Great House (18 page)

From time to time their father asked Yoav or Leah to assist him
with some small aspect of his work—to show a client a piece, to travel somewhere to pick up something he'd acquired, or to attend an auction on his behalf. It was the first time Yoav had asked me to accompany him, and I took it as a sign that something important had changed between us. For the first time I was being trusted to take part in some private aspect of the family's affairs. We took the car, a black 1974 Citroën DS. Turning the ignition, you had to wait a moment while the hydraulic pump kicked in and lifted the back part of the car off the wheels. The front seat was one long bench, and I sat close to Yoav as he drove. The car slid onto the motorway, and we talked about places we both wanted to go (I to Japan, he to see the Northern Lights), about Hungarian versus Finnish, genius at midnight, the relief of failure, Joseph Brodsky, cemeteries (my favorite was San Michele, his Weissensee), the house of Yehuda Amichai in Yemin Moshe. Yoav told me about how when he was a child his mother used to point out Amichai on the bus or walking down the street carrying his plastic baskets full of food from the shuk. Look at him, she used to say, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet, in his soul all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words. And then we were there, together, in the Jerusalem of his childhood. He told me about the house on Ha'Oren Street, which smelled of musty paper, damp cisterns, and spice, and how his mother had fallen in love with it the first time she visited Ein Kerem years before, and how the first thing his father did when he began to make money was pay a visit to the owner of the house to ask his price. One day he asked his wife if she wanted to go for a walk, and slowly, taking a meandering route, they arrived at the house on Ha'Oren Street as if by accident, and he took the key out of his pocket and opened the gate, and she, bewildered, hung back, the way one always hangs back, a little frightened, when a dream suddenly transforms into reality.

Looking back, I don't think that I was ever happier during my
time in England than on that drive, nestled against Yoav, who talked as he drove. Though soon enough we reached Folkestone, drove the car onto the train, and left England behind. The radio didn't work in the tunnel and the car didn't have a CD player or tape deck, but we kissed in the silence under the Channel until we surfaced again in Calais. We drove past signs for the battlefields of Ypres and Passendale, but headed east toward Ghent. Outside of Brussels it became foggy, and as we sped along a canal the crows scattered and then disappeared altogether as the dilapidated outskirts of the city reared up. We got lost in a maze of one-way streets and roundabouts and avenues without signs, or confusing signs, and had to stop to ask an African taxi driver for directions. He laughed at us as we drove away, as if he knew something about where we were headed that we didn't. We drove south through the expensive streets of Uccle, and soon we were on tree-lined roads in the countryside again, those wonderful tree-lined roads planted with a ruler and a whip that you can only find in a place as anal about beauty as Europe. As we drove we talked about the future as we rarely did, though not directly since it was impossible to talk to Yoav directly about anything to do with our relationship, whereas indirectly he could talk about the most raw and intimate things, the most dangerous things, the most painful and inconsolable but also the most hopeful. As for what, exactly, was said about the future, all I can say is that, speaking as indirectly as we were, transferred between us was only a feeling, or a shift in feeling, something like the sense of solid ground underfoot after walking for days or even months on spongy bog, a shift that I would be hard pressed, both then and now, but especially now, all these years later, to put into words.

It was late in the afternoon by the time we drove up to a pair of rusted wrought-iron gates. Yoav rolled down the window and pressed the buzzer. A minute or more passed before anyone answered, and just when he was about to buzz again the gates came to life and began to swing slowly open. We drove up the drive, gravel crunching under
the Citroën's wheels. Who lives here? I asked, trying to sound unimpressed by the stone castle with slate turrets coming into view behind the huge ancient oaks, because the last thing I wanted to do was make Yoav regret having brought me. Mr. Leclercq, he said, which only added to the absurdity of the situation, since I'd never heard of any Leclercq, nor had any idea who he might be.

I assumed that anyone wealthy enough to live in such a place would be attended around the clock by butlers and maids, by a staff of uniformed people that provided a buffer between himself and any possibility of physical exertion, no matter how slight. But when we rang the bell and the enormous, brass-studded door creaked open, it was Leclercq himself who stood there, in checkered shirt and sweater vest, dwarfed by the double marble staircase behind him. An enormous leaded-glass light fixture hung from a brass chain above him, swaying slightly in a gust of wind. Otherwise, the interior was dark and still. Leclercq extended his hand to each of us, though for a second or fraction of a second I was paralyzed to respond, struggling as I was to recall who, exactly, our host reminded me of, and only once my hand was clenched tightly by his, and a chill began to spread down the back of my neck, did I realize it was Heinrich Himmler. Of course the face had aged, but the tiny pointy chin, the thin lips, the round wire-frame glasses and, beginning just above their rims, that enormous flat expanse of forehead, an unbroken plane that went on far higher than proportion should have allowed, topped with the comically small, almost shrunken mound of hair—all of it was unmistakable. When he welcomed us with an anemic smile, his teeth were small and yellow.

I tried to catch Yoav's eyes, but as far as I could tell he was oblivious to the resemblance and followed Leclercq blithely into the house. He led us down a long polished corridor, his feet, scaly, swollen, and laced with bulging veins, stuffed into a pair of red velvet slippers. We passed an enormous mirror of mottled glass in a gilded frame, and for a moment our party doubled in size, making the silence more eerie.
Perhaps Leclercq felt it too, because he turned to Yoav and began to speak to him in French—about our journey, as far as I could tell, and the large and venerable oaks on the property, planted before the French Revolution. I calculated that even if Himmler's suicide in the Lüneburg prison had been a hoax, the famous photograph of the corpse laid out on the floor a theatrical trick, by then he would have been ninety-eight, and the spry man we followed couldn't have been much more than seventy. But who was to say this wasn't some relative, like those of Hitler's prospering in the leafy suburbs of Long Island, a nephew or lone surviving cousin of the overseer of the extermination camps, the Einsatzgruppen, and the execution of millions? He stopped in front of a closed door, removed from his pocket a ring of heavy keys, and finding the right one, let us into a large paneled hall with a view of the gardens stretching out in all directions. I looked out, and when I turned back again Leclercq was gazing at me with an interest that unnerved me, though perhaps it was only appreciation for a little company at last. Motioning for us to sit, he disappeared to bring some tea. Apparently, he was alone in that vast place.

When I asked if he'd noticed that our host was a dead ringer for Himmler, Yoav laughed, and when he saw that I couldn't have been more serious, he said he hadn't noticed, and when I pressed him on it he admitted that, yes, perhaps there was some minor, a very minor likeness if you squinted at the old man in a certain light. But Leclercq, he assured me, descended from one of the oldest noble families in Belgium, able to trace its ancestry back to Charlemagne; his mother's father had been a viscount, and for a short time had served Leopold II as director of a rubber plantation in the Congo. The family had lost most of its fortune during the War. What remained went to their enormous property taxes, until in the end they were forced to sell off all of their estates, keeping only Cloudenberg, the beloved family home. Leclercq was the last of his siblings alive, and, as far as Yoav knew, he'd never married.

A likely story, I almost said, but at that moment a tremendous
crash came from down the hall, followed by the banging or rolling of tins or pots. We followed the noise down the corridor and eventually found the large kitchen behind the dining room where Leclercq was on his hands and knees among metal bowls of various sizes that had tumbled from the cabinet above. For a moment I thought he was crying, but it turned out that he'd lost his glasses and couldn't see. We got down on the floor to help him, the three of us crawling around together. I found the glasses under a chair. One of the lenses was cracked, and Leclercq tried pathetically to reshape the wire earpiece. On the counter was a box of vanilla wafers on a tray, and when Leclercq slipped the cracked glasses back onto his face, I had to admit that his likeness to Himmler, so striking before, faltered and grew dim, and that the association I'd made was probably born of my limited knowledge about the nature of Weisz's business.

Maybe it was because he saw the world differently now, but after Leclercq's glasses broke a kind of sadness seeped out of him, trailing behind him as we followed him down the long hallways and the winding garden paths, past sheared hedges, through the boxwood maze, and up and down (mostly up) the stairs of that great stony castle, blooming into the atmosphere the way water around a harpooned seal fills with a cloud of blood. He seemed to have forgotten why we'd come—he never mentioned the table, or maybe it was a chest of drawers, or a clock, or chair, that was the reason for our trip, and Yoav was too polite to bring it up. Instead, Leclercq got lost down the long alleys, the turns and switchbacks of his own voice as it unraveled the long history of Cloudenberg that began as far back as the twelfth century. The original castle went up in a fire that began in the kitchen and raged through the great banquet hall and up the stairs, consuming tapestries, paintings, hunting trophies, and the owner's youngest son, trapped on the third floor with his milk nurse, sparing only the Gothic chapel that sat, some distance off, on a hill. At times Leclercq's voice became almost a whisper, and I could barely make out what he was saying. I thought then that if we
had crept away, retraced our steps, and disappeared back down the long drive in the Citroën, Leclercq might not have noticed, so lost was he in the long, tangled affairs, the secrets, triumphs, and disappointments of Cloudenberg, and at those moments he seemed to me, with his crazily cracked glasses, his dry and swollen feet, his steep and treacherous forehead, like a nun, if that's possible, a nun who had wed herself, body and soul, not to God but to the austere stones of Cloudenberg.

By the time the tour (if one can call it that) ended it was night. The three of us sat around the scarred wooden table in the kitchen where the cooks had once chopped shoulders and loins for the enormous banquets thrown by the viscount. Leclercq looked pale and exhausted and almost vacant, as if the Leclercq inside Leclercq had gotten up and wandered off into the fiery sunset of the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth century. Forgive me, he said, you must be starving by now, and got up to look in the refrigerator, a piece of gadgetry that looked out of place amid so much history. He seemed to have acquired a limp; either that or I hadn't noticed it before, doubtful as that was considering I'd been following him around all afternoon. Possibly it was one of those limps that becomes exaggerated with fatigue or certain kinds of weather. Let me help, I said, and he gave me a look of gratitude. Isabel is a wonderful cook, Yoav said. She can make a banquet out of nothing.

Leclercq went off and came back with a bottle of wine. I prepared a quiche, and while it was in the oven I set the table. Afterwards, I realized I'd put the fork and knife on the wrong sides, and when at last it came time to eat Leclercq froze, as if he'd been presented with a conundrum, one he had no hope of being able to solve, but then, summoning all the grace of his nobility, he delicately crossed his wrists over his plate and took up the utensils in the proper hands. As soon as he ate the first forkful an audible sigh escaped his lips, the uneasiness passed, and after that, as he consumed the food and wine, he seemed a little more himself again.

After dinner, Leclercq showed us to our room. If a conversation had been had about our staying the night, I'd missed it. And yet it was past ten o'clock by the time we'd finished the meal and the subject of the item we'd come for, whatever it was, had yet to be raised. We'd packed overnight bags, having planned to stop at a cozy inn on the way home. Yoav went out to get them from the car, leaving me alone with Leclercq who busied himself with the bed linens, muttering something about the housekeeper who had her day off.

Yoav and I brushed our teeth side by side in the enormous bathroom attached to our room, with a bathtub large enough for a horse. In bed, we began to kiss. Iz, what am I going to do with you? he whispered into my hair. I fit my body into his. But instead of making love as we did almost every night, Yoav started to talk in a whisper, his face pressed to my ear. He told me more stories about his childhood in Jerusalem, things he had never told me before, as if, away from the house in Belsize Park, he could speak more freely. He told me about his mother, who had been an actress until she became pregnant with him. After he was born she never went back to work, but sometimes, looking at a photograph of her from those days, he saw in her expression intimations of the things she might have told him. Before she died, he explained, his mother was a kind of buffer between their father and them. Coming through her, his commandments were softened, and she always found ways to make the things he required of them easier.

Hours later I woke up drenched in sweat. I got up to drink from the faucet and realized that I was wide awake and, as often happens to me when I wake at night, I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. Not wanting to disturb Yoav by turning on the light to read, I found my book—something by Thomas Bernhard, I can't remember what—and crept out of the room. I made my way down the hall under the dull gaze of six or seven mounted stag heads. At the top of the stairs was a small painting by Brueghel that Leclercq had pointed out earlier. It was one of those winter scenes of gray ice, white snow, and blackened
trees all overrun with a stampede of human life, so exquisitely small and yet not one life overlooked, each measured and considered: tiny scenes of merriment and despair, equally ominous and comic when seen at such a distance through the master's telescopic eyes. I stepped closer to study it. In one corner a man was pissing on the wall of a house, while in the window above a coarse, dough-faced woman prepared to empty a pot of water on his head. Some ways off, a man with a hat had fallen through the ice while around him the oblivious skaters continued to enjoy themselves—only one small boy had noticed the accident, and was trying to offer the drowning man the end of his stick. There the scene was frozen: the young boy leaning, the stick offered but not yet taken, the whole scene suddenly tilted toward that dark hole that waited to swallow it.