Forest Dark

  He had always prided himself on his ability to read people, to see what was behind the surface. But he could not yet put his finger on Klausner. A grand facilitator, he had transported the still-searching to his magic mountain by the hundreds, all the way from JFK and LAX; it was nothing for him to sweep Epstein up from Tel Aviv. And yet there was something in the rabbi’s gaze—not its attentiveness, for the world had always been attentive to Epstein, but rather its depth, the suggestion of capaciousness within—which seemed to hold the promise of understanding. The events of the day before—the lost coat, the mugging, the hearse with the ebony casket shining long and dark in the hold, which that evening had come back to Epstein with a chill as he entered the dark town car waiting for him in its place—had left Epstein feeling out of sorts. Perhaps it was just an overreceptivity born of emotion, but he found himself wishing to confide in Klausner. In broad strokes, he told him about the last year, beginning with the deaths of his parents, and how he had brought his long, mostly stable marriage to an end, to the shock of his family and friends, and retired from his law firm, and finally he told him about the irresistible desire for lightening that had swelled under all of this and led him to give so much away.

  The rabbi ran his long, thin fingers through his beard, and at last pronounced a word Epstein did understand. Tzimtzum, Klausner had repeated, and explained the term that was central in Kabbalah. How does the infinite—the Ein Sof, the being without end, as God is called—create something finite within what is already infinite? And furthermore, how can we explain the paradox of God’s simultaneous presence and absence in the world? It was a sixteenth-century mystic, Isaac Luria, who articulated the answer in Safed five hundred years before: When it arose in God’s will to create the world, He first withdrew Himself, and in the void that was left, He created the world. Tzimtzum was the word Luria gave to this divine contraction, Klausner explained, which was the necessary precursor of creation. This primordial event was seen as ongoing, constantly echoed not just in the Torah but in our own lives.

  “For example?”

  “For example,” said Klausner, twisting around in his seat, which lacked the leg room of the pulpit, “God created Eve out of Adam’s rib. Why? Because first an empty space needed to be made in Adam to make room for the experience of another. Did you know that the meaning of Chava—Eve, in Hebrew—is ‘experience’?”

  It was a rhetorical question, and Epstein, who was used to employing them himself, didn’t bother to answer.

  “To create man, God had to remove Himself, and one could say that the defining feature of humanity is that lack. It’s a lack that haunts us because, being God’s creation, we contain a memory of the infinite, which fills us with longing. But the same lack is also what allows for free will. The act of breaking God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge can be interpreted as a rejection of obedience in favor of free choice and the pursuit of autonomous knowledge. But of course it’s God who suggests the idea of eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the first place. God who plants the idea in Eve. And so it can also be read as God’s way of leading Adam and Eve to confront the vacated space within themselves—the space where God seems to be absent. In this way it is Eve, whose creation required a physical void in Adam, who also leads Adam to the discovery of the metaphysical void within him which he will forever mourn, even as he floods it with his freedom and will.”

  It was in the story of Moses, too, Klausner went on. The one chosen to speak for his people must first have speech removed from him. He put a hot coal in his mouth as a child and burned his tongue and so was unable to speak, and it was this absence of speech that created the possibility of his being filled with God’s speech.

  “This is why the rabbis tell us that a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite.”

  “What are you saying to me?” Epstein asked with a dry laugh. “That I’ve made myself susceptible?”

  The plane began to shudder as it drifted into a pocket of turbulence, and Klausner’s attention was diverted to a frantic search for the straps of his seat belt. He had already confided his fear of flying to Epstein, who had watched him gulp down two pills chased with a glass of pineapple juice he’d finagled from the stewardess, even after she’d instructed him to return to his seat in Economy. Now he cupped his palms around his face and peered out at the dark sky again, as if the cause for instability could be spied there.

  The danger passed, the stewardess came to shoo Klausner away with a white cloth for the tray table: dinner was being served, and he really had to go back to his seat. With his time almost up, Klausner quickly got down to business. As much as he would have liked to dedicate himself entirely to Gilgul, he told Epstein, much of his time these days was taken up by the organizing committee of a reunion for the descendants of King David, to be held next month in Jerusalem. It had never been done before. A thousand people were expected to attend! He’d meant to raise the subject at the Plaza, he said, but Epstein had left before he’d had the chance. Would he consider attending? It would be an honor if he’d agree. And might he consider joining the advisory board? It would only mean lending his name and a donation.

  Ah, Epstein thought, so that was it. But if his thoughts were jaded, his heart was not, for at the mention of Jerusalem—Jerusalem, which somehow never appeared exhausted by its ancientness, by all its collected pain and heaps of paradox, its store of human mistake, but rather seemed to derive its majesty from it—he recalled the view of its ancient hills and felt his blood-thinned heart expand.

  He told Klausner that he would think about it, though he did not really plan on thinking about it. He had a sudden urge to show the rabbi pictures of his children, in case he had given an inaccurate impression of himself with his tale of letting go, of giving away. His vibrant children and grandchildren, who were proof of his attachment to the world. One had to search to find the resemblance. Jonah, darker than his sisters, needed only a few hours of exposure to the sun to become swarthy. To become a Moroccan carpet seller, Epstein used to say. But their mother always said that he had the hair of a Greek god. Maya had the same dark hair, but all the melanin had been given out by the time she was conceived, and her skin was pale and burned easily. Lucie looked neither Moroccan nor Greek, nor even Jewish—she had about her a northern look, touched by the grace of snow and clarified by the cold. And yet there was something in the animation of their faces that was shared.

  But the moment Epstein took out his phone to show the rabbi, he remembered that it was empty: all the thousands of photographs had gone with the Palestinian. Epstein thought again of the man in his coat, who by now must have arrived home to Ramallah or Nablus and hung it in the closet, to the surprise of his wife.

  Having nothing to show, Epstein asked how Klausner had come to be invited to the meeting with Abbas at the Plaza, to which the rabbi answered that he was an old friend of Joseph Telushkin’s. But Epstein did not know any Telushkin. “Not a descendant,” Klausner said, but with a gleam in his eye, as if he were all too aware of the image he was playing to—the Jew who aspires to cliché, who, in his pious fight against extinction is willing to become a copy of a copy of a copy. Epstein had seen them all his life, the ones whose dark suits only highlight the fact that after so many mimeographs the ink has faded and blurred. But that was not the case with Klausner.

  Now the rabbi was waiting for him in the lobby of the Hilton. Through the plate-glass window of his hotel room, Epstein could see the hill of Jaffa in whose belly thousands of years lay collapsed and dreaming, returned to the womb. A sense of languor came over him, and, not being used to it, uneasy with its implications, he forced himself to stand. He swept the shekels from the night table into his pocket and took some large bills from the safe in the closet, tucking them into his wallet. Whether strolling the green lawns of the Weizmann Institute and touring the house with the stern eyes of Israel’s first
president following him from out of the oil portraits, or riding out to Ben-Gurion University, where he saw huge carrion birds feeding in the desert, or even sitting across the table from his cousin, Moti, the subtext of all the conversations he’d had over the last days was money. Epstein had had enough. He would make a small gift to Klausner’s kabbalah operation and be done with it. He wished to talk to the rabbi of other things.

  Rounding the corner of the bank of elevators in the lobby, he spotted Klausner from behind. He was wearing the same grubby suit as before; Epstein recognized a loose thread still dangling from the hem of the jacket, which the rabbi had not yet bothered to cut, and the back was marked by what looked like a dusty footprint. A navy wool scarf hung around his neck. Klausner sprang to life when he spotted Epstein, grasping his shoulders and squeezing them warmly. He lacked the physical awkwardness of the Orthodox, who often seemed to want to get as far away from their bodies as possible, and contracted themselves to a point inside their craniums. Epstein wondered if Klausner had not been born into religion but rather had come to it later. Whether beneath the ill-fitting suit there was a body that had once played basketball, wrestled, rolled naked with a girl in the grass, a body that had been granted sway in its near constant pursuit of freedom and pleasure. Imagining this commonality, Epstein felt the warmth of friendship tingle in his chest.

  He followed the rabbi through the revolving door and across the drive to where a beat-up car stood at an angle to the curb, looking more abandoned than willfully parked. Klausner opened the passenger door and rifled around, removing empty plastic bottles and some cardboard tied with twine, which he tossed into the trunk. Observing from behind, Epstein asked whether Klausner also ran a recycling facility. “In a manner of speaking,” the rabbi replied with a grin, and slung himself in behind the steering wheel. Even with the seat far back, his knees were still bent at an unnatural angle.

  Epstein arranged himself in the passenger seat. From the dashboard, disconnected wires bristled angrily where the stereo had been wrenched out. The engine came to life with a kick, and the rabbi swerved past a parked Mercedes and down the hotel’s steep driveway. “Sorry about this. The Bentley is in the shop,” said Klausner, swatting the lever for the turn signal and peering at Epstein out of the corner of his eye to see how the joke went over. But Epstein, who had once owned a Bentley, only smiled mildly.

  Two hours later, after they’d left the coastal road and climbed in elevation, a thin rain began to fall. The car had no windshield wipers—whoever had stripped it of the stereo had perhaps seen value there, too. But Klausner, whom Epstein by now understood to be indefatigable, expertly reached outside with a dirty rag and rubbed the glass clear without so much as slowing down. This was repeated every few minutes without a break in his exegesis on the life and teachings of Luria. He would take Epstein to the house in Safed where Luria had lived, Klausner promised, to the courtyard where his students had once gathered to follow their teacher into the fields, dancing and singing psalms to welcome in the Shabbat queen.

  Looking out the window, Epstein smiled to himself. He would go along with it. He would not interfere. He was someplace he couldn’t have predicted he’d be only a week earlier—in a car with a mystical rabbi on the way to Safed. The thought that he’d arrived here without having given any instructions pleased him. He had spent his whole life laboring to determine the outcome. But the eve of the sixth day had come for him, too, hadn’t it? The ancient land spilled out all around. Every life is strange, he thought. When he rolled down his window, the air smelled of pine. His mind felt light. The sun was already low. They had been delayed by traffic on the highway, and the Shabbat queen was breathing down their necks. But Epstein, looking out at the slumbering hills, was struck by the feeling of having all the time in the world.

  They entered Safed and drove through the narrow streets, where the stores were already shuttered. Twice they had to stop and reverse to let tour buses pass, their high windows filled with the weary but satisfied faces of those who have just drunk from the world’s authenticity. Beyond the town center, the tourists and artists thinned out, and then they met only Hasids on the road, who flattened themselves against the stone houses as the car squeezed past, clutching their plastic bags to their bodies. What was it with religious Jews and their plastic bags? Epstein wondered. Why did these people who had been wandering for thousands of years not invest in more reliable luggage? They didn’t even believe in briefcases and came to court with their legal documents in bags from the kosher bakery—he’d seen it a hundred times. Now they shook their hands in annoyance at Klausner, not for nearly cutting off their noses as he passed but for driving so close to the arrival of Shabbat. But four minutes before the closing bell, the rabbi made a sharp turn into a driveway on the edge of town and rolled to a stop in front of a building whose mottled stones were the color of teeth, though perhaps of a person too ancient to use them.

  Klausner hopped out, singing to himself in a rich tenor. Epstein stood in the fresh, cool air and saw down through the valley where Jesus had performed his miracles. A rooster crowed in the distance, and as if in answer there came the distant reply of a dog. Had it not been for the satellite dish planted on the terra-cotta roof, it might have been possible to believe that the rabbi had brought him back to a time when the world was not yet consequence.

  “Welcome to Gilgul,” Klausner called, already hurrying up the path. “Come in, they’ll be waiting for us.”

  Epstein remained where he was, taking in the view.

  But now his phone was going off again, the ring so loud it might have been heard all the way down in Nazareth. It was his assistant calling from New York. Good news, she said: she thought she might have a lead on his coat.

  Packing for Canaan

  I spent the rest of the night after I met Friedman stuck in the juncture between sleep and waking. Whenever I closed my eyes and drifted into a thin, disturbed sleep, my mind filled with the rows and columns of the hotel’s windows, lighting up and whirring like a slot machine or giant abacus. I couldn’t glean what these anxious and repetitive calculations meant. Only that they had significance for me, and what my life would come to. The events of the day stretched and warped in my mind, and at some point I became convinced that Kafka himself was sitting in the chair by the window, half turned toward the terrace. I was certain of his presence, as certain as I was, the next moment, of the absurdity of what just a moment ago I’d believed. There was the face I’d studied so many times in the photograph taken during the last year of his life: forty years old, eyes burning in either illness or the excitement of escape, cheekbones bulging from the gaunt face, pointed ears pulled sharply up and away from the skull as if by some outside force. Torqued by the strain, no longer merely human—weren’t they always evidence, those ears, of an incomprehensible transformation already under way?

  The door was cracked open, and through it came the gentle, slow rocking of the sea. From time to time Kafka delicately lifted a foot and rubbed his slender, hairless ankle against the long curtains. His preoccupation filled the room, heavy and foreboding, and somewhere in my subconscious the suicidal fantasy Kafka had often rehearsed in his diary of jumping out the window and smashing himself on the pavement below must have twined together with the man who had leaped to his death from the hotel terrace.

  But Kafka, my Kafka, made no movement toward the terrace door, and so instead I became convinced that he was deliberating whether or not to marry one or another of the succession of women in his life. Reading his letters and diaries, one has the sense that this was the main subject he applied himself to, second only to his writing. Vaguely, I considered telling him that he had wasted far too much energy on it all. That his hysteria was useless, that he was right to believe he wasn’t made for marriage, and that what he saw as his failure and weakness could also be seen as a sign of health. A health, I might have added, that I’d begun to suspect I might also possess, insofar as health is that part of one that recognizes wh
at is making one unwell.

  In a year I, too, would be forty, and the thought came to me that if my beginning was conceived at the Hilton, it would follow that my end would be, too. That this was what my research was meant to look into. In the fog of semiconsciousness, it didn’t frighten me. It seemed not merely a logical thought but one touched by profound logic, and for the moment before I finally fell asleep it filled me with strange hope.

  In the morning, sun streaked through the windows, and I was woken by a brusque knock on the door. I staggered out of bed. It was a woman from housekeeping come to restore order, all the way from Eritrea or Sudan. Her cart was piled high with pristine towels and little packages of scalloped soap. She peered past me into the room at the twisted bedsheets and scattered pillows, gauging the size of the job. She must have seen all kinds of things. A woman who had wrestled with sleep all night was nothing to her. But she realized that she had woken me, and she began to turn away. It occurred to me then that if anyone knew something about the man who had jumped or fallen, it would be her.