House of Windows

The Aerial Courtyard

With its flight of worn limestone steps, its slender columns and iron banisters, rising at intervals into delicate archways, the house called to mind a host of mismatched objects and structures, the entire assortment of which might suggest, together, something of its quirky elegance, but none of which alone does justice to the building's eccentric proportions. It had the multiple, zigzagging decks of a luxury liner, the intricate balconies and catwalks of a stage set, the busy grid of a crossword puzzle, and

The tall, spindly struts of an oversized canopy bed. All and none. Whatever else it resembled (as it turned out, some other thing or form almost every time I mounted the stairs), we both felt the mysterious lure of the place in excited silence the first time we ascended. It was nighttime and December. The bite of the air made the stars appear sharper with each step upward.

E., the young architect who had just bought the apartment perched at the uppermost back corner of the building, had decided to travel from Jerusalem to Rome for nine months. He'd been offered work at an Italian firm and meant to rent his new place for a reasonable fee. Sleepy-lidded and skinny-hipped, he greeted us at the door and waved us casually inside the cavernous front room—which looked, in the glare of the fluorescent lights that night, too wide and lofty and tiled a space to ever be adequately heated, or even thinly warmed. This prediction proved accurate. When the temperature there was ours to control, we discovered that it didn't matter if we placed both our on-loan space heaters in the room and cranked them high enough to singe the links of the feeble electrical system: We would never manage to take the edge off that chill. But in the end, the cold didn't really matter. If anything, it came to seem a necessary, albeit uncomfortable, aspect of the apartment's obstinate charm. Life there would be as raw as that at the summit of a wind-blasted cliff, I imagined then, and again was more or less right in my estimation.

After glancing at the rest of the apartment to be sure that our first charged impression had been correct—we agreed that we would take it. There were two large rooms, a hallway of a kitchen, and a basic bathroom with a ragged piece of broken mirror propped on the primitive sink. The place had some furniture (a boxy Formica-topped desk, a stuffed couch, several rigid chairs, and a drafting table from whose weak back we would soon learn to eat our meals, taking extra care not to set pots down suddenly and upset its nervous balance), but still it echoed, hollow as an airplane hangar. Even after we scattered the floors with the candy-striped rag rugs we'd toted back under our arms from the Old City, the front room talked back when we whispered. A child's desk and rickety trundle bed took up most of the back room, whose most magical feature was a wood-and-glass-fronted cabinet, set back into an arch. When we visited that first night, its papered shelves served as a resting place for what looked like most of E.'s belongings: a few rolled floor plans, a sweater tangled in its own tattered sleeves, some notebooks, several pairs of worn tube socks. A plastic-framed poster of a David Hockney swimming pool leaned against one wall, its electric new blues and yellows at once worlds away from this turn-of-the-last-century Arab house and, in a blockier, more abstract sense, a perfect extension of the building's deepest shapes.

E. seemed reluctant to make the place his. As we sat and discussed the lease and security deposit, we sipped the tea he served us from what appeared to be his only two cups. He coiled his arms around his legs meanwhile and squeezed himself into a tight knot on the couch, unwilling, it looked, even to let his feet touch the floor. I had never owned property, but I thought I understood E.'s impulse to flee town just as soon as the apartment was officially his. It wasn't that he didn't love the place; as he showed us the views from the bedroom windows and the faint scar on the floor where he'd knocked down an extraneous wall, it was clear that he did. He just needed to leave and come back, I supposed, to prove that this was home.

We ourselves had, in a way, set out on a similar probative trek. By packing all our books, plates, lamps, rugs, and paintings into a San Francisco storage locker and flying with the key to Jerusalem for ten months, we were testing the bonds and limits of our American home. Peter had a fellowship to translate medieval Hebrew poetry from Muslim Spain. His stipend would pay our expenses that first married year in the city where he had spent the better part of his adult life and where I'd lived briefly as a student. He would finish his book; I looked forward to improving my Hebrew and, just as important, to not being in San Francisco, where I had moved, fresh and confident, straight out of college, and found myself almost instantly at loose ends.

While I couldn't blame my newfound confusion on anyone but myself, I sensed there was something in the slack rhythms, the soft air, and famous fog of that city that encouraged aimlessness. Was it something in the water? Almost everyone I knew there was caught—if that's not too active a word to describe this floaty way of drifting through life—between careers or lovers or coasts. Nothing stuck. Or perhaps I should say, nothing stuck to me. There were others, obviously, who were quite content to pass the time there, and though I took an active dislike to the local cult of the good life and its literary equivalent, I tried for a while to adapt myself by searching out and soaking up the more grounded sides of the city: I'd stroll past the herbalists, fish stores, and stationery shops of Chinatown or buy my fruit, cheap and in Spanish, from the outdoor stands in the Mission District. There was an Iranian grocer named Muhammad from whom I often purchased salted white cheese, pickled vegetables, and powdery cardamom cookies. ("Your husband is Persian?" he asked skeptically once, as I loaded my goods on the counter.) But these (mainly commercial) wanderings of mine had a haphazard quality. The neighborhoods were not my own, and my own wasn't quite mine either: We lived, at the time, in a liminal area that Peter called the Tendernob, at the peculiar, anonymous midpoint between the seamy, druggy Tenderloin and upscale, patrician Nob Hill.

My occupation also seemed, for the first time in my life, fuzzy, even pointless. When I'd first arrived in California, I worked at a magazine where I wrote rejection letters by the stack and learned to proofread—both inherently depressing tasks, as they make one fixate on all that is wrong with a given paragraph or poem. Later, I assembled indexes, edited textbooks, taught Hebrew school, and worked for a while as a receptionist in an imposing Victorian mansion where illegal immigrants would come for help in getting their green cards. Surrounded by the heavy, plush drapes and mahogany paneling, I sat at a huge desk and answered the phone, then tried to decide, on the basis of a few nervous words mumbled in one of twelve or fifteen languages I didn't understand, where to transfer the call. To the Cantonese-speaking social worker or the Mandarin one? Vietnamese? Thai? Polish? Serbo-Croatian? When the phone wasn't ringing I would read. Once, in the midst of a biography of the poet Mandelstam, I looked up to find a gaunt young man inspecting me and my book scornfully from the bench where he slumped, waiting to talk to Ella, the sweet, pudgy Russian counselor whose bright pink lipstick only emphasized her full mouth of gold teeth. Finally, he spoke: "You are not Russian."

No, I said.

"You have interest in this poet?"

Yes.

"But you do not know Russian language."

No—which prompted an exasperated shake of the head and a lengthy lecture, in broken English, on the superiority to all others of his native tongue. This literary-jingoistic diatribe—from a person who had, in fact, come to wait opposite me in the hope that he might someday win American citizenship—veered now to the subject of Shakespeare and culminated in the conversation-killing pronouncement, "Is much better in Russian." Who was I to disagree? My internal sense of continental drift had become so pronounced by then, I could hardly defend Shakespeare's language, let alone my own.