A History of the Big House

1

He fell quiet again and slumped back into his armchair with a lost, faraway look in his eyes, muttering in protest that he would never ever talk about it, that it was a story from a bygone age, that nothing was worth waking the dead. Then he picked up the pack of cards again, and started shuffling them continuously to keep his hands busy, a pack that he had once used to play solitaire before he gave up on even that pointless activity, but that he was now happy simply to shuffle all day, then to set down on the tray next to him, beside the address book in which almost all the telephone numbers were of people long dead, all the names reminders of another time in his life, of a history that had collapsed, crumbled, disappeared, and been swept away, like everything else around him, while he stayed there, solid as a rock, a survivor of almost heroic eras, the last offspring of a huge family whose members had all died in turn, one after the other, leaving him all alone in a field of ruins, of memories, in a sea of stories whose inextricable tangles he now found himself less and less able to unravel, and so he would pick up the pack of cards again, and shuffle them once, twice, then put them down again, and stay silent until I asked him another question about someone else, about another incongruous or distant or implausible event. He would think for a while, muddle up a few dates or wars, then find the thread again and go back to the beginnings, to the initial exile, the orange groves, the fleeing deserters, the father’s banishment, the destroyed village in Anatolia, then he would take a long stride through time, lunge over an entire decade, the very one I wanted him to talk about, and go to the Egyptian deserts, the fire stoker on the Suez Canal, the laughing Ethiopian soldier, then he would turn around again, slowly make his way backward, talk about the older branch of the family, about the famine, the Big House crumbling into ruins, the orchards liquidated for next to nothing, coming closer and closer in concentric circles to that mysterious story, to that unnamable thing, holding it close, almost touching it, as he spoke of a Panhard at the bottom of the front steps of the Big House. I would keep quiet, like someone holding their breath while watching a tightrope walker reach his goal, but he would always come to a final halt again at that unnamable thing, then breathe heavily for a while, bite his bottom lip, mutter an incantation and fall quiet, then pick up the pack of cards and swear that he would never ever speak of it.
And then suddenly, one day at noon, as he was eating lunch, seated in the same place as he always had been for the past forty years, at the huge table where no one besides himself ever sat anymore, except when we came to keep him company, as I had that day, and to have lunch with him (but always after him, because since my mother’s death, he had started taking his meals imperceptibly earlier and earlier, so that he now had lunch almost when we would usually be having breakfast), so yes, one day at noon, or to be more accurate while he was having lunch, and I was distracting him by asking him the same questions over and over again, without him fully realizing that I already knew all the answers but one, instead of starting to go around in circles again, inexplicably, he uttered the fateful words, he revealed the final secret, he muttered that they had had him thrown into prison after setting him a shameful trap, and it was up to me to understand that they were the members of the older branch of the family, and that he was one of his brothers, one of my uncles.
I was dumbfounded for a split second, illuminated, as I gathered up these words that were more precious than gold to me, and held them in the purest silence I could find within myself in that instant. Then I realized that I had always imagined that things had happened in exactly that way, that, from the scraps of what he had let slip over the years, I had reconstituted the story precisely as he just told it to me, although I could not be sure whether he had cleverly suggested all of its elements to me without my realizing it, or whether everything he had ever told me, like a slope, inevitably led all the streams of story to flow toward the very one that I was missing and that I thought I had simply made up.
Whatever the case, it seemed to me at that moment that I held all the pieces in play at last, and that I could now re-create the history of the entire family, from the time of the Big House and the land covered in orange trees to the three brothers’ exile in Egypt and their return, a history that would finally flow into my own story, after crossing paths with my mother’s equally tormented family history. And it seemed to me also that I could easily imagine the bridges, the junctures, and all the dizzying lacework of details of the story, with the certainty I now had, that anything I might imagine might just as well have happened, that any distinctions between reality and invention are naturally blurred, and that truth becomes legend and legend acquires authenticity, all within the same edifice.
And as the moment of inner illumination passed, I heard my father add, as he looked right through me into the distance inside himself, that in any case all of that—the sons’ wanderings, the exile in Egypt, and the rest—it was all to blame on an absence, the father’s absence, his own father and the entire family’s, a man who was too imposing, too powerful, and had died too soon, so that the entire universe he had created around himself had vanished along with him. That was something I already knew, but my father made this admission in a kind of absent, altered state, and the dreamy tone of his voice as he made it gave it the sense of an augury. That was when I realized it was time for me to start, and that I could only start from there. From his father’s history.