Moti laughed, relieved to hear something of the old, familiar raconteur.
“You think she would have wanted this, your mother?” Moti asked, thrusting his chin out toward the barren hillside. “Is that why you’re doing it?”
Do what you want, you’re a free person, his mother used to yell at him, which was her way of saying Do what you want if you want to kill me. Inside the hem of his independence she’d sewed her command, so that at his greatest moments of freedom he felt her pull on him like gravity. Even going away from her, he was going toward her. All that was loyal in him and all that was seditious originated in grappling with that waxing and waning span, even if later it flung itself out toward other entities. No, she had not been a calming force, his mother. Her favorite piece of jewelry was a double strand of pearls, and on occasions when they lay around her throat, Epstein could not help but feel that her attachment to them had something to do with the irritant at their core that had gone and produced such luster. She had brought him to a state of vibrancy by means of provocation.
“She wanted a bench in a crummy park in Sunny Isles. If that.”
“So why? I don’t understand, Yuda, I really don’t. It’s none of my business, but they were frugal people, your parents. They didn’t like to waste. One tree, two trees. But four hundred thousand? For what? You remember how I came to America for the first time when I was twenty-one? Your mother wouldn’t let me throw out my own toenail clippings.”
Epstein didn’t remember any such visit. He would already have been married by then, Jonah and Lucie both born. He would have been preoccupied with his work at the firm, and a hundred forms of struggle.
“They brought me to see you and Lianne. I came to your Park Avenue apartment, and it was like something out of another world. I’d never seen people live like that. You took me out for lunch at an expensive restaurant and insisted on ordering a lobster. Because you wanted to treat me, or impress me, or because you were having a little fun with me, I couldn’t tell which. And the waiter brings this huge boiling-red creature, this terrifying insect, to the table and puts it in front of me, and all I can think about are the swarms of giant red locusts that come every seven years and lie washed up on the beach. You got up and went to the bathroom, leaving me alone with it. And after a while, I couldn’t stand its beady black eyes staring at me anymore, so I put my napkin over its head.”
Epstein smiled. He had no recollection of it, but it didn’t sound unlike him.
“That night, I went back to the house in Long Beach. Your mother put me up in your old bedroom. And, lying there in your bed, listening to your parents go at each other in the kitchen, I kept thinking about that lobster. For the first time since I’d arrived, I felt homesick. All I wanted was to go back to Israel, where we might have had plagues of locusts, but they were my locusts, and at least I understood what they meant. I was lying there listening to your parents tear each other apart, and thinking about what it must have been like to be you. And suddenly I heard something slam hard against the wall with a thud. Then silence. I was already a man by then, just out of the army, with the reflexes of a soldier, and I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen. I saw your mother leaning against the wall, holding her face, and I understood that some things are everywhere the same, and it was like I was back in my childhood kitchen again, with my own mother.”
Epstein looked up at the sky, bloodied to the west. Had he been better acquainted with this side of Moti, hidden under the coarseness and the wise cracks, or had the thought itself not been so abstract, he might have said something about the way, out of chaos, a few singular images are sometimes thrown up that come to seem, in their unfading vividness, the summation of one’s life, and all that one will take from it when one goes. And his were almost all of violence: his father’s or his own.
Instead, he said, “I think of my parents now, and I think, my God, so much argument. So many battles. So much destructiveness. It’s strange, but when I think about it, I realize my parents never once encouraged me to make anything. To build anything. Only to take things apart. It struck me the other day that only in arguing did I ever feel truly creative. Because it was always there that I defined myself—first against them, and then against everything and everyone else.”
“So what are you saying? That’s what this is about? A belated desire to stop fighting and make something? Yuda, let’s sign up for a pottery class, please. It will save you a lot of money. Come to think of it, I know a painter with a studio in Jaffa. For a small sum he’ll happily go to Rio for the month and leave you his place.”
But Epstein didn’t laugh.
“OK, it’s just that I don’t see it. You have three children. You were a great lawyer. You built a huge life. Isn’t that creation enough? If it were me we were talking about, a total failure in nearly everything, that would be a different story.”
“In everything?” Epstein asked, with genuine interest.
“It’s a part of me, very strongly connected to Jewishness, to the fact that I belonged to a cursed tribe.”
Epstein turned to look at his cousin, but at that moment Moti stood, hitching up his loose jeans and snapping a photo of the view on his phone, and in his slack expression Epstein saw no chance of being understood. He turned back to the desert, set ablaze by the sinking sun.
“This is it,” he said softly. “Go tell her this is the place.”
The car was silent on the drive back. A screen of darkness fell over the hills, and the temperature dropped. Epstein opened the window, and the cold air tumbled into his lungs. He began to softly hum the Vivaldi. How did it go? Cum dederit something, something, something somnum. He heard the countertenor, and saw the blind woman’s German shepherd with its eyes closed, listening outside the human range.
His phone began to vibrate in his pocket, and he ignored it. But when it started up again with new urgency, he checked and saw that it was Klausner trying to get through, and that he’d already missed three calls from him. Seeing the date, he realized that it must be the reunion Klausner was calling about. He looked back out at the darkening landscape, and against his natural persuasion he felt a little shiver at the thought that the real David must have walked and fought, loved and died, somewhere out there.
When his phone rang again, he gave in and answered to get it over with.
“Jules! Where are you? Are you in Jerusalem already?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
“In the desert.”
“The desert? What are you doing in the desert? We’re starting in an hour!”
“It’s tonight, is it? I’ve been busy.”
“Good thing I got through to you. I was starting to get worried. There’s still time. I’m at the hall now supervising the preparations—hold on—the musicians just arrived.”
“Listen, I’m on my way back to Tel Aviv now. It’s been a very long day.”
“Come for half an hour. Just to absorb the atmosphere. Eat something. Jerusalem isn’t so far out of your way. I don’t want you to miss this, Jules.”
Epstein felt the gnarled hand of the little man in the Safed shrine reach out once more for his pants leg. But this time he had no intention of yielding.
“To think that the Messiah might be there on the guest list. But no, really, I can’t.”
Klausner took no offense at the joke, and unwilling to take no for an answer, said he would try him again in half an hour. Epstein bade him good-bye and turned off his phone.
“What was that all about?” Moti asked.
“My rabbi.”
“Mother of God, what did I tell you?”
But Epstein really was exhausted now. The driving, the sun, and the long day of being with people had taken it out of him. What he wanted was to shower away the dust and to lie alone under the air conditioning, thinking about the forest that would one day cover the slope of the mountain, rustling and alive under the moon. Moti couldn’t understand. Neither would Schloss. Nor Lianne, who
had never understood him, who in the end had not really wished to look, though he had tried and tried to reveal himself to her. He no longer needed to be understood. The night outside was thickening. He lowered the window all the way so that the wind drowned out the sound of his cousin’s voice, and inhaled the fragrant smell of the desert.
He did not attend the reunion, but that night, exhausted as he was, he could not sleep, and stayed up reading from the weathered book on his bedside table. Walking one afternoon down Allenby, he had seen it in a display case full of sun-faded books in English, all the colors moving toward blue. He had gone down the narrow alley and into the crowded, dusty bookshop to inquire about it. The owner was playing jazz over the stereo and tallying his accounts at a cluttered desk. The contents of the display case had not enticed anyone for ages, and it took a long time for the key to be found. But at last the case was pried open, releasing the musty smell of trapped weather and disintegrating paper. The owner reached in and removed The Book of Psalms, and Epstein tucked it under his arm, and went back out again into the crowded street and made his way toward the sea.
Was there a more complicated hero in the Bible than David? David who manipulated the love of Saul, of Jonathan, of Michal, of Bathsheba, of everyone who ever came close to him. A warrior, a murderer, hungry for power, willing to do whatever it took to become king. Betrayal was nothing to him. Killing was nothing. Nothing was left to stand in the way of his desires. He took what he wanted. And then, to let him rest from what he had been, the authors of David ascribed to him the most plaintive poetry ever written. Had him, at the end of his days, stumble into the discovery of what was most radical in himself. Into grace.
In the morning Epstein slept late, and was woken by the ring of the hotel phone. It was reception calling. Someone was waiting for him downstairs.
“Who?” he asked, still in the fog of sleep. He was not expecting anyone: he had no money left to give.
“Yael,” the receptionist reported.
Epstein roused himself and squinted at the clock. It was only just past eight. “Yael who?” he asked. He did not know any Yael, except for his mother’s cousin, who was buried in Haifa. There was a muffled pause, and then a woman’s voice came on the line.
“Hello?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Yael.” She paused, as if waiting for his memory to be jogged. Had it gotten that bad? Epstein wondered, rubbing his eyes with a dry knuckle.
“I have something for you. My father asked me to make sure that you got it.”
Still dazed, Epstein recalled how, at the first sign of light on Sunday morning, unable to stand another minute in the hard little Gilgul bed, he’d splashed his face with cold water and gone in search of a cup of tea to soothe his still uneasy stomach. On his way, he nearly smacked into Peretz Chaim, who was coming out of his room. Peretz had rolled up his sleeve, and was tightening the black band of his phylacteries around his bicep the way an addict ties a tourniquet. But it was Epstein who’d felt the longing: the hunger for the vein that goes straight to the heart. He touched his fingers to his chest, over the beating muscle that could not handle his thick blood.
“You want me to just leave it here at the desk?” she asked. “I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“No! Don’t,” Epstein said in a rush, already standing and reaching for his pants. “Wait. I’m on my way down.”
With trembling fingers, he pushed the buttons through the holes of his shirt, brushed his teeth, splashed water on his face, and paused in front of his dripping image in the glass, surprised to find that his hair had grown so long.
He saw her in the lobby before she saw him, bent over her phone, her pale, high forehead wrinkled in a frown. She was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and now that she was fully dressed he saw that his Bathsheba’s nose was pierced with a tiny diamond. But as he approached, he was struck by something familiar in her profile, some likeness that he had not noticed that night two weeks earlier. When he said her name, she raised her head, and their eyes met for the second time. But if she remembered, she didn’t let on.
She was working on a script about the life of David, and had attended her father’s reunion in Jerusalem with the film’s director. At the end of the night, as she was getting ready to drive back to Tel Aviv, the rabbi had asked her to bring this to him—and from her bag she produced a golden folder. It was imprinted with the words DAVIDIC DYNASTY, above which was a shield with the lion of the Kingdom of Judea and the Magen David. She held it out for him, but Epstein remained unmoving.
“You’re making a film?” he asked in wonder. “About David?”
“Why the surprise? When I tell people, it’s always the same reaction. But there’s never been a good film about David, unlike Moses, even though he’s the most complex, fully wrought, and fascinating character in the whole Bible.”
“It isn’t that. It’s just that I happen to be—” But he stopped himself from telling her that for many nights now he had been reading the Psalms. That something in him, strong and flawed, might go all the way back to an ancient story. “I’m interested in David.”
“You should have been there last night, then.”
“Should I have?”
With an amused smile, she described how the guests had entered under the fake stone arch, guarded by two messengers decked out in royal garb, who announced each one, followed by a trill on their bugles. A harpist in trailing velvet had plucked golden strings in the foyer. You couldn’t have cast it better had you tried, she said.
Glancing again at her phone, she told him that she really had to leave; she was late to meet someone.
“Where do you need to go?” Epstein asked.
“Jaffa.”
“I’m going that way, too. Can I give you a lift in the taxi? I want to hear more about the film.” He stopped himself from saying that he wanted to know why the rabbi’s daughter, who looked upon her father’s pet project with irony and appeared to have gotten as far from religion as she could, would want to make a film about David.
She put on her sunglasses and smiled faintly at something over his shoulder as she lifted her heavy bag off the floor.
“But we already know each other, don’t we?”
Something to Carry
We’d only driven for ten minutes after leaving the restaurant in the Confederation House when a row of green army vehicles appeared, blocking the road. The northwest traffic had been brought to a standstill, and each car was being stopped and checked by soldiers. Friedman switched the radio dial to the news, which flooded into the interior with rattled urgency. When I asked what was going on, he said it could be anything: breach of the wall, bomb threat, a terrorist attack in the city.
The atmosphere grew more ominous by the minute as we crawled along, waiting to get to the front of the line. When we finally did, two soldiers with automatic weapons slung across their chests circled our vehicle, looking into all the windows and underneath the car with a mirror attached to a long handle. I couldn’t understand either their questions or Friedman’s answers, which seemed to me far longer than required to satisfy these teenagers in fatigues, following orders that must have meant little to them. The girl was tall and pigeon-toed, still fighting off acne but with the promise of yet becoming beautiful one day, and the boy was squat, hairy, and arrogant, too interested in the power the situation lent to him. Friedman, already tense, grew quickly annoyed with the questioning, and this only stoked the arrogance of the boy—one couldn’t really call him a man, and maybe that was the problem, or one of the many problems. I waited for Friedman to reveal his secret connections that would bring about our immediate release and a flurry of embarrassed apologies. But when he finally fished out his wallet from one of the voluminous pockets of his vest, the card he removed from it and held out with his tremulous right hand was nothing more than a standard ID. The soldier plucked it away, studied it briefly, then turned and addressed me in Hebrew.
“I’m American.”
“What’s your business with him?” He gestured at Friedman with his chin, which had a cleft in it, like a thumbprint, where the otherwise dark, intractable hair refused to grow.
“Business?”
“How do you know him?”
“We met a couple of days ago.”
“Met why?”
Friedman tried to interrupt in Hebrew, but the soldier silenced him with a raised palm and a few sharp words. “Why did you meet him?” he demanded again.
Various answers flitted through my mind. I thought of telling him that Friedman was some sort of distant relative that my father had sent me to be in touch with, a lie that at least had an oblique relationship to the truth.
“We don’t have all day.”
“He has a project he thought I might be interested in,” I finally said, a reply that seemed innocuous enough until the words came out of my mouth.
The soldier raised his heavy eyebrows, knitting them together so that they formed one large hairy bar across his forehead, then went round to the back of the car and opened the trunk.
“You didn’t let me finish,” I called to him, trying to amend my mistake while maintaining the illusion that I couldn’t care less what he thought, that his modicum of power had no currency with me. “I’m a writer, if you want to know. I write novels.” But the sentence and its meaning struck me as pathetic.