Free Great House by Nicole Krauss Page B

the pursed lips and furrowed brow their faces so naturally assumed after years of raising children, sending them to the army, and shepherding their husbands through the dark valley of middle age. Without another word, I put down the untouched plate someone had filled, a heaping plate that could not have held a morsel more and whose slightness, in the ratio of food to grief, disgusted me, and went to the bathroom. I locked the door and sat down on the toilet.
    Soon I heard my name called. In time others joined in the search. I saw you walk across the garden, distorted through the glass, calling. You! Calling me! It almost made me laugh. Suddenly I saw you as you were at the age of ten on the trail in Ramon Crater, pacing wildly, out of breath, your little mouth agape, sweat trickling down your face, the ridiculous sun hat drooping around your head like a wilted flower. Calling and calling to me because you thought you were lost. Guess what, my boy. I was there the whole time! Crouched behind a rock, a few meters up the cliff. That’s right, while you called, while you screamed out for me, believing yourself to be abandoned in the desert, I hid behind a rock patiently watching, like the ram that saved Isaac. I was Abraham and the ram. How many minutes passed while Ilet you shit in your pants, a ten-year-old boy facing his smallness and helplessness, the nightmare of his utter aloneness, I don’t know. Only when at last I decided that you’d learned your lesson, that it had been made clear to you just how much you needed me, did I pop out from behind the rock and saunter down to the path. Relax, I said, what are you shrieking for, I was just taking a piss.
    Yes, that’s what I suddenly remembered while I watched you through the bathroom window thirty-seven years later. There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn’t lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular. I find these little abysses everywhere now.
    You went on calling me for twenty minutes. The children were drawn into it, too, lured away from the television by a real-life mystery, perhaps if they were lucky even an emergency. I saw the smallest one through the window, trailing my sweater across the grass. Leaving my scent for the dogs, perhaps. They are all so educated, the grandnephews and grandnieces. Pooled together, their knowledge could run a small, terrifying country. They speak with confidence; they hold the keys to the castle. I was the afikomen they searched for. A few minutes into the game I heard the pack of them scratching at the door. We know you’re in there, they called. Open up, one said in a little hoarse voice, and then the rest joined in, their little fists raining down. I tapped a giant bruise on my knee that I couldn’t remember getting. I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without. Uri arrived, calling off the beasts. Dad? he said through the door. What are you doing in there? Are you all right? Many ways to answer the question, but none sufficient. You have no toilet paper? one of the kids piped up. A pause, footsteps receding, then returning again. The sound of a struggle with the knob, and before I had time to prepare the door shuddered and sprang open. The crowd peered at me. Among the children, giggles and scattered applause. The smallest one,my little Cordelia, approached and touched my bruised knee. The others, rightly, backed away. In Uri’s face I saw a look of fear I hadn’t seen before. Relax, my son, I was just taking a piss.
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    N O , I AM not a man who harbors romantic ideas about the extension of the spirit. It’s something I’d like to think I taught my sons, to partake of the physical world while it is yours to take, because that is