Great House (33 page)

It must have been some hours later when I woke again. It was dusk outside. I lay still looking up at the mute rectangle of sky. I turned my face to the wall. And as I did, an image came to me of Lotte in the garden. I have no sense of the provenance of the memory, and in fact I can't say for certain whether it happened at all. In it, she stands near the back wall, unaware that I am watching from a second-story window. A small fire smolders at her feet that she tends with a stick or perhaps the fire poker, bending over her work, heavy with concentration,
her shoulders covered in a yellow shawl. From time to time she adds a few more pieces of paper to the blaze, or perhaps shakes a book whose pages float down into the fire. The smoke rises in a twisting violet plume. What she was burning, and why I watched in silence from the window, I couldn't say, and the more I tried to remember, the less vivid the image became, and the more agitated I felt.

My shoes were lined up under a chair, though I didn't remember removing them. I put them on, smoothed the lace bedcover, and went down the stairs. When I came to the kitchen Mrs. Fiske was standing with her back to me over the stove. It was that hour before dark when one hasn't yet thought to turn on the lights. Steam rose from the pot she was stirring. I pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and she turned, face flushed from the heat. Mr. Bender, she said. Please, I said, call me Arthur, though immediately I regretted it because I knew that it was my strangeness to her that allowed her to speak so openly. She said nothing, only took down a bowl from a shelf, ladled some soup into it, and wiped her hands on her apron. She set the bowl down in front of me, and took a seat opposite, just as my own mother used to do. I wasn't hungry, but there was no choice but to eat.

After a long silence, Mrs. Fiske began to speak again. I always thought that she would contact me. Of course she knew where we lived. In the beginning I was terrified that I would receive a phone call or letter, or that she would simply appear at the door to say that a mistake had been made, that she wanted Teddy back. Rocking him to sleep at night, or standing still in the dark so as not to creak the floorboards and wake him, I used to silently plead my case. She gave him away! And I took him in. I loved him like my own! And yet a feeling of guilt weighed on me. He used to cry so much, his face knotted, his mouth agape. He was inconsolable, you see. The doctor said it was colic, but I didn't believe it. I thought he was crying for her. At times, in my frustration, I would shake him and shout for him to stop. For a moment he would look at me, surprised or maybe frightened into silence. In his dark eyes I saw the hard glimmer of willfulness. Then
he would begin to shriek louder than before. Sometimes I slammed the door and let him cry. I would sit here, where I'm sitting now, with my hands over my ears, until I became nervous that the neighbors might hear and suspect me of neglect.

But neither the call nor the letter ever came, said Mrs. Fiske. And after three or four months Teddy began to cry less. Together he and I discovered things, little rituals and songs that calmed him. A kind of understanding, however tentative, began to unfold between us. He learned to smile at me, a crooked, gaping smile, but it filled me with joy. I began to gain confidence. For the first time since I brought him home, I began to take him out in the pram. We would walk to the park and he would sleep in the shade while I sat on the bench, almost the same as any other mother. Almost, but not quite, because in a little, hidden cell of each day—arriving often at the hour of dusk, or after I'd put the baby to sleep and was drawing myself a bath, but sometimes without warning at the exact moment my lips brushed his cheek—a feeling of fraudulence took hold of me. It would slip around my neck like a pair of tiny, cold hands, and in an instant it would obliterate the rest. At first it filled me with despair, said Mrs. Fiske. I hated myself for carrying on as if I really were his mother, something that, in that chilling, lucid moment, I felt I could never be. While I was feeding or bathing or reading to him, there would always be a part of me that was somewhere else, riding a tram in a foreign city in the rain, walking along a foggy promenade on the edge of an alpine lake so large that a scream would falter and become lost before it ever reached the other shore. My sister had no children, and I didn't know many other young mothers. Those I did know I would never have dared to ask if they ever felt the same. I took it to be my own failure, a failure that had something to do with having not conceived Teddy myself, but which ultimately came down to an inadequacy at the core of me. And yet, what could I do but continue to try despite myself? No one came for him. He only had me. I made an enormous effort, lavishing no end of attention on him in order to make up for it. Teddy
grew into a contented child, though there were times that I saw in his eyes, or thought I saw, a fleeting look of some long-unrelieved desperation, though afterwards I could never be sure that it wasn't just thoughtfulness, which for some reason always carries the faint impression of sadness when passing across the face of a child.

By then I no longer worried that she was going to come back to claim him, Mrs. Fiske said. I thought of him as my own, no matter my faults, no matter the failing of attention from which he would call me back with increasing determination, my impatience with certain little games he wished to repeat over and over again, no matter the sense of paralyzing boredom that sometimes took hold after I'd dressed him and the day stretched out again before us like an endless car park. I knew that he loved me despite all of this, and when he crawled into my lap and found the place where he fitted most naturally, I felt that no two people could understand each other better than he and I, and that it must be that, after all, which was what was meant by being a mother and child. Mrs. Fiske stood to clear my bowl, put it in the sink, and looked out the window at the small garden behind the house. She seemed to be in something close to a trance, and I didn't speak for fear of breaking it. She filled the kettle, put it on the stove, and returned to the table. I saw then how tired she seemed. She fixed her eyes on mine. What is it that you came here to find out, Mr. Bender?

Taken aback, I didn't speak right away.

Because if you came to understand something about your wife, I can't help you, she said.

A long silence passed. And then Mrs. Fiske said: I never heard from her again. She never wrote. Sometimes I thought of her. I watched the baby sleeping and I wondered how she could have done what she did. Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child—not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the
depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

With time I thought of her less and less. But when he died she returned to me. He was twenty-three when it happened. I thought that in the whole world, only she could fathom the depth of my grief. But then I realized that I was wrong, said Mrs. Fiske. She couldn't know. She didn't know the first thing about my son.

 

S
OMEHOW
I
MADE IT
back to the railway station. It was difficult to think clearly. I took the train back to London. Every station we passed through I saw Lotte on the platform. What she had done, the cold-bloodedness of it, filled me with horror, a horror amplified by the fact that I had lived with her for so long without having the faintest idea of what she was capable. Everything she had ever said to me I now had to consider in this new light.

That evening I returned to Highgate to find that the front window of the house had been smashed. From the large hole a magnificent, delicate web of cracks radiated outwards. It was something to behold, and a feeling of awe came over me. On the floor inside, lying among the broken glass, I found a rock the size of a fist. Cold air filled the living room. It was the special stillness of the scene that shook me, the kind that comes only in the wake of violence. At last I saw a spider crawling very slowly across the wall and the spell was broken. I went to get the broom. When I had finished cleaning up, I taped a sheet of plastic over the hole. The rock I saved and put on the living room table. The next day, when the glazier arrived, he shook his head and said something about rowdy kids, hoodlums, the third window they'd broken that week, and I felt a sudden pang and realized I had wanted that rock to be meant for me, the work of someone who wished to throw a rock through
my
window, and mine alone, not just any window. And when the little feeling of pain passed, I began to resent the glazier with his loud and gleeful voice. Only after he left did I
understand how lonely I was. The rooms of the house sucked me in and seemed to scold me for having left them. You see? they seemed to say. You see what happens? But I did not see. I had the feeling of understanding less and less. It was becoming difficult to remember—or not to remember, but to
believe
what I remembered of what Lotte and I used to do in those rooms, how we passed our time, where and how we used to sit. I sat in my old chair, and tried to summon Lotte as she used to sit across from me. But it all became touched with absurdity. The plastic rippled over the gaping hole, and the spectacular cracked glass hung suspended. One heavy step or gust of wind, it seemed, and the whole thing would fall into thousands of pieces. The following day when the glazier returned I excused myself, and went out to the garden. When I came back the window was whole again, the glazier smiling at his handiwork.

I understood, then, what deep within myself I had always understood: that I could never punish her as much as she had already punished herself. That it was I, after all, who had never admitted to myself just how much I knew. The act of love is always a confession, Camus wrote. But so is the quiet closing of a door. A cry in the night. A fall down the stairs. A cough in the hall. All my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin. Imagine myself into her loss. Trying and failing. Only perhaps—how can I say this—perhaps I
wanted
to fail. Because it kept me going. My love for her was a failure of the imagination.

 

O
NE EVENING
the doorbell rang. I was not expecting anyone. There is no longer anyone or anything to expect. I put down my book, carefully marking the page with a bookmark. Lotte had always put her books down open-faced and when we first met I used to tell her that I could hear the little high-pitched cry as its spine was broken. It was a joke, but later when she left the room or went to sleep I would pick up her book and slip a bookmark in, until one day she
lifted her book, ripped the bookmark out, and dropped it on the floor. Don't ever do that again, she said. And I understood that there was one more place that belonged to her that I would be now and forever barred from. From then on I no longer asked about her reading. I waited until she volunteered something—a sentence that moved her, a bright passage, a character vividly drawn. Sometimes it came and sometimes it didn't. But it was not for me to ask.

I walked the few paces down the hallway to the door. Hoodlums, I thought, the word of the glazier coming back to me. But through the eyehole I saw it was a man close to my own age dressed in a suit. I asked who was there. He cleared his throat on the other side of the door. Mr. Bender? he asked.

He was a small man, dressed with simple elegance. The only flourish was a walking stick with a silver handle. It seemed unlikely that he was there to bludgeon or rob me. Yes? I said, standing in the open doorway. My name is Weisz, he said. Forgive me for not calling in advance. But he did not offer any excuse. There's something I'd like to discuss with you, Mr. Bender. If it isn't too much of an imposition—he looked past me, into the house—may I come in? I asked what it was about. A desk, he said.

A weakness came into my knees. I was paralyzed, certain that it could only be he: the one she had loved, in whose shadow I had eked out a life with her.

As if in a dream, I showed him into the living room. He moved without hesitation, as if he knew his way. A coldness slid through me. Why had it never occurred to me that he might have been here before? He walked directly to Lotte's chair and stood waiting. I gestured for him to sit as my legs began to crumple under me. We sat face to face. I in my chair, he in hers. As it had always been, I thought now.

I've intruded on you, he said, I'm sorry. And yet he spoke with a composure that belied his words, with a confidence that was almost intimidating. His accent was Israeli, though tempered, I thought, by the vowels and accents of elsewhere. He looked as if he were in
his late sixties, perhaps seventy, which would have made him a few years younger than Lotte. Then it dawned on me. How could I not have guessed before? One of her charges on the Kindertransport! A boy of fourteen, perhaps fifteen. Sixteen at most. In the beginning those few years might have seemed like a lot. But as time passed, less and less. When he was eighteen she would have been twenty-one or twenty-two. They would have shared an unbreakable bond, a private language, a lost world condensed into blunt syllables that each had only to utter for the other to understand completely. Or no language at all—a silence that stood for all that could not be spoken aloud.

His appearance was impeccable: not a hair out of place or a speck of lint on his dark suit. Even the soles of his shoes looked unscuffed, as if he hardly touched the ground. Just a few minutes of your time, he said. Then I promise to leave you in peace.

In peace! I almost cried out. You who tormented me all these years! My enemy, the one who occupied a corner of the woman I loved, a corner of her like a black hole that, through some sorcery I never understood, contained the deepest volumes of her.

I find it difficult to describe my work to others, he began. I'm not in the habit of talking about myself. My business has always been to listen. People come to me. At first they don't say much, but slowly it comes out. They look out the window, at their feet, at some point behind me in the room. They don't meet my eyes. Because if they were to remember that I was there, they might not be able to say the words. They begin to talk and I go with them back to their childhoods, before the War. Between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. The way he lined his soldiers up under the hem of the curtain. How she laid out the little toy teacups. I am there with him under the table, Weisz continued. I see his mother's legs move about the kitchen, and the crumbs the housekeeper's broom missed. Their childhoods, Mr. Bender, because it is only the ones who were children who come to me now. The others have died. When I first started my business, he said, it was mostly
lovers. Or husbands who had lost their wives, wives who had lost their husbands. Even parents. Though very few—most would have found my services unbearable. The ones who came hardly spoke at all, only enough to describe a little child's bed or the chest where he kept his toys. Like a doctor, I listen without saying a word. But there's one difference: when all of the talking is through, I produce a solution. It's true, I can't bring the dead back to life. But I can bring back the chair they once sat in, the bed where they slept.