Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss

Author:Nicole Krauss
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781408871805
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-06-12T09:21:36+00:00

Kaddish for Kafka

In the morning everything was calm again, the sky still and cloudless. I’d slept hardly at all, and as always during nights of insomnia, I’d had the feeling that the shore of reason, with its familiar hills and landmarks, was drifting farther and farther away from me, and was touched by the fear that I was in some way willing myself away from it, and had chosen sleeplessness as my method. I sat drinking bitter coffee on my sister’s terrace. The brightness irritated my eyes, but from there I could look out for Friedman, who in my exhaustion I half hoped wouldn’t show up. Sitting in my grandmother’s chair, I thought of how she used to take me to the Dead Sea as a girl. She would pack us a lunch, and we would take the bus from the Central Station out to the desert, and in a couple of hours the two of us would be floating belly-up in the salty, electric blue remainder of an extinct sea, with the ancient mountains of Moab behind us. Floating in a concentration of history reduced by the slow evaporation of time, my grandmother in her white bathing cap decorated with rubber flowers. I imagined Friedman floating there, too, in his darkened glasses, controlling the transmission of national literature while his white hair rippled out on either side like underwater life.

At ten sharp he rattled up in his white Mazda, another symphony pouring through the windows. I lifted myself out of the old chair and tucked Parables and Paradoxes into the plastic bag that held my change of clothes. Hazily, I grabbed my bathing suit and stuffed that in, too. I glanced at the computer left open on the table from my middle-of-the-night e-mail home, then closed the door behind me, locking both upper and lower locks as my sister had instructed me to do whenever leaving the apartment for any length of time. The stairwell was cool and dark going down, and the sudden switch from the brightness made me dizzy, as if the roof over my thoughts had been suddenly raised, letting in a cold rush of space. Just beyond exhaustion there must be something else, just as beyond hunger they say there is an exalted clarity and lightness. But I’d always preferred to read about altered states rather than risk them personally. My mind was too permeable as it was; what few drug trips I’d taken had dipped all too briefly into euphoria before plunging me into panic. I sat down on the steps and put my head between my knees.

A warm wind came in through the open windows of the car as we drove. Friedman had brought me some chocolate rugelach from the bakery, and, feeling better, I ate these, one after another, while his dog rested her head on my shoulder, breathing in my ear. When I’d had dinner with Matti a couple nights earlier and told him about the other Friedman I’d met, who

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