In those first mornings at the Hilton, Epstein had woken to the Mediterranean and stood rapt on the terrace, watching the waves. In a long, feathery contrail dissolving in the blue sky, he saw the line of his life. Long ago, at Maya’s bat mitzvah party, they’d had a palm reader. Never mind the unkosher presence of the occult: it was what she had wanted. (“What do you love most, Mayashka?” he’d once asked her as a little child. “Magic and mystery,” she’d replied without pause.) To indulge her, Epstein had turned his hand over to the frail and turbaned fortune-teller, who looked like she hadn’t eaten for weeks. “Get this woman some cake!” he’d shouted, and three waiters, angling for a tip, had sprung into action, bringing three pieces of heavily frosted white cake, which had the promise of a wedding baked into it. But the three slices had only sat at the pointy elbow of the fortune-teller, who was clever enough to know that eating would have lessened her aura and bungled the illusion of clairvoyance. She stroked Epstein’s palm with her own dry, cool one, as if brushing off the dust, then began to trace the lines with a scarlet fingernail. Growing bored, Epstein scanned the dance floor, where the limbo bar had been lowered to the point that only one scrawny seventh-grader, an acrobatic prepubescent, could still bend backward and slide her way triumphantly beneath. Then he felt the fortune-teller’s hand tighten around his, and when he turned back, he saw the look of alarm on her face. It was pure theater, Epstein knew. But he had a taste for drama, and was curious to see a display of her skill. “What did you find?” he’d asked gamely. The fortune-teller gazed at him with black eyes outlined in kohl. Then she quickly folded his palm and pushed it away. “Come to see me another time,” she pleaded in a hoarse whisper. She’d slid her business card with a Bayside address into his other hand, but Epstein had only laughed and gone off to yell at the caterer, who had let the Vietnamese chicken skewers run low. The following week, when he found the card again in his pocket, he’d dropped it into the trash. Six months later, Lianne told him that the fortune-teller had died of cancer, but even then Epstein had not regretted his failure to visit her, and felt only a rustle of curiosity.
Now the contrail was slowly evaporating, widening out toward something indistinct. No, he had not believed in the predictions of fortune-tellers, even those touched by a nearness to death. The truth was that he had believed in very little that he couldn’t see, and more than that, he’d had something against belief. Not just because of its grand potential for error. To be wrong—even to be wrong one’s whole life!—was one thing, but what Epstein could not abide, what filled him with such distaste, was the idea of being taken advantage of. Belief, with its passive trust, required putting oneself in other hands, and as such it made one susceptible to the worst sort of insidiousness. Epstein saw it everywhere. Not just in the large strokes of religion—in the constant stream of news stories about children molested by their priests and rabbis, or teenagers blowing themselves up for the promise of seventy virgins, or performing beheadings in the name of Allah. There were also the countless varieties of small beliefs that provided opportunity for the wool to be pulled over one’s eyes, for the great woolly hat of belief to obscure what would be clear to the naked eye. Every advertisement preyed on the human inclination toward belief, a tilt like Pisa’s that had proved uncorrectable, no matter that what was promised failed and failed to be delivered. Good people robbed of their money and their right to peace, sometimes even their dignity and freedom, because of a structural flaw! Or so it had seemed to Epstein, who avoided believing in anything that he could not touch or feel or measure with his own instruments.
He would walk on solid ground, or would not walk at all. He would not venture out on the thin ice of belief. But of late he had found his legs moving under him, against his instincts. This was what was so strange. The feeling of movement against his will. Against his better judgment! His great deliberateness! Against all that he had shored up in sixty-eight years of collecting knowledge; call it, even, wisdom. And he could not say what it was he was walking toward.
Out there, a boat made its way across the white-capped water on its way toward Cyprus or Tripoli. Epstein felt an expansion in his chest. Why not take a swim? he thought, and the idea seemed so good to him, so marvelous, that he went inside right away and called down to the concierge to see if a swimsuit could be purchased in the lobby. Yes, they could have one ready for him. What was his size?
There was still an hour and a half before the car was coming to pick him up for a tour of the Weizmann Institute, which had suggested an endowment for research in his parents’ names. Just last month professors Segal and Elinav had discovered that artificial sweeteners could actually raise blood sugar levels instead of reducing them, information that would help millions of diabetics, not to mention the plain overweight! And what would the Edith and Sol Epstein line of research go into? In honor of their lives, what should be investigated? What do you have, Epstein wished to ask, that could ever be big enough?
Making his way down the carpeted hallway in hotel robe and slippers, he tried to remember the last time he had swum in the sea. When Maya was still young? He recalled an afternoon in Spain when they had gone out on a boat. He dived off the bow—he never immersed himself in anything slowly—and swam around to the ladder to receive his younger daughter, whose tiny head of black curls poked out from the bulky life vest. The third time around, he had better understood the patterns of love and fatherhood, the way nearly immeasurable fractions of time and experience accumulate toward a closeness, a sweetness. Maya had let out a shriek as soon as her legs touched the water. But rather than relinquish her to Lianne’s outstretched arms, Epstein had spoken softly to the child. “A great big bathtub,” he’d said, “the bathtub of all life,” and called up what he knew of tides and dolphins, of tiny clown fish in a world of coral, until bit by bit she had calmed down and loosened her grip on Epstein—loosened it out of trust, so that on another level her hold became tighter. Later, she didn’t push her father away as her brother and sister had. Wincing, Epstein remembered how he had once tried to coax Jonah into the sea for twenty minutes before giving in to rage: at the boy’s intolerable cowardice, at his lack of strength and will. For not being made of the same materials as Epstein was.
In the new yellow bathing suit, Epstein stood on the shore. The waistband was too large, and he had to tie the drawstring tightly so that it didn’t slip down. Sunlight caught in the silver hairs of his chest. The black flag was up, but the lifeguard, lifting a lazy finger, gestured to a red flag a few meters away, where one was allowed to swim with caution. Epstein strode toward the water.
Behind him was the city where he had been born. However far his life had unspooled from it, he had come from here, this sun and breeze were his native conditions. His parents had come from nowhere. Where they came from had ceased to exist and so could not be returned to. But he himself came from someplace: less than ten minutes’ walk away was the corner of Zamenhof and Shlomo ha-Melekh Streets, where he had arrived in the world in such a hurry that his mother didn’t have enough time to get to the hospital. A woman had come down from her balcony, pulled him out, and wrapped him in a dishcloth. She had no children herself, but had grown up on a farm in Romania, where she had seen the births of cows and dogs. Afterward his mother went to visit her once a week, and would sit drinking coffee and smoking in her tiny kitchen, while the woman, Mrs. Chernovich, bumped Epstein up and down on her knee. She had a magical effect on him. In her lap, the irascible Epstein became instantly calm. When they moved to America his mother had lost touch with her. But in 1967, when Epstein returned to Tel Aviv for the first time just after the war, he’d gone straight to the corner where he had emerged into the world, walked across the street, and rang the buzzer. Mrs. Chernovich looked down over the railing of the balcony, where she had been watching the world go by all those years. The moment he entered her tiny kitchen and sat down at her table, he’d felt the strange sensation that he thought other people must call peace. “You should have asked to buy the table,” an eight-year-old Maya had famously said when she was told the story.