Great House by Nicole Krauss

threatened to kill yourself, came home on leave, and sat in the garden like a vegetable, your shoulders draped with a blanket. No one came to see you, not even Shlomo, because a few months earlier, because of God knows what injury that you judged unforgivable, you cut him off, your best friend of ten years, as close to you, closer, than your own limbs. What is it like, I once demanded of you, to be a man of such high principles that no one else can live up to them? But you only turned your back on me, just as you turned your back on everyone who betrayed you with their shortcomings. So you sat hunched in the garden like an old man, starving yourself because the world had disappointed you again. When I tried to approach, you stiffened and became mute. Perhaps you sensed my disgust. I left you to your mother. The two of you whispered together, and fell silent whenever I entered the room.
    There was another girl after that. The one you met in the army,when you were stationed together at Nachal Tzofar. You stopped coming home on the weekends; you wanted to stay close to her. Later she was sent to the north, wasn’t she? But you found ways of seeing each other. When she finished her tour of duty she enrolled in Hebrew University. Your mother told me that you planned to follow. The army wanted you to become an officer, but you declined. You had better things to do. You intended to study philosophy. What is the application? I asked you. You stared at me darkly. I’m not a fool; I recognize the value of expanding the human picture. But for you, my child, I wished a life of solid things. To move in the opposite direction, toward greater and greater abstraction, seemed to me a disaster for you. There are those who have the necessary constitution, but not you. From a young age, you tirelessly searched for and collected suffering. Of course it isn’t that simple. One doesn’t choose between the outer and the inner life; they coexist, however poorly. The question is: Where does one place the emphasis? And here, however coarsely, I tried to guide you. Sitting in the garden wrapped in a shawl, recovering from your forays into the world, you read books on the alienation of modern man. What does modern man have on the Jews? I demanded, passing you with the garden hose. The Jews have been living in alienation for thousands of years. For modern man it’s a hobby. What can you learn from those books that you weren’t born knowing already? And then, watering the vegetables, I let a little spray drift in your direction, soaking your book. But it wasn’t me who stood in your way. I couldn’t have even if I wanted to.
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    W E STOOD in the hall of the house that had once been all of our house, a house that had been filled with life, every last room of it brimming with laughter, arguments, tears, dust, the smell of food, pain, desire, anger, and silence, too, the tightly coiled silence of people pressed up against each other in what is called a family. And thenUri enlisted, and, three years later, you, and after what happened you left Israel, and then it was only your mother’s and my home, and we could only occupy one, at most two rooms at a time, leaving the rest empty. And now it was mine alone. Only there you were like an awkward visitor, a weary guest, clutching your suitcase. I looked at it, and then I looked at you. You shifted it from one hand to the other. I thought—you began to say, but then stopped, following some invisible thing across the room. I waited.
    I thought maybe, you began again, if you didn’t mind, I would stay here a little while.
    I must have looked shocked because you swallowed and looked away. And I was, Dov. I was shocked. And I wanted to say, Yes. Of course. Stay with me here. I’ll make up your old bed. But I didn’t say that. What I said was, For your sake or mine? A faint but unmistakable grimace seized your face before it dissolved, leaving your features flat and