Great House (24 page)

You went. I could not bring myself to drive you to the airport. I drove you to war, but I could not deliver you to the plane that would take you away from your country. I had a trial. Maybe I could have canceled it, but I didn't. The night before your mother stayed up finishing a sweater she had knit for you. Did you ever wear it? Even I could see that it was unflattering, bulky with her fear that you might
freeze to death. We left our goodbyes to the morning. But when the time came for me to leave for work, you were still asleep.

From the beginning your marks were tremendous. You rose easily to the top of your class. The suffering did not vanish but appeared to go into remission. You kept it buried under endless, obsessive work. When you graduated, we thought you would come home, but you didn't come. You became a barrister and were accepted in a prestigious set of chambers. You worked impossible hours, leaving no room for anything else, and quickly made a name for yourself in the criminal field. You prosecuted and defended, balanced the scales of justice, the years passed, you married, divorced, were appointed judge. And only later did I come to understand what perhaps you had meant to tell me that day so long ago: you would not come back to us.

 

A
LL OF THIS
was long ago. And yet against my will I find myself returning to it. As if to touch, ritually, one last time, every enduring pocket of pain. No, the powerful emotions of youth don't mellow with time. One gets a grip on them, cracks a whip, forces them down. You build your defenses. Insist on order. The strength of feeling doesn't lessen, it is simply contained. But now the walls begin to buckle. I find myself thinking of my parents, Dovi. Of certain images of my mother in shadowy evening light, in the kitchen, and I see that her expression meant something different than I had understood it to mean as a child. She would lock herself in the bathroom and was reduced to mere sound. Muffled, through the door, my ear to it. To me my mother was first and foremost a smell. Indescribable. Pass over it. Then a feeling, her hands on my back, the soft wool of her coat against my cheek. Then the sound of her, and at the end of all that, a distant fourth, the sight of her. How she looked to me, only in parts, never the whole. So large, and I so small that at any one time I could only take in a curve, or the swelling flesh over a belt, or the slope of freckles down to the bosom, or the legs sheathed in stockings. Any
more was impossible. Too much. After she died, my father lived on almost another decade. Steadying the one shaking hand with the other. I used to find him in his underwear, unshaven, with the blinds drawn. A meticulous, even a vain man, in a stained undershirt. It took him a full year before he began to dress again. Other things were never righted or repaired. Something toppled within. His conversation gave way to gaping holes. Once I found him on all fours, inspecting a scratch in the wood floor. Muttering and applying to it some Talmudic knowledge he had acquired as a boy and, having no use for it, had forgotten until now. I have no idea, no idea at all, what his thoughts were about the afterlife. We didn't speak of personal things. We saluted each other from across a great distance, from mountain peak to mountain peak. The clinking of the spoon in the teacup, or the throat cleared. A discussion of the best kind of wool, from where it came, type of animal, how manufactured, when there was discussion at all. He died peacefully in his bed, not a dirty dish in the sink. After filling a glass of water he would wipe the sink dry so that the steel would remain, true to name, stainless. For a few years I lit the yahrzeit candle for them both, but then I lost the habit. I can count on one hand the number of times I visited their graves. The dead are dead, if I want to visit them I have my memories, this is how I looked at it, if I looked at it at all. But even the memories I kept at bay. Is there not always some slight but unmistakable rebuke in the death of those closest? Is that what you will make of my death, Dov? A final installment of the long rebuke you took to be my life?

 

I
WAS NEARING
the end and then you came home. You stood holding your suitcase in the hall, and I thought—it seemed—a beginning. Am I too late? Where are you? You should have been home hours ago. What's keeping you? Something isn't right, I can feel it. Your mother is no longer here to worry. Now it falls to me. For ten days I woke up and found you here, sitting at this table. So short a time, and
yet already I had come to depend on it. But this morning, the morning I came down the stairs prepared to break the silence and offer a truce at last, the table was empty.

There's a pressure mounting in my chest. I can't pass over it. For ten days we have lived under the same roof and you've hardly spoken, Dov. We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Every day exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence. You in your chair, I in mine. Except today, when I woke and for the first time I coughed in the hallway, entered the kitchen, and no one was there. Your chair was empty. The newspaper still wrapped in a bag outside the door.

I promised myself I would wait until you were ready, that I wouldn't push. Yesterday I came across you standing in the garden, a strange stiffness in your posture as if you carried a wooden yoke like the old Dutch, only instead of water it was great reserves of feeling that you wished not to spill. I tried not to disturb you. Afraid to say the wrong thing, I've said nothing at all. But every day there's a little bit less of me. Just the tiniest bit, almost immeasurable, and yet I feel life slipping away. You don't have to tell me what you don't want to tell me about your life. I won't ask you what happened, why you resigned, why you suddenly gave up the only thing that has kept you bound to life all these years. I can live without knowing that. But what I need to know is why you've come back to me. I need to ask. Will you visit me once I'm gone? Will you come from time to time and sit with me? It's absurd, I'll be nothing, just a handful of inert material, and yet I feel it would help me to go more easily if I knew that you would come sometimes. To sweep around the headstone, and pick a stone to set there with the others. If there are others. Just to think that you would come, even once a year. I know how it sounds given the oblivion I've never doubted awaits me. When I first began my little wanderings through the valley of death and discovered within myself this desire, I, too, was surprised. I remember exactly how it happened. Uri came
to take me to the eye doctor one morning. Overnight, a tiny spot of darkness had lodged in the vision of my right eye. It was just a speck, but this little void drove me crazy, everything I looked at was marred by it. I started to panic. What if another spot appeared, and then another? Like being buried alive one shovel of dirt at a time, until there was only a prick of light left, and then nothing. Having worked myself into a state, I called Uri. An hour later he phoned back that he'd made an appointment and would come for me. We went to see the doctor, none of this is important, afterwards we got in the car to go home. We were driving when out of nowhere a rock hit the windshield. The bang was tremendous. Both of us flew out of our skin, and Uri slammed on the brakes. We sat in silence, barely breathing. The road was empty, there was no one around. By some miracle it took us a moment to fully grasp, the glass had not broken. The only mark in it was a divot the size of a fingerprint almost exactly between my eyes. A moment later I saw the rock resting in the recess for the windshield wipers. Had it gone through the glass it might have killed me. I got out of the car, my legs trembling, and took hold of the stone. It filled my palm, and when I closed my fingers around it, it fit perfectly in my fist. Here is the first, I thought. The first stone to mark my grave. The first stone placed like a period at the end of my life. Soon the mourners will come bringing stone after stone to anchor the long sentence that was my life to its final, strangled syllable—

And then, my child, I thought of you. I realized that I didn't care if the others came. That the only one whose stone I wanted was yours, Dov. The stone that can mean so many things to a Jew, but in your hand could mean only one.

My child. My love and my regret, as you were when I first laid eyes on you, a tiny old man who hadn't had time to brush off his ancient expression, naked and misshapen in the nurse's arms. Dr. Bartov, my old friend who broke the rules so that I could be present, turned to me and asked if I wanted to cut the cord, bulging, whitish blue and twisted, so much thicker than I'd ever imagined, more
like a rope for tying a boat, and without thinking I agreed. Just like this, he said, he who had done it a thousand times before. So I did, and suddenly it began to dance like a snake in my hands, and blood spurted around the room, splashing the walls like the scene of a heinous crime, and you opened your eyes, I swear you opened your tiny wet eyes, my child, and looked at me, as if to fix in your mind forever the face of the one who had separated you from her. At that moment I was filled with something. It was as if a pressure had blown into me, expanding everything, pushing at the walls from within, as if I were being besieged from the inside, if that's possible, and I thought I would explode from it all, from love and regret, Dov, love and regret as I never thought possible. In that instant I understood with surprise that I had become your father. The surprise lasted less than a minute because your mother began to hemorrhage, and one nurse gathered you up and hurried you away, while the other pushed me out the door and deposited me in the waiting room, where the men who had not yet seen their children looked at my bloody shoes and trembling lip and began to cough and shake.

I want you to know that I never gave up being your father, Dovik. Sometimes driving to work I found myself talking aloud to you. Pleading, reasoning with you. Or consulting with you about an especially difficult case. Or just telling you about the aphids attacking my tomatoes, or the simple omelet I made for myself one morning before your mother was awake, and ate alone in the bright silence of the kitchen. And when she fell ill, it was you I talked to while I sat in hard plastic chairs waiting for her to emerge from another procedure, another treatment, another test. I made a little scarecrow of you in my head and I talked as if you could hear me. The second time they bombed the number 18 bus I was two blocks away. Blood, so much blood, Dovi. The remains were everywhere. I watched the special Orthodox arrive to collect the splattered dead, to scrape the bits from the sidewalk with tweezers, to go up a ladder to peel a shred of ear from a high branch, to retrieve a child's
thumb from a balcony. Afterwards I couldn't talk to anyone about it, not even your mother, but I talked to you. True Kindness, that's what they call themselves, the ones who arrive in their kippot and their Day-Glo yellow vests, always the first there to hold the dying as they go in shocked silence, to gather up the child without limbs. True kindness, because the dead cannot repay the favor. Yes, it was you I spoke to when I woke with nightmares. You I addressed when I looked at myself to shave in the mirror. I found you everywhere, hiding in the most unlikely places, and though at first I wondered why, soon enough I realized it was because I believed I could learn something from you, from your example. You who had always been so gifted at giving up, of letting go, of making yourself lighter and lighter, less and less, one friend at a time, one father less, one wife less, and now you have even given up being a judge, there is almost nothing anymore to tether you to the world, you're like a dandelion with only one or two hairs left, how easy it would be for you, with a little cough, a little sigh, to blow the last one away—

Suddenly I'm frightened, Dov. I feel a shiver, a coldness is seeping into my veins. For once I think I understand. What do I understand? Is it possible you've come to say goodbye again? That you intend to put an end—at last?

Wait, Dovik. Don't go. Remember how I used to put you to sleep at night, always you wanted one more question? Where does the sun go at night? What do wolves eat? Why is there only one of me?

One more question, Dovik. One more song. Five more minutes.

What would she do?

Where are you? All your life I've been asking.

I'll put on my shoes. I'll get down on my knees. I'll never mention it again.

I'll do what your mother would have done. I'll call every hospital.

Y
OUR
H
ONOR, IN THE DARK AND STONY COOLNESS
of my room I slept like someone rescued from a typhoon. A restless disquiet, the awareness of some misfortune, fluttered at the edge of my dreams, but I was too exhausted to investigate it. It gathered and coalesced over long hours of sleep, until at the moment I opened my eyes it burst into consciousness as an almost fanatical dread. Just beyond my reach was an insistent question that needed an answer, but what was the question? I felt a terrible thirst and fumbled in the dark for the little glass bottles of cold water. I had no sense of the time, but through the crack under the shutters I saw that it was still light out, or had become light again. The question pressed up more insistently, but when I tried to grasp it it eluded me. I groped for the key to open the door to the veranda, knocking over a bottle that shattered on the floor. The lock stuck then gave way to the violent light of Jerusalem. I looked out at the walls of the Old City, deeply moved by the view, and yet still the question was there, and my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a missing tooth: it hurt but I wanted to know. When the sun went down and darkness slipped over the hills like a hood, everything in my head became amplified as if in a theater with perfect acoustics, a
wretched clamminess seeped back in, and the urgent question rose up again, but what was it, what, until with a shock of nausea it surfaced at last:

What if I had been wrong?

 

Y
OUR
H
ONOR
, for as long as I can remember I set myself apart. Or rather I believed that I had been set apart from others, chosen out. I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive that dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself. I didn't grant myself magical powers or believe myself to be under the watch of some beneficent force—it was nothing so tangible as that—nor did I ever lose sight of the immutable reality of my situation. I simply came to believe that one, the factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and a depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it. In the worst moments I only needed to pull myself beneath the surface, to dive down and touch the place within where this mysterious giftedness lived in me, and so long as I found it I knew that one day I would escape their world and make my life in another. There was a hatch in our apartment building that led to the roof and I used to run up four flights and scale a wall to where I could see the hard glimmer of the overpass where the trains ran, and there, where I knew no one could find me, a secret quiver of joy slid coolly through my veins and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, because I sensed, in the raw stillness of the moment, that the world was revealing something of itself to me alone. When I couldn't get to the roof I could hide under
my parents' bed, and though there was nothing to see I felt the same thrill, the same sense of privileged access to the underpinnings of things, to the currents of feeling on which all of human existence delicately rests, to the almost unendurable beauty of life, not mine or anyone else's, but the thing itself, irrespective of those who are born into and die out of it. I watched my sisters trip and tumble, one who learned to lie and steal and cheat, and the other who was destroyed by self-loathing, who tore herself up until she could no longer remember how to put the pieces together again, but I stayed the course, Your Honor, yes, I believed myself to be somehow chosen, not protected so much as made an exception of, imbued with a gift that kept me whole but was nothing more than a potential until the day came that I would make something of it, and as time passed, in the depths of me, this belief transformed itself into law, and the law came to govern my life. In so many words, Your Honor, that is the story of how I became a writer.

Understand: it isn't that I was excused from self-doubt. All my life it has shadowed me, a gnawing sense of doubt and the loathing that accompanied it, a special loathing I saved only for myself. Sometimes it lived in an uneasy opposition with my sense of chosenness, coming and going, troubling me until, in the end, my secret belief in what I was always won out. I remember all those years ago how I almost balked when the movers brought Daniel Varsky's desk through the door. It was so much larger than I remembered, as if it had grown or multiplied (had there been so many drawers?) since I'd seen it two weeks earlier in his apartment. I didn't think it would fit, and then I didn't want the movers to leave because I was afraid, Your Honor, of being left alone with the shadow it cast across the room. It was as if my apartment were suddenly plunged into silence, or as if the quality of the silence had changed, like the silence of an empty stage versus the silence of a stage on which someone has placed a single, gleaming instrument. I was overwhelmed and wanted to cry. How could I be expected to write at such a desk? The desk of a great mind, as S
said the first time I brought him back to my place years later, possibly the desk of Lorca for God's sake? If it fell it might crush a person to death. If my apartment had felt small before, now it seemed tiny. But while I sat cowering beneath it I remembered, for some reason, a film I'd once seen about the Germans after the War, how they starved and were forced to chop down all the forests for firewood so that they wouldn't freeze, and when there were no trees left they turned their axes on the furniture—beds, tables and armoires, family heirlooms, nothing was saved—yes, suddenly they rose up before me wrapped in coats like dirty bandages, hacking away at the legs of tables and the arms of chairs, a little hungry fire already crackling at their feet, and I felt the tickle of a laugh in my belly: imagine what they'd have done with such a desk. They'd have swooped down on it like vultures on the carcass of a lion—what a bonfire it would have made, enough wood for days—and now I actually chortled out loud, biting my nails and practically grinning at that poor, overgrown desk that had so narrowly escaped becoming ash, had risen to the heights of Lorca, or at the very least of Daniel Varsky, and now had been abandoned to the likes of me. I ran my fingers along the nicked surface and reached up to caress the knobs of its many drawers as it stooped under the ceiling, because now I began to see it in a different light, the shadow it cast was almost inviting, Come, it seemed to say, like a clumsy giant who reaches out its paw and the little mouse jumps up into it and away they go together, over hills and plains, through forests and vales. I dragged a chair across the floor (I still remember the sound it made, a long scrape that gouged the silence), and was surprised to discover how small it appeared next to the desk, like the chair of a child or the baby bear in the story of Goldilocks, surely it would break if I tried to sit in it, but no, it was just right. I placed my hands on the desk, first one hand and then the other, while the silence seemed to strain against the windows and doors. I lifted my eyes up and I felt it, Your Honor, that secret quiver of joy, and either then, or soon enough, the immutable fact of that desk, the first thing
I saw each morning when I opened my eyes, renewed my sense that a potential in me had been acknowledged, a special quality that set me apart and to which I was beholden.

Sometimes the doubt receded for months or even years, only to return and overwhelm me to the point of paralysis. One night, a year and a half after the desk arrived at my door, Paul Alpers called on the phone: What are you doing? he asked, Reading Pessoa, I said, though the truth was that I had been asleep on the sofa, and as I uttered this lie my eyes fell on a dark spot of drool. I'm coming over, he said, and fifteen minutes later he was standing at my door, looking pale and clutching a wrinkled brown bag. It must have been some time since I'd last seen him, because I was surprised at how much thinner his hair was. Varsky disappeared, he said, What? I said, though I'd heard him perfectly well, and then we both turned at the same time to stare at the towering desk, as if at any moment our tall, thin friend with the big nose might leap out, laughing, from one of the many drawers. But nothing happened except that a trickle of sadness began to leak into the room. They came to his house at dawn, Paul whispered. Can I come in? and without waiting for a reply walked past me, opened the cupboard, and returned with two glasses that he filled from the bottle of scotch in the paper bag. We raised our glasses to Daniel Varsky, and then Paul refilled the glasses and we toasted again, this time to all the kidnapped poets of Chile. When the bottle was finished and Paul sat hunched in his coat in the chair across from me, a hard but vacant look in his eyes, I was overwhelmed by two feelings: one, the regret that nothing ever stays the same, and two, the sense that the burden I labored under had now gotten immeasurably heavier.

I became haunted by Daniel Varsky and had difficulty concentrating. My mind would wander back to the night I met him, when I stood looking at the maps on the walls of all of the cities he'd lived in, and he told me about places I'd never heard of—a river outside of Barcelona the color of aquamarine where you could dive down through an underwater hole and surface in a tunnel, half-air,
half-water, and walk for miles listening to the echo of your own voice, or the tunnels in the Judean Hills no wider than a man's waist where the followers of Bar Kochba lost their minds waiting out the Romans, through which Daniel had slid with nothing but a match to light his way—while I who have always suffered from a mild claustrophobia nodded meekly, and soon afterwards listened to him recite his poem which he did without blinking or looking away.
Forget Everything I Ever Said
. It really was quite good, Your Honor, the truth is that it was an astounding poem, and I never forgot it at all. There was a naturalness about it that it now seemed to me I would never possess. It was painful to acknowledge, but I'd always suspected it about myself, this little lie beneath the surface of my lines, how I piled the words on like decoration while for him it was like stripping everything away, more and more until he lay utterly exposed, writhing like a little white larva (there was something almost indecent about it which made it all the more breathtaking). Remembering it as I sat across from Paul, who by that point had fallen asleep, I felt a pain in my stomach just below my heart, like a deep stab from a tiny pocketknife, and I doubled over on his sofa, the sofa on which I had so often fallen asleep thinking about nothing, about little things, on what day of the week my birthday would fall, how I needed to buy a bar of soap, while somewhere in the desert, plains, or basements of Chile Daniel Varsky was being tortured to death. After that the sight of the desk every morning made me want to cry, not just because it embodied the violent fate of my friend, but also because now it only served to remind me that it had never really belonged to me, nor would it ever, and that I was only an accidental caretaker who had foolishly imagined that she possessed something, an almost magical quality, which, in fact, she'd never had, and that the true poet who was meant to be sitting at it was, in all likelihood, dead. One night I had a dream in which Daniel Varsky and I were sitting on a narrow bridge above the East River. For some reason he was wearing a patch over one eye like Moshe Dayan. But don't you feel, deep down, that there's something special about you?
he asked me, carelessly swinging his legs while down below us swimmers, or perhaps dogs, tried to make their way against the current. No, I whispered, trying to hold back tears, No, I don't, while Daniel Varsky looked at me with a mixture of bewilderment and pity.

For a month I wrote almost nothing. At that time one of my many odd jobs was folding origami birds for a Chinese caterer owned by the uncle of one of my friends, and I outdid myself folding birds, cranes of every color, until my hands were first numb, then so stiff I couldn't curl my fingers around a cup and had to drink right from the faucet. Yet I didn't mind, there was something almost comforting about the way I began to see every object in the world as a variation on the eleven folds it took to make a crane, the flock of cranes a thousand strong that I packed into boxes that took up what little space there was not occupied by the desk. In order to get to the mattress where I slept I had to squirm between the boxes and the desk, so that for a moment my whole body was pressed against it and inhaling the smell of the wood, at once unplaceable and painfully familiar, I felt a bolt of misery so acute that I gave up the mattress and slept on the sofa until the day the man came to pick up the boxes of cranes (he let out a low whistle of surprise, then proceeded to count out the money), and my apartment was empty once again. Or rather, empty but for the desk, sofa, chest, and chairs of Daniel Varsky. After that, I did my best to ignore the desk, but the less attention I paid to it the more it seemed to grow, and soon I began to feel claustrophobic and took to sleeping with the windows open despite the cold, which lent my dreams a strange austerity. Then, passing the desk one night, I caught sight of a sentence on a page I'd written some months before. The sentence stayed in my head as I continued on to the bathroom, something about it was off, and while I was sitting on the toilet the right constellation of words suddenly leaped into my head. I went back to the desk, crossed out what I'd written, and wrote down the new sentence. Then I sat down and began to rework another sentence, and another after that, the thoughts crackled inside my skull, the words snapped
together like magnets, and soon, without ceremony, I forgot myself in my work. I remembered myself again.