Forest Dark, Page 2

  And indeed at last, after nearly a year of chipping away at the accumulations of a lifetime, Epstein arrived at the bottommost layer. There, he hit on the memory of his parents, who had washed up on the shores of Palestine after the war and conceived him under a burned-out bulb that they had not had enough money to replace. At the age of sixty-eight, having cleared a space to think, he found himself consumed by that darkness, deeply moved by it. His parents had brought him, their only son, to America, and once they’d learned English, resumed the screaming match that they’d begun in other languages. Later his sister Joanie came along, but she, a dreamy, unresponsive child, refused to take the bait, and so the battle remained triangulated. His parents screamed at each other, and they screamed at him, and he screamed back at them, together and separately. His wife, Lianne, had never been able to accustom herself to such violent love, though at the beginning, having come from a family that suppressed even its sneezes, she had been attracted to its heat. Early on in their courtship, Epstein had told her that from his father’s brutality and tenderness he’d learned that a person can’t be reduced, a lesson that had guided him all his life, and for a long time Lianne thought of this—of Epstein’s own complexity, his resistance to easy categorization—as something to love. But in the end it had exhausted her just as it had exhausted so many others, though never his parents, who remained his tireless sparring partners, and who, Epstein sometimes felt, had lived on with such tenacity only to torment him. He’d taken care of them until the end, which they’d lived out in a penthouse he bought for them in Miami, with deep-pile carpets that came up to their ankles. But he had never found peace with them, and only after their deaths—his mother following his father within three months—and after he’d given nearly everything away did Epstein feel the sharp stab of regret. The naked bulb sputtered on and off behind his inflamed lids when he tried to sleep. He couldn’t sleep. Had he accidentally given sleep away, along with everything else?

  He wanted to do something in his parents’ names. But what? His mother, while still alive, had proposed a memorial bench in the little park where she used to sit, while upstairs his father was giving up his mind in the presence of Conchita, the live-in nurse. Always a big reader, his mother would bring a book with her to the park. In her last years, she had taken up Shakespeare. Once Epstein overheard her telling Conchita that she had to read King Lear. “They probably have it in Spanish,” she’d told the nurse. Every afternoon, when the sun was no longer at its peak, his mother rode down in the elevator with a large-print edition of one of the Bard’s plays in the knockoff Prada bag she had bought—over Epstein’s protests that he would buy her a real one—from an African selling them at the beach. (What did she need with real?) The park was run-down, the play equipment caked with the shit of seagulls, but there was no one in the neighborhood under the age of sixty-five to climb on it, anyway. Had his mother been serious about the bench, or had she suggested it with the usual sarcasm? Epstein couldn’t say, and so, to be sure, a bench of ipe that could withstand the tropical weather was ordered for the grimy Florida park, bolted with a brass plate that read, IN MEMORY OF EDITH “EDIE” EPSTEIN. “I AM NOT BOUND TO PLEASE THEE WITH MY ANSWER.”—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. He left the Colombian doorman of his parents’ building $200 to shine it twice a month at the same time that he polished the brass in the lobby. But when the doorman texted him a photo of the pristine bench, it seemed to Epstein that it was worse than if he had done nothing. He remembered how his mother used to call him when too much time had gone by since he’d last phoned, and in a voice hoarse from sixty years of smoking, would quote God who called out to the fallen Adam: “Ayeka?” Where are you? But God knew where Adam was physically.

  On the eve of the first anniversary of his parents’ deaths, Epstein decided two things: to take out a $2 million line of credit on his Fifth Avenue apartment, and to go on a trip to Israel. The borrowing was new, but Israel was a place he’d returned to often over the years, drawn back by a tangle of allegiances. Ritually installing himself in the fifteenth-floor executive lounge of the Hilton, he had always taken visits from a long line of friends, family, and business associates, getting into everything, dispensing money, opinions, advice, resolving old arguments and igniting new ones. But this time his assistant was instructed not to fill his schedule as usual. Instead, she was asked to set up appointments with the development offices of Hadassah, the Weizmann Institute, and Ben-Gurion University, to explore the possibilities of a donation in his parents’ names. The remaining time should be kept free, Epstein told her; perhaps he would finally hire a car to tour parts of the country he had not been to for many years, as he had often spoken of doing but hadn’t, because he’d been too busy having it out, getting overly involved, and going on and on. He wanted to see the Kinneret again, the Negev, the rocky hills of Judea. The mineral blue of the Dead Sea.

  As he spoke, his assistant, Sharon, glanced up, and in the familiar face of her employer she saw something she didn’t recognize. If this worried her a little, it was only because knowing what Epstein wanted, and exactly the way he liked things, was what made her good at her job, and it mattered to her to be good at it. Having survived his explosions, she’d become aware of the generosity that lived alongside Epstein’s temper, and over the years he’d won her loyalty with his.

  The day before leaving for Israel, Epstein attended a small event with Mahmoud Abbas, hosted by the Center for Middle East Peace at the Plaza Hotel. Some fifty people representing the American Jewish leadership had been invited to sit down with the president of the Palestinian Authority, who was in town to address the UN Security Council, and had agreed to quell their Jewish fears over a three-course meal. Once Epstein would have leaped at the invitation. Would have gone barreling in and thrown around his weight. But where could it get him now? What could the square-hewn man from Safed tell him that he didn’t know already? He was tired of it all—tired of the hot air and lip service, his own and other people’s. He, too, wanted peace. Only at the last minute did Epstein change his mind, firing off a text to Sharon, who had to scramble to snatch back his place from a late-joining delegation from the State Department. He had given up much, but he had not yet lost his curiosity. Anyway, he was going to be around the corner at the office of the bank’s lawyers beforehand, signing documents—despite Schloss’s pleas—for the loan against his apartment.

  And yet as soon as Epstein was seated at the long table shoulder to shoulder with the banner carriers of his people busily loading chive butter onto their rolls while the soft-spoken Palestinian spoke of the end of conflict and the end of claims, he regretted his change of heart. The room was tiny; there was no way out. Once he would have done it. At a state dinner honoring Shimon Peres at the White House only last year, he’d gotten up to take a piss halfway through Itzhak Perlman’s rendition of Tempo di Minuetto—how many hours total of his life had he spent listening to Perlman? A solid week? The Secret Service had convulsed toward him; after the president was seated, no one was allowed to leave the room. But when the call of nature comes, all men are equal. “It’s an emergency, gentlemen,” he’d said, pushing past the dark suits. Something gave, as it had always given for Epstein; he was escorted past the brass-buttoned military guards to the restroom. But the need to assert himself had gone out of Epstein.

  The Caesar salad was served, the floor opened, and Dershowitz’s sonorous voice—“My old friend, Abu Mazen”—was carrying. To Epstein’s right, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia was fiddling with the cordless microphone, at a loss for how it worked. Across the table, Madeleine Albright sat heavy-lidded like a lizard in the sun, radiating an inward intelligence; she too was no longer really there, having moved on to matters of a metaphysical nature, or so it seemed to Epstein, who was struck by the desire to take her aside and discuss these deeper concerns. He patted his inside pocket for the small book bound in worn green cloth that Maya had given him for his birthday, and which he had carried with him everywhere for the last month.
But it wasn’t there; he must have left it in his coat.

  It was then, removing his hand from his pocket, that Epstein first noticed, out of the corner of his eye, the tall, bearded man in a dark suit and large black skullcap standing at the edge of the group, not distinguished enough to have been granted a seat at the table. The little smile on his lips brought out the crinkles around his eyes, and his arms were folded across his chest as if he were bracing a restless energy. But Epstein sensed it was not self-control in the service of humility at work in him, but something else.

  The American Jewish leadership went on unspooling their questionless questions; the salad dishes were removed by the Indian waiters and replaced with poached salmon. At last it came Epstein’s turn to speak. He leaned forward and flipped the switch on the mic. There was a loud pop of static that made the Saudi Arabian ambassador jump. In the silence that followed, Epstein looked around at the faces turned expectantly toward him. He had not given any thought to what he wanted to say, and now his mind, which had always honed in on its target like a drone, drifted leisurely. He looked slowly around the table. The faces of the others, at a loss for how to respond to his silence, suddenly fascinated him. Their discomfort fascinated him. Had he once been immune to the discomfort of others? No, immune was too strong a word. But he had not paid it much attention. Now he watched them look down at their plates and shift uncomfortably in their seats until finally the moderator broke in. “If Jules—Mr. Epstein—has nothing to add, we’ll move on to—” but the moderator was forced to swivel around just then, being interrupted by a voice behind her.

  “If he doesn’t want his turn, I’ll take it.”

  Searching for where the intrusion had come from, Epstein met the keen eyes of the large man in the black knitted skullcap. He was about to answer when the man cut in again.

  “President Abbas, thank you for coming today. Forgive me: like my colleagues, I don’t have a question for you; just something to say.”

  A ripple of relieved laughter rolled through the room. His voice carried easily, making the use of the microphones seem fussy.

  “My name is Rabbi Menachem Klausner. I’ve lived in Israel twenty-five years. I’m the founder of Gilgul, a program that brings Americans to Safed to study Jewish mysticism. I invite all of you to look us up, perhaps even to join us on one of our retreats—we’re up to fifteen a year now, and growing. President Abbas, it would be an honor to welcome you, though of course you know the elevations of Safed better than most of us.”

  The rabbi paused and rubbed his glossy beard.

  “As I stand here listening to my friends, I’m reminded of a story. A lesson, actually, that the rabbi once taught us in school. A real tzadik, one of the best teachers I had—had it not been for him, my life would have turned out differently. He used to read aloud to us from the Torah. That day it was Genesis, and when he got to the line, ‘On the seventh day God finished his work,’ he stopped and looked up. Did we notice anything strange? he wants to know. We scratch our heads. Everyone knows that the seventh day is the Sabbath, so what was so strange?

  “ ‘Aha!’ the rabbi says, leaping up from his seat, as he does whenever he’s excited. But it doesn’t say that God rested on the seventh day! It says that he finished his work. How many days did it take to create the heavens and the earth? he asks us. Six, we say. So why doesn’t it say God finished then? Finished on the sixth, and on the seventh rested?”

  Epstein glanced around, and wondered where all of this was going.

  “Well, the rabbi tells us that when the ancient sages convened to puzzle over this problem, they concluded that there must have been an act of creation on the seventh day, too. But what? The sea and the land already existed. The sun and the moon. Plants and trees, animals, and birds. Even Man. What could it be that the universe still lacked? the ancient sages asked. At last a grizzled old scholar who always sat alone in the corner of the room opened his mouth. ‘Menucha,’ he said. ‘What?’ the others asked. ‘Speak up, we can’t hear you.’ ‘With the Sabbath, God created menucha,’ the old scholar said, ‘and then the world was complete.’”

  Madeleine Albright pushed back her chair and made her way out of the room, the material of her pantsuit making a soft scuffing noise. The speaker seemed unfazed. For a moment Epstein thought he might even seize her empty chair, just as he had seized the turn Epstein had forfeited. But he remained standing, the better to command the room. Those nearby had edged back to open a space around him.

  “ ‘So what is the meaning of menucha?’ the rabbi asks us. A bunch of restless kids staring out the window, whose only interest in the world is to be out playing ball. No one speaks. The rabbi waits, and when it becomes clear that he’s not going to give us the answer, a kid at the back of the room, the only one with polished shoes, who always goes straight home to his mother, the many-generations-removed progeny of the grizzled old scholar who carried within him the ancient wisdom of sitting in corners, opens his mouth. ‘Rest,’ he says. ‘Rest!’ the rabbi exclaims, spit spraying from his mouth as it does when he’s excited. ‘But not only! Because menucha doesn’t simply mean a pause from work. A break from exertion. It isn’t just the opposite of toil and labor. If it took a special act of creation to bring it into being, surely it must be something extraordinary. Not the negative of something that already existed, but a unique positive, without which the universe would be incomplete. No, not just rest,’ the rabbi says. ‘Tranquillity! Serenity! Repose! Peace. A state in which there is no strife, and no fighting. No fear and distrust. Menucha. The state in which man lies still.’

  “Abu Mazen, if I may”—Klausner dropped his voice and adjusted the kippah that had slipped to the back of his head—“in that classroom of twelve-year-olds, not a single one of us understood what the rabbi meant. But I ask you: Do any of us in this room understand it any better? Understand that act of creation that stands alone among the others, the only one that didn’t establish something eternal? On the seventh day God created menucha. But He made it to be fragile. Unable to last. Why? Why, when everything else he made is impervious to time?”

  Klausner paused, sweeping his gaze across the room. His enormous forehead glistened with sweat, though otherwise he gave no sign of exerting himself. Epstein leaned forward, waiting.

  “So that it falls to Man to re-create it over and over again,” Klausner said at last. “To re-create menucha, so that he should know that he is not a bystander to the universe, but a participant. That without his actions, the universe God intended for us will remain incomplete.”

  A lone, lazy clap rang out from the far reaches of the room. When, unaccompanied, it drifted into silence, the leader of the Palestinians began to speak, pausing for his translator to convey his message about his eight grandchildren who had all attended the Seeds of Peace camp, about living side by side, encouraging dialogue, building relationships. His comments were followed by a few last speakers and then the event came to an end, with everyone rising to their feet, and Abbas pumping a row of extended hands as he made his way down the table and out of the room, followed by his entourage.

  Epstein, also eager to be on his way, headed toward the coat check. But while standing in line, he felt a tap on his shoulder. When he turned, he came face-to-face with the rabbi who had delivered the sermon on stolen time. A head and a half taller than Epstein, he radiated the wiry, sun-beaten strength of someone who has lived a long time in the Levant. Close up, his blue eyes shone with stored-up sunlight. “Menachem Klausner,” he repeated, in case Epstein had missed it earlier. “I hope I didn’t step on your toes back there?”

  “No,” Epstein said, smacking the chip for his coat down on the table. “You spoke well. I couldn’t have said it better myself.” He meant it, but had no desire to get into it now. The woman working the coat check had a limp, and Epstein watched her head off to fulfill her task.

  “Thanks, but I can’t take much credit. Most of it is from Heschel.”

  “I thought you said it was y
our old rabbi.”

  “Makes for a more captivating story,” Klausner said, raising his eyebrows. Above them, the pattern of deep lines on his forehead changed with each exaggerated expression.

  Epstein had never read Heschel, and anyway the room was warm and what he wanted above all was to be outdoors, refreshed by the cold. But when the coat clerk returned from the revolving rack, it was with someone else’s coat slung over her arm.

  “This isn’t mine,” Epstein said, pushing the coat back across the table.

  The woman looked at him with contempt. But when he returned her hard stare with a harder one of his own, she capitulated and limped back to the rack. One leg was shorter than the other, but it would take a saint not to hold it against her.

  “Actually, we’ve met before,” Menachem Klausner said behind him.

  “Have we,” said Epstein, barely turning.

  “In Jerusalem, at the wedding of the Schulmans’ daughter.”

  Epstein nodded but could not recall the encounter.

  “I never forget an Epstein.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Not an Epstein, or an Abravanel, or a Dayan, or anyone with lineage that can be traced back to the dynastic line of David.”

  “Epstein? Unless you’re referring to the royalty of some backwater shtetl, you’re wrong about Epstein.”

  “Oh, you’re one of us, all right.”

  Now Epstein had to laugh.

  “Us?”

  “Naturally; Klausner is a big name in Davidic genealogy. Not quite the same clout as Epstein, mind you. Unless one of your ancestors pulled the name out of thin air, which seems unlikely, then the chain of begetting that led to you backs right up to the King of Israel.”

  Epstein had the competing urges to pull a fifty out of his wallet in order to get rid of Klausner and to ask him more. There was something compelling about the rabbi, or there would be at another time.