Forest Dark

by Nicole Krauss

  I’d argued with her. Argued for my son’s happiness and well-being, and against a despair that surpassed the circumstantial. You should see him at home, I told her. A child brimming with joy! Full of humor, full of life! To support my claim, I drew from a deep well of anecdotes. But later, after the meeting was adjourned, the psychologist’s comment continued to get under my skin.

  The difficulty of parting had become easier with time. My son grew to love school, and there were long periods when he had no trouble at all with good-byes. But the fear of separating never fully left him, and even now it still happened that from time to time he was thrown into a panic at the entrance to school. While he pleaded with me not to make him go, I could remain calm and talk him down. But after half an hour of this—once he had exhausted himself, finally submitted to the fact that there was no choice, and went wiping his eyes through the doors, and I’d gone the opposite way without looking back—sadness would engulf me. It could take me hours before I was able to concentrate on my work, and when it neared the time to pick him up, I would leave far earlier than I needed to and hurry the whole way. And though it would be easy to say that I just felt for my son, it seems to me that if I’d examined myself more closely all those years, I’d have had to admit to the likelihood that it was in fact my anxiety and loneliness that came first, and my sons’—the oldest’s, and then the younger one’s—that echoed it, because in some corner of themselves they understood that it was only in their presence, attached to them, that I could feel truly here, and that it was because of them that I stayed.

  I called home on Skype. My husband answered, and then the boys’ faces bobbled into view. Nothing had died since I’d been gone, they told me; none of the remaining ants in the ant farm, or the mealworms, or the guinea pigs, or our dog, who was old and blind, though they themselves seemed to have grown or otherwise changed in my brief absence. And mustn’t they have? Every day, they were replacing the atoms they were born with with those they absorbed from their surroundings. Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world. At an ordinary moment that passes without notice, a child loses the last atom given to him by his mother. He has exchanged himself completely, and then he is all and only the world. Which is to say: alone in himself.

  My younger son told me about the story he’d written the day before, concerning a volcano with a square stuck in its stomach. He had a problem, my son explained (the volcano, not the square, for the square, at least, was dead). Some soldiers had come to him and instructed him to go to the Storm of Dawn. Had I ever heard of the Storm of Dawn? Well, in the center of the Storm of Dawn is a tiny dot that is the Storm of Doom, and that, my son informed me, is the hottest place in the world.

  Behind him, I saw the familiar view of the blue kitchen cabinets, the window, the old stove, and remembered the feeling of evenings after the boys had fallen asleep, or mornings when I got back from dropping them off at school, when I’d tried to detect, again, the presence of the other life.

  I began to tell them about the gray whale who’d lost his way and ended up off the shore of Tel Aviv, but only a sentence in, they began to make little noises of distress, and I realized that it had been a mistake. Ho-ho! I exclaimed, not yet sure quite how I would rescue them from this little snafu, this puddle of sadness that God forbid they should drown in because they’d never been given the chance to learn to swim. We had made such a huge production out of their happiness, my husband and I, had gone to such lengths to fortify their lives against sadness, that they had learned to fear it the way their grandparents had feared the Nazis, and not having enough food to eat. Despite the par-for-the-Jewish-course nightmares I had a few times a year about trying to hide my children under the floorboards or carry them in my arms on a death march, far more often I found myself contemplating how much personal growth they could achieve in a few weeks of running for their lives through a Polish forest.

  But wasn’t it possible, I hurriedly pointed out to them now, that the scientists had gotten it all wrong? That instead of a mistake, maybe the whale had come here willingly, isolating himself at great cost and risking his life to cling to what was most original in him? That the whale was on a great adventure?

  Saved again, my sons soon became restless. At last, my husband reappeared on the screen. Twice his pixelated face froze in expressions that had no viable translation. But even whole, there was something unusual about his appearance. In the last months he too had begun to appear different. When you look at something for long enough, there is a point at which familiarity passes into strangeness. Maybe it was just the result of my tiredness, of the brain economizing its work by turning off the flood of associations and stored perspectives it uses every second to fill in the blanks and make sense of what the eyes transmit. Or maybe it was the early onset of the Alzheimer’s I was sure would be my fate, as it had been my grandmother’s. Whatever the case, more and more I found myself looking at my husband with the same inquisitiveness with which I looked at other passengers on the train, but even more so, and with added surprise, since for nearly a decade his face had been to me the epitome of the familiar, until one day it crossed out of that realm and into the unheimlich.

  He’d been following the news and wanted to know what it was like in Tel Aviv, and which direction things seemed to be going. It was calm now, I said. Maybe there would be no Israeli airstrike, though as I said the words, I didn’t really believe them. Didn’t I want to come home? he asked. Wasn’t I afraid? Not for myself, I told him, and repeated what I had heard others say: that one was more likely to be hit by a car than a rocket.

  Then he asked how things were going with me, and what I had been up to since I’d been away. This simple question, so rarely asked, now struck me as vast. I could no more answer it than I could tell him what I had been up to, and how things had gone for me, during the decade we’d been married. All that time we had been exchanging words, but at some point the words seem to have been stripped of their power and purpose, and now, like a ship without sails, they no longer seemed to take us anywhere: the words exchanged did not bring us closer, neither to each other nor to any understanding. The words we wanted to use, we weren’t allowed to use—the rigidity that comes of fear prevented them—and the words we could use were, to me, irrelevant. Still, I tried: I told him about the clearing weather, the swim I’d taken in the Hilton pool, and seeing Ohad, Hana, and our friend Matti. I told him about the atmosphere in the shelter, and the loud booms that sometimes shook the walls. But I didn’t tell him about Eliezer Friedman.

  One corner of my sister’s apartment was open to the dark, leathery foliage of a tree under whose leaves the air was kept dim and humid, spider-filled, and in this small outdoor room she had placed a once-expensive leather chair that had lived for a quarter century in our grandparents’ apartment. When it rained in the winter, the metal shutter could be closed, but otherwise the chair, which my grandparents had been religious in their care of, rarely sitting in and protecting from the Middle Eastern sun with a sheet, was left open to the elements. This rebellious or just free-spirited act of my sister’s was thrilling to me. I sat in the chair often to defuse the urge to cover it.

  Opening to the first page of Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, I began to read:

  Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.

  I felt a little upswell of frustration. When I thought about Kafka at a distance from his books, I almost always forgot this feeling. I would think of the iconic scenes of his life, which I’d read about enough times that I recalled them in my mind like the scenes of a film: the physical exercise before the open w
indow, the feverish midnight writing at his desk, the painful days passed on the white, disinfected sheets of one sanatorium after another. But frustration was more than a subject for Kafka, it was a whole dimension of existence, and the moment one begins to read him, one is delivered there again. There is never any resolution to the first aggravating, then enervating scenarios that arise in his writing; there is only the great, unending occupation of them, the nearly tantric endurance of frustration that achieves nothing except to prime the soul for absurdity. Even the sages are wrung for it: they tell us to go someplace, but we have no way of moving toward this place, and moreover they know no more about it than we do—there is no proof that it even exists. No matter that the sages are only ever finite and yet endeavor to direct us to the infinite. In Kafka’s calculation, which cannot exactly be refuted, they’re useless. They draw our attention to the fabulous beyond, but cannot bring us there.

  I flipped ahead and reread what has always been, for me, one of the most unforgettable passages that Kafka wrote, a section from The Trial, which he chose to extract and publish alone. A man comes to the doorkeeper who stands on guard before the Law and asks for admittance. He is refused, but not outright—the doorkeeper tells him that he might be admitted later. The man can’t advance but neither can he turn away, and so he sits down on the stool the doorkeeper offers, to wait before the open door to the Law. He’s not allowed to go through; indeed, it seems the door remains open only to taunt him with the idea of passage. He spends a lifetime waiting, a lifetime on the threshold of the Law, and every attempt he makes to get in is always denied. The man grows old, his eyes become dim, his hearing faint; at last his life is drawing to a close, and “all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question.” He summons his last bit of strength to whisper it to the doorkeeper: Everyone strives to attain the Law, so why in all these years has no one tried to go through but me? To which the doorkeeper, shouting to make himself heard to the dying man, bellows, “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since it was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

  In the kindergarten across the street, Lady Gaga had been turned off, and the children began to sing. The tune was familiar, as were the words, though I couldn’t understand all of them. I grew up with Hebrew in my ears—among other things, it was the language my parents argued in—but never enough to learn to really speak it. And yet, the sound of it felt intimate to me, like a mother tongue I’d forgotten, and over the years I’d taken up studying it numerous times. Kafka had also studied Hebrew during his last years in preparation for the move to Palestine that he dreamed of making. But of course in the end he never made aliyah—in Hebrew, the phrase literally means “to go up,” and perhaps some part of him knew that he would never “go up,” just as one cannot “go over” to the beyond, and can only remain stationed before the open door. After seeing a film about Jewish pioneers in Palestine, Kafka wrote in his diary about Moses:

  The essence of the path through the desert . . . He has had Canaan in his nostrils his whole life long; that he should not see this land until just before his death is difficult to believe . . . Not because life was too short does Moses fail to reach Canaan, but rather because it was a human life.

  No one ever inhabited the threshold more thoroughly than Kafka. On the threshold of happiness; of the beyond; of Canaan; of the door open only for us. On the threshold of escape, of transformation. Of an enormous and final understanding. No one made so much art of it. And yet if Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it’s because to even reach the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There’s a way up or over. It’s just that one almost certainly won’t manage to reach it, or recognize it, or pass through it in this life.

  That evening I went to a dance class held in an old yellow school whose window frames were painted sky blue. I love to dance, but by the time I came to understand that I ought to have tried to become a dancer instead of a writer, it was too late. More and more it seems to me that dancing is where my true happiness lies, and that when I write, what I am really trying to do is dance, and because it is impossible, because dancing is free of language, I am never satisfied with writing. To write is, in a sense, to seek to understand, and so it is always something that happens after the fact, is always a process of sifting through the past, and the results of this, if one is lucky, are permanent marks on a page. But to dance is to make oneself available (for pleasure, for an explosion, for stillness); it only ever takes place in the present—the moment after it happens, dance has already vanished. Dance constantly disappears, Ohad often says. The abstract connections it provokes in its audience, of emotion with form, and the excitement from one’s world of feelings and imagination—all of this derives from its vanishing. We have no idea how people danced at the time Genesis was written; how it looked, for example, when David danced before God with all his might. And even if we did, its only way of coming to life again would be in the body of a dancer who is alive now, here to make it immediate for us for a moment before it vanishes again. But writing, whose goal it is to achieve a timeless meaning, has to tell itself a lie about time; in essence, it has to believe in some form of immutability, which is why we judge the greatest works of literature to be those that have withstood the test of hundreds, even thousands, of years. And this lie that we tell ourselves when we write makes me more and more uneasy.

  So I love to dance, but nowhere do I love to dance more than in this class in the yellow school, in those old rooms from whose large windows one can see the red flowers of trees that give me endless pleasure, but of which I’ve never taken the trouble to learn the name, and where upstairs Ohad rehearses with his company in a room with a view of the sea. The teacher told us that we should try to feel small collapses inside us as we moved, collapses that were invisible on the outside, but which were happening inside of us all the same. And then after a few minutes, she told us that we should feel a continuous collapse, soft but ongoing, as if snow were falling inside us.

  When the class ended, I walked to the beach. I sat in the sand and thought about how what was behind me had once been a desert. One day a stubborn man came and traced lines in the sand, and sixty-six stubborn families stood on a dune and drew seashells for sixty-six plots, and then went off to build stubborn houses and plant stubborn trees, and from that original act of stubbornness an entire stubborn city grew up, faster and larger than anyone could have imagined, and now there are four hundred thousand people living in Tel Aviv with the same stubborn idea. The sea breeze is just as stubborn. It wears away the facades of the buildings, it rusts and corrodes, nothing is allowed to stay new here, but people don’t mind because it gives them a chance to stubbornly refuse to fix anything. And when some know-nothing comes from Europe or America and uses his foreign money to make the white white again, and the porous whole, no one says anything because they know it’s just a matter of time, and when soon enough the place looks decrepit they’re happy again, they breathe more easily when they pass, not out of schadenfreude, not because they don’t want the best for him, whoever he is who only comes once a year, but because what people really long for, even more than love or happiness, is coherence. Within themselves, first of all, and then in the life of which they are a small part.

  The tide had brought in plastic refuse ground down to confetti by the sea. The colored bits littered the sand and swirled on the surface of the waves. Narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance—is that what I wrote? What I should have written is “human life.” Because nature creates form but it also destroys it, and it’s the balance between the two that suffuses nature with such peace. But if the strength of the human mind is its ability to create form out of the formless, and map meaning onto the world through the structures of language, its weakness lies in its reluctance or refusal to demolish it. We are attached to form and fear the formless: are taught to fear it fr
om our earliest beginning.

  Sometimes, reading to my children at night, the perverse thought would come to me that in rehashing for them the same fairy tales, Bible stories, and myths that people have been telling for hundreds or thousands of years, I was not giving them a gift but rather taking something from them—robbing them of the infinite possibilities of how sense should be made of the world by so early, and so deeply, inscribing their minds with the ancient channels of event and consequence. Night after night, I was instructing them in convention. However beautiful and moving it could be, it was always that. Here are the various forms life can take, I was telling them. And yet I still remembered the time when my older son’s mind did not produce known forms or follow familiar patterns, when his urgent, strange questions about the world revealed it anew to us. We saw his perspective as a form of brilliance and yet went on educating him in the conventional forms, even while they chafed us. Out of love. So that he would find his way in the world he has no choice but to live in. And bit by bit his thoughts surprised us less, and his questions came mostly to concern themselves with the meaning of the words in the books he now read to himself. On those nights, reading aloud to my children the story of Noah again, or Jonah, or Odysseus, it seemed to me that those beautiful tales that stilled them and made their eyes shine were also a form of binding.