Pushing down the strap of her sandal, the head of outreach rubbed her blistered heel in the driver’s seat while Epstein only repeated that he would know the place when he saw it. And so she swallowed back her frustration and started the engine, turning up the air conditioner to the max, and blotting the sweat from her forehead with a tissue on which her orange makeup came away. Behind her, Moti began to shake a cigarette from his crumpled pack but, feeling Galit the forestry expert’s disapproving look, shoved the pack back in his pocket, coughed, and checked his phone again to see if there was reception. Leaning forward, Galit told Epstein about the forestation work the foundation was doing in the wadis to stop erosion. But Epstein wasn’t interested in planting in the wadis, and so after a while she too fell silent and leaned back in her seat, having told Epstein nearly everything she knew about the Mediterranean region, the Irano-Turanian and Sahara-Sindi regions, about arid and semi-arid, average yearly rainfall, seedlings per dunam, soil quality, slopes and plains, the Jordan Rift, the lithology of Mount Hebron, the advantages of Mediterranean oak, pistachio, carob, tamarisk, Aleppo pine, and Christ’s thorn, names that seemed to her to rustle something in the depths of him, without ever touching on whatever it was he really wanted to know.
Twenty minutes later, they reentered a cellular zone and the head of outreach’s phone buzzed with a text from the office suggesting a last location. Moti slumped down with a groan and threw back his head, either because of the texts that had just tumbled through to his own phone or because he had already considered Epstein’s money in the clear, his work for the day done.
Slowly turning his head, he opened his eyes and looked at Galit.
“Sweetheart,” he said quietly in Hebrew, “is there anything you like aside from trees? Because if you can arrange for this forest not to happen, I can get you a week in a hotel in Eilat with your boyfriend. My friend has a place right on the Red Sea. You’ll go scuba diving, lie on the beach, and you’ll see how quickly you’ll forget all about this erosion business.” And when Galit only rolled her eyes, Moti turned his face the other way and looked out at the desert.
And so after driving back down through the Jordan Valley as far as Mount Hebron, at almost five in the afternoon they’d finally arrived here, on a slope of a mountain in the northern Negev. And here, where there was nothing except the sky and the stony earth turning red and gold in the sunset, Epstein was asked to imagine a forest.
The light filled his head. Filled it from the bottom to the brim, and threatened to overspill him. When the sensation had passed, and the light drained, the awe remained behind like a sediment, a fine sand as old as the world. Dizzy, he walked away from the others to stand alone on an outcropping above the sloping hillside, and saw endless rows of saplings unfurling in the beating sun.
There was a time, Galit had told him, when the whole southern and eastern Mediterranean, from Lebanon down through North Africa and Greece, had been covered with forests. But with each war they had been plundered for timber, turned into fleets that in the end had sunk to the bottom of the sea with their drowned. And bit by bit, as the trees were stripped away and the land plowed into fields, the earth dried out, and the fertile soil was blown away by hot winds, or washed away by the rain and rivers, and where once six hundred cities had flourished on the coast of North Africa, the population dwindled, and sand blew through and covered the ruins of empty cities with dunes. As early as the fourth century BC, Plato wrote about the devastation of the forests that had once covered all of Attica, leaving behind only the skeleton of the land. And so it had been here, too, Galit told him. Mount Lebanon was stripped for the temples at Tyre and Sidon, and then the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem; the destruction of the forests of Sherin, Carmel, and Bashan was the theme of the prophet Isaiah in 590 BC, and Josephus wrote about the widespread devastation of huge swaths of forests during the Jewish Wars some five hundred years later. Jerusalem, too, had once been surrounded by forests of pine, almond, and olive, and the whole region from the Judean Hills all the way down to the coast: all of it once covered with lush, dark forest, a word, Epstein realized, after a lifetime of uttering it in ignorance, was composed of the words for rest.
Moti came up behind him, lit a cigarette, and exhaled with feeling. Even he was muted by the boundless expanse. They stood together in silence, like old friends who had spoken about many personal things over the course of their lives, when in reality, despite all the years they’d known each other, they had never really spoken about anything at all.
“What is it with Jews and hills?” Epstein finally said, more to himself than Moti. “They’re forever going up to experience their important things there.”
“Only to come hurrying down again.” Moti crushed the butt of his cigarette into a rock. “Unless they have to be brought down in body bags, like from Masada, or from Beaufort, like Itzy’s son. Personally, I prefer to stay to the bottom.” But Epstein’s back was to him, so Moti couldn’t see his response, if there was any.
“Yuda,” he said again after a long while, “what are we doing here? I’m asking you seriously. I’ve known you my whole life. You don’t seem like yourself these days. You’re forgetting things—the other day you couldn’t remember that Chaya is called Chaya, though you’ve been calling her for fifty years, and then you left your wallet on the table after you paid. And you’ve lost weight. Have you seen a doctor?”
But Epstein didn’t hear, or chose not to hear, or had no wish to answer. Minutes passed, in which they sat looking out at the distant glowing hills in silence, until finally Epstein spoke.
“I remember when I was seven or eight, soon after we moved to America. There was this kid, two or three years older, who started up with me after school. One day I came home with a bloody nose, and my father caught me in the hall and dragged the story out of me. He was livid. ‘You go back there with a stick right now and crack him over the head!’ My mother heard this and came rushing into the room. ‘What are you saying?’ she shouts at him. ‘This is America. That’s not how they do things here.’ ‘So how do they do things?’ my father bellows back. ‘They go to the authorities,’ my mother says. ‘The authorities?’ my father said, mocking her. ‘The authorities? And what do you think the authorities will do? Anyway, that’s snitching, and our Yuda is no snitch.’ My mother shouted that I would never be a brute like him. Then my father turns back to me, and I can see he’s thinking things over. ‘Listen,’ he finally says to me, narrowing his eyes. ‘Forget the stick. You go right up to him, and you grab him like this,’ he says, and with one huge hand he takes me by the neck and pulls my face to his, ‘and you tell him, You do that again, and I’ll murder you.’”
Moti laughed, relieved to hear something of the old, familiar raconteur.
“You think she would have wanted this, your mother?” Moti asked, thrusting his chin out toward the barren hillside. “Is that why you’re doing it?”
Do what you want, you’re a free person, his mother used to yell at him, which was her way of saying Do what you want if you want to kill me. Inside the hem of his independence she’d sewed her command, so that at his greatest moments of freedom he felt her pull on him like gravity. Even going away from her, he was going toward her. All that was loyal in him and all that was seditious originated in grappling with that waxing and waning span, even if later it flung itself out toward other entities. No, she had not been a calming force, his mother. Her favorite piece of jewelry was a double strand of pearls, and on occasions when they lay around her throat, Epstein could not help but feel that her attachment to them had something to do with the irritant at their core that had gone and produced such luster. She had brought him to a state of vibrancy by means of provocation.