Excerpt of Great House by Nicole Krauss
(Page 6 of 6)
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Many years have passed since then. I was married for a while, but
now I live alone again, though not unhappily. There are moments
when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see
through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to
ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make
life, particularly life with other people, possible. And that's where I'd
arrived, Your Honor. If it weren't for the events I'm about to describe,
I might have gone on not thinking about Daniel Varsky, or very
rarely, though I was still in possession of his bookshelves, his desk,
and the trunk of a Spanish galleon or the salvage of an accident on
the high seas, quaintly used as a coffee table. The sofa began to rot,
I don't remember exactly when but I had to throw it away. At times I
thought of getting rid of the rest, too. It reminded me, when I was in
a certain mood, of things I would rather forget. For example sometimes
I am asked by the occasional journalist who wishes to interview
me why I stopped writing poetry. Either I say that the poetry I wrote
wasn't any good, perhaps it was even terrible, or I say that a poem has
the potential for perfection and this possibility finally silenced me,
or sometimes I say that I felt trapped in the poems I tried to write,
which is like saying one feels trapped in the universe, or trapped
by the inevitability of death, but the truth of why I stopped writing
poetry is not any of these, not nearly, not exactly, the truth is that if
I could explain why I stopped writing poetry then I might write it
again. What I am saying is that Daniel Varsky's desk, which became
my desk of more than twenty-five years, reminded me of these things.
I'd always considered myself only a temporary guardian and had
assumed a day would come, after which, albeit with mixed feelings,
I would be relieved of my responsibility of living with and watching
over the furniture of my friend, the dead poet Daniel Varsky, and
that from then on I would be free to move as I wished, possibly even
to another country. It isn't exactly that the furniture had kept me in
New York, but if pressed I have to admit this was the excuse I'd used
for not leaving all those years, long after it became clear the city had
nothing left for me. And yet when that day came it sent my life, at last
solitary and serene, reeling.
It was 1999, the end of March. I was at my desk working when
the phone rang. I didn't recognize the voice that asked for me on the
other end. Coolly, I inquired who was calling. Over the years I've
learned to guard my privacy, not because so many people have tried
to invade it (some have), but because writing demands that one be
protective and adamant about so much that a certain a priori unwillingness
to oblige spills over even to situations where it isn't necessary.
The young woman said that we'd never met. I asked her the reason
for her call. I think you knew my father, she said, Daniel Varsky.
At the sound of his name I felt a chill through me, not only from
the shock of learning that Daniel had a daughter, or the sudden
expansion of the tragedy I'd perched on the edge of for so long, or
even the certain knowledge that my long stewardship had come to an
end, but also because some part of me had waited for such a phone
call for years, and now, despite the late hour, it had come.
Reprinted from Great House: A Novel by Nicole Krauss Copyright (c) 2010 by Nicole Krauss. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
