Free Great House by Nicole Krauss Page A

that. I tucked the unfinished letter in my pocket and went back to the room where your mother lay among the wires and tubes and beeps and drips. There was a water-color of a landscape on the wall, a bucolic valley, some distant hills. I knew every inch of it. It was a flat and crude painting, terrible actually, like something out of one of those paint-by-numbers kits, like one of those landscapes-out-of-a-can they sell in the souvenir booths, but right then I decided that when I left that room for the last time I would take it off the wall and carry it away with me, cheap frame and all. I had stared at it for so many hours and days that in a way I can’t explain that shitty painting had come to stand for something. I had begged it, reasoned with it, argued with it, cursed it, I had goneinto it, I had bored my way into that incompetent valley and by and by it had come to mean something to me. So I decided, while your mother was still clinging to the last inhumane shred of life given to her, that when it was all over I would take it down off the wall, stick it under my jacket, and make off with it. I closed my eyes and drifted off. When I woke, the nurses were gathered in a little clot around the bed. A flare of activity, and then they parted and your mother was still. Gone from this world, as they say, Dova’leh, as if there is any other. The painting was nailed to the wall. Such is life, my boy: if you think you’re original in anything, think again.
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    I RODE with her body to the mortuary. It was I who looked on her last. I pulled the sheet over her face. How is this possible? I kept thinking. How am I doing this, look at my hand, it’s reaching out, now it’s taking hold of the cloth, how? The very last time I will ever look on the face that I spent a lifetime studying. Pass over it. I went to reach in my pocket for a tissue. Instead I pulled out the crumpled letter to Avner Segal’s seventh grade teacher. Without stopping to think I smoothed it out, folded it up, and slipped it in with her. I tucked it next to her elbow. I trust that she would have understood. They lowered her into the ground. Something gave way in my knees. Who had dug the grave? Suddenly I needed to know. He would have had to spend the night digging. As I approached the abysmal hole the absurd thought crossed my mind that I had to find him to tip him.
    At some point in all of this, you arrived. I don’t know when. I turned around and there you were in a dark raincoat. You’ve gotten old. But still slim, because you always had your mother’s genes. There you stood in the cemetery, sole surviving carrier of those genes because Uri, as I don’t need to tell you, Uri always took after me. There you stood, the big-shot judge from London, holding out your hand, waiting for your turn with the shovel. And do you know what I wanted to do, my boy? I wanted to slap you. Right then and there, I wanted to slapyou across the face and tell you to go find your own shovel. But for the sake of your mother who never liked a scene, I handed it over. It took everything I had to restrain myself, but I handed it over to you and watched as you bent down, drove the spade into the pile of loose dirt, and, with the slightest tremor in your hands, approached the hole.
    Afterwards everyone gathered at Uri’s house. I thought that was the most I could bear—not my house, not seven days—and even that was too much. The children were closed up in the den watching television. I looked at the guests around me and suddenly I couldn’t stand to be among them a moment longer. Couldn’t stand either the shallowness of their mourning or the depth of it—which of them had any true idea of what had been lost? Couldn’t stand the righteousness of their consolations, the idiotic justifications of the pious, nor the empathy of Eve’s old friends or the daughters of those friends, the carefully placed hand on my shoulder,