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A Novel
by Nicole Krauss
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It was then that he told me the desk had been used, briefly, by
Lorca. I didn't know if he was joking or not, it seemed highly improbable
that this traveler from Chile, younger than I, could have gotten
hold of such a valuable item, but I decided to assume that he was
serious so as not to risk offending someone who had shown me only
kindness. When I asked how he had gotten it, he shrugged and said
he had bought it, but didn't elaborate. I thought he was going to say,
And now I am giving it to you, but he didn't, he just gave one of the
legs a little kick, not a violent one but a gentle one, full of respect,
and kept walking.
Either then or later we kissed.
She injected another dose of morphine into your drip, and fixed
a loose electrode on your chest. Out the window, dawn was spreading
over Jerusalem. For a moment she and I watched the green glow of
your EKG rise and fall. Then she drew the curtain and left us alone.
Our kiss was anticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was
just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical
remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement,
a mutual offer of companionship, which is so much more rare than
sexual passion or even love. Daniel's lips were bigger than I expected,
not big on his face but big when I closed my eyes and they touched
mine, and for a split second I felt as if they were smothering me. More
than likely it was just that I was so used to R's lips, thin non-Semitic
lips that often turned blue in the cold. With one hand Daniel Varsky
squeezed my thigh, and I touched his hair, which smelled like a dirty
river. I think by then we'd arrived, or were about to arrive, at the cesspool
of politics, and at first angrily, then almost on the edge of tears,
Daniel Varsky railed against Nixon and Kissinger and their sanctions
and ruthless machinations that were, he said, trying to strangle all
that was new and young and beautiful in Chile, the hope that had
carried the doctor Allende all the way to Moneda Palace. Workers'
wages up by 50 percent he said, and all these pigs care about is their
copper and their multinationals! Just the thought of a democratically
elected Marxist president makes them shit in their pants! Why don't
they just leave us alone and let us get on with our lives, he said, and
for a minute his look was almost pleading or imploring, as if I somehow
held sway with the shady characters at the helm of the dark ship
of my country. He had a very prominent Adam's apple, and every
time he swallowed it bobbed around in his throat, and now it seemed
to be bobbing continuously, like an apple tossed out to sea. I didn't
know much about what was happening in Chile, at least not then,
not yet. A year and a half later, after Paul Alpers told me that Daniel
Varsky had been taken in the middle of the night by Manuel
Contreras' secret police, I knew. But in the spring of 1972, sitting in
his apartment on 99th Street in the last of the evening light, while
General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was still the demure, groveling
army chief of staff who tried to get his friends' children to call him
Tata, I didn't know much.
What's strange is that I don't remember how the night (by then it
was already an enormous New York City night) ended. Obviously we
must have said goodbye after which I left his apartment, or maybe we
left together and he walked me to the subway or hailed me a cab, since
in those days the neighborhood, or the city in general, wasn't safe. I just
don't have any recollection of it. A couple of weeks later a moving truck
arrived at my apartment and the men unloaded the furniture. By that
time Daniel Varsky had already gone home to Chile.
Two years passed. In the beginning I used to get postcards. At
first they were warm and even jovial: Everything is fine. I'm thinking
of joining the Chilean Speleological Society but don't worry,
it won't interfere with my poetry, if anything the two pursuits are
complementary. I may have a chance to attend a mathematics lecture
by Parra. The political situation is going to hell, if I don't join the
Speleological Society I'm going to join the MIR. Take good care of
Lorca's desk, one day I'll be back for it. Besos, D.V. After the coup
they became somber, and then they became cryptic, and then, about
six months before I heard he'd disappeared, they stopped coming
altogether. I kept them all in one of the drawers of his desk. I didn't
write back because there was no address to write back to. In those
years I was still writing poetry, and I wrote a few poems addressed,
or dedicated, to Daniel Varsky. My grandmother died and was buried
too far out in the suburbs for anyone to visit, I went out with a
number of men, moved apartments twice, and wrote my first novel
at Daniel Varsky's desk. Sometimes I forgot about him for months
at a time. I don't know if I knew about Villa Grimaldi yet, almost
certainly I hadn't heard of 38 Calle Londres, Cuatro Alamos, or the
Discoteca also known as Venda Sexy because of the sexual atrocities
performed there and the loud music the torturers favored, but
whatever the case I knew enough that at other times, having fallen
asleep on Daniel's sofa as I often did, I had nightmares about what
they did to him. Sometimes I would look around at his furniture, the
sofa, desk, coffee table, bookshelves, and chairs, and be filled with a
crushing despair, and sometimes just an oblique sadness, and sometimes
I would look at it all and become convinced that it amounted to
a riddle, a riddle he had left me that I was supposed to crack.
1 4 Gr ea t Hous e
From time to time, I've met people, mostly Chileans, who knew
or had heard of Daniel Varsky. For a short time after his death his
reputation grew, and he was counted among the martyred poets
silenced by Pinochet. But of course the ones who tortured and killed
Daniel had never read his poetry; it's possible they didn't even know
that he wrote poetry at all. Some years after he disappeared, with the
help of Paul Alpers, I wrote letters to Daniel's friends asking if they
had any poems of his that they could send to me. I had the idea that
I could get them published somewhere as a kind of memorial to him.
But I only received one letter back, a short reply from an old school
friend saying he didn't have anything. I must have written something
about the desk in my letter, otherwise the postscript would have been
too strange: By the way, it said, I doubt Lorca ever owned that desk.
That was all. I put the letter in the drawer with Daniel's postcards.
For a while I even thought of writing to his mother, but in the end I
never did.
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.
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