Forest Dark

  The suitcase was still waiting by the door. The moment I laid my fingers on the handle, the dog began to pant with excitement. I pulled it across the empty room while she watched. It was far lighter than I’d expected. So light that for a moment I wondered whether the army had left the wrong suitcase, or whether Friedman had really taken anything from Spinoza Street at all.

  I filled some large jars with water and put them in the musty canvas backpack I’d found in the closet. I was still wearing the coat that might have been Kafka’s coat, but instead of returning it to the hanger, I buttoned it up to my chin. Then I took one last look around the room, which seemed to hold no more memory of his time here than it did of mine. I drew the thin curtains, which did little to keep out the light. Kaddish for Kafka. May his soul be bundled in the bundle of life. He might have lived there, but I never could. I had children who needed me, and whom I needed, and the time when I might have been able to live confined to what was unquestionably within myself had passed when they were born.

  I opened the door, and the dog didn’t hesitate. She ran out thirty or forty paces ahead, then turned to wait for me. She seemed to want to show me that she knew the way, and could be trusted to lead. The furniture was still laid out under the sky. The slippers stood waiting side by side on the dusty ground for whoever would come. Soon the rain would arrive and come down on everything. I looked back on the house, which seemed even tinier from the outside.

  The dog hurried ahead, alternately sniffing the ground and turning back to be sure I was following. The suitcase bumped along behind me over the rocky ground. What at first seemed light soon became heavy, as is always the way. If I lagged too far behind, the dog circled back and trotted at my heels, and when I stopped and sat down on the ground, she whined and licked my face.

  We walked for hours. The sun began to fall toward the west, sending our shadows ahead of us. The skin of my palms became raw and blistered, my arms had lost their feeling, and by then my belief in the dog’s preternatural ability to guide me had been worn thin by exhaustion and fear that I would die out there, and never see my children again because I’d been foolish. It was not without disgust with myself that I abandoned the job of wheeling a suitcase that I was afraid to find out was empty across the floor of a desert that once had been the bottom of a sea. The dog looked at it pitifully for a moment, then raised her nose to the sky and sniffed the air, as if to demonstrate that she was already on to other things.

  It was late by the time we reached the road. I wanted to get down on my knees and cry into the tarmac that someone had taken the trouble to lay down there. I shared out the last of the water with the dog, and we curled against each other for heat. I slept intermittently. It must have been nearly six in the morning when we heard the rising hum of an engine approaching from the other side of the hill. I jumped to my feet. The taxi came tearing around the bend, and I waved frantically at the driver, who slammed on the brakes, glided slowly toward us, and lowered his window. We were lost, I explained, and not in good shape. He turned down the Mizrahi music coming from the stereo and smiled, revealing a gold tooth. He was on his way back to Tel Aviv, he said. I told him that’s where we were headed, too. He looked skeptically at the dog, whose body had become tense and rigid. She seemed prepared to spring forward and sink her teeth into his jugular, if necessary. She looked nothing at all like a shepherd, neither German nor any other, but in the end Friedman was right, that’s what she was. She was an extraordinary dog; to think that I almost gave her up to the soldier. After I got out of the hospital, I tried to find her. I’d half expected her to be waiting on her haunches exactly where I left her outside the entrance to the emergency room. But she must have been long gone by the time I was released. She’d done her part, and had gone off in search of her master. Later I looked for him, too. But there was no trace of Friedman. At the offices of Tel Aviv University, they told me that they had no record of any Eliezer Friedman—no one by that name had ever been employed by the department of literature, or any other department, for that matter. I’d lost the card he’d given me. I checked the telephone listings, too, but though there were hundreds of Friedmans in Tel Aviv, there was no Eliezer there, either.

  Lech Lecha

  When the photos came through, they showed neither rubble nor flames. The first was a foot next to what looked to be colored plastic bags. The second was of the same foot, blurred. The third was only a streak of colors. And so on, until the sixth photo finished downloading and popped open on his screen, and Epstein found himself looking into the eyes of a child. A boy of no more than eight or nine; eleven if one took into consideration the way malnutrition can keep a child small. His impish face was smudged with dirt, and beneath the arches of his brows his dark eyes shone. His mouth was closed, and yet he seemed to be laughing. Mesmerized, it took a minute for Epstein to realize that the navy collar from which the delicate neck protruded was his own, the coat his own. He pictured the boy picking his way through the rubbish, leaping over tires, and scurrying down an alley with the tattered hem trailing like a cloak. Then the face on his screen was abruptly replaced by an incoming call from Schloss. He hit the red button, sending his lawyer through to his voice mail, which was already full.

  It was four in the morning. Epstein sat on the toilet, letting the hot water from the shower drive the chill from his bones. The roll of toilet paper had to be kept outside the door, but once he’d made this small adjustment, he began to appreciate the convenient situation of the showerhead, with its ready seat below. He washed himself, soaping between his toes as his mother had taught him to do. The mirror above the sink became fogged. He stood and rubbed the glass, and his eyes appeared under his fingers. Vanishing again under the steam, he repeated the trick. Then he went to find his clothes, shivering in the cold and leaving a trail of wet footprints across the floor. Naked before the wardrobe mirror, he saw his thin, veined legs and the folds of loose skin around his belly. Stepping away, he hurried into his clothes.

  He slipped his copy of the Psalms into his briefcase, patted his jacket pocket for his wallet, wrapped his neck in a scarf, and stood for a minute in the dark, trying to remember if he had forgotten anything. Then he double-locked the apartment door behind him. The taxi he’d called was already waiting downstairs. A cat ran into the beam of the headlights and yowled. Epstein got into the passenger seat, and the driver greeted him, and after a minute of silence turned up the Mizrahi music on the radio.

  The location manager met him with a car at the appointed place by the side of the road, in the desert not far from Ein Gedi. Things were going terribly, he reported, running his free hand through his thinning hair. Did Epstein mind if he smoked? Epstein rolled down the window, which brought in the sulfurous smell of the Dead Sea. Because the budget was tight until they got the funds from him, they’d had to make compromises. This had turned the already moody and irascible director into a tyrant. Even he had come to despise him, the location manager told Epstein. His sole motivation had always been to please the directors he worked for. All he wanted from his effort, and the endless hours he put in, was to make the director happy. But Dan was impossible. Nothing was good enough for him. If he weren’t so talented, no one would have put up with it. He blew his top over the smallest mistakes, and made a show of humiliating those responsible. When the assistant director let Bathsheba go home, thinking she was done for the day, Dan threatened to cut off his dick. When Goliath’s greaves were nowhere to be found, he also went batshit. “Goliath has four lines,” he screamed, “and one of them is ‘Bring me my bronze greaves!’ So where the fuck are his greaves?” In less than an hour, Props had found some shin guards and spray-painted them gold, but though they looked convincing enough, Dan took one look at them and threw a chair. The next day, when the tech guys had no dolly for a battle shot, Dan stormed off the set, and could only be soothed back after Yael shut herself up with him in the van for over an hour. But rather than return peaceably, he came back demanding a larger crowd of Phi
listines. Seeing as he had just fired the casting director, and the budget wouldn’t stretch for more paid extras, Eran—though by now he wanted to kill Dan—had posted a call for volunteers on Facebook, and had his rock-star cousin share it to his three hundred thousand followers, with the vague hint that he himself might show up.

  And how many came? asked Epstein.

  The location manager shrugged, tossed his cigarette, and said they would see tomorrow. The battle scene had been put off until they could locate a crane.

  When they arrived at the set, the sun was starting to rise. Dan and Yael were still on their way from the hotel at a nearby kibbutz, but the DP was rushing to set up, and wanted to begin as soon as possible, while the light was still magic. They were supposed to shoot three scenes of David in the wilderness on the run from Saul. First, David and his band of misfits and outlaws showing up at the house of the wealthy Calebite, Nabal, to demand provisions in return for the fact that, under their watch, no harm has come to Nabal’s shepherds and three thousand sheep. After that, the scene of Nabal’s death, and his wife, Abigail, being forced to marry David. At midday, when the sun would be too hard for anything else, the DP wanted to shoot inside the cave, where David secretly snips off the corner of Saul’s cloak while the king relieves himself. Just before sunset, they would do one final shot from the end of the film.

  David was in the truck, getting his makeup done. Thirty sheep were on their way, led by their Bedouin shepherd. Saul, who struck Epstein as too eager, was wandering around in costume, joking with the grips. Next to Epstein, Ahinoam, Saul’s ex-wife, was curling a lock of hair around her finger as she mouthed her lines. She was having problems, she told him. Epstein asked her why, and she explained that her part was one of the more controversial aspects of the script. She’s mentioned only twice in the whole Bible: once as the wife of Saul, mother of Jonathan, and once as the wife of David, to whom she’s apparently already married when he weds Abigail, too. But nowhere does it say anything about how David must have stolen Saul’s wife—which amounted to an attempted coup—and that’s the reason he had to flee into the wilderness, and why Saul wants him hunted down and killed. But since the point of the book of Samuel was to establish David’s kingship as an act of divine will, obviously the biblical author couldn’t go too much into the whole Ahinoam debacle, Ahinoam explained, which would have exposed David as the ambitious and cunning prick that he really was. But they also couldn’t totally ignore what everyone knew back then, either. So they had to stick Ahinoam’s name in on the sly—oh, yeah, by the way, David also had this other wife, whoops—and then gloss over it, just as they had to do with the fact that David joined the Philistines and probably really did raid the towns of his own people in Judah, just like he told Achish. But Yael had a different vision, Ahinoam told him. Her David was a little closer to the real David, and her script also emphasized the female characters’ roles, which was good for Ahinoam, otherwise she wouldn’t even have a part. Still, she only had three lines in the wedding scene, so she had to squeeze a lot in. Handing over the script, she asked Epstein to prompt her.

  After a long morning they broke for lunch, with only the final scene to shoot in the early evening. But by three thirty the actor playing the elderly David still had not appeared. A call came through on the satellite phone: Zamir was ill. He’d thought it was nothing, and hadn’t wanted to cancel, but now it was something. He sent his regrets from Ichilov Hospital, where he was getting some tests. The director, too exhausted to scream anymore, slowly poured the remains of his coffee onto the desert floor and walked off, talking to himself. The set was nearly empty now. The other actors had all returned to the kibbutz, and only a small group had driven in jeeps to this remote spot. Yael huddled with the production manager and producer. A head taller than both, she had to stoop to keep their voices within their circle. Under stress, in the chaos of the set, she alone remained unflappable. Without her, Dan would have been lost, and, understanding this, Epstein begrudged him her attention a little less.

  The director was throwing small rocks at the tire of the van when the little circle broke. Epstein, sipping his tea, watched Yael approach him. She really was something beautiful to see. She didn’t lay her hand on his shoulder, didn’t baby him or tiptoe around him like the others. She just stood serenely, like a queen, waiting for the director to come back to himself. Only then did she begin to talk. After a while, they both turned and looked in Epstein’s direction. He tilted his head to look up at the sky, and took another swallow of tea.

  They had begun at the end, and two weeks ago had shot the scene in which Solomon leans over David to hear the dying king’s final words. There were no lines left for the old David: only a long shot in which he walks into the desert. As such, the loss of the actor Zamir need not have been a total disaster. The final shot was meant to be at twilight, lit by torches, everything cast in shadows. Epstein was nearly the same size and build as Zamir. They only needed to shorten the hem of the cloak a centimeter, two at most. The wardrobe person kneeled at his feet, needle between her pursed lips as she knotted the thread. But when everyone stepped back to admire her handiwork, they concluded that something wasn’t right. Epstein straightened the heavy belt buckle while Yael bent her head toward Dan. He looked neither regal enough, nor fallen enough, the seamstress whispered to him, making a quick, irrelevant adjustment to his sleeve. A crown was found by the prop master. But the gold was deemed too bright, and black shoe polish was used to tarnish it.

  The torches were lit. All he needed do was walk between their two rows in the opposite direction of the camera, then continue walking until the director yelled for the cut. But just as they began to roll, a wind came up and blew half of the torches out. They were relit, but a moment later went out again. There would be a storm that night, someone said. The rain, when it finally came to the desert, was always violent: the production manager checked his Android phone, and announced a flash-flood warning in the area. Bullshit, Dan said, checking his iPhone, there was nothing about flash floods. Epstein looked up at the sky again, but saw no clouds. The first star was already out. The wind was strong, and nothing the lighting technician did would keep the torches lit. The air became heavy with the smell of kerosene. They would have to do without them, the production manager argued. But Dan refused to budge. Without torchlight, the scene was useless.

  The director and the production manager went on loudly arguing. Soon the producer joined in, and even the DP, whose light was quickly vanishing. The wind blew. Epstein heard the Vivaldi in his head. He thought of his trees, growing even now. The mountainside couldn’t have been very far from here. Was it possible they had already begun to transport the saplings? He’d lost track of the date. Surely someone would have told him? He thought of calling Galit, but his phone was in the pocket of his jacket, which someone from Costumes had taken from him, along with his pants.

  The wool cloak had begun to itch. Deep in argument, no one noticed when he wandered away from the double row of torches and found his briefcase under a chair. He took off the cloak, left it draped over the back, and began to walk up the slope toward the ridge above. From there, he would be able to see. For a while he could still hear them arguing. The wind blew his hair, and reaching up to brush it back, he realized he was still wearing the tarnished crown. He took it off and lay it down on a boulder, then turned and slipped into a wadi carved by thousands of years of water, thousands of years of wind. If the rain came, in the absence of forests, the water would cascade down the slopes and flood its ancient path, carrying everything away toward the sea. The temperature was dropping. He would have liked to have his coat now. Better the boy should have it. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the ridge. Down below, he heard them calling his name. Jules! But their voices, echoing off the ancient rock, rolled back without him: Jews! Jews! Jews! He could see very far now, all the way to Jordan. When he looked up, the star was gone, and clouds had wiped out the moon. He could smell the storm coming from J
erusalem.

  And now the Philistines appeared, cresting the hilltop, a trembling mass disturbing the light and the air. Some of them knew they were Philistines, and others knew only that they were part of something enormous, gathering itself for elemental reasons, the way the ocean gathers itself to break on the shore.

  The Philistines stood waiting. Holding their breath. A helmet clanged to the ground. A red flag rippled in the wind, silk torn. A great silence sounded across the valley. But there was no sign of David.

  And now a Philistine held his arm up high, and snapped a picture with his iPhone. Where are you? he typed, and, straightening his battle gear, the Philistine pressed SEND, releasing his message into the cloud.

  Already There

  The night I spent in the emergency room felt like three. The shot of hydromorphone the nurse finally gave me quieted the pain and made me woozy. For the hours before that, I’d harnessed myself to the broad and beautiful face of an Ethiopian woman who sat with quiet patience on the other side of the open curtain, cradling her pregnant belly. But after the needle went in and the tingling spread up my spine and later down to my toes, I needed her less, and she, too, must have lost her need for me, for whatever my face did for her pain, because after a while she got up and walked away and that was the last I saw of her. By now she must have a child, and the child a name, whereas I no longer have my virus whose name they never discovered, and have given up searching for.