Great House by Nicole Krauss
When I got to London I took the Tube to West Finchley. It was a warm, sunny day and she was the only one indoors in the ticket hall. She fixed me in her gaze, but didn’t step forward. I felt she was looking inside me, under my skin. A strange calmness, that’s what struck me. For a moment I thought it was possible that she wasn’t the mother, but rather a surrogate sent in her place to carry out the bitter task. But when she moved the blanket away and I stepped forward and saw the baby’s face, I knew he could only be hers. When she spoke at last her accent was heavy. I didn’t know where she was from, Germany or Austria, maybe, but I understood that she was a refugee. The baby was asleep, his little knotted fists balled on either side of his face. We stood there in the empty ticket hall. He doesn’t like it when the hat falls too low on his forehead, she said. Those were her first words to me. A few moments later, very long moments, she said, If you put him on your shoulder after he eats, he cries less. And then, His hands get cold easily. As if she were giving me instructions on how to run a finicky car instead of giving away her own baby. And yet later, once I had him a few weeks, I began to see it differently. I understood that those few things were the precious discoveries of someone who had studied and tried to understand the mystery of her child.
We sat side by side on the hard bench, Mrs. Fiske said. She patted the bundle in her arms one more time then handed it to me. I felt the warmth of his body through the blanket. He squirmed a little, but continued to sleep. I thought she would say something else, but she didn’t. There was a bag on the floor and she nudged it toward me with her foot. Then she looked out of the window and something she noticed on the platform seemed to jar her because she stood abruptly. I continued to sit because my legs were weak and I worried that I might drop the baby. Just like that, she began to walk away. Only when she reached the door did she stop and look back. I pulled the baby to my chest and held him tightly. I felt him snuffling there, and then I began to rock him a little and he relaxed and even cooed a little. You see! I wanted to shout to her. But when I looked up she was gone.
I sat without moving. I rocked the baby and sang to him quietly. I bent my head over his to block the light from his eyes, and when I pressed my lips to his head a cloud of warmth seemed to come off him, and I smelled the sweetness of his skin and also a fetid odor from behind his ears. He jerked his face toward me and opened his mouth. His eyes were wide with shock and his arms sprang up, as if he were trying to catch himself from falling. He began to cry. A sudden heat rose to my face and I began to sweat. I jiggled him, but he began to cry louder. I looked up, and there, peering through the window, was a young man in a strange, almost pitiful coat with a matted fur collar. He had very black shining eyes. A shiver went up my spine as he looked at us, the baby and me. He looked at us with the hunger of a wolf, and I knew he could only be the baby’s father. The moment seemed elongated, pulled thin, while some starved longing or awful regret churned inside him. Then a train pulled into the station and he boarded it alone and that was the last I saw of him. When you called last night, Mr. Bender, I was sure that you were he. Only when you rang the bell did I realize that you couldn’t be.
AT THAT POINT I stood and asked Mrs. Fiske the way to the lavatory. The black spaniel dropped to the floor and bounced in a sickening way. A dizzy spell had come over me and I felt faint. I closed the door and sank down on the toilet seat. There was a wooden rack set up in the bath where two or three pairs of tights were drying, the shriveled brown feet still dripping, and above the tub was a window fogged from the humidity. I imagined escaping through it and running down the street. I put my head between my knees to stop the dizziness. For forty-eight years I had shared my life with a woman who was capable of coolly giving her child away to a stranger. A woman who had put an advertisement in the paper for her own baby—her own baby—as one advertises an item of furniture for sale. I waited for this new knowledge to throw its stark light, waited to understand, for the door to swing open, waited to come into a lifetime of hoarded truth. But no revelation came.
Are you all right? Mrs. Fiske asked, her voice coming from far away. I don’t know how I responded, only that some minutes later she led me up the stairs to a small room with a twin bed where I proceeded to lie down without protest. She brought me a glass of water, and when she leaned over to put it down on the night table the view of her throat reminded me of my own mother. May I ask a question? I said. She said nothing. How did he die? She sighed and squeezed her hands together. It was a terrible accident, she said. Then she left me alone, closing the door softly behind her, and only as I listened to her footsteps recede down the stairs, fainter and fainter, and the room began slowly, almost leisurely, to spin, did it occur to me that I was lying in the room that had belonged to him, to Lotte’s child.
I closed my eyes. As soon as this passes, I thought, I’ll thank Mrs. Fiske, say goodbye, and return home on the next train to London. But even as I thought it I didn’t really believe it. Once more I had the feeling that it would be a long time before I would see the house in Highgate, if I saw it again at all. It was getting cold, the tomcat would have to find his dinner elsewhere. The swimming holes would freeze over. What was it that slept there on the soft, slimy bottom that drew Lotte back down day after day? Every morning she would go, as Persephone went down, to touch again that dark thing, vanishing into the black depths. In front of my eyes! And I could never follow. Can you understand what it was like? As if a small rip had been made in the day and she alone slipped through it. A splash, and then a stillness that seemed to last forever. A kind of panic crept over me. And just when I was convinced that she had hit her head on a rock or broken her neck, the surface would break and she would appear again, blinking water out of her eyes, her lips blue. Something had been renewed. On the walk home we spoke little. There was only the sound of the leaves and twigs crunching under our feet like broken glass. I haven’t gone back since she died.
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
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.
SOMEHOW 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.
ONE 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 la
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.