Great House (27 page)

The smoke singed my throat and chest, the wind got colder. I began to shiver and he lent me his jacket that smelled of old wood and sweat. He asked me more questions about my work, and though
from someone else they would have made me groan (You ever write a murder mystery? No? So, what? You write things that happen to you? Your life? Maybe someone tells you what to write? They hire you? What do you call it, the publisher?), coming from him in the gathering dusk I didn't mind. When he, too, began to shiver and the silence between us grew thick it was time to go, and I found myself searching for another excuse to see him again. He handed me the helmet, though this time he didn't offer to help. Listen, I said, rummaging in my bag, there's somewhere I have to go tomorrow. I pulled out the wrinkled note that had migrated from my suitcase to my bedside table, from between the pages of my books to the bottom of my bag, but had not yet been lost. This is the address, I said. Could you give me a ride? I might need a translator, I don't know if they speak English. He seemed surprised but pleased, and took the piece of paper from me. Ha'Oren Street? In Ein Kerem? Our eyes met. I told him there was a desk there that I wanted to see. You need a desk to write at? he asked, interested now, even excited. Something like that, I said. You need one or you don't? he demanded. Yes, I need a desk, I said. And they have one here, he jabbed the note with his finger, at Ha'Oren Street. I nodded. He paused to think, running his hand through his hair again while I waited. He folded the note and put it in his back pocket. I'll pick you up at five, he said. OK?

That night I dreamed about him. Or rather sometimes it was him and sometimes it was Daniel Varsky, and sometimes through the generosity of dreams it was both of them at once, and we were walking through Jerusalem together, I knew it wasn't Jerusalem at all, but somehow I believed that it was Jerusalem, a Jerusalem that kept opening up into smoking gray fields which we had to cross to get back to the city, the way one tries to get back to a melody played long ago. For some reason Adam or Daniel was carrying a small case in his hand, a little case that contained some sort of instrument he planned to play for me if and when we found the place he was searching for, a kind of horn, perhaps, though it might also have been a
weapon. At last the dream found its way into a room. But by then the case was gone, and while I watched Adam or Daniel slowly removed his clothes and folded them on the bed with the obsessive neatness of a man who has lived for many years under a severe authority, in a prison, perhaps, where he was schooled in a precise way to fold his clothes. The sight of his nakedness was tormenting, sad, and sweet, and I woke filled with tenderness and longing.

At four forty-five the following afternoon I was waiting in the lobby, having looked at myself too many times in the mirror, chosen a strand of red beads and dangling silver earrings. He was twenty-minutes late and I began to pace, sick at the thought of what awaited me in my room if he changed his mind and didn't come, the interminable night ahead, tearing myself to pieces. But at last I heard the bike in the distance and he appeared around the bend, and the ill feeling was drowned in a flat lake of shining pleasure, nothing could dim it, not even the spare helmet he held out this time, a sparkling red one that no one needed to tell me usually fit onto the heads of girls his own age who listened to the same bands and spoke his language, girls who could undress in daylight, with feet smooth as a baby's.

We made our way through the streets, coasting downhill, and I was happy, Your Honor, happy as I had not been for months or even years. When he leaned into a turn I felt his waist shift beneath my hands and that was enough, more than enough for someone who had so little left, and I did not think much about what I would say when we arrived at the house of Leah Weisz, the girl who had come five weeks ago to take away the desk. When we arrived in the sleepy village of Ein Kerem, Adam stopped to ask for directions. We sat down in a café and he ordered for us in blunt, quick Hebrew, joking with the young waitress, cracking his knuckles, tossing his phone onto the table. A mangy dog limped across the street, but even it couldn't darken my mood or detract from the beauty of the place. Adam stirred a sugar into his coffee and sang along with the pop song drifting out of the café speakers. The light hit his face and I saw how
young he was. Behind the cocky, off-tune singing, I caught the nervous shadow of uncertainty and understood that he didn't know what to say to me. Tell me about yourself, I said. He straightened up, lit a cigarette, grinned and licked his lips. So you're going to write about me after all? That depends, I said. On what? What I find out about you. He tipped back his head and exhaled a column of smoke. Go ahead, he said. You can use me in your book. I'm free. What do you want to know?

What did I want to know? What it looked like, the place he went home to at night. What hung on the walls and whether he had a stove that had to be lit with a match, whether the floors were tile or linoleum and whether he wore shoes when he walked across them, and the expression he wore when he looked in the mirror to shave. What his window looked out on, and what did his bed look like, yes, Your Honor, already I was imagining his bed, with its rumpled blankets and cheap pillows, his bed which, on the nights he spent alone, he sometimes slept across diagonally. But I didn't ask about any of it. I could wait, I could bide my time. Because he was singing, you see, and the evening would be coming on soon, and now I saw that something was different, yes, he had washed his hair.

He finished the army two years ago, he said. First he got a job with a security agency, but the boss accused him of certain things (he didn't say what) so he quit, and then he got a job painting houses with a friend of his who started a business, but the fumes got to him so he had to stop. Now he was working in a mattress store, but what he really wanted was to become an apprentice to a carpenter because he had always been good with his hands and liked to build things. And your family? I asked. He stubbed out his cigarette, glanced around distractedly, checked his phone. He didn't have any, he said. His parents died when he was sixteen. He did not say where or how. He had an older brother he had not spoken to for many years. Sometimes he thought of trying to look him up, but he never did. What about Rafi? I asked. I told you, he said, he's an asshole. The only reason I bother
with him is because of Dina. If you met her you'd never be able to figure out how someone so beautiful came from that baboon. Tell me about her, I said, but he said nothing and turned away to hide the contortion that seized his face, a split second only in which all of his features collapsed and another face came through, a face he quickly wiped away with his sleeve. He stood up and threw some coins on the table, called goodbye to the waitress who smiled at him. Please, I said, reaching for my wallet, let me. But he clucked his tongue, swung his helmet up and pulled it down over his head, and at that moment, for some reason, I thought of his dead mother, of how she must have bathed him as a child, how she must have lifted him out of his crib at the bottom of the night and felt his wet lips on her face, unwrapped his little fingers from her long hair, sung to him, imagined his future, and then the needle of my mind slipped and it was Daniel Varsky's mother I was imagining, and as if in a mirror image it was the son who was dead and the mother who went on living. For the first time in the twenty-seven years I had been writing at his desk the magnitude of his mother's loss dawned on me, a window swung open and I saw out to the unutterable nightmare of her grief. I stood next to the motorcycle. The wind was still. There was the smell of jasmine. What is it, I thought, to go on living after your child is dead? I climbed onto the bike and gently clasped his waist in my hands, and each of my hands were those mothers' hands, the one who couldn't touch her child because she was dead, and the one who couldn't touch her child because she went on living, and then we arrived at Ha'Oren Street.

We did not immediately find the house because the number was hidden behind a riot of vines that grew up along the wall that surrounded it. There was an iron gate locked by a chain, but through it, half obscured by the trees, we could see a large stone house with green shutters, almost all of which were closed. To imagine the girl, Leah, living there was to give her an entirely new dimension, a profundity I hadn't sensed. Peering into the dusty garden, I was myself filled with a sadness that came from the uncanny feeling of being in
a place that had been touched, however obliquely, by Daniel Varsky: inside that shuttered house lived a woman, or so I believed, who had once known and most likely loved him. What had Leah's mother thought about her daughter's search, and how had she felt when the desk of the man, the father of her child, who had been so brutally ripped from the world, had arrived home to her like a giant wooden corpse? As if that weren't enough, now I was here to deliver his ghost. I considered making up an excuse, telling Adam I'd made a mistake, this wasn't the place, but before I could he found the bell under the leaves and rang it. A tinny electric rasp sounded. Somewhere a dog barked. When there was no answer he pressed it again. You have a telephone number maybe? he asked, but I did not so he held it down for a third time and the lack of even the faintest stirring, the paralysis of the stones and the shutters and even the leaves came back as sheer stubbornness. They know you're coming? Yes, I lied, and Adam shook the bars of the gate to see if the chain would give. I guess I'll have to come back, I began to say, but at that moment an old man appeared, or rather lengthened like a shadow from behind the wall, holding an elegant walking stick. Ken? Ma atem rotsim? Adam answered him, gesturing to me. I asked if he spoke English. Yes, he said, gripping the silver handle of his cane which I saw now was the shape of a ram's head. Does Leah Weisz live here? Weisz? he said, Yes, I said, Leah Weisz, she came to see me last month in New York to pick up a desk. A desk? the old man echoed, uncomprehending, and now Adam fidgeted impatiently and said some more words to the man in Hebrew. Lo, the old man said, shaking his head, lo, ani lo yodea klum al shum shulchan, He doesn't know anything about a desk, Adam said, and the old man balanced on his cane and made no movement to unlock the gate. Maybe they gave you the wrong address, Adam said. He pulled Leah's crumpled note out of his jeans and offered it through the bars. Unhurriedly the old man reached into his breast pocket, unfolded a pair of glasses and slipped them onto his face. It seemed to take him a long time to understand what was written there. When he finished
reading, he turned it over to look at the other side. Finding it blank, he turned it back again. Ze ze o lo? Adam demanded. The old man neatly folded the note and passed it back through the bars. This is 19 Ha'Oren Street, but there is no one by that name here, he said, and I was surprised by his accent, which was fluent and refined.

Now it occurred to me that there was something cunning I had missed in Leah Weisz. That she might have deliberately given me the wrong address in case I changed my mind and tried to get back the desk. But then why give any address at all? I hadn't asked, and the fact that she had left one had almost struck me, I realized now, as a kind of invitation. The old man stood in meticulously ironed shirtsleeves while behind him the house held its breath beneath the leaves. What was it like inside, I wondered. What did the kettle look like, was it old and dented, the cup for the tea, were there books, what hung there in the gloomy hallway, something biblical, a little etching of the binding of Isaac perhaps? The old man studied me with sharp blue eyes, the eyes of a tamed eagle, and I sensed that he, too, was curious about me, as if there were a question he wished to ask. Even Adam seemed to notice it, and looked from the old man to me, then back to the old man, and the three of us hung in the balance of the silence that surrounded the house until at last Adam shrugged, ripped off another sliver of nail with his teeth, spat it out, and turned back to the bike. Good luck, the old man said, his hand tightening around the curled silver horns of the ram, I hope you find what you're looking for. I don't know what possessed me, Your Honor, I blurted out, I didn't want it back, the desk, I only wanted—but I stopped because I couldn't say what it was that I had wanted, and a look of pain flickered across the old man's face. Adam started up the engine behind me. Let's go, he said. I didn't want to leave yet, but there seemed to be no choice. I got onto the motorcycle. The old man lifted his stick in farewell and we drove away.

Adam was hungry. I didn't care where we went, so long as he didn't bring me back to the guesthouse. I tried to understand what
had happened. Who was Leah Weisz? Why had I so blithely accepted everything she'd told me without the least bit of proof? So willing had I been to give up that desk around which I had bent my life that one might have thought I had been eager, keen to be relieved of it at last. It's true that I'd always thought of myself as its guardian, sooner or later, I told myself, someone would come for it, but the truth was that it was merely a convenient story I told myself, a story like so many others that excused me from the responsibility of my decisions, that lent them an air of the inevitable, and beneath it all I had been convinced that I would die at that desk, my inheritance and my marriage bed, so why not also my bier?

Adam took me to a restaurant on Salomon Mall where he was friends with some of the waiters. They clapped him on the back and looked at me appraisingly. He grinned and what he said made them laugh loudly. We sat down by the window. Outside, on a balcony that hung above the narrow street, a man sat on an old mattress hugging his young son and talking to him. I asked Adam what he had said to his friends. With lips half curled in a smile he looked around at the other diners to gauge their reaction, as if he had walked in with a celebrity, as absurd as that may seem. With a pang I realized that I was deceiving him, but it was too late. What could I say: No one reads my books, perhaps soon they will stop publishing me? I told them you're writing about me, he said and flashed another grin. Then he snapped his fingers and his friends laughed and brought us plates stuffed with food, then more plates after that. They looked me over and I saw the amusement in their eyes, as if they sensed my desperation and knew something about their friend that I did not. From the back of the restaurant they watched us, enjoying their friend's luck at having netted this older woman, a rich and famous American, or so they believed, until Adam snapped again and they came forward again with a bottle of wine. He ate ravenously, as if he had not eaten for many days, and it was a pleasure to watch him, Your Honor, to sit back with my glass of wine and enjoy his beauty and his hunger.
When the meal was finished (he devoured almost all of it), his friends put the check in front of me, and I saw that they had chosen for us the most expensive bottle of wine. While I fumbled with my money, trying to count out the right bills, Adam rose and joined them, joking and chewing on a toothpick. When I stood I felt the wine in my head. I followed him out of the restaurant, and I knew he could feel my eyes on him, knew that he knew I wanted him, though I would like to say, Your Honor, in my defense, that it was not only lust I felt for him, it was also a kind of tenderness, as if I might be able to lessen the pain I had seen in the face he had wiped away with his sleeve. He winked at me when he tossed me the helmet, but it was the awkward and unsure young man behind the posturing that made me want to ask him home with me. We arrived at the entrance of the guesthouse and I groped for the right words, but before I could say them he announced that a friend of one of the waiters had a desk, and if I wanted he could bring me to see it tomorrow. Then he kissed me chastely on the cheek and drove away without saying what time he would come for me.