Great House (10 page)

At that time she was living in a rented room not far from Russell Square. The other side of the street had been bombed, and from her window you could see the piles of rubble where the children sometimes came to play King of the Castle (long after it became dark, you could still hear their voices), and here and there was the shell of a house whose empty windows framed the sky. In one, only the staircase with carved banisters remained rising out of the rubble, and in another you could still make out the floral wallpaper that the sun and rain were slowly erasing. Though it was melancholy it was also exhilarating in a strange way, to see the inside turned out like that. Many times I saw Lotte staring at those ruins with their solitary chimneys. The first time I visited her room I was amazed at how little was in it. She'd been in England for almost ten years by then, but, aside from her desk, there were only a few sticks of plain furniture, and much later I came to understand that in a certain way the walls and ceiling of her own room were as nonexistent to her as those across the street.

Her desk, however, was something else entirely. In that simple, small room it overshadowed everything else like some sort of grotesque, threatening monster, clinging to most of one wall and bullying the other pathetic bits of furniture to the far corner, where they seemed to cling together, as if under some sinister magnetic force. It was made of dark wood and above the writing surface was a wall of drawers, drawers of totally impractical sizes, like the desk of a medieval sorcerer. Except that every last drawer was empty, something I discovered one evening while waiting for Lotte, who had gone down the hall to use the lavatory, and which somehow made the desk, the specter of that enormous desk, really more like a ship than a desk, a ship riding a pitch-black sea in the dead of a moonless night with no hope of land in any direction, seem even more unnerving. It was, I always thought, a very masculine desk. At times, or from time to time when I came to pick her up, I
even felt a kind of strange, inexplicable jealousy overtake me when she opened the door and there, hovering behind her, threatening to swallow her up, was that tremendous body of furniture.

One day I got up the courage to ask her where she had found it. She was as poor as a church mouse; it was impossible to imagine that she had ever been able to save enough money to buy such a desk. But rather than allaying my fears, her answer plunged me into despair: It was a gift, she said. And when, trying my best to act casually but already feeling my lips begin to twitch as they do whenever my emotions get the better of me, I asked her from whom, she gave me a look, a look I will never forget as it was my first introduction to the complex laws that governed life with Lotte, though it would be years before I came to understand those laws, if I ever really understood them at all, a look equivalent to the raising of a wall. Needless to say, nothing more was said on the subject.

During the day she worked in the basement of the British Library reshelving books, and at night she wrote. Strange and often disturbing stories that she left out, I assumed, for me to read. Two children who take the life of a third child because they covet his shoes, and only after he is dead discover that the shoes don't fit, and pawn them off to another child, whom the shoes fit, and who wears them with joy. A bereaved family out for a drive in an unnamed country at war, who accidentally drive across enemy lines and discover an empty house, in which they take up residence, oblivious to the horrific crimes of its former owner.

She wrote in English, of course. In all the years we lived together I only heard her utter something in German a few times. Even once her Alzheimer's became advanced and language came unbraided in her, she did not revert to the syllables of her childhood, as many do. I sometimes thought that if we'd had a child it would have given her a way to return to her mother tongue. But we never had a child. From the beginning Lotte made it clear that it wasn't a possibility. I'd always imagined that I would have children one day, perhaps just
because it seemed to me that was what happened to one as a matter of course; I don't think I ever really pictured myself as a father. On the few occasions I tried to raise the subject with Lotte she immediately erected a wall between us that took me days to dismantle. She didn't have to explain herself, or defend her position; I should have understood. (Not that she expected me to understand. More than anyone I've known, Lotte was content to live in a perennial state of misunderstanding. It's so rare, when you think about it, a trait one can imagine belonging to the psychology of a race more advanced than ours.) Eventually I came to accept the idea of a life without children, and I can't say that part of me wasn't also a bit relieved. Though later, as the years passed with so little to account for them, with almost nothing in our lives that grew and changed, I sometimes regretted that I hadn't argued harder for it—footsteps on the stairs, an unknown quantity, an envoy.

But, no: our life together was organized around protecting the ordinary; to throw a child into it would have shattered everything. Lotte was unnerved by disruptions to our habits. I tried to insulate her from the unexpected; the smallest change in plans threw her completely. The day would be lost reassembling a sense of peace. It took more than a year to convince her to leave that shabby room overlooking the rubble and come to live with me in Oxford. Of course I asked her to marry me. I even moved into larger rooms in a college-owned house, very comfortable ones with a fireplace in the living room and the bedroom, and a large window that looked out onto the garden. When the day of the move arrived at last, I went to pick her up at her room. Aside from her desk and the meager bits of furniture, everything she owned fit into a couple of battered suitcases already standing by the door. Giddy with the prospect of our lives together, full of hope that we were seeing the last of that wretched desk, I kissed her face, the face I was always so overjoyed to see. She smiled up at me. I've arranged for the desk to be moved to Oxford by van, she said.

By some miracle, some miracle or nightmare depending on the perspective, the movers managed to negotiate the narrow corridors and staircases of the house, groaning with pain and shouting obscenities that rose up on the crisp autumn breeze and were carried in through the open window of the room where I sat, waiting in horror, until at last I heard a pounding at the door, and there it was, resting on the landing, its dark, almost ebony, wood gleaming with a vengeance.

Almost as soon as I brought Lotte to Oxford I realized it had been a mistake. That first afternoon she stood with her hat in her hands, and seemed not to know how to proceed. What use did she have for a stone hearth or overstuffed chairs? I would get up in the middle of the night to find the bed empty, and discover her standing in the living room holding her coat. When I asked her where she was going, she would look down in surprise at the coat and hand it back to me. Then I would lead her back to bed and stroke her hair until she fell asleep, just as I would do forty years later when she forgot everything, and afterwards I would lie awake against the pillows, staring into the shadows of the room to where the desk waited like a Trojan horse.

 

O
NE
S
ATURDAY
not long after, we went to London to have lunch with my aunt. Afterwards the two of us took a walk on the Heath. It was a bright autumn day; the light lent itself to everything. As we walked, I told Lotte an idea I had for a book on Coleridge. We crossed the Heath and stopped for a cup of tea in Kenwood House, where afterwards I showed Lotte the late Rembrandt self-portrait, the one I'd first visited as a boy, and which I came to associate with the expression “a ruined man,” a phrase that, in my childish mind, took hold and became my own private, glorified aspiration. We emerged from the Heath, and took the first turn, which happened to be onto Fitzroy Park. As we made our way toward Highgate village, we passed a house for sale. It was in poor shape, suffering from
neglect, the whole thing engulfed by brambles from all sides. On the peaked roof above the door, a strange little gargoyle crouched with a terrible grimace. Lotte stood looking up at it, kneading her hands in a way she sometimes did when she was thinking, as if the thought itself were lying inside her hands and she had only to polish it. I watched her studying the house. I thought maybe it reminded her of somewhere, perhaps even her home in Nuremberg; once I knew her better, I understood that would have been impossible—she avoided anything that reminded her. No, it was something else again. Perhaps the look of it simply appealed to her. Whatever it was, I could see immediately that she was taken by the place. We walked up the little front path, crowded by overgrown shrubs. A severe-looking woman let us in after some hesitation—it turned out she was the daughter of the old woman, a potter, who'd lived in the house for years, but had grown too frail to go on living alone. There was a stuffy, medicinal smell and the ceiling of the hall had been badly damaged by water, as if someone had accidentally diverted a river to flow right above it. In a room that led off from the hall I glimpsed the back of a white-haired woman sitting in a wheelchair.

I had a small inheritance from my mother that made it just possible to buy the house. One of the first things I did was paint the attic room that became Lotte's study. It was she who chose the room for herself, but I admit that I was relieved to think that the desk would be relegated to the attic, away from the rest of the house. She chose the same dove gray for the walls and floor, and from the day I finished painting until the day she became too ill to ascend the steep stairs alone, I avoided the attic. Not because of the desk, of course, but out of respect for her work and her privacy, without which she wouldn't have survived. She needed a place to escape, even from me. If I wanted her, I stood at the bottom of the steps and called up. When I made her a cup of tea, I left it for her at the foot of the stairs.

A year or so after we moved, Lotte sold her first collection of stories,
Broken Windows,
to a small publishing house in Manchester
dedicated to experimental work (a label she objected to, but not enough to refuse the offer of publication). There wasn't a single reference in the book to Germany. All she allowed for was a mention in the brief biography on the last page of the place and date of her birth—Nuremberg, 1921. But there was a story buried near the end that touched on the horror. It was about a landscape architect in an unnamed country, an egoist so taken with his own talent that he is willing to collaborate with the officials of the country's brutal regime in order to see that a large park he has designed is built near the center of the city. He commissions appropriately fascist-looking bronze busts in each of their images, scattered among the rare and tropical plants. He names an alley of palm trees after the dictator. When the secret police begin to bury the bodies of murdered children under the park's foundations in the middle of the night, he turns a blind eye. People flock from all over the country to see the enormous blooms and admire the rare beauty of the place. The title of the story was “Children Are Terrible for Gardens”—a line the landscape architect had tossed off many years earlier to a young female journalist who obviously was in love with her subject—and for a long time after I read it I would catch myself staring at my wife, feeling a little bit afraid.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
Daniel first appeared I didn't hear the front door open and close again until well past midnight. Another quarter of an hour passed before Lotte came upstairs. I was already lying in bed. I watched her undress in the dark. The revelation of her body twice a day was one of the great pleasures of my life. She slipped under the covers. I reached out and put my hand on her thigh. I waited for her to say something, but she didn't. Instead she slid on top of me. Everything in silence, but there was a special tenderness about the way she bent her head to touch mine. Afterwards, we went to sleep. The next morning a smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the kitchen, but
otherwise nothing was out of the ordinary. I left for Oxford, and nothing more was said about Daniel.

But when I came home on Thursday night and went to hang up my coat I was hit by the powerful stench of cologne. It took me a moment to connect it to Daniel's jacket, and when I did I expected to find it hanging there, forgotten. But there was no sign of it. I might not have thought about it again if, settling into the sofa to read after dinner, I hadn't noticed a metal lighter resting near a cushion. Weighing it in my hand, I thought of how to phrase the question to Lotte. But what, exactly, was the question? Has that boy been back to see you? So what if he had? Wasn't she allowed to see whomever she pleased? She had made it clear to me from the beginning that I had no claims on her freedom, nor did I wish to have any. There was much she didn't tell me, and I didn't ask. Once, in a bitter argument over our late mother's affairs, my sister said she thought I liked being married to a mystery because it turned me on. She wasn't right—she never understood the first thing about Lotte—but perhaps she wasn't entirely wrong either. At times it seemed to me that my wife was built around a Bermuda Triangle, for God's sake! Send something in and you might never hear from it again. All the same, I wanted to know—had the boy been back, and what was it about him that made her immediately accept him in? To say she was not a sociable person would be to put it mildly. And yet, no sooner had a stranger at the door introduced himself than she was brewing his tea in the kitchen.

We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it's there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

Lotte was reading in the chair across from me. I meant to ask, I said, where was Daniel from? She looked up from her book. Always the same rumpled expression when I disturbed her from her reading. Who? Daniel, I said. The boy who rang the bell the other night. I heard an accent, but couldn't quite place it. Lotte paused. Daniel, she repeated, as if she were testing the durability of the name for one of her stories. Yes, where was he from? I repeated. Chile, she said.
All the way from Chile! I exclaimed. Isn't that remarkable! That your books have reached as far as that. For all I know, he picked one up at Foyles, Lotte said. We didn't talk about it. He's read a lot, and he wanted someone to discuss books with, that's all. You're being modest, I'm sure, I said. He seemed quite amazed to find himself in your presence. He probably could quote whole paragraphs of your work. A pained look crossed Lotte's face, but she remained silent. He is alone here, that's all, she said.