To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  I’ve got it! Iris shouts. Everyone turns to her. How about Rafael? He’s a perfect Rafael! she exclaims, holding up the baby so that all can look at him in this new light. Her uncles exchange a thoughtful look. Shlomi still likes Micah, but Dan wants to stay away from the Bible and its implications. He stands looking at the baby with his hands on his hips, the empty carrier slung across his shoulder where twenty years ago there hung a machine gun.

  What about Tom? he asks. Sandor came up with it the other day, and I have to say that it’s stuck.

  It’s the first time Tamar has heard anyone utter the Husband’s name. The first time, in fact, that anyone has mentioned him since she arrived in Israel. She’s half begun to wonder, despite the toothbrush and the smell of cologne, whether as part of some elaborate ploy they’ve made him up altogether.

  Doesn’t he look like a Tom? Dan asks.

  He looks like an Eli, is what he looks like, her mother insists.

  I like Tom, Remy offers.

  Iris turns the baby back to herself, to study his features once more.

  Actually, me too, she agrees.

  Shlomi gives a look that suggests he doesn’t disagree, and all eyes turn expectantly to Tamar. But what she’s really being asked, what it is that she would be agreeing to, she can’t exactly say. And so she sighs and turns back to the sea, as if there was something out there, something coming from far off, that requires her presence to receive it.

  5

  The following day the baby comes down with something. They all used the antibacterial gel that Dan squirted into their palms, but nevertheless the baby has woken with a stuffy nose, and soon he is running a fever. Shlomi, who is against worrying, insists it is only a cold. But the fever climbs, and when the hitherto peaceful baby starts to scream and has trouble breathing while he feeds, Dan calls a doctor. It is three in the morning by then, but his old friend Yuli, a pediatrician, drives over in her car. When she sees the baby’s labored breathing and listens to the congestion in his chest, she tells them he has a bronchial infection and insists on driving them to the hospital. There the baby is given a chest X-ray, admitted to the pediatric ICU, placed in a metal crib under an oxygen tent, hooked to an IV and cardiac monitor, and fitted with a tiny clamp on his finger that sends rays of light through it, so that the doctors can keep track of the oxygen level in his blood. He has a respiratory virus that, while common enough in adults, can take a five-week-old’s life. By the time Tamar, Ilana, and the kids get to the Children’s Center at Ichilov, Shlomi is frightened. He stares at the baby’s vital signs rising and falling on the monitor, or slouches next to the crib, stroking his child with a hand slipped under the plastic tent. A nurse comes and sticks a long tube far down the baby’s throat to suction out the mucus, while Shlomi looks on in horror, crossing and recrossing his arms over his chest. It is a procedure that will have to be done every few hours in the days that follow. The baby doesn’t have enough energy left to scream, but tears run down from the corners of his gray eyes. Remy starts to sob, and Tamar takes him downstairs with the excuse of buying her brother and Dan a coffee.

  Is Tom going to be okay? Remy asks, pushing his forehead into her stomach.

  Yes, she says, though she has no authority to declare as much. Tom will be just fine.

  But from then on, the baby has a name. A name that pins him to life, that stands in opposition to the nothing and nowhere that hovers like a shadow just outside the hospital room door. A name both of his fathers can cry out on the second day, when the Code Red sounds and the emergency team comes flying into the room, ready to intubate the baby, a procedure that will no longer leave him to breathe on his own. A name that the Code Red team, gathered around the crib, can refer to in his chart once the numbers on the monitor begin slowly to drift up again, and for the time being the emergency has passed, and his fragile life holds.

  It is not until the third day that the Husband appears at the hospital. He arrives carrying a plastic Castro bag from which he removes homemade sandwiches packed in tinfoil for everyone, and a large thermos of sweet tea. The brown felt hat has been replaced with a straw one for summer, which he hangs on a hook behind the door. He has been away, and came as fast as he could, he explains. He does not say where. Maybe the others know, or maybe for them it is irrelevant: the point is that he is here with them now. Remy and Iris greet him with smiles, glancing at their mother, whom they seem to hope will not say or do anything untoward. Tamar watches him take her own mother’s hand. He doesn’t assert himself into the family dynamic, and yet at the same time he seems simply to be accepted there, with kindness and gratitude. Watching him, Tamar thinks of something Katie sometimes said: that there is no man anywhere so difficult, that there is not some woman somewhere dying to take care of him. If, having had enough of being a woman, she decides to throw in the towel at last—if such a thing were actually possible without extreme hardship, and every form of pain—could Tamar also give herself over to those that would bring her up the stairs to an unknown door, where a woman would be waiting, perhaps a whole family, to take her in with open arms and no questions asked?

  Ilana insists that they all take a break and go out to sit under the trees in the playground for a while. Shlomi and Dan haven’t left the hospital since they arrived, and the sun and air will do them good. Tamar goes down with everyone, but once outside realizes that she’s forgotten her handbag with her sunglasses. Returning upstairs, she pauses at the door of Tom’s room and looks in to find the Husband sitting next to his crib in a shaft of light from the window, talking quietly to the baby in his strange language. The moment has no logic, it exists outside of reason, nor does it carry anything inauthentic. No one and nothing has any more right to it than the new child, foreign like every baby who arrives from the unknown, and the foreign old man who now begins to softly sing to him.

  On the fifth day, Tom finally turns the corner. He is in the clear, and that evening the oxygen tent is removed, and when Remy puts down the card trick he has been practicing and goes over to look into the open crib, Tom looks up at him and beams. On the morning of the sixth they promise that after a final chest X-ray, Tom will be able to go home, but they keep him one last night, so that it is not until the morning of the seventh day that he is finally released, returned to the family the same way he came to them, only now with the awareness that the people who arrive to us from nowhere and nothing are only ever that: a gift, received without our having known to ask, with only the wonder of how life delivers and delivers.

  To Be a Man

  My Father

  My boys are standing at the edge of the jetty, and either they will jump or they won’t jump. It is early summer, June, under the great bell of the sky, on the island on which I was raised. The waves are coming in from such a long way off that no one can say when or where their turbulence began, only that they are the transmittance of an energy that finally breaks here, and resolves into the shore. I watch them, my two boys, from the sand. My father, unusually quiet today, wearing a hat against the sun, watches too. He isn’t yet old, but at this very moment I can’t recall exactly how old he is. If his life seems long to me, it’s because he has changed more than anyone I know. One day, over the course of many years—there is no other way to put it—he took all his great anger out to sea, let the wind out of its sails, and came back home without it. Came back home with a stillness and patience where once the rocking fury had been.

  Sometimes I forget my own age too. When people ask the ages of my boys, I round upward to give myself time to get used to where they are going. But while my father doesn’t have so very much time left, and I have some, my boys still have all the time in the world. The younger one does a little dance on the edge of the jetty. The older one tilts back his head, spreads his arms, and shouts something toward the sky.

  I watch my boys and talk, and my father listens. Life, I say, or am trying to say, which is always happening on so many levels, all at the same time.

  Broken Ribs
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  1

  That summer, while her boys are on vacation with their father, she goes to visit her lover in Berlin.

  “You see,” he says, leaning down toward her and lowering his voice so that those passing by won’t hear, “one thing you don’t know about me is that I like to serve.”

  It is a surprising thing to hear, coming from a man two meters tall and built like a heavyweight. In fact, he is an amateur boxer; or rather was one for many years, until a month ago, when an attack of Schwindel—of vertigo—briefly hospitalized him, turned up a scar in his brain, and put an end to it. And yet, though he claims that he will never step foot in the ring again, and is employed as an editor at a highly respected newspaper, she still privately refers to him, both to her friends and herself, as the German Boxer. It is easier than using his name, which means “little gift from the gods”—because of that, and because calling him the German Boxer highlights their differences, and preserves a sense of ironic distance that keeps her grounded in the new land she’s recently discovered, like some Christopher Columbus of the soul: the land of being unattached and free.

  They are walking around Schlachtensee—a long, thin lake at the edge of the Grunewald Forest—discussing whether or not eighty years ago he would have been a Nazi. The German Boxer thinks it is moral grandstanding to claim that he would not have been, as most everyone else in his generation claims, but now he goes beyond the usual argument of how he would have been shaped by historical forces that would have made his participation nearly inevitable, to offer the particular vulnerabilities of his own character.

  “I am exactly the kind of person they would have recruited for the Napola,” he says, referring to the elite preparatory schools where they groomed the strong, obedient, and relatively clever German youth into leaders of the SS. “I’ve always overly idolized my mentors, and strove to fulfill every last demand they made of me, because it struck fear in me to imagine failing their expectations. That, along with my size and build, makes me just the sort of person they would have wanted. And, being wanted, I would have felt honored. It’s my weakness for honor and praise, you see, that would have sent me right into the ranks of the SS.”

  “Plus you would have loved the uniform,” she adds, thinking of the row of white shirts tailored in London that hang on a bar in the sunlight of his bedroom, of his suits made in Naples not only to his measurements but also to his precise taste (no silk, no lining at all, only materials rough to the touch), his winter coat of wool so finely stitched that he avoids putting his hands in the pockets for fear of ruining it. Of his white leather boxing gloves, handmade by Winning in Japan to fit his slim fingers and wrists. She does not offer this evidence gladly. She would prefer to believe that the man she is sleeping with could not have been, under any circumstances, a Nazi. But by now she knows him well enough that she can’t truly disagree.

  Along the shore of the lake, lovers spoon in the sunlight or under the alders, kissing or lazily stroking each other’s half-naked bodies, and whenever they pass an attractive couple, the German Boxer points them out with a sign of appreciation, or maybe even envy. He was happily married for nearly a decade, blazingly happy, as he describes it, until his wife, an actress, left him for the man who played Lancelot to her Guinevere in the Volksbühne. Since then he’s lost the feeling he’s had all his life of being blessed and untouchable. Those close to him see this as a positive development, he admits, since until his divorce felled him, he was often insufferable. But he has been broken by it, and he would have preferred to remain happy and insufferable than whatever he is now.

  Arriving at the beer garden at the eastern end of the lake, they stop to have a drink. It is a Sunday, and the tables covered with red-and-white-checked cloths are crowded with Germans enjoying their nature. Joyful shouts of children float up from the water’s edge. The German Boxer is telling her that her older son’s lankiness and long arms, which he’s seen in a photo, would make him an excellent boxer, and it does not seem necessary to her to repeat that her son would never box, that her son is nearly as far from boxing as he is from being German. Not finding a foothold, the conversation moves on to Oktoberfest, and he begins to explain to her what a dirndl is.

  “But you would have killed?” she asks now, though perhaps with less incredulity than she might have expressed toward someone who had not, on occasion, knocked out a stranger with a single punch, or nearly snapped the wooden bars of her headboard because in the midst of orgasm he experienced an uncontainable desire to destroy something.

  “Of course I would have killed,” he says. “Killed while believing—having been built to believe—that I was doing the right thing.”

  “I could never kill anyone,” she insists.

  Over the top of his beer glass, the German Boxer eyes her with a look of polite skepticism. And it is true that no sooner has she made this assertion than her mind begins involuntarily to supply exceptions.

  When, a few days later, she makes reference in a text to him showing up at her door in 1941 in leather boots, he replies that one thing he could not have done was kill innocent people. This seems in contradiction to what he so plainly asserted while walking in placid sunshine around the lake, but when she writes back to clarify which people it was that he had been so certain he could kill, her text remains unanswered, hanging in WhatsApp limbo, stamped with only a single gray check, because the German Boxer likes to turn his phone off when he feels finished with it. Later, when she meets him for dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Mitte, he says that of course he couldn’t have knocked on people’s doors and deported or executed them. What kind of person does she think he is? When he said he could kill people, he meant in battle, since he was sure that he would have been assigned to the Waffen SS and sent to the front. She does not have the wherewithal just then to ask what makes him so sure he wouldn’t have been assigned to the Gestapo, or the Allgemeine SS responsible for enforcing the Nazi racial policies, or even the Death’s Head units that oversaw the concentration and extermination camps.

  They sit in silence, waiting for their dumplings to come. After a few moments, the German Boxer suggests that he might be wrong. After all, he says, his grandfather was in constant trouble with the Nazis because he’d allowed Gypsies to stay on his land, his great-grandfather was murdered in Aktion T4, and his father was the sort of man who refused to follow anyone. No, perhaps he wouldn’t have been a Nazi after all—let’s hope as much, he says. She nods. In truth, she agrees, their conversation is an impossible one, given that whoever he was now would not have been who he’d have been back then, shaped as he would have been by different forces, and whoever he’d have been then did not exist.

  Though naturally she continues to think about it.

  2

  A mutual friend set them up in New York, and over email they agreed to have dinner the following night. He asked if they could meet on the later side, since he would be boxing in the afternoon. Where did he box? she asked; she was curious to see this. In fact, she had never seen anyone box, not even on TV, since brutality and blood made her queasy. He wrote that she wouldn’t want to meet him after he sparred, that it was the kind of gym where no one showered, but that if he liked her after tomorrow, he would take her to the gym and they would fight; until then it would remain a secret gym. “Nobody knows me there, or what I do or what I think or what I want,” he wrote. She read his email three times, then replied that he ought to be careful, that she was deadly. She didn’t know exactly why she wrote that. Maybe because of the arrogance in his phrasing, the indirect challenge of it: If I still like you. Because of the sense of pride it tripped loose in her, even if she knew he was writing in a language not his own, without the nuance he had in German, and because she wanted him to know that she was someone who had—who had always had—a certain power over men. Or because she wished to imply that whatever was explosive in him was also explosive in her, that there might be a parity there, and maybe more than a parity: that the scales of explosivene
ss, of a form of strength, might even tip in her favor. Which may or may not have been grandstanding.

  “My ribs have a tendency to break,” he wrote back. “Please be careful when destroying me.” In other words, he knew exactly what to do with her. Caught her and spun her around and drew her close; knew how to work her, knew just what a mix of strength and vulnerability in a man can do to certain women, of which she was apparently one. As it was, after this brief exchange she knew that she would take him home to bed.

  When she arrived at the restaurant, he was already there, the way German trains are always already there, waiting in the station. His size was something else again. It was impossible not to notice him, looming a head or even two above everyone around him. If someone asked her in that moment—the waiter, for example, going past with his tray held high—whether she liked being made to feel physically small next to a man, she would have had to answer yes. Yes, but with an asterisk! *Physically small but spiritually powerful. In other words, she liked him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing until she said he could be a wolf, and then he should be pure wolf with no trace of the sheep for the duration of time they would spend fucking in her bed, after which he should go back to being someone who wouldn’t in a million years think of grabbing her throat when he wanted something. Was this a problem? And one more thing: from time to time he should be very slow and gentle when he went about blowing her house down.

  He handed her a stem of tiny, pale purple flowers. She thought he’d picked them on the way, but later it turned out that he’d bought a whole bouquet, but gave the rest away to a pregnant woman on the subway who’d admired them and asked who they were for, because at that moment it occurred to him that he’d bought a bouquet of flowers for a stranger, which might have been overdoing it. They were shown to their table. The restaurant was dim and warm, the walls lined with the old glass cabinets of the pharmacy the place had been until, after having been boarded up for decades, it reopened as an Italian restaurant. Whenever a waiter or waitress came to the table, the German Boxer stopped what he was saying to smile and thank them for whatever they had just set down.