Great House by Nicole Krauss Read Free Book Online

belonging to a child. It seemed to come from the other side of the wall, in the next apartment over. I was overcome by a feeling of regret, so sharp that I felt it as a kind of physical pain in my gut, and I had to sit. I admit that I even cried, sobbing until the blood from my finger began to drip onto my shirt. After I’d gotten control of myself and wrapped the cut in a paper towel, I went to knock on my neighbor’s door, an old woman named Mrs. Becker who lived alone. I heard her slow footsteps shuffling to the door, and then, after I announced myself, the patient unlocking of various bolts. She peered up at me through enormous black glasses, glasses that somehow made her look like a small, burrowing animal. Yes, dear, come in, so nice to see you. The smell of ancient food was overwhelming, years andyears of cooking odors clinging to the rugs and upholstery, thousands of pots of soup that allowed her to scrape by. I thought that I heard a cry coming from here just a moment ago. A cry? Mrs. Becker asked. It sounded like a child, I said, peering past her into the dark recesses of her apartment, cluttered with claw-footed furniture that would only be moved, with great difficulty, when she died. Sometimes I watch the television, but no, I don’t think it was on, I was just sitting here looking at a book. Maybe it came from downstairs. I’m fine, dear, thank you for your concern.
    I didn’t tell anyone what I’d heard, not even Dr. Lichtman, my therapist of many years. And for some time I didn’t hear the child again. But the cries stayed with me. Sometimes I would suddenly hear them within me when I wrote, causing me to lose my train of thought or become flustered. I began to sense in them something mocking, an undertone I had not heard at first. Other times I would hear a cry just as I woke, as I crossed over into wakefulness or departed from sleep, and on those mornings I rose with the feeling of something wound around my neck. A hidden weight seemed to attach itself to simple objects, a teacup, a doorknob, a glass, hardly noticeable at first, beyond the sense that every move required a slightly greater exertion of energy, and by the time I negotiated among these things and arrived at my desk, some reserve in me was already worn down or washed away. The pauses between words became longer, when for an instant the momentum of pressing thought into language faltered and a dark spot of indifference bloomed. I suppose it’s what I’ve battled most often in my life as a writer, a sort of entropy of care or languishing of will, so consistently, in fact, that I barely paid it any attention—a pull to give in to an undertow of speechlessness. But now I often became suspended in these moments, they grew longer and wider, and sometimes it became impossible to see the other shore. And when I finally got there, when a word at last came along like a lifeboat, and then another and another, I greeted them with a faint distrust, a suspiciousness that took root and did not confine itself to my work. It isimpossible to distrust one’s writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.
    Around that time a houseplant I’d had for many years, a large ficus that had grown happily in our apartment’s sunniest corner, suddenly became diseased and began to drop its leaves. I gathered them into a bag and brought it to a plant store to ask how to treat it, but no one could tell me what it had. I became obsessed with saving it, and explained again and again to S the various methods I’d used to try to cure it. But nothing eradicated the disease and in the end the ficus died. I had to throw it out on the street, and for a day, until the garbage truck picked it up, I could see it from my window, bare and ruined. Even after the garbagemen took it away, I continued to page through books on care for houseplants, to study the pictures of mealybugs, of twig blight and canker, until one night S came