Great House (12 page)

I called out Lotte's name. A pause, and then I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She was alone. As soon as I saw her expression, I understood that the boy had gone for good. I don't know how I knew, but I did. Something wordless was exchanged between us. We embraced. When she asked me how the conference had gone, and why I had come home a day early, I told her it had been fine, nothing interesting, and that I had missed her. We made a late dinner together, and as we ate I searched Lotte's face and voice for some sign of how things had ended with Varsky, but the way was barred: in the days that followed Lotte was subdued, lost in thought, and I let her be, as I always have.

It was months before I realized that she had given him her desk. I only found out because I noticed that a table we kept in the cellar was missing. I asked her if she'd seen it, and she told me she was using it as a desk. But you have a desk, I said, stupidly. I gave it away, she said.
Gave it away? I said, unbelieving. To Daniel, she said. He admired it, and so I gave it to him.

Yes, Lotte was a mystery to me, but a mystery through which I somehow found my way. She was the only child with her parents when the SS rung their bell that October night of 1938 and rounded them up with the other Polish Jews. Her brothers and sisters were all older than she—one sister was studying law in Warsaw, one brother was the editor of a communist paper in Paris, another was a music teacher in Minsk. For a year she clung to her elderly parents and they to her inside the sealed compartment of that rapidly moving nightmare. When her chaperone visa came through, it must have felt like a miracle. Of course it would have been unimaginable not to take it and go. But it must have been equally unimaginable to leave her parents. I don't think Lotte ever forgave herself for it. I always believed it was her only real regret in life, but a regret of such vast proportions that it couldn't be dealt with straight on. It reared its head in unlikely places. For example, I thought that what really bothered Lotte about the woman who was hit by a bus on St. Giles' was how she herself had reacted in the moment. She had watched it happen—the woman stepping into the street, the screech of brakes, the terrible, inanimate thud—and as a crowd gathered around the fallen woman, she had turned and continued on her way. She hadn't mentioned it until that night, when we were reading. She told me the story, and of course I'd asked what anyone would have—whether the woman had been all right. A certain look came over Lotte's face, a look I'd seen many times before, and which I can only describe as a kind of stillness, as if everything that normally existed near the surface had retreated into the depths. A moment passed. I felt something one from time to time experiences with those one is intimate with, when the distance that all the while has been folded up like a Chinese paper toy suddenly springs open between you. And then Lotte shrugged, breaking the spell, and said she didn't know. She didn't say anything else about it, but the next day I saw her scanning the newspaper, looking, I felt
sure, for some report of the accident. She walked away, you see. She walked away without waiting to find out what had happened.

All her life I thought it was about her parents. When she told the story about the bus it was about her parents, and when she woke up crying it was about her parents, and when she lost her temper at me and went cold for days, it was also, I believed, about her parents in some way. The loss was so extreme there seemed no need to go looking any further. So how was I to know that lost inside the vortex of her there was also a child?

I might never have known about him at all if a strange thing hadn't happened toward the end of Lotte's life. By then the Alzheimer's was quite advanced. In the beginning she had tried to hide it. I would remind her of something we had done together—a seaside restaurant we'd eaten in years before in Bournemouth, or the boat ride we'd taken in Corsica when her hat had blown off and floated on the backs of the waves toward the shores of Africa, or so we'd later imagined lying sun-drenched, naked, and happy in bed. I would remind her of one of these memories and she would say, Of course, of course, but I could see in her eyes that beneath those words there was nothing, just an abyss, like the black-water pond she disappeared into every morning no matter the weather. Then followed a period when she became scared, aware of how much she was losing by the day, perhaps even the hour, like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion. When we went for a walk she would grip my arm as if at any minute the street might drop away, the trees and houses, England itself, sending us tumbling down, turning and tumbling, unable to ever right ourselves. And then even that period passed, and she no longer remembered enough to be afraid, no longer remembered, I suppose, that things had ever been any other way, and from then on she set off alone, utterly alone, on a long journey back to the shores of her childhood. Her conversation, if one could call it that, disintegrated, leaving behind only the rubble out of which a once-beautiful thing had been built.

It was during this time that she began to wander off. I would come back from doing the shopping and find the front door open and the house empty. The first time it happened I got into the car and drove around for fifteen minutes, becoming more and more distraught before I found her half a mile away, on Hampstead Lane, sitting at a bus stop without a jacket though it was winter. When she saw me she didn't move to get up. Lotte, I said, bending down to her, or maybe I said, Darling. Where were you planning to go? To visit a friend, she said, crossing and uncrossing her ankles. Which friend? I asked.

It became impossible to leave her alone. She didn't always wander, but there had been enough scares that I had to hire a nurse to stay with her three afternoons a week so I could go out to do the errands. The first nurse I found turned out to be a nightmare. In the beginning she had seemed very professional, arriving with a long list of references, but soon enough she revealed herself to be careless and irresponsible, only in it for the money. One afternoon I came home and she was standing nervously by the door. Where is Lotte? I demanded. She wrung her hands. What is going on here? I said, pushing past her into the hall that Lotte and I had first entered together so many years ago when it still belonged to the potter in the wheelchair, and overhead hung the damage of a diverted river, a river, I admit, that from time to time I would wake in the middle of the night and think I could hear still flowing somewhere in the walls. But the hall was empty, as was the living room and kitchen. Where is my wife? I said, or perhaps I shouted, though I am hardly the shouting type. She's fine, this nurse, Alexandra, or Alexa, I can't remember, assured me. A very nice woman called, a magistrate if I'm not mistaken. She's bringing Lotte home right now. I don't understand, I shouted, for surely by this point I'd lost my temper and had begun to shout, How did she wander off with you sitting right next to her? Actually, said the nurse, I wasn't sitting right next to her. She was watching television, it was a program I didn't care much for myself, and so I decided to wait in the other room until she was
finished. And after that program she watched another of the same kind, so I called a friend of mine and we chatted for a while, and then when she decided to watch a
third
program, one of those really awful ones where they have snakes devouring helpless animals, snakes and alligators, I believe, though I think the third one was about piranhas, well after that I went in to see if she wanted anything, and she was gone. Luckily they called from the court a few minutes later to say that they had Ms. Berg, and she was perfectly fine.

By this point I was in such a rage that I could barely speak. The court? I shouted. THE COURT? and if a car hadn't pulled up in front of the house just then I might have lunged at her. The driver, a woman in her late fifties, got out and went around to open the door for Lotte. She led her patiently up the path long since cleared of brambles, planted on either side with purple irises and grape hyacinths, purple being Lotte's favorite color. Here we are, Ms. Berg, home at last, the woman said, leading her along on her arm as if Lotte were her own mother. Home at last, Lotte repeated, and beamed. Hello Arthur, she said, smoothing her trousers, and walked past me into the house.

Afterwards the woman, who was indeed a magistrate, told me the following story: At around three o'clock she'd gone down the hallway to speak to a colleague, and when she came back there was Lotte, sitting with her handbag on her lap, staring straight ahead as if she were riding in a car and unknown landscapes were unfolding before her, or as if she were in a movie acting as if she were riding in a car while in truth she was sitting perfectly still. Can I help you? the magistrate asked, though normally they buzzed her when she had a visitor, and as far as she knew she didn't have any meetings scheduled. Later it was a mystery to her how Lotte had got past the security guard and her secretary. Slowly Lotte turned to look at her. I've come to report a crime, she said. All right, the magistrate said, taking her seat across from Lotte, because the only other option would have been to ask her to leave, which she didn't have the heart to do. What is the crime? she asked. I gave up my child, Lotte announced. Your child? she asked,
and at that moment she began to sense that Lotte, who was seventy-five by then, was perhaps disoriented or not altogether in her senses. On July 20, 1948, five weeks after he was born, she said. To whom did you give him? the magistrate asked. He was adopted by a couple from Liverpool, Lotte said. In that case no one committed a crime, Madame, said the magistrate.

At this point Lotte became silent. First silent and then confused. Confused and then frightened. She stood abruptly and asked to be taken home. Stood and didn't know which way to turn, as if she had forgotten where even the door was, as if the exit had gone the way of the rest. When the magistrate asked her address, Lotte gave her the name of a German street. From down the hallway came the sound of a gavel and Lotte jumped. At last she agreed to let the magistrate look in her handbag to find her address and telephone number. The magistrate phoned the house and spoke to the nurse, and then she told her secretary that she would be back soon. As they were leaving the building, Lotte looked up as if she were seeing the magistrate for the first time.

A coldness entered my head, a kind of severe numbness as if ice had crept up my spine and begun to flow into my brain, to protect my sensorium from the blow of the news it had just received. I managed to thank the magistrate profusely, and as soon as she drove away I went in and fired the nurse, who left cursing. I found Lotte in the kitchen, helping herself from a box of biscuits.

 

A
T FIRST
I did nothing. Slowly, my mind began to thaw. I listened to the noises of Lotte moving through the house, the breathing and the cracking of bones and swallowing and wetting dry lips and allowing a little groan to escape through the mouth. When I helped her to undress or bathe, as I had to do now, I looked at her slim body that I thought I'd known every inch of, and wondered how it was possible that I'd never realized it had borne a child. I smelled her smells, the
familiar ones and the newer smells of her old age, and I thought to myself, Ours is the home of two different species. Here in this house live two different species, one on land and one in the water, one who clings to the surface and the other who lurks in the depths, and yet every night, through a loophole in the laws of physics, they share the same bed. I looked at Lotte brushing her white hair in the mirror, and I knew that every day from then until the end we would grow stranger and stranger to each other.

Who had been the father of the child? To whom had Lotte given the infant? Had she ever seen him again, or been in touch with him in any way? Where was he now? I turned these questions over and over in my mind, questions that I still found hard to believe I was asking at all, as if I were asking myself why the sky was green or why a river was running through the walls of our house. Lotte and I had never spoken to each other of the lovers we'd had before we met; I out of respect for her, and she because that is how she dealt with the past: in total silence. Of course I was aware that she'd had lovers. I knew, for example, that the desk had been a gift from one of these men. Perhaps he had been the only one, though I doubted it; she was already twenty-eight when I met her. But now it dawned on me that he must have been the child's father. What else could explain her strange attachment to the desk, her agreeing to live with that monstrous thing, and not just live with it but to work in the lap of the beast day in and day out—what else but guilt and almost certainly regret? It wasn't long before my mind arrived, inevitably, at the ghost of Daniel Varsky. If what she had told the magistrate was true, he would have been almost exactly the same age as her child. I never imagined that he actually was her child—that would have been utterly impossible. I couldn't say exactly how she would have responded had her grown son walked through the door, but I knew it would not have been in the way she had when she first laid eyes on Daniel. And yet, suddenly I understood what had drawn her to him, and all at once the whole thing became clear, or at least
a glimpse of the whole, before it dissolved into more unknowns and more questions.

It must have been four years after Daniel Varsky first rang our bell that Lotte picked me up at Paddington one evening, a winter evening in 1974, and as soon as I got into the car I realized that she had been crying. Alarmed, I asked her what was wrong. For some time she didn't speak. We drove in silence over the Westway and through St. John's Wood, along the dark edge of Regent's Park where from time to time the headlights would illuminate the ghostly flash of a runner. Do you remember that Chilean boy who visited a few years ago? Daniel Varksy? I asked. Of course. At that moment I had no idea what she was about to say to me. Any number of things flashed through my mind, but none of them even approached what she told me next. About five months ago he was arrested by Pinochet's secret police, she said. His family hasn't heard anything from him since, and they have reason to believe he was killed. Tortured first and then killed, she said, and as her voice slid over those nightmarish last words it didn't catch in her throat or contract to hold back tears, but rather expanded, the way pupils do in the dark, as if it contained not one nightmare but many.