Great House (17 page)

Just as the children of a sea captain instinctively understand the sea, Yoav and Leah had a natural sense for furniture, for its origins, age, and worth, and a sensitivity to its peculiar beauty. Not that they made much use of this gift, or were so persuaded to treat such furniture with special care. They simply took note of it, as one might remark on a nice view, and carried on doing whatever they had been doing, exactly as they pleased. I began to learn from their casual
observations. Wanting to be more like them, I made a point of asking Yoav questions about the various pieces that came in and out of the house. He answered in a disinterested way, without looking up from whatever it was he was doing. Once I asked him if he ever felt there was anything sad about furniture left behind after the lives it serviced had scattered or disintegrated, all of those objects that had no power of memory themselves, just standing and gathering dust. But he only shrugged and chose not to answer. No matter how much I came to know, I could never master the grace and ease with which Yoav and Leah moved among all of those antiques, nor their strange combination of sensitivity and indifference.

Growing up in New York, I had never gone without, but my family wasn't rich either. As I child I'd always had the feeling that what we did have couldn't be relied on and might crumble from under us at any moment, as if we lived in an adobe house built in the wrong climate. I sometimes overheard my parents discussing whether or not they should sell two Moses Soyer paintings that hung in the hallway. They were moody, foreboding paintings that spooked me in the dark, but the idea of my parents being forced to part with them for money worried me. Had I known that the likes of George Weisz existed he would have haunted my sleep, as would the idea of the family furniture being carted off one piece at a time. In reality, we lived in an apartment in a white brick building on York Avenue that my grandparents had helped my parents to buy, but we always shopped for clothes at discount stores, and I was often scolded for forgetting to turn off the lights because of the price of electricity. Once I overheard my father yelling at my mother that every time she flushed the toilet it was a dollar down the drain. After that, I acquired the habit of letting waste collect in the bowl over the course of the day until it reached a critical mass. When my mother's threats prevented this, I trained myself to hold it for as long as possible. If I had an accident, I bore my humiliation and my mother's anger with thoughts of the money I'd saved my parents. All the same, I could never quite work out the incongruity between the
wide, murky East River that ran endlessly outside our window and the preciousness of the water in the toilet.

What furniture we did have was generally of high quality, including some antiques bestowed on us by my grandfather. The surfaces of these were fitted with pieces of glass that rested on clear rubber circles placed at each corner. Even so, I was not to rest my glass on them or play too close. These valuable things produced in us a feeling of intimidation. We knew that no matter how far we got in life, we would never really be meant for such fineness, that the few expensive antiques we did have had fallen to us from a higher life and now condescended to live among us. We were always afraid that we would inflict some damage on them, and so I was raised to move carefully around the furniture, not so much to live with it as to live alongside it, at a respectful distance. When I first began to spend time in Belsize Park it made me queasy to see how carelessly Yoav and Leah treated the furniture that passed through their house, which constituted their father's, and their own, livelihood. They rested their bare feet and glasses of wine on Biedermeier coffee tables, left fingerprints on the vitrines, napped on the settees, ate off the Art Deco commodes, and occasionally even walked atop the long dining tables when it was the most convenient way of getting from one place to another in a room crowded with furniture. The first time Yoav undressed me and bent me over I became stiff and awkward, not because of the position, which I liked perfectly well, but because I was leaning over a writing desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl. But no matter how careless they were, they seemed never to leave behind a mark or trace. At first I took this to be the grace of those brought up to consider such furniture their natural habitat, but once I knew Yoav and Leah better I began to think of their talent, if one can call it that, as something borrowed from ghosts.

 

T
HE HOUSE
gave away its secrets more easily, and I got to know it well. It was four floors altogether. Leah lived at the top. She slept
in the back room, in a canopy bed, and in the front one she kept an upright Steinway under a stained-glass skylight; at certain hours of the afternoon the ivory keys became streaked with color. Before I met Leah, I'd been intimidated by the idea of the place she held in Yoav's life. He referred to her often in conversation, sometimes as
my sister
and sometimes just as
she
, and frequently he spoke of the two of them collectively. When her playing stopped, I was sure that she was watching from somewhere in the house, and the hair on my arms would rise. But when Leah finally appeared for the first time I was surprised at how slight and unassuming she was, as if all her being were reserved for the life inside. She seemed held together by some great pressure exerted from within. She kept a second piano, a baby grand, in a study on the ground floor. Sheet music was stacked everywhere. These pages migrated through the house, turning up in the kitchen and bathrooms. She spent a week or two memorizing a piece, breaking it down into smaller and smaller parts, playing these mechanically with an absent look on her face. She wore an old cotton kimono and rarely got dressed. A kind of grubbiness overtook her, the piano keys became smudged and even her fingernails collected dirt. Then the day would arrive when she'd swallowed the piece whole, consumed it and made it part of herself, and she would run around clearing everything up, wash her hair, and then sit down to play the piece from memory. She would play it a hundred different ways, very fast, or very slow, and with each note she would be one step closer to a kind of uncertain clarity. Everything about her was delicate and compact, full of grace, and yet when she laid her hands on the keys something enormous seethed in her. Years later, after I got Leah's letter and went to Yoav in the house on Ha'Oren Street, in an enormous, vaulted room, hanging from the ceiling in place of a chandelier, I found her grand piano rigged up via ropes and pulleys. There was a terrible violence in it. It seemed to sway infinitesimally, though there was no breeze on that stifling day. Leah would have needed a ladder to play it. How she had hauled the piano
up there was a mystery. Later, Yoav claimed he hadn't helped her; one day he had gone out and when he came back it was there. When I asked why she would have done such a thing, he replied obscurely about the pureness of a note sounded in the air that rings, for a split second, without influence. But as far as I knew, Leah had stopped playing altogether after their father killed himself. Even when I was at the other end of the house I was aware of the piano hanging eerily, at times forlorn and others menacing, and I had the feeling that when it finally fell—it was just a matter of time until the ropes gave way—it would pull the whole house down with it.

Yoav's bedroom in the Belsize Park house was directly below Leah's. In general, what minimal furniture there was on both their floors was permanent, either because it was too much of an effort for things to be constantly carried up and down, or because it was a relief for them to dwell in some place that was, at least in this one regard, outside their father's influence. There was a large mattress on the floor of Yoav's room, a wall of books, and little else.

The kitchen was down a flight of stairs on the garden level. From there you could look out on the back garden. A door at the end of a short corridor took one out into it. To open it required destroying the complicated work of the spiders that lived there; as soon as you closed it again they were back at it. Bogna, who belonged to the Orthodox Church, cared too much for the sanctity of life to kill them. The garden was wild and overgrown, full of brambles. When I saw it for the first time it was November and the whole of it was dying back. At some point the garden must have been planted and cared for, but left to its own devices, the steady tenacity and stubbornness of vegetable life unchecked, only the coarser plants had survived, grown thick and tangled. The walkway had collapsed. The rhododendrons and laurel grew up in a great, dark wall against the sunlight. There was a card table on the grass. Candle wax had collected in places on the surface, and an ashtray from the Excelsior in Rome was filled with dirty water. Later, once the weather got warm, we started to use it
again, sitting out with a bottle of wine. The state of the garden suited Yoav and Leah. They had a taste and respect for the private lives of things let be; they held these things in distant, high regard. Scattered throughout the house were objects abandoned, dropped, or left where they had last been put down. Sometimes these tableaux were left to sit for weeks before Bogna finally cleared them away, returning things to their proper place if they had one or throwing them out in the trash. She seemed to understand Yoav and Leah's taste and habits even when they stood in opposition to her own. She pretended at exasperation, making much of her heavy sighing and adding extra weight to the bad leg, yet it was obvious she felt sorry for them. But in the end Bogna had her job to do. It was Weisz who paid her, and to whom she had to answer if the place wasn't clean when at last he appeared.

 

B
EFORE THEIR
father arrived, I always took the bus back to Oxford. Though his work demanded a certain charm and sociability, he was a withdrawn and private person, surrounded by a kind of moat. The sort of person who creates the illusion of intimacy by drawing you out, asking you about yourself and remembering the names of your children, if you have any, or the kind of drink you like, but who, you realize later, if you realized it at all, managed not to share much about himself. When it came to his family, he didn't like the presence of outsiders. I don't remember exactly how this was explained to me—it was never said outright—but I knew it was verboten to be there when their father was. After his visits, Yoav often seemed remote and listless, and Leah disappeared for long, punishing hours of practice. As time passed and my relationship with Yoav grew more serious, my place in the Belsize Park house more entrenched, I began to become hurt and annoyed at having to remove myself like some inappropriate or unsightly guest whenever their father arrived. The feeling was made worse by the fact the Yoav refused to explain why, or to
talk about it much at all. He only insinuated that there were certain unspoken rules and expectations that simply couldn't be broken. All that remained explicit was that I couldn't be present when his father was. It aggravated an insecurity in me that always lurked below our relationship: the sense that some large share of Yoav would always be held back from me, some life he lived never mine to live beside him.

 

B
Y
J
ANUARY
, I was spending almost every day at the British Library. It was dark when I set out up Haverstock Hill for the Tube, and dark when I came out of the library onto Euston Road in the afternoon. I still hadn't come up with a new topic for a dissertation. I spent the days reading aimlessly, not absorbing much, still nervous about a relapse of panic. I called A. L. Plummer, for whom I seemed to hold less and less interest, and reported on the direction I thought I was taking. Carry on then, he said, and an image came to me of him perched on one of his stacks of books, bald head tucked into his robe like a sleeping vulture's. Some days I set out intending to go to the library, but when I reached the Tube station something in me couldn't steel myself for the long descent in the elevator with the other rush-hour travelers to the cavernous depths of the Northern Line, and so I would continue on my way, buying breakfast at one of the small shops on the High Street, and passing time browsing in Waterstone's or the narrow aisles of the secondhand bookshop on Flask Walk until quarter after eleven, when I would begin to make my way down Fitzjohns Avenue. The Freud Museum opened at noon. I was often the only person there, and the docents and the woman who ran the museum shop always seemed glad to see me, and would withdraw from whatever room I was in so that I would be left alone to linger in peace.

Afternoons in Belsize Park, Yoav and I, and often Leah, would go to the movies, sometimes seeing two back-to-back, or sitting for the same movie twice. Or we would walk on the Heath. Every once in a while we would go on some expedition—to the National
Gallery, or Richmond Park, or to see a play at the Almeida. But we spent most of our time in the house, which drew us back with a force I can't quite explain except to say that it was our world, and we were happy there. At night we either watched rented movies, or read while Leah practiced, and often, once it got late enough, we would open a bottle of wine and Yoav would read aloud to me from Bialik, Amichai, Kaniuk, Alterman. I loved listening to him read in Hebrew, to hear him exist so vividly in his native language. And maybe because in those moments, I was relieved of the effort of struggling to understand him.

I, at least, was happy there. One morning as I was getting dressed in the dark, Yoav reached out from under the covers and pulled me back. You, he said. I lay down next to him and stroked his face. Let's run away, he said. To where? I asked. I don't know. Istanbul? Caracas? And what will we do? Yoav closed his eyes and thought. We'll have a juice stand. A what? Juice, he said. We'll sell fresh juice. Whatever people want. Papaya, mango, coconut. I knew he was joking, but there was a pleading look in his eyes. They have coconuts in Istanbul? I asked. We'll import them, he said. It'll be a huge craze. People will line up down the street. The whole city will go crazy for our coconut juice, I said. Yes, he said, and in the afternoon, after we've sold all the coconut juice we feel like selling, we'll go back to our place, all sticky and happy, and we'll make love for hours, and then we'll get all dressed up, you in a white dress and me in a white suit, and we'll go out, all glowing, and ride all night up and down the Bosporus in a glass-bottom boat. What can you see at the bottom of the Bosporus? I asked. Suicides, poets, houses swept away by storms, he said. I don't want to see any suicides, I said. All right, so then come with me to Brussels. Why Brussels? Orders from above, he said. What? I asked. El Jefe, he said. Your father? That's the one. Seriously? I asked. Have you ever known me not to be serious? he said, pulling down my underwear and disappearing below the covers.