Forest Dark
To my father
Also by Nicole Krauss
GREAT HOUSE
THE HISTORY OF LOVE
MAN WALKS INTO A ROOM
Contents
I
Ayeka
Out in the Blue
Every Life Is Strange
Packing for Canaan
Is and Isn’t
Kaddish for Kafka
II
Gilgul
Forests of Israel
Something to Carry
The Last King
To the Desert
Lech Lecha
Already There
Author’s Note
About the Author
The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal. Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the process makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not.
— KAFKA
I
Ayeka
At the time of his disappearance, Epstein had been living in Tel Aviv for three months. No one had seen his apartment. His daughter Lucie had come to visit with her children, but Epstein installed them in the Hilton, where he met them for lavish breakfasts at which he only sipped tea. When Lucie asked to come over, he’d begged off, explaining that the place was small and modest, not fit for receiving guests. Still reeling from her parents’ late divorce, she’d looked at him through narrow eyes—nothing about Epstein had previously been small or modest—but despite her suspicion she’d had to accept it, along with all the other changes that had come over her father. In the end, it was the police detectives who showed Lucie, Jonah, and Maya into their father’s apartment, which turned out to be in a crumbling building near the ancient port of Jaffa. The paint was peeling, and the shower let down directly above the toilet. A cockroach strutted majestically across the stone floor. Only after the police detective stomped on it with his shoe did it occur to Maya, Epstein’s youngest and most intelligent child, that it may have been the last to see her father. If Epstein had ever really lived there at all—the only things that suggested he had inhabited the place were some books warped by the humid air that came through an open window and a bottle of the Coumadin pills he’d taken since the discovery of an atrial fibrillation five years earlier. It could not have been called squalid, and yet the place had more in common with the slums of Calcutta than it did with the rooms in which his children had stayed with their father on the Amalfi coast and Cap d’Antibes. Though, like those other rooms, this one also had a view of the sea.
In those final months Epstein had become difficult to reach. No longer did his answers come hurtling back regardless of the time of day or night. If before he’d always had the last word, it was because he’d never not replied. But slowly, his messages had become more and more scarce. Time expanded between them because it had expanded in him: the twenty-four hours he’d once filled with everything under the sun was replaced by a scale of thousands of years. His family and friends became accustomed to his irregular silences, and so when he failed to answer anything at all during the first week of February, no one became instantly alarmed. In the end, it was Maya who woke in the night feeling a tremor along the invisible line that still connected her to her father, and asked his cousin to check on him. Moti, who had been the beneficiary of many thousands of dollars from Epstein, caressed the ass of the sleeping lover in his bed, then lit a cigarette and stuffed his bare feet into his shoes, for though it was the middle of the night, he was glad to have a reason to talk to Epstein about a new investment. But when Moti arrived at the Jaffa address scrawled on his palm, he rang Maya back. There must be a mistake, he told her, there was no way her father would live in such a dump. Maya phoned Epstein’s lawyer, Schloss, the only one who still knew anything, but he confirmed that the address was correct. When Moti finally roused the young tenant on the second floor by holding down the buzzer with a stubby finger, she confirmed that Epstein had in fact been living above her for the last few months, but that it had been many days since she’d last seen him, or heard him, really, for she had gotten used to the sound of him pacing on her ceiling during the night. Though she couldn’t know it as she stood sleepily at the door addressing the balding cousin of her upstairs neighbor, in the rapid escalation of events that followed, the young woman would become accustomed to the sound of many people coming and going above her head, tracing and retracing the footsteps of a man she hardly knew and yet had come to feel oddly close to.
The police only had the case for half a day before it was taken over by the Shin Bet. Shimon Peres called the family personally to say that mountains would be moved. The taxi driver who’d picked Epstein up six days earlier was tracked down and taken in for questioning. Scared out of his wits, he smiled the whole time, showing his gold tooth. Later he led the Shin Bet detectives to the road along the Dead Sea and, following some confusion as a result of nerves, managed to locate the spot where he had let Epstein off, an intersection near the barren hills halfway between the caves of Qumran and Ein Gedi. The search parties fanned out across the desert, but all they turned up was Epstein’s empty monogrammed briefcase, which, as Maya put it, only made the possibility of his transubstantiation seem more real.
During those days and nights, gathered together in the rooms of the Hilton suite, his children tossed back and forth between hope and grief. A phone was always ringing—Schloss alone was manning three—and each time it did, they attached themselves to the latest information that came through. Jonah, Lucie, and Maya learned things about their father that they hadn’t known. But in the end, they got no closer to finding out what he had meant by it all, or what had become of him. As the days passed, the calls had come less often, and brought no miracles. Slowly they adjusted themselves to a new reality in which their father, so firm and decisive in life, had left them with a final act that was utterly ambiguous.
A rabbi was brought in who explained to them in heavily accented English that Jewish law required absolute certainty about the death before the mourning rituals could be observed. In cases where there was no corpse, a witness to the death was considered enough. And even with no corpse and no witness, a report that the person had been killed by thieves, or drowned, or dragged off by a wild animal was enough. But in this case there was no corpse, no witness, and no report. No thieves, or wild animals, as far as anyone knew. Only an inscrutable absence where once their father had been.
No one could have imagined it, and yet it came to seem like a fitting end. Death was too small for Epstein. In retrospect, not even a real possibility. In life he had taken up the whole room. He wasn’t large, only uncontainable. There was too much of him; he constantly overspilled himself. It all came pouring out: the passion, the anger, the enthusiasm, the contempt for people and the love for all mankind. Argument was the medium in which he was raised, and he needed it to know he was alive. He fell out with three-quarters of everyone he had fallen in with; those that remained could do no wrong, and were loved by Epstein forever. To know him was either to be crushed by him or madly inflated. One hardly recognized oneself in his descriptions. He had a long line of protégés. Epstein breathed himself into them, they became larger and larger, as did everyone he chose to love. At last they flew like a Macy’s parade balloon. But then one day they would snag themselves on Epstein’s high moral branches and burst. From then on, their names were anathema. In his inflationary habits Epstein was deeply American, but in his lack of respect for boundaries and his tribalism he was not. He was something else, and this something else led to misunderstanding again and again.
And yet he’d had a way of d
rawing people in, bringing them over to his side, under the expansive umbrella of his policies. He was lit brightly from within, and this light came spilling out of him in the careless fashion of one who hasn’t any need to scrimp or save. To be with him was never dull. His spirits swelled and sank and swelled again, his temper flared, he was unforgiving, but he was never less than completely absorbing. He was endlessly curious, and when he became interested in something or someone, his investigations were exhaustive. He never doubted that everyone else would be as interested in these subjects as he was. But few could match his stamina. In the end, it was always his dinner companions who insisted on retiring first, and still Epstein would follow them out of the restaurant, finger stabbing the air, eager to drive home his point.
He had always been at the top of everything. Where he lacked natural facilities, by sheer force of will he drove himself beyond his limits. As a young man he had not been a natural orator, for example; a lisp had gotten in the way. Nor was he innately athletic. But in time he came to excel in these, especially. The lisp was overcome—only if one listened microscopically could a slur be detected where he had performed the necessary operation—and many hours in the gym, and the honing of a wily, cutthroat instinct, turned him into a champion lightweight wrestler. Where he encountered a wall, he threw himself against it over and over, picking himself up again until one day he went right through it. This enormous pressure and exertion were perceptible in everything he did, and yet what might have come off as striving in anyone else, in him seemed a form of grace. Even as a boy, his aspirations were gargantuan. On the block where he grew up on Long Beach, Long Island, Epstein had charged ten houses a monthly retainer fee, for which he was available twenty-four hours a day, with a cap of ten hours a month, to deliver his services, outlined in an ever-expanding menu he sent out with the invoice (mowing, dog walking, car washing, even unclogging toilets, for he did not have the switch in him that seemed to turn others off). He was going to have endless money because that was his fate; long before he married into it, he already knew exactly what to do with it. At thirteen, he bought with his savings a blue silk scarf that he wore as casually as his friends wore their gym sneakers. How many people know what to do with money? His wife, Lianne, had been allergic to her family fortune; it stiffened her and made her quiet. She spent her early years trying to erase her footsteps in the formal gardens. But Epstein taught her what to do with it. He bought a Rubens, a Sargent, a Mortlake tapestry. He hung a small Matisse in his closet. Under a ballerina by Degas, he sat without pants. It wasn’t a question of being crude or out of his element. No, Epstein was very polished. He was not refined—he had no wish to lose his impurities—but he had been brought to a high shine. In pleasure he saw nothing to be ashamed of; his was large and true, and so he could make himself at home among even the most exquisite things. Every summer he rented the same “shabby” castle in Granada where the newspaper could be thrown down and the feet put up. He chose a spot on the plaster wall to pencil in the children’s growth. In later years he grew misty-eyed at the mention of the place—he had gotten so much wrong, he had made a mess of it, and yet there, where his children had played freely under the orange trees, he had gotten something right.
But at the end there had been a kind of drift. Later on, when his children looked back and tried to make sense of what had happened, they could pinpoint the beginning of his transformation to the loss of his interest in pleasure. Something opened up between Epstein and his great appetite—it receded beyond the horizon a man carries within himself. Then he lived separately from his purchase of exquisite beauty. He lacked what it took to bring it all into harmony, or got tired of the ambition to do so. For a while the paintings still hung on the walls, but he no longer had much to do with them. They carried on their own lives, dreaming in their frames. Something had changed in him. The strong weather of being Epstein no longer gusted outward. A great, unnatural stillness settled over everything, as happens before radical events of meteorology. Then the wind shifted and turned inward.
It was then that Epstein began to give things away. It started with a small maquette by Henry Moore handed off to his doctor, who had admired it during a home visit. From his bed, laid up with the flu, Epstein instructed Dr. Silverblatt on which closet he could find the bubble wrap in. A few days later, he twisted the signet ring off his pinkie and dropped it in the palm of his surprised doorman, Haaroon, in place of a tip; flexing his naked fist in the autumn sunlight, he smiled to himself. Soon afterward he gave away his Patek Philippe. “I like your watch, Uncle Jules,” his nephew had said, and Epstein unbuckled the crocodile strap and handed it to him. “I like your Mercedes, too,” said his nephew, at which Epstein only smiled and patted the boy’s cheek. But quickly he redoubled his efforts. Giving farther, giving faster, he began to bestow with the same ferocity with which he had once acquired. The paintings went one by one to museums; he had the crating service on automatic dial, and knew which of the men liked turkey on rye and which baloney, and had the deli delivery waiting when they arrived. When his son Jonah, trying not to appear driven by self-interest, tried to dissuade him from further philanthropy, Epstein told him he was clearing a space to think. If Jonah had pointed out that his father had been a rigorous thinker all his life, Epstein might have explained that this was thought of an entirely different nature: a thinking that didn’t already know its own point. A thinking without hope of achievement. But Jonah—who had so many chips on his shoulder that one evening, on a private tour of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, Epstein had stood before a second-century bust and seen his firstborn in it—had only answered him with injured silence. As with everything Epstein did, Jonah took his father’s deliberate draining of assets as an affront, and yet another reason to feel aggrieved.
Beyond this, Epstein made no effort to explain himself to anyone, except once to Maya. Having arrived thirteen years after Jonah, and ten after Lucie, at a less turbulent and agitated epoch in Epstein’s life, Maya saw her father in a different light. There was a natural ease between them. On a walk through the northern reaches of Central Park, where icicles hung from the great outcrops of schist, he told his youngest daughter that he had begun to feel choked by all the things around him. That he felt an irresistible longing for lightness—it was a quality, he realized only now, that had been alien to him all his life. They stopped at the upper lake, thinly sheeted with greenish ice. When a snowflake landed on Maya’s black eyelashes, Epstein gently brushed it away with his thumb, and Maya saw her father in fingerless gloves pushing an empty shopping cart down Upper Broadway.
He sent friends’ children through college, had refrigerators delivered, paid for a pair of new hips for the wife of the longtime janitor of his law office. He even made the down payment on a house for the daughter of an old friend; not any house, but a large Greek Revival with old trees and more lawn than the surprised new owner knew what to do with. His lawyer, Schloss—the executor of his estate, and his longtime confidant—was not allowed to interfere. Schloss had once had another client who’d caught the disease of radical charity, a billionaire who gave away his houses one by one, followed by the ground under his feet. It was a kind of addiction, he told Epstein, and later he might come to regret it. After all, he was not yet seventy; he could still live thirty more years. But Epstein had barely seemed to listen, just as he hadn’t listened when the lawyer strenuously argued against letting Lianne walk away with the entirety of her fortune, and just as he didn’t listen a few months later when Schloss again tried to dissuade him, this time from retiring from the firm where he’d been a partner for twenty-five years. Across the table, Epstein had only smiled and changed the subject to his reading, which had recently taken a mystical turn.
It had begun with a book Maya had given to him for his birthday, he told Schloss. She was always giving him strange books, some of which he read, and many of which he didn’t, a practice that never seemed to bother her—naturally free-spirited, she was the oppos
ite of her brother, Jonah, and rarely took offense at anything. Epstein had opened the cover one evening with no intention of reading it, but it had pulled him in with an almost magnetic force. It was by an Israeli poet, Polish-born, who had died at sixty-six, two years younger than the age Epstein had just turned. But the little autobiographical book, the testament of a man alone facing God, had been written when the poet was only twenty-seven. It had overwhelmed him, Epstein told Schloss. At twenty-seven, he himself had been blinded by his ambition and appetite—for success, for money, for sex, for beauty, for love, for the magnitudes but also the nitty-gritty, for everything visible, smellable, palpable. What might his life have been if he had applied himself with the same intensity to the spiritual realm? Why had he closed himself off from it so completely?
As he spoke, Schloss had taken him in: his darting eyes, the silver hair that came down over his collar, striking because of how meticulous he had always been about his appearance. “What do you have to say about the steak versus its competitors?” Epstein was known to demand of the waiter. But now the plate of Dover sole remained untouched, belying his usual appetite. Only when the waiter came by to ask if anything was wrong did Epstein look down and remember the food, but all he did then was push it around with his fork. It was Schloss’s sense that what had happened to Epstein—the divorce, the retirement, everything coming loose, coming away—had begun not with a book but rather with the death of his parents. But afterward, when Schloss put Epstein into the back of the dark sedan waiting outside the restaurant, the lawyer paused for a moment with his hand on the car’s roof. Looking in at the strangely vague Epstein in the dark interior, he wondered briefly whether there was something more grave going on with his longtime client—a kind of neurological turbulence, perhaps, that might develop toward the extreme before it was diagnosed as medical. At the time, Schloss had brushed the thought off, but later it came back to him as prescient.