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 from 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.
I walked home up one of the little streets that led away from the sea, and by the time I got back to Brenner it was late and my legs ached, but I still couldn’t sleep.
Feel ready to snap, the dance teacher had said. But don’t snap yet.
At two or three in the morning the sirens went off, and I went downstairs and stood with an old lady and her daughter in the concrete stairwell. The wailing stopped, and in the silence we bowed our heads. When the thunderous explosion sounded, the old woman looked up and smiled at me, a smile so out of place that it could have only come from senility. On the way back to bed, I removed a few items of clothes from my suitcase and stuffed them into a plastic bag I found under the sink. For the sake of unpreparedness, I could say. Or because it was the hour when I seemed to pack for the trips I had no plans to take. Or because it would save me from having to wake up and face trying to begin the novel that by now I knew I would almost certainly never begin, though there was still a sliver of a chance that I might. Opening my computer, I checked the news, but nothing had yet been reported. I typed an e-mail to my husband. I might need some time, I said. I might need to be away for longer than I’d thought. Beyond that, I gave no explanation for what would become my silence.
Is and Isn’t
Epstein entered the house. Entered it with a song in his head. Entered the way a man enters into his own solitude, without hope of filling it. A man like Klausner must have his minions, and so he was not surprised to encounter three or four of them bustling about, preparing for the arrival of both Shabbat and Klausner. They were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, and had it not been for the skullcaps, they could have been the sloppy residents of any college dorm in America. All but one, a young black man whose patchy sideburns were making slow inroads toward the rest of his scraggly beard, but who had already donned the pious uniform of dark jacket and white shirt. From the corner, hunched over a guitar, he sized Epstein up without pausing the graceful movement of his fingers across the strings. By what route had he arrived here? Epstein wondered, trying to place the melody. He pictured the boy’s mother with graying temples by the window of her Bronx apartment, the Christmas tree rigged up. Later, gathered around a table set for ten, introductions were made, and the soulful guitar player was presented as Peretz Chaim. Epstein couldn’t contain himself: “But what’s your real name?” he asked. To which the young man, whose manners were fine, solemnly replied that Peretz Chaim was his real name, as real as Jules Epstein.
Klausner, having sent a last-chance-before-Shabbat e-mail at an outdated computer behind the front desk, and double-checked that all the lights had been left on, hurried Epstein back outside again, through the narrow streets to the old synagogue where he wanted to take him—to soak up the atmosphere, he said, rubbing two fingers together in a sign that to Epstein signaled money rather than rich air. To breathe in the spirituality. As they turned down a passage of stone steps, a large cemetery came into view below in the valley. It was planted with cypresses whose tapering forms seemed shaped by conditions separate from sun, wind, and rain.
Down below, the great sages of centuries past lay under tombs painted blue. Epstein had seen the paint everywhere in town, on paving stones and doors, in the grouting between the rough stones of the houses. It was tradition, Klausner explained, to ward off the evil eye. “A bit pagan”—he shrugged—“but what’s the harm?”
They arrived at an arched door in the wall and, crossing a courtyard of broad paving stones, entered into a high-ceilinged, whitewashed room crowded with men in dark coats, fringes dangling. There seemed to be no order to the restless movement in the room, to the chanting here and swaying there, beards bristling with the tension of communication with the Almighty, while others kibitzed off-duty and helped themselves from a table laid with bottles of orange soda and cake. Klausner handed him a white satin skullcap from a table. Epstein examined the inside. Who knew how many heads it had been on? He was about to tuck it away in his pocket, but the man behind the table, beadle of the skullcaps, was watching him with fiercely narrowed eyes, and so with a wink Epstein set it on his head.