Forest Dark

  I walked home up one of the little streets that led away from the sea, and by the time I got back to Brenner it was late and my legs ached, but I still couldn’t sleep.

  Feel ready to snap, the dance teacher had said. But don’t snap yet.

  At two or three in the morning the sirens went off, and I went downstairs and stood with an old lady and her daughter in the concrete stairwell. The wailing stopped, and in the silence we bowed our heads. When the thunderous explosion sounded, the old woman looked up and smiled at me, a smile so out of place that it could have only come from senility. On the way back to bed, I removed a few items of clothes from my suitcase and stuffed them into a plastic bag I found under the sink. For the sake of unpreparedness, I could say. Or because it was the hour when I seemed to pack for the trips I had no plans to take. Or because it would save me from having to wake up and face trying to begin the novel that by now I knew I would almost certainly never begin, though there was still a sliver of a chance that I might. Opening my computer, I checked the news, but nothing had yet been reported. I typed an e-mail to my husband. I might need some time, I said. I might need to be away for longer than I’d thought. Beyond that, I gave no explanation for what would become my silence.

  Is and Isn’t

  Epstein entered the house. Entered it with a song in his head. Entered the way a man enters into his own solitude, without hope of filling it. A man like Klausner must have his minions, and so he was not surprised to encounter three or four of them bustling about, preparing for the arrival of both Shabbat and Klausner. They were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, and had it not been for the skullcaps, they could have been the sloppy residents of any college dorm in America. All but one, a young black man whose patchy sideburns were making slow inroads toward the rest of his scraggly beard, but who had already donned the pious uniform of dark jacket and white shirt. From the corner, hunched over a guitar, he sized Epstein up without pausing the graceful movement of his fingers across the strings. By what route had he arrived here? Epstein wondered, trying to place the melody. He pictured the boy’s mother with graying temples by the window of her Bronx apartment, the Christmas tree rigged up. Later, gathered around a table set for ten, introductions were made, and the soulful guitar player was presented as Peretz Chaim. Epstein couldn’t contain himself: “But what’s your real name?” he asked. To which the young man, whose manners were fine, solemnly replied that Peretz Chaim was his real name, as real as Jules Epstein.

  Klausner, having sent a last-chance-before-Shabbat e-mail at an outdated computer behind the front desk, and double-checked that all the lights had been left on, hurried Epstein back outside again, through the narrow streets to the old synagogue where he wanted to take him—to soak up the atmosphere, he said, rubbing two fingers together in a sign that to Epstein signaled money rather than rich air. To breathe in the spirituality. As they turned down a passage of stone steps, a large cemetery came into view below in the valley. It was planted with cypresses whose tapering forms seemed shaped by conditions separate from sun, wind, and rain.

  Down below, the great sages of centuries past lay under tombs painted blue. Epstein had seen the paint everywhere in town, on paving stones and doors, in the grouting between the rough stones of the houses. It was tradition, Klausner explained, to ward off the evil eye. “A bit pagan”—he shrugged—“but what’s the harm?”

  They arrived at an arched door in the wall and, crossing a courtyard of broad paving stones, entered into a high-ceilinged, whitewashed room crowded with men in dark coats, fringes dangling. There seemed to be no order to the restless movement in the room, to the chanting here and swaying there, beards bristling with the tension of communication with the Almighty, while others kibitzed off-duty and helped themselves from a table laid with bottles of orange soda and cake. Klausner handed him a white satin skullcap from a table. Epstein examined the inside. Who knew how many heads it had been on? He was about to tuck it away in his pocket, but the man behind the table, beadle of the skullcaps, was watching him with fiercely narrowed eyes, and so with a wink Epstein set it on his head.

  Now, as if under the command of a distant electromagnetism, the whole group joined together in song. Epstein, who had the urge to add his voice—not to sing so much as to yell out some disjointed, Tourette’s-like phrase into the volume—opened his mouth, but closed it again when he was shunted aside by the traffic still coming in from behind. When the song died back into scattered chanting, Klausner was drawn into conversation by a man even larger than he, with a beard as coarse and red as Esau’s.

  Finding himself separated, Epstein let himself be pulled by the crowd in the opposite direction, past the shelves of gilded books and baskets of silk flowers. Caught in an eddy of black coats, he saw a huge, dark wooden chair with eagle’s talons at the bottom of its legs, attached to what looked like a cradle—oh, God, was that where they performed the circumcisions? The barbarism! Then he noticed an opening in the wall, and to get away from the chair, stepped down into a small, grotto-like room where some oily candles flickered. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that he wasn’t alone: a rheumy-eyed man was perched on a low stool. The musty air was heavy, tinged with the man’s body odor. A little brass plaque on the wall, which Epstein tried to make out in the gleam from the candles, commemorated this as the place where the famous Luria had come to pray five hundred years ago.

  The shrunken man was groping his leg, offering him something. A wave of claustrophobia came over him. The breathable air seemed to be running out. A psalm, did he want to say a psalm? Was that what the man was asking? To ask for a blessing from the sage? In the old man’s lap was a package of cookies, and when Epstein refused the book of psalms, the man waved the package blindly, pushing it toward him. No, no, he didn’t want a cookie, either, and when the man continued to pull on his pants leg, Epstein reached down, tore off the arthritic claw, and fled.

  Half an hour later, back at Gilgul, drops of sweat were forming again on Klausner’s brow. For the second time in a week, Epstein found himself seated at a table of Jews under the sway of the rabbi’s exertions. But unlike the audience of American Jewish leaders gathered vaguely, expensively, to rehearse their old positions, the students around this simple wooden table seemed alert and alive, open to miracles. Glancing avidly about, Epstein waited for the show to begin. In these elevations, under his own mystical roof, Klausner was even more in his element than he had been at the Plaza. And tonight Epstein was his guest of honor, and so it was especially for his sake that the rabbi’s sermon was designed—if design was the word, for the sentences seemed to roll from his mouth spontaneously. Rocking on the balls of his feet, he opened grandly:

  “Tonight, we have in our company a man come down from King David!”

  All heads turned to look. Epstein, who had come down from Edie and Sol, did not bother to correct him, the way one does not bother to correct a magician whom one has seen pull an extra card from his sleeve.

  From the King of Israel, Klausner leaped to the Messiah, who it was said would come from the descendants of David. And from the Messiah, he leaped to the end of time. And from the end of time, he leaped to time’s beginning, to the withdrawal of God to make space for the finite world, for time can only exist in the absence of the eternal. And from the withdrawal of God’s divine light, the rabbi, blue eyes sparking with local candlelight, leaped to the empty space, whose spot of darkness held the potential for the world. And from the empty space that held the potential for the world, he leaped to the creation of the world, with its days and measures.

  Like so, the tall, limber rabbi born in Cleveland, transplanted to the ancient land of the Bible, leaped like Jackie Joyner from the infinite to the finite. Epstein followed loosely. His thoughts were diffuse tonight, his focus fleeting. The words rolled through him, under the notes of an aria by Vivaldi whose steady heartbeat had been lodged in his head since he woke that morning at the Hilton.

  “But the finite remembers the infi
nite,” Klausner said, holding up a long finger. “It still contains the will of infinity!”

  The will of infinity, Epstein repeated to himself, weighing the phrase in his mind as one weighs a hammer to see if it is enough to drive the nail. But the words came apart on him and raised only dust.

  “And so everything in this world longs to return there. To repair itself to infinity. This process of repair, this most beautiful of processes which we call tikkun, is the operating system of this world. Tikkun olam, the transformation of the world, which cannot happen without tikkun ha’nefesh, our own internal transformation. The moment we enter into Jewish thought, Jewish questioning, we enter into this process. Because what is a question but a voided space? A space that seeks to be filled again with its portion of infinity?”

  Epstein glanced at his small, pale neighbor, whose pierced eyebrow was knitted in concentration. She was young—younger even than Maya—and solemn as an icon. She gave off the air of having survived a disaster. Would she know what to do with her portion of infinity when she finally got it? Studying the tattoos on her knuckles, Epstein wasn’t sure. He looked gloomily at his watch: still an hour and a half before the taxi was supposed to come for him. He thought of calling Maya, or checking in with Schloss, or reaching the director of development of the Israel Museum in the fragrant garden of her Jerusalem home, apologizing for disturbing her Friday-night meal, and announcing that he had decided to give her the $2 million to commission a monumental sculpture in his parents’ names. Something rusted, immovable, dwarfing, called, simply, Edie and Sol.

  His father first, and then, suddenly, his mother. His father had been dying for years, had been dying for as long as Epstein could remember, but his mother had been scheduled to live forever, for how else would she have the last word? Epstein had buried his father, had arranged everything—the relatives, however distant, wanted a copy of his eulogy, so moving had it been. But there was nothing he could give them, he had spoken extemporaneously. Jonah and his cousins shouldered the pine casket. “Stand on the boards!” the gravedigger had shouted. “On the boards!” He’d laid two thin wooden planks lengthwise across the grave, on which they were to perch to lower the coffin on ropes. But they were struggling under the weight, slipping in the loose soil in their dress shoes, and could not see where they were putting their feet. That night, after everyone had left the shiva, Epstein wept alone, thinking of how his father had looked down at his naked, bruised legs in the hospital bed, and asked, “How did I get so banged up?”

  But he could still operate the heavy machinery of grief, and steered his mind away from the places that would cause the most destruction. He had arranged for the religious relatives to fly in from Cleveland and California, had arranged for someone to say the daily kaddish, had already paid the mason for the headstone a year in advance, but in all of this arranging he had failed to arrange his mother, who had always made her own arrangements, who did not want his help, who had never wanted anyone’s help, who had been offended at its mere offer, and who one morning, not even three months after his father died, riding down alone in the Sunny Isles elevator, had had a massive heart attack and died. Passed away in the back of the ambulance, in the presence of no one but the paramedic.

  Then Epstein had had to do it all over again. He went through the motions, as if in a fog. People spoke to him, but he barely heard, and wandered off in the middle of their condolences; all was excused, he was in shock. Three weeks later, he flew back to Miami alone. His sister Joanie wanted no part in dealing with their parents’ things. As with everything, she left it to her accomplished brother. Sorting through their belongings, he knew himself to be searching for something, a form of evidence for what he had always known but had never been told, because to utter even a word about his father’s past had been against the laws of their world. Even now, as he looked with trembling hands through his father’s drawers, he could not speak to himself about the wife and small son his father had lost in the war. He couldn’t say how he knew. The origins of his knowledge—no, it was not knowledge, it was innate sense—were inaccessible to him. But for as long as his memory went back, he had been in possession of this sense. It had informed everything. Without touching it, his consciousness had nevertheless grown around this vacuum of his father’s original son.

  In the end, he’d turned up nothing except for a shoebox of old photographs of his mother that he’d never seen, belly round with him, hair whipped by wind, face browned by the Middle Eastern sun, the lines of her features deep and strong. Already operating according to her own system. She was not disorganized but did things her own way. Her internal order was hidden to others, and this gave the impression that she was impenetrable. Even after a lifetime with her, standing knee-high in boxes in her closet or going through her papers, Epstein could not crack the code. Conchita was no help either. He made his own instant coffee while she moped in the bedroom and called Lima on the house phone. In the cupboard, behind the boxes of unopened tea, Epstein had noticed a tin from Ladurée—a gift from him, bought on one of his trips to Paris. Opening it, he discovered what appeared to be a few serrated gray beads at the bottom, but when he poured them into his palm, he saw with surprise that they were baby teeth. His own teeth, which his mother, whom he’d never known to possess a grain of sentimentality, had kept for sixty years. He was deeply touched, tears sprang to his eyes; he had the desire to show them to someone, and was about to call Conchita into the room. But his phone rang just then, and he’d slipped them distractedly into his pocket and only remembered them too late, after he had sent the pants to the dry cleaner’s. Wincing, he thought now of the tiny teeth washing down through the drainpipes with the wastewater.

  The rabbi drew his sermon to a close, and the blessing was made over the challah. Klausner tore hunks from the braided loaves, stabbed them into a dish of salt, stuffed one into his mouth, and tossed the rest around the table. It was a form of crudeness Epstein had been known to praise: the crudeness of passion that refuses to dull itself with manners. What good had etiquette ever done anyone? So began the little speech he liked to give to Lianne on the long rides back from visiting her parents, the dense old growth of Connecticut unfurling outside the windows. A wrong turn had been taken in the human evolution, the result of the slow drain of necessity from life. Once survival was ensured, time had opened for frivolity and daft embellishment, and this led to the absurd contortions of propriety. So much useless energy spent meeting the standards of social manners, which in the end accomplish nothing but constriction and misunderstanding. Lianne’s family and their priggish formalities were the inspiration for his lecture, but once he’d gotten started, there was no stopping him until they’d pulled into the parking garage in Manhattan: humanity could have gone another way, leaving its inner self exposed!

  Lianne, being unable to turn the tide of evolution, silently removed an issue of the New Yorker from her bag and began to leaf through its pages. It had always been that way with her. Epstein could never get through. Perhaps it was desire that had kept him there for so long: he had tried and tried to throw himself against that wall, too, to break through to her secret inner court. After a while, he lost his energy for the argument. His world was making him weary. Those were the months leading up to his announcement to Lianne that he could no longer remain married. When they were dining at the Four Seasons for her niece’s sixteenth birthday, a white-coated waiter had lifted his dropped napkin from the floor and returned it to his lap, and as he did, Epstein had felt an urge to jump to his feet and cry something out. But what? He’d imagined the diners turning to him in bewildered silence, the faces of the waitstaff tightening, the rippling curtains falling finally still, and so instead excused himself, and on the way to the men’s room instructed the maître d’ to bring his niece the spun sugar dessert with a sparkler for a candle.

  Now, at the thought of Lianne’s face, finely lined, touched by faint surprise as it was whenever she opened her eyes in the morning, Epstein felt a st
ab of pain. It had always annoyed him, this expression of her bewilderment. He woke to the day, into argument, having rehearsed his position all night in his sleep, but she slept and forgot, and woke perplexed. Why was she not more like him? He remembered how, on the night he’d told her that he could no longer carry on in their marriage, Lianne had said that he wasn’t himself. That he was still reeling from his parents’ deaths, and that it wasn’t the time to do anything rash. But by the way her eye twitched, he’d understood that she knew something not even he yet fully grasped. That she was the opposite of bewildered, and had come to her own conclusions. Something had needed to break, and he felt it then, the fragile bones snapping one by one under his fingers. He hadn’t guessed it would be like that. He had imagined it as a huge, nearly impossible labor, but it took almost nothing. So light, so delicate a thing was a marriage. Had he known, would he have been more careful all these years? Or would he have broken it long ago?

  The steaming dishes were brought out from the Gilgul kitchen. In a burned pan, a whole chicken lay plucked and yellow, bubbling in its own fat. Epstein half wondered whether Klausner would tear off the thighs and toss them around the table, too. But one of the girls, a lesbian by the look of it, applied herself to it with a carving knife. A plate was passed down the table to Epstein, piled high with meat and potatoes. He’d barely eaten since his near drowning. His stomach couldn’t take it. On account of what? Swallowing a bit of sea? From beyond the grave, his mother laid into him. What was wrong with him? The smoke from an eternal cigarette swirled around her. He used to have a stomach of steel! He took down a swallow of sour wine and set into the greasy chicken. Bracing himself, he stuffed it down. It was just a question of mental exertion over the body. Long ago, when Jonah and Lucie were still young, he’d received a diagnosis of malignant melanoma. A small mole on his chest had begun to change color with the leaves one autumn. But when the doctor scratched it off and sent it to the lab, the news came back that it was his death that had been growing there, unfurling its colors. There was a 10 percent survival rate, the doctor reported grimly. In the meantime, there was nothing to be done. Leaving the office and walking down Central Park West in the invigorating sunlight, a trembling Epstein had made a decision: he would live. He told no one of the diagnosis, not even Lianne. And he never went back to see the doctor again. The years passed and passed, and the little white scar on his chest faded and became imperceptible. His death became imperceptible. Once, passing the forgotten address, his eye had caught on the doctor’s name on the brass placard, and a chill had gone through him. He pulled his scarf around his neck and laughed it away. Mind over matter! Yes, he had cured himself of a lisp, cured himself of weaknesses, of failures, of exhaustions, of all manner of inability, and as if that were not enough, he had gone and cured himself of cancer. A stomach of steel and an iron will. Where there was a wall, he had gone through. Surely he could get his dinner down, despite the nausea he felt chewing it.