The girl, Dafna, left you of course. Not immediately, but in time. You discovered that she had been with another man. Could you blame her? Maybe this other man took her out dancing. Cheek to cheek, groin to groin, in one of those noisy discos with a tribal drum-beat, and she was intoxicated by her nearness to a man whose body was not a distant country to himself, a distant and at times enemy country. No, the story isn’t difficult to imagine. Already at twelve or thirteen you began growing inward. Your chest collapsed, your shoulders rounded, your arms and legs became caught out in awkward positions, as if they had become disassociated from the whole. You closed yourself in the bathroom for hours on end. God knows what you did in there. Tried to make sense of things. When Uri used the bathroom he would burst out, the water still gurgling down the toilet, rosy cheeked and even singing. He could have done it in front of a live audience. But when you at last emerged you looked pale, sweaty, troubled. What were you doing all that time, my boy? Waiting to let the smell pass?

She left you, and you 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.

Nicole Krauss. Great House (Kindle Locations 966-971). W. W. Norton.