To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  When I finally rouse myself, it’s already noon, and sunlight streams through the slats of the shutters. The long blind sleep has left me agitated and restless. The door of the small bedroom is closed. I walk all the way to the pool on the roof of Dizengoff Center, a large mall with cheap clothing shops and a movie theater. The women with saggy-bottomed bathing suits drift back and forth, and the old man with the gold swimming cap is there again, doing his knee bends in the shallow end. If he slips below the surface and doesn’t come up, the lifeguard will come down and fish him out, but once he leaves and goes home there are no lifeguards. One day he will slip below the surface in his own house, or on the street, the way my father slipped below the surface in a restaurant. Or maybe it isn’t like that at all—maybe the weights that hold life down suddenly lift.

  I swim thirty lengths, then walk back to the apartment. The door of the stranger’s bedroom is still closed. I make some toast and afterward go out to read at a nearby café, where the waiter in skinny jeans with a lazy eye smiles at me while he squeezes my orange juice. Afterward I wander through the market. A man tries to sell me a hat, but I don’t want a hat. What do I want? the man wants to know. I go to the beach and watch the hairy men playing paddleball. By the time I return to my father’s apartment, it’s already late in the afternoon, the shadows on the sidewalk grow away from the sea, and the municipal engineer is in the kitchen baking stuffed peppers. Only at that moment, the moment I come through the door and see him peering into the oven, does it occur to me that my father might have arranged this. That just as he had prepared his will, given Koren the keys, and made sure his wish for me to come here was communicated, my father might also have gone to the trouble of asking his old friend to watch over me, or to pass something on to me, however discreetly, some message or sign of what to do now that he was gone.

  “You’re back,” he says, lowering the volume of the news from the radio. “Good. Dinner is almost ready. You like cherries? The grocer had cherries today.”

  I want to ask him where he was last night. I want to ask about the undertow that pulled me out with him into fathomless sleep. But what would be the question? Instead I set the table and wonder which chair my father used to sit in. I decide it must have been the one closest to the stove, facing the window—the one Boaz sat in yesterday. This time when we sit to share the meal he has prepared, he in his chair and I in mine, I make a point of being more friendly. Something has changed, and he knows it. His nimble eyes, even lighter than I’d remembered, regard me with a questioning look, and something else, too, a kind of sad patience. I wish he would talk, but he carries on eating in silence. It’s up to me to speak, so I tell him that I’m not in fact a student, that I’ve been working in an architecture firm for three years, but that I don’t like it. When I wake up in the morning, I tell him, I don’t look forward to the hours in front of the computer, the architect’s bad-tempered outbursts, and the complaints of his rich clients.

  “So why do you stay?” he asks, wiping his mouth.

  After dinner he takes a bath, and in my room I hear the water ripple each time he moves on the other side of the wall. Twenty minutes later he comes out of the bathroom dressed in the same clothes, freshly shaved, his wet hair neatly slicked back.

  “I’m going out for a while,” he says, “so you’ll have the place to yourself.” He goes down the hall to the small bedroom, carrying his toothbrush and his towel. I can smell his aftershave in the humid air that floats out of the bathroom.

  “What did you come here for?” I blurt out when he appears again. It isn’t the way I’d meant to ask, and immediately I regret it. I want him to know that I understand the need to uphold our parts in the charade we’re playing for my father’s sake. And so quickly I add, “Just to check for leaks?”

  “To see someone,” he answers, and by the way he says it, shoving his hands into his pockets, I sense that it’s a woman. For the second time I’m surprised at myself, at the way his answer disappoints me. It was not what I’d expected him to say—though what was it that I’d expected him to say? That he came for me?

  And I surprise myself yet again when, a few moments after he goes out the front door, I slip out after him and hurry down the stairs. I follow him at a distance down the street. He passes under a mulberry tree, so I pass. He crosses to the other side, so I cross. He stops to look up at the tall building they are raising, and I too stop to look up, and it seems to me that I could go on doing this for a very long time, shadowing a life.

  Soon we are in an unfamiliar part of the city, more run-down than the rest. The terraces seem to be hanging on by a few screws. He stops at a bakery and comes out again holding a small box tied with string. Cookies? What kind? Cakes? The woman’s favorite kind, which she waits for every time, and has come to expect? He looks across the street, and for an instant it seems that his eyes catch mine. But his face registers nothing, and he turns away and continues to walk. A few blocks farther, he goes into a supermarket, and this time I wait behind a car until I see him come out with a plastic bag.

  By now it’s dark. The stranger, Boaz—if that’s his name—is still moving up ahead. We walk for almost an hour. But I don’t mind, I’ve always been a good walker. My father used to say that even as a little girl I would walk very far and never complain. If it weren’t for my thirst, and the fact that I ran out without my wallet, I’d be content to go on like this all night. But soon I’m really dying for a drink, and every time we pass one of the wire recycling cages filled with the negative shapes of so many quenched thirsts, I’m reminded.

  At last the stranger stops in front of a squat stucco apartment building. The small front garden is overgrown, crowded by a large bush by the entrance and a wild-looking tree whose dark, glossy leaves partly obscure the facade. He pauses to look up, and through the leaves I see that the windows of the first floor are lit up. He goes through the front gate, but instead of entering the building he walks around to the side alley, and four or five skinny cats spill out of the bushes, threading through his legs and purring as he removes some tins from the supermarket bag. He peels off the tops and sets the tins down on the ground. The cats swarm, more appearing from under the bushes. When he kicks some empty tins aside, they leap back and tense. He says something to calm them, and they return to devouring the food. I stand under the streetlamp, no longer caring if he sees me. But if he knows I’m there, he doesn’t let on. Stuffing the plastic bag into his pocket, he comes back around to the front and pauses, as if to sniff something in the night air, and looks up again at the lit windows through the leaves. The branches move in the breeze, tapping the glass, and he stands, jingling the coins and keys in his pocket, as if trying to decide something that could go either way. Then, squaring his shoulders, he hurries up the path and disappears into the dark lobby. A cat yowls, somewhere a television is on, but otherwise it’s quiet. For a moment I think I can hear the waves, but it’s only the breeze rising in the leaves. I cross to the other side of the empty street, but it’s even harder to see into the windows from there. It’s obvious I’ll have to climb the tree.

  Standing at the base of the trunk, I search for a foothold and manage to hoist myself up into the branches. The twigs catch on my T-shirt, and the resin that oozes out of the broken stems makes my hands sticky. Once my foot slips, and I almost fall. But then I am high enough, and close enough, that I can almost reach out and touch them: a young woman and a child, sitting peacefully at a table, framed in a rectangle of light. Her long hair is braided down her back, and when she looks up from her book to see what the child has drawn, I see her light-colored eyes, and the thought comes to me—calmly, clearly—that somewhere, somehow, someone has given him the wrong key, and that she is the daughter he has come back to watch over. Legs trembling from effort, I grip the tree trunk, waiting for her to hear the doorbell and to let him in. What could be taking him so long? What is he rehearsing on the other side of her door? And is it only their own doors, the doors of those they love, t
hat become locked to the dead?

  At that moment I hear footsteps below, and see him hurrying underneath into the street. The twigs tear past on my way down, scratching my face and arms. I jump the last part, land hard, and begin to run. At the top of the block I see a figure turn the corner, but by the time I get there there’s no sign of him, and the quiet street ends in a wide and busy avenue. Traffic speeds past. A bus groans to a halt, and it seems possible he’s on the other side of it, but when it pulls away the sidewalk is empty. I look into the only place that’s open, an all-night pharmacy on the corner, but there is only an old woman leaning on her cane among the boxes and bottles, patiently waiting for her prescription to be filled. How could he have just disappeared like that? I think, angry at him and at myself. Though maybe the real question is how I managed to follow him so far.

  No place in Tel Aviv is ever far from the sea, and when I find my way to it and get my bearings, I realize I’m closer to my father’s apartment than I’d thought. The sea is different in the dark, more vast and alive, filled with intelligence. When I get to the rock jetty behind the old shuttered discotheque, I see a group of men casting their fishing lines off the end into the black water. I watch for a while, but nothing comes of it. I wonder whether I should go home and wait for the stranger. But I feel he won’t come back, not tonight, and not tomorrow either, just as I also feel that a decade will pass, and I’ll have children of my own, before I finally change the lock.

  By the time I return, it’s past midnight. I check the stranger’s room, but it’s empty, as I knew it would be, the bed neatly made. My head feels heavy, and a feeling of exhaustion comes over me. I strip off my clothes, dropping them in a trail in the hallway on my way to bed, as I’ve always done when I’ve lived alone. The shutters are closed, and I inch through the pitch-dark and collapse on top of the covers. Only then, lying still with my eyes open, do I hear the rhythmic breath of someone already asleep in the bed. I scream out, arms flailing, and my fist sinks into something soft and warm. I grope for the lamp, and when the bulb flares, I see the stranger sprawled out in his undershirt, mouth half open, abandoned to sleep just as before. He couldn’t have gotten home long before me, and yet he’s already so far from the shore of wakefulness that neither my scream nor my fist has roused him. Heart pounding, I snatch my T-shirt from the floor and throw it over my head. I mean to shake him awake and demand an explanation for everything, to tell him to get out of my bed, or my father’s bed—at the very least a bed that isn’t his, for his is down the hall if it is anywhere at all. But just as I’m about to grab him by the shoulders, a powerful chill comes over me. Suddenly I’m afraid to disturb him, as if he might have been sleepwalking all this time, as if waking him might unsettle a balance, causing something to cease or fall still forever.

  I switch off the lamp, close the door gently behind me, go down the hall to the spare bedroom, and climb into the narrow bed. For a while it seems that sleep will never come, until I open my eyes and it’s morning, and I hear the sound of the bath running. But it isn’t the bath; it’s the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the wall from the apartment above. Perhaps soon there will be another leak, and then the stranger will have to wake up and deal with it. I get out of bed and go to look for him in my father’s bedroom. The door is open and the bed is empty, the sheets unmade. Entering the living room, I almost trip over him. He’s curled up on the floor, legs pulled into his stomach, hands tucked between his knees, sleeping like a baby. Very gently, I prod him with my foot, but he carries on serenely, untouched in his vast sleep. How long can this go on? I wonder. Soon winter will come, the sea will darken, and the rain will fall, leaving puddles in the broken asphalt. But even as I think this, I know in my heart that it will go on a very long time. That I will get used to stepping over the stranger on my way to the kitchen because that is the way one lives, casually stepping over such things until they are no longer a burden to us, and it is possible to forget them altogether.

  End Days

  On the third day of the fires, after they jumped the borders and entered the city, the rabbi called to find out if her parents’ judgment of divorce had arrived. The telephone woke Noa. It was barely past seven, but the rabbi had probably been awake since dawn, his world a more ancient place. She put him on hold while she got up and searched through the stacks of mail that had piled up since Leonard and Monica left. Under the bills and advertisements, she found the thick brown envelope from the California State Supreme Court.

  “Hello?” she said into the phone. “It’s here.”

  Her finger must have slipped, because now the rabbi’s voice flooded forth on speakerphone, magnified and amplified, with instructions on how to deliver him a copy, so that the get—the Jewish divorce agreement—could be finalized and officially registered. She copied down the address. The rabbi was leading a trip to Poland, flying tomorrow with a group of thirty-five. Before he departed for the camps and ghettos, he wanted to get this squared away. “That everything should be in order,” he told her. And so the paperwork in Noa’s hand was needed immediately. Today if possible; tomorrow morning at the latest. The rabbi made no mention of the fires. They had nothing to do with him, burning now and here.

  Come summer, Noa’s family, too, had always gone back in time. Back three thousand years, to the Iron Age and its successive disasters. Leonard liked to say that they were profiting from other people’s tragedies. Her father never failed to deliver this line every June, when the new team assembled for his welcoming remarks, so that she came to associate the arrival of summer—of stifling heat, of heaped-up time—with the coopting of a distant suffering. Archaeology, Leonard liked to say, is the reverse of building up: as the work descends, it undoes and destroys. And though Noa always looked for a tinge of regret in his voice, she never found it. Once, when she was ten, she had been present at a discussion between him and his second-in-command, an archaeologist named Yuval, who had a three-legged dog. Yuval was agonizing over a small intact wall that he didn’t want to destroy. “You think you’ll ever remember this wall?” her father demanded. Yuval rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his dirt-caked hand. “Knock it down,” her father ordered, and trudged off into the shattering sunlight.

  Leonard had been excavating Megiddo since before the girls were born. Megiddo, called Armageddon by the Greeks, prophesied in the book of Revelation as the place where armies will gather to battle at end times. But its past went back millennia. Over the course of twenty years, Leonard had dug down through the centuries until he’d hit on the tenth, BC, when, according to biblical history, Israel to the north and Judah to the south had been joined together by King David. Megiddo, Leonard liked to say, was the playground for the big questions about the United Kingdom of Israel. But it had been her playground, too, as every year she had spent the summer watched over by the students, who took turns entertaining her and Rachel until they were old enough to entertain themselves. Then they would spend their days reading paperbacks on the dry lawn at the kibbutz where they lived during the excavation, or swimming in its pool, where chlorine stung their eyes and blurred their vision.

  But now Rachel was doing an internship in New York, Monica was in Europe taking care of her own ailing mother, and Leonard had returned to Megiddo alone. Alone, too, Noa slid open the patio door and sniffed the air. The acrid smell of burning was at odds with the buoyant morning sun that drifted through the leaves. Just past seven meant that in Megiddo it would already be five in the afternoon, the hour they began washing the load of pottery shards exhumed that day. At five thirty sharp Leonard would arrive, and the team would pour out basket after basket for his inspection, which he would rapidly sift through, deciding what should be sent to Reconstruction, and what should be discarded. She’d watched the procedure countless times when she was younger, positioning herself near enough to snatch a rejected piece off the table, a terra-cotta handle or enameled shard that she could salvage from the trash.

  Having raise
d two daughters and been through thick and thin, Leonard and Monica had separated amicably in early spring. The explanation they gave to those who asked and many who didn’t was that after twenty-five years of marriage they were ready for new adventures. What these adventures entailed neither would say, but it was clear to Noa that their terrain would be human rather than geographical. Liberal and evolved as they were, neither saw any great tragedy in their uncoupling, for they would always be friends, Leonard and Monica explained. So amicably did they separate that they had brought Noa and Rachel to the ceremony for the get, required for a Jewish divorce. Brought the girls, as they had once brought them to see a healing dance performed by the San tribe in Namibia, and the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Monica, impeccable as always, wore a floral dress. Rachel came home from college specially, arriving from the East Coast the day before. The divorce had come as a surprise to them both, but only Rachel was convinced that something had happened to instigate it. Noa would have liked to believe that—to believe that only recent events had been hidden from them, rather than a fundamental truth that went back many years. On the drive there, she listened to their parents run though a litany of stories about how they’d met and the early years when the girls were babies, just as the canonical stories about Leonard’s mother had been recited at her shiva the year before.