by David Hopen
“Just passing by,” he said. “I’m not really here.”
We drank more in silence. It occurred to me that the last time he and I had shared a drink was on a motorboat.
“So,” he said eventually, “do you speak to anyone anymore? Oliver?”
I laughed slightly. Shortly after high school, Oliver visited Israel on some half-year traveling program. Within weeks, he dropped out of the program and entered a Beit Medresh in Har Nof. He married his rabbi’s niece and never came back. Apparently he now has several young children, teaches cheder. His eyesight never returned. He wears thick, tinted glasses and goes by Eliyahu Elisha, his Hebrew name. He and I, as I consider during late-night musings, traded lives. He, like Shimon, got the better deal. “Only Amir, really,” I said. “Though less and less these days.”
“He’s in medical school, isn’t he?”
“He just finished,” I said. “Helped that he graduated college in three years.”
“Of course he did.” Evan put fingernails to his teeth, only to pull away his hand. “I hear he’s getting married.”
“He is.”
“Good for him. He’s always been the one who coped best, hasn’t he?”
“Turns out he’s the greatest of the five of us,” I said. “After Noah, at least.”
The name drew silence. I strained to make out the music in the background. I watched waiters roam the room. I found it simultaneously beautiful and devastating to consider that the other human beings around us had no knowledge whatsoever of our two lives.
“With what happened, though—you have to question that sometimes,” Evan said, “don’t you?”
I blinked into my tumbler. “Question what?”
“Well, I mean, Amir survived . . . untainted, it sounds like,” Evan said. “He wasn’t wounded. He’s had all the normalcy, all the success.”
“If you’re actually suggesting that Noah was impure or defective or whatever the fuck you believe because he—”
Evan put up a hand, the way he used to. “There’s a world of difference between being not pure and being impure, Eden.”
I shook my head. “I’m not talking about this.”
Evan allowed his gaze to move about the room before returning to me. “All right, then what about you, Eden? Still seeing someone special?”
I chewed on the insides of my cheeks. “No, I—that didn’t work out.”
“For now, at least. How long was it?”
“About a year and a half.”
He touched his cane, as if for support. “What happened?”
I didn’t answer, so he lit a cigarette. He did so, I noticed, with his old Cartier lighter. “And Bloom? Ever hear from Socrates?”
“Here and there,” I said. Rabbi Bloom resigned after the fire, taking up an ad hoc lecturer position at Rutgers. From time to time we exchange letters. He visited once, when I was a college freshman. We walked the campus, went for coffee. I tried thanking him, right before he left, for helping me get there but failed to find the words. Sometimes I send updates—about my dissertation, not life. He responds, without fail, quickly and with detailed, handwritten notes, pointing out arguments I perhaps hadn’t considered, books I might find useful. I don’t listen to his recommendations. Mostly it’s an excuse to talk to the man. “What about you?”
He put a finger to his scar, though I wasn’t certain if he realized he was doing this. “It wasn’t his fault, what happened to us.”
“Well, of course not.”
“He thinks so.” He chewed his lip. It was a familiar act. I put the tumbler back into motion. “And for a while, I did, too. Now I don’t. Now I realize the man was more of a father to me than Julian ever was.”
“Yeah? What about all that Nietzschean gibberish about self-creation? About being your own father?”
He shook his head with distaste, allowing the cigarette to dangle from his lips. “That’s not for me anymore.” Smoke twined between us. The smell nauseated me. “So I looked you up online. I even read the description about your research.”
“I’m flattered, truly.”
“Hegel, tragedy, guilt, sentiment.” He smiled. “Have I taught you absolutely nothing?”
A friend once warned Tennyson that humans cannot live in art. After college, however, I set out to do just that. I’m writing on what Coleridge calls “implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.” My aim is to prove that, in Hegelian tragedy, moral intuition mandates a belief in the inevitable triumph of our ethical institutions, even at the expense of a hero’s self-destruction. What I mean by this is that sometimes the world demands one person’s devastation so as to secure salvation for everyone else and prevent the unraveling of what has, until now, been holding us together. I like this idea. The department claims to like it, too, if I ever finish the project. “I should hope not,” I said.
“An inveterate idealist, you are. Maybe that’s a good thing. Actually, probably, it’s a wonderful thing.” A waiter, frowning, requested Evan stop smoking. Evan apologized and put out the rest of his cigarette. “Know what I believe in?”
“I can only imagine.”
“How about this? I believe certain people are damned to be unhappy.”
“So?”
“Don’t you agree?”
I wanted to be embarrassed by the question. I wanted my cheeks to redden the way they used to when I’d first arrived in Zion Hills. As it was, I didn’t flinch. I caught a glint of my reflection through a window behind Evan’s head. Studying my features, I missed my childhood in Brooklyn more intensely than I ever had before. “Sure I do.”
“What do you do about the solitude?” He stirred his drink. “I mean, maybe you should marry her, after all.”
I looked away from his face. “Pardon?”
“It’s just that, for me, the worst horror of all, even after all these years?” He looked at me with defeated eyes. “It’s that feeling of moral aloneness. It’s always been the feeling I’ve never gotten rid of.”
I finished my whiskey, crossed my legs. I prepared to submit the question I’d been wondering, with varying degrees of intensity, for some seven years. I’d been able to bury it for temporary stretches, even as I knew this question—properly or not, meaningfully or not—measured my existence. Faced with the prospect of vocalizing it now, I found it resisted simple articulation. “If it never happened,” I said, slowly, struggling for words, “I want to know how you imagine things would’ve ended, if left to—to a natural course.”
“Natural course?” Evan smiled pitifully, sipped. “You, of all people, don’t really believe in life divorced from divine intervention?”
“No,” I said, “but I believe in a life divorced from what you’ve done.” I started thinking about things I’d lost years before. I thought about that winding staircase and about what a casket looks like lowered into earth and about a pomegranate bleeding in my hand. I thought about how I felt more Jewish now that I was alone and capable of relinquishing my birthright than I ever did in Brooklyn or Zion Hills. I thought about how surviving requires finding something that possesses the mind so thoroughly that nothing else matters. I thought about how sorrow, in the final analysis, probably does elevate, so long as you convince yourself that being untouched by yearning means you were never really worthy of experience. I thought about how we never really do manage to recover fully from whatever first wounds us. I thought about how human memory probably has a habit of rendering things more profound than they ever really were. I thought about how some find God while trying to lose Him and how others lose God while trying to find Him.
“Ari,” Evan said, his voice thin, “do you ever miss it?” He fumbled for a second cigarette, though didn’t light it. I felt, for the first time in many years, an urge to become excessively drunk, but I didn’t touch what remained in my tumbler. Something in me had been gone for quite some time now, but in this moment I felt its absence most profoundly.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said
.
“But that clarity, that recognition of looking upon the most beautiful thing either of us or any other human will ever see, that sense of—of divine intoxication?” He removed his unlit cigarette from his mouth, stored it in his pocket. “That’s what it was, Eden. Divine intoxication.”
“You know what Oliver told me, after I first found him?” I asked this in a voice that wasn’t mine. “He said we weren’t supposed to see any of it. And he was right, I think. That’s why everything happened.”
It was hot, suddenly, even with the light fading around us. After the long pause: “Ever think about returning?”
“Yes,” I said. “Nearly every day.”
“I’m going back.” He finished his drink and stood. “Forever.”
Acknowledgments
Yeats wanted to ground literature on the three things that Kant believed rendered life livable: “Freedom, God, Immortality.” To that list, I submit family, friends and teachers, without each of whom this book could not exist.
Susan Choi’s support of the embryonic version of this manuscript helped propel me into motion. I am grateful for her mentorship and inspiration.
John Crowley shared his wisdom with me, embracing the story’s mysticism and humor. I appreciate his graciousness and his confidence in my potential.
Emily Forland, my agent, believed in me from the moment she suspected that my manuscript sounded like her “cup of tea.” She helped actualize my lifelong dream, providing brilliant guidance, vision, calm and cheer each step of the way. Thank you, also, to everyone at Brandt & Hochman.
Sara Birmingham, editor extraordinaire, improved this book immeasurably. I am lucky to have worked with and befriended someone with her depth of insight and expertise. My thanks, additionally, to the entire team at Ecco and HarperCollins.
I remain thankful for my teachers and professors, from my high school and yeshiva days to college, graduate school and, now, law school. I have been privileged to study with giants—masterful, caring thinkers whose teachings endure and enrich each aspect of my life.
I am blessed with exceptional friends, for whom I am continually grateful. Thank you for the support, endless laughter and infinitely entertaining material. (I jest. This book, I promise, is not about you.)
My paternal grandparents, Joseph and Selma Hopen, nurtured my literary interests from an early age. I miss them deeply. My maternal grandparents, Kalman and Irene Talansky, champion my pursuits on a daily basis. I have loved poring over this book with my grandpa, whose incomparable devotion resembles that of a parent toward his own child.
My siblings, Jessica and Josh, support me in every capacity. We are inseparable and lean on each other at all times. The fierce bond I have with my sister and brother—and now my brother-in-law, Charles—is one of the great joys of my life.
I reserve my deepest gratitude, now and forever, for my parents, Gary Hopen and Beth Talansky-Hopen. They are my original—and constant—editors, they are my role models and they are the finest, most selfless people I will ever know. My parents have given me everything. Any virtue of this book functions as but a reflection of their love.
About the Author
DAVID HOPEN is a student at Yale Law School. Raised in Hollywood, Florida, he earned his master’s degree from the University of Oxford and graduated from Yale College. The Orchard is his debut novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE ORCHARD. Copyright © 2020 by David Hopen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Cover art and design by Elizabeth Yaffe
Illustration by Elizabeth Yaffe
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hopen, David, 1993– author.
Title: The orchard: a novel / David Hopen.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013616 (print) | LCCN 2020013617 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062974747 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062974761 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jewish teenagers—Fiction. | Jews—Fiction. | Jewish fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.O633 O73 2020 (print) | LCC PS3608.O633 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013616.
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013617.
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-297476-1
Version 10012020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297474-7
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