Forest Dark

by Nicole Krauss

  In those first mornings at the Hilton, Epstein had woken to the Mediterranean and stood rapt on the terrace, watching the waves. In a long, feathery contrail dissolving in the blue sky, he saw the line of his life. Long ago, at Maya’s bat mitzvah party, they’d had a palm reader. Never mind the unkosher presence of the occult: it was what she had wanted. (“What do you love most, Mayashka?” he’d once asked her as a little child. “Magic and mystery,” she’d replied without pause.) To indulge her, Epstein had turned his hand over to the frail and turbaned fortune-teller, who looked like she hadn’t eaten for weeks. “Get this woman some cake!” he’d shouted, and three waiters, angling for a tip, had sprung into action, bringing three pieces of heavily frosted white cake, which had the promise of a wedding baked into it. But the three slices had only sat at the pointy elbow of the fortune-teller, who was clever enough to know that eating would have lessened her aura and bungled the illusion of clairvoyance. She stroked Epstein’s palm with her own dry, cool one, as if brushing off the dust, then began to trace the lines with a scarlet fingernail. Growing bored, Epstein scanned the dance floor, where the limbo bar had been lowered to the point that only one scrawny seventh-grader, an acrobatic prepubescent, could still bend backward and slide her way triumphantly beneath. Then he felt the fortune-teller’s hand tighten around his, and when he turned back, he saw the look of alarm on her face. It was pure theater, Epstein knew. But he had a taste for drama, and was curious to see a display of her skill. “What did you find?” he’d asked gamely. The fortune-teller gazed at him with black eyes outlined in kohl. Then she quickly folded his palm and pushed it away. “Come to see me another time,” she pleaded in a hoarse whisper. She’d slid her business card with a Bayside address into his other hand, but Epstein had only laughed and gone off to yell at the caterer, who had let the Vietnamese chicken skewers run low. The following week, when he found the card again in his pocket, he’d dropped it into the trash. Six months later, Lianne told him that the fortune-teller had died of cancer, but even then Epstein had not regretted his failure to visit her, and felt only a rustle of curiosity.

  Now the contrail was slowly evaporating, widening out toward something indistinct. No, he had not believed in the predictions of fortune-tellers, even those touched by a nearness to death. The truth was that he had believed in very little that he couldn’t see, and more than that, he’d had something against belief. Not just because of its grand potential for error. To be wrong—even to be wrong one’s whole life!—was one thing, but what Epstein could not abide, what filled him with such distaste, was the idea of being taken advantage of. Belief, with its passive trust, required putting oneself in other hands, and as such it made one susceptible to the worst sort of insidiousness. Epstein saw it everywhere. Not just in the large strokes of religion—in the constant stream of news stories about children molested by their priests and rabbis, or teenagers blowing themselves up for the promise of seventy virgins, or performing beheadings in the name of Allah. There were also the countless varieties of small beliefs that provided opportunity for the wool to be pulled over one’s eyes, for the great woolly hat of belief to obscure what would be clear to the naked eye. Every advertisement preyed on the human inclination toward belief, a tilt like Pisa’s that had proved uncorrectable, no matter that what was promised failed and failed to be delivered. Good people robbed of their money and their right to peace, sometimes even their dignity and freedom, because of a structural flaw! Or so it had seemed to Epstein, who avoided believing in anything that he could not touch or feel or measure with his own instruments.

  He would walk on solid ground, or would not walk at all. He would not venture out on the thin ice of belief. But of late he had found his legs moving under him, against his instincts. This was what was so strange. The feeling of movement against his will. Against his better judgment! His great deliberateness! Against all that he had shored up in sixty-eight years of collecting knowledge; call it, even, wisdom. And he could not say what it was he was walking toward.

  Out there, a boat made its way across the white-capped water on its way toward Cyprus or Tripoli. Epstein felt an expansion in his chest. Why not take a swim? he thought, and the idea seemed so good to him, so marvelous, that he went inside right away and called down to the concierge to see if a swimsuit could be purchased in the lobby. Yes, they could have one ready for him. What was his size?

  There was still an hour and a half before the car was coming to pick him up for a tour of the Weizmann Institute, which had suggested an endowment for research in his parents’ names. Just last month professors Segal and Elinav had discovered that artificial sweeteners could actually raise blood sugar levels instead of reducing them, information that would help millions of diabetics, not to mention the plain overweight! And what would the Edith and Sol Epstein line of research go into? In honor of their lives, what should be investigated? What do you have, Epstein wished to ask, that could ever be big enough?

  Making his way down the carpeted hallway in hotel robe and slippers, he tried to remember the last time he had swum in the sea. When Maya was still young? He recalled an afternoon in Spain when they had gone out on a boat. He dived off the bow—he never immersed himself in anything slowly—and swam around to the ladder to receive his younger daughter, whose tiny head of black curls poked out from the bulky life vest. The third time around, he had better understood the patterns of love and fatherhood, the way nearly immeasurable fractions of time and experience accumulate toward a closeness, a sweetness. Maya had let out a shriek as soon as her legs touched the water. But rather than relinquish her to Lianne’s outstretched arms, Epstein had spoken softly to the child. “A great big bathtub,” he’d said, “the bathtub of all life,” and called up what he knew of tides and dolphins, of tiny clown fish in a world of coral, until bit by bit she had calmed down and loosened her grip on Epstein—loosened it out of trust, so that on another level her hold became tighter. Later, she didn’t push her father away as her brother and sister had. Wincing, Epstein remembered how he had once tried to coax Jonah into the sea for twenty minutes before giving in to rage: at the boy’s intolerable cowardice, at his lack of strength and will. For not being made of the same materials as Epstein was.

  In the new yellow bathing suit, Epstein stood on the shore. The waistband was too large, and he had to tie the drawstring tightly so that it didn’t slip down. Sunlight caught in the silver hairs of his chest. The black flag was up, but the lifeguard, lifting a lazy finger, gestured to a red flag a few meters away, where one was allowed to swim with caution. Epstein strode toward the water.

  Behind him was the city where he had been born. However far his life had unspooled from it, he had come from here, this sun and breeze were his native conditions. His parents had come from nowhere. Where they came from had ceased to exist and so could not be returned to. But he himself came from someplace: less than ten minutes’ walk away was the corner of Zamenhof and Shlomo ha-Melekh Streets, where he had arrived in the world in such a hurry that his mother didn’t have enough time to get to the hospital. A woman had come down from her balcony, pulled him out, and wrapped him in a dishcloth. She had no children herself, but had grown up on a farm in Romania, where she had seen the births of cows and dogs. Afterward his mother went to visit her once a week, and would sit drinking coffee and smoking in her tiny kitchen, while the woman, Mrs. Chernovich, bumped Epstein up and down on her knee. She had a magical effect on him. In her lap, the irascible Epstein became instantly calm. When they moved to America his mother had lost touch with her. But in 1967, when Epstein returned to Tel Aviv for the first time just after the war, he’d gone straight to the corner where he had emerged into the world, walked across the street, and rang the buzzer. Mrs. Chernovich looked down over the railing of the balcony, where she had been watching the world go by all those years. The moment he entered her tiny kitchen and sat down at her table, he’d felt the strange sensation that he thought other people must call peace. “You should have aske
d to buy the table,” an eight-year-old Maya had famously said when she was told the story.

  The cold surprised him, but he kept moving steadily until he was up to his waist. Seen from an impossible perspective, there were his legs, greenish and beaded with air bubbles, standing on the great incline that led to the bottom of the sea. What was down there after all, Mayashka? The plunder of the Greeks and the Philistines, and the Greeks and Philistines, too.

  The wind was up, and the waves skipped over the breakwater. It was no longer the season for swimming, and the only people out were a small party of Russians. One of them, with pendulous breasts, spreading thighs, and a long, swinging silver cross, plopped a fat, dripping baby down on the chair: I just found her in the sea! Epstein knew plenty about negotiating the waves, having grown up alongside the Atlantic. Holding his breath, he dived under and began to swim through the turbulence. The water seemed to buzz with life, with something almost electrical, or maybe it was only he, Epstein, who was conducting his energies across a new vastness. Weightless, he turned a somersault.

  When his head broke through the surface again, there was a tall wave moving toward him. He went under and let himself be tossed about. He swam farther out, the long, strong strokes of his youth. It was different to think in the sea than it was to think on land. He wanted to get out past the breaking waves to where he could think as one only can when rocked by the sea. One is always in the hold of the world, but one doesn’t physically feel its hold, doesn’t account for its effect. Cannot draw comfort from the hold of the world, which registers only as a neutral emptiness. But the sea one feels. And so surrounded, so steadily held, so gently rocked—so differently organized—one’s thoughts come in another form. Freed into the abstract. Touched by fluidity. And so, floating on his back in the great bathtub of all life, the abstracted Epstein did not notice the tremendous moving wall until it was upon him.

  It was one of the Russians, a bear of a man, who dragged him, sputtering, onto the shore. He had not been under for long, but had swallowed a lot of water. Retching, it came out of him, and he gasped for breath with his face in the sand. Hair plastered to one side, bathing suit hanging low on his hips, Epstein heaved with shock.

  That night, while Epstein was eating dinner in a restaurant on Rothschild chosen by his cousin, his cell phone rang. The old one had not been recovered. The Palestinian party had checked out of the New York hotel at dawn; by the time Epstein’s assistant arrived, they were already aloft above Nova Scotia. In the Arctic altitudes, a stranger had nestled deep inside Epstein’s cashmere coat, perhaps scrolling through his photos. But there was nothing to be done for the moment, and so the lost phone had been replaced by a new one. He still wasn’t used to the ringtone, and when he finally realized it was coming from him and fished the phone out of his pocket, the caller was unidentified because his address book had not yet been transferred. It went on ringing while Epstein stalled, at a loss for what to do. Should he answer? He who always answered, who had answered once in the middle of Handel’s Messiah, conducted by Levine! The blind woman with a crooked haircut who never missed a concert and listened to the music in raptures had nearly set her German shepherd on him. At intermission she had laid into Epstein. He told her to go to hell—a blind woman, to go to hell! But why should they not be treated equally?—and when, the next time, he saw the dog eating some chocolate it had found in the aisle, he had done nothing to stop it, though later that night he had woken in a cold sweat, imagining the woman in the emergency room of the vet, eyes rolled back to their whitish blue, waiting to have the beast’s stomach pumped. Yes, he had always answered, even if only to say that he could not answer now, would have to answer later. His whole life had tilted toward his great readiness to answer, even before he knew what was being asked. At last, Epstein stabbed the screen to accept the call.

  “Jules! It’s Menachem Klausner here.”

  “Rabbi,” said Epstein, “what a surprise.” Moti raised his eyebrows across the table, but continued shoveling pasta cacio e pepe into his mouth. “How did you find me?”

  They had been on the same plane to Israel. Going through security at JFK, Epstein heard his name being called. Looking around, he’d seen no one and so finished lacing up his oxfords, grabbed his rollaway, and hurried on to the business lounge to make some final calls. Two hours into the flight, already drowsing in the fully reclined position, he was roused by a persistent tap-tap-tap on his shoulder. No, he did not want any warm nuts. When he lifted his eye mask, though, he was met not by the painted face of the stewardess but by a bearded man leaning over him, close enough that Epstein could see the enlarged pores of his nose. Epstein squinted up at Klausner through a veil of sleep and considered lowering the mask again. But the rabbi squeezed his arm with a firm grip, his blues eyes alight. “I thought it was you! It’s bashert—that you should be coming to Israel, and we should be on the same flight. May I?” he’d asked, and before Epstein was able to reply, the oversize rabbi was stepping over his legs and dropping into the empty seat by the window.

  “What are you doing for Shabbat?” Klausner asked now, on the other end of the line.

  “Shabbat?” Epstein echoed. In Israel, the day of rest that was ushered in late Friday afternoon and stretched until Saturday evening had always represented an annoyance to Epstein, since everything closed, and the city went into lockdown in pursuit of some ancient, lost peace. Even the most secular Tel Avivians loved to talk about the special atmosphere that settled over the city on Friday afternoons, when the streets emptied and the world drifted toward a quietness, lifted out of the river of time, so that it might be laid back down in it deliberately, ritually, all over again. But as far as Epstein was concerned, a state-enforced hiatus from productivity was merely an imposition.

  “Why not come with me up to Safed?” Klausner suggested. “I’ll pick you up and bring you myself. Door-to-door service, nothing could be easier. I have to come to Tel Aviv for a meeting on Friday morning anyway. Where are you staying?”

  “The Hilton. But I don’t have my schedule in front of me.”

  “I’ll hold on.”

  “I’m at a restaurant. Can you call me back in the morning?”

  “Let’s say you’ll come, and if there’s a problem, you’ll call me. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be in the lobby on Friday at one. It’s only two hours’ drive, but that will give us plenty of time to get there before Shabbat comes in.”

  But Epstein was only half listening, feeling instead the urge to tell the rabbi that he had nearly drowned that day. That he had been pulled back from drowning in the nick of time. His stomach was still uneasy; he couldn’t eat. He’d tried to tell Moti about it, if only to explain his lack of appetite, but though his cousin had raised his voice in alarm and waved his hands, presently he’d gone back to studying the wine list.

  The following day was busy with phone calls to Schloss, who was executing further changes to his will now that Epstein had less to bequeath, and another meeting about what his benefaction might achieve, this one with the Israeli Philharmonic. Zubin Mehta met with him personally. The maestro, wearing an Italian coat and silk scarf, strolled with him around Bronfman’s concert hall. He may have been a smaller fish, but his $2 million could nevertheless endow the Edith and Solomon Epstein Chair for the first violinist. His parents had loved music. His father had played the violin until the age of thirteen, when the money for lessons ran out. At home, they’d played records at night, Epstein told the conductor, and he would listen from his bed through the open door. When he was six his mother had taken him to hear—but suddenly, to his embarrassment, he could not remember the name of the great pianist who had stepped onto the stage and approached the piano as an undertaker approaches a coffin.

  Mehta’s assistant glossed over the moment of forgetfulness, and took everything else down on a yellow legal pad. Afterward they sat drinking coffee in the blazing white light of Habima Square. Still trying to remember the name, Epstein recalled instead some
thing that had happened to him around the time he was taken to see the pianist. He had been lying in his bed with his eyes closed after a nap on a very hot afternoon when a vision of a spider came to him. He saw vividly the orange hourglass on its abdomen and the tan legs with dark striations at the joints. And then, very slowly, he opened his eyes, and there the spider was on the wall in front of him, exactly as he had seen it in his mind. Only when his mother came into the room and began to scream did he learn that it was a brown widow. Epstein would have liked for the assistant to take this down on her pad, too, for it seemed to him of great significance.

  But the maestro was talking, his attention leaping restlessly from his buzzing phone to the purple flowers growing in braids up the side of the wall to the mud pit of Israeli politics (he was no prophet, Mehta reported, but things didn’t look good). Then he switched to an upcoming concert in Bombay where he would conduct Wagner, as he could not in Tel Aviv. He’d had five children by four women, Epstein had heard; the maestro found no need to finish one story before starting another.

  When they got up to shake hands, Epstein touched his coat. He’d had one just like that, he told Mehta, who only smiled vaguely, his mind already on other things. Later Epstein discovered that the orchestra had not a single Palestinian musician, and knowing the earful he would get from his daughters if he made his donation there, he turned his attention to the Israel Museum.

  In all of this, he had forgotten about Klausner’s invitation and did not remember it until Friday at noon, when he tried to make a dinner reservation and was reminded by the concierge that the restaurant he wanted would be closed. An hour later, at 1:00 p.m. sharp, the front desk rang his room to say that the rabbi was waiting downstairs. Epstein weighed the matter. He could still cancel. Did he really want to spend the next two hours stuck in a car with Klausner and then at his mercy all evening? On the plane, when he’d first raised the idea of a visit, Klausner had insisted that he stay at the Gilgul guesthouse. It wasn’t four stars, he’d said, but they would give him the nicest room. But Epstein had no intention of staying overnight. He could call a driver to come for him the moment he began to tire of the rabbi’s hospitality. He’d been to Safed thirty years ago but could only recall some roadside stands selling silver jewelry, and the countless stone steps hairy with lichen. A beautiful place, Klausner had said of the town in the mountains of the Upper Galilee that had drawn mystics for five hundred years. A place of bracing air and incomparable light. Perhaps Epstein was even interested in learning with them at Gilgul? “And what would you have me learn?” Epstein asked with an arched brow. To which Klausner quoted a Hasidic tale about a student who goes to visit his teacher, a great rabbi, and when he is asked on his return what he learned, he answers that he learned how the great rabbi ties his shoes. Gesturing down at Klausner’s black loafers, worn at the heel, Epstein quoted the words of his father: “And this is how you make a living?”