To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  On the day I graduated from the Horticultural Institute, the sun was shining as usual, and I rode my bicycle to the new park in the north of the city, the one already made famous by the newspapers, though construction had only just begun. I presented myself at the park office. At the time it was temporarily housed in a building that later became a café where visitors could order coffee and sit outside in the shade of a giant plane tree. (The tree itself hadn’t arrived yet on a flatbed truck; it was still bending in the provincial wind somewhere, oblivious of the plans in store for it.) There he was, sitting behind a desk piled with papers and drawings, the famous botanist and landscape architect, newly crowned director of public gardens, browned and silvered from sun and age. He hardly glanced at me. I’d like to apply for a job, I announced. We have all the gardeners we need, he said, and went on turning the pages. I don’t know what possessed me—maybe the courage that comes with being in the presence of one’s fate—but I said: You don’t have one like me. Now he looked up, and a species of smile slid across his face, then disappeared around the back of his head. He studied my pants first, the dirt under my nails, and at last my face. I stiffened under his gaze. And what sort is that? he asked, leaning back so that his chair was forced to let out a terrified squeal. I thought of the withered Phalaenopsis bellina I’d found in the garbage a few months earlier, which I brought home and tended until one day it began to send out green shoots again, and, God help me, I said: The kind that can wring new life out of the dead.

  The park was still under construction: the paths weren’t yet laid, the future greenhouse was just a pit of tepid water filled with mosquito larvae, they were only beginning to haul in the dirt for the rolling hills of the upper gardens, and the busts of the generals were still being forged at the official foundry. But he must have sensed how fully I understood the beauty of what he intended, a wildness barely contained. He must have sensed, too, my willingness, the wholehearted way I was prepared to throw myself into the work. I had no other loyalties: no parents, no children, no ambition other than to exist among leaves and Latin names. That first day I sat beside him taking notes he dictated to me as he paged through the plans, and I didn’t miss a thing, didn’t need to be told how to spell Trochodendron aralioides or Xanthorrhoea preissii, and when on occasion he mistook one plant for its cousin I made the correction without drawing attention to the mistake. At four he dismissed me and told me to return with clean nails the following day. At eight o’clock sharp I took up my place again by his side. I had only the greatest respect for him. I felt that I had been—what was it? That I had been chosen, above all. Without being told, I knew when to shadow him and when to make myself scarce, when to provide the word he was looking for and when to absorb his words like a heavy rain.

  What do you want me to say? he used to shout. I’m a realist and a man of the earth, both of which require few words! If I hadn’t become what I became, I might have become a poet. I respect them enormously, the poets, he used to say. We each have to work with what we have, I with the once rich flora of our country, so much of which is now teetering on the brink of extinction, and they with our language, which is suffering the same fate. When I was a boy there were many more words, he’d say, but one by one they’ve fallen out of use. History has reached the point where language is sliding backward; one day we will be restored to speechlessness, and then, as if to prove the point, he’d go sit on the veranda and collect from the garden a gloomy silence. But he never managed to remain silent for long. Sooner or later, the words still left would burst out of him.

  Neither of us came from this country. He was more from it than I, having been born in the capital, but his mother was born in the Carpathian Mountains and his father in Leipzig, and he grew up in the abandoned zones between world-class languages, which is perhaps why he gravitated to one that, however dead, offered a proper name for everything. And, being dead, it never changes. A lake is a lake is a lake forever. A lake cannot one day become a blind eye or a grave.

  One afternoon, as we were inspecting a new shipment of ferns and orchids in the upper gardens, a procession of three black sedans with darkened windows drove up the alley of imperial palms, unsettling a cloud of dust, and halted in front of the temporary park office. The sight of them, like dark weasels among the greenery, sent chills up my spine. All four doors of the first car sprung open, and four men in military uniforms and gold sunglasses got out. One of them rapped on the door of the park office, entered, and after some moments emerged again. Then all four doors of the second car opened, and four more men in uniform emerged, one of whom gestured leisurely in our direction. The doors of the third black sedan remained closed. Shouldn’t you go to them? I asked. Yes, he said, but remained glued to the spot, a small Aphelandra squarrosa trembling in his palm. Yes of course, he said again, more to the plant than to anyone else. In the end, they came and got him and took him away in the third black sedan. A single door was opened from within, and I remember that as he stood peering into the dark upholstered interior, the look on his face was that of a man standing on the edge of an abyss, equally afraid of falling and of throwing himself in.

  Plan by plan, sketch by sketch, undulating bed by bed, he bent the neck of nature. Nature isn’t a daisy chain, it isn’t a pocketful of posies, he used to say. Nature bites the hand that feeds it. But he never tried to tame nature, he never removed its claws or its venom. That was his secret, what set him apart from the rest: he only bent nature’s neck, he never broke it. That was his genius and his downfall, too. He let nature keep its wildness, and one day nature turned around and struck him down. Not one day, in fact—very slowly, stealthily, but the result was the same.

  I watched the procession of cars disappear the same way they had come, and then, however shaken, I went back to my work—my work, after all, which was no more and no less than dutifully tending to the frail and exhausted plants that had journeyed from far and wide to take their place in the illustrious park, designed by the great botanist and landscape architect who had taught people to see exquisite beauty in the native species of his country. That night, a bright blue spring night, I rode home on my bicycle and took a bath and watched the dirt swirl away down the drain, where it would join all of the other sediment making its slow way back to the sea, floating down league after soundless league. I wanted to call someone to tell them what had taken place, but who was there to call? I thought it was possible that I might never see him again, which, looking back, shows just how naive I was about the way the generals worked.

  That night I didn’t sleep. The following day, when I arrived early at the park, he was already sitting behind his desk. He looked terrible; either he’d slept in his clothes or he hadn’t slept at all. But I was relieved all the same. I boiled the water for tea. When I brought in the tray, he insisted on pouring the steaming liquid for both of us. His hand shook ever so slightly, and the tea splashed into the saucer. There are things you should know, he said quietly. Should I? I asked, and dropped a heaping spoonful of sugar into his cup. I stirred, and we watched the sugar dissolve. These are not ordinary times, he whispered. To build a park like this, one has to sleep with the devil. I folded my hands in my lap, the hands of a simple gardener, and studied my nails. A garden is an arrangement of light. One has to think from which direction the sun will shine, how it will set and how it will rise, which leaf will reveal and which will obscure. I unrolled the plans for the park, and wordlessly—yes, with a trace of my finger—I drew his attention to this or that detail, until his vision returned to him. Then I stood and put the tea things away. God dwells in your gardens, I said, and walked out the door to begin the morning’s work.

  He invited me to Three Winds. It was an invitation that could mean many things, and only as I felt my stomach tighten did I realize that I had been waiting for it. The estate was more than an hour away by car, on the coastal plain. I rode up front with his driver while he rode in the back seat, and from time to time I felt his eyes resting on the back of my
neck, very lightly, like a fly. Three Winds was a garden turned inward. It was there that he cultivated himself; there that he experimented most wildly, without restraint. When he gave me a tour of the grounds, I remember the shock I felt coming upon the concrete walls with no roof, like a ruin from the future, or the shiny, damp path that wound through the undergrowth to a cathedral of trees. Afterward he led me to the nursery, the tropical plant collection, the herbarium, to the little Benedictine chapel dedicated to Saint Francis, and finally to his painting studio, engulfed by vines. As I stood before one of his large canvases, a riot of interlocking colors, I felt a hand glide heavily to my shoulder. His breath was warm and heavy, and he smelled of sandalwood and wine. What do you see? he said close to my ear. It’s a fine painting, sir, I told him. I heard a gurgle in the back of his throat. Perhaps you aren’t the man I thought you were, he whispered. I see a precipice in front, and wolves behind, I said. His fingers tightened their grip on my shoulder. You do, don’t you? he said. You do?

  Not long after that, my things were sent for and the small room next to the kitchen that faced east was given to me as my own. The bed was narrow but comfortable, and from the chair I had a view of a cherry tree, whose fruit got riper by the day. On the windowsill I set the little pewter box from where I was born, with the views of Henkersteg, the Opera House, and Bratwurst Glöcklein, and on the shelf I arranged my botany books. I quickly took up my new duties. I answered letters, oversaw the orders, arranged the schedule, supervised the staff, and saw to the needs, great and small, of Latin America’s greatest landscape architect. His work was never done, but sometimes there were quiet moments together, too, and I don’t think it’s too much to say that then he was the happiest I ever saw him.

  That time didn’t last. When we are given fair warning, does what happens next not always seem inevitable? When the generals came from the city and arrived at Three Winds in their dark cars, I met them at the top of the drive, brought them to the house, and served them glasses of lemonade on the beaten copper tray. We stood on ceremony. They toured the grounds. In the little chapel of Saint Francis, one of them got down on his knees and crossed himself. When they were getting ready to leave, the same general couldn’t find his sunglasses, and the landscape architect fell to the floor and began crawling frantically among the chairs of the long dining table. I’d never seen him like that, like a dog or a cockroach, and I wanted to shout at him to get up, but at the same time I knew there was no choice but to join him. At that moment I remembered the chapel. I ran back to it, and sure enough there were the sunglasses, glinting under the empty pew. The general examined them to make sure they were intact, and then he smiled at me and slowly rubbed away my fingerprints with a handkerchief.

  And soon afterward, very soon after that, the lower gardens in the heart of the public park in the city were replaced on the plans by a shimmering lake, a lake so deep that no one could reach the bottom, which anyway was concrete. The bulldozers rolled in to tear up the ground, wildly scooping up shrubs, and the dark loam was carted away in trucks that rumbled up and down the alley of imperial palms. Four days passed, during which the hole gaped under the blank sky. At last they came one night, the people who are in the business of what lies at the bottom. They buried what the generals wished to bury, then they poured the concrete. If there was gunfire, or screams, or if there was only the silence of the dead, I don’t know. We were far away, cloistered in Three Winds, where the grandfather clock from Leipzig gently ticked off the hours. It must have taken a small army of them, with their trucks and floodlights, because in the morning the concrete had already dried in the sun that never ceases to shine. A few weeks later the lake was filled, the sun busied itself on the blue surface, and an official message came from the Supreme Chief of the Nation himself: paddleboats. That was all. The birds arrived on their own, as soon as the duckweed and water lilies were laid in.

  From my room I could hear him call to me no matter where he was in the house, though in time I learned to recognize the sounds that preceded a question, and before he could even ask, I was there in the doorway. If the telephone rang, it was I who answered it; I who knew whether he was able to talk just then, or whether a message needed to be taken; I who instructed the cook on what was to be prepared for dinner, who helped him to bed when he drank too much, who brought him the first steaming cup of tea in the morning, in the sixteenth-century bowl sent to him by an admirer in Japan; I who handed him his pencil, his hat, his stick, his trowel, his knife; I who came with the first aid kit whenever he cut himself, because he was—our greatest landscape architect and botanist—squeamish at the sight of his own blood.

  Things grow in this country, under a sun like this. Under the watchful eye of the generals’ bronze gaze, the imperial palms grew. The giant lily pads grew as large as tables. The giant bamboo grew until it was four or five stories high, and when the breeze blew through it the stalks made a clacking sound, and as they leaned in the wind, they creaked like the sound of braking streetcars, and somehow there was also the sound of horses’ hooves and a braying donkey, even a whole barnyard of animals, contained in that bamboo. There were whispers, and the sound of children playing, or maybe crying, or just singing softly. But Latin America’s greatest landscape architect never heard them, because after construction was complete, and the opening ceremony attended, he had no time to return to the parks and gardens he’d designed during his tenure as director of public gardens—parks, after all, that were visited and enjoyed by the many who came to walk their paths or rest on their benches. Those were busy years for him. I won’t lie: they were mostly good years, too. He had his work. The grotesque incident of the lake was never repeated. And when, after almost fifteen years, some of the generals fled the country, and a few were put on trial, and most retreated behind the tall stucco walls of their mansions to live out the rest of their lives in the peace of their own gardens, no one bothered with our country’s landscape architect; he, too, was left in peace.

  What do you want me to say? he used to shout. My work was straightforward: I collected plants and designed parks and gardens. No more and no less. I live in a house I built with my own hands, surrounded by my acres of plants and trees, some common and some very rare, so rare you would have to walk into the heart of the forest for days, as I did, to find them. Some of the trees I planted long ago, when I was young, he would shout, and now they are old, like me, and yet, unlike me, their plans haven’t been ruined, sullied and ruined, suffocated in darkness. Once—only once—did I look him squarely in the eye and say, quietly and clearly: It isn’t you who got suffocated in darkness. I’ll never forget the look on his face, like a child who had never before been slapped across the mouth. He recoiled, or tried to recoil, but in the end one can’t recoil from oneself.

  In the last years we used to travel, which was the only thing that gave temporary relief to his moods. We went to the Alhambra. In Lake Como, we stayed at the Villa d’Este and walked through the gardens of the Villa Carlotta and the Villa Cipressi. We went to Arezzo to see the Piero della Francescas, and to Florence to see the Fra Angelicos. It was my first time in Italy, and he insisted that I climb the stairs to the top of the Duomo and tour its double shell, while he sat having coffee below. At a time agreed upon in advance, I was to exit onto the tiny lookout terrace at the very top and wave to him, and he, in turn, was to wave back at me. The going was difficult—the stairs were steep, and the passageways were very narrow, and many times I had to beat back a suffocating sense of claustrophobia. I had to run up the last flights of stairs to make it to the lookout to wave at the appointed time, and when I got there, I was gasping for breath. The claustrophobia turned out to be nothing compared with the vertigo. Gripping the wall, legs shaking, I looked down over the ledge. Far below, among the little white specks of the café tables set out on the square, I saw a figure waving. I waved back. He waved again, and I waved once more. He went on waving, as if out of inertia. How long must this go on? I wondered. And then I unde
rstood that I was considering leaving him—leaving him alone with all of those ghosts and demons and starting life again, somewhere else. Everything was still possible for me, the door stood open. Down below, he continued waving. Now I had the feeling that he was trying to say something. Don’t ask me how I knew; obviously I couldn’t make out his face from so high up. Somehow I just knew that he was mouthing something to me, or maybe shouting it, both of which were equally futile. I thought that something was wrong, so I turned and hurried all the way down the narrow stairs, going around and around and still not reaching the bottom, getting nowhere near the bottom, frankly, while, God knows, he might have been having a heart attack in the square. But when I finally emerged into the daylight and ran to the café, sweating profusely, I found him absorbed in a newspaper. What were you trying to tell me? I asked. Tell you? he said. What do you mean? I was blinded by the glare. I didn’t even know whether you were up there.

  I’m not a Christian, but many times I found myself drawn into the chapel at Three Winds, to look again at the small painting of Saint Francis holding the dove. There are those who committed terrible crimes. And there are those who acquiesced. What I never knew was, what is it to acquiesce to the acquiescent? Sometimes a long time would pass as I stood there, so long that the fingers of colored sun that fell through the stained glass would shift to a different wall. No, not just to yield but, in one’s own way, to affirm?