To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  It was a neighborhood of modest houses set back from front lawns unadorned by flowers. In the dusk, the Hasids went past at a tilt in dark suits, in denial of the heat, the women in long skirts and sleeves pushing and lugging children, bent and hurrying. Always hurrying, these people—it was Leonard’s voice she heard in her head. Hurrying to get one last mitzvah under the belt, though the Messiah himself, that great scorekeeper of Jewish action, Jewish fate, was in no hurry himself.

  The rabbi’s house was as nondescript as the rest, aside from an aluminum frame chair left out under a tree, the nylon straps of the seat sagging deeply, as if someone had sat many hours thinking there. But when Noa parked and crossed the lawn at a diagonal on the way to the front door, she saw that the patchy grass around the chair was littered with cigarette butts, the chair merely the seat of a bad habit the rabbi’s wife wouldn’t condone in the house.

  With Leonard and Monica’s divorce papers under her arm, she rang the bell. But when the door opened, it wasn’t the rabbi’s wife, but the young assistant with the sparse blond beard. His face brightened with surprise when he saw her. She asked if the rabbi was home, holding up the envelope by way of explanation. No, the young rabbi said, the whole family was at a wedding. “Seems everyone is getting married today,” Noa said. The young rabbi raised his eyebrows and smiled. She clutched the envelope, not yet ready to give it up. Did she want to come in? he asked.

  Noa wondered if he had even heard about the fires, which couldn’t be smelled from there. A bowl of fruit, pears and purple grapes, their skin ripe and frosted, was set out on the kitchen table. Sit down, he offered, gesturing to a chair. He boiled water in the kettle for tea, and brought her some in a glass. She sipped it, grateful for his simple act of kindness. Watching the familiar ease with which he moved around the kitchen, it occurred to her that this was not merely an assistant but the rabbi’s son. He sat down opposite her and stirred a spoonful of sugar into his own glass, his lips moving in silent blessing before he drank.

  “Noa, right?” he said.

  She couldn’t remember introducing herself by name on the day of the get, but he must have heard her parents or sister address her.

  “I’m Aviel, but everyone calls me Avi.”

  Noa looked hungrily at the fruit, and Avi, sensitive and alert, pushed the bowl toward her.

  “Please, take,” he said, and got up to bring her a plate and knife. She thought of the Hasids who sometimes stood on street corners, stopping passersby to ask if they were Jewish, and if they wanted Shabbat candles, or to put on tefillin, and wondered if Avi’s hospitality was merely practical, born of the Rebbe’s command to draw in wayward Jews, to bring them into the fold where they, too, could add to the count of mitzvot that would hasten the coming of the Moshiach.

  “How are your parents?” he asked. He didn’t know them, but had been present at an intimate moment of their lives, which made him something other than a stranger.

  “They’re away,” Noa offered. “Leonard is an archaeologist, and every summer he goes back to Israel to lead an excavation. And Monica is in Vienna, taking care of my grandmother.”

  “And you stayed behind?”

  Cutting a pear, Noa told him about her job at the florist shop, and how she was saving money to travel next summer. She had been many places with her parents, but never to South America. If she got as far as Chile and still had enough money, she would make the journey to Easter Island, to see the monolithic heads carved in volcanic stone that had fascinated her since she first saw photographs of their strange faces as a child. For a long time no one knew how their primitive makers had transported them from the quarry to the coast, where they were mounted on massive platforms, their faces turned inland. When Leonard told her, a few years later, that researchers had finally figured out how it was done, she was disappointed and didn’t want to know, preferring to preserve the mystery. It was a difference between her and Leonard, who had spent his life digging to the bottom of things. And Monica, too, a professor of comparative literature whose effort to squeeze the meaning out of German and Hebrew texts was exhaustive. It worried Noa that she couldn’t yet think of any profession that appealed to her in which this holding on to mystery had any value.

  Avi listened with fascination, as if he were imagining her traveling alone on buses barreling through the jungle, around dangerous curving mountain passes, toward the mysteries of childhood. He, too, liked to travel, and had recently returned after two years of running the Chabad house in Bangkok. That he had seen the wider world might explain the knowingness Noa sensed in his face. She remembered how she had caught him looking at her during the get, and now she saw again that there was a flickering brightness in his eyes, a curiosity at odds with the conformity of his dark suit. The cigarette butts by the lawn chair must have been his, not the elder rabbi’s, a habit he might have picked up in Thailand. What place did curiosity have, Noa wondered, in a world like his?

  “And what about you? Why’d you stay behind instead of going to the wedding with everyone else?”

  “There’s no shortage of weddings. My mother is one of eight sisters and brothers. I have a cousin getting married nearly every month.”

  She thought she should relinquish the envelope and go, but something kept her. Avi’s fingers rested on his empty tea glass, long and delicate. She saw him look at her bare legs, and the knowledge that such nakedness had never before been glimpsed in that kitchen gave her a sudden sense of power.

  “And you? When are you getting married?”

  The sky was darkening outside the window.

  “Next year, im yirtzeh HaShem.”

  They went on talking. He asked her about Leonard’s work in Israel, and she told him about Tel Megiddo, formed by the remains of twenty-five civilizations that rose and fell, destroyed by earthquake or fire, until the next was rebuilt atop the ruins. How for twenty years Leonard had been uncovering these layers of destruction, destroying them in turn in order to discover the truths about the people who lived and died there. How? Avi asked, fascinated, and she described the slow and methodical work, the baskets of shards collected and sorted each day, the carbon-14 used to determine when a living thing, a seed or grain left in a cup, had ceased to live. As she spoke, she sensed in him the familiar shiver of wonder and fear she’d sometimes been struck with as a child, looking around her from the vantage of a distant future, and wondering what would be left to piece back together the rituals of vanished belief, vanished hopes and hungers, to solve the mystery of why she and all those near to her had passed out of existence.

  He waited for her to say more, but she had run out of the words for things. Finally she put her fingers on the edge of the envelope that contained the judgment of divorce, then slid it across the table. Far away, her parents were getting on with their lives. Avi took it and held it for a moment in his delicate hands, then put it on the counter where the rabbi would find it. Noa stood up as if to go, but even as she stood she knew, from the depths of her body, that she wasn’t going. She remained standing, swaying on her feet. Avi watched her, full of amazement. At last she stepped toward him, and it seemed that her fingers were reaching for a very long time until at last they touched the blond hairs of his cheek. He closed his eyes, his lips moving. Gently, she covered them with her own, as if to still them, but instead she took into herself whatever they were saying in that ancient language, and felt the desire grow live in her groin. His eyes were open now, and moving her mouth away, she unbuttoned her shirt. It wasn’t much, but she felt it was a gift all the same, and took his trembling fingers and put them on her breast. His thumb moved over her nipple, and she held her breath and shivered. She undid her shorts and let them fall to the floor, and was about to step out of her underwear when he turned to the window in fear, as if someone outside might see into the wonders of what was happening within. As if the fires were nearly upon them, burning closer and closer, as uncontainable as all fires that sweep away the old order to make way for the next. He cl
utched her hand in his sweaty hand, and led her through the dark living room to his small bedroom at the back of the house. And there, in the narrow twin bed, she gave to him what she wanted to give, and took from him what she needed, and when the splitting pain shot through her, she bit into his shoulder to stifle her cry, and had no words for the blessing.

  Seeing Ershadi

  I’d been in the company for over a year by then. It had been my dream to dance for the choreographer since I first saw his work, and for a decade all of my desire had been focused on getting there. I’d sacrificed whatever was necessary during the years of rigorous training. When at last I auditioned and he invited me to join his company, I dropped everything and flew to Tel Aviv. We rehearsed from noon until five, and I devoted myself to the choreographer’s process and vision without reserve, applied myself without reserve. Sometimes tears came spontaneously, from something that had rushed upward and burst. When I met people in the bars and cafés, I spoke excitedly about the experience of working with the choreographer, and told them that I felt I was on the verge of constant discovery. Until one day I realized that I had become fanatical. That what I had taken to be devotion had crossed the line into something else. And though my awareness of this was a dark blot on what had been, until then, a pure joy, I didn’t know what to do with it.

  Exhausted after rehearsal, I’d either walk to the sea or go home to watch a film until it got late enough to go out and meet people. I couldn’t go to the beach as often as I’d have liked because the choreographer said he wanted the skin all over our bodies to be as pale as the skin on our asses. I’d developed tendinitis in my ankle, which made it necessary for me to ice it after dancing, and so I found myself watching a lot of films, lying on my back with my foot up. I saw everything with Jean-Louis Trintignant until he got so old that his imminent death began to be too depressing, and then I switched to Louis Garrel, who is beautiful enough to live forever. Sometimes, when my friend Romi wasn’t working, she came to watch with me. By the time I finished with Garrel it was winter, and swimming was out of the question anyway, so I spent two weeks inside with Ingmar Bergman. With the New Year, I resolved to give up Bergman and the weed I smoked every night, and because the title was appealing, and it was made far from Sweden, I downloaded Taste of Cherry, by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

  It opens with the actor Homayoun Ershadi’s face. He plays Mr. Badii, a middle-aged man driving slowly through the streets of Tehran in search of someone, scanning crowds of men clamoring to be hired for labor. Not finding what he’s looking for, he drives on into the arid hills outside the city. When he sees a man on the side of the road, he slows the car and offers him a ride; the man refuses, and when Badii continues to try to convince him, the man gets angry and stalks off, looking back darkly over his shoulder. After more driving, five or seven minutes of it—an eternity in a film—a young soldier appears, hitchhiking, on the side of the road, and Badii offers him a ride to his barracks. He begins to question the boy about his life as a soldier and his family in Kurdistan, and the more personal and direct the questions, the more awkward the situation becomes for the soldier, who is soon squirming in his seat. Some twenty minutes into the film, Badii finally comes out with it: he’s searching for someone to bury him. He’s dug his own grave into the side of one of those bone-dry hills, and tonight he plans to take pills and lie down in it; all he needs is for someone to come in the morning to check that he’s really dead, and then to cover him with twenty shovelfuls of earth.

  The soldier opens the car door, leaps out, and flees into the hills. What Mr. Badii is asking amounts to being an accomplice to a crime, since suicide is forbidden in the Quran. The camera gazes after the soldier as he grows smaller and smaller until he disappears altogether into the landscape, then it returns to Ershadi’s extraordinary face, a face that remains almost completely expressionless throughout the film, and yet manages to convey a gravity and depth of feeling that could never come from acting—that could only come of an intimate knowledge of what it is to be pushed to the brink of hopelessness. Not once in the film are we told anything about the life of Mr. Badii, or what might have brought him to decide to end it. Nor do we witness his despair. Everything we know about the depth contained within him we get from his expressionless face, which also tells us about the depth contained within the actor Homayoun Ershadi, about whose life we know even less. When I did a search, I discovered that Ershadi was an architect with no training or experience as an actor when Kiarostami saw him sitting in his car in traffic, lost in thought, and knocked on his window. And it was easy to understand, just looking at his face: how the world seemed to bend toward Ershadi, as if it needed him more than he needed it.

  His face did something to me. Or rather the film, with its compassion and its utterly jarring ending, which I won’t give away, did something to me. But then again, you could also say that in some sense the film was only his face: his face and those lonely hills.

  Not long after that, it became warm again. When I opened the windows the smell of cats came in, but also of sunshine, salt, and oranges. Along the wide streets, the ficus trees showed new green. I wanted to take something from this renewal, to be a small part of it, but the truth was that my body was increasingly run-down. My ankle was only getting worse the more I danced on it, and I was going through a bottle of Advil a week. When it was time for the company to go on tour again, I didn’t feel like going, even though it was to Japan, where I’d always wanted to travel. I wanted to stay and rest and feel the sun, I wanted to lie on the beach with Romi and smoke and talk about boys, but I packed my bag and rode with a couple of the other dancers to the airport.

  We had three performances in Tokyo, followed by two free days, and a group of us decided to go to Kyoto. It was still winter in Japan. On the train from Tokyo, the heavy tile roofs went by, houses with small windows. We found a ryokan to stay at, with a room done up with tatami mats and shoji panels, and walls the color and texture of sand. Everything struck me as incomprehensible; I constantly made mistakes. I wore the special bathroom slippers out of the bathroom and across the room. When I asked the woman who served us an elaborate dinner what happened if something was spilled on the tatami mat, she began to scream with laughter. If she could have fallen off her seat, she would have. But the room had no seats at all. Instead, she stuffed the wrapping for my hot towel into the gaping sleeve of her kimono, but very beautifully, so that one could forget the fact that she was disposing of garbage.

  On the last morning I got up early and went out with a map, on which I had marked the temples I wanted to visit. Everything was still stripped and bare. Not even the plum trees were in blossom yet, so there was nothing to bring out the hordes with their cameras, and I’d gotten used to being mostly alone in the temples and gardens, and to the silence that was only deepened by the loud cawing of crows. So it was a surprise when, having passed through the monumental entrance gate of Nanzen-ji, I ran into a large group of Japanese women chatting happily together in singsong fashion on the covered walkway that led to the abbot’s residence. They were all outfitted in elegant silk kimonos, and everything about them, from the ornate inlaid combs in their hair to their gathered obi belts and their patterned drawstring purses, was out of another age. The only exception were the dull-brown slippers on their feet, the same kind offered at the entrance of every temple in Kyoto, all of which were tiny and reminded me of the shoes Peter Rabbit lost in the lettuce patch. I’d tried them myself the day before, shoving my feet into them and gripping on with my toes while attempting to slide across the smooth wooden floors, but after almost breaking my neck trying to climb stairs in them, I’d given up and taken to walking across the icy planks in my socks. This made it impossible to ever get warm, and, shivering in my sweater and coat, I wondered how the women didn’t freeze wearing only silk, and whether assistance was needed to tie and wrap and secure all the necessary parts of their kimonos.

  Without noticing, bit by bit I’d worked my way
into the center of the group, so that when suddenly the women began to move in unison, as if in response to some secret signal, I was swept along down the wide and dim open-air corridor, carried by the flow of silk and the hurried pit-patter of tiny slippers. About twenty feet down the walkway, the group came to a halt and spat out from its amoeba-like body a woman dressed in normal street clothes, who now began to address the others. By standing on my tiptoes, I could just see over the women’s heads to the four-hundred-year-old Zen garden that was one of the most famous in all of Japan. A Zen garden, with its raked gravel and minimum of rocks, bushes, and trees, is not meant to be entered but to be contemplated from the outside, and just beyond where the group had stopped was the empty portico designed for this. But when I tried to make my way out by tapping shoulders and asking to be excused, the group seemed only to tighten around me. Whomever I tapped would turn to me with a bewildered look, and take a few quick little steps to the left or right so that I could pass, but immediately another woman in a kimono would flood in to fill the void, either out of an innate instinct to right the group’s balance or just to get closer to the tour guide. Enclosed on all sides, breathing in the dizzying stench of perfume, and listening to the guide’s relentlessly incomprehensible explanations, I began to feel claustrophobic. But before I could try to elbow my way out more violently, the group suddenly began to move again, and by flattening myself against the wall of the abbot’s residence I managed to stay put, forcing them to move around me. They crossed the wooden floor in a chorus of scuffling slippers.