Great House (9 page)

Your mother couldn't drop the matter so easily. Even a whiff of the suggestion that she was somehow doing something wrong as a mother wracked her with guilt. She beat herself up over it and tried to figure out where she had gone wrong. She put herself under the psychologist's tutelage, and listened once a week while he explained to her what he'd gleaned from his sessions with you that continued at the school, and instructed her on how to assuage some of your
“difficulties.” He developed a strategy, and laid down a set of rules that your mother clung to about how we should and shouldn't behave with you. He even gave her his number at home, and when she was unsure of how to apply one of his rules, or what the proper reaction was to some fit of yours, she would dial him up, no matter the hour of the morning or night, and explain the problem in a low, serious tone, then listen to his response in silence, nodding grievously. Mr. Shatzner said we shouldn't do that, she would say to me as soon as you left the room, Mr. Shatzner said we should let him do this, Mr. Shatzner said we should stand on our heads, bite our tongues, turn in circles, Mr. Shatzner, Mr. Shatzner, Mr. Shatzner, until finally I blew up at her and said I never wanted to hear that name in our house again, that I knew how to raise my own child, what did he think it was, a game of Scrabble or Monopoly, there are no rules, was she so blind that she couldn't see that all that mental midget had done was turn her into a nervous wreck, full of doubt about something that had come naturally to her from the beginning, something any idiot could see, which was that she was a wonderful mother, full of love and patience? He's five years old, for God's sake, I shouted, if you treat him like a special case then that's what he'll always be. Have you seen any improvement at all since you started with this clown? No. Who is he to suddenly be offering himself as a source of wisdom on human behavior? You think that little prick knows better than us, than you and me? A silence passed between us. But he is a special case, she said quietly. He has always been.

Eventually she caved in. The sessions were stopped, and you wriggled out from under Shatzner's watch like a little animal set free who goes immediately to hide in the underbrush. But the whole experience set a certain tone. Your mother continued to hover and worry, to rigorously put every one of your moods, episodes, and tantrums through a little gauntlet of analysis, searching for a clue to your hurt and our role in it. This self-lacerating attitude drove me crazy, almost as much as your crying and carrying on. One night,
in the middle of you throwing a fit about the bathwater not reaching exactly the level you liked, I grabbed you from under your arms and held you naked and dripping above the floor. When I was your age, I shouted, shaking you so hard your head wobbled sickeningly on your neck, there was nothing to eat, and no money for toys, the house was always cold, but we went outside and played and made games out of nothing and lived because we had our lives, while the others were being murdered in the pogroms we could go out and feel the sun and run around and kick a ball! And look at you! You have everything in the world, and all you do is shriek your head off and make everyone's life miserable! Enough already! Do you hear me? I've had enough! You looked at me, your eyes enormous, and reflected in your pupils, small and far away, I saw the image of myself.

Seventy years ago I was a child, too. Seventy years?
Seventy?
How? Pass over it.

 

N
OW YOU
stood holding your suitcase. There was nothing to say. You seemed no longer to need my help. Once you had perhaps, but no longer. I have a terrible headache, you said at last. The light is hurting my eyes. If you don't mind, I think I'll go lie down. We can talk later.

And just like that you walked back into the house that you had left so long ago. I heard your footsteps slowly ascend the stairs.

Were they the lepers, Dov, those other kids? Is that why you held yourself apart? Or was it you? And the two of us, closed up together in this house—are we the saved or the condemned?

A long silence while you must have stood at the threshold of your old room. Then the creak of the floorboards, and the sound of your door closing again after twenty-five years.

T
HAT EVENING WE WERE READING TOGETHER
, as we always did. It was one of those winter nights in England when the darkness that falls at three makes nine feel like midnight, reminding one of how far north one has staked one's life. The doorbell rang. We looked up at each other. It was rare for anyone to visit us unannounced. Lotte put her book down in her lap. I went to the door. A young man was standing there holding a briefcase. It's possible that the moment before I opened the door he had extinguished his cigarette, because I thought I saw a trail of smoke slip out of the corner of his mouth. Then again, it could have been just his breath in the cold. For a minute I thought it was one of my students—they all shared a certain knowing look, as if they were trying to smuggle something in or out of an unnamed country. There was a car waiting by the curb, the motor still running, and he glanced back at it. Someone—man or woman, I couldn't say—was hunched over the steering wheel.

Is Lotte Berg home? he asked. He had a strong accent, but I couldn't place it immediately. May I ask who would like to see her? The young man thought, just for a moment really, but long enough for me to notice a slight twitch at the corners of his mouth. My name
is Daniel, he said. I assumed it was one of her readers. She wasn't widely known; to say she was known at all in those days would be generous. Of course it always made her happy to receive a letter from someone who admired her work, but a letter was one thing, and a stranger at the door at that hour was another. It's a bit late—perhaps if you called or wrote first, I said, immediately regretting the lack of kindness I thought this Daniel must have heard in my words. But then he shifted something he'd been holding inside his cheek from one side to the other and swallowed. I noticed then that he had quite a large Adam's apple in his throat. It crossed my mind that he wasn't one of Lotte's readers at all. I glanced down at the darkness gathered in the folds of the leather jacket where it fell around his hips. I don't know what I thought I might see concealed. But of course there was nothing. He continued standing there as if he hadn't heard me. It's late, I said, and Ms. Berg—I don't know why I called her that, it was absolutely ridiculous, as if I were the butler, but that's what happened to come out of my mouth—Ms. Berg isn't expecting anyone. Now his face crumpled, but just for a fraction of a second, really, resuming its former appearance so quickly that someone else might have missed it altogether. But I caught it, and as it crumpled I saw through to another face, the face one wears alone, or not even alone, the face one wears asleep or unconscious on the gurney, and in it I recognized something. This is going to sound foolish, but though I lived with Lotte and, as far as I knew, this Daniel had never met her at all, in that instant I felt that he and I were aligned in some way, aligned in our position toward her, and that it was only a matter of degrees that separated us. It was absurd, of course. After all, I was the one keeping him from whatever it was he wanted from her. It was a mere projection of myself onto this young man clutching his briefcase in front of the skeleton of my hydrangeas. But how else are we to make decisions about others? On top of which it was freezing out.

I let him in. In our hallway, standing in his boots under our little collection of straw hats, all the shadows fell away and I saw him
clearly. Arthur? Lotte called from the living room. Daniel and I locked eyes. I posed a question, and he answered. Nothing was said. But at that moment we agreed on something: Whatever happened, he would not disturb us. He would do nothing to threaten or dismantle what we had taken such pains to build. Yes, darling, I called back. Who's there? she asked. I studied Daniel's face once more for even a glimmer of dissent. But there was none. There was only seriousness, or an understanding of the seriousness of the agreement, and something else as well, something I took for gratitude. Just then I heard Lotte's footsteps behind me. It's for you, I said.

Our lives ran like clockwork, you see. Every morning we walked on the Heath. We took the same path in and the same path out. I accompanied Lotte to the swimming hole, as we called it, where she never missed a day. There are three ponds, one for men, one for women, and one mixed, and it was there, in the last, that she swam when I was with her so that I could sit on the bench nearby. In the winter, the men came to smash a hole in the ice. They must have worked in the dark because by the time we arrived the ice was already broken. Lotte would peel off her clothes; first her coat and then her pullover, her boots and trousers, the heavy wool ones she favored, and then her body would at last appear, pale and shot through with blue veins. I knew every inch of her body, but the sight of it in the morning against the wet, black trees almost always aroused me. She'd approach the water's edge. For a moment she would stand completely still. God knows what she thought about. Up until the last she was a mystery to me. At times the snow would fall around her. The snow or the leaves, though most often it was rain. Sometimes I wanted to cry out, to disturb the stillness that in that moment seemed to be hers alone. And then, in a flash, she'd disappear into the blackness. There would be a small splash, or the sound of splash, followed by silence. How terrible those seconds were, and how they seemed to last forever! As if she would never come up again. How deep does it go? I once asked her, but she
claimed not to know. On many occasions I would even leap up off the bench, ready to dive in after her, despite my fear of the water. But just then her head would break the surface like the smooth head of a seal or an otter, and she would swim to the ladder where I would be waiting to fling the towel over her.

Every Tuesday morning I took the eight-thirty train to Oxford, and returned to London on Thursday evening at nine. When we went out with colleagues of mine, Lotte would explain again why she couldn't live in Oxford. The persistence of all those bells disturbed her work, she said. On top of that, one is always being tripped over, shoved, or bumped into by some student scurrying through the streets, or someone riding a bike while engaged in the life of the mind. At least once at every such dinner I would overhear Lotte tell the story of how she saw a woman knocked over by a bus on St. Giles'. One second she was crossing the street, she'd say, her voice rising, and the next she's slumped against the wheels of a bus. It's a crime, Lotte would go on, how they turn those children loose in the world with their heads full of Plato and Wittgenstein, but impart to them no sense of how to safely negotiate the dangers of daily life. It was a strange argument to make for someone who spent most of her days closeted in her study inventing stories and searching for ways to make them plausible. But, out of politeness, no one ever pointed that out.

The truth was more complicated, of course. Lotte liked her life in London—liked the anonymity that was hers as soon as she got off the Underground at Covent Garden or King's Cross, and which would have been impossible in Oxford. She liked the swimming hole and our house in Highgate. And I think she liked being alone while I was off teaching the long-haired youth gathered from Winchester and the polished halls of Eton. On Thursday evenings she would be waiting for me with the car at Paddington, the windows fogged and the motor idling. In those first minutes of the drive home through the dark streets, while she still held in my eyes the clarity of something separate unto herself,
I sometimes noticed in her a renewed patience—for our life together, perhaps, or for something else.

Yes, Lotte was a mystery to me, but I took comfort in those little islands I discovered in her, islands that I could always find, no matter how poor the conditions, and use to orient myself. At the center of her was her abysmal loss. She'd been forced to leave her home in Nuremberg when she was seventeen. For a year she'd lived with her parents in a transit camp in Zbaszyn, Poland, in what I can only imagine were atrocious conditions; she never spoke about that time, just as she rarely spoke of her childhood or her parents. In the summer of 1939, with the help of a young Jewish doctor also in the camp, she received a visa to chaperone eighty-six children on a Kindertransport to England. That detail, eighty-six, always struck me, both because the story as she told it had so few details, and also because it seemed such an enormous number. How did she care for so many children, knowing that everything she had ever known, that they'd all ever known, had just been lost forever? The boat left from Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. The voyage which was supposed to take three days took five instead, because halfway through it Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, and the boat had to be diverted to avoid Hamburg. They arrived in Harwich three days before war broke out. The children were scattered to foster homes throughout the country. Lotte waited until every last one of them had departed on a train. And then they were gone, carried away from her, and Lotte disappeared into her life.

No, I couldn't possibly know what it was she carried in the depths of her. But slowly I discovered certain footholds. When she shouted out in her sleep, it was almost always her father she had been dreaming of. When she was hurt by something I'd said or done, or more often failed to do or say, she became suddenly friendly, although it was a sort of lacquered friendliness, the friendliness of two people who happen to find themselves sitting together on a bus ride, a long one for which only one of them has remembered
to bring food. Some days later something little would happen—I would forget to return the tea canister to the shelf, or leave my socks on the floor—and she would explode. The force and volume of her anger were shocking, and the only possible response was to make myself very still, and stick to a course of silence until the brunt of it had passed and she'd begun to retreat inward. At that moment there was a break or opening. A moment earlier and the gesture meant to calm and make amends would only stoke her fury. A moment later, and she would already have crawled into herself and shut the door, taking up residence in that obscure chamber where she could survive for days or even weeks without so much as a word for me. It took me many years to put my finger on that moment, to learn to see it coming and seize it when it arrived, to save us both from that punishing silence.

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them. But often I did—with time I learned where to look—and tried to fit them together. It pained me that she felt she couldn't come to me with it, but I knew it would hurt her more to know that I'd uncovered what she hadn't intended for me to find. In some fundamental way I think she objected to being known. Or resented it even as she longed for it. It offended her sense of freedom. But it isn't possible to simply look upon a person one loves in tranquility, content to regard her in bafflement. Unless one is happy to worship, and I never was. At the heart of any scholar's work is the search for patterns. You may think it sounds cold to suggest that I took a scholarly attitude toward my wife, but then I think you would be misunderstanding what drives a true scholar. The more I've learned in my life, the more acutely I've felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I've felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness. At times I've felt myself to be clinging onto the rim—of what I can hardly say without the risk of sounding ridiculous—only to slip and find myself deeper in the hole than ever.
And there, in the dark, I find again in myself a form of praise for all that continues to crush my certainty.

 

I
T'S FOR YOU
, I said to Lotte, but I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes fixed on Daniel, and so I missed the expression on her face when she saw him that first time. Later on I came to wonder whether it had given anything away. Daniel stepped forward toward her. For a moment he seemed at a loss for words. I saw something in his face that I hadn't seen before. Then he introduced himself as one of her readers, as I'd expected. Lotte invited him inside, or further inside. He let me take his jacket, but held tightly to the briefcase—I assumed it held a manuscript inside that he wanted to show to Lotte. The jacket smelled, sickeningly, of cologne, though as far as I could tell, relieved of the coat Daniel himself smelled of nothing. Lotte led him to the kitchen, and as he followed her he looked around at everything, the pictures on our walls, the envelopes on the table waiting to be mailed, and when his eyes met his own reflection in the mirror I thought I saw the hint of a smile. Lotte gestured at the kitchen table, and he sat, placing the briefcase delicately between his feet, as if a small, live animal were contained inside of it. From the way he watched Lotte fill the battered kettle with water and put it on the stove I could tell that he hadn't expected to get so far. Perhaps he'd hoped to come away with an autographed book at best. And now he was inside the house of the great writer! About to drink tea from her cups! I remember thinking that perhaps this was just the encouragement Lotte needed: She said little about her work while in the throes of it, but I could tell from her mood exactly how things were going, and for some weeks she'd seemed listless and depressed. I excused myself politely, saying I had work to do, and went upstairs. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I felt a pang of regret for the child we'd never had who might have been almost Daniel's age by now, who might have come in from the cold, like him, full of things to tell us.

I hadn't thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don't know what that's supposed to tell you; nothing, except that we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none. The evening she lost consciousness for the last time seems further away to me now than the June afternoon in 1949 when I saw her for the first time. It was at a garden party to celebrate the engagement of Max Klein, a close friend from my student days. Nothing could have been more lovely and genteel than the crystal bowl of punch and vases of freshly cut irises. But almost immediately on walking in I sensed something strange about the room, something interrupting an otherwise uniform light or mood. I found the source without trouble. It was a small woman, like a sparrow, with short black hair cut straight across her face, standing by the doors to the garden. She was at odds with everything around her. To begin with, it was summer and she was wearing a purple velvet dress, almost a smock. Her hairstyle was completely unlike any other woman's there, something like a flapper's, though seemingly cut for comfort over style. She wore a very large silver ring that seemed to weigh too much for her bony fingers (much later, when she took it off and put it on my bedside table, I noticed that it left a green mark of corrosion on her skin). But it was really her face, or the expression on her face, that struck me as most unusual. It reminded me of Prufrock—
There will be time, / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet
—because she alone in that room seemed not to have had time, or not to have thought to take the time. It wasn't that her face was open or revealing in any way. It's just that it appeared to be at rest, completely unaware of itself as the eyes took in all that happened before them. What I first took to be an uneasiness emanating from her now seemed, as I watched from across the room, to be just the opposite: the uneasiness of others, brought to light when standing in opposition to her. I asked Max who she was, and he told me she was somehow related, a distant
cousin of his fiancée. She remained rooted to the same spot the entire party, holding an empty glass. At some point I wandered over and offered to refill it.