But as he reentered the cool room in search of his bathing suit, the dream of the forest came back to him, the darkness and the white snow all as vivid as before. Suddenly he gleaned something of its essence, and halted excitedly in front of the unmade bed. He sank down on the duvet, only to leap up again a moment later and begin to pace. But why hadn’t he thought of it before? Back on the terrace, he dipped his body out for the whole view. Of course—but yes—it made such beautiful sense!
He dug through the damp bed sheets in search of his phone, and had a fleeting thought of the lost one. Who knew where it was now? Somewhere in Ramallah, making calls to Damascus. The rumpled bed was empty. He checked the desk, then came back and lifted the book he’d laid facedown on the night table before going to sleep, and discovered the new phone under its pages. He dialed his assistant Sharon, but after two rings remembered that it was the middle of the night in New York. After the sixth, he gave up and called his cousin instead.
“Moti, it’s Jules.”
“Hold on——Unbelievable! This son of a bitch just cut me off. What did you say? Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“Who do I speak to about planting—”
“What?”
“Go on, speak to who about what?”
“Trees. Planting trees.”
“Trees? Like for, what do you call it—”
“Trees! The way they’ve been doing since before there was a State. My mother used to send me out with a blue-and-white collection box.” Epstein could remember how the coins would jangle in the tin box as he ran from house to house, but could not recall the name of the foundation. “Trees for the slopes of Jerusalem, I think. I don’t know, for Mount Hebron. Later on, in Hebrew school, they showed us the photograph of kids wearing the kova tembel planting the saplings we’d raised money for in America.”
“What, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael?”
“Yes, wait—the Jewish National Fund, right? Can you get me in touch with someone there?”
“You want to plant trees, Yuda?” Moti asked, using the Hebrew nickname Epstein had gone by as a child.
“Not trees,” Epstein said softly, “a whole forest.” The goose bumps rose on his arms as he remembered the stillness gathered under the soft, dark boughs.
“We have enough trees. Now it’s water that’s the problem. Last I heard they were working on turning salt water into fruit. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to convince you to dig a hole in the ground instead. The Edith and Solomon Epstein Memorial Reservoir.”
Epstein pictured his parents’ hole, and the winter rain falling.
“Of course they’re still planting trees,” he snapped. “Can you get me a number or no? If not, I’ll talk to the concierge.”
But Moti wouldn’t think of letting Epstein go to someone else for a favor he himself could do that might later be repaid. “Give me half an hour,” he told Epstein, lighting a cigarette and exhaling into the phone. When he got to Petah Tikvah he would make some phone calls. He thought he might know someone who had a connection there. And Epstein didn’t doubt it: there was nothing that Moti—who had fought in three wars, married and divorced twice, and had more professions than Epstein could recall—couldn’t rustle up.
“Tell them I want to build a forest. Pine trees, as far as the eye can see.”
“Sure, a two-million-dollar forest, I’ll tell them. But, God help me, it hurts. In case you change your mind, there’s a place I can show you, all glass and Italian marble, and a Jacuzzi with a view all the way to Sicily.”
But when Moti called back later that afternoon, he told Epstein that everything had been arranged. “We have a meeting with them tomorrow,” he said. “One o’clock at Cantina.”
“Thanks. But there’s no need for you to come. It’s not your kind of thing. There’ll be no naked women.”
“That’s what worries me. What you do with your life is your own business, but you’re sixty-eight, Yuda, you’re not going to live forever, and here you are finally divorced, free, and you have your mind on rabbis and forests, oblivious to the fact that there are always naked women everywhere. I’m looking at one right now, wearing a yellow dress. And this is a form of joy, I tell you, that you will never find in a forest in memory of your parents, who, as far as I remember, had no interest in trees. Am I wrong, Yuda? But a woman, this is something your father, may his memory be a blessing, could have understood. Think about what I’m telling you. I’ll see you tomorrow at one,” he said, and before going back to the shiva call he was paying, phoned the owner of Cantina to tell him to put aside his most expensive bottle of Chardonnay.
A few days later, Epstein was standing atop a mountain, flanked by the JNF’s head of outreach, one of their forestry experts, and Moti, who had insisted on taking off from the real estate office where he worked to accompany his cousin. The JNF’s director of development was abroad, but Epstein had refused to wait, and so the head of outreach had been sent instead, a small publicist in cheap sunglasses who’d worn the wrong shoes. She’d been driving all day, and, having brought him to three different sites, was now at the far edge of her outermost reach, and had begun to lose patience. The last place she’d brought him had been devastated by forest fires and was in desperate need of rehabilitation. His gift would be enough to replant the whole area, she’d explained. One day his children would come to walk there in the cool shade of their grandparents’ forest, and his children’s children, and, God willing, their children after that.
But, surveying the landscape of charred stumps, Epstein had shaken his head. “Not it,” he’d murmured, and turned back toward the car.
What exactly was he looking for, then? the head of outreach had demanded, catching up to him.
“You heard him,” Moti had piped up from behind, throwing himself once more into the backseat next to the forestry expert, a young woman in khaki shorts, fluent in all things arboreal, who, as far as Moti was concerned, was the only thing that had made the day bearable. “He says it’s no good, so it’s no good. Yallah.”