Eventually there was evidence in the overhead window that the night was giving way. Something was changing inside the hospital, too, or so I thought as I lay on my back on the gurney. A kind of lull had settled over everything. The night shift had come to an end, and the doctors and nurses who’d spent it ministering to so many emergencies would now wash their hands of them and return home, but not before briefing their replacements, going over the charts in a burble of medical shorthand, who was due for what when, until they had at last completed all their duties and were free to change into their street clothes and leave through the automatic doors, exiting into the morning. Who in that hospital didn’t wish to be released? I’d thought of giving up the interminable wait plenty of times and escaping through those doors myself. Once I’d tried, scooting off the gurney with the IV port still plugged into the vein of my arm, but I didn’t get far down the hall before the brusque nurse in triage blocked my path.
At some point my fever began to soar again, and that was what finally got the doctors’ attention. Actually, it was the Arab with the mop and stethoscope who noticed my condition. From where I lay, half-concealed by a curtain, I could look out onto the cubicle occupied by the Ethiopian woman, and the hallway between her liminal space and mine where the hospital staff came and went, as well as the patients, increasingly residents, of the emergency room, who passed by in wheelchairs, gurneys, or occasionally on their own two legs. I remember that the Arab man went past, and I watched him pushing the long rectangular mop that left behind a wet, shiny trail like a slug. A few minutes later he reappeared, pushing the mop back in the other direction, and when he got to my cubicle he stopped and looked in. He had kind eyes, deep and brown, and seemed too old to be doing such work. After a moment he put the mop down and approached me. I thought he might remove the stethoscope from around his neck and use it on me, or maybe I hoped he would, because by then I was in need of an act of kindness. But instead he reached out his hand and pressed the back of it to my forehead and then my cheek, said something quietly in his language, and disappeared, leaving the mop where it was so that I understood that he would return. When he did, it was with a nurse I hadn’t seen before, slender with gray roots in her blond hair. I thought I might have a better chance with her, and so I tried again to describe what had happened to me.
The nurse put a hand on my arm and turned to the computer station on a trolley, making it clear that everything she needed to know would come not from me but from that other, more reliable, source. Once she’d caught herself up, she turned and asked the orderly a question in Hebrew, to which he answered in the affirmative, taking the opportunity to pop into the cubicle and retrieve his mop with its dirty, tangled head, before retreating back to the hallway. He continued to stand there, absently twisting the handle between the hands he’d used to gauge my temperature, and whose accuracy would now be checked against the thermometer in its disposable plastic sheath that the nurse stuck under my tongue. It began to beep wildly, and the nurse snatched it out of my mouth with a perturbed look that soon shifted to surprise.
She went away and came back with some bitter syrup in a paper cup, and then vanished again, presumably to find the doctor. What I remember next is that the orderly, still standing in the hallway, now looked around him furtively, first left and then right, until, judging the coast clear, he approached again, rested the mop against the wall, and again laid his hand on my forehead, this time with the palm down so that I felt the refreshing coolness of his skin. Looking up at his face, it seemed to me that he was listening intently. As if he were straining to hear after all, not with the stethoscope that still hung inert around his neck but with the hand itself. As if the sensitive instruments of his cool fingers could read my mind. And though I know this is impossible—that the memory I invoked under his touch had not yet happened to me—it is there all the same, impervious to reason.
With the orderly’s cool hand on my forehead, I recalled an afternoon the following winter when my lover arrived home and entered the bedroom carrying his bag. Get undressed, he said to me. It was a bright day, so cold outside that his fingers had frozen inside his gloves. I remember that from where I lay I could see the bare branches of the plane tree, with its spiked fruit still hanging on far past their season. I pulled my shirt over my head. Leave the curtains open, I said. For a moment he seemed to consider this. Then he proceeded to close them anyway, and removed four black ropes from his bag. They were very beautiful things, black and silken, but thick enough that a sharp knife would be needed to cut through them. The deftness with which he knotted my wrists to the bars of the headboard surprised me. What did you tell them it was for when you bought it? I asked. For tying someone up, he replied. And do you know what they asked me? I shook my head. A woman or a child? he told me, running his freezing fingers across my breasts and down my ribs, and delicately turning my necklace until he could get at the clasp. What did you say? I asked, shivering. Both, he whispered, and the gentleness with which he touched me, and understood this simple thing, filled me with peace and made me want to weep.
By then, the brief winter war was over. A single missile had fallen through the Iron Dome and killed a man on the corner of Arlozorov and Ben Ezra. The barrier had been broken, a tear in the sky, but the reality of that other world didn’t come pouring through. There was only another incommensurable onslaught of violence in Gaza, and then, at last, a fragile cease-fire. After I was released from the hospital, I spent another week in Tel Aviv, monitored by Dr. Geula Bartov, the petite and forceful GP whose care I’d been placed under while recuperating. Since the fever had come and gone intermittently, Dr. Bartov had been firm about waiting with the flight back to New York until I had been afebrile for forty-eight hours and they received the results of the battery of tests they’d done. It struck her as odd that I didn’t appear more interested in getting to the bottom of what had infected me; she saw it as a symptom, and marked it down as apathy.
The pain had gone, but in its wake I was weak and exhausted, and still had very little appetite. My father had not called Peres, but he had called his cousin Effie, who’d sent the police to bang down the door of my sister’s apartment, which they had left—because this was Israel, after all—hanging half off its hinges. Someone had taken this as an invitation to enter the apartment, rip the TV off the wall, and carry it away, but not before having a roll in the bed and eating the peaches I’d left in the refrigerator.
I’d told my family that I’d gone camping in the desert for research, had been without phone reception, and had gotten sick. For now, it seemed to be enough that I was all right, and they didn’t press me any further, though my father did insist on sending Effie to check in on me. As a result, I found myself locked in a two-hour argument with the second intruder to sidestep the busted door, this one four feet eleven inches of totally impossible. In the end it became clear that he couldn’t forcibly remove me to his Jerusalem house to convalesce under Naama’s care if I didn’t want to go, and so Effie settled for driving me back to the Hilton. On the way, I asked him to tell me everything he could about Friedman, but the details of their friendship seemed to grow vaguer and vaguer the more he spoke, until at last he drifted off the subject entirely, leaving me to wonder how well he had ever really known Friedman.
I was given a room on the north side of the hotel this time, overlooking the pool below and the sea to the west, which I promptly went out to greet, swiveling my waist as was necessary. The general manager called up to welcome me back, and this time the fruit basket he sent actually materialized, full of the sweet Jaffa oranges called Shamouti, from the Arabic for “lamp.” Either he’d forgotten his former wariness or I’d only imagined it. When I caught sight of him the following morning on the way to breakfast, he greeted me with a smile, his golden lapel pin sparkling, and when my passport was returned by two IDF officers who left it at reception, he had it sent up in a Hilton envelope, along with a little box of chocolates.
I spent those final day
s in Israel lying on a chair by the pool, still weak. My mind felt hollowed out, and I didn’t have the concentration even to read, so I looked out at the surf, or watched the few bold enough to swim off-season, mostly the elderly doing their slow, repetitive laps across the pool. I asked the young attendant who managed the umbrellas and towels whether Itzhak Perlman ever came anymore. But he had never heard of Itzhak Perlman, God bless him. I kept my phone by my side, hoping Friedman might still call—“out in the blue,” as Effie had said that first time—but he never did. Though the fever was gone, my dreams remained vivid, and when I dozed off, Friedman often appeared in them, mixed with what was nearest. The dreams wore me out, and I would have preferred a dreamless sleep, barricaded from the workings of my mind, but by that stage I was still grateful for any kind of sleep at all. I stayed outside until late, after the attendant had stripped the chairs of their mattresses. Five o’clock in the Mediterranean, such beautiful light, it’s easy to understand how empires rose and fell in it, the Greek and Assyrian, Phoenician and Carthaginian, the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman.
It was while lying there, by the pool, that I looked up for a moment at the looming monstrosity of the Hilton, and, shielding my eyes from the sun, saw him there, on a terrace of the fifteenth or sixteenth floor. He was the only one out on the whole north side of the building, and for a moment I had the feeling that he was about to perform a trick. Twenty years ago, I’d come out of Lincoln Center and seen a small knot of people looking up at a building in which every window of the upper floors had been darkened but for one. And there, in that illuminated rectangle, a couple could be seen slowly dancing together. It might have been only serendipity that all the other windows were dark, and the couple may have been clueless that a small crowd had gathered below to watch. But there was something deliberate in their movements that filled us with the sense that they knew. I think it must have been that which drew my attention to the man standing on the terrace of his room on the fifteenth floor: a concentrated sense of intent and drama that animated his body as he leaned out over the railing. I was riveted and couldn’t look away. I felt I should call the pool attendant and alert him, but what would I say?
It happened very quickly. He shifted his weight forward onto his hands, and vaulted one leg over the metal rail. A woman getting out of the pool shouted, and in a matter of seconds the man had swung the other leg over, and was perched on the railing, legs dangling over the two-hundred-foot drop. He seemed, suddenly, to be filled with enormous potential, as if the whole rest of his life had slammed forward into him. And then he leaped with arms open, like a bird.
Thirty-six hours later, the taxi that drove me from JFK through the corrosive orange dusk falling on fast food restaurants and funeral parlors, on the Baptist churches and the Hasids in Crown Heights hurrying through old snow, turned onto my street at last, and the driver waited while I made my way up the front steps with my suitcase. The lights were on inside our house. Through the front window I could see my children playing on the floor, heads bent over a game. They didn’t see me. And for a while I didn’t see myself either, sitting in a chair in the corner, already there.
Author’s Note
The title of this book is taken from the following lines of Dante, translated by Longfellow, and quoted to me some years ago on a long drive to Jerusalem:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
I hereby excuse all those named in this book, including Eliezer Friedman, from all liability. Should he ever wish to contact me, he knows where to find me.
About the Author
Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as ‘one of America’s most important novelists’. She is the author of the international bestsellers Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by the New Yorker for their ‘Twenty Under Forty’ list. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.
nicolekrauss.com
First published in Great Britain 2017
This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Nicole Krauss, 2017
Nicole Krauss has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organisations or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark
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