taller by some trick of perspective, as if a sunken ship were rising back up out of the depths of the sea, until the driveway turned a corner and I lost sight of him through the trees.
On the drive home, Yoav and I were both quiet, huddled in our own thoughts. It was only as we left the depressed outskirts of Brussels behind and once again were on the open motorway that I asked what it was his father had sent him for. He glanced at the rearview mirror and let a car overtake us. A chess table, he said. We must have spoken of other things then, but what they were I no longer remember.
IN THE MONTHS that followed, Yoav, Leah, I, and even Bogna, who had not yet left, began to settle into a familiar routine. Leah was absorbed in learning pieces by Bolcom and Debussy for her first recital at the Purcell Room, I was doing my time at the library, Yoav began to study for his exams in earnest, and Bogna came and went, returning everything to its proper place. On the weekends, we rented a pile of movies. We ate when we felt like it, and slept when we felt like it. I was happy there. Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.
Then one rainy evening in early March the telephone rang. Sometimes it seemed that Yoav and Leah knew when it was their father even before lifting the receiver: a glance, quick and deft, flew between them. It was Weisz calling from the train station in Paris to say he would be arriving that night. Immediately a tense mood swept through the house, and Yoav and Leah became restless and agitated, coming and going in and out of rooms and up the stairs. If we leave for Marble Arch now you could be back in Oxford by half past nine, he said. I became furious. We argued. I accused him of being embarrassed of me and wanting to hide me from his father. In my own mind, I became again the daughter of those who covered the fine sofa with a plastic slipcover only removed for guests. The daughter of those who aspired to a higher life while never believing they were worthy of it, who bowed to an idea of all that hung above them, out of reach—not only materially, but spiritually, that part of the spirit that tends to satisfaction if not happiness—while diligently tending their disappointment. And if I became those things in my mind, Yoav, too, became something he wasn’t: a person born into an elevated life, who, as much as he loved me, could only ever play host to me there. Looking back, I see how much I misunderstood, and it pains me to think of how blind I was to Yoav’s pain.
We fought, though what we said, exactly, I can’t now say, since in our arguments what began as something direct always, deflected by Yoav, became indirect. It only ever occurred to me afterwards: he had talked about something, reasoned with me about something, defended himself against something without ever really addressing or even naming the thing at all. But this time I dug my heels in and carried on. In the end, exhausted, or at a loss for further strategies, he grabbed my wrists, forced me down onto the sofa, and began to kiss me hard enough to silence me. Sometime later we heard the front door open and then Leah’s footsteps on the stairs. I pulled up my jeans and buttoned my shirt. Yoav said nothing, but even then the pained look on his face filled me with guilt.
Weisz stood in the tiled entryway in polished shoes holding a walking stick with a silver handle, the shoulders of his wool overcoat shiny with rain. He was a diminutive man, smaller and older than I’d imagined, scaled back in all dimensions as if occupying space at all were a compromise he’d accepted but refused to embrace. It was hard to believe that this was the man who wielded such authority over Yoav and Leah. But when he turned his face in my direction his eyes were live, cold, and piercing.