To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  So much the same, but with the emphasis in a different place: that was the simple, clockwork beauty of their union, as they saw it. Once, early on, lying naked on the mattress in his East Village apartment, she assessed aloud their compatibility, and he listened and agreed and then put it this way: While she looked for all to see like a nice, good girl who did everything right, in truth she liked transgression and had a dirty mouth and her dark side liked it darker, while he presented as dark, troubled, and filthy, but actually was warm and pretty nice. Beyond that, they’d come down from more or less the same number of Holocaust survivors, had more or less the same number of relatives in Israel, each had a mother born in Europe and a father just barely born in America who’d been Republican up to Reagan; each had been raised with the same death-penalty prohibition against marrying a goy, or failing in any way, which is to say that each was a product of the same proud, closed-minded, hotheaded, anxious, comforting, all-consuming tribalism, but while Sophie’s mother, resenting the confines of her postwar North London Orthodox childhood, had sent her daughter to public school in Roslyn, he, Ezra, had been sent to, and eventually kicked out of, yeshiva.

  Beyond even that, both wanted to be what their families, who had seen so much, had not yet seen: a person who considers it their vocation to make not a living, not money, not measurable success—but art.

  Pasolini! I repeated, when Sophie told me this detail. She was lying on her pallet under the dirty, tattered blue blanket, watching the rain dribble into a rusted, overflowing metal drum. I’d forgotten that name, and by then I’d forgotten the images of most of the movies I’d once seen. But Sophie could remember them all. She could describe whole scenes, the light, the camera angles, she could even remember the lines, and when she unspooled these films, her gray-violet eyes softened, as if she were watching them again, projected on the tarpaulin of makeshift tents, the rubbled walls, the filthy sky crosshatched with wires. Whoever was nearby, or waiting with us on the line for the food kits, vaccines, or juice boxes that might or might not come, would quiet down and listen too, and without any evidence to back it up, I want to say that the movies she blew into our minds with her magic-lantern words achieved their higher form, their highest, with everything else stripped away from them.

  In the early aughts I saw Sophie, and so Ezra, a fair bit, at dinners, or parties of friends, or the parties thrown by the establishments that those friends now worked for. Then, about two years after 9/11, I moved to London for a job and lost touch with Sophie. She and Ezra were still together, and I remember hearing at some point that they’d gotten engaged, that there would eventually be a wedding at her family’s house on Long Island. By then I’d stopped fantasizing about her, I suppose. By then it had seemed good and right: that those two, whose match was so fated and well built and symmetrical, should lead the way into the farther fields, into the seemingly still faraway fields of adulthood, where eventually we would be put out to the pasture of parenthood. But time passed, and no wedding invitation came, and then other people we knew went ahead and got married, and then babies started to be born, some even to the last people we ever expected to go nuclear-family, and then one year, back in New York for the holidays, catching up with the friends I still stayed in touch with there, I finally heard that Sophie and Ezra had broken up.

  By the time I encountered her decades later in the camp, Sophie was already in bad shape. Malnourished, weak, tubercular, she moved only between her pallet and the crossroads—the makeshift center of camp where distributions happened and lines were formed. I was more mobile, searching out what I could find or use or trade or eat, working my connections among formal and informal associations, still strong enough to keep busy so that my mind skipped and skimmed on the surface of grief and didn’t get sucked under. In my comings and goings through the camp I would pass the medical station, the hall with broken windows where weddings were still performed, the guy who cut hair and the one who hawked containers, and the handyman in a turban who worked in the shade of an archway, who would take a broken gas burner or heater and, with a little sideways nod of his head, would always say “Tomorrow is good” to the owner impatient to know when he or she could return for it. Sometimes parts of the camp became flooded, and when the water was gone, there would be impassable mud. But I would always come back again to check on Sophie, and bring to her what I could. It felt good to be useful, good to be able to make things a little bit easier for her. When she ceased being able to move at all, or no longer cared to, I would sit with her, dipping a rag in water and laying it on her feverish head, or just holding her hand, and sometimes when she was a little better she would look out into the middle distance with her gray-violet eyes and unspool for us a part of some movie. Once she did all of E.T., from the opening when the alien spaceship lights blink through the silhouette of pine needles, and those two long, knobby, supra-prehensile brown fingers reach up and pluck down a branch for a better view, and you just know that one’s not going to make it back on board in time, all the way until the crushing goodbye. When Sophie got to the end, this little elfin kid under a floppy hat with his arms wrapped around his knees started to weep, the tears making clean tracks down his dirty face until he windshield-wiped it all away with his hoodie sleeve.

  A few times I managed to get her up, and we limped her out to the chain-link fence, beyond which you could see the barbed wire and the military trucks, but beyond still those a patch of listless gray sea. It reminded us that there were still beautiful places left. From there we couldn’t smell the plastic people burned for warmth that hurt the lungs to inhale. Someone had dragged a busted easy chair out there, the fabric shredded and the crumbly yellow foam exploding through. But it was wide enough that both of us could get into it and sit shoulder to shoulder, and, looking out, we sometimes picked up this or that jumbled, unassembled thing that had happened to us all those years ago, and looked at it for a while without the hope of using it for anything or returning it to any rightful place. Not unrelatedly, there was a lot of trash blown up against the fence or lodged in its holes, plastic bottles and bags and so forth, and fifteen or twenty feet away from where we sat there was a large piece of torn black plastic that the wind had flung against the fence and arranged there in a shape that looked exactly like a coat. A long, wide-collared black coat with flowing folds that seemed to have been hung there as deliberately as one would hang it on a hook in the cozy entryway of a house, to wait until the owner was ready to go out again. So much did this piece of plastic sheeting resemble a coat that we watched first an old man and then a burly woman in a sailor’s hat hurriedly approach it until each got close enough for the illusion to reveal itself as just a piece of trash.

  That coat—Sophie said, after the woman had gone off, slumped and sheepish—it reminds me.

  The wind was playing in the hem of the thing.

  It happened, she told me, maybe six months before she and Ezra broke up. It was winter, and she was walking with a friend in Chelsea, looking at the galleries, maybe. They turned the corner onto the West Side Highway, and the icy wind off the Hudson came slicing into them. She started to shiver, and her friend, who lived abroad and whom she rarely saw, paused whatever he’d been in the middle of saying to ask if she wanted his coat. She said no, because of course she wasn’t about to take the coat off his back, no matter how cold she was. And then the conversation continued, but almost without her. She stayed back, frozen in that question, amazed that he had asked it: that someone might think to ask such a thing so intuitively, as if thoughtfulness were so much part of his nature that the question, which housed such kindness, such genuine concern, could be nearly automatic. It was simply who he was, how he had been taught, or maybe taught himself, to live. And his care touched a nerve in her, because she’d begun to feel, more and more, that it was something the man she was living with, and with whom she planned to spend the rest of her life, lacked. It occurred to her that in all the years she’d been with him, Ezra had never once offered her hi
s sweater or jacket. And I was almost always cold! she said. Always shivering, even when everyone else was warm. Though it’s possible he didn’t notice.

  But it was more than that, she said. She could be sick in bed, and he wouldn’t think to bring her a cup of tea, which wouldn’t have cost him anything. Once, she was making him a bagel and the knife slipped and cut deeply into her thumb. She held it under the cold water, bleeding. He got up from the counter and came around to her, and she thought he was going to hug her from behind, but instead he picked up the knife and finished cutting the bagel, and put it in the toaster himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, she said. She always knew that he loved her, in so far as he was capable. He was just busy, he was absorbed, he had no instinct for how to take care of someone else, which has to begin with noticing, with listening. But in that moment that her friend understood that she was cold and paused what he was saying to offer his own coat, she felt the pain of what she’d been missing.

  The wind kept playing in Sophie’s hair as she spoke, revealing the bald patches of her scalp.

  It hadn’t been the kind of thing she could have explained to anyone, she told me. In so many ways, she knew that she and Ezra had been lucky to have found each other. To enjoy each other as much as they did. Lucky to have found certain quiet rhythms of life, of closeness, that had sustained them. Anything she might have said about it to anyone else would have sounded ungrateful. Would have sounded like complaining, she’d thought, to friends who’d gone through rough breakups, or been treated badly, who’d had their hearts broken, or were alone because they couldn’t find anyone.

  Then one day they went to see a movie. It was in French, she said, and in some ways you could say that it was a very simple story. A story about the private life of an old couple, retired music teachers, who have been happy together for a very long time. They go to a concert, and the next morning, while they are eating breakfast in the kitchen in their robes, the wife suffers her first stroke. And from then on, the film remains there in those rooms of their conjoined inner life, trying to work out what happens when there is a couple who have been together for a lifetime, and one of them suddenly becomes an invalid. When it’s up to the other to figure out how to care for her, to help her to live with the least amount of suffering and indignity.

  Sophie had sat in the dark theater watching the face of the elderly husband, she told me. Watching his expression as he cared for his wife with such patience, such tenderness and loyalty. His wife had made him promise not to send her back to the hospital ever again, and he wouldn’t break that promise, no matter what strain it put on him. He isn’t a saint. He loses his temper, and once he even slaps his wife out of frustration that she refuses to eat or drink, that he is alone in trying to keep her alive. But never once does he fail to try, fail to care. It’s continuous with who he has been to her, and what she has been to him, for more than fifty years. Though the fact that it’s intuitive, an expression of his nature, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t tax him or require enormous effort.

  Toward the end of the film, Sophie began to think of her own parents. Of how, despite the fact that they’d fought all their lives, they’d always taken care of each other. That they would continue to take care of each other until the very end was beyond question, and to some degree, Sophie told me, she had always lived in the shelter of that assumption, of what it meant not only about her parents but about love, about people in general. But now she understood that she herself had chosen differently. Other things had been important to her when she was younger, and as a result she’d chosen a man who—though he was many things to her—would never have the capacity to take care of her if she ceased to be able to take care of herself.

  When the movie was over and they walked back outside into the sunlight, she knew then that something much bigger had ended. And not long after that, she told Ezra that it was over, that she couldn’t marry him.

  Sophie smiled a crooked half smile now, and looked out past the barbed wire to the smudged gray sea. Then she shrugged her bony shoulders and lifted her empty palms skyward, as if to gesture at the absurdity—though which aspect of it she was referring to, I couldn’t say. The absurdity of believing that the decisions about who we love, and who we bind ourselves to, could ever be arrived at rationally? Or of assuming that we would be afforded a fair or natural death? Or did she mean the absurdity of having once believed in the possibility of dedicating one’s life to anything beyond tomorrow, beyond just surviving? Or just the simple, long-standing absurdity of having lived a beginning that bore so little relation to the end?

  I wasn’t there when her end came. I was standing in line somewhere, or searching for a connection, or looking for water, or waiting.

  In the Garden

  For twenty-one years I was employed as the personal secretary to Latin America’s greatest landscape architect, a man you almost certainly will have heard of. If you haven’t heard of him, you will have sat in one of the parks he designed, unless you make it your business to avoid public places, in which case you might have been lucky enough to sit in one of the many private gardens he created, in our beautiful city or outside of it, in the hills or valleys, inland or by the sea. And if you were among the very luckiest, you might even have visited the garden he designed for himself on the estate of Three Winds, one of the most intriguing gardens in the world according to scholars and experts, on par with El Novillero and Compton Acres. If so, we’ve probably even met, since it was I who received guests in the role of personal secretary during my years at Three Winds, ushering the new arrival into the living room, always cool no matter how oppressive the heat outside, or, if he was staying overnight, to the guest room. There I would leave the guest in peace to collect himself after his travels, to change his clothes or rest in the rattan chair. Twenty minutes later I would knock again with a glass of lemonade on a beaten copper tray and the invitation to meet on the patio at half past, when Latin America’s greatest landscape architect would begin his personal tour of the acres brimming with rare species, so rare you would have to walk into the heart of the forest for days to find them, and perhaps even then you might not.

  Some of the trees he planted over half a century ago. When I die, he used to say, remember not to move anything. Not even the pills on the night table? I would ask. All right, he used to say, but only the pills. I’m a realist and a man of the earth! he used to shout when I looked at him the wrong way. I built my house with my own hands, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask that when I die, my glasses be left where I put them down! Because it was his hope (now trampled by history, into whose path he stumbled) that Three Winds would become a museum where the public would come and fall in love with the flora of our beautiful country, as he had. He carried his burden of regrets the same as anyone—so many of his dreams never came to fruition, and others only after many compromises—but on those acres, at least, everything existed according to his design, as far as was possible: the rest was up to nature.

  And nature, as he used to say, is not a peaceful thing. It’s not a gentle breeze and the sun coming up over the mountains, as they’d have you believe in children’s books. It’s not little pink buds or a rhapsody in green. (Have you ever noticed that what passes for green in this country is really black? An infinity of black leaves?) Nature is a cruel and conniving affair, he used to say to me when we were alone together, which was often. It’s aggressive, and surprisingly fatal. The weak are killed, first tormented and then killed, and the strong are nourished by the rot and decay. So don’t let them talk to you about how peaceful it all is, the wind in the trees and the sound of the crickets. The crickets are alone; they drag their wings across a vein out of which teeth grow, in the hope that another of their kind will find them, either to mate or to fight. Don’t let them talk to you about the sound of the crickets, or quote you poems about roses. I’m not saying flowers shouldn’t be picked and enjoyed for their beauty, I’m only saying that your picking and enjoying are part of th
eir plan, not vice versa.

  Not that he always talked like that. After a good meal in the presence of friends, he could carry on for hours about the prehistoric ginkgo that holds the knowledge of dinosaurs, the bromeliads that survive on motes of dust and droplets of humidity, or the moss garden of Saihoji, whose pond is covered by a skin of algae through which the rain falls peaceably to its death. He could philosophize about the garden of Epicurus, or captivate with stories of his adventures into the rain forest, or his youthful travels in Asia, where he’d followed the trail of Basho as far as Haguro. It all depended on his mood, which could be overturned like a bottle of ink, sending the blackness spilling. In the final years, there were no longer many friends left. But at the beginning they came from all over the world, famous writers, artists, dignitaries of all kinds, to receive a private tour of Three Winds and sign the gold-tasseled visitors’ book.

  For twenty-one years I served as personal secretary to Latin America’s greatest landscape architect. They were dark years in our country’s history, but outside the sun shone, as it has always shone here, and always will. Behind closed doors, in basements, in warehouses, in secret complexes, the sun did not shine, but outside it shone always. A garden depends on sun. A garden is an arrangement of light, he used to say, one has to think how the sun will set on it, how it will rise, from which direction it will shine, how it will pass through; how every leaf will reveal or obscure.