You shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall surely reprove your fellow and not bear guilt because of him. Leviticus 19:17 “This last winter was another lost in fog. As usual he did nothing.” In this way A.B. Yehoshua introduces readers to the anonymous, plodding, intellectually undistinguished Israeli protagonist of his story “Facing the Forests,” which appeared in 1968. The character betrays clumsiness even with his own perceptions, which often strike him as blurry, out of focus. A haze encircles him. At first he seems merely lazy, but slowly, slowly, at the glacial pace of a narrative that unfolds in a universe staggering beneath its own drowsiness, the reader realizes that this man is bound by an incapacitating awareness that something terrible has gone wrong. He has been sewn into an inheritance, bequeathed to him at birth, which he is powerless to set right. This awareness thickens and befuddles him, affecting him more than it seems to affect anyone else in the story. The other characters are utterly immune to whatever dark reality shackles him in place. Solitude, his friends decree, will cure him. They propose a plan: he must become a forest ranger — ads in the newspaper assure them that such a position exists. All alone for months on end surveilling the trees in case of fire, this isolation will invigorate him, they insist, and shake loose the clutches of inertia. They do not know what the reader freshly suspects: that inertia is the mechanism by which he ignores an unbearable truth. It is his cure, and there is no cure for it. Since protestation requires energy, which his crushing passivity saps, he finds himself some days later at the Forestry Service where “in a sort of dangerous drowsiness” he cannot stop himself from expressing his disbelief that there are any forests at all in a country as arid as Israel. The manager of the department, visibly insulted, assigns our gloomy hero to one of the larger forests. He will not be alone there; there is also an Arab laborer, about whom “they feel certain he has no prejudices.” Before his departure, a friend suggests that he make use of his leisurely job as a scout to finally distinguish himself academically. Why not sink his teeth into a subject — the Crusades, for example? Together they pack a suitcase full of history books. A truck from the Forestry Service carries him from Jerusalem — “fading like a dream” — into a forest populated with pines so alien to that topography he is surprised they could take root in the rocky soil. The dream that he leaves behind is a world in which everyone but himself goes about ignoring a past which they are powerless to alter, though it hangs heavily over their present and their future. In this land, the Holy Land, more perhaps than any other track of earth, the living live alongside ghosts, and the ghosts preside. At long last he alights at a small house, a two-story lookout post, in which an Arab man and his daughter also live. The man is mute — his tongue was cut out long ago. (“Did we cut it out or did they?” our hero wonders.) The Fire Scout’s solitude remains virtually undisturbed until, soon after his arrival, his timid father comes to visit. In this confrontation between father and son, Yehoshua forces the generations to face one another. The story presumably occurs in the year it was published, which means that the Fire Scout was ten years old when his country was established. His father’s generation oversaw that creation, and so this father bequeathed to this son not only a great victory but also a painful past. In the Fire Scout’s case, this father is the one responsible — though no single individual bears the blame for the ruthlessness of history. Father and son sit in silence, broken occasionally by the old man’s awkward mutterings as he tries to strike up discussion. Why, he asks, doesn’t his son treat the Jewish dimension of the Crusades? The mass Jewish suicides in the Rhineland, for example, rather than the Muslim blood spilled by Christian hands in the Holy Land? This is the only time in Yehoshua’s tale that the two histories which are the ultimate subject of the story, winding around one another like twisted arteries, are overtly juxtaposed: the Muslim presence on the land from which the Jews were evicted a thousand years before the First Crusade, and the Jewish longing for return, punctuated and deepened by slaughters in exile. But the Fire Scout does not know this history, and he cannot answer his father. The son smiles and the two slip back into silence. Their silence is symptomatic of an overwhelming historical ignorance, which is often the condition of citizens who live in the grip of history. This ignorance, and the complacence that it fosters, is the ultimate villain of the story. A day or so before the father leaves, he mumbles warnings about the Arab who might any day set fire to the forest. Why not? he asks. His son offers no answer. The Fire Scout returns to his books, but after a week heaving himself from line to line, he finds that he has read only three pages. Discouraged and distracted, he ventures out into the forest for the first time since his arrival. On the stones at his feet, he notices brass plaques glittering in the dappled sunlight. The plaques have names stamped on them: “Louis Schwartz of Chicago” and “the King of Burundi and his People.” These are the names of donors who have contributed to the national project of afforestation, to plant trees in a land so lacking in them. He stoops and reads plaque after plaque, repeating the names to himself, and is suddenly overcome by a great sadness. Hikers begin to flow into the forest for the summer. From afar they look to him rather like Crusaders. At
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