come, don’t bother ringing. He won’t answer. I’ll leave the key for you, taped to the back of the buzzer on the gate. I nodded, too choked to speak. Izzy, I’m sorry that we—that he never—She broke off. It was so terrible, she said. There was tremendous guilt. For years we punished ourselves. And Yoav’s way of punishing himself was giving you up. Leah—I said. I have to go, she whispered. Take care of him.
THEY HAD LIVED everywhere. Their mother had died when Yoav was eight and Leah seven, and after that, without his wife to anchor him, haunted by grief, their father had wandered with them from city to city, sometimes staying months, sometimes a few years. Wherever he was, he worked. According to Yoav, his fame in the field of antiques became legendary during those years. He never had need for a store; his clients always knew where to find him. And the furniture they so coveted, the desks or bureaus or chairs they longed for, had long ago sat in and thought they would never sit in again, all that furnished the lives they lost or the lives they dreamed of living, arrived into George Weisz’s possession via sources, channels, and coincidences that remained the secrets of his trade. When Yoav was twelve he used to have a reoccurring dream that his father, his sister, and he lived together on a wooded shore and every night the tide would wash furniture onto the beach, four poster beds and sofas dressed with seaweed. They dragged these under the cover of the trees and assembled them in rooms demarcated by lines their father drew on the forest floor with the toe of his shoe, rooms upon rooms that began to take over the woods, without roofs or walls. The dreams were sad and eerie. But once Yoav dreamed that Leah found a lamp with the bulb still screwed in. They ran back with it to their father, who placed it on a mahogany side table and plugged it into Yoav’s mouth. Crouched on the floor, his mouth clamped shut, Yoav watched the canopy of leaves illuminate. Shadows rippled in the boughs. Years later, traveling through Norway with a backpack, Yoav stumbled across a stretch of shoreline he recognized as the one from his dreams. He took a photograph of it and when he got back to Oslo he had the film developed. Then he sent the photograph to his sister without a note, because between them there was no need for explanation.
Their father took them to Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Madrid, Munich, London, New York, Amsterdam. When they arrived at the new apartment it would already be filled with furniture. The pieces would be sold until the apartment was almost empty, and then they would leave for another city. Or it was the opposite: upon arriving, the new apartment would be bare and smell of fresh paint. As the months passed it would slowly fill up with a rolltop desk, a set of nesting tables, a daybed that arrived through the window or door, on the backs of men breathing heavily through the nose, or sometimes as if on its own, materializing while Yoav and Leah were away at school or playing at the park, making itself at home in some unnoticed corner as if it had been there all its inanimate life. Yoav told me that one of his earliest memories from those transitory years was hearing the doorbell ring, going to open the door, and finding a Louis XVI chair in the stairwell. The blue damask was ripped, and the horsehair stuffing exploded through. When the apartment became too crowded, or when the memory of his wife caught up with George Weisz, or for reasons Yoav and Leah understood but couldn’t explain, they would be on their way again to another city. In the new place, they would wake in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and, believing themselves still in the old apartment, in the prior city, would crash into walls. On the inside of the medicine cabinet on the third floor of the house in Belsize Park, one or both of them had carved a list of all the addresses they’d lived at: 19 Ha’Oren, Singel 104, Florastrasse 43,