Forest Dark

  It was the location manager who’d invited him, and who now spoke rapidly over a second espresso while they waited for Yael to show up at the café in Ajami. Epstein had been awake since four that morning, and it had been days since he’d spoken to anyone. But the location manager, who wore a terse Mohawk to get around his receding hairline, and was skinny enough to be feeding an addiction but too affable to need it, spoke so voluminously into Epstein’s silence that nothing was required of him. Israeli filmmaking, he announced to Epstein, was at the pinnacle of its creativity. Until 2000, the great Israeli talent wasn’t making films. When Epstein asked what the great Israeli talent was doing before 2000, the location manager appeared stumped.

  Half an hour passed, and Yael still had not arrived, so the location manager ordered a third espresso from the young waitress, took out his phone, and began to show his captive audience clips and stills of his work. Epstein studied a photograph of an old house in Jerusalem, its dusky, sunken living room crowded with books and oil paintings, a small walled garden visible from the window. There was nothing unusual about the room, he thought, and yet its elements all cohered into something unquestionably warm, intelligent, and inviting. The location manager had visited fifty houses before stumbling onto this one, he said. The moment he’d walked in, he’d known it was the place. Nothing had to be moved for the set, not a stitch of furniture. Even the little dog curled on the chair was perfect. But what a job to convince the owners! He’d had to come back four times, the last time with an obsolete part the couple needed for their anciently dripping faucet, which he’d procured from a plumber whose shop he’d once shot a scene in. That was what sealed the deal: a little copper circle that had eluded them for years. But as soon as he’d won them over, the next-door neighbor stuck out her foot. The old woman did everything in her power to get in the way of the filming. All day long she sat in her window and screamed at them, and refused to keep her cat inside. On the contrary, she’d deliberately let the cat out the moment the cameras began rolling. The scenes constantly had to be interrupted by this cantankerous woman, who threatened to drive the rattled director crazy. But he, Eran, had found a way. Had listened and listened, and slowly understood that the old woman was jealous, that like a child she felt left out, overlooked, and all he had to do was offer her a minuscule role as an extra for her to become instantly cooperative. Ten times they’d had to do the take of her being pushed down the sidewalk in a wheelchair he’d gotten from props, because every time she’d either smiled broadly into the camera or tried to squeeze in an improvised line. But in the end it had been more than worth it: from then on the old woman was quiet as could be, and guarded her cat as if it were a python that—God forbid it escaped—could devour her film whole. Yes, finding the right location was really the smaller part of his job, despite what you might think. The true essence of his work was in the management of the borders between this world and the one that the director was trying to create. Out of the present reality of houses and streets, furniture and weather, the director aimed to create another reality, and for however long the shot endured, it was up to him, Eran, to guard the borders between them. To make certain that nothing unwanted from the real world penetrated through to that other world, or in any way interrupted or threatened to dissolve its delicate conditions. And for this, one had to have a multitude of talents. But most of all one had to be skilled in dealing with people. After weeks of shooting came to an end, the location manager said, this skill had been so overused that all he wanted was to live like a hermit or misanthrope. And what do you do then? Epstein asked.

  But at that moment Yael arrived, apologetic but serene, as if she had just stepped down out of a painting. If Epstein had no pressing desire to talk before, now he found again that in her presence he was nearly speechless. She had brought along Dan, the director, who was in his forties and had the small eyes and sharp protuberant nose of an animal that spent most of its time underground, forever seized by a frenzied desire to dig its way into the light. Epstein had met him before, and taken an immediate dislike to him. He had obvious designs on Yael. The thought of her in his tribally tattooed arms made Epstein want to cry.

  The location manager launched excitedly into a description of the spot he’d discovered: some caves close to where the Dead Sea scrolls had been found, but far enough away from any archaeological site that they could shoot there without permits, and with a vista so untouched as to be purely biblical. The caves were incredible because of the way they were lit, with a hole above that brought in shafts of sunlight. It was entirely possible that David himself had hidden in them. At the very least, the Essenes had probably occupied them two thousand years ago, while preparing for the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

  But the director and Yael, son of darkness and daughter of light, were in a low mood, and no cave, however authentic, could lift them out of it. That morning they’d received bad news: Neither Hot nor Yes had come through. On the basis of the synopsis and treatment she had written, Yael explained to Epstein, they’d gotten production grants from both the Jerusalem Film Fund and the Rubinstein Foundation. At first it had seemed like enough, but once they’d understood what sort of budget was required to really do the film right, they found themselves short of money. They’d hoped that one of the big cable companies would get behind the project, but neither had. Shooting was supposed to begin in two weeks, and if something else didn’t come through quickly, everything would have to be put on hold.

  How much did they need? Epstein asked reflexively.

  His trees were growing at a kibbutz in the Kinneret. A month after he’d signed his name to the $2 million donation, Epstein was taken to see them. The head of the JNF, having returned from her travels in South America, brought him personally. They dined under a grape arbor that the kibbutz rented out for weddings, and drank the wine produced by its sister kibbutz across the valley. Epstein’s glass was refilled, and afterward, tipsy, he was driven out to the fields in a tractor. The air was heavy with the smell of manure, but the view was wide and fertile, with green fields, yellow grasses, and brown hills. Epstein stood, loafers sinking into the soil, and saw the rows upon rows of shivering saplings. Is that all? he’d asked. All four hundred thousand? It seemed to him that even with so many, there were still not enough. The head of the JNF double-checked with her assistant, who confirmed that a further hundred fifty thousand saplings, broadleaf rather than pine, would be brought from another kibbutz, but that what he was looking at, right here in front of him, was the heart of the Sol and Edith Epstein Forest.

  His books lay open on the table. He was reading Isaiah and Kohelet. He was reading the aggadot in Bialik’s Book of Legends. The man behind the crowded desk in the secondhand bookshop on Allenby understood the vein he was mining, and always had something waiting. But now, close to midnight in the apartment in Jaffa, Epstein left off from their pages and began once more to pace. The saplings still needed six weeks before they could be transplanted. Come March it would be spring, and then the valley would burst into flower, ranunculus and cyclamen would cover the hills, and the saplings would be ready. They would be dug up and wrapped in burlap, transported to the mountain in the northern Negev, and placed in the ground by an army of laborers. In Israel, where the warm sun almost always shone, trees grew twice as fast as in America. By summer they would already be up to Epstein’s chest, and by fall they would surpass him. Galit was overseeing the project; on this Epstein had been insistent. In his impatience, he phoned her once a day. His energy for the subject of forests and trees was inexhaustible, and only she could keep pace with him. The word humus—which she used when referring to the rich soil that the trees held in place, and replenished when they died, suffusing it with the minerals they had mined from the depths of the earth—sent a shiver down Epstein’s spine. He developed a great interest in the topic of erosion, not only in the wadis, where the rain from flash floods spilled down the barren slopes and came sluicing through in search of
the shortest path to the sea, but across the world, and through time. When the owner of the bookshop on Allenby failed to procure any books on forestry, Galit arranged for certain titles to be delivered to Epstein’s Jaffa apartment, and in these he read about how the great empires of Assyria, Babylon, Carthage, and Persia were all destroyed by the floods and desertification brought on by mass clearing of their forests. He read about how the felling of forests in ancient Greece was soon followed by the vanishing of its culture, and how the same destructive clearing of the virgin forests of Italy later caused the downfall of Rome. And all the while, as he read, and the sea rolled its great dark waves against his windows, his own saplings were growing, their leaves unfurling, their leaders stretching upward toward the sky.

  Epstein took up his book again: Rescue me, God, for the waters have come up to my neck.

  His phone rang.

  And there is no place to stand

  I am come into deep waters,

  where the floods overflow me.

  It was Sharon, breathless to have gotten through, since he rarely answered anymore. She had still not given up the search for his lost phone and coat. Standing on the cold Jaffa floor, it all struck Epstein as long ago: Abbas at the Plaza, the coat clerk with a limp, the mugger who ran the shining knife across his chest. But Sharon had not forgotten, and—in Epstein’s absence, without instructions otherwise—had remained doggedly on the case. With excitement, she reported that she had traced the phone to Gaza.

  Gaza? Epstein echoed, turning to the south and looking through the dark windows.

  Using Find My iPhone, she explained, she had been able to track it over GPS. And, after many hours on the phone with a technician in Mumbai, she had disengaged Lost Mode and triggered an app installed when Epstein’s phone was new that allowed one to remotely command it to take pictures. Within a matter of hours, Sharon announced with pride, tomorrow at the very latest, the photographs taken by Epstein’s itinerant phone would be transmitted through to her computer.

  Epstein imagined bombed buildings nestled in the lost phone’s archive next to the stream of photographs Lucie had sent him of his grandchildren.

  Sharon’s tone now switched to one of concern. But how was he? She had not heard from him for two weeks; messages she had left had not been returned. Did he want her to book his return flight?

  He assured her that he was well, and that he didn’t need her to do anything at the moment. Not wishing to get into it further, he hurried off the phone, without pausing to ask her what it was she meant to do once the pictures from his phone in Gaza finally came through.

  He put on a jacket and went down the dark stairwell, not bothering to turn on the lights. When he got to the landing of the floor below, a cat streaked out through an open door and wound itself around his legs. His downstairs neighbor came out, apologized, scooped up the ginger cat, and invited him in for a cup of tea. Epstein politely declined. He needed some air, he explained. Perhaps another time.

  On the jetty made of boulders and concrete blocks, some Arab men were fishing in the dark. What are you trying to catch? Epstein asked in his simple Hebrew. Communists, they told him. And when he did not understand, they gestured with their thumb and forefinger to demonstrate the smallness of the fish they were after. He stood watching them throw their lines for a while. Then he touched the elbow of the youngest of them and gestured south, toward the open water. How far to Gaza? he asked. The boy grinned and reeled in his line. Why? he asked. You want to visit? But Epstein had only been trying to gauge the distance, a skill that along with others seemed to be slowly abandoning him.

  He was known at Sotheby’s. Known by the heads of old master paintings, of master drawings, of modern art, of rugs. Known by the curator of primitive sculpture and Roman glass. Ordering his cappuccino on the tenth floor, Epstein would be intercepted by the tapestry specialist who had a piece from the Brussels workshop he really must see. At previews, he did not fall under the purview of the DO NOT TOUCH signs, and was allowed to finger what he wished; when he arrived at an auction, his paddle was always waiting. But however known he was, and however eager they might have been to offer his extraordinary Annunciation—which they also knew well, having sold the fifteenth-century altar panel to him ten years earlier—they could not pick the painting up themselves, for reasons of liability. Neither was there time to organize third-party transport, if he wanted it included in the upcoming auction: the catalogue was closing in two days.

  Schloss was out of the question. So were all three of Epstein’s children, since each would have sounded a different kind of alarm. And Sharon’s concern for him was such that he couldn’t risk the possibility of her calling Lianne or Maya when she discovered that he had decided to sell off the Annunciation to fund a film about the biblical David. Epstein settled on phoning the lobby on Fifth Avenue. The first time Haaroon wasn’t on duty, only the small Sri Lankan whose name he forgot a moment after he’d been reminded of it. Had Jimmy answered, the slender, remote Japanese who rode the elevator enveloped in a distant privacy and never said a word, Epstein might have gone ahead and explained what he’d wanted. But the Sri Lankan had always exhibited too much curiosity to be trusted. When he called back a few hours later, Haaroon had arrived for his shift and answered after the first ring. He asked Epstein to hold while he procured the yellow legal pad and pen that he kept in the drawer of the lobby console.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, balancing the pad on his arm while clamping the phone between ear and shoulder, and set to copying down his instructions. Oh no, it would be no trouble at all, he could pack it tonight—yes, he would be exceedingly careful—nearly six hundred years old—how extraordinary, yes, truly, sir—first thing tomorrow morning to Sotheby’s, Seventy-Second and York—oh, he would carry it like a newborn—yes, the Virgin, sir, hah-hah, very funny—oh really, a Madonna!—certainly, Mr. Epstein, no trouble at all.

  It was five in the morning when Haaroon’s shift came to an end and he hung his uniform in the basement office, took the spare key to the Epstein apartment, rode up in the elevator, and fingered the prayer rug from Isfahan in front of the door, loomed for bowing prostrate rather than wiping dirty feet. He removed his shoes and lined them up under the brass-footed bench. Letting himself in with the key, he searched in the dark for the light switch but, catching sight of the glittering view, he stopped. Overwhelmed all over again, he crossed the empty living room, large enough to have fit the houses of both his brothers in Punjab. He looked out over the park. The hawk would still be asleep in his nest now. His new mate would be getting ready to lay her eggs, and soon Haaroon would have to watch the sky for flocks of ravenous crows. Last year a fledgling had fallen out of a tree right in front of the building, and he had run to its rescue, stopping traffic, but after a stunned moment the bird had righted itself and taken flight again. The faithful doorman pressed his nose to the cold glass, but could see nothing in the still-black sky.

  He found the painting in the master bedroom, just as Epstein had described it. It was smaller than he’d expected, and yet its radiance was such that he could not bring himself to touch it right away. Standing nearly upon it, he had the feeling of intruding on something intensely private. And yet he couldn’t take his eyes away from the girl Mary and the angel. Only after some time did he notice that in the corner, half outside the frame, was a third figure, a man who was also looking, long fingers pressed together in devotion. The man’s lurking presence bothered him. Who was he meant to be? Joseph? Useless Joseph, who had to insinuate himself there into the scene? But, no, he didn’t look like Joseph at all; a man with a face like that surely could have nothing to do with the illuminated girl kneeling before the angel.

  The sky was already beginning to lighten when Haaroon stepped out through the building’s service entrance with the package tucked under his arm. Spring was not far off, but it was still cold enough that his breath froze under the streetlamps. There were three hours until Sotheby’s would open, and so he entered the par
k, gazing up toward the barren treetops. The bench where he liked to spend his lunch break was taken by a homeless man in filthy boots, sprawled across the length of it under a ratty blanket the color and texture of loam. Practicing to be buried, Haaroon thought, and sank down two benches away, laying the precious parcel on his lap. From there, the great swath of sky was partially obscured by the branches of a giant tree, but he could still see enough of it to keep watch. His eyes followed the darting sparrows for a while. When he looked down, he saw with wonder how the light falling from the streetlamp through the clear wrapping still glinted on the Virgin’s halo. That he, a man born in Punjab Province to a farmer, should be sitting in New York City holding a masterpiece painted in fifteenth-century Italy—he felt a sudden urge to break the little painting in two and shivered. To his brothers, such a thing would hold no value at all, and he felt a wave of sadness at a distance he could no longer cross.

  As if deliberately out to disturb him, a crow came angling down, strutted across the grass, and began to shriek at him. Such aggressive and conspiratorial birds, so maliciously intelligent—they seemed to remember him from the time he had pelted some of their kind with acorns to protect one of the fledgling hawks, and now they cawed angrily whenever they came across him. Haaroon took hold of his parcel and stood, waving his free arm and shouting back at the crow: Go back to where you come from! The bird flapped off, its black wing feathers reflecting the blue of the sky, and the homeless man stirred under the brown surface. After a moment, a matted head of hair popped out, followed by his weathered face.

  “Asshole!”

  “Sorry,” Haaroon muttered, and grimly took his seat again.

  The homeless man eyed him from his horizontal position.

  “What are you looking for, drones?”

  “Not really.”

  “Yesterday I saw one fly right by that window”—the homeless man pointed a steady finger at a high floor of a building across the street—“and hover there for two minutes, looking in.”