Epstein dreamed he was walking through an ancient forest. It was cold, so cold that his breath hung frozen in the air. The black needles of the pine trees were dusted with snow, and the air was fragrant with resin. Everything was dark—the damp ground, the great high boughs of the trees bathed in muted cloud light, the bark, the cones hanging on above—all except for the white snow and the pair of red slippers on his feet. Surrounded by the tall trees, he felt a sense of being protected, safe from anything that might wish to harm him. There was no wind. The world was still, a stillness very close to joy. He walked a long time, the snow crunching under his feet, and only when he stumbled on a root across the path did he look down and recognize the slippers. Of red felt, brought by his mother’s cousin from Europe, more beautiful than functional, the soles so thin that they barely did their work of protecting his feet from the cold below. The sensation of seeing something long forgotten but intensely familiar washed over him, and in that instant it dawned on him that he hadn’t grown up after all. Somehow, unknown to everyone, most of all to himself, he’d remained a child all this time.
At last he came to a clearing, and in the center of the glade he saw a stone pedestal. Bending, he brushed away the snow and the golden letters appeared under his fingers frozen with cold:
IN MEMORY OF SOL AND EDIE
THE SUN AND THE EARTH
When he woke, a shivering Epstein discovered that he had sweated through the sheets. He stumbled through the hotel room and turned off the icy blast from the air conditioner. Pulling back the heavy drapes, he saw that it was already morning. He slid open the glass door to the terrace, and a warm breeze floated in, carrying the sound of breaking waves. He felt the sun on his skin and inhaled the salty air. In damp pajamas, he leaned over the railing, squinting at the oily light that sat heavily on the surface of the water. He thought about swimming again. It would feel good after the strange intensity of the last days. He thought again of the Russian who’d pulled him out from under the waves, who had only laughed and clapped him on the back when he’d offered remuneration, and told him that if he stayed out of the water it would be payment enough. But why shouldn’t he go back in again? On the contrary, it was exactly because he had nearly drowned that he should now march right back into the sea, before there was a chance for the fear to gather tension and solidify into an impasse. He was a strong swimmer, had always been a strong swimmer. This time he would pay more attention. And anyway, the water was calmer today, the black flags gone.
But as he reentered the cool room in search of his bathing suit, the dream of the forest came back to him, the darkness and the white snow all as vivid as before. Suddenly he gleaned something of its essence, and halted excitedly in front of the unmade bed. He sank down on the duvet, only to leap up again a moment later and begin to pace. But why hadn’t he thought of it before? Back on the terrace, he dipped his body out for the whole view. Of course—but yes—it made such beautiful sense!
He dug through the damp bed sheets in search of his phone, and had a fleeting thought of the lost one. Who knew where it was now? Somewhere in Ramallah, making calls to Damascus. The rumpled bed was empty. He checked the desk, then came back and lifted the book he’d laid facedown on the night table before going to sleep, and discovered the new phone under its pages. He dialed his assistant Sharon, but after two rings remembered that it was the middle of the night in New York. After the sixth, he gave up and called his cousin instead.
“Moti, it’s Jules.”
“Hold on—
—Unbelievable! This son of a bitch just cut me off. What did you say? Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“Who do I speak to about planting—”
“What?”
“Go on, speak to who about what?”
“Trees. Planting trees.”
“Trees? Like for, what do you call it—”
“Trees! The way they’ve been doing since before there was a State. My mother used to send me out with a blue-and-white collection box.” Epstein could remember how the coins would jangle in the tin box as he ran from house to house, but could not recall the name of the foundation. “Trees for the slopes of Jerusalem, I think. I don’t know, for Mount Hebron. Later on, in Hebrew school, they showed us the photograph of kids wearing the kova tembel planting the saplings we’d raised money for in America.”
“What, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael?”
“Yes, wait—the Jewish National Fund, right? Can you get me in touch with someone there?”
“You want to plant trees, Yuda?” Moti asked, using the Hebrew nickname Epstein had gone by as a child.
“Not trees,” Epstein said softly, “a whole forest.” The goose bumps rose on his arms as he remembered the stillness gathered under the soft, dark boughs.
“We have enough trees. Now it’s water that’s the problem. Last I heard they were working on turning salt water into fruit. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to convince you to dig a hole in the ground instead. The Edith and Solomon Epstein Memorial Reservoir.”
Epstein pictured his parents’ hole, and the winter rain falling.
“Of course they’re still planting trees,” he snapped. “Can you get me a number or no? If not, I’ll talk to the concierge.”
But Moti wouldn’t think of letting Epstein go to someone else for a favor he himself could do that might later be repaid. “Give me half an hour,” he told Epstein, lighting a cigarette and exhaling into the phone. When he got to Petah Tikvah he would make some phone calls. He thought he might know someone who had a connection there. And Epstein didn’t doubt it: there was nothing that Moti—who had fought in three wars, married and divorced twice, and had more professions than Epstein could recall—couldn’t rustle up.
“Tell them I want to build a forest. Pine trees, as far as the eye can see.”
“Sure, a two-million-dollar forest, I’ll tell them. But, God help me, it hurts. In case you change your mind, there’s a place I can show you, all glass and Italian marble, and a Jacuzzi with a view all the way to Sicily.”
But when Moti called back later that afternoon, he told Epstein that everything had been arranged. “We have a meeting with them tomorrow,” he said. “One o’clock at Cantina.”
“Thanks. But there’s no need for you to come. It’s not your kind of thing. There’ll be no naked women.”
“That’s what worries me. What you do with your life is your own business, but you’re sixty-eight, Yuda, you’re not going to live forever, and here you are finally divorced, free, and you have your mind on rabbis and forests, oblivious to the fact that there are always naked women everywhere. I’m looking at one right now, wearing a yellow dress. And this is a form of joy, I tell you, that you will never find in a forest in memory of your parents, who, as far as I remember, had no interest in trees. Am I wrong, Yuda? But a woman, this is something your father, may his memory be a blessing, could have understood. Think about what I’m telling you. I’ll see you tomorrow at one,” he said, and before going back to the shiva call he was paying, phoned the owner of Cantina to tell him to put aside his most expensive bottle of Chardonnay.
A few days later, Epstein was standing atop a mountain, flanked by the JNF’s head of outreach, one of their forestry experts, and Moti, who had insisted on taking off from the real estate office where he worked to accompany his cousin. The JNF’s director of development was abroad, but Epstein had refused to wait, and so the head of outreach had been sent instead, a small publicist in cheap sunglasses who’d worn the wrong shoes. She’d been driving all day, and, having brought him to three different sites, was now at the far edge of her outermost reach, and had begun to lose patience. The last place she’d brought him had been devastated by forest fires and was in desperate need of rehabilitation. His gift would be enough to replant the whole area, she’d explained. One day his children would come to walk there in the cool shade of their grandparents’ forest, and his children’s children, and, God willing, their children after that.
But, surveying the landscape of charred stumps, Epstein had shaken his head. “Not it,” he’d murmured, and turned back toward the car.
What exactly was he looking for, then? the head of outreach had demanded, catching up to him.
“You heard him,” Moti had piped up from behind, throwing himself once more into the backseat next to the forestry expert, a young woman in khaki shorts, fluent in all things arboreal, who, as far as Moti was concerned, was the only thing that had made the day bearable. “He says it’s no good, so it’s no good. Yallah.”
Pushing down the strap of her sandal, the head of outreach rubbed her blistered heel in the driver’s seat while Epstein only repeated that he would know the place when he saw it. And so she swallowed back her frustration and started the engine, turning up the air conditioner to the max, and blotting the sweat from her forehead with a tissue on which her orange makeup came away. Behind her, Moti began to shake a cigarette from his crumpled pack but, feeling Galit the forestry expert’s disapproving look, shoved the pack back in his pocket, coughed, and checked his phone again to see if there was reception. Leaning forward, Galit told Epstein about the forestation work the foundation was doing in the wadis to stop erosion. But Epstein wasn’t interested in planting in the wadis, and so after a while she too fell silent and leaned back in her seat, having told Epstein nearly everything she knew about the Mediterranean region, the Irano-Turanian and Sahara-Sindi regions, about arid and semi-arid, average yearly rainfall, seedlings per dunam, soil quality, slopes and plains, the Jordan Rift, the lithology of Mount Hebron, the advantages of Mediterranean oak, pistachio, carob, tamarisk, Aleppo pine, and Christ’s thorn, names that seemed to her to rustle something in the depths of him, without ever touching on whatever it was he really wanted to know.
Twenty minutes later, they reentered a cellular zone and the head of outreach’s phone buzzed with a text from the office suggesting a last location. Moti slumped down with a groan and threw back his head, either because of the texts that had just tumbled through to his own phone or because he had already considered Epstein’s money in the clear, his work for the day done.
Slowly turning his head, he opened his eyes and looked at Galit.
“Sweetheart,” he said quietly in Hebrew, “is there anything you like aside from trees? Because if you can arrange for this forest not to happen, I can get you a week in a hotel in Eilat with your boyfriend. My friend has a place right on the Red Sea. You’ll go scuba diving, lie on the beach, and you’ll see how quickly you’ll forget all about this erosion business.” And when Galit only rolled her eyes, Moti turned his face the other way and looked out at the desert.
And so after driving back down through the Jordan Valley as far as Mount Hebron, at almost five in the afternoon they’d finally arrived here, on a slope of a mountain in the northern Negev. And here, where there was nothing except the sky and the stony earth turning red and gold in the sunset, Epstein was asked to imagine a forest.
The light filled his head. Filled it from the bottom to the brim, and threatened to overspill him. When the sensation had passed, and the light drained, the awe remained behind like a sediment, a fine sand as old as the world. Dizzy, he walked away from the others to stand alone on an outcropping above the sloping hillside, and saw endless rows of saplings unfurling in the beating sun.
There was a time, Galit had told him, when the whole southern and eastern Mediterranean, from Lebanon down through North Africa and Greece, had been covered with forests. But with each war they had been plundered for timber, turned into fleets that in the end had sunk to the bottom of the sea with their drowned. And bit by bit, as the trees were stripped away and the land plowed into fields, the earth dried out, and the fertile soil was blown away by hot winds, or washed away by the rain and rivers, and where once six hundred cities had flourished on the coast of North Africa, the population dwindled, and sand blew through and covered the ruins of empty cities with dunes. As early as the fourth century BC, Plato wrote about the devastation of the forests that had once covered all of Attica, leaving behind only the skeleton of the land. And so it had been here, too, Galit told him. Mount Lebanon was stripped for the temples at Tyre and Sidon, and then the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem; the destruction of the forests of Sherin, Carmel, and Bashan was the theme of the prophet Isaiah in 590 BC, and Josephus wrote about the widespread devastation of huge swaths of forests during the Jewish Wars some five hundred years later. Jerusalem, too, had once been surrounded by forests of pine, almond, and olive, and the whole region from the Judean Hills all the way down to the coast: all of it once covered with lush, dark forest, a word, Epstein realized, after a lifetime of uttering it in ignorance, was composed of the words for rest.
Moti came up behind him, lit a cigarette, and exhaled with feeling. Even he was muted by the boundless expanse. They stood together in silence, like old friends who had spoken about many personal things over the course of their lives, when in reality, despite all the years they’d known each other, they had never really spoken about anything at all.
“What is it with Jews and hills?” Epstein finally said, more to himself than Moti. “They’re forever going up to experience their important things there.”
“Only to come hurrying down again.” Moti crushed the butt of his cigarette into a rock. “Unless they have to be brought down in body bags, like from Masada, or from Beaufort, like Itzy’s son. Personally, I prefer to stay to the bottom.” But Epstein’s back was to him, so Moti couldn’t see his response, if there was any.
“Yuda,” he said again after a long while, “what are we doing here? I’m asking you seriously. I’ve known you my whole life. You don’t seem like yourself these days. You’re forgetting things—the other day you couldn’t remember that Chaya is called Chaya, though you’ve been calling her for fifty years, and then you left your wallet on the table after you paid. And you’ve lost weight. Have you seen a doctor?”
But Epstein didn’t hear, or chose not to hear, or had no wish to answer. Minutes passed, in which they sat looking out at the distant glowing hills in silence, until finally Epstein spoke.
“I remember when I was seven or eight, soon after we moved to America. There was this kid, two or three years older, who started up with me after school. One day I came home with a bloody nose, and my father caught me in the hall and dragged the story out of me. He was livid. ‘You go back there with a stick right now and crack him over the head!’ My mother heard this and came rushing into the room. ‘What are you saying?’ she shouts at him. ‘This is America. That’s not how they do things here.’ ‘So how do they do things?’ my father bellows back. ‘They go to the authorities,’ my mother says. ‘The authorities?’ my father said, mocking her. ‘The authorities? And what do you think the authorities will do? Anyway, that’s snitching, and our Yuda is no snitch.’ My mother shouted that I would never be a brute like him. Then my father turns back to me, and I can see he’s thinking things over. ‘Listen,’ he finally says to me, narrowing his eyes. ‘Forget the stick. You go right up to him, and you grab him like this,’ he says, and with one huge hand he takes me by the neck and pulls my face to his, ‘and you tell him, You do that again, and I’ll murder you.’”
Moti laughed, relieved to hear something of the old, familiar raconteur.
“You think she would have wanted this, your mother?” Moti asked, thrusting his chin out toward the barren hillside. “Is that why you’re doing it?”
Do what you want, you’re a free person, his mother used to yell at him, which was her way of saying Do what you want if you want to kill me. Inside the hem of his independence she’d sewed her command, so that at his greatest moments of freedom he felt her pull on him like gravity. Even going away from her, he was going toward her. All that was loyal in him and all that was seditious originated in grappling with that waxing and waning span, even if later it flung itself out toward other entities. No, she had not been a calming force, his mother. Her favorite piece of jewelry was a double strand of pearls, and on occasions when they lay around her throat, Epstein could not help but feel that her attachment to them had something to do with the irritant at their core that had gone and produced such luster. She had brought him to a state of vibrancy by means of provocation.
“She wanted a bench in a crummy park in Sunny Isles. If that.”
“So why? I don’t understand, Yuda, I really don’t. It’s none of my business, but they were frugal people, your parents. They didn’t like to waste. One tree, two trees. But four hundred thousand? For what? You remember how I came to America for the first time when I was twenty-one? Your mother wouldn’t let me throw out my own toenail clippings.”
Epstein didn’t remember any such visit. He would already have been married by then, Jonah and Lucie both born. He would have been preoccupied with his work at the firm, and a hundred forms of struggle.
“They brought me to see you and Lianne. I came to your Park Avenue apartment, and it was like something out of another world. I’d never seen people live like that. You took me out for lunch at an expensive restaurant and insisted on ordering a lobster. Because you wanted to treat me, or impress me, or because you were having a little fun with me, I couldn’t tell which. And the waiter brings this huge boiling-red creature, this terrifying insect, to the table and puts it in front of me, and all I can think about are the swarms of giant red locusts that come every seven years and lie washed up on the beach. You got up and went to the bathroom, leaving me alone with it. And after a while, I couldn’t stand its beady black eyes staring at me anymore, so I put my napkin over its head.”
Epstein smiled. He had no recollection of it, but it didn’t sound unlike him.
“That night, I went back to the house in Long Beach. Your mother put me up in your old bedroom. And, lying there in your bed, listening to your parents go at each other in the kitchen, I kept thinking about that lobster. For the first time since I’d arrived, I felt homesick. All I wanted was to go back to Israel, where we might have had plagues of locusts, but they were my locusts, and at least I understood what they meant. I was lying there listening to your parents tear each other apart, and thinking about what it must have been like to be you. And suddenly I heard something slam hard against the wall with a thud. Then silence. I was already a man by then, just out of the army, with the reflexes of a soldier, and I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen. I saw your mother leaning against the wall, holding her face, and I understood that some things are everywhere the same, and it was like I was back in my childhood kitchen again, with my own mother.”
Epstein looked up at the sky, bloodied to the west. Had he been better acquainted with this side of Moti, hidden under the coarseness and the wise cracks, or had the thought itself not been so abstract, he might have said something about the way, out of chaos, a few singular images are sometimes thrown up that come to seem, in their unfading vividness, the summation of one’s life, and all that one will take from it when one goes. And his were almost all of violence: his father’s or his own.
Instead, he said, “I think of my parents now, and I think, my God, so much argument. So many battles. So much destructiveness. It’s strange, but when I think about it, I realize my parents never once encouraged me to make anything. To build anything. Only to take things apart. It struck me the other day that only in arguing did I ever feel truly creative. Because it was always there that I defined myself—first against them, and then against everything and everyone else.”
“So what are you saying? That’s what this is about? A belated desire to stop fighting and make something? Yuda, let’s sign up for a pottery class, please. It will save you a lot of money. Come to think of it, I know a painter with a studio in Jaffa. For a small sum he’ll happily go to Rio for the month and leave you his place.”
But Epstein didn’t laugh.
“OK, it’s just that I don’t see it. You have three children. You were a great lawyer. You built a huge life. Isn’t that creation enough? If it were me we were talking about, a total failure in nearly everything, that would be a different story.”
“In everything?” Epstein asked, with genuine interest.
“It’s a part of me, very strongly connected to Jewishness, to the fact that I belonged to a cursed tribe.”
Epstein turned to look at his cousin, but at that moment Moti stood, hitching up his loose jeans and snapping a photo of the view on his phone, and in his slack expression Epstein saw no chance of being understood. He turned back to the desert, set ablaze by the sinking sun.
“This is it,” he said softly. “Go tell her this is the place.”
The car was silent on the drive back. A screen of darkness fell over the hills, and the temperature dropped. Epstein opened the window, and the cold air tumbled into his lungs. He began to softly hum the Vivaldi. How did it go? Cum dederit something, something, something somnum. He heard the countertenor, and saw the blind woman’s German shepherd with its eyes closed, listening outside the human range.
His phone began to vibrate in his pocket, and he ignored it. But when it started up again with new urgency, he checked and saw that it was Klausner trying to get through, and that he’d already missed three calls from him. Seeing the date, he realized that it must be the reunion Klausner was calling about. He looked back out at the darkening landscape, and against his natural persuasion he felt a little shiver at the thought that the real David must have walked and fought, loved and died, somewhere out there.
When his phone rang again, he gave in and answered to get it over with.
“Jules! Where are you? Are you in Jerusalem already?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
“In the desert.”
“The desert? What are you doing in the desert? We’re starting in an hour!”
“It’s tonight, is it? I’ve been busy.”
“Good thing I got through to you. I was starting to get worried. There’s still time. I’m at the hall now supervising the preparations—hold on—the musicians just arrived.”
“Listen, I’m on my way back to Tel Aviv now. It’s been a very long day.”
“Come for half an hour. Just to absorb the atmosphere. Eat something. Jerusalem isn’t so far out of your way. I don’t want you to miss this, Jules.”
Epstein felt the gnarled hand of the little man in the Safed shrine reach out once more for his pants leg. But this time he had no intention of yielding.
“To think that the Messiah might be there on the guest list. But no, really, I can’t.”
Klausner took no offense at the joke, and unwilling to take no for an answer, said he would try him again in half an hour. Epstein bade him good-bye and turned off his phone.
“What was that all about?” Moti asked.
“My rabbi.”
“Mother of God, what did I tell you?”
But Epstein really was exhausted now. The driving, the sun, and the long day of being with people had taken it out of him. What he wanted was to shower away the dust and to lie alone under the air conditioning, thinking about the forest that would one day cover the slope of the mountain, rustling and alive under the moon. Moti couldn’t understand. Neither would Schloss. Nor Lianne, who had never understood him, who in the end had not really wished to look, though he had tried and tried to reveal himself to her. He no longer needed to be understood. The night outside was thickening. He lowered the window all the way so that the wind drowned out the sound of his cousin’s voice, and inhaled the fragrant smell of the desert.
He did not attend the reunion, but that night, exhausted as he was, he could not sleep, and stayed up reading from the weathered book on his bedside table. Walking one afternoon down Allenby, he had seen it in a display case full of sun-faded books in English, all the colors moving toward blue. He had gone down the narrow alley and into the crowded, dusty bookshop to inquire about it. The owner was playing jazz over the stereo and tallying his accounts at a cluttered desk. The contents of the display case had not enticed anyone for ages, and it took a long time for the key to be found. But at last the case was pried open, releasing the musty smell of trapped weather and disintegrating paper. The owner reached in and removed The Book of Psalms, and Epstein tucked it under his arm, and went back out again into the crowded street and made his way toward the sea.
Was there a more complicated hero in the Bible than David? David who manipulated the love of Saul, of Jonathan, of Michal, of Bathsheba, of everyone who ever came close to him. A warrior, a murderer, hungry for power, willing to do whatever it took to become king. Betrayal was nothing to him. Killing was nothing. Nothing was left to stand in the way of his desires. He took what he wanted. And then, to let him rest from what he had been, the authors of David ascribed to him the most plaintive poetry ever written. Had him, at the end of his days, stumble into the discovery of what was most radical in himself. Into grace.
In the morning Epstein slept late, and was woken by the ring of the hotel phone. It was reception calling. Someone was waiting for him downstairs.
“Who?” he asked, still in the fog of sleep. He was not expecting anyone: he had no money left to give.
“Yael,” the receptionist reported.
Epstein roused himself and squinted at the clock. It was only just past eight. “Yael who?” he asked. He did not know any Yael, except for his mother’s cousin, who was buried in Haifa. There was a muffled pause, and then a woman’s voice came on the line.
“Hello?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Yael.” She paused, as if waiting for his memory to be jogged. Had it gotten that bad? Epstein wondered, rubbing his eyes with a dry knuckle.
“I have something for you. My father asked me to make sure that you got it.”
Still dazed, Epstein recalled how, at the first sign of light on Sunday morning, unable to stand another minute in the hard little Gilgul bed, he’d splashed his face with cold water and gone in search of a cup of tea to soothe his still uneasy stomach. On his way, he nearly smacked into Peretz Chaim, who was coming out of his room. Peretz had rolled up his sleeve, and was tightening the black band of his phylacteries around his bicep the way an addict ties a tourniquet. But it was Epstein who’d felt the longing: the hunger for the vein that goes straight to the heart. He touched his fingers to his chest, over the beating muscle that could not handle his thick blood.
“You want me to just leave it here at the desk?” she asked. “I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“No! Don’t,” Epstein said in a rush, already standing and reaching for his pants. “Wait. I’m on my way down.”
With trembling fingers, he pushed the buttons through the holes of his shirt, brushed his teeth, splashed water on his face, and paused in front of his dripping image in the glass, surprised to find that his hair had grown so long.
He saw her in the lobby before she saw him, bent over her phone, her pale, high forehead wrinkled in a frown. She was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and now that she was fully dressed he saw that his Bathsheba’s nose was pierced with a tiny diamond. But as he approached, he was struck by something familiar in her profile, some likeness that he had not noticed that night two weeks earlier. When he said her name, she raised her head, and their eyes met for the second time. But if she remembered, she didn’t let on.
She was working on a script about the life of David, and had attended her father’s reunion in Jerusalem with the film’s director. At the end of the night, as she was getting ready to drive back to Tel Aviv, the rabbi had asked her to bring this to him—and from her bag she produced a golden folder. It was imprinted with the words DAVIDIC DYNASTY, above which was a shield with the lion of the Kingdom of Judea and the Magen David. She held it out for him, but Epstein remained unmoving.
“You’re making a film?” he asked in wonder. “About David?”
“Why the surprise? When I tell people, it’s always the same reaction. But there’s never been a good film about David, unlike Moses, even though he’s the most complex, fully wrought, and fascinating character in the whole Bible.”
“It isn’t that. It’s just that I happen to be—” But he stopped himself from telling her that for many nights now he had been reading the Psalms. That something in him, strong and flawed, might go all the way back to an ancient story. “I’m interested in David.”
“You should have been there last night, then.”
“Should I have?”
With an amused smile, she described how the guests had entered under the fake stone arch, guarded by two messengers decked out in royal garb, who announced each one, followed by a trill on their bugles. A harpist in trailing velvet had plucked golden strings in the foyer. You couldn’t have cast it better had you tried, she said.
Glancing again at her phone, she told him that she really had to leave; she was late to meet someone.
“Where do you need to go?” Epstein asked.
“Jaffa.”
“I’m going that way, too. Can I give you a lift in the taxi? I want to hear more about the film.” He stopped himself from saying that he wanted to know why the rabbi’s daughter, who looked upon her father’s pet project with irony and appeared to have gotten as far from religion as she could, would want to make a film about David.
She put on her sunglasses and smiled faintly at something over his shoulder as she lifted her heavy bag off the floor.
“But we already know each other, don’t we?”