Free Great House by Nicole Krauss

by carrying the almost-dead, bald and shrunken, a little bag of bones that opened an eye in which all the sentience had been concentrated, and fixed me in its gaze as it rolled past. I turned back to the paper in front of me. Dear Eve. But after that, nothing. Suddenly it becameimpossible to write another word. I don’t know which was worse, the plea of that pathetic little eye or the rebuke of the blank page. To think that you once wanted to make a life of words! Thank God I saved you from that. You might be a big macher now, but it’s me you have to thank.
    Dear Eve , then nothing. The words dried up like leaves and blew away. All that time I’d sat by her side as she lay unconscious it had been so clear in my head, the many things I still needed to tell her. I’d held forth, I’d carried on, all in my head. But now every word I dredged up seemed lifeless and false. Just when I was ready to give up and crumple the page into a ball I remembered what Segal once told me. You remember Avner Segal, my old friend, translated into many obscure languages but never English so he always stayed poor? A few years ago we met for lunch in Rehavia. It had surprised me how old he’d gotten in the few years since I’d seen him. No doubt he thought the same of me. Once we worked side by side among the chickens, full of ideals of solidarity. The kibbutz elders had decided the best way to make use of our youthful talent was to send us to inoculate a flock of birds, then to clear up their shit in the hay. Now we sat together, the retired prosecutor and the aging writer, hair growing out of our ears. His body was bent. He confided that despite the fact that his last book had won a prize (I never heard of it), he was having a terrible time. He couldn’t get a paragraph out without condemning it to the trash. So what do you do? I asked. You want to know? he said. I’m asking, I told him. All right, he said, between you and me, I’ll tell you. He leaned across the table and whispered two words: Mrs. Kleindorf. What? I said. Just what I said, Mrs. Kleindorf. I’m not following you, I told him. I pretend I’m writing to Mrs. Kleindorf, he said. My seventh grade teacher. No one else is going to see it, I tell myself, only her. It doesn’t matter that she’s been dead already twenty-five years. I think of her kind eyes and the little red smiley faces she used to draw on my papers, and I begin to relax. And then, he said, I can write a little.
    I turned back to the paper in front of me. Dear —I wrote, butstopped again there, because I couldn’t remember the name of my seventh grade teacher Not the sixth, fifth, or fourth either. The smell of the floor polish mingling with unwashed skin I remembered, and the dry feel of chalk dust in the air, and the stench of glue and urine. But the names of the teachers were lost to me.
    Dear Mrs. Kleindorf , I wrote, My wife is dying upstairs. For fifty-one years we shared a bed. For a month she’s been lying in a hospital bed, and every night I go home and sleep in our bed alone. I haven’t washed the sheets since she left. I’m afraid that if I do I won’t be able to sleep. The other day I went into the bathroom and the maid was cleaning the hair out of Eve’s brush. What are you doing? I asked. I’m cleaning the brush, she said. Don’t touch that brush again, I said. Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Mrs. Kleindorf? And while we’re on the subject of you, let me ask a question. Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science, and God knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters?
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    D O YOU LIKE THAT , my boy? I thought you would. Suffering: just the sort of thing that’s up your alley.
    Anyway, I got no further than