Epstein entered the house. Entered it with a song in his head. Entered the way a man enters into his own solitude, without hope of filling it. A man like Klausner must have his minions, and so he was not surprised to encounter three or four of them bustling about, preparing for the arrival of both Shabbat and Klausner. They were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, and had it not been for the skullcaps, they could have been the sloppy residents of any college dorm in America. All but one, a young black man whose patchy sideburns were making slow inroads toward the rest of his scraggly beard, but who had already donned the pious uniform of dark jacket and white shirt. From the corner, hunched over a guitar, he sized Epstein up without pausing the graceful movement of his fingers across the strings. By what route had he arrived here? Epstein wondered, trying to place the melody. He pictured the boy’s mother with graying temples by the window of her Bronx apartment, the Christmas tree rigged up. Later, gathered around a table set for ten, introductions were made, and the soulful guitar player was presented as Peretz Chaim. Epstein couldn’t contain himself: “But what’s your real name?” he asked. To which the young man, whose manners were fine, solemnly replied that Peretz Chaim was his real name, as real as Jules Epstein.
Klausner, having sent a last-chance-before-Shabbat e-mail at an outdated computer behind the front desk, and double-checked that all the lights had been left on, hurried Epstein back outside again, through the narrow streets to the old synagogue where he wanted to take him—to soak up the atmosphere, he said, rubbing two fingers together in a sign that to Epstein signaled money rather than rich air. To breathe in the spirituality. As they turned down a passage of stone steps, a large cemetery came into view below in the valley. It was planted with cypresses whose tapering forms seemed shaped by conditions separate from sun, wind, and rain.
Down below, the great sages of centuries past lay under tombs painted blue. Epstein had seen the paint everywhere in town, on paving stones and doors, in the grouting between the rough stones of the houses. It was tradition, Klausner explained, to ward off the evil eye. “A bit pagan”—he shrugged—“but what’s the harm?”
They arrived at an arched door in the wall and, crossing a courtyard of broad paving stones, entered into a high-ceilinged, whitewashed room crowded with men in dark coats, fringes dangling. There seemed to be no order to the restless movement in the room, to the chanting here and swaying there, beards bristling with the tension of communication with the Almighty, while others kibitzed off-duty and helped themselves from a table laid with bottles of orange soda and cake. Klausner handed him a white satin skullcap from a table. Epstein examined the inside. Who knew how many heads it had been on? He was about to tuck it away in his pocket, but the man behind the table, beadle of the skullcaps, was watching him with fiercely narrowed eyes, and so with a wink Epstein set it on his head.
Now, as if under the command of a distant electromagnetism, the whole group joined together in song. Epstein, who had the urge to add his voice—not to sing so much as to yell out some disjointed, Tourette’s-like phrase into the volume—opened his mouth, but closed it again when he was shunted aside by the traffic still coming in from behind. When the song died back into scattered chanting, Klausner was drawn into conversation by a man even larger than he, with a beard as coarse and red as Esau’s.
Finding himself separated, Epstein let himself be pulled by the crowd in the opposite direction, past the shelves of gilded books and baskets of silk flowers. Caught in an eddy of black coats, he saw a huge, dark wooden chair with eagle’s talons at the bottom of its legs, attached to what looked like a cradle—oh, God, was that where they performed the circumcisions? The barbarism! Then he noticed an opening in the wall, and to get away from the chair, stepped down into a small, grotto-like room where some oily candles flickered. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that he wasn’t alone: a rheumy-eyed man was perched on a low stool. The musty air was heavy, tinged with the man’s body odor. A little brass plaque on the wall, which Epstein tried to make out in the gleam from the candles, commemorated this as the place where the famous Luria had come to pray five hundred years ago.
The shrunken man was groping his leg, offering him something. A wave of claustrophobia came over him. The breathable air seemed to be running out. A psalm, did he want to say a psalm? Was that what the man was asking? To ask for a blessing from the sage? In the old man’s lap was a package of cookies, and when Epstein refused the book of psalms, the man waved the package blindly, pushing it toward him. No, no, he didn’t want a cookie, either, and when the man continued to pull on his pants leg, Epstein reached down, tore off the arthritic claw, and fled.
Half an hour later, back at Gilgul, drops of sweat were forming again on Klausner’s brow. For the second time in a week, Epstein found himself seated at a table of Jews under the sway of the rabbi’s exertions. But unlike the audience of American Jewish leaders gathered vaguely, expensively, to rehearse their old positions, the students around this simple wooden table seemed alert and alive, open to miracles. Glancing avidly about, Epstein waited for the show to begin. In these elevations, under his own mystical roof, Klausner was even more in his element than he had been at the Plaza. And tonight Epstein was his guest of honor, and so it was especially for his sake that the rabbi’s sermon was designed—if design was the word, for the sentences seemed to roll from his mouth spontaneously. Rocking on the balls of his feet, he opened grandly:
“Tonight, we have in our company a man come down from King David!”
All heads turned to look. Epstein, who had come down from Edie and Sol, did not bother to correct him, the way one does not bother to correct a magician whom one has seen pull an extra card from his sleeve.
From the King of Israel, Klausner leaped to the Messiah, who it was said would come from the descendants of David. And from the Messiah, he leaped to the end of time. And from the end of time, he leaped to time’s beginning, to the withdrawal of God to make space for the finite world, for time can only exist in the absence of the eternal. And from the withdrawal of God’s divine light, the rabbi, blue eyes sparking with local candlelight, leaped to the empty space, whose spot of darkness held the potential for the world. And from the empty space that held the potential for the world, he leaped to the creation of the world, with its days and measures.
Like so, the tall, limber rabbi born in Cleveland, transplanted to the ancient land of the Bible, leaped like Jackie Joyner from the infinite to the finite. Epstein followed loosely. His thoughts were diffuse tonight, his focus fleeting. The words rolled through him, under the notes of an aria by Vivaldi whose steady heartbeat had been lodged in his head since he woke that morning at the Hilton.
“But the finite remembers the infinite,” Klausner said, holding up a long finger. “It still contains the will of infinity!”
The will of infinity, Epstein repeated to himself, weighing the phrase in his mind as one weighs a hammer to see if it is enough to drive the nail. But the words came apart on him and raised only dust.
“And so everything in this world longs to return there. To repair itself to infinity. This process of repair, this most beautiful of processes which we call tikkun, is the operating system of this world. Tikkun olam, the transformation of the world, which cannot happen without tikkun ha’nefesh, our own internal transformation. The moment we enter into Jewish thought, Jewish questioning, we enter into this process. Because what is a question but a voided space? A space that seeks to be filled again with its portion of infinity?”
Epstein glanced at his small, pale neighbor, whose pierced eyebrow was knitted in concentration. She was young—younger even than Maya—and solemn as an icon. She gave off the air of having survived a disaster. Would she know what to do with her portion of infinity when she finally got it? Studying the tattoos on her knuckles, Epstein wasn’t sure. He looked gloomily at his watch: still an hour and a half before the taxi was supposed to come for him. He thought of calling Maya, or checking in with Schloss, or reaching the director of development of the Israel Museum in the fragrant garden of her Jerusalem home, apologizing for disturbing her Friday-night meal, and announcing that he had decided to give her the $2 million to commission a monumental sculpture in his parents’ names. Something rusted, immovable, dwarfing, called, simply, Edie and Sol.
His father first, and then, suddenly, his mother. His father had been dying for years, had been dying for as long as Epstein could remember, but his mother had been scheduled to live forever, for how else would she have the last word? Epstein had buried his father, had arranged everything—the relatives, however distant, wanted a copy of his eulogy, so moving had it been. But there was nothing he could give them, he had spoken extemporaneously. Jonah and his cousins shouldered the pine casket. “Stand on the boards!” the gravedigger had shouted. “On the boards!” He’d laid two thin wooden planks lengthwise across the grave, on which they were to perch to lower the coffin on ropes. But they were struggling under the weight, slipping in the loose soil in their dress shoes, and could not see where they were putting their feet. That night, after everyone had left the shiva, Epstein wept alone, thinking of how his father had looked down at his naked, bruised legs in the hospital bed, and asked, “How did I get so banged up?”
But he could still operate the heavy machinery of grief, and steered his mind away from the places that would cause the most destruction. He had arranged for the religious relatives to fly in from Cleveland and California, had arranged for someone to say the daily kaddish, had already paid the mason for the headstone a year in advance, but in all of this arranging he had failed to arrange his mother, who had always made her own arrangements, who did not want his help, who had never wanted anyone’s help, who had been offended at its mere offer, and who one morning, not even three months after his father died, riding down alone in the Sunny Isles elevator, had had a massive heart attack and died. Passed away in the back of the ambulance, in the presence of no one but the paramedic.
Then Epstein had had to do it all over again. He went through the motions, as if in a fog. People spoke to him, but he barely heard, and wandered off in the middle of their condolences; all was excused, he was in shock. Three weeks later, he flew back to Miami alone. His sister Joanie wanted no part in dealing with their parents’ things. As with everything, she left it to her accomplished brother. Sorting through their belongings, he knew himself to be searching for something, a form of evidence for what he had always known but had never been told, because to utter even a word about his father’s past had been against the laws of their world. Even now, as he looked with trembling hands through his father’s drawers, he could not speak to himself about the wife and small son his father had lost in the war. He couldn’t say how he knew. The origins of his knowledge—no, it was not knowledge, it was innate sense—were inaccessible to him. But for as long as his memory went back, he had been in possession of this sense. It had informed everything. Without touching it, his consciousness had nevertheless grown around this vacuum of his father’s original son.
In the end, he’d turned up nothing except for a shoebox of old photographs of his mother that he’d never seen, belly round with him, hair whipped by wind, face browned by the Middle Eastern sun, the lines of her features deep and strong. Already operating according to her own system. She was not disorganized but did things her own way. Her internal order was hidden to others, and this gave the impression that she was impenetrable. Even after a lifetime with her, standing knee-high in boxes in her closet or going through her papers, Epstein could not crack the code. Conchita was no help either. He made his own instant coffee while she moped in the bedroom and called Lima on the house phone. In the cupboard, behind the boxes of unopened tea, Epstein had noticed a tin from Ladurée—a gift from him, bought on one of his trips to Paris. Opening it, he discovered what appeared to be a few serrated gray beads at the bottom, but when he poured them into his palm, he saw with surprise that they were baby teeth. His own teeth, which his mother, whom he’d never known to possess a grain of sentimentality, had kept for sixty years. He was deeply touched, tears sprang to his eyes; he had the desire to show them to someone, and was about to call Conchita into the room. But his phone rang just then, and he’d slipped them distractedly into his pocket and only remembered them too late, after he had sent the pants to the dry cleaner’s. Wincing, he thought now of the tiny teeth washing down through the drainpipes with the wastewater.
The rabbi drew his sermon to a close, and the blessing was made over the challah. Klausner tore hunks from the braided loaves, stabbed them into a dish of salt, stuffed one into his mouth, and tossed the rest around the table. It was a form of crudeness Epstein had been known to praise: the crudeness of passion that refuses to dull itself with manners. What good had etiquette ever done anyone? So began the little speech he liked to give to Lianne on the long rides back from visiting her parents, the dense old growth of Connecticut unfurling outside the windows. A wrong turn had been taken in the human evolution, the result of the slow drain of necessity from life. Once survival was ensured, time had opened for frivolity and daft embellishment, and this led to the absurd contortions of propriety. So much useless energy spent meeting the standards of social manners, which in the end accomplish nothing but constriction and misunderstanding. Lianne’s family and their priggish formalities were the inspiration for his lecture, but once he’d gotten started, there was no stopping him until they’d pulled into the parking garage in Manhattan: humanity could have gone another way, leaving its inner self exposed!
Lianne, being unable to turn the tide of evolution, silently removed an issue of the New Yorker from her bag and began to leaf through its pages. It had always been that way with her. Epstein could never get through. Perhaps it was desire that had kept him there for so long: he had tried and tried to throw himself against that wall, too, to break through to her secret inner court. After a while, he lost his energy for the argument. His world was making him weary. Those were the months leading up to his announcement to Lianne that he could no longer remain married. When they were dining at the Four Seasons for her niece’s sixteenth birthday, a white-coated waiter had lifted his dropped napkin from the floor and returned it to his lap, and as he did, Epstein had felt an urge to jump to his feet and cry something out. But what? He’d imagined the diners turning to him in bewildered silence, the faces of the waitstaff tightening, the rippling curtains falling finally still, and so instead excused himself, and on the way to the men’s room instructed the maître d’ to bring his niece the spun sugar dessert with a sparkler for a candle.
Now, at the thought of Lianne’s face, finely lined, touched by faint surprise as it was whenever she opened her eyes in the morning, Epstein felt a stab of pain. It had always annoyed him, this expression of her bewilderment. He woke to the day, into argument, having rehearsed his position all night in his sleep, but she slept and forgot, and woke perplexed. Why was she not more like him? He remembered how, on the night he’d told her that he could no longer carry on in their marriage, Lianne had said that he wasn’t himself. That he was still reeling from his parents’ deaths, and that it wasn’t the time to do anything rash. But by the way her eye twitched, he’d understood that she knew something not even he yet fully grasped. That she was the opposite of bewildered, and had come to her own conclusions. Something had needed to break, and he felt it then, the fragile bones snapping one by one under his fingers. He hadn’t guessed it would be like that. He had imagined it as a huge, nearly impossible labor, but it took almost nothing. So light, so delicate a thing was a marriage. Had he known, would he have been more careful all these years? Or would he have broken it long ago?
The steaming dishes were brought out from the Gilgul kitchen. In a burned pan, a whole chicken lay plucked and yellow, bubbling in its own fat. Epstein half wondered whether Klausner would tear off the thighs and toss them around the table, too. But one of the girls, a lesbian by the look of it, applied herself to it with a carving knife. A plate was passed down the table to Epstein, piled high with meat and potatoes. He’d barely eaten since his near drowning. His stomach couldn’t take it. On account of what? Swallowing a bit of sea? From beyond the grave, his mother laid into him. What was wrong with him? The smoke from an eternal cigarette swirled around her. He used to have a stomach of steel! He took down a swallow of sour wine and set into the greasy chicken. Bracing himself, he stuffed it down. It was just a question of mental exertion over the body. Long ago, when Jonah and Lucie were still young, he’d received a diagnosis of malignant melanoma. A small mole on his chest had begun to change color with the leaves one autumn. But when the doctor scratched it off and sent it to the lab, the news came back that it was his death that had been growing there, unfurling its colors. There was a 10 percent survival rate, the doctor reported grimly. In the meantime, there was nothing to be done. Leaving the office and walking down Central Park West in the invigorating sunlight, a trembling Epstein had made a decision: he would live. He told no one of the diagnosis, not even Lianne. And he never went back to see the doctor again. The years passed and passed, and the little white scar on his chest faded and became imperceptible. His death became imperceptible. Once, passing the forgotten address, his eye had caught on the doctor’s name on the brass placard, and a chill had gone through him. He pulled his scarf around his neck and laughed it away. Mind over matter! Yes, he had cured himself of a lisp, cured himself of weaknesses, of failures, of exhaustions, of all manner of inability, and as if that were not enough, he had gone and cured himself of cancer. A stomach of steel and an iron will. Where there was a wall, he had gone through. Surely he could get his dinner down, despite the nausea he felt chewing it.
And so it went, so that it was not until much later—for the eating went on a long time, and then there was still the singing led by Klausner, who brought the group to finale with a loud, rhythmic thumping with his giant palm on the table, rattling the plates and silverware—that a full Epstein, unable to bear the churning in his gut any longer, rose and, groping down the dark hallway in search of a bathroom, came upon her.
The door had been left ajar, and through it warm light tumbled out across the hall. Approaching, he heard the gentle ripple of water. He did not think of turning away. It was not his nature to turn away, he had always been too curious, had taken the world as something given him to see all of. But when he peered through the opening, what he saw sent a surge of feeling through him. He gripped his stomach and held his breath, but the young woman sitting in the bath with her chin resting on her knees must have sensed his presence, because slowly, almost leisurely, without lifting her head, she turned her face. Her black hair, cut above the nape, fell back from her ear, and her eyes came calmly to rest on him. Her gaze was so direct and startling that he felt it as a rupture. Along seams that had been waiting to come apart, but it hardly mattered. Shocked, he stepped back, and as he did, he lost his footing. Falling through the dark, he flung out his hands. His palms slapped the wall, and at the sound she jumped up with a splash.
Only then did he realize that she hadn’t seen him at all. Couldn’t have in the dark. But for a moment he had seen all of her, the water streaming in rivulets down her body. Then the door slammed shut.
He felt his gut convulse and fled back down the hall. Coming to the front door, he shoved it open and hurled himself outside. The temperature had dropped, and in the tremendous sky the cold stars had hardened and shone. He tore through the bristled growth, wild and knee-high. A dank vegetative smell rose, released by the broken weeds underfoot. Doubling over, he began to vomit. It came out of him and came out of him, and when he thought it was over, more came. Heaving, purged of his great effort, he saw the cloud of his own breath vanishing up.
He wiped his mouth and straightened, his legs still weak. He should really call a doctor tomorrow. Something wasn’t right. He looked back at the house picked over by moonlight. What was he doing here? He wasn’t himself tonight. Had not been himself, it seemed, for some time. He had taken a rest from being himself. Was that it? A rest from being Epstein? And was it not possible that, resting from his lifelong logic, his epic reason, he had seen an apparition?
He couldn’t bring himself to go back inside. Pushing through the nettles, he made his way he didn’t know where. Around the side of the house, where blocks of stone and roof tiles had been left in disorderly piles, and a shovel stuck up out of the stony earth. Nothing was ever finished here: the world built over and over again on the same ground, with the same broken materials. Epstein stumbled, and the loose earth poured into his shoe. Leaning against the house, he pulled off the Italian loafer and shook out the dirt. He still wasn’t ready to be buried. The wall retained the heat from the sun. Shivering, Epstein tried to absorb it, until a thought pierced him: What if she was not an apparition at all, but Klausner’s flesh-and-blood lover? Was it possible that Klausner could carry on like that about the spiritual realms and the revelation of the divine light, waving his mystical wand, when all the while he was just as controlled by the laws of this world as anyone? Or could it be that she was his wife? Had the rabbi mentioned a wife? Was it possible that she, a world unto herself, sat listening to Klausner in a long drab skirt and punishing stockings, her head covered with a lifeless helmet of hair?
Coming around to the back of the house, Epstein saw light shining from a window. What more? He should go back to Tel Aviv, back to his hotel where he could fall asleep in the king-size bed, which was the only form of kingship he wanted, and wake up to his old understanding. The taxi was already on its way to him. He would go as he’d come: backward through the streets of Safed now settled in the dark, down the now-dark mountainside, through the dark valley, along the dark and shining sea, everything the reverse of what it had been, for that is what it is to live in a finite world, wasn’t it? A life of opposites? Of doing and undoing, of here and not here, of is and isn’t. All his life he had turned what wasn’t into what was, hadn’t he? He had pressed what did not and could not exist into bright existence. How often, standing atop the mountain of his life, had he felt that? In the glowing rooms of his home, while the cocktail waiters darted among the guests who had gathered to toast his birthday. Watching his beautiful daughters, whose every move was touched by their confidence and intelligence. Waking under sixteenth-century ceiling beams and a white eiderdown in a room with a view of the snow-capped Alps. Hearing his grandson play the small cello Epstein had bought him, the sheen on the rich brown wood the sheen of a good life. A full life. A life tirelessly wrestled from nonexistence into existence. There were moments when the elevator doors would open to the home where he and Lianne had raised their children like the curtains to a stage, and the world there was so fully wrought that he couldn’t quite believe it. Couldn’t believe what his belief in himself, and his huge desire, and his ceaseless effort had achieved.
He was exhausted. He half wished to pick up his phone and find someone to yell at. But yell what? What was it that, so late, still needed correction?
He was about to reach the window when he heard a rustling in the weeds. The light had blinded him. And yet he sensed that whatever was moving in the dark was more human than animal. “Who’s there?” he called. All that came back was the sound of the faraway dog who, having not gotten back what he’d wanted, was still barking. But Epstein could feel a presence close by, and, not yet ready to give himself wholly over to the inexplicable, he called again: “Hey! Who’s out here?”
“It’s me.” The deep-throated reply came from close behind him.
Epstein spun around.
“Who?”
“Peretz Chaim.”
“Peretz—” Epstein exhaled, and felt his knees nearly give way. “You almost gave me a heart attack. What are you doing here?”
“I was going to ask the same of you.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck. I came out to take a piss. The rabbi’s speech was heady. I needed some fresh air.”
“And the air is fresher back here?”
Epstein, not entirely himself, was not yet unhimself, and rose reflexively to the challenge.
“What does your mother call you, Peretz?”
“She doesn’t.”
“But once upon a time she must have called you something.”
“She called me Eddie.”
“Eddie. Eddie, I can imagine going through the world as. I had an uncle Eddie. I would have stuck with Eddie, if I were you.”
But Peretz Chaim was also quick, emboldened, perhaps, by the wine from dinner.
“Would have stayed stuck, you mean?”
Epstein now recalled how his own grandfather, whom he’d never known, had apparently changed names four times so that the evil eye wouldn’t find him. But the world was larger then. It was easier not to be found.
“And how did you get here, Peretz Chaim?”
But the moment offered the young man an escape, because just then the light in the window behind them went out, and they were plunged into darkness.
“Bedtime,” whispered Peretz Chaim.
A wave of exhaustion came over Epstein. He would lie down right there on the ground at the foot of her window and close his eyes. In the morning everything would look different.
“The rabbi’s waiting,” Peretz Chaim finally said. “He sent me to find you.”
Epstein sensed the disapproval in his words. And yet weren’t the two of them on the same side? Having both come late, unexpectedly, but of their own accord? Now, absurdly, he saw himself with a scraggly beard, donning the dark jacket, becoming a copy of a copy, so that he might brush against what was anciently original.
He could smell the kid’s sweat. Reaching out, he laid his hand on his broad shoulder. “Tell me, Peretz, I have to know—who is she?”
But the young man sputtered a laugh, and abruptly turned and was lost to the darkness. His allegiances lay elsewhere. It was clear he didn’t think much of Epstein.
The taxi that had come for him all the way from Tel Aviv was turned away—the 700-shekel fare handed to the driver through the open window, with another hundred on top. The driver, trying to decide if he should be annoyed, finally shrugged—what was it to him?—counted the money, and threw the taxi into reverse. Epstein waited until the sound of the engine died out and the night filled up again with its silent, immeasurable distances. It was a mistake, he knew. He should have gone back in the car, should have escaped while he could to the familiar dimensions of his world. Tomorrow he could have been drinking orange juice in the sun on the terrace. He should have gone, but he couldn’t.
Back inside, Epstein followed the sound of voices to the kitchen. The one who’d wielded the carving knife was now making coffee with hot water from an urn, jabbering on proudly to whomever would listen about how Maimonides would turn in his grave if he could hear the rabbi. From the way she spoke, one might assume she had known the eleventh-century doctor personally. According to Maimonides, she said, God’s existence is absolute. He has no attributes, there has never been a new element in Him. She carried on until the somber Peretz Chaim, whose name, Epstein had been told, meant “explosion into life,” spoke up to say that, all the same, Maimonides still insisted on miracles. He was a medieval, Peretz was saying: he accepted both reason and revelation. But the girl didn’t give up, and had Peretz Chaim been true to his name, it might have come to blows. But the gentle guitar player who had yet to explode, but still might explode one day, gave up the fight, and at last the conversation moved on to the cheese maker a group of them were going to visit the following day, whose Orthodox husband grew marijuana behind the house.
Epstein found the rabbi in his study, turned down his invitation to join him for a glass of brandy, and asked to be shown to his room. The rabbi was delighted. He would give Epstein a tour tomorrow, would show him how he had restored the walls and arches, had brought the place back from a century of neglect! He would show him the classroom, the small library with its collection of books donated by the Solokov family—did he know the Solokovs, from East Seventy-Ninth Street? Their son, who’d had no interest in Judaism, no interest in anything at all, had arrived in a state of lassitude and left to study philosophy, and then herbal medicine, and now, after backpacking across India, he had combined the strands of his enlightenment and opened Neshama Yoga in Williamsburg, out of whose storefront he also sold tinctures. From the depth of their thanks, the Solokovs had donated three thousand books. Epstein said nothing. And the money for shelving, too, Klausner added.
Looking around the room, Epstein saw that it was as simple as promised: bed, window, chair, and a small wardrobe, empty but for the smell of other centuries. A lamp cast warm shadows across the wall. In the corner stood a triangular sink, and beside it a hard, stiff towel hung from a peg on the wall; who could say how many pilgrims had already dried themselves with it? Hovering behind him, Klausner had moved on to the subject of the Descendants of David reunion. With a small endowment, they might be able to get Robert Alter as the keynote speaker. It wasn’t his first choice, but Alter had mainstream appeal, and was already scheduled to be in town that week.
And what would the rabbi’s first choice have been? asked Epstein, who could once make conversation in his sleep.
David himself, Klausner said, turning sharply, and in the now-familiar gleam in Klausner’s eyes Epstein thought he caught something else, something he might have mistaken for a glimmer of madness if he hadn’t been all too aware of his own haziness and fatigue.
“So you think I go all the way back to him?” Epstein asked softly.
“I know.”
At last, unable to stand any longer, the pilgrim Epstein hung his jacket and sank down onto the bed, swinging his legs up. For an absurd moment, he thought the rabbi might bend to tuck him in. But Klausner, having gotten the point at last, bade Epstein good night, promising to rouse him early. Just before he pulled the door closed, Epstein called out to him.
“Menachem?”
Klausner poked his face back around, flushed with enthusiasm. “Yes?”
“What were you before this?”
“What? Before Gilgul?”
“Something tells me you weren’t always religious.”
“I’m still not religious,” Klausner said with a grin. But, remembering himself, his face became serious again. “Yes, there’s a story there.”
“With all due respect, I’d like to hear about that more than the restored arches.”
“Whatever you want to know.”
“And something else,” Eptein said, remembering. “Why did you call the place Gilgul? It sticks in the throat a little, if you ask me.”
“Livnot U’Lehibanot—to build and be built—was already taken by the place down the street, along with an endowment from the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach.”
“And what do they do there?”
“Hitbodedut. Hasidic meditation. At the end of every retreat, they send the students alone into the woods. To contemplate. To sing and shout. Experience elevation. Occasionally it happens that someone goes astray, and the emergency rescue unit has to be brought in.” But Gilgul was better than it sounded, Klausner said, and explained that the word meant “cycle” or “wheel,” but in kabbalah it referred to the transmigration of the soul. To higher spiritual realms, if one is prepared. Though sometimes, naturally, to more punishing ones.
Switching off the bedside lamp, Jules Epstein’s soul stirred under the stiff sheets and he was returned again to the intractable dark that he had stared into on countless nights when he couldn’t sleep, when the arguments continued in his head, the great assemblage of the evidence of his rightness. And did the unyielding dark look different to him now, in the cease-fire that had arisen in him during these last months?
The word came to him unbidden, full of meaning. For it was only in the arena of this cease-fire—in its eerie silence, its suspension of a former directive—that he had become fully aware of what he must now think of as a war. An epic war, whose many battles he could no longer name or recall, except that he had mostly won them at a cost he did not care to explore. He had attacked and defended. Slept with his weapon under the pillow and woke into argument. His day had not officially begun, Lucie once said of him, until he had taken issue with something or someone. But he had felt it as a form of health. Of vitality. Of creativeness, even, however destructive the consequences. All of the meshugas! Embroiled, horns locked, in a permanent state of conflict—it had only ever energized him, never depleted him. “Leave me in peace!” he had sometimes roared in arguments with his parents or Lianne, but in truth peace had not appealed to him, for in the end it had meant being left alone with himself. His father used to take the belt to him. To lash him repeatedly for the smallest errors, driving him into the corner as he pulled the black leather from the loops, and laying into his bared skin. And yet it was the specter of his father lying inert in bed with the curtains drawn at ten in the morning that stirred his own rage. The fear he felt as a child tiptoeing past his father’s bedroom door later turned to fury: Why didn’t he rally forces and rouse himself? Why didn’t he stand and come out swinging? Epstein couldn’t bear being around it, and so he began to spend all of his time out of the house, where the bright energies hummed busily. When his father wasn’t laid out with depression, he was another form of impossible—stubborn and fixed in his ways, easily set off. Between Sol and Edie, who went perpendicular to everything and parallel to nothing, who couldn’t let be and had something to say about everything, Epstein developed in a solution of extremes. Either you were lying listless or you came out armed and loaded. Out in the fresh air and sunlight, he threw himself into the fray. Threw the first punch. Discovered that he could be ruthless. Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands! So large did he grow, so taken with his power, that one night he came home, and when the father, standing in the kitchen in his stained robe, started in on the son, the son turned, swung, and delivered a clenched fist to the father’s face. Punched him, and then sobbed like a child as he held a slab of ice to the fallen father’s grotesquely swelling eye.
Epstein touched his own eye reflexively, got out of bed, and went barefoot to the window. What had he known of relations of grace?
He could have still gone back to Tel Aviv had he wanted. Could have called the taxi back, walked down the still-dark hallway to the waiting car, texting Klausner with the excuse of a forgotten meeting. He could have finalized the details of a donation in memory of his parents to the Weizmann Institute or the Israel Museum, finalized the hotel bill, finalized Moti, who would have come to the lobby with sweat stains under the arms to see him off and receive the usual envelope of cash, could have packed up and gone back to the airport, left the city where he’d been born, and to which he had returned countless times to regain what he could never put his finger on, flown six hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction from Judah Halevi’s heart, and watched the Eastern Seaboard emerge out of the dark and fathomless. And after the pilot, fighting high winds, had brought the plane down askew to the scattered applause of those who found themselves still, surprisingly, alive, he could have sailed through Global Entry, hurtled in a taxi along the Grand Central, empty at four thirty in the morning, glimpsed the Manhattan skyline, and felt the rush of emotion that comes with returning after having been far away, at a place where one’s arrival had felt very nearly final. He could have gone home had he wanted to. But he hadn’t. And now other things would have to happen.
He felt the ballast gone. Everything and everyone that held him to the pattern of himself was gone now. He leaned his forehead against the glass and looked out at the immense realm of the sky, hemmed below by the jagged line of primordial masses. He felt aroused, not only by the view but by his own receptivity. Something had been dislodged, and in the cavity the nerves conducted raw feeling without purpose. He probed tenderly and discovered, as one discovers with all absences, that the emptiness was far larger than what had once filled its place.