Nicole Krauss by Great House

Author:Great House [House, Great]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-11-13T12:36:22+00:00

IN THE MONTHS that followed, Yoav, Leah, I, and even Bogna, who had not yet left, began to settle into a familiar routine. Leah was absorbed in learning pieces by Bolcom and Debussy for her first recital at the Purcell Room, I was doing my time at the library, Yoav began to study for his exams in earnest, and Bogna came and went, returning everything to its proper place. On the weekends, we rented a pile of movies. We ate when we felt like it, and slept when we felt like it. I was happy there. Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

Then one rainy evening in early March the telephone rang. Sometimes it seemed that Yoav and Leah knew when it was their father even before lifting the receiver: a glance, quick and deft, flew between them. It was Weisz calling from the train station in Paris to say he would be arriving that night. Immediately a tense mood swept through the house, and Yoav and Leah became restless and agitated, coming and going in and out of rooms and up the stairs. If we leave for Marble Arch now you could be back in Oxford by half past nine, he said. I became furious. We argued. I accused him of being embarrassed of me and wanting to hide me from his father. In my own mind, I became again the daughter of those who covered the fine sofa with a plastic slipcover only removed for guests. The daughter of those who aspired to a higher life while never believing they were worthy of it, who bowed to an idea of all that hung above them, out of reach—not only materially, but spiritually, that part of the spirit that tends to satisfaction if not happiness—while diligently tending their disappointment. And if I became those things in my mind, Yoav, too, became something he wasn’t: a person born into an elevated life, who, as much as he loved me, could only ever play host to me there. Looking back, I see how much I misunderstood, and it pains me to think of how blind I was to Yoav’s pain.

We fought, though what we said, exactly, I can’t now say, since in our arguments what began as something direct always, deflected by Yoav, became indirect. It only ever occurred to me afterwards: he had talked about something, reasoned with me about something, defended himself against something without ever really addressing or even naming the thing at all. But this time I dug my heels in and carried on. In the end, exhausted, or at a loss for further strategies, he grabbed my wrists, forced me down onto the sofa, and began to kiss me hard enough to silence me.

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