To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  The conversation moved lightly, swiftly. His nose didn’t break easily, only his ribs, he told her, and his lips—his lips tended to get busted and bleed when he boxed, because they were big. He asked if she had long arms, and before she could answer, he took her hand across the table and guided it to where his bottom left rib stuck out because it had been broken clean through, leaving it to float unattached in his body.

  The waiter came and poured their wine. When he was gone, she took the German Boxer’s hand and guided it to the same rib on her body, which jutted out at the same angle, and had been that way for as long as she could remember. “How is that possible?” he asked in surprise. “You must have broken yours too.” But as far as she knew, she had never broken any ribs. The ribs, it seemed to her, went all the way back to the beginning, and were trying to say something amid their generational confusion about what it was to be a man and what it was to be a woman, and if these things could be said to be equal, or different but equal, or no.

  3

  Her bed, which was queen-size, was too small for the German Boxer, and so he had to curl up in it like a child. The light from a Himalayan salt lamp cast his torso in a warm, pinkish hue. They spoke about: his growing up on a farm near the North Sea and how, when his family went to other people’s houses for dinner, they always brought flowers picked from the fields, how this had instilled in him a sense that all flowers should look as if they had been stolen; the books they liked; whether it was strange to be a German man in bed with a Jewish woman whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors; her sister; his brother; the fact that she never wanted to get married again; the fact that nowadays it was often older women with much younger men, men who wanted to have children that the women, like her, had already had; the problem with monogamy; the problems without monogamy; his belief that boxing was not about violence but about discipline, physical discipline and the discipline of facing his fears.

  Then it was four in the morning, and he said he had to go home. She told him he could sleep there. But he couldn’t, he said, sitting up and pulling on his jeans. He couldn’t fall asleep with someone else in the bed. When she expressed surprise, his face darkened. “No one likes it,” he said, as if a referendum had been held and the results decisive. When his wife left him for another man, she’d told him that it was because the other man held her as they fell asleep. Of course there had been other reasons for her dissatisfaction, too. When she finally admitted that she was in love with someone else and was going to leave the German Boxer, she did it by phone, and during the conversation he took notes so that he wouldn’t forget anything. These he took down on the endpapers of Ghosts by Daylight, a memoir by a journalist on her twenty years of reporting from war zones. And at the top of the list, underlined twice: the fact that he had been unable to hold his wife through the night.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t wish he could sleep next to someone, he told her now. He simply couldn’t find any peace that way. He remained alert, on edge, and so it could take him hours to fall asleep, a problem that was exacerbated by the fact that he knew that if he didn’t get enough sleep, he was likely to get a migraine. He had been getting migraines since he was thirteen. They arrived with an aura that blacked out parts of his vision, and when they came the only thing he could do was curl up in a fetal position until they passed. Though it was impossible to say exactly what caused them, he was certain that lack of sleep was a factor, and so sleep had become of paramount importance. Only when he was alone did he feel at peace, and then he fell asleep moments after his head touched the pillow. It had been like that always, he told her. The last time he could remember sleeping well with someone next to him was when he was five, and had asked his mother to sit by the bed and hold his hand. But he still remembered the serenity of that, the goodness. And yet, whenever the German Boxer spoke of the unhappiness his inability had caused his wife and other women since her, his tone became frustrated and resentful: Why couldn’t they understand that it was bad for him to share a bed? That it caused him to suffer?

  On the only night they ever slept together in a bed—they were in the middle of a forest, he had no choice—he asked her if she minded if he said the Lord’s Prayer. He had just flipped her over, pinned her arm hard against her back, and leaned his two hundred pounds into her. Now they were lying peacefully, her back against his stomach, his long arms around her. “Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name,” he whispered. “Dein Reich komme; dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auf Erden.”

  Freedom

  1

  That same summer—the summer her boys were thirteen and ten, and she was sleeping and not sleeping with the German Boxer—she’d been driving with her friend Rafi back from the moshav where he’d grown up, outside of Tel Aviv. The name of the moshav was Freedom, though it sounded better in Hebrew, less remarkable, but all the same that was the place he was born and had grown up, and as they approached on a dusty road that wound through the fields of orange trees, their children shouting in the back seat, he told her that when he’d at last begun to see a therapist at the age of forty-two, he’d asked aloud, almost to himself, in the way that one can ask unanswerable questions aloud in the presence of such people, “What do I want? What is it that I really want?” To which the therapist had answered, “What you’ve always wanted: Freedom.”

  It was Saturday, and they’d left Tel Aviv early that morning. Rafi had texted her when she woke to ask what she was doing with the kids, and to suggest that they go somewhere all together. Where? she’d written back. To the fields of my childhood, he replied. Their children, all boys, got along well enough that they usually wandered off to kick a ball or climb something, leaving her and Rafi alone to talk. Rafi was a dancer, had been one since the age of three, when he’d begun in his mother’s dance studio. Everything always began and ended for him with the body, whereas she had spent many long years in her mind (or so it felt to her), and had only fully emerged into her body after she’d borne one child and then another, after she’d fulfilled the commands of her biology, and having done with it, at last took up true residence in her body, and started to dance at the age of thirty-five. Sometimes they talked about this, and sometimes they talked about their relationships, or the things they still wanted from life. The boys ran wildly around the playground where Rafi had lost his virginity. He’d had sex everywhere around there, he told her—in that building once abandoned, behind that shed, up on that dry, grassy hill.

  Afterward they all went to his childhood house, and the boys filled their pockets with red lychees from the tree and got bitten by nasty ants in the grass, and then they drove to the neighboring Arab village for lunch and got chastised by the owner of the hummus place for giving their dog water from a bowl that humans ate out of. A plastic takeout box was brought with the water, which the dog didn’t want anyway.

  Now they were on the highway driving home, and she was saying to Rafi that all week people had been telling her the most astonishing stories. She was not aware of having asked for these intimate and staggering stories about their lives, but maybe in her way she had been; maybe she had the look of someone who was trying to work something out, something at once vast and fleeting, which could never be approached head-on but only anecdotally.

  The sea was going by turquoise in the passenger window. The kids were laughing or complaining.

  “I told you the one about the chicken under the car in Lebanon, didn’t I?” Rafi asked. No, he hadn’t, she said; she would have remembered if he had.

  Rafi might have been a dancer, but from the ages of eighteen until twenty-three he’d been in the Sayeret Golani, an elite special forces unit known for the physical extremes demanded of its soldiers. To become a man in his country was to become a soldier—being a soldier was the passage you had to go through, whether you liked it or not, on the way to becoming a man, though no one could say exactly when along that passage it happened that you stopped being a boy. The first time you fired your gun at a moving targe
t? The first time you saw the enemy as an animal? Or the first time you treated him like one?

  Like every other eighteen-year-old, Rafi had no choice but to enlist. But it had not been required of him to go through the grueling selection process to be chosen for the special forces, or the year of masochistic training that followed, nor had it been required, after completing three years of necessary service, to sign on for another two years as an officer. Yet it had always been Rafi’s understanding with himself that he would serve in the special forces, in a unit that would push him to the furthest limits of his physical and mental capacity. That he would become an animal, but a pure animal that operates on instinct alone, like the flying tiger that was the symbol of the Sayeret Golani, and which its commandos received during the induction ceremony in the form of a small metal pin.

  “There would be a field of thorns,” Rafi told her, “and you’d have to cross it. And to do so, your mind simply has to refuse to consider the pain. To think only about getting across, to make the pain irrelevant.” Or there was Hunger Week, during which the recruits were not allowed to eat or sleep for seven days. Each evening, the officers would make a barbeque next to the starving recruits. They would grill steaks, lay out a feast, and then they would say to the recruits, “Come, why don’t you eat with us?” And if someone gave in to his hunger and ate, that was the end: just like that, he’d fallen, and that same day he was sent back to the regular infantry. Once the officers gave out chocolate balls. “Just a small treat,” they said, “we’ll all eat them together,” and on the count of three the soldiers put them in their mouths and bit down on what turned out to be balls of goat shit.

  Of course he had been ready to die for his country, Rafi told her. To believe that one was willing to die for one’s country was the bare minimum required to even enter into the selection process, though along the way there were many boys or men who discovered that they were too afraid to die or to suffer, who couldn’t dissolve their fear so that it seeped out like an odor from the pores of their skin, and the moment this was detected, they were immediately disqualified. It was not until later, after Rafi was discharged from the army and fell in love, that he came to see the grotesqueness and absurdity of dying for one’s country, of dying and also being willing to kill.

  In the back seat, their boys became quiet: the oldest one, the only one with a phone, had taken it out, and the others were leaning in to see.

  2

  It had happened when he was an officer, during the years that Israel had occupied southern Lebanon. His unit was given the assignment to kill the Hezbollah leader in the region. Intelligence knew that every single day at 6:30 a.m. sharp, the Hezbollah chief left the house and got into his car, and their instructions were to rig the engine with a bomb. There were fifteen men in Rafi’s unit, and they were carried over the border by helicopter and dropped at a mountain hideout. At 10:00 p.m., they set out crawling down the mountain and through the fields. For four hours they dragged themselves along on their stomachs until finally they arrived at the village. There was a UN convoy there, and the peacemakers were up laughing and drinking, because the UN people are always happy, Rafi said, for them it’s just one long party. The unit slid past the UN tent on their stomachs and surrounded the house of the Hezbollah leader. As the officer of his unit, Rafi was positioned near to the front door, and it was then, lying on his stomach with his gun trained on it while the explosion specialist disappeared under the car, that he noticed the pairs of children’s shoes. Three or four pairs lined up at the entrance, little rubber sandals just like he and his brothers used to wear on the moshav, when they wore shoes at all. No one had mentioned any children. Though why would they have? Children had no value in the calculus of military operations or wars. And in all of his nearly five years in the army, no one had ever told him anything beyond what he needed to know, and he hadn’t asked. About civilians, the question had only ever been: Should you encounter one in your mission, what will you do? Of which the only three options were: kidnap, kill, or let go, where no answer was right or good. And yet the fact that Rafi had not known about the children and now was lying ten meters from their sandals disturbed him. At that moment he felt a tap on his shoulder and, lifting his eye from the crosshairs of his gun, he saw the face of the explosion specialist, painted dark green like his. The specialist gave him the thumbs-up: the bomb was in place, rigged to go off the moment the Hezbollah chief touched his foot to the gas pedal. Rafi signaled to his men to retreat, and for four hours they crawled back on their stomachs to the mountain hideout, where they collapsed in exhaustion.

  By then it was close to the hour that the Hezbollah chief left his house every day and got into his car. An unmanned aircraft flew overhead and provided grainy footage of what was happening on the ground, and at 6:20 the unit gathered around the display monitor and waited. There on the screen was the house they had left four hours before, dark and still. First it was 6:28, then 6:30, then 6:35, and nothing; 6:45, 7:00, 7:15, and still only that haunting stillness. “What the fuck?” someone said more than once, possibly many times. Intelligence had established that each day without fail, at 6:30 a.m. sharp, the Hezbollah chief stepped out of his house and got into his car. So what was going on? Seven thirty arrived, and still nothing. Rafi radioed to the general of the Northern Command. “Boxer to Kodkod North, over. What’s happening? Kodkod North to Boxer”—because Boxer was always the radio name of Rafi’s position, the officer of the antiterror unit—“Kodkod North to Boxer, stand by, over.” Then, just after 8:00, the door of the house opened, and the whole family stepped out.

  Rafi, who was holding the monitor, felt himself grow cold. In the grainy picture, the father, the mother, and three children approached the car, opened the doors, and disappeared inside. The bomb was rigged such that turning the key in the ignition and engaging the engine activated it, but detonation occurred only at the first millimeter of movement on the gas pedal. At the first millimeter of movement, the car and all of its passengers would be blown to pieces. The doors of the car closed, and now there passed a moment of stillness before the key was turned and the engine came alive. “We have ignition,” came the confirmation over the radio.

  “The seconds that followed, as I remember them now, were the longest of my life,” Rafi said. “I sat watching and waiting, in a state of complete and total horror. One second, two seconds, five. And then after ten seconds, the driver’s door opened, and the Hezbollah chief got out, bent over to look under the car, and pulled out a chicken.”

  It must have been a family chicken, beloved enough that someone in the car would have asked about its whereabouts before they pulled away. Where is—whatever her name was—look, she’s not there with the others! Or, I just saw so-and-so run under the car, she hates it when we leave, she always does this. Or whatever one of the kids piled into the back seat said the moment before their father applied the first touch of pressure to the gas, which would have exploded them all in an instant.

  “Out came the chicken,” Rafi said, “and then the guy ducks down again for a second look, straightens up, and orders everyone out of the car. All the doors flew open, the kids tumbled out along with the wife, and everyone went back into the house. Around me, many of my soldiers were furious—all of that for nothing, the mission had failed, our superiors were pissed off as hell.”

  And him? she asked. How did he feel?

  “The thing is,” he said, “that I can’t remember. And the more time passes, the more I feel I need to know what it seems I will never know: whether I was relieved, whether I understood at that moment that that chicken had saved my life, too, or whether I was no longer even an animal, and had become a machine.”

  3

  It was the late afternoon now, and they were driving away from Freedom, a fact that wasn’t lost on either Rafi or her. She’d had boyfriends one after another before marrying, and then after a decade of marriage she’d gotten divorced, and after that she’d been with a younger man for a long time,
until now at last, for the first time in twenty years, she wasn’t attached to any man at all. It was a lack that had first produced in her a sense of terror that went so far back that she couldn’t identify its source. At the start of what had become a nightmarish period, she had met a friend for lunch who’d said to her, “There is no woman, however loved, who isn’t terrified of abandonment,” and for a very long time she’d tried to work out what that meant. Was it only because the friend was much older, shaped by a time in which women had little or no access to the avenues that might lead to self-sufficiency and independence, that she believed that? When she herself thought about it, there was very little left that a man could give her that she really needed, aside from sex, which was easy enough to find. After six months of panic attacks, unremitting insomnia, and depression, the fear of being alone, without the life support of a man, had at last receded and been replaced with a feeling of quiet euphoria.

  As for Rafi, a year earlier he and his wife had decided to open their relationship of twenty-three years. They had a good and loving marriage, the heat between them had remained, and still they had arrived at the decision together, with the desire for growth and new discoveries. At first Rafi was unsure if he would ever want another woman. He thought he might be like his father, for whom his mother had remained the main force in his life, and to whom his father had remained entirely dedicated. And then, while at a residency abroad, Rafi slept with a much younger dancer from Korea, with whom he thought he was in love, until he met another from Thailand who blew his mind. When he returned home, the Thai woman broke things off from Bangkok, and after some weeks of pain, there was a very young French woman, then two or three Israelis. Meanwhile, during that time, his wife went to the beach with their children, and while they played in the waves with the dog, she met and fell in love with a man fifteen years younger than her.