Forest Dark

  “I was under the impression—”

  But what could I say? That I’d been led to believe, had let myself believe, that I’d been selected for something special by him, Eliezer Friedman, a retired professor of literature with time on his hands? In a moment he would ask me if I would agree to come speak to his wife’s book club.

  “The Hilton is in the other direction. I should be heading back.”

  “I’m taking you someplace I think you’ll find interesting.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We walked along the tree-lined footpath that runs down the median of Ben Gurion Street. To those that passed we must have looked like nothing so much as a grandfather and granddaughter out for a stroll together. As if to play up his role, Friedman offered to buy me a fresh juice.

  “They have everything,” he said, waving toward the stand strung with heavy net bags of overripe fruit. “Guava, mango, passion fruit. Though I recommend a combination of pineapple, melon, and mint.”

  “Thank you, really, but I’m fine.”

  Friedman shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He asked me whether I knew the country much, beyond Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Had I been north to the Sea of Galilee or spent time in the desert? The landscape had astounded him as a child when he’d first arrived here. Reaching into one of his pockets, he produced a potsherd and handed it to me. To walk into the setting of the Bible stories, to find what had been inscribed in his imagination corroborated by stone, olive tree, sky. The fragment of terra-cotta in my hands was three thousand years old, he said. He’d picked it up not long ago in Khirbet Qeiyafa, above the valley of Elah, where David slew Goliath; the ground there was littered with them. Some archaeologists argued that it was the biblical city of Shaaraim, that the ruins of King David’s palace might be found there. A quiet place, with wildflowers growing up through the stones and rainwater in ancient bathtubs reflecting the silent clouds passing above. About this they would go on arguing, Friedman said. But the fallen walls and the broken pots, the light and the wind in the leaves—it was enough. The rest would never be more than technical. No physical evidence of a kingdom had ever been found by archaeologists. But if David’s palace was the dream of the writer of Samuel, just as the brilliant insight into political power was his, what did it matter in the grand scheme of things? David, who might have been only the tribal leader of a hill clan, had brought his people to a high culture that has since given shape to nearly three thousand years of history. Before him, Hebrew literature didn’t exist. But because of David, two hundred years after his death, Friedman said, the writers of Genesis and Samuel established the sublime limits of literature almost at its beginning. It’s there in the story they wrote about him: a man who begins as a shepherd, becomes a warrior and a ruthless warlord, and dies a poet.

  “Writers work alone,” Friedman said. “They pursue their own instincts, and one can’t interfere with that. But when they are guided naturally toward certain themes—when their instincts and our goals converge in a common interest—one can give them opportunities.”

  “What goals do you mean, exactly? To cast Jewish experience in a certain light? To put a spin on it in order to influence how we’re seen? Sounds to me more like PR than literature.”

  “You’re looking at it too narrowly. What we’re talking about is much larger than perception. It’s the idea of self-invention. Event, time, experience: these are the things that happen to us. One can look at the history of mankind as a progression from extreme passivity—daily life as an immediate response to drought, cold, hunger, physical urges, without a sense of past or future—to a greater and greater exercise of will and control over our lives and our destiny. In that paradigm, the development of writing represented a huge leap. When the Jews began to compose the central texts on which their identity would be founded, they were enacting that will, consciously defining themselves—inventing themselves—as no one had before.”

  “Sure, put like that, it seems extremely radical. But you could also just say the earliest Jewish writers were at the frontier of that natural evolution. Humanity had begun to think and write on a more elevated plane, giving people greater sophistication and subtlety in how they defined themselves. To suggest a level of self-awareness that would allow for self-invention, as you say, is assuming a lot about the intentions of those earliest writers.”

  “There’s no need to assume. The evidence is everywhere in the texts, which are not just the work of one or two individuals, but a series of composers and redactors who were supremely conscious of every choice they were making. The first two chapters of Genesis, taken together, are about exactly that—a meditation on creation as a set of choices, and a reflection on the consequences that result. The very first thing we’re given in the very first Jewish book is two contradictory accounts of God’s creation of the world. Why? Perhaps because, in echoing God’s gestures, the redactors came to understand something about the price of creation—something they wished to communicate to us that, if we were to grasp it, would verge on blasphemous, and therefore could only be hinted at obliquely: How many worlds did God consider before He chose to create this world? How many scales that contained neither light nor dark but something else entirely? When God created light, he also created the absence of light. That much is spelled out for us. But only in the uncomfortable silence between those two incompatible beginnings is it possible to grasp that at that instant He created a third thing, too. For lack of a better word, let us call it regret.”

  “Or an early theory of the multiverse.”

  But Friedman seemed not to hear me. We stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Overhead, the Mediterranean sky was stupendously blue, utterly cloudless. Friedman stepped out in front of an idling taxi and began to march across the street.

  “Read closely enough, it’s impossible to deny that whoever composed and edited those first texts understood what was at stake,” he said. “Understood that to begin was to move from infinity to a room with walls. That to choose one Abraham, one Moses, one David, was also to reject all the others that might have been.”

  We turned onto a quiet residential street, lined with the same squat concrete apartment houses that are everywhere in Tel Aviv, their ugliness softened by the lush vegetation that grows around them, and the bright purple bougainvillea that climbs up their walls. Halfway down the block Friedman stopped.

  According to the sign, we were on Spinoza Street. I assumed that was the reason Friedman had brought me there, since it was the Jewish philosopher who first claimed that the Pentateuch wasn’t given by God and scribed by Moses but was rather the product of human authorship. But what would Friedman’s point be? At the heart of the Dutch lens-grinder’s assertions, at least where Judaism was concerned, was the idea that the God of Israel was Himself a human invention, and as such Jews should no longer be bound by the Law ascribed to Him. If there was ever a man who strained against the notion of Jewish binding, it was Baruch Spinoza.

  Friedman said nothing about the name of the street, though. Instead he gestured to a gray four-floor apartment building whose facade, inset with rows of hollow concrete blocks in the shape of hourglasses, was the only thing that made it stand out from the other stucco buildings on the block.

  “I know from your books that Kafka is of interest to you.”

  I had to suppress a laugh. It was becoming increasingly hard to keep up with Friedman. All morning I’d been trailing a few steps behind him, but now I’d lost him completely.

  “He seems to make an appearance in all of your books. Once you even wrote an obituary for him, as I recall. So the story of the fate of his papers after his death is no doubt familiar to you?”

  “You’re referring to the note he left for Max Brod, asking him to burn all the manuscripts Kafka had left behind, which Brod—”

  “In 1939,” Friedman cut in impatiently, “five minutes before the Nazis crossed the Czech border, Brod caught the last train o
ut of Prague, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, saving his life and rescuing from almost certain destruction all the remaining unpublished work of the greatest writer of the twentieth century. Brod came to Tel Aviv and lived out the rest of his life here, where he published more of Kafka’s work. But when he died in 1968, a portion of the material in the suitcase had still never been released.”

  I wondered how many times Friedman had recited this story, too. The dog herself seemed to have heard it before, because after pausing in a wide stance to see where things were going, she now traced a few pathetic circles in the grass, lowered herself with a groan, and conked down her head in such a way that she could keep a lazy upside-down eye on Friedman.

  “I know all that, yes. I’ve read my fill of Kafka porn.”

  “And so you also know that everything left in that suitcase is moldering in the most heinous conditions less than three meters from where you’re standing now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  With the tip of his cane, Friedman pointed to the window of the ground-floor apartment. It was protected by a cage of curved iron bars in whose hold three or four mangy cats were nestled in a pile. Two more cats were lazing on the front steps of the building, and the stench of feline urine hung in the air.

  “Unfinished novels, stories, letters, drawings, notes—God knows what, sitting under the neglectful but pathologically obsessive watch of the now elderly daughter of Brod’s lover, Esther Hoffe, whose hands they came into through various questionable channels of inheritance. The daughter, Eva Hoffe, claims to have stored some of the papers in safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich to protect against potential theft. But the truth is that she is too fanatically possessive and paranoid to let any of it out of her sight. Behind those bars in Eva’s apartment, along with twenty or thirty more cats, are hundreds of pages written by Franz Kafka that almost no one has ever seen.”

  “But surely Kafka’s manuscripts can’t be hidden from the world on the claim that they’re private property?”

  “The National Library of Israel filed a lawsuit challenging Esther Hoffe’s will after she died, asserting that Brod had intended for the papers to be donated to them, and that they belong to the state. The trial has been going on for years. Each time a judgment is handed down, Eva appeals.”

  “How do you know that most of it’s here, and not locked up in the bank, as Eva claims?”

  “I’ve seen the papers.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I’ve only told you the beginning.”

  Friedman’s cell phone rang, and he looked thrown off guard for the first time all day. He fumbled in his pockets, patting down the vest while the phone kept going off with the loud, alarming tone of an old-fashioned telephone ring. When he still couldn’t find it, he handed me the cane and started lifting one flap after another, until at last, just as the phone gave up, he found it in his inside pocket. He glanced at the screen.

  “I didn’t realize it was so late,” he said, turning back to me. In the silence that followed, he seemed to be studying me, and I wondered if he had found something in my face to trust. He called the dog, and the beast came to and began the long process of rising.

  “Among the papers sitting in that apartment is a play that Kafka wrote near the end of his life. He nearly finished it, but just before the end he abandoned it. The moment I read it, I understood that it had to be realized. It took a long time, but at last it’s happening. Shooting is scheduled to begin in six months.”

  “You’re turning it into a film?”

  “Kafka loved the movies. Did you know that about him?”

  “That doesn’t mean he would have approved!”

  “Kafka approved of nothing. Little could have been more foreign to Kafka than approval. The afterlife of his work would have sickened him. And yet no one who has ever read him believes that his wishes should have been carried out.”

  “Why should Kafka’s intentions be irrelevant,” I asked, “while you glorify the intentions of the writers and redactors of the Bible who were—what was it you said before—‘supremely conscious’ of the choices they were making?”

  “Where is the glory? We don’t even know who they were, and most of their intentions were lost or overridden by the needs of everyone who came afterward. Beneath the countless revisions, there’s a Genesis written by a singular person who had all of the genius and none of the moral intention. Whose greatest invention was a character called Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay, and whose book might have been called The Education of God, had it not been absorbed by another destiny. But in the end, it isn’t up to the writer to decide how his or her work will be used.”

  “And the pathologically obsessive, paranoid Hoffe daughter has agreed to this? What about the National Library of Israel? In the middle of a trial, you got the rights to a piece of highly disputed material, a play by Kafka, which is going to be made into a film?”

  Friedman looked past me at the house. It was clear he wasn’t going to be solving any mysteries that afternoon; he was too busy sowing them.

  “Changes need to be made to the script, of course. And there remains the problem of an ending.”

  Now I really did laugh. “I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s all a bit much.”

  “Take your time,” Friedman said.

  “For what?”

  “To decide.”

  “What am I deciding?”

  “Whether my proposal is of interest to you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re proposing!”

  But before I could ask anything more, he gave me a grandfatherly pat on the back.

  “I’ll be in touch soon. Don’t hesitate to contact me in the meantime.”

  Unzipping a bulging pocket of his vest, he removed his wallet and extracted a card. ELIEZER FRIEDMAN, it read. PROFESSOR EMERITUS, DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the curtains of the ground-floor apartment move slightly, as if with the wind. Only the window was closed. I might have missed it had the cats lying on the bars not suddenly stiffened with alertness, feeling whoever was moving within. Their keeper.

  I walked slowly back toward the Hilton, trying to sort through everything Friedman had said. The sun had drawn everyone outdoors again, and the beach was now full of people in bathing suits, though it was too cold to swim. As I watched them, something came back to me from one of Kafka’s letters, written at a vacation camp on the Baltic during the last year of his life. Next door was a summer camp for German Jewish children, and all day and night Kafka could watch them from his window playing under the trees and on the beach. The air was filled with their singing. I am not happy when I’m among them, he wrote, but on the threshold of happiness.

  They were all out: the possessed matkot players, the only-barely-Jewish Russians, the lazy couples with young babies, the girls who, caught off guard by the sun, figured that their bras could pass as bikinis. Just as the inhabitants of Tel Aviv refuse to believe in the need for central heating, so they also seem to insist on going around underdressed, in T-shirts and flip-flops, always unprepared for the rain or surprised by the cold, and at the first sign of sun they rush outside to resume their usual positions. In this way, the whole city seems to have agreed collectively to deny the existence of winter. To deny, in other words, an aspect of their reality, because it conflicts with what they believe about who they are—a people of sun, of salt air and sultriness. A people who are, in that moment of sunbathing, of forgetfulness by the sea, as related to missiles as a man is related to the flight of a bird. And yet isn’t it true of all of us? That there are things we feel to be at the heart of our nature that are not borne out by the evidence around us, and so, to protect our delicate sense of integrity, we elect, however unconsciously, to see the world other than the way it really is? And sometimes it leads to transcendence, and sometimes it leads to the unconscionable.

  How else to explain myself, then? Explain why I went along with Fr
iedman, refusing to heed all the obvious warnings. One often hears people say that it’s easy to misunderstand. But I disagree. People don’t like to admit it, but it’s what passes as understanding that seems to come too easily to our kind. All day long people busy themselves with understanding every manner of thing under the sun—themselves, other people, the causes of cancer, the symphonies of Mahler, ancient catastrophes. But I was going in another direction now. Swimming against the forceful current of understanding, the other way. Later there would be other, larger failures to understand—so many that one can only see a deliberateness in it: a stubbornness that lay at the bottom like the granite floor of a lake, so that the more clear and transparent things became, the more my refusal showed through. I didn’t want to see things as they were. I had grown tired of that.

  Every Life Is Strange

  How it happened, for example, that one afternoon, a few months after his mother died, Epstein stood up to get a drink from the kitchen, and as he rose, his head suddenly filled with light. Filled as a glass is filled, from the bottom to the brim. The idea that it was an ancient light came to him later, when he was trying to remember how it had been—trying to remember the sensation of the level rising in his head, and the fragile quality of the light, come from far off, old, and which, in its long endurance seemed to carry a sense of patience. Of inexhaustibility. It had lasted only a few seconds, and then the light had drained away. At another time he would have chalked it up to aberrant sensation, and it would not have struck him much, the way hearing one’s name called from time to time when no one is there to call it does not strike one overly. But now that he lived alone, and his parents were dead, and day by day it was becoming harder to ignore the slow drain of interest in the things that had once captivated him, he had become aware of a sense of waiting. Of the heightened sense of awareness of one who is waiting for something to arrive.