Forest Dark

by Nicole Krauss

  I called her back; I was checking out shortly, I explained, she might as well get started now. Get started on erasing my presence, as it were, so that the next person who arrived could enjoy the illusion that the room was meant especially for him, and not have to think about the parade of people who’d slept in his bed already.

  I followed her into the bathroom, where she began to tidy up around the sink. Sensing me hovering, she caught my eyes in the mirror.

  “More towels?”

  “I have enough, thanks. But I wanted to ask you something else.”

  She straightened up, drying her hands on her apron.

  “Do you know anything about a guest who fell from the terrace a few months ago?”

  A look of confusion, or perhaps suspicion, clouded her face.

  I tried again: “A man who fell from there—” I gestured toward the windows, the sky, the sea. “A man who died?” When this elicited no reaction, I quickly drew my finger across my throat like the Polish brute in Shoah who demonstrated for Claude Lanzmann how, from the side of the train tracks, he would give the Jews a sign that they were careening toward their murder. Why I did this, I don’t know.

  “No English.” She bent to scoop a used towel off the floor and squeezed past me. She took fresh towels from her cart, dropped them on the unmade bed, and told me she would come back later. The door clicked shut behind her.

  Alone again, a depressed feeling washed over me. For months I’d clung to the idea that this ugly hotel held out some sort of promise for me. Unable to make anything out of it, I’d allowed it to keep its grip on me, and instead of giving up and moving on, I’d packed my bags and gone right toward it, actually checked in to it, and now here I was pressing this poor woman to make good on the possibility that someone had tossed himself to his death so that I might discover that there was a story here after all.

  I packed my suitcase, eager to leave the hotel and be on my way to my sister’s apartment on Brenner Street, where I normally stayed whenever I came to Tel Aviv. She spent only part of the year there and at the moment was back in California. I’d spent days writing in her empty apartment in the past, so it was not impossible to believe that, no longer at the Hilton, but not so very far from it, I might finally sit down and begin my novel about the Hilton, or in some way modeled on the structure of the Hilton, which I’d had in mind to write for half a year but of which I had not written even a single chapter.

  The news on TV reported that there had been no further rockets. So unnewsworthy a night had it been that between footage from Gaza and a speech from the defense minister, who was largely indistinguishable from the culture minister, there was time for a report about a whale sighting in waters north of Tel Aviv—a gray whale, whose likes had not been seen in the Mediterranean for some two hundred and fifty years, having been hunted to extinction in our hemisphere. But now a solitary member of its race had appeared here, and swum from Herzliya to Jaffa before disappearing again into the deep. A man from the Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center was interviewed and explained that the whale was emaciated, almost certainly lost. They believed he’d become confused when he arrived at the Northwest Passage and found the ice melted, that without familiar landmarks, he’d accidentally turned south instead of north and ended up in Israeli waters. Sitting down on the hotel bed, I watched the shaky video footage of the spray from his spout and then, after a long pause, the huge, scarred tail rising.

  I went out onto the balcony to take in the view a last time. Or to scan the waves for a sign of the whale. Or just to measure again how close Gaza really was. In a small boat with an outboard motor, it wouldn’t have taken long to go the forty-four miles to where the Palestinians looked out at the same horizon, at the same approximation of infinite space, and were unable to go anywhere.

  Down in the lobby there was a line at reception. A large group was checking in—aunts, uncles, and cousins all come from America to celebrate the arrival into manhood of one of their own, now perched on a bulging piece of Louis Vuitton luggage, busily trying to shake loose into his mouth the last pieces from a box of Nerds. I waited my turn, watching the security guard at the door digging down into an enormous white purse that contained in its soft, leathery depths an unknown pocket of the universe. I, too, wanted to look. The tanned woman with painted nails waiting patiently for her bag to be returned believed it was being searched for a gun or a bomb, but the thorough devotion of the guard suggested that he was looking for something of far greater significance.

  The general manager emerged from the back office. A look of recognition lit up his face when he spotted me, and he sailed over to where I stood. Clasping my hand between his, he asked after my grandfather, whom he’d known for twenty years. My grandfather was dead, I told him; he’d died the year before. The general manager couldn’t believe this and seemed on the verge of suggesting that I’d made it up, as I had made up all of the other things I’d claimed had happened in my books. But he stopped short of that, and, after expressing his regret, asked whether I’d enjoyed the fruit basket he’d sent up to my room. I said I had, because there was no sense in telling him that I had not received any fruit basket, with all of the drama that might kick up. I explained that I wished to check out. More surprise and concern—hadn’t I just arrived? I was brought to the front of the line, bypassing the bar mitzvah party, and the general manager slipped behind the desk to attend to me himself, handling everything with speed and elegance. When my account was settled, he escorted me to the door and instructed the porter to hail me a taxi. He seemed in a hurry to see me off. Presumably it was because he had many other things to tend to, but it occurred to me that he might know I’d heard about the man who had fallen to his death. Effie, or even Matti, my journalist friend, might have called the hotel on my behalf, and news of their inquiries would have been passed on to the general manager. Or perhaps the alarmed housekeeper had alerted her superior an hour ago. While I considered this, my suitcase was dispatched to the trunk of the waiting taxi, and before I could formulate the appropriate question, the general manager had loaded me into the backseat and, with an air of bright professionalism, smiled, slammed the door, and rapped the flank of the taxi with his knuckles to send it on its way.

  We’d only gone five minutes down the road when the driver swerved toward the curb and brought the taxi to a halt. A bus honked, and through the rear window I saw it come screeching on its brakes toward us, stopping within inches of the rear bumper. The taxi driver got out, cursed the driver of the bus, and disappeared behind the open hood of his car. I followed him around to the front and asked what was going on, but he ignored me and continued to engross himself in the overheated innards of the engine. Pedestrians on the street gathered to watch. America is a place with no time on its hands, but in the Middle East there is time, and so the world gets more looked at there, and as it’s looked at, opinions are formed about what is seen, and naturally opinions are different, so that an abundance of time, in a certain equation, leads to argument. Now an argument broke out about whether the taxi driver should have stopped where he did, blocking the bus stop. A man in a tank top stained with sweat joined the driver under the hood, and they, too, began to argue about what was happening there. To my husband, the world was always what it appeared to be, and to me the world was never what it appeared to be, but in Israel no one can ever agree on the way the world appears, and despite the violence of the never-ending argument, this basic admittance of discord had always been a relief to me.

  I repeated my question, and at last the driver lifted his sweaty face, took in everything he ever wanted to know about me, sauntered around to the back, popped the trunk, dumped my suitcase onto the street, and went back to his tinkering. I dragged the suitcase behind me onto the sidewalk, and the small crowd parted, just barely, to let me pass. Stationing myself a few yards farther up the street, I scanned the oncoming traffic for another taxi. But it was rush hour, and they were all full. Finally I saw a sherut—a communal taxi va
n that follows a set route, stopping along the way when people shout out to the driver—and waved it down. But just as it began to slow for me, a car pulled up and the window was lowered.

  It was Friedman behind the wheel, still wearing his safari vest.

  “Nu?” he said, in the old Yiddish way of taking another’s pulse. “What happened?” He reached across the passenger seat and opened the door, then lowered the volume of the symphony on the radio.

  Did I get in? Narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance, given that it is processed by the mind whose function it is to produce coherence at any cost. To produce, in other words, a credible story.

  “You’re going to tell me that was a coincidence?” I demanded as Friedman merged back into the traffic. “My taxi broke down, and you just happened to be passing by?”

  But the truth was that I was relieved to see him.

  “I went to drop this off for you at the Hilton.”

  Without taking his eyes off the road he reached behind my seat, scooped up a large, grubby brown paper bag, and deposited it in my lap.

  “They told me you’d just checked out, and I remembered that you’d said you were planning to move to your sister’s apartment on Brenner Street. I was on my way there when I spotted you on the side of the road.”

  I couldn’t remember mentioning my sister’s place, but then my memory was foggy from lack of sleep. Yesterday afternoon I’d forgotten an appointment I’d made to have coffee with my Hebrew translator, and after visiting an old friend, the choreographer Ohad Naharin, I’d left my bag behind at his apartment. And yet I was also ready to believe that Friedman knew everything there was to know about me; that he’d read my file. Maybe I even wanted to believe it, too, since it would let me off the hook.

  I unrolled the paper bag, and a smell of mildew wafted up. Jumbled at the bottom was a pile of brittle Kafka paperbacks, the spines cracked from use.

  “To help you think,” Friedman said, but did not elaborate.

  I crumpled the bag closed. We were stopped at a light, and a young couple crossed in front of the car, their arms slung around each other’s waists. The boy was beautiful, as only a person raised in sunlight can be. His shirt was open at the neck to reveal his throat. I turned back to Friedman, who was busy fiddling with the rearview mirror. He looked too old to be driving. His right hand had a tremor—there was no question about it. Was it not possible that, like my father’s cousin Effie, he too had entered into the twilight years where reality, of less and less use, begins to dissolve at the edges?

  The light changed, and he turned left onto Allenby. Within a few minutes we’d arrived at my sister’s small, quiet street. I pointed to number 16, fronted by a parking lot that the building overhung, and something of a garden that managed to be at once bare and wild. We both got out, Friedman with the help of his cane, which had been resting across the backseat, hairy with dog fur. His calloused feet were shod in leather sandals today, the toenails cracked. I worked my suitcase out of the trunk for the second time.

  “You always pack so heavily?”

  I protested that I was the lightest packer in my family; that my parents and siblings didn’t go on so much as an overnight without three suitcases each.

  “And this makes them happy?”

  “Happy has nothing to do with it. For them, it’s a question of being prepared.”

  “Prepared for unhappiness. For happiness one doesn’t need to prepare.”

  He turned and gazed up at my sister’s first-floor windows, shuttered by metal blinds. Lady Gaga floated toward us from the kindergarten across the street.

  “You can write there?”

  I paused, pretending to consider my answer; pretending, as it were, that there was a chance that I might write there, while knowing full well that there wasn’t.

  “If you want the truth,” I admitted, “my work hasn’t been going well. I hit a wall with it.”

  “All the more reason to try something else for a while.”

  “What? Finding an end to what Kafka couldn’t finish, or chose to abandon, like most of what he wrote? Works that made their way into the world regardless, without any ending, to no less effect? Even if I could get past the intimidation, the sense of transgression would be intolerable. My own work makes me anxious enough as it is.”

  Through the large leaves of a jungle tree, the sun fell dappled on Friedman’s face, and a little smile tugged at the corners of his dry lips, the inward smile that the wise give themselves in the face of other people’s foolishness.

  “You think your writing belongs to you?” he asked softly.

  “Who else?”

  “To the Jews.”

  I broke into laughter. But Friedman had already turned away and begun to comb through his bulging pockets one by one. The hands, their papery backs blotchy with sunspots, patted and pressed, worked open the Velcro closures. It was an ordeal that could go on all day: he was as thickly packed as a suicide bomber.

  Amid the laughter, the famous line from Kafka’s diary came back to me: What do I have in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself. It was often quoted in the tireless argument about just how Jewish Kafka’s work really was. Then there was what he’d written in his diary about wishing to stuff all of the Jews (including himself) into a drawer until they’d suffocated, opening and closing the drawer from time to time to check on the progress.

  Friedman didn’t respond and went on searching his pockets, which I now imagined to be filled with scraps of paper, assignments to be delivered to other writers to keep the great machine of Jewish literature rolling forward. But nothing was found or discovered, and either he forgot what he was looking for or lost interest. Jewish literature would have to wait, as all Jewish things wait for a perfection that in our hearts we don’t really want to come.

  “Anyway, you said it yourself,” I reminded him, “no one cares about books anymore. One day the Jews woke up and realized that they needed another Jewish writer like they needed a hole in the head. Now we’re back to belonging to ourselves.”

  A disapproving look made the already deep furrows in Friedman’s forehead deeper. “Your work is good. But this false naïveté is a problem. It gives the impression of immaturity. You don’t come off well in interviews.”

  A wave of fatigue came over me. I took up the handle of my suitcase.

  “Tell me, what is it you want from me, Mr. Friedman?”

  He lifted the bag of Kafka from the low wall where he’d set it down, and held it out. There was a small tear at the bottom, and it looked as if the whole thing were about to rip open. I reached for it instinctively to stop the books from spilling all over the sidewalk.

  “I’m flattered that you approached me, really I am. But I’m not the writer for you. I have a hard enough time with my own books. My life is already complicated. I’m not looking to contribute to Jewish history.” I tugged the suitcase toward the front path of my sister’s building. But Friedman wasn’t finished.

  “History? Who said anything about history? The Jews never learned from history. One day we’ll look back and see Jewish history as a blip, an aberration, and what will matter then is what has always mattered: Jewish memory. And there, in the realm of memory, which will always be irreconcilable with history, Jewish literature still holds out hope of having some influence.”

  Opening the car door, he tossed in the metal cane, slid into the driver’s seat, and started up the engine.

  “I’ll come for you at ten tomorrow morning,” he called through the lowered window. “You like the Dead Sea? Pack an overnight bag. The desert gets cold after sunset.”

  Then he raised an open palm and drove off, the tires crunching over broken glass.

  Lying in my sister’s familiar bedroom, I fell asleep at last. When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century mercenary soldiers who’d fallen ill from being so far from ho
me, the first to be diagnosed with the disease of nostalgia. Though never so acute, the longing for something I felt divided from, which was neither a time nor a place but something formless and unnamed, had been with me since I was a child. Though now I want to say that the division I felt was, in a sense, within me: the division of being both here and not here, but rather there.

  I’d spent my early twenties thinking and writing about this ache. I’d tried, in my way, to treat it in the first novel I wrote, but in the end the only true cure I ever found for it had also been physical: first intimacy with the bodies of men who’d loved me, and later with my children. Their bodies had always anchored me. When I hugged them and felt their weight against me, I knew that I was here and not there, a reminder renewed each day when they climbed into my bed in the morning. And to know that I was here was also in a sense the same as wanting to be here, because their bodies created such a powerful reaction in mine, an attachment that didn’t need to question itself, because what could make more sense, or be more natural? At night my husband would turn his back to me and go to sleep on his side of the bed, and I would turn my back to him and go to sleep on mine, and because we could find no way across to the other, because we had confused lack of desire to cross with fear of crossing with inability to cross, we each went to sleep reaching for another place that was not here. And only in the morning, when one of our children slid into our bed, still warm from sleep, were we repaired to the place where we were and reminded of our strong attachment to it.

  Facedown in my sister’s bed, I tried to reason with the anxiety seeping into me. I knew it not only from the many work trips I’d taken away from home, but also from when I dropped my children at school on mornings when they found it hard to say good-bye, when I would have to peel their hands off me and wipe the tears from their cheeks and then turn my back and go out the door as the teachers were always instructing us to do. The longer the good-bye stretched, the harder it became for the child, so they said, and what was required in such moments, if one wished to make it easier, was to detach with a swift pat and go quickly on one’s way. Around us there were always children who seemed to have no trouble with this daily procedure. They didn’t experience parting with their parent as a rupture or cause for distress. But neither of my children had an easy time of it. When my older son was three and began to attend preschool for a few hours in the mornings, he was so constantly distraught at separating that by late October the school psychologist called my husband and me in for a meeting, attended by his teachers and the head of the school. Behind the psychologist, colored paper leaves taped to the window fluttered in the updraft from the radiator. When he cries, the psychologist informed us, it’s not the normal crying of a child. So what is it? I asked. To us—and here she looked gravely around at her colleagues to gather their support—it seems existential.