Back inside, Epstein followed the sound of voices to the kitchen. The one who’d wielded the carving knife was now making coffee with hot water from an urn, jabbering on proudly to whomever would listen about how Maimonides would turn in his grave if he could hear the rabbi. From the way she spoke, one might assume she had known the eleventh-century doctor personally. According to Maimonides, she said, God’s existence is absolute. He has no attributes, there has never been a new element in Him. She carried on until the somber Peretz Chaim, whose name, Epstein had been told, meant “explosion into life,” spoke up to say that, all the same, Maimonides still insisted on miracles. He was a medieval, Peretz was saying: he accepted both reason and revelation. But the girl didn’t give up, and had Peretz Chaim been true to his name, it might have come to blows. But the gentle guitar player who had yet to explode, but still might explode one day, gave up the fight, and at last the conversation moved on to the cheese maker a group of them were going to visit the following day, whose Orthodox husband grew marijuana behind the house.
Epstein found the rabbi in his study, turned down his invitation to join him for a glass of brandy, and asked to be shown to his room. The rabbi was delighted. He would give Epstein a tour tomorrow, would show him how he had restored the walls and arches, had brought the place back from a century of neglect! He would show him the classroom, the small library with its collection of books donated by the Solokov family—did he know the Solokovs, from East Seventy-Ninth Street? Their son, who’d had no interest in Judaism, no interest in anything at all, had arrived in a state of lassitude and left to study philosophy, and then herbal medicine, and now, after backpacking across India, he had combined the strands of his enlightenment and opened Neshama Yoga in Williamsburg, out of whose storefront he also sold tinctures. From the depth of their thanks, the Solokovs had donated three thousand books. Epstein said nothing. And the money for shelving, too, Klausner added.
Looking around the room, Epstein saw that it was as simple as promised: bed, window, chair, and a small wardrobe, empty but for the smell of other centuries. A lamp cast warm shadows across the wall. In the corner stood a triangular sink, and beside it a hard, stiff towel hung from a peg on the wall; who could say how many pilgrims had already dried themselves with it? Hovering behind him, Klausner had moved on to the subject of the Descendants of David reunion. With a small endowment, they might be able to get Robert Alter as the keynote speaker. It wasn’t his first choice, but Alter had mainstream appeal, and was already scheduled to be in town that week.
And what would the rabbi’s first choice have been? asked Epstein, who could once make conversation in his sleep.
David himself, Klausner said, turning sharply, and in the now-familiar gleam in Klausner’s eyes Epstein thought he caught something else, something he might have mistaken for a glimmer of madness if he hadn’t been all too aware of his own haziness and fatigue.
“So you think I go all the way back to him?” Epstein asked softly.
“I know.”
At last, unable to stand any longer, the pilgrim Epstein hung his jacket and sank down onto the bed, swinging his legs up. For an absurd moment, he thought the rabbi might bend to tuck him in. But Klausner, having gotten the point at last, bade Epstein good night, promising to rouse him early. Just before he pulled the door closed, Epstein called out to him.
“Menachem?”
Klausner poked his face back around, flushed with enthusiasm. “Yes?”
“What were you before this?”
“What? Before Gilgul?”
“Something tells me you weren’t always religious.”
“I’m still not religious,” Klausner said with a grin. But, remembering himself, his face became serious again. “Yes, there’s a story there.”
“With all due respect, I’d like to hear about that more than the restored arches.”
“Whatever you want to know.”
“And something else,” Eptein said, remembering. “Why did you call the place Gilgul? It sticks in the throat a little, if you ask me.”
“Livnot U’Lehibanot—to build and be built—was already taken by the place down the street, along with an endowment from the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach.”
“And what do they do there?”
“Hitbodedut. Hasidic meditation. At the end of every retreat, they send the students alone into the woods. To contemplate. To sing and shout. Experience elevation. Occasionally it happens that someone goes astray, and the emergency rescue unit has to be brought in.” But Gilgul was better than it sounded, Klausner said, and explained that the word meant “cycle” or “wheel,” but in kabbalah it referred to the transmigration of the soul. To higher spiritual realms, if one is prepared. Though sometimes, naturally, to more punishing ones.
Switching off the bedside lamp, Jules Epstein’s soul stirred under the stiff sheets and he was returned again to the intractable dark that he had stared into on countless nights when he couldn’t sleep, when the arguments continued in his head, the great assemblage of the evidence of his rightness. And did the unyielding dark look different to him now, in the cease-fire that had arisen in him during these last months?
The word came to him unbidden, full of meaning. For it was only in the arena of this cease-fire—in its eerie silence, its suspension of a former directive—that he had become fully aware of what he must now think of as a war. An epic war, whose many battles he could no longer name or recall, except that he had mostly won them at a cost he did not care to explore. He had attacked and defended. Slept with his weapon under the pillow and woke into argument. His day had not officially begun, Lucie once said of him, until he had taken issue with something or someone. But he had felt it as a form of health. Of vitality. Of creativeness, even, however destructive the consequences. All of the meshugas! Embroiled, horns locked, in a permanent state of conflict—it had only ever energized him, never depleted him. “Leave me in peace!” he had sometimes roared in arguments with his parents or Lianne, but in truth peace had not appealed to him, for in the end it had meant being left alone with himself. His father used to take the belt to him. To lash him repeatedly for the smallest errors, driving him into the corner as he pulled the black leather from the loops, and laying into his bared skin. And yet it was the specter of his father lying inert in bed with the curtains drawn at ten in the morning that stirred his own rage. The fear he felt as a child tiptoeing past his father’s bedroom door later turned to fury: Why didn’t he rally forces and rouse himself? Why didn’t he stand and come out swinging? Epstein couldn’t bear being around it, and so he began to spend all of his time out of the house, where the bright energies hummed busily. When his father wasn’t laid out with depression, he was another form of impossible—stubborn and fixed in his ways, easily set off. Between Sol and Edie, who went perpendicular to everything and parallel to nothing, who couldn’t let be and had something to say about everything, Epstein developed in a solution of extremes. Either you were lying listless or you came out armed and loaded. Out in the fresh air and sunlight, he threw himself into the fray. Threw the first punch. Discovered that he could be ruthless. Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands! So large did he grow, so taken with his power, that one night he came home, and when the father, standing in the kitchen in his stained robe, started in on the son, the son turned, swung, and delivered a clenched fist to the father’s face. Punched him, and then sobbed like a child as he held a slab of ice to the fallen father’s grotesquely swelling eye.