Great House (13 page)

I asked Lotte how she knew, and she told me that she had been corresponding with Daniel from time to time, until one day she stopped hearing from him. At first she hadn't been concerned since it often took time for her letters to reach him, as they were always forwarded on by a friend; Daniel himself moved around quite a bit, and so he had an agreement with a friend who lived in Santiago. She wrote again, and still heard nothing. At that point she became worried, aware of how bad the situation was in Chile. So this time she wrote directly to the friend and asked him whether Daniel was all right. Almost a month passed before she finally got a letter back from the friend who gave her the news that Daniel had disappeared.

That night I tried to console Lotte. And yet even as I tried, I was aware that I didn't know how to, that what we were performing
together was a kind of empty pantomime, since I couldn't hope to know or understand what the boy had meant to her. It was not for me to know, and yet she wanted or perhaps even needed my comfort, and though I suppose a better man might have felt differently, I couldn't help feeling a grain of resentment. Just a drop, nothing more, but as I held her in the car outside our house I felt it. After all, wasn't it unfair of her to erect walls and then ask me to comfort her for what went on behind them? Unfair and even selfish? Of course I said nothing. What could I have said? Once upon a time I had promised to forgive her everything. The violent tragedy of the boy loomed over us in the darkness. I held her and comforted her.

A week or ten days after the magistrate brought Lotte home, while she was napping on the sofa, I went up to her study. It had been a year and a half since she had been there, and on her desk were her papers exactly as she had left them on the last day she had tried to battle her failing mind and lost for good. The sight of her handwriting on those curling pages pained me deeply. I sat down at her desk, the simple wooden table she had been using since she gave the other away to Varsky twenty-five years before, and spread my hands on the surface. Most of the writing on the top page was crossed out, leaving only lines or phrases here or there. What I could make out was largely senseless, and yet in the manic cross-outs and shaky letters Lotte's frustration was clear, the frustration of someone trying to transcribe a fading echo. My eye caught a line near the bottom:
The
astonished
man stood under the ceiling: Who can that be? Who in the world can that be?
Without warning, a sob came over me like a violent wave, a wave that had traveled across a flat and otherwise placid ocean with the express purpose of crashing down on my head. It pulled me under.

After that I got up and went to the cabinet where Lotte kept her papers and files. I didn't know what I was looking for, but imagined that sooner or later I would find whatever it was. There were old letters from her editor, birthday cards from me, drafts of stories she
never published, postcards from people I knew and others I didn't. I looked for an hour but didn't find anything that referred in any way to the child. Nor did I find any letters from Daniel Varsky. After that I went downstairs, where Lotte was just waking up. We went out together for a walk, as we had done every afternoon since I had retired. We got as far as Parliament Hill, where we watched the kites tossed by the wind and then turned home for dinner.

That night after Lotte had fallen asleep I slipped out of bed, made myself a cup of chamomile tea, paged through the newspaper in a leisurely manner, and then, as if the thought had only just occurred to me, made my way up to the attic. I opened other drawers and other files, and when I had finished with these more drawers and more files sprung up in the place of those I'd already gone through, some marked and others not. Pages seemed to drift out of their own accord and migrate across the floor, like a paper autumn staged by a bored child. There seemed no end to the amount of paper that Lotte had squirreled away in that deceptively small cabinet, and I began to lose hope of ever finding what I was looking for. And all the while, as I read snatches of letters, notes, and manuscripts, I couldn't escape the feeling that I was betraying Lotte in the way she would have found most unforgivable.

It was well past three in the morning when at last I found the plastic folder holding two documents. The first was a yellowed release from the East End Maternity Hospital, dated June 15, 1948. Under Patient's Name, someone, a nurse or secretary, had typed Lotte Berg. The address given wasn't of the room near Russell Square, but another street I'd never heard of, which I looked up later and found was in Stepney, not far from the hospital. Below that it said that Lotte had given birth to a boy on June 12th, at 10:25 in the morning, and that he had weighed seven pounds and two ounces. The second was a sealed envelope. The glue was ancient and dry, and gave way easily when I tried to open it with my finger. Inside was a small lock of dark, fine hair. I picked it up and held
it in the palm of my hand. For reasons I can't explain, what came to mind was a tuft of hair stuck to a low branch I had once found walking in the woods as a boy. I didn't know what kind of animal it was from, and in my mind I saw a majestic beast as large as a moose, but very graceful, making its way silently across the forest floor, a magical creature that never revealed itself to humans, but that had left a sign behind for me alone to find. I tried to shake that ancient image, which really I hadn't thought of for more than sixty years, and to concentrate instead on the fact that what I held in my palm was the hair of my wife's child. But no matter how I tried, all I could think about was that beautiful animal that strode with silent footfalls through the forest, an animal that didn't speak but knew all and looked with great sadness and pain on the ravages of human life, against its own kind and every other. At one point I even wondered whether fatigue was making me hallucinate, but then I thought to myself, No, this is what happens when you get old, time abandons you and all your memories become involuntary.

There was nothing else in the envelope. After a moment, I dropped the lock of hair back in, and sealed the envelope with tape. I tucked it back into the plastic folder, and laid it back at the bottom of the drawer I'd found it in. Then I cleared up all of the papers, put them back in order as best I could, closed the drawers of the bureau, and turned off the lights. By now it was near dawn. I crept down the stairs and went into the kitchen to put the water on to boil. In the pale light, I thought I saw something move under the azalea by the garden door. A hedgehog, I thought with delight, though I had no reason to believe as much. What has happened to the hedgehogs of England? Those friendly creatures I used to find everywhere as a boy, though even then they were often dead by the roadside. What has killed all the hedgehogs? I thought as the tea bag steeped in the steaming water, and in my mind I made a note to myself, a note I might remember or not, to tell Lotte that once upon a time you could find them everywhere in this country, those lovely nocturnal animals
whose large eyes belie their terrible eyesight. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing, as Archilochus said, but what was it? Time passed and then I heard her calling me from the bedroom. Yes, my love, I called, still looking out at the garden. Here I come.

I
MET AND FELL IN LOVE
with Yoav Weisz in the fall of 1998. Met at a party on Abingdon Road, farther down that road than I'd ever been. Fell in love, which was still something new for me. Ten years have passed, and yet that time stands out in my life as few others do. Like me, Yoav was at Oxford, but he lived in London, in the house in Belsize Park that he shared with his sister, Leah. She was studying piano at the Royal College of Music, and often I could hear her playing from somewhere behind the walls. Sometimes the notes would stop abruptly and a long silence would pass, punctuated by the scrape of the piano bench or footsteps across the floor. I thought she might appear to say hello, but then the music would start up again from inside the woodwork. I was at the house three or four times before I finally met Leah, and when I did I was surprised by how much she looked like her brother, only more elfin, and less reliable to still be there if you happened to look away.

The house, a large and dilapidated brick Victorian, was too big for the two of them, and filled with darkly beautiful furniture that their father, a famous antiques dealer, kept there. Every few months he came through London, and then everything would be magically rearranged according to his impeccable taste. Certain tables, chairs,
lamps, or settees were crated up and removed and others arrived to take their place. In this way the rooms were always changing, taking on the mysterious, dislocated moods of houses and apartments whose owners had died, gone bankrupt, or simply decided to bid farewell to the things they had lived among for years, leaving it to George Weisz to relieve them of their contents. Occasionally potential buyers came to the house to see one of the pieces in person, and then Yoav and Leah had to clear up whatever dirty socks, open books, stained magazines, and empty glasses had accumulated since the cleaner's last visit. But most of Weisz's clients had no need to see for themselves what they were buying, either because of the antiques dealer's world-class reputation, or because of their wealth, or because the pieces they were buying held a sentimental value that had nothing to do with their appearance. When he wasn't traveling to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or New York, their father lived on Ha'Oren Street in Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, in the stone house choked with flowering vines where Yoav and Leah had lived as children, whose shutters were always closed to keep out the punishing light.

The house where I lived with them from November of 1998 to May of 1999 was a twelve-minute walk from 20 Maresfield Gardens, the home of Dr. Sigmund Freud from September of 1938, after he fled the Gestapo, until the end of September 1939, when he died of three doses of morphine administered at his request. Often, heading out for a walk, I'd find myself there. When Freud fled Vienna almost all of his belongings were crated up and shipped to the new house in London, where his wife and daughter lovingly reassembled, down to the last possible detail, the study he'd been forced to abandon at 19 Berggasse. At the time I didn't know anything about Weisz's study in Jerusalem, and so the poetic symmetry of the house's nearness to Freud's was lost on me. Maybe all exiles try to re-create the place they've lost out of their fear of dying in a strange place. And yet, during the winter of 1999, when I would linger on the worn Oriental rug in the doctor's study, comforted by the hominess of the place and the
sight of his many figurines and statuettes, I was often struck by the irony that Freud, who shed more light than anyone onto the crippling burden of memory, had been unable to resist its mythic spell any better than the rest of us. After he died, Anna Freud preserved the room exactly as her father left it, down to the glasses he removed from the bridge of his nose and laid on the desk for the last time. From twelve to five, Wednesday through Sunday, you can visit the room stalled forever at the moment the man who gave us some of our most enduring ideas of what it is to be a person ceased to be. In the leaflet given out by an elderly docent who sits in a chair by the front door, the visitor is encouraged not only to consider her tour as one through an actual house, but also, given the various exhibits and collections on display in its rooms, as a tour through that metaphorical house, the mind.

I say
the house where I lived with them
rather than
our house
, because though I resided there for seven months it in no way ever belonged to me, nor could I ever have been considered anything more than a privileged guest. Aside from me, the only regular visitor was a Romanian cleaner named Bogna, who fought the ever-encroaching chaos that seemed to threaten the siblings like a squall on the horizon. After what happened she left, either because she couldn't battle the mess any longer or because no one paid her. Or maybe she sensed that things were headed in a bad direction and wanted to get out while she could. She had a limp, water on the knee, I think, a cup of the Danube that sloshed around as she thumped from room to room with her mop and feather duster, sighing as if freshly reminded of a disappointment. She kept the knee thickly bandaged under her housecoat, and bleached her hair with a home brew of dangerous chemicals. If you got close enough, she smelled of onions, ammonia, and hay. She was an industrious woman, but sometimes she would pause in her work to tell me about her daughter in Constanţa, a horticultural expert poorly paid by the state whose husband had left her for another woman. Also her mother, who owned a small piece of land that she refused to sell
and suffered from rheumatism. Bogna supported them both, sending money each month and clothes from Oxfam. Her own husband had died fifteen years earlier of a rare blood disease; now there was a cure for it. She called me Isabella, instead of my real name, Isabel, or Izzy, as most people call me, and I never bothered to correct her. I don't know why she talked to me. Perhaps she saw an ally in me, or at the very least someone who was an outsider, not being part of the family. Not that I saw myself that way, but back then Bogna knew more than I did.

Once Bogna was gone the house went to seed. It slumped and turned in on itself as if to protest the abandonment of its only advocate. Dirty plates piled up in every room, spilled food was left where it had scattered or congealed, the dust thickened, achieving a fine gray fur in the wilderness under the furniture. Black mold colonized the fridge, windows were left open to the rain, souring the curtains and leaving the sills to peel and rot. When a sparrow flew in and became trapped, batting its wings against the ceiling, I made a joke about the ghost of Bogna's feather duster. It was met with a sullen silence, and I understood that Bogna, who had looked after Yoav and Leah for three years, was not to be mentioned again. After Leah's trip to New York, and the beginning of the terrible silence between the siblings and their father, they stopped leaving the house altogether. Then I was the only one they had to bring them what they needed from the outside. Sometimes, scraping dried egg yolk from a pan so that I could cook some breakfast, I thought of Bogna and hoped that one day she would retire to a cottage by the Black Sea as she had longed to do. Two months later, at the end of May, my mother became sick, and I went back home to New York for almost a month. I called Yoav every few days and then, abruptly, the siblings stopped answering the phone. Some nights I would let it ring thirty or forty times while my stomach tied itself into knots. When I returned to London in early July the house was dark and the locks had been changed. At first I thought Yoav and Leah were playing a trick on me.
But days passed and I heard nothing from them. In the end I had no choice but to go home to New York, since by then I'd been thrown out of Oxford. Hurt and angry as I was, I still did everything I could to find them. But I turned up nothing. The only sign that they were still alive somewhere was the box of my belongings that arrived at my parents' apartment half a year later without a return address.

Eventually I came to accept the strange logic in their departure, a logic I'd been schooled in during my brief time with them. They were prisoners of their father's, locked within the walls of their own family, and in the end it wasn't possible for them to belong to anyone else. I'd expected nothing less than their unbroken silence all these years, and never thought I'd see them again—what they did, they did without compromise, free of the complications imposed on the rest of us by indecision, wavering, regret. But though I moved on, and fell in love more than once again, I never stopped thinking about Yoav, or wondering where he was and who he had become.

Then one day in the late summer of 2005, six years after they disappeared, I received a letter from Leah. In it she wrote that in June of 1999, a week after celebrating his seventieth birthday, their father had killed himself in the house on Ha'Oren Street. The maid had found him in his study the following day. On the table next to him was a sealed letter to his children, an empty bottle of sleeping pills, and a bottle of scotch, a drink Leah had never seen him touch in his life. There was also a small booklet from the Hemlock Society. Nothing had been left to chance. Across the room on another table was the small collection of watches that had belonged to Weisz's own father, which he had kept wound since his father's arrest in Budapest in 1944. While he was alive, the watches had accompanied Weisz wherever he traveled so that he would be able to wind them on schedule.
When the maid arrived,
Leah wrote,
all of the watches had stopped.

Her letter was written in small, neat script at odds with its loose and haphazard composition. There was little by way of a greeting, as if only months had passed since we'd seen each other rather than
six years. After the news about her father's suicide, the letter went on at some length about a painting that had hung on the wall of his study, the room in which he'd taken his life. It had been there for as long as she remembered, Leah wrote, and yet she knew there was a time when it had not been there, when her father was still searching for it, just as he had searched for and repossessed every other piece of furniture in that room, the same pieces that had sat in his own father's study in Budapest until the night in 1944 when the Gestapo had arrested his parents. Another person would have considered them lost forever. But that was what set her father apart, what led him into his field and distinguished him in it above all others: Unlike people, he used to say, the inanimate doesn't simply disappear. The Gestapo confiscated the most valuable items in the apartment, which were many, since Weisz's family on his mother's side had been wealthy. These were loaded—along with mountains of jewelry, diamonds, money, watches, paintings, rugs, silverware, china, furniture, linens, porcelains, and even cameras and stamp collections—onto the forty-two car “Gold Train” the SS used to evacuate Jewish possessions as the Soviet troops advanced toward Hungary. What was left behind the neighbors looted. In the years after the War, when Weisz returned to Budapest, the first thing he did was knock on these neighbors' doors and, as the color washed out of their faces, entered their apartments with a small gang of hired thugs who seized the stolen furniture, carrying it out on their backs. A woman who had grown up and moved away, taking his mother's vanity table with her, Weisz hunted down in the city's outskirts; entering her house in the middle of the night, he helped himself to some wine, left the dirty glass on the table, and carried out the vanity himself, all while the woman slept soundly in the other room. Later, in his business, Weisz hired others to do such work. But his own family's furniture he always appeared to claim himself. The Gold Train was seized by the Allied troops near Werfen, in May of 1945. Most of its load was sent to a military warehouse in Salzburg, and later
sold through army exchange stores or at auction in New York. These pieces took Weisz longer to find, often years or even decades. He made contact with everyone from the high-ranking U.S. military officers who had overseen the dispersion of goods, to the workers employed by the warehouse to move them. Who knows what he offered them in exchange for the information he wanted.

He made it his business to know personally every serious dealer of nineteenth-and twentieth-century furniture in Europe. He scoured the catalogues of every auction, befriended every furniture restorer, knew what came through London, Paris, Amsterdam. His father's Hoffmann bookcase showed up in a shop on Herrenstrasse in Vienna in the autumn of 1975. He flew direct from Israel and identified the bookcase by the long scrape along its right side. (Other bookcases had turned up without this mark and been rejected by Weisz.) His father's dictionary stand he tracked to a banking family in Antwerp, and from there to a store on Rue Jacob in Paris, where it lived for some time in the window under the watch of a large white Siamese cat. Leah remembered the arrival of certain of these long-lost pieces at the house on Ha'Oren Street, tense and somber events that had terrified her so much that as a small child she would sometimes hide in the kitchen when the crates were pried open, in case what popped out were the blackened faces of her dead grandparents.

About the painting, Leah wrote the following:
It was so dark you had to stand at a certain angle to make out that it was of a man on a horse. For years, I was under the impression that it was Alexander Zaid. My father never liked the painting. Sometimes I think that had he allowed himself to live as he wanted to, he would have chosen an empty room with only a bed and a chair. Anyone else would have let the painting go the way of the rest that was lost, but not my father. He was burdened with a sense of duty that commanded his whole life, and later ours. He spent years tracking down the painting and paid quite a sum to convince its owners to sell it back to him. In the letter he left, he wrote that the painting had hung in his own father's study. I nearly choked, or screamed at the absurdity.
It's possible I even laughed out loud. As if I hadn't known that everything in his study in Jerusalem was laid out exactly as my grandfather's study in Budapest had once been, down to the millimeter! Down to the velvet of the heavy drapes, the pencils in the ivory tray! For forty years my father labored to reassemble that lost room, just as it looked until that fateful day in 1944. As if by putting all the pieces back together he might collapse time and erase regret. The only thing missing in the study on Ha'Oren Street was my grandfather's desk—where it should have stood, there was a gaping hole. Without it, the study remained incomplete, a poor replica. And only I knew the secret of where it was. That I refused to hand it over to him was what tore our family apart in the year when you lived with us, a few months before he killed himself. And yet he refused to acknowledge it! I thought I'd killed him with what I'd done. But it was just the opposite. When I read his letter,
Leah wrote,
I understood that my father had won. That at last he'd found a way to make it impossible for us ever to escape him. After he died
,
we went home to the house in Jerusalem
.
And we stopped living. Or maybe you could say that we began a life of solitary confinement, only with two of us instead of one.