To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  Dedication

  For Sasha and Cy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Switzerland

  Zusya on the Roof

  I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake

  End Days

  Seeing Ershadi

  Future Emergencies

  Amour

  In the Garden

  The Husband

  To Be a Man

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nicole Krauss

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Switzerland

  It’s been thirty years since I saw Soraya. In that time I tried to find her only once. I think I was afraid of seeing her, afraid of trying to understand her now that I was older and maybe could, which I suppose is the same as saying that I was afraid of myself: of what I might discover beneath my understanding. The years passed and I thought of her less and less. I went to university, then graduate school, got married sooner than I’d imagined, and had two daughters, only a year apart. If Soraya came to mind at all, flickering past in a mercurial chain of associations, she would recede again just as quickly.

  I met Soraya when I was thirteen, the year that my family spent abroad in Switzerland. “Expect the worst” might have been the family motto, had my father not explicitly instructed us that it was “Trust no one, suspect everyone.” We lived on the edge of a cliff, though our house was impressive. We were European Jews, even in America, which is to say that catastrophic things had happened, and might happen again. Our parents fought violently, their marriage forever on the verge of collapse. Financial ruin also loomed; we were warned that the house would soon have to be sold. No money had come in since our father left the family business after years of daily screaming battles with our grandfather. When our father went back to school, I was two, my brother four, and my sister yet to be born. Premed courses were followed by medical school at Columbia, then a residency in orthopedic surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery, though what kind of special we didn’t know. During those eleven years of training, my father logged countless nights on call in the emergency room, greeting a grisly parade of victims: car crashes, motorcycle accidents, and once the crash of an Avianca airplane headed for Bogotá that nosedived into a hill in Cove Neck. At bottom, he might have clung to the superstitious belief that these nightly confrontations with horror could save his family from it. But one stormy September afternoon, my grandmother was hit by a speeding van on the corner of First Avenue and Fiftieth Street, causing hemorrhaging in her brain. When my father got to Bellevue Hospital, his mother was lying on a stretcher in the emergency room. She squeezed his hand and slipped into a coma. Six weeks later, she died. Less than a year after her death, my father finished his residency and moved our family to Switzerland, where he began a fellowship in trauma.

  That Switzerland—neutral, alpine, orderly—has the best institute for trauma in the world seems paradoxical. The whole country had, back then, the atmosphere of a sanatorium or asylum. Instead of padded walls it had the snow, which muffled and softened everything, until after so many centuries the Swiss just went about instinctively muffling themselves. Or that was the point: a country singularly obsessed with controlled reserve and conformity, with engineering watches, with the promptness of trains, would, it follows, have an advantage in the emergency of a body smashed to pieces. That Switzerland is also a country of many languages was what granted my brother and me an unexpected reprieve from the familial gloom. The institute was in Basel, where the language is Schweizerdeutsch, but my mother was of the opinion that we should continue our French. Schweizerdeutsch was only a hairbreadth removed from Deutsch, and we were not allowed to touch anything even remotely Deutsch, the language of our maternal grandmother, whose entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. We were therefore enrolled in the École Internationale in Geneva. My brother lived in the dormitory on campus, but as I’d just turned thirteen, I wasn’t old enough. To save me from the traumas associated with Deutsch, a solution was found for me in the western outskirts of Geneva, and in September 1987 I became a boarder in the home of a substitute English teacher named Mrs. Elderfield. She had hair dyed the color of straw, and the rosy cheeks of someone raised in a damp climate, but she seemed old all the same.

  My small bedroom had a window that looked onto an apple tree. On the day that I arrived, red apples were fallen all around it, rotting in the autumn sun. Inside the room was a small desk, a reading chair, and a bed at whose foot was folded a gray wool army blanket old enough to have been used in a world war. The brown carpet was worn down to the weave at the threshold.

  Two other boarders, both eighteen, shared the back bedroom at the end of the hall. All three of our narrow beds had once belonged to Mrs. Elderfield’s sons, who had grown up and moved away long before we girls arrived. There were no photographs of her boys, so we never knew what they looked like, but we rarely forgot that they had once slept in our beds. Between Mrs. Elderfield’s absent sons and us there was a carnal link. There was never any mention of Mrs. Elderfield’s husband, if she’d ever had one. She was not the sort of person who invited personal questions. When it was time to sleep, she switched off our lights without a word.

  On my first evening in the house, I sat on the floor of the older girls’ room among their piles of clothes. Back home, the girls sprayed themselves with a cheap men’s cologne called Drakkar Noir. But the strong perfume that permeated these girls’ clothes was unfamiliar to me. Mixed with their body heat and the chemistry of their skin, it mellowed, but from time to time it built up so strongly in their bedsheets and tossed-off shirts that Mrs. Elderfield forced open the windows, and the cold air once again stripped everything bare.

  I listened as the older girls discussed their lives in coded words I didn’t understand. They laughed at my naïveté, but they were both only ever kind to me. Marie had come from Bangkok via Boston, and Soraya from Tehran via the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris; her father had been the royal engineer to the shah before the revolution had sent their family into exile, too late to pack Soraya’s toys, but in time to transfer most of their liquid assets. Wildness—sex, stimulants, a refusal to comply—was what had landed them both in Switzerland for an extra year of school, a thirteenth year that neither of them had ever heard of.

  We used to set out for school in the dark. To get to the bus stop, we had to cross a field, which by November was covered in snow that the sheared brown stalks sworded through. We were always late. I was always the only one who’d eaten. Someone’s hair was always wet, the ends frozen. We huddled under the enclosure, inhaling secondhand smoke from Soraya’s cigarette. The bus took us past the Armenian church to the orange tram. Then it was a long ride to the school on the other side of the city. Because of our different schedules we rode back alone. Only on the first day, at Mrs. Elderfield’s insistence, did Marie and I meet up to travel together, but we took the tram in the wrong direction and ended up in France. After that I learned the way, and usually I broke up the journey by stopping in the tobacco shop next to the tram stop, where before catching the bus I bought myself some candy from the open containers that, according to my mother, were crawling with strangers’ germs.

  I’d never been so happy or so free. It wasn’t only the difficult and anxious atmosphere of my family that I’d got away from but also my miserable school back home, with its petty, hormonal girls, olympic in their cruelty. I was too young for a driver’s license, so there was never any means of escape except through books or walks in the woods behind our house. Now I spent the hours after school wandering the city of Geneva. I never had any destination, though I often ended up by the lake, where I watched the tourist c
ruises come and go, or invented stories about the people I saw, especially the ones who came to make out on the benches. Sometimes I tried on clothes at H&M, or wandered around the Old City, where I was drawn back to the imposing monument to the Reformation, to the inscrutable faces of towering stone Protestants of whose names I can only recall John Calvin’s. I hadn’t yet heard of Borges, and yet at no other time in my life was I closer to the Argentine writer, who had died in Geneva the year before, and who, in a letter explaining his wish to be buried in his adopted city, wrote that there he had always felt “mysteriously happy.” Years later, a friend gave me Borges’s Atlas, and I was startled to see a huge photo of those somber giants I used to visit regularly, anti-Semites all, who believed in predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God. In it John Calvin leans slightly forward to gaze down at the blind Borges, seated on a stone ledge holding his cane, chin tilted upward. Between John Calvin and Borges, the photo seemed to say, there was a great attunement. There was no attunement between John Calvin and me, but I too had sat on that ledge looking up at him.

  Sometimes in my wanderings a man would stare at me without letting up, or come on to me in French. These brief encounters embarrassed me, and left me with a feeling of shame. Often the men were African, with sparkling white smiles, but one time, as I stood looking into the window of a chocolate shop, a European man in a beautiful suit came up behind me. He leaned in, his face touching my hair, and in faintly accented English, whispered, “I could break you in two with one hand.” Then he continued on his way, very calmly, as if he were a boat sailing on still water. I ran all the way to the tram stop, where I stood gasping for breath until the tram arrived and squeaked mercifully to a stop.

  We were expected at the dinner table at 6:30 sharp. The wall behind Mrs. Elderfield’s seat was hung with small oil paintings of alpine scenes, and even now an image of a chalet, or cows with bells, or some Heidi gathering berries in her checked apron brings back the aroma of fish and boiled potatoes. Very little was said during those dinners. Or maybe it only seemed so in comparison to how much was said in the back bedroom.

  Marie’s father had met her mother in Bangkok while he was a GI, and had brought her back to America, where he set her up with a Cadillac Seville and a ranch house in Silver Spring, Maryland. When they divorced, her mother went back to Thailand, her father moved to Boston, and for the next ten years Marie was tossed and tugged between them. In the last few years she had lived exclusively with her mother in Bangkok, where she had a boyfriend with whom she was madly, jealously in love, and would stay out with him all night, dancing in clubs, drunk or high. When Marie’s mother, at her wit’s end and busy with her own boyfriend, told her father about the situation, he yanked her out of Thailand and deposited her in Switzerland, known for its “finishing” schools that polished the wild and the dark out of girls and contained them into well-mannered women. Ecolint was not such a school, but Marie, it turned out, was already too old for a proper finishing school. She was, in the estimation of these schools, already finished. And not in the good way. So instead Marie was sent to do an extra year of high school at Ecolint. Along with Mrs. Elderfield’s house rules, there were strict instructions from Marie’s father about her curfew, and after Marie got into Mrs. Elderfield’s cooking wine, these stringent regulations were tightened even further. Because of this, on the weekends that I did not take the train to Basel to see my parents, Marie and I were often home together while Soraya was out.

  Unlike Marie, Soraya didn’t radiate trouble. At least not the sort of trouble that comes of recklessness, of a desire to cross whatever boundaries or limits others have set for you without consideration of the consequences. If anything, Soraya radiated a sense of authority, exquisite because it derived from an inner source. Her outward appearance was neat and composed. She was small, no taller than I was, and wore her dark straight hair cut in what she called a Chanel bob. Her eyes were winged with eyeliner, and she had a downy mustache that she made no effort to conceal, because she must have known that it added to her allure. But she always spoke in a low voice, as if she trafficked in secrets, a habit she may have formed during her childhood in revolutionary Iran, or in her adolescence, when her appetite for boys, and then men, quickly outgrew what was considered acceptable by her family. On Sundays, when there wasn’t much to do, the three of us would spend the day closed up in the back bedroom listening to cassettes and, in that low-slung voice further deepened by smoking, descriptions of the men Soraya had been with and the things she’d done with them. If these accounts never shocked me, it was partly because I didn’t yet have a solid enough sense of sex, let alone the erotic, to really know what to expect from it. But it was also because of the coolness with which Soraya told her stories. She had about her a kind of unassailability. And yet I suppose she felt the need to test whatever it was at her core that had come to her, like all natural gifts, without effort, and what might happen if it failed her. The sex she described seemed to have little to do with pleasure. On the contrary, it was as if she were submitting herself to a trial. Only when Tehran was woven into her discursive stories and she recounted her memories of that city was her sense of pleasure truly palpable.

  November, after the arrival of the snow: it must have been November already when the businessman showed up in our conversations. Dutch, more than twice Soraya’s age, he lived in a house with no curtains on an Amsterdam canal, but every couple of weeks he came to Geneva on business. A banker, as I recall. The lack of curtains I remember because he told Soraya that he only fucked his wife with the lights on when he was sure people across the Herengracht could see her. He stayed at the Hôtel Royale, and it was in the restaurant of that hotel, where her uncle had taken her for tea, that Soraya first met him. He was sitting a few tables away, and while her uncle droned on in Farsi about all the money his children spent, Soraya watched the banker delicately debone his fish. Wielding his utensils with precision, a look of absolute calm on his face, the man extracted the skeleton whole. He performed the operation perfectly, slowly, with no sign of hunger. Not once, as he proceeded to devour the fish, did he stop to remove a small bone from his mouth, the way everyone does. He ate his fish without choking, without even making a passing grimace that comes with the displeasure of being speared in the throat by a tiny, errant bone. It takes a certain kind of man to turn what is essentially an act of violence into elegance. While Soraya’s uncle was in the men’s room, the man called for his check, paid in cash, and rose to leave, buttoning his sports jacket. But instead of going straight out the doors that led to the lobby, he detoured past Soraya’s table, on which he dropped a five-hundred-franc note. His room number was written in blue ink next to Albrecht von Haller’s face, as if it were Albrecht von Haller who was affording her this bit of precious information. Later, while she was kneeling on the hotel bed, freezing in the cold gusting in through the open terrace doors, the banker told her that he always got a room overlooking the lake because the powerful stream of its fountain, which shot up hundreds of feet into the air, aroused him. As she repeated this to us, lying flat on the floor with her feet up on the twin bed that had belonged to Mrs. Elderfield’s son, she laughed and couldn’t stop. And yet, despite the laughter, an arrangement had been made. From then on, if the banker wished to let Soraya know of his impending arrival he would call Mrs. Elderfield’s house and pretend to be her uncle. The five-hundred-franc note Soraya put away in the drawer of her night table.

  At the time, Soraya was seeing other men. There was a boy her age, the son of a diplomat who came to pick her up in his father’s sports car, the transmission of which he destroyed on a drive they took to Montreux. And there was an Algerian in his early twenties who worked as a waiter at a restaurant near the school. She slept with the diplomat’s son, whereas the Algerian, who was genuinely in love with her, she only allowed to kiss her. Because he had grown up poor like Camus, she projected on him a fantasy. But when he had nothing to say about the sun he was raised under, she be
gan to lose feeling for him. It sounds cold, but later I experienced this myself: the sudden disassociation that comes with the fear of realizing how intimate you have been with someone who is not at all what you imagined but something other, entirely unknown. So when the banker demanded that Soraya drop both the diplomat’s son and the Algerian, it was not difficult for Soraya to comply. It excused her of responsibility for the Algerian’s pain.

  That morning before we left for school, the telephone rang. When she cut things off with each of these lovers, the banker instructed, she was to wear a skirt with nothing underneath. She told us this as we crossed the frozen field on our way to the bus stop, and we laughed. But then Soraya stopped and cupped her lighter from the wind. In the brightness of the flame I caught her eyes, and for the first time I felt afraid for her. Or afraid of her, maybe. Afraid of what she lacked, or of what she possessed, that drove her beyond the place where others would draw the line.

  Soraya had to call the banker from the pay phone at school at certain times of the day, even if it meant excusing herself in the middle of class. When she arrived at the Hôtel Royal for one of their meetings, an envelope would be waiting for her at the front desk, containing elaborate instructions for what she was to do when she entered the room. I don’t know what happened if she failed to follow the banker’s rules, or follow them to his exacting standards. It didn’t occur to me that she might allow herself to be punished. Barely out of childhood, I think what I understood then, however simply, was that she was engaged in a game. A game that at any moment she could have refused to go on playing. That she, of all people, knew how easily rules could be broken, but that she elected, in this instance alone, to follow them—what could I have understood then about that? I don’t know. Just as thirty years later I don’t know if what I saw in her eyes when the flame illuminated them was perversity, or recklessness, or fear, or its opposite: the unyielding nature of her will.