To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  The service door led to the fire stairs. Abandoning the cane, Brodman clutched the bannister and dragged himself up two flights. His stomach muscles ached. Three times he had to put the basket down to catch his breath. At last they reached the top, and Brodman pushed the metal bar of the door that released them to the roof.

  Birds exploded from the ledge, soaring skyward. Below, the city spread out in all directions. From here it appeared quiet, almost still. To the west, he saw the great barges on the Hudson, the cliffs of faraway New Jersey. Heaving, he set the basket down on the tar paper. The baby squirmed in the cold; his eyes blinked with wonder. Brodman trembled with love for him. His beautiful features were wholly unfamiliar, loyal to no one. A child still without measure, equal only to himself. Perhaps he would turn out not to resemble any of them.

  They would already have discovered him missing below. Alarms would be ringing, the apartment in chaos. Brodman felt the wind knife through the silk shirt. He had no plan. If he had hoped for some guidance, there was none to be found here. The leaden sky had sealed the heavens up. Stooping with difficulty, he lifted the baby out of the basket. His tiny head flopped back, but Brodman caught it and cradled it tenderly in the crook of his arm. He rocked and swayed gently, just as his father had in the early morning, after he had wrapped the black straps around his arm and head. If he was weeping, he did not know it. He stroked the baby’s soft cheek with his finger. The boy’s gray eyes seemed to look on him with patience. But Brodman could not say what it was that he was meant to tell the child. Restored to life, he could no longer parse the infinite wisdom of the dead.

  I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake

  Asleep in my father’s apartment, I dream that someone is at the door. It’s him—he is three, or maybe four, years old. He’s crying; I don’t know why, only that he is bitterly disappointed. I try to distract him by showing him a picture book with beautiful illustrations, in colors far brighter than those one gets in life. He glances at the book, but carries on anyway. In his eyes I see that everything has already been decided. So instead I pick him up and carry him around on my hip. It isn’t easy, but that’s how it has to be, because he’s so upset, this tiny father-child.

  The latch of the front door awakens me. I’ve been living here alone for more than a week. Now, lying still, I listen to the sound of footsteps entering, and a bag being set heavily on the floor. The footsteps move away, toward the small kitchen, and I hear the creak of the cabinet open and close. The sound of water rushing from the tap. Whoever it is knows his way, so there is no one it can be.

  From the bedroom doorway I see the stranger’s broad, stooped back. It takes up half the tiny kitchen. He gulps down a glass of water, fills it again, drains that one, and a third. Then he rinses the glass and places it to dry, upside down, on the rack. He’s sweated through his white shirt. He unbuttons the sleeves and rolls them to the elbows. He splashes his face with water, removes the checked dishcloth from the peg, dries himself brusquely, and stops to press the towel into his eyes. From his back pocket he produces a small comb and runs it through his hair, smoothing it into place. When he turns, his face is not the face I expected, although there was no face I was expecting. This face is old and refined, with a long nose and high, flared nostrils. His eyes are hooded, but surprisingly light and nimble. He walks the few steps back into the living room, tosses his wallet on the table, and only then, looking up, does he notice me watching him from the doorway.

  My father is dead; he died two months ago. At the hospital in New York I was given his clothes, his watch, and the book he’d been reading as he ate alone at the restaurant. I searched his pockets for a note to me, first the pants and then the raincoat. Finding none, I read the book, about legal theory and Maimonides. I couldn’t make sense of the words. I had not prepared myself for his death. He had not prepared me. My mother died when I was three. We had already dealt with death, in our way we’d agreed to be finished with it. Then, without warning, my father broke our agreement.

  A few days after the shiva, Koren brought me the keys to the apartment in Tel Aviv. I hadn’t known there was anything that belonged to my father there. In the five years before he died, he had taught the winter semester in Israel, in the city where he grew up. But I always assumed that he lived in rooms loaned to him by the university, the sort of spare, impersonal place visiting academics are always given, which have everything and nothing: salt in the cupboard, but never olive oil; a knife, but a knife that doesn’t cut. He told me almost nothing about where he lived between January and May. But he was not secretive about it. I knew, for example, that he stayed in the center and commuted to the campus in Ramat Aviv three times a week because he preferred the city, and that the apartment where he stayed was not far from the sea, where he liked to walk in the early morning. When we spoke on the phone, as we often did, and he told me about the concerts he attended, the dishes he had tried cooking, and the book he was writing, I never pictured his surroundings on the other end of the line. And when I tried to recall those conversations, it seemed to me that there was nothing beyond the sound of my father’s voice: it absorbed even the need to imagine.

  And yet there was Koren, with the keys to the apartment I hadn’t known of. It was Koren, the executor of my father’s will, who’d taken care of the funeral arrangements; I had only to be present when they lowered him into the ground, to add the first shovel of dirt. The hollow thud it made on the pine casket made my knees buckle. Standing in the cemetery in a dress too heavy for the warm weather, I remembered the one time I’d seen him drunk. He and Koren had sung so loudly it had woken me up: Chad gadya, chad gadya. One little goat, one little goat. The dog came, and bit the cat, that ate the goat, that my father bought for two zuzim. Once my father told me that the Torah contained no mention of the everlasting soul—that the soul as we know it came along only in the Talmud, and, like all technological advances, it made things easier but cut people off from something that had once been native to them. What was he saying? That the invention of the soul made people strangers to death? Or was he instructing me not to think of him as a soul once he was gone?

  Koren copied the address onto the back of his business card and told me that my father had wanted me to have the apartment. Afterward, as we stood in the fluorescent-lit hall waiting for his elevator, sensing, perhaps, that he had not adequately conveyed some message, Koren added, “He thought it was someplace you might go sometimes.”

  Why? Why, when all these years I’d never visited him there, nor had he ever invited me? I had cousins in the north of the country but was rarely in touch with them; their mother, my father’s sister, was nothing like him. My cousins are hard, practical, unsparing people. Now they already have children of their own whom they let run freely in the street, playing with sharp and rusty things. I admire them but don’t know how to speak to them. After my grandmother died, when I was ten, I’d only gone back once. There was no longer any reason to go. As if something had been decided, my father gave up speaking to me in Hebrew. I’d been answering him in English for years, and so I hardly noticed, but later I came to sense that the language he still dreamed in was an argument he had lost with someone else, not me.

  Now when the stranger in my father’s apartment speaks to me, I answer reflexively in English: “I’m Adam’s daughter. Who are you?”

  “You surprised me,” he says, clapping his chest. He sinks down onto the sofa, his knees falling open.

  “You’re a friend of my father?”

  “Yes,” he says, rubbing his throat under the open collar. The hair on his chest is sparse and gray. He gestures for me to sit, as if it were I who had appeared unannounced in his living room, and not vice versa. With shining eyes, he takes me in. “I should have guessed, you look like him. Only prettier.”

  “You didn’t say your name.”

  “Boaz.”

  My father had never mentioned a Boaz.

  “I’m an old friend,” the stranger says.

  �
��Why do you have the keys?”

  “He lets me use the place when he isn’t here. Now and then, when I come through the city. I stay in the back bedroom, and check on things for him. Last month there was a leak from upstairs.”

  “My father died.”

  For a moment he says nothing. I can feel him studying me.

  “I know.” He stands up, turning his back to me, and easily lifts the heavy bag of groceries he’d set down earlier. But instead of leaving, as I expect—as any normal person would—he retreats to the kitchen. “I’m making something to eat,” he says without turning. “If you’re hungry, it’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

  From the living room I watch him nimbly chopping the vegetables, cracking the eggs, and rummaging in the refrigerator. It annoys me to see him making himself so at home. My father is gone, and yet this stranger intends to take advantage of his hospitality. But I haven’t eaten all day.

  “Sit,” he commands, sliding the omelet from the skillet onto my plate. Obediently, I take my place, just as I used to do when my father called me to the table. I eat quickly, without seeming to taste the food, so as not to give him any pleasure—although it’s good, the best I’ve had in a long time. My father used to say that food tasted better to him when I ate it, but it also always tasted better to me when he’d prepared it. I pick the last salad leaves off the plate with my fingers, and when I look up, the stranger is watching me with pale green eyes.

  “Your hair,” he says, “you always wear it so short?” I shoot him a look to make it clear that I have no interest in getting personal. He eats in silence for a few minutes before trying again: “You’re a student?”

  I drink my water without bothering to correct him. Through the bottom of the glass I see his blurred mouth.

  He tells me that he is an engineer. “Then you can afford to stay wherever you want when you come to the city,” I say. He stops chewing and smiles, revealing small, gray, childish teeth. “I work for the municipal department,” he says, and names a city in the north. “Anyway, this is the most convenient.”

  It makes no difference to him, whoever he is, that my father has died—why should he let that get in the way of convenience? I decide to tell him to leave right now. I push back my chair and drop my plate in the sink, but what I find myself saying, instead, is that I am going out for a walk.

  “Good,” he says, and goes on chewing in a slow manner, his fork and knife poised delicately in the air above his plate. “Get some fresh air. I’ll do the dishes.”

  It’s late in the afternoon, but the heat hasn’t let up. All the same, my annoyance dissipates once I’m outside. On the taxi ride from the airport I’d been surprised by how ugly and run-down everything looked, the pockmarked walls and rusted rebar poking from concrete columns on the roofs. But now I’m already used to it. It even comforts me in a way, this lazy decrepitude, along with the dusty trees, the yellow sunlight, and the sound of my father’s language.

  Soon I come to the water. I sit cross-legged on the beach and choose a small piece of the sea to watch, a tiny piece that changes with the light and the wind and some force far below. A child is sitting at the shore’s edge, shouting with glee every time the waves lap her legs, while her parents sit in plastic chairs, talking and sharing a thermos of coffee. It’s easy enough to understand what drew my father back here. More difficult to understand is why he stayed away for twenty years. He left with me after my mother died. He got a job teaching in New York, I started school, and we spoke less and less about my mother’s absence, or our lives before. I became a native, but he could only ever be a foreigner, and now that I am here, in his city, I wonder for the first time why he waited so long to return, after I’d already grown up and finished college. When I first opened the door of the apartment I hadn’t known about, I was overwhelmed by what I found: the walls lined with books, the faded rugs my father must have hunted for in the market, his opera records, the baubles on the shelves, mementos from his travels, the tin tea caddies and the colorful dishes in the cabinet, the battered upright piano with Bach still open on the stand. Even the smell of spices in the kitchen. It was my father’s place, there was no question of that; here were all of the things he loved. But it was exactly this thoroughness that surprised and unsettled me. It was as if I was looking at my father’s life upside down: this was his real home, and the apartment I’d grown up in was merely the place he stayed when away from here. Standing in the middle of his living room, I felt a stab of betrayal. If there were such thing as a soul, however refracted, to where would his return?

  By the time I get back to my father’s street, it’s already dusk, and I see the lights on in his apartment. My eye catches something moving on the washing line that extends from the bathroom window. Some shirts—my shirts—are swaying in the shadows. I follow the cord until my gaze arrives at a pair of large hands, delicately pinning my underwear up to dry.

  Racing up the two flights of stairs, I bang the light switch in the hall, fumble with the keys, and fly through the door. “What are you doing?” I explode, gasping for breath, the blood buzzing in my ears. “Who gave you the right to go through my things?”

  The municipal engineer has stripped to his white undershirt. The basket of wet clothes is balanced on the stool beside him.

  “They were on top of the washing machine. I stained my shirt cooking, and it seemed a waste to run a wash for nothing.”

  He places a clothespin between his thick lips and turns back to the careful work of pinning my clothes and letting out the line. His shoulders are covered with the sunspots that come with age, but his arms are thick and muscular. He wears no wedding ring.

  “Listen,” I say in a low voice, though he is already listening. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t just go letting yourself into people’s apartments and invading their privacy.”

  He puts down the clothes and removes the pin from his mouth. “Have I invaded your privacy?”

  “You’re going through my underwear!”

  “And you think they interest me?”

  Now the heat rushes to my face. The pair of purple underwear that was in his hands a moment ago is old and childish, the elastic stretched out.

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “So what are you saying? You don’t want me to do your laundry? Next time I won’t.” He pins the last shirt and turns away from the window. “There’s ice cream in the refrigerator. I’m going out and I won’t be back until late. There’s no need to wait up for me; I have the key. In case you have nowhere to go, there’s a good movie on at nine.”

  Why do I watch the movie? I eat the ice cream and watch the movie, just as he suggested. The movie isn’t half bad, it’s true, but I fall asleep anyway, and when I wake up something else is on. It’s past midnight. I put my father’s watch to my ear. It will go on ticking for only so long, and soon the surplus of time he left for me will be spent. But for now it goes on ticking.

  Somewhere there is a cat crying, or maybe a baby. I run the water for a bath and, lying back, I notice for the first time a dark water stain on the ceiling where the plaster has begun to peel from a leak. Before I go to bed, I knock on the door of the tiny back bedroom, although I know he isn’t there: I would have heard him come in. I flip the light switch. The narrow bed is as neatly made as a soldier’s. He seems too big for such a bed—my bed, it suddenly occurs to me, the one my father meant for me to sleep in if I’d ever come to visit. But I had not visited, and so in the meantime the small bed had been loaned out to a stranger.

  There is a wooden dresser at the foot of the bed, the only other piece of furniture that fits in the room. Opening the top drawer, I find a shaving kit, toothbrush, and a change of underwear. The others are empty.

  In my father’s bedroom, I take out the small leather photo album I found in the drawer of his night table. In the apartment where I grew up, the only photographs my father kept were of me, and now, since I found the little album a week ago, I can’t st
op looking at it. On the first page is a picture of him as a young man, even younger than I am now. He wears shorts and hiking boots, and stands in front of the rock wall of a canyon. It’s uncanny how much the face in the photo looks like mine. Though we always shared a resemblance, it was muted by the difference in our ages. But in this picture it’s easy to see how it happens—how one nose gets passed down through time; one set of ears that stick out a little too much; one eye that is just the tiniest bit smaller than the other, as if to hold itself back from seeing. Even our postures are similar, as if we were born, one after the other, to occupy the same spot.

  It takes me a moment to pick him out in the next photo. He’s swimming in a pool under a waterfall with some others, mouth open, eyes laughing, the shutter snapped just as he was shouting to the person behind the lens. In the third photo he’s crouching on a rock, shirtless, a cigarette cupped in his hand, a girl next to him, her legs outstretched. Now the familiarity of his face, which is also my face, begins to feel even stranger, because this relaxed young man has so little to do with my father, who was disciplined and rigorous even in the pursuit of his pleasures. In the last photo, his arms are thrown out, and he is laughing in a desert that stretches behind him forever. It fills me with longing, as if I, too, had been there long ago, or as if part of me goes on being there, or maybe it’s just the feeling that I would give anything to meet him there, to stand face-to-face with him, a mirror image of the desert stretching behind me forever.

  I fall asleep without realizing it, and when I open my eyes again a filmy dawn fills the window, and I have the sense that something has woken me. In the dream I was having, many people were coming and going from a place that was supposedly my father’s apartment, but actually looked more like the train station of a small town. I understood that my father was dying there, in the stationmaster’s office, like Tolstoy. I get up for a glass of water, and in the hall I see that the door of the spare bedroom is slightly ajar. When I push it open, a heavy odor drifts out, the odor of a man’s body abandoned to sleep. I see him sunk into the covers, legs thrown over the edge, arms wrapped around the pillow, breathing evenly. Submerged in sleep, given over entirely to it, as if he no longer had any responsibility left in the world but to sleep like that—to sleep the sleep of the dead. I feel myself growing drowsy just watching him. As if his sleep has cast a spell over me, suddenly my limbs feel heavy and all I want is to collapse back into bed, to burrow down in the blankets and abandon myself to a long and dreamless sleep. I’m so exhausted that if the bed in the small room hadn’t been so narrow I’d have crawled in next to him, curled up, and closed my eyes. I have to fight to pull myself away and back down the hall, and when I get there I fall into bed.