Lies, First Person

— 1 -

First of all we have to plant the Garden of Eden, because without the Garden of Eden there is no serpent; without the boughs of the apple tree to hide in, the serpent is nothing but an eater of dirt, of no greater significance than a snail or a worm.

Therefore, let there be a Garden of Eden!

And in fact, why “let there be”? There was a Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden existed. Because why shouldn’t I call what I had a “Garden of Eden”?

Let’s begin with a Sabbath day of unutterable sweetness. The smell of figs bursting with ripeness, in the enclosed garden of the house. Clouds sift the gold of the sun through the leaves of the grapevine hanging over our heads. Oded rolls a Sabbath cigarette from the grass he’s been growing in pots ever since our sons grew up and left home. On weekends he likes smoking a joint or two, and for me, a non-smoker, he pours a glass of wine. I roll the glass between two fingers and observe the rays of the sun refracted in the liquid red, and my husband, relaxed, rubs the bottle against my upper arm, sliding the glass over my tiger face. Twenty-six years we’ve been together, and his enthusiasm for my tattoo has not waned, and it seems it never will. If not for him I would have had this totem surgically removed a long time ago, because there is no fear in the Garden of Eden, and a woman has no need of a totem to brandish. But Oded loves my tiger face, and I don’t want to deprive him of anything.

The Garden of Eden. A muezzin calls the faithful from inside the Old City. We don’t understand the words, and we enjoy the sound of the voice rising and gathering in the distance. The golden Sabbath time stretches out around us without a point of reference — perhaps it’s morning now, perhaps it’s twilight — people whose lives are as good as ours don’t need points of reference.

Our financial situation is comfortable, some might say excellent. The firm in which Oded is a partner with his father is stable and successful. Money is saved, property accumulated, and if my husband should decide or be obliged, God forbid, to stop working, neither we nor our sons will want for anything.

The hand that casts the dice blessed us with two healthy, handsome, clever, and sensible sons. Within a few years they will both do well, each in his field, and in fact are doing well already. Nimrod in Atlanta, as an exchange student from the Israel Institute of Technology. Yachin is also in the United States, in Seattle at the moment, overseeing some project of the aviation industry. When Yachin was born I was twenty-one, Nimrod is less than two years younger than his brother, and I was happy with them both and thankful that I had not given birth to daughters.

My body is intact and strong and still able to take pleasure in the very fact of its existence. Without difficulty I carry baskets full of the earth’s plenty from the market, and cook meals without effort for twenty or thirty of our friends.

My appetite for sleep is as voracious as that of an adolescent girl: ten, sometimes even twelve hours a day. Sleep tastes sweet to me, on no account should my greed for it be seen as a sign of depression.

My husband is in the habit of introducing his wife as a writer, and this is one of the few things about him that annoys me. Writing a column in the newspaper doesn’t make a person a writer. I have had two offers to collect the columns of “Alice in the Holy City”—both by reputable publishers — for a book, and I turned them both down, even though my husband and my sons were very keen for me to accept them.

Oded, who mainly reads detective stories, tends to admire “literature” and “writers” in general whereas I, who read a lot, know what good literature is and how it incites the mind, and I have no pretensions to being what I am not. I was fond of my puppyish Alice, I enjoyed most of our walks round the city together, but I am not persuaded that her adventures are worth a book. The “Alice” columns enriched me with lively encounters and gave me a measure of fame too modest to arouse the envy of the gods — and this is no doubt another element of our happiness.

Paradise. Wine and pot, grapes and olives. Actually, no olives. We don’t have an olive tree in our garden. Figs. A fig tree. And a good man planted underneath it. Successful sons. Professional satisfaction. Friends. Perfect weather, and a heating-air-conditioning system that protects us when the weather is less than perfect.

Who or what did I forget?

Menachem, Chemi, a patient patriarch, in his old age at least, whose health is also excellent.

Rachel, my blue-eyed mother-in-law, a practical angel with a beaming face.

Shaya, my father, whose flowery letters from Italy I didn’t keep.

My sister Elisheva, who has gone to ground somewhere in the American Midwest.

And my dead mother.

When she deserted us I was too young to understand that my Garden of Eden would only grow on orphaned ground. I was young and raging, I raged a lot, until in the course of time I got over it. There is no room for rage in Paradise, and if a little surliness appears from time to time, it quickly disappears again. And thus on our languid, wine-drenched Sabbath day we experience no painful feelings. We mostly experience gratitude toward the invisible hand that allotted us a vine and a fig tree, and even more so gratitude to ourselves, for even if we didn’t plant them, we knew how to tend them and make them thrive.

Leafy shadows dance in the light breeze. The taste of wine in my mouth, and in the air the fragrance of figs flavored with pot. The cellphone rings in the Garden of Eden, and his voice rises from it, the person who, for most of my life, I have been trying to forget.

“His voice” I say, but the truth is that I didn’t recognize the voice. The phone rang, I thought of letting it ring, but on the screen I saw that it was an overseas call, and even though we had spoken to the boys earlier in the day and I didn’t think it was one of them, I answered the phone, because overseas calls can’t be ignored.

He asked into my ear “Can I speak to Mrs. Brandeis?” He spoke in English, even though he knew Hebrew and I knew him as a Hebrew speaker.

I replied: “Elinor speaking.”

“Hello, Elinor.” He said my name — and only then: “This is Aaron Gotthilf.”

I didn’t utter a word and for some reason I didn’t hang up, either. Mutely I held out the phone to my husband, who took it immediately and refrained from asking me “What?” or “What’s up? Who is it?”

I heard: “Oded Brandeis speaking,” and then a long speech on the other end of the line. I saw Oded narrowing his eyes, absent-mindedly putting out his unfinished joint, and then very aggressively: “My wife has no desire to talk to you. This conversation is unwanted and I must ask you not to call again.”

Quick to react, he jumped in between us, but too late; the reaction came too late. Aaron Gotthilf had searched for and found me, he knew my private phone number and my married name, which had often, too often, appeared in the newspaper. His thoughts were occupied with me, his desires pawed me, and he could do it again whenever he wanted to.

I went on sitting when Oded got up to stand behind me and put his arms around me, but I didn’t lean back.

“What did he say?” I demanded. The embrace that restricted my movements made me feel uncomfortable.

“It seems he’s on his way to Israel,” Oded sounded apologetic, “it seems that some idiots or other have invited him to a conference. He said that he’d very much like for you to agree to meet him. And I say, listen, Elinor, what I say is this: I say let’s just forget about him, let’s forget about this phone call. That man and his conference — they’re not relevant to anything.”

“Did you understand what he wants?” I removed one of his arms from my breasts.

“What he wants? I don’t know. He was. . not exactly equivocal, cautious I’d say. He mentioned his grandchildren, he has a couple of grandkids in New York. You know what, I think, yes, I think that somehow he wants a connection with us. However incredible it sounds, he wants a connection. He repeated twice that he’s already an old man.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said and removed Oded’s other arm. “It’s not relevant.”

“No,” he echoed, “that person is no longer relevant.”

“Stop calling him a person,” I corrected him. “He’s not a human being at all, and I don’t want to hear anything about him because it’s got nothing to do with anything. Just remember that I’ll never, ever, not even when he’s dead, forgive him for existing.”

— 2 -

Oded says that I brought up the rape the first time I went out with him. But I remember clearly that the subject didn’t come up on the first date, only on the third, and argue that his memory is changing the order of events for dramatic effect. In any case, there is no disagreement between us regarding the scene that followed.

I told him whatever I told him — not much — and then I said: “That’s it. That’s what happened. Just don’t think that I’m going to tell you anything more about it, go into details, I mean.” And he, in obvious confusion, replied: “Sure. Of course.” And then he asked me: “Why?” Because what else could he say?

“First of all because it’s my sister’s rape, not mine, okay? That’s the first thing. And apart from that. . Never mind.”

“Apart from that — what?”

“Forget it.”

“No, tell me.”

“Apart from that you’re a man. Can you honestly tell me that you never fantasized about rape? Can you tell me that your imagination never wanted, even a little, to look and see? That’s not a real question, so you don’t need to answer it.”

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. Oded Brandeis, salt of the earth, black belt in the gifted students track of the University High School, graduate with the distinction of a paratrooper commando unit, volunteer in a legal clinic in the Negev — Oded Brandeis was offended.

We met during the end-of-year exams, and the guy took the evening off to drive me to a spot on top of the Mount of Olives where he had only taken one girl he loved before. He brought a pique blanket for us to sit on and a bottle of white wine, and offered me the nocturnal view as if it belonged to him and he was free to give it away for nothing.

If people in this world got what they deserved he would have given me my marching orders on the spot. After jumping on him like that I deserved to have him cross me off the map. But in our world people don’t get what they deserve, and the sudden ferocity of my attack didn’t prompt him to get rid of me, but somehow made me more interesting in his eyes. Later on, when he dropped me off outside my apartment next to the market, I apologized, and he accepted my apology like an aristocrat: he made the broad, sweeping gesture of a man who can permit himself anything, even a crazy woman, even though it was clear that he was alarmed. Because not only was my ferocity intimidating, but my entire manner of speech. I said: “My sister was raped and she went mad”; “went mad” I said and not “was traumatized” or “suffered a mental breakdown.”

The laws of attraction work deceptively: things are not what they seem. Beneath every marriage contract another document lies hidden, written in invisible ink that only time reveals, and with Oded and me time worked fast on what was hidden from sight.

When we met, Oded was about to complete his studies and was making up his mind whether to do what it was obvious to everyone he would do after he finished making up his mind: first, clerking for Judge Brenner, who was a friend of his father’s, and from there straight to his father’s office to take up his position as the third generation of the firm. But the third generation had, in his words, “second thoughts about the path,” and his thoughts wavered between joining legal aid, changing to studying history, or maybe something else, even more revolutionary, exactly what he didn’t know himself.

When he met me it seemed that he had found his rebellion: a rebellion with spiky hair, a tiger face on its arm, and the exaggerated halo of a kind of desperate kamikaze pilot. Everything about me looked romantic to him: studies leading nowhere in the English Literature department, missing classes, the day I forgot to get out of bed for an exam, the small literary prize I received for a dubious volume of poetry — most of the copies of which I succeeded in destroying in later years. My squalid apartment, the wall I peeled pieces of plaster off, the bits of plaster on the bed, the empty vodka bottles — everything seemed romantic, even my orphaned state was perceived as romantic. I was not the girl suitable to be taken to Friday night dinner with his parents, and precisely for that reason, only a little more than a month after we met, he took me to his parents’ house.

Wise people, Menachem and Rachel, very wise. Is it possible that they read the message in the invisible ink? Did some intuition tell Rachel that the girl in the see-through green tank top with the chopped hair who bit her nails in public till they bled — this girl would give her two grandchildren within the space of three and a half years? And that she would always, always gratefully accept her help in raising them, to the point where their house and ours appeared to be one unit, whose rooms were only accidentally scattered around the town?

Perhaps they were nice simply because it was their nature, certainly Rachel’s nature. And perhaps they considered that any opposition on their part would only fan the flames of their son’s rebelliousness.

Whatever the reason, when I accompanied Oded’s mother to the smell of the pot roast in the kitchen, she took the empty soup bowls from me and put them down, and then, with a twinkle in her eyes she stopped to admire my tattoo: she had never seen one close-up. How beautiful, like an artistic piece of jewelry, even more beautiful, more integrated, definitely more beautiful than jewelry — and with her little hand she stroked my tiger face.

“It suits your arm very well, but tell me, isn’t it awfully painful to have it done?”

Suddenly feeling faint from the smell of the food I shrugged my shoulders, and she, without removing her hand, added something jovial about how much we women were prepared to suffer for the sake of beauty, perhaps it was a question of education, but what could we do? That’s the way we were. She too would like to have a cute little tiger like mine, but she was too old already, and anyway she lacked the courage.

Oded sometimes jokingly claims that that I fell in love with his parents before I fell in love with him. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn’t, but in any case, according to my mythological memory, on that Friday night I already lay down my arms. The cleanliness, the white cleanliness of the house acted on me like a drug as soon as I walked through the door. Without my noticing it made me feel disgusted by the filth of my own apartment, and what’s more it made me yearn for something I had never had and of whose absence I had never been aware; for even before I took up residence in my squalid cave in the marketplace — in my parents’ home, in the boarding school, in all the places where I had ended up, there was nowhere that was really clean, and it was only when I stepped into the quiet whiteness of the Brandeis residence that I could look back and be revolted, and only then did I begin to yearn for this new wonder.

The comfortable cleanliness, which was deep but not sterile, the vaulted white ceilings, the solid, welcoming wooden furniture — everything invited me to lean back, to close my eyes, and sail to a land where nothing bad had ever happened. And I closed my eyes and sailed to that Neverland, because after she had turned my tattoo into an ornament, Oded’s mother went on calmly stroking me without hurrying to the stove. She traced the lines of the predator’s face with her finger, touched the bared fangs, and in parting also gave its nose a friendly little poke. And with this gentle poke I fell asleep and I went on sleeping for a long time, until Aaron Gotthilf came back to ambush me and invade my dreams. For with the passing of time I had succeeded in banishing him from my dreams as well as my waking thoughts.

My lack of a mother and the absence of any other significant relations in my life were the main dowry I brought to my marriage with the Brandeis family. This was not a dowry to be admired out loud, but over the years we all came to appreciate its worth.

Free of parents, I relieved my father- and mother-in-law of the need to share the title “grandparents” with a pair of strangers, and gave them the gift of taking for granted the fact that their son and grandsons spent almost every holiday and Saturday with them. A picture in which they sit around the table with my pre-historic family is not one that I want to imagine. My father squirming and bragging and never still for a minute, the lock of hair stuck to his forehead growing greasy with effort. My mother raising her fair, plucked eyebrows, thin as a hair, in an exaggerated expression of amazement, and raising a hand to her operatically plunging neckline to feel her heart. Disgusting. I don’t want to think about the disgust. For a long time I succeeded in not thinking about it, and I succeeded so well that I was close to believing that we are the masters of our thoughts.

— 3 -

Disgust is a cunning infiltrator; it’s hard to keep its stealthy invasions at bay, and sometimes you have to recruit guards to protect you from them. The guardian of my soul against disgust was the idiotic Alice, the heroine of my newspaper column.

Alice appeared in my life when my sons were already in high school and empty pits of leisure began to yawn around me. The sentry of my soul appeared at the right time, a moment before my husband began to wonder where the artistic personality he had married, in his opinion, had disappeared to. Like a lot of other good things, the writing came to me as a result of a conversation with Menachem. Chemi collects books about journeys to Jerusalem. I sat on the comfortable window seat while he showed me an old-new addition to his collection to admire, and as I paged through it and examined the engravings I mused aloud that “you don’t need to be a pilgrim to see this city through the eyes of a traveler,” and in order to gild the lily of this pronouncement I added, “When you think about the history of Jerusalem, in a certain sense we’re all only visitors here.”

My family likes hearing remarks of this kind from me. Even though I haven’t written a word for years, those dear to me continue to boast of me as a poet — including the sons I kept from reading my poems — and in their opinion, these are the kinds of sayings an artist is supposed to produce.

Chemi beamed at me, said that this was a very original view, and before taking the book from me to return it to the shelf, he set me a challenge: “Come on, Elinor, let’s see you write something about Jerusalem, something short, from the point of view of a visitor. How long will it take you? Will a week be enough? Two?”

Menachem Brandeis knows how to direct others toward wanting what he wants. His son says that I have no idea how he used to tyrannize his employees and articled clerks. And how could I have any idea? In the family circle, not only have I never heard him raise his voice, I don’t even recall him sounding stern.

Two days after the conversation with Chemi, Alice was already there. And when she appeared, I had no idea that she would be with me for years to come.

My Alice — she has no surname — was born and grew up in the fictional town of Coldstone in Alaska, and came to Jerusalem with one overriding obsession: to learn how to paint desert light. Why Alaska? And why desert light? Just because. Because that’s what came into my head. With a pair of pigtails she came to me from a little town in Alaska to acquaint herself with a different light, and fell under the spell of a different city.

The first two chapters of her adventures — Alice enrolls in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Alice looks for an apartment in the picturesque quarter of Nahlaoth — were written in less than a week. A drawing teacher I met by lucky chance at exactly this time provided me with anecdotes about Bezalel; Nahlaoth I know very well. I had a basis in reality, and on it I began to elaborate the fantasy.

Over the years I composed hundreds of Alice episodes, but the characteristics of the heroine and the characteristics of the story remained as they were in the first two pieces that were written at the request-demand of Chemi: naïve and clueless, ignorant of our great stern beliefs, ignorant of the history and customs of the place, Alice from the realms of ice roams our streets, mostly our alleys, breathless with excitement, biting the tips of her braids, opening her eyes wide at the colorful sights she sees. Colorfulness is the key, and everyone who runs into Alice tends to see himself as colorful character.

“Are these real people? People you know?” Menachem asked when he finished reading my one thousand six hundred words.

“Partly. Not exactly. Partly yes. The Iraqi from the grocery store is quite real, as is the connection of the Armenian, Dakaan, to the Natural History Museum: the building was originally called the Villa Dakaan. Never mind. Most of it I made up. I was just having fun.” I went to the table to take my pages, but Menachem put his hand over them. “The fact that you’re talented goes without saying, but apart from being well-written, in my opinion you’ve hit on a gimmick here. Let me see what we can do with it.”

I didn’t protest. I was in Paradise. I was in the middle of the years of the Garden of Eden, and Alice was the kind of character you’d expect to meet among the trees. I enjoyed the company of this innocent, and from the moment she appeared I was in no hurry to get rid of her. My family was agog with silent excitement — Mom’s writing, my wife’s gone back to writing, quiet everybody. Even the boys didn’t think that their mother was embarrassing them — and without an explicit invitation on my part, Alice began to accompany me almost everywhere I went, and like a Cocker Spaniel puppy she would urge me to take her out for a walk.

Menachem spoke to whomever he spoke to, sent off the material, and that same week I met the person who was then the culture editor of The Jerusalemite and explained the “gimmick” to him. As if I had intended a gimmick from the outset: Alice as a kind of reporter. She goes to real places in the city and interviews people, but her reports on them are only half true, and both of us are free to add fictional characters and fictional elements as the fancy strikes us.

Like Chemi, the editor too used words like “fresh” and “authentic.” But at the same time he wondered about the possibility of libel suits. I promised him that there was nothing to worry about and that no such situation would come up. It wouldn’t come up because the enthralled Alice saw nothing but good, and there was no way that anyone would be offended by her descriptions. In fact the opposite would probably happen: Alice would make the people she met see themselves as colorful characters and rejoice in the colorfulness of the world.

What I said without giving it much thought turned out to be true. In all her explorations of the city, innocently delighting in Jerusalem and all its inhabitants, Alice never offended or insulted a single soul. And something else happened too, which neither the editor nor I myself anticipated: over the years Alice acquired a circle of fans who set out to follow in her footsteps, curious to meet the people she had met and to find the charm she had found, mixing the facts with the fiction in her stories. Did the embroiderers of the curtains in the Armenian Patriarchy really sing like angels as they worked? Had “Mister Soup”’s green soup really been served at the table of the King of Morocco? Did the stammering seller of textiles in Davidka Square really hide pearls of ancient wisdom among her broken words, and did a descendent of the House of Romanov really get on the number four bus to Mount Scopus every morning? And perhaps only Alice found wisdom, and only she recognized royal features on the face of an old woman with her head wrapped in a scarf?

It took eight columns for Alice to find her first apartment, and in all her searches she never tired of basking in colorfulness and wallowing in wide-eyed delight. A grumpy Kurdish wizard accompanied by a pack of stray cats offered her a room on Agrippas Street. A tamer of hawks, working as a peddler of soap in the market, tried to deter her from taking it.

She met a pair of giggling circus twins who enjoyed having a laugh with relatives who had departed this world, and a poker player smelling of mothballs who was practicing how to die without batting an eyelash — and every one of them, every single one, was a wonder in her eyes. Even the one-eyed organ tuner who tried to steal her galoshes.

All of them butterflies on the lawn, songbirds in the trees, the glitter of gold in the sunshine. Great is the garden of God, tweet-tweet, and wonderful are his creatures.

— 4 -

If I had taken her to my parents’ home and allowed her to open her mouth about it, Alice would long ago have painted me a portrait of a “colorful childhood experience.”

A modest family hotel in the neighborhood of Beit Hakerem, referred to by the father of the family as “my little Switzerland,” two stories surrounded by pine trees, their scent filling the rooms. And who lives there? A father and mother and two daughters. Two little dolls. The elder blonde, the younger brunette, the former slow and the latter quick.

The mother’s heart is weak, she spends most of her days in bed or in the little reception office, which is also suffused by a resinous scent. On the office walls hang landscapes and cityscapes — given by artist guests as mementos to the proprietors, who are happy to point them out and mention the names of the many artists and intellectuals who return year after year to their modest hostelry.

A Jesuit priest comes every summer to take part in archeological digs and teaches the younger daughter to play chess.

“The child is ripe for intellectual development,” avers the scholar. “Ripe, ripe” concurs the father.

A Yiddish singer affectionately powders the nose of the giggling elder sister as the younger brings a cup of tea to the singer’s room, and even gives the child a lilac perfume bottle in the shape of swan.

A pair of Belgian birdwatchers teach the little girls to look up at the sky. The young man’s finger on his lips, signaling silence, the young woman’s finger points upward. Their identical noses are sharp, as are their identical chins, and they both wear the same round, gold-rimmed glasses. Behind their backs the girls call them “the twins” and laugh.

A cloth cap on his head, the lock plastered to his forehead pointing like an arrow to one black eye, Shaya Gotthilf stands in the little kitchen and flourishes the omelet pan like a paintbrush. Fate and the need to earn a living have made him a hotel proprietor, and once in possession of the establishment he also gave it his name, but Shaya looks more like an artist or a scholar than a service provider.

An observer less inclined to enthuse herself than Alice would have pointed out that, when it came to service, Pension Gotthilf did not always meet conventional expectations — and that’s putting it mildly. The omelet is fried in the cheapest oil, the chrysanthemums in the Armenian pottery vases should have been thrown out the day before yesterday, and the feel of the bed linen testifies to a long life and many launderings. The Arab maid in her embroidered dress does not clean well, and from time to time, when due to confusion or illness or some other temporary difficulty the mother forgets to pay her, Jamilla does not come to work at all. The dark-haired daughter rebels. The fair-haired one smiles her slow smile and languidly pushes the vacuum cleaner about, without reaching underneath the radiators that give off a weak heat.

You won’t find luxury here — Alice would say — but the place has atmosphere. There is something about the house that closes one’s eyelids like honey and invites all who enter it to daydream. And it seems as if the daydreams of the guests did not leave with them, but are still stirring between the stones: the dreams of those who came to Jerusalem to dig up the treasures of her kings and Temple, of those who came to find in it a crown for themselves, and those who sought to redeem it.

Squeals of laughter from the little girls in the courtyard. A deaf-mute acrobat is teaching them to catch and throw a ball blindfolded. The older girl’s eyes are covered with a red scarf, the younger refused the blindfold but keeps her eyes closed and doesn’t cheat. The pealing of church bells is heard in the distance and mingles with the closer chimes of the old grandfather clock in the library. Hundreds of volumes are collected in Shaya’s library, available to anyone who wishes to consult them, and the girls’ father would fix his eyes on whoever entered the room, as if he wanted to etch the picture of a person holding a book on his heart.

“My foundlings,” Shaya calls his books, which for the most part were picked up after being thrown out in the street. Volumes in Hebrew, English, French, Russian, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Serbian. Volumes in brown, gold-lettered covers in languages unknown to their loving owner, who could not bear the sight of a book abandoned in the street because its owner had died. “With me at least they have a home,” says Shaya, a solemn note in his voice. The hand of fate sent a refugee child, his mother’s only son, to Palestine. A great love for an exquisite Jerusalem beauty set him down in this house in its bower of greenery. But the same hand might have acted differently, and it’s easy to imagine a different Shaya: Shaya Gotthilf of Manhattan, sharp-witted journalist and thinker; Shaya Gotthilf the Dutchman; Shaya the painter; Professor Shaya Gotthilf expounding his wide-ranging views from coast to coast in America, often invited as well to the capital cities of Europe. Shaya has a rich imagination, he could easily see himself in any of these incarnations. And even though he does not elaborate on them, Alice reads his fantasies, swallows his illusions whole, and enthuses:

Anyone else with such prodigious talents would have felt constrained by these narrow hotel walls, but Shaya sees himself as lacking for nothing: abundance is an attribute of the soul, not something outside it. A hotel, however small, is an entire universe, and a lively soul will always find interest in it. To his elder daughter Shaya often says, “This is your real school,” and he never scolds her when she plays hooky from her regular school.

“More than once she came home from school with tears in her eyes,” he says, without anger or bitterness, “but here, among people who know her and love her, here she can learn real things at her own pace, the way children used to learn once.”

Shaya thinks that “the separation between real life and educational institutions is insufferable.” But when his young daughter asked to go to a boarding school and even sat for the entrance exams without informing her parents, he gave her his blessing and with great effort also paid the fees. “Children are like plants,” he explained. “If you water a cactus too much it will rot, while another plant receiving the same amount of water will shrivel and die. A parent, above all, must be a good gardener.”

And perhaps he really should have been a gardener. For he quenches the thirst of his guests as well: with a glass of home-made cherry liqueur; with a word of wisdom; with an striking quotation. He dispenses his advice freely to the honeymooners from a kibbutz, to the guests of a festival taking place in the city, to the elderly immigrant whose stay is being paid for by the Jewish Agency until he finds a place of his own. Shaya only keeps his harmonica for himself and refuses to play it even when urged to do so. But on summer nights when the windows are open, a passerby in the streets of Beit Hakerem might hear a harmonica playing “A wandering star” somewhere in the distance.

I have been working with Alice for years and her ability to deceive can still surprise me; the naturalness with which she flutters her eyelashes and performs her legerdemain; draws our attention to a ball of dust under the radiator so that we won’t notice the used condoms next to the bed. Knows that the superficial dirt distracts from the sordid filth, that admitting the existence of the dust creates the illusion of honesty.

Alice flits quickly past the reception office of the pension and leaves Erica, the mother, sighing over her “weak heart,” as if she were some romantic nineteenth century heroine, to her fate. Six years, she states briefly, are the difference in age between her and the father. The couple claims six years, but the actual difference is nine. Alice, like everyone else, finds it easy to pass over the sickly mother and fill our ears with the pretentious ideas of the father.

Convenient to ignore the fact that one little daughter in a fancy dress hasn’t been bathed for two weeks, and the other, suffering daughter, has been left to act as a servant in the house, crawling on all fours to gather up the muck of wet, used tissues.

Not a thought to little girls fraternizing unsupervised with strangers. Not a word about the parents’ screaming quarrels with Jamilla, and not a word about the never-ceasing torture through which the two of them put each other. The man wants to sell the pension and the woman refuses: the pension is her inheritance, and her father, who put his whole life into it would turn over in his grave.

In private the man begs, implores, coaxes. Outside the range of hearing of the guests, but definitely within the hearing of his daughters, the man describes in glowing terms the personal and familial happiness awaiting them if they would only sell the house. The woman softens, agrees on principle to sell, but not now. Never now. Next year if everything is all right, after her health improves, after the price goes up, first they have to get another, more serious offer, first they have to get their affairs in order, and in any case it’s impossible until after the end of the season.

Just because of her obstinacy we’re stuck here. Just because of your mother’s petty fears of moving without insurance certificates in hand. Wouldn’t you like to live, girls, for example, in an artist colony in Italy? Or if it has to be a pension, then why not in Cyprus? You know that with the money the agent is already prepared to pay us, cash in hand, we could buy a little house exactly like the one on the postcard? Wouldn’t you like to live in a little house like that with a veranda on the roof? Wouldn’t you like a little donkey of your own to ride on? And if your mother doesn’t want to go abroad — how about right here in Israel? A small apartment in Tel Aviv, facing the sea, wonderful winters, five minutes’ walk to the theater and ten cinemas to choose from. Sitting in cafés with famous people passing by. There’s no need to be afraid all the time. You have to know how to think big because it’s the only way to succeed. Remember, children, what your father says, at least remember this: don’t be afraid.

“My wife takes everything to heart,” Shaya explains to the Jesuit when her wet sighs rise from the room.

“Your mother isn’t sick, she’s just sensitive,” he reassures his daughters when the blonde one’s eyes start to blink uncontrollably. “She has thin skin and little things penetrate it and give her heartburn. Tomorrow she’ll be fine, and she’ll take you to buy coats fit for a princess.”

“Hysteria,” pronounces the Yiddish singer calmly, “with her it’s simply hysteria, we’ve seen it all before.”

“Manipulations,” whispers Gemma, the amateur painter from Verona, to her English girlfriend. “That’s how she controls her husband.”

“Problem with regulation of the spleen,” announces the guest who claims he was a very great doctor in Georgia, and my father looks gratified as the three of us are given a picturesque lesson on the gall bladder and its effluents.

But no doctor confirms my mother’s self-diagnosis, according to which she suffers from a sick heart. In one of the emergency rooms somebody once mentions “anxiety attacks.” At the age of seven or eight I learn the word “hypochondria,” but when I use it, my father scolds me for a crudeness he would not have expected to hear from his clever daughter. The soul, he tells me, is mysterious and as delicate as a spider web.

“Who are we and what are we to judge our fellows,” he adds to the Jesuit who is sitting with us. And to me he continues: “What would help your mother is for all of us to go and live in Italy. For a refugee like me, everywhere is both exile and home, but for your mother’s nerves, a quiet village in Italy would be best.”

“Hypochondriac, hypochondriac, hypochondriac,” I chant in spite of him after the two of them have left the table.

“Hypochondriac,” I insist over the remains of their breakfast, which I have already made up my mind not to clear away.

When did my mother begin to treat herself with Digoxin? Who was the criminal doctor who prescribed Digoxin for a woman who was physically healthy? Did she swallow these pills for years in secret like a junkie, producing the terrible vomiting and irregular heartbeat that won her a bed in all the emergency rooms of the city?

“Doctors don’t understand anything,” she liked to say. Perhaps it was only after she understood what had happened to my sister that she began to use the drug seriously, because it can’t be possible that she took it consistently for years, certainly not in lethal amounts, perhaps only one pampering pill from time to time, and straight to the hospital for a few hours of pleasurable care and concern.

“Do you think she took those pills to make herself sick, or that she really believed that she had a cardiac disease and that they’d cure her?” Oded asked me once, a long time ago. And he went on probing: “Do you think it was connected to what happened to your sister?” This was soon after we met, in the period when I was still running around and saying things to people I’d just met such as: “My mother’s dead. She poisoned herself,” and “My mother was a junkie, she killed herself with prescription drugs.” I would say things like this and smile.

“Don’t you get that I’m not interested in what it’s connected to? That I really, really don’t give a damn?” I growled at my well-meaning boyfriend. “That woman nearly ruined my life, that’s what she did. So do you expect me to understand what went on in her head? There’s nothing to understand and I don’t want to go anywhere near her head. Or maybe you expect me to feel sorry for her too? Is that what you think? That I should pity her? Empathize?”

Oded didn’t protest or argue. My love accepted it, like he accepted everything, without questioning or nagging. He simply let it go, he set my mind at rest, and cradled me until I learned to sleep for nine hours at a stretch to the lullaby of his no-no-no-I-shall-fear-no-evil, for he was with me.

•

My pigtail-sucking Alice is a perfect idiot and a chronic faker. She isn’t capable of producing a single straightforward sentence, and her description of my childhood is, of course, completely false. That’s what she’s like, that’s how I created her, and I take full responsibility for her falsifications and for the small pleasures they afforded me.

But what about my own account? Is it truer? More reliable? Was my childhood really as grim as I describe it? Were there no moments of grace in it? No dewy lawns of happiness?

You could say that I came out okay: I’m sane most of the time, functioning, and I raised two good sons well enough. By any accepted criterion I’m okay, and accordingly any reasonable person would assume that my parents did a few things right, and that there were presumably also a few corners of light in Pension Gotthilf. Because anything else is impossible. Impossible that there were no corners of light. Logic says there were. Perhaps later events cast their shadow backward, and perhaps this shadow makes me see my entire childhood as black.

Words of wisdom such as these were offered by Rachel, my mother-in-law, when we told her, only a little and in general, about my past — and what can I say? Maybe there was something good, too. Let’s say there was. I’m prepared to admit that there was. But how does this good that may have existed help me, how does it help me if I don’t remember any of it? What I do remember and know for certain is that from a very young age I began to calculate and calculate how long I would have to go on staying with my family until I could be free of them.

My mother, it seems, was not the only one who wanted to get away, and perhaps the need to get away is in my genes.

•

“Tomorrow your mother will feel better and the three of you will go to buy coats fit for princesses,” promised Shaya, and the coats were indeed bought at the WIZO shop, even though it was the beginning of summer.

My father hoarded books, and my mother, Erica, collected theatrical clothes. Her sartorial inclinations always met my father’s fantasies, and her closets were stuffed with exotic garments. The fair-haired elder daughter loved being dressed, and even as a young girl she adored having her hair combed. Her eyelids stopped twitching then, and her green eyes slowly closed, leaving slits like a cat’s.

Alice described my sister as “slow,” which was also the word used by our parents, as if they wanted and didn’t want to say “retarded.” But my sister wasn’t retarded. Elisheva’s movements were perhaps a little strange, the way she held a pencil awkward, and simple arithmetic exercises made her cry. And nevertheless, I am sure that today nobody would have kept her back a class in school or pushed her into the vocational track. Because, for example, in spite of her oddities, she loved to read, and not only books for girls but also, and above all historical romances: I remember her poring over old volumes of Ivanhoe and Quo Vadis. She read very slowly, it took her months to finish a book. When asked to read aloud she would pronounce the words with the exaggerated emphasis of a kindergarten teacher, and stress the wrong words in the sentence, but she understood what she read very well, and found interest in it; Elisheva learned English easily simply by listening to the guests, and she also knew how to recognize birds by their calls, which I myself never succeeded in doing; she remembered the names of people who had only stayed with us a single night; and after her breakdown, through her cracks, my sister shed a stream of statements that were terrible in their accuracy. “I’m your Jew,” she said to me.

“What do you mean?”

“That I’m your Jew. So because you’re a good person, you look after me and keep me from dying again. But what you would really like in your heart is for there to be no Jews. You won’t let anyone hurt me, but in your heart of hearts you’re revolted by me, for not being born like you.”

A cold summer afternoon. My sister stands in the yard, wearing a red coat trimmed with fake black fur. Her eyes are covered with a dark scarf and she holds out blind hands to catch a rubber ball. Jamie the acrobat, a minor performer in the street shows of the Jerusalem Festival, speaks to her in English, with a Scottish accent she can barely understand — the acrobat is neither deaf nor dumb. The handicap is a whimsical fiction of Alice’s — and Elisheva turns her body in the direction of his voice. My sister isn’t laughing, neither laughter like the chiming of bells nor any other kind of laughter. Her fleshy shoulders are thrust forward, her hands stretched out stiffly, suspended in the air. A cold wind makes the clouds in the sky race, revealing and concealing the sun. Rays of light penetrate the swaying branches, touching and vanishing, and my sister’s face is shadowed and illuminated in rapid alternation. Jamie and I and the branches, the shadows, and the sunlight don’t stop moving for a second, and Elisheva stands rooted to the spot, waiting obediently for a sign.

“The firstborn daughter,” Alice called her, and so indeed she was, my big sister, for a certain period of time, when we were still small. A difference of less than three years between us, and nevertheless she appointed herself the “little mother.” Our parents were more concerned with the clothes we wore than with our personal hygiene, while she, to the best of her ability, insisted on bathing me and was often the one who put me to bed. “Little mommy” our parents liked to call her, and so did some of the guests, who saw how she held my hand on the stairs or gave me a square of chocolate after I finished my salad.

It didn’t take me more than a few years to steal my sister’s birthright; to put her in the shade with the skills I acquired, to skip a class, to sweep up all the highest marks, to rob her of any ability she might have developed and any true praise she might have won.

First I stole her birthright, and then I deserted her.

The quick daughter made haste to save herself and left the slow one behind.

I, the quick daughter, saved myself.

I deserted and abandoned my sister to her fate.

— 5 -

When Satan arrived in my parents’ house, I was already in boarding school, and a feverish round of schoolwork and social activities gave me an excuse for cutting down my visits to a minimum. I was in Jerusalem, but the Jerusalem I was in was very far from the one in which I grew up.

Life in boarding school made my head spin with the range of possibilities it offered: interesting lessons, a history teacher who was particularly interesting, youth movements, a theatrical society, a writing club, stealing out and hitching rides, beer, kisses tasting of beer, political arguments, volunteer activities in the deprived neighborhood of Katamon, nocturnal excursions to the Old City and the churches of Ein Kerem, hesitant experiments full of self-importance with marijuana — I said yes to everything, I wanted everything, and every leap and every opportunity seemed to be the very one I had been waiting for.

I was surrounded by people who were as hungry and packed with energy as I was, and our hunger went on raging on the weekends and holidays too, which we were supposed to spend at home. We went on hikes, camped out and attended courses, and I did not refuse a single invitation: I spent Passover with a girlfriend on a kibbutz, and on Sukkoth I went to harvest olives at an Arab village. Every month or two I fell in love with someone else, a boy or girl whose uniqueness was always revealed to me in a flash. Amos, at the piano, singing songs by Georges Brassens. How could I have overlooked him before? Betty, cradling the face of a tiny boy who had cut his chin in the yard of the youth club in Katamon. Dror, declaiming Mark Anthony’s speech in a British accent. Amichai, telling jokes all the way up the stiff climb to Massada without a single pant.

I was full of falling-in-love, and the love, like a moving spotlight, fell unexpectedly on one new object after another.

In order to visit my sister and my parents I had to walk for forty minutes on foot or ride on two buses for about half an hour. But for months at a stretch I didn’t have the time. I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t interested.

But nevertheless, from my rare visits I remember the talk that preceded the arrival of the serpent from America: Your uncle, girls, the professor, the historian and commentator Aharon Gotthilf. Aaron he calls himself today.

“Uncle Aaron,” my mother would say, taking care to flatten the “a” and drawl the “r” so that it would sound American. Uncle Aaron would arrive in December, when it was Christmas vacation over there. He intended to spend three weeks with us, but it was possible, very possible, that if certain things worked out as he hoped, he would stay longer.

Aaron was coming to attend his son’s wedding in Jerusalem. It turns out — such a surprise, we had no idea — that he has a grown son, a son from an early marriage. Suddenly, now Uncle Aaron tells your father that he was once married to some Czech, a woman with serious mental problems. He met her when he was living in Paris. A sad story, very sad. Because the son grew up without him, and the mother, who didn’t have a clue, sent him to a Chabad school, and what can you expect when you send a child to Chabad? The boy grew up ultra-Orthodox, came to Israel, didn’t serve in the army, landed up in a black-coat yeshiva. Now they’ve arranged a match for him, and even though to this day he never had much contact with his father, he invited Aaron to the wedding out of honor for his father. That’s one good thing that has to be said for those people, I have to admit: Honor thy father and thy mother. Aaron has another son who lives in New Mexico, about him we actually knew, we even told you once, his mother is a professor of archeology, she studies the Indians, and this son, who is your second cousin, treats his father very differently. Aaron told us that he isn’t even prepared to come and visit him, even though he offered the mother to pay for the tickets.

Aaron came in December but they already started talking about him in the summer, in the wake of a surprise letter and a long, expensive phone call in which he renewed the connection with my father, his dear cousin. It occurs to me now that my parents described him in way that would have fitted nicely into one of Alice’s idiotic columns: I even remember my father defining him as “a classic Jewish intellectual” and a “colorful character on the personal level.”

I don’t remember him being spoken of before, but once the letter arrived, the talk began to bubble and the anecdotes about “Erwin, to me he’ll always be Erwin”—overflowed to the paying guests as well. All my parents’ acquaintances were required to bask in the glow of our uncle’s glamour, whose glory could be assumed to reflect on his more modest relatives too.

My grandmother Sarah Gotthilf and her sister-in-law Hannah escaped from Vienna in November 1938, carrying in their arms sons who were intended to be the first but turned out to be the last. My grandfather was murdered in Dachau and his brother in Nisko, but we won’t go into that here. The women crossed from Switzerland to Italy, where they spent six months in Genoa — judging by the way my father told the story it sounded as if they had set out on a tour of classical Europe — and then Sarah, who had contacts with the Zionists, obtained a certificate and sailed with her baby for Palestine, while the beautiful Hannah and her son Erwin — that’s what they called him then — made their way to England.

Equipped with enthusiastic recommendations — her dissertation on Feuerbach came out in book form and Freud himself sent his compliments — Hannah Gotthilf found her way to the most interesting circles of the period, and in ’47, two years after the end of the war, she married a well-known economist from Oxford who was also an aristocrat boasting the title of Sir.

As you may imagine, the son of Lady Hannah received the best possible education — the sciences, the arts, classical languages. His Hebrew was classical too, and at the age of twenty-one Erwin, who had in the meantime become Aaron, was already studying for a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne in Paris.

His reputation preceded him, wherever he went he stood out as an original thinker, and since the academic world in France before the students’ revolution seemed fossilized to him, he didn’t wait to complete his doctorate but took advantage of the first opportunity that presented itself to emigrate to America. There are mean-spirited dwarves everywhere. Pettiness and envy too are universal, but Aaron in his innocence believed that he would enjoy more intellectual freedom in America than in Europe.

The main subject of his studies was modern totalitarianism, and he shocked many people when he chose to focus on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis, claimed Aaron, drew a dark, prophetic and amazingly accurate picture of modern tyranny.

The issues that engaged Aaron were always broad, too broad for the Procrustean bed of academia, and despite the high esteem in which he was held, the trailblazer also acquired a number of enemies. For three or four years it seemed to him that he had found himself a home in the University of Columbia, but for a man like Aaron every home is only a port from which to sail onward. In the wake of all kinds of slander that arose, he transferred to the University of New Orleans, and from there this Jew went on wandering to other stations and other ports.

Unlike those of his colleagues who secluded themselves in ivory towers, Aaron turned from the outset to the non-academic public as well. His articles were published in dozens of newspapers, and he made frequent appearances on television as well as on the radio. But Aaron was not the kind of sycophant who was only seeking popularity, and the things he wrote and said gave rise to more than a little opposition. The hippies considered him one of theirs, until he poured scorn on them in a stinging essay. A highly regarded Jewish journal flaunted him, until he insisted on publishing a paper on “Jewish murderers in the service of Stalin.” The New York left, which in the past had attempted to embrace him, has not forgiven him to this day for a brilliant article analyzing their psychology. That’s Aaron. A complex personality. Not an easy person, clearly. Not an easy man, but a deep one. Possessing a profundity you don’t often see today.

Uncle Aaron’s history was not always recounted from the beginning, sometimes my father expounded on a single chapter: Genoa, England, the title of Sir, the interesting circles of the period, the Sorbonne University in Paris, the Marquis de Sade, stations and ports. But I remember well how every chapter of the story concluded with the same words: deep, profound, complex.

“Aren’t you sick of hearing about him?” I asked Elisheva. But my sister said that she was glad for Mommy and Daddy. She was glad because both of them were glad, and now that Daddy had a cousin he was sure to be happier, because family was good, and it was sad when somebody had a relative he didn’t see.

If it had been voiced by anyone else, this sentence could have been interpreted as a complaint about my absence, but Elisheva never hinted, and I ignored the non-existent hint and the unuttered complaint and slipped away again to pursue my own affairs. If they were all happy, why should I question their happiness? And to my friends at school I threw out: “A cousin of my father’s is coming, a British aristocrat or something, now they’ll force me to come visit all the time, what a bore.”

What room should they give him? My parents debated the question, and dwelled pleasurably on the subject right up to the eve of his arrival. First floor or second? Opposite the stairs or at the end of the corridor? Double or single? Our uncle would pay, he had made this an explicit condition, the income from three weeks was nothing to be sneezed at, but we had always preferred guests who came for a prolonged stay, and the ones who became like part of the family always received preferential treatment. If he preferred a double room, we would give it to him at the price of a single room. Number eighteen had a pastoral view, twenty-two was more modest, but he would have more privacy there, and for someone who was writing a book there was nothing more important: quiet and privacy, privacy and quiet — that’s what our place gave its guests and that’s what we could offer someone who had stayed in some of the most luxurious hotels in the world. Pay attention, girls, we won’t disturb Uncle Aaron, and on no account will we impose ourselves on him. We’ll spend just as much time with him as he wants to spend in our company, and we have to understand that he won’t spend as much time with us as he might wish, because he’s working on a book.

•

The business of the book was especially thrilling to my mother. From the intimate way she spoke about it you would have thought that he sent her drafts for her comments: Aaron will take advantage of his stay in Israel to go into the archives, but what Aaron’s working on isn’t just another piece of ordinary research. We know that this time it’s something much more literary. Aaron has set himself a high literary challenge. Aaron is about to deal with something that nobody before him has even dared to touch. His book will present a historical angle that other people haven’t had the courage to approach up to now. Aaron says that anyone who writes something so innovative has to expect a tremendous scandal after publication. And we, of course, are with Aaron. This is the small contribution that his family can make, and it goes without saying that we’ll give him all the conditions he needs for his work. If Aaron decides afterward to mention that he began writing the book here with us in Jerusalem, fine, we’re not hiding and we’ve got nothing to hide. A family has to be prepared to stand together even when there’s a huge scandal, and we’re not going to ask Uncle Aaron to hide anything either.

The excited anticipation improved my mother’s health to no end. People quite often used to say to me “You have a beautiful mother”—and when I was very small I thought so too. By the time I was in grade school she already seemed to me embarrassingly affected — but shortly before Aaron’s arrival I remember hearing such admiring remarks again. And I also remember my father saying: “Did you see how beautiful your mother looks today?”

The excitement took her almost every morning into the dining room, away from the account books, and from keeping account of expenses altogether. New glasses were purchased, both for cold drinks and for tea. And somehow she managed to persuade Jamilla to polish the ornamental samovar on the counter. In the evenings I know that she lingered to chat to the guests, smoking a slender cigarette, only one — she was permitted one little indulgence, who could deny her, life was short anyway — tapping off the ash with a finger freshly tipped with scarlet, gracefully inclining her chin, and waiting for another opportunity to insert Uncle Aaron into the conversation.

What was this special angle on history about which the professor was writing? To this Erica had no reply, and from the sly expression on her face it was hard to tell if she didn’t know the answer or if she had promised to keep the secret. Only the subject may perhaps be revealed, revealed but not elaborated on: Aaron had taken it upon himself to write about Hitler. Yes, Hitler. Imagine the strength of mind required to tackle such a subject. A historian, and moreover a Jew, and with Aaron’s personal background too, where did he get the courage? You’ll agree, said my mother, that his strength of mind must be tremendous.

He arrived in December and extended his stay beyond what my parents had dared to hope, but more than three weeks passed before I saw him. It was morning, and I was standing in the little kitchen cutting up vegetables: cucumbers and tomatoes for a salad. Breakfast was served to the guests at seven o’clock. It wasn’t yet seven, and he was already sitting in the dining room.

My father had gone out early to do some chores or other. My mother promised that she would finish getting dressed in a minute and come down to help me. Elisheva complained of stomachache, and I drew the curtains in our room and left her to rest in bed.

I stood and sliced vegetables; the tomatoes were a problem. My father was in the habit of buying crates of cheap vegetables, and the vegetables he bought were often too ripe or not ripe enough. Green tomatoes were easier to bury in a salad than those close to rotting, and that morning, I remember, the slices of tomato drowned in the juices on the board.

•

The tomato. From the point of view of its botanical classification a fruit, and not a vegetable: a flower-bearing dicotyledon, perennial plant of the family Solanaceae, native to tropical America. Thought to have been cultivated already in ancient Peru, but considered poisonous by Europeans who encountered it.

I have a lot more to say on the subject of tomatoes. I even know a song written in their honor, with a refrain which goes: Tomato, tomato / sing high, sing low / the song of the tomato / oh, the song of the tomato.”

I am prepared to sing the song of the tomato. It needs to be sung from the depths of the chest, taking a lot of air. I am also prepared to provide information on the nutritional value of this vegetable-fruit, which would no doubt be of interest to the reader and contribute to the public health.

I’m ready to do a lot of things — to sing, to investigate, to lecture, but apparently I am not yet ready to introduce the serpent. I knew that I would have to prepare myself for his introduction, and now that the time has come, I am not prepared.

Because what I am supposed to say about him — what? And how am I supposed to do it? Should I focus on his body and describe his appearance, so that he’ll come across as a “real person?” Should I mention, to make it more authentic, the cartilage of his gigantic ears? Let’s say this: he was very tall, his long legs were stretched out in front of him, feet clad in moccasins, his one ankle rested on the lower calf of the other leg. He was tall and quite broad-shouldered, and although I thought of him as old, he looked a little like a movie star or some important politician. Not somebody in particular, but somebody. A persona. A persona on vacation, in a jacket with leather elbow patches.

Is that enough? For me it’s definitely enough, and even if it isn’t enough, how the hell am I supposed to remember exactly how he looked to me then, when all my memories are colored by what happened afterward? Am I supposed to fabricate a description of Satan in order to convince you that he exists?

He came. He was there, he sat there in the dining room — all these are facts. And I wondered in my embarrassment whether to wait for my mother or to go up to him and introduce myself, or not to introduce myself and simply to ask in a professional manner if he wanted tea or coffee. In any case the water hadn’t boiled yet.

Is that important? What’s important?

It’s important that he stayed with us for almost six months, and that during this time he raped my sister consistently.

It’s important that after he got her pregnant, he arranged for her to have an abortion and, immediately afterward, when she was still bleeding, he raped her again. He was turned on by the blood. And by her pain. Do I have to go into detail about that too? And why, exactly? In order to justify myself and what I did years later? In order to justify myself do I have to paint a close-up picture of my sister with a tear trickling down her round baby face? Or perhaps I should paint her holding a teddy bear, like in the pictures they publish in the papers to illustrate a story about child abuse? Elisheva didn’t have a teddy bear. She collected make-up and little scent bottles, empty ones too, and she’d left her toys behind her a long time ago.

She actually had chubby cheeks, but at the time in question she suffered from adolescent pimples, which my mother forbade her to squeeze. She never had a lot of pimples, only a few, but for people like Alice it only takes a hint of that yellow pus to spoil the whole picture.

This story can be briefly told, the facts can be summed up as follows: he raped her consistently, but two years passed before she broke down. It happened when she was already in boot camp, and more time passed before she spoke about it, first to her psychologist in the mental hospital, and afterward to us. But up till then her weight gain and all the other symptoms of depression were attributed to her difficulties in school and her fear of the few matriculation exams that she sat for. We found this explanation convenient, and even when the psychologist invited my parents to come in for a joint session, they refused to believe it, at first anyway: my sister was crazy, and crazy people invent all kinds of things. To the important psychologist they said nothing, of course, they only made shocked noises, but I understood that they didn’t believe it and I was the one who had to make them believe.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. Except that after I made them believe it, my mother took off with Digoxin, my father got on a plane to Italy, and I stayed with my sister until I couldn’t stay with her another minute. And that’s really everything.

Really everything?

When my mother came into the dining room, perfectly made up, she introduced me to my uncle immediately: “You haven’t yet met our clever Elinor.”

“Elinor and Elisheva,” he said in his strange accent. “Two daughters. Eli and Eli.” And then, as if playfully, he took my hand and lifted it to his mouth, and fixing me with a colorless stare under half-lidded, he kissed it.

— 6 -

Oded says that after that phone call from America it was hard to talk to me: that I kept uncharacteristically pressing him to tell me exactly what time he would be home, and when he was home he couldn’t get anything out of me except for brief, laconic replies.

That’s what my husband says, and it sounds logical — maybe that’s how I behaved, but in any case Oded and I are in the habit of calling each other several times a day, that’s what we’ve always done, and I really don’t remember any excessive nagging on my part.

I assume we visited his parents, I don’t remember any cancellations, and of course we didn’t tell them anything about our dread. They both knew about my sister, that’s to say they knew that she had been raped by a guest from overseas. That when it came out it broke my mother’s heart, and that in the wake of all these horrors my father made haste to flee the scene of the crime and escape from the memories.

They knew about Elisheva’s derangement too, and about how she returned to life in this world in an eccentric incarnation — I told Rachel all this, and she told Menachem soon after we met; and from time to time, once in a while, she would ask me how my sister was doing and if I heard from her.

I told my mother-in-law all kinds of things, and like Alice I directed her gaze toward the dust bunnies under the radiator so she wouldn’t notice the real filth. Because I didn’t tell her who had murdered my sister’s soul. I kept this a secret and they, wisely, did not interrogate me. Perhaps they assumed that I didn’t know his identity, perhaps they thought that his name wasn’t important, but I had a good reason for keeping quiet, and it was clear to me why I held my tongue and why I ostensibly protected his identity.

The general impression I created, which I somehow tried to create, was that although the Gotthilf family was what they politely referred to as a “family with difficulties,” it was “the tragedy” that caused us to cross the line into madness. And that but for “our tragedy” we would all have been a little strange, but nevertheless within the bounds of normality.

They received a daughter-in-law whose sister had barricaded herself in the toilets of Training Base 12 with a weapon, and whose mother, intentionally or unintentionally, had killed herself with prescription drugs.

They adopted a girl with a tattoo, whose father, according to her at least, was “unable to attend the wedding.”

They embraced me as a victim, but how far could I stretch the limits of their tolerance? Even the tolerance of the tolerant, even the broad-mindedness of the most broad-minded has its limits, and a rapist in the family is going too far. They were generous to me. Generous to a fault, to the point of tears, bighearted and clear-minded and absolutely dependable, but at a certain point it was inevitable that even the bighearted and clear-minded would be assailed by genetic revulsion. And it was impossible, impossible that they would not be horrified by the amount of crooked genes that their daughter-in-law was bringing into the tribe. Presumably they would have refrained from outright opposition to the match, but I have no doubt that their dread would have found a way to express itself.

When he was four years old, my Yachin choked a playmate in preschool. Nimrod, at the age of fifteen, hid copies of Penthouse under his mattress: weren’t these signs? Weren’t they obvious symptoms of distortions in the nucleus of the cell? Long before my sons were born, I sensed that I would not have the strength to cope with this kind of dread in my benefactors, I would not be able to stand their revulsion. And after Rachel stroked my tiger-face, all I knew was that I yearned for her to touch me again.

So it happened that I hid his name, and so it happened that, after he came back again, Oded and I went on visiting his parents and behaving as if everything was as usual.

And many things were indeed as usual: the chronically enchanted Alice set forth on her weekly bullshit tour, visited the Ratisbonne Monastery, and was thrilled by the height of the ceilings and the charming stories of the Benedictine monk. I not only remember this column, I can even verify its existence in the archives. Saint Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, retired from the world to live in a cave. And Alice, who was curious about the spiritual experiences of the hermit, briefly considered going to look for a cozy little cave in the Judean desert: to taste the delights of spiritual seclusion for herself and to see the sun rise in silence.

Menachem, who was in the habit of phoning me every weekend to react to my column, remarked that “the story this time was both instructive and entertaining,” and “I’m glad that your little Alice understood without having to experience it for herself that human beings are not cut out for solitude. As one of her greatest fans I wouldn’t like to see her spending even a single day in a cave.”

Nimrod and Yachin called, or we called them, as we did on a routine basis. We are a sociable couple, far from any kind of monastic seclusion, and it seems to me that we also had friends over for dinner.

As far as I can remember, I behaved as usual even though I was worried, but there seemed to be a growing disturbance below the surface, and I sensed that the disturbance was not in me, but in Oded. Now I think that if our relationship had not been beyond a doubt, I would have suspected him of having an affair. I did not suspect him, praise whoever deserves to be praised — in this instance presumably Oded and myself — but the signs of disturbance accumulated uneasily, even though it’s hard to pinpoint them exactly. He looked at me too much and didn’t look at me enough, meaning it seemed as if he gazed at me intently at the wrong moments, and looked away precisely when I looked at him. He listened when I spoke to him, but somehow he didn’t listen in the right way, and even though he answered to the point, it seemed as if he was thinking about something else. His touches also felt programmed, and a couple of times when he kissed me it seemed as if he were obeying some instruction he had given himself. Another woman would have interpreted all this in one way only. I didn’t know how to interpret it, and I waited. I was upset, and nevertheless I waited, because ever since that phone call from America everything around me was fragile, and also because I knew that in the end my husband would speak.

It took him almost two weeks, after the first rain fell, and perhaps it wasn’t the first real rain of the year but only a summer shower, because it was still hot. We left the windows open, and with the fresh air that came in he said, “Elinor, there’s something I should have told you before, it’s just that I’m such an idiot I didn’t know how. I received an email. That man sent me an email to the office.”

“That man,” he called him, and there was no need to explain who he meant. Innocent and blind as a puppy, my Oded expected me to ask immediately, “What did he write?” but I was unable to hear a word. The blindness, the wicked blindness of my good husband threatened me where I lived. And it was clear to me that if I didn’t open my husband’s eyes we would fall, fall deep underground: we had already begun to fall.

And so, instead of asking “What did he write?” I demanded: “When? When exactly did you get it? What’s ‘a few days ago’? How many days? What were you thinking? When exactly were you going to tell me? How dare you not tell me? By what right?”

Oded rubbed his brow and apologized again, and again admitted that he had behaved like a fool.

“But explain to me, explain to me what you were thinking? How could you come into the house every evening and know that you were going to lie to me?”

“Lie to you?”

“Not tell me the truth. What else would you call it?”

Oded’s thick eyebrows bristled with all the rubbing, lending him the air of an angry troll. The bristling gray hairs did not suit the neatness of his close-cropped head, but I did not lick my thumb to smooth and straighten them.

“Sorry,” he said. “Look at me, Elinor. Look at me. I’m truly, truly sorry. Try to understand, you were so upset by that phone call, I saw what it did to you, so in my foolishness I wanted to spare you.”

“To spare me or yourself? Who were you really thinking of — me or yourself, that it would be unpleasant for you to tell me?”

“I don’t see it like that.”

“No? So how do you see it?”

“I told you, it was a mistake on my part. I made a mistake.”

“You made a mistake because it was comfortable for you to let me live in an illusion.”

“Do you really think that I felt comfortable?”

“Admit that you would have been more comfortable not telling me.”

And so on and on, until I gradually calmed down, first to the sound of the pattering rain and Oded’s quiet voice, and then to the touch of his hands on my face and the smell of his soap.

“Just understand,” I said between his hands, “you have to understand that he’s a snake, and that this is exactly how he operates. First he tried to talk to me, and now, after he didn’t succeed, he’s coming between us. Understand that when you don’t tell me, it’s like you’re collaborating with him.”

“No one can come between us. Nobody can do that.”

“Okay. So now tell me,” I said a little later.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what he wrote you.”

My husband was ready for this part of the conversation, the forces of the salt of the earth were marshaled and ready. “Let’s start with the good news, what I see as a good sign, which is that he sent the mail to me at the office and didn’t try to phone again and speak to either you or me. Which tells me that he accepts there are limits he has to respect, and this, in fact, is how he began, by saying that he had no intention of troubling you. In English it sounds even more polite.”

“Understood. But what does he want?”

“What does he want? That’s harder for me to define. I’d say that he wants some kind of connection, don’t ask me what or why. He was careful of course, very careful in how he phrased it. Don’t forget that he has no idea what you know, and certainly not what I know. He concentrated, in fact, on his book: he said that today he understands why a person might want to ostracize the author of this book. His main statement, as far as I understand, is that a lot of time has passed since he wrote it, and that today he himself has reservations about it, and not only privately, he has also publicly condemned himself. He even attached a link to some article of self-criticism that he wrote.”

“Did you read it?”

“I had a look at it. I didn’t want to go into all that stuff. What jumps out, in my opinion, is that at present he’s on some new PR campaign, only this time the campaign is against the book. In the spring, as we already know, he’s supposed to be coming here to take part in some international conference, and the title of his talk, as far as I remember, is the same title he gave to the article: ‘My Mistake.’” What the man actually wants, I don’t understand, but the explicit wish he expressed was that you would agree at least to hear him speak at the conference.”

“You said he was coming ‘here.” Is ‘here’ Jerusalem?”

“It seems so. Unfortunately. The bottom line: I think that what he’s trying to tell us is that he’s changed; that he is no longer the person you once justly called ‘that Hitler.” He claims not only the statute of limitations, but also repentance. I can only guess that he’s hinting at something beyond the book.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“As what?”

“As repentance. Everything he says, all his sophisms and rationalizations about limitations and repentance, are a load of crap. Elisheva doesn’t have the luxury of wiping out the past and going back to what she was before. Hang on, I’m not angry at you, I’m not angry any more, it’s just hard for me to hear those bullshit words coming out of your mouth. Repentance. The nerve of that man is something unbelievable. Can you believe that he had the nerve to call me and write to you? There’s no going back from that either.”

“I agree, I didn’t say anything else,” replied my glib attorney, and he was already standing in front of me to bring me too to my feet.

“There’s no going back, so from here on you and I will simply go forward together.”

— 7 -

I remember the clicking of the typewriter from room number twenty-two, the one at the end of the corridor on the second floor, the one that to the regret of my parents did not have a pastoral window, but ensured privacy. There, it appears, he began to write the cause of the scandal to which they looked forward, and there, in the privacy that was respected to an exaggerated, ritualistic degree, he conducted experiments on my sister. Once he made her crouch like a footstool at his feet, and forced her to remain in this position for hours without moving. And another time, when he had finished hurting her, he said that she had to understand how difficult all this was for him. If she thought that he had no feelings, she was a fool. He wasn’t a psychopath, there were goals for which it was right and proper to sacrifice the moral sentiment, and “only history will judge the value of the work of literature to which our project gave birth.”

The worst thing, she said, was when he talked to her. And also when he forced her to read aloud to him from the book. “The one he was writing? His manuscript?” I asked. No, she wasn’t allowed to touch his manuscript when she cleaned the room. There were a lot of books there, but he always wanted one book in English. He would instruct her to read, and then sneer at her reading and do it to her. But there also times when he would first read aloud from it himself.

The things I know accumulated slowly: a statement here, a statement there. Sometimes she came out with something horribly coherent, but a lot of the time what she said was unintelligible. And I, choking on it, didn’t know what was worse: when she spoke clearly I longed for vagueness, and when she was vague I wanted to shake her until she told me exactly what and how and when. Maybe with her psychiatrist she was different, but when I pressed her she was unable to answer, looking blank and stammering in reply to my questions.

Only when she was about to leave for the United States in her new incarnation, she revealed, as if by the way, the name of the book: The 120 days of Sodom. Because of the name she believed that she was destined to be tortured by him for one hundred twenty days, but the clue deceived her. She was tortured for longer.

He was a brutal, pornographic sadist, that’s what he was. A filthy rat dressed up in sordid intellectual pretensions. He was something that I wouldn’t even call human. A rat. A warped rat who decided he had it in his power to gnaw his way into the black box of Hitler and solve its riddle from the inside. Before he left he gave my sister a potted orchid. Elisheva put it on the reception desk, and there this gift remained until it died. I have no idea why I mentioned this now. I mention it because I remember. This detail of the white orchid I actually told Oded quite early on, but he wasn’t very impressed by it; he only remarked that giving flowers seemed like part of the window dressing. But I knew, and kept it to myself, that the purpose of the orchid was completely different, and that in this final act of parting too, the Not-man meant to mock her. Like he did when he met me and kissed my hand.

•

When the book my parents had so eagerly awaited came out in America, Erica was already resting in her grave, my father was apparently resting with his lady love in Verona, and Elisheva and I were going crazy together in the renovated, three-and-a-half-room basement flat where my father set us up nicely before he deserted us.

I had no idea that the book had come out, or about anything else, except for the fact that I was responsible for a sister who, according to the official authorities, posed no danger to herself or others, and consequently did not need to be hospitalized.

Only months later, after I had put her back, not so nicely, in the hospital, I learned about the book from a newspaper article, and my first thought was: I hope they don’t hand out newspapers in the psychiatric ward.

The article reported on a dispute between the literary editor and the owner of one of the big publishing houses in Israel. The owner wanted to bring out a Hebrew translation of Hitler, First Person, and the editor, it was reported, threatened to resign. Neither of the parties to the dispute agreed to be interviewed on record, but it appeared that they had given the reporter a broad overview of the reasons for the standoff.

Hitler, First Person, as may be gleaned from the title, attempts to present “an autobiography of the fiend.” According to the blurb on the back of the English edition, the book was not a forgery like the so-called “Hitler Diaries,” nor yet pure historical research, but rather “an attempt to deepen human consciousness by literary means” and by “a significant and chilling contribution to the self-knowledge of human beings as such.” The book relies on hundreds of documents and historical research. It attempts to penetrate beneath the persona the Führer presented to the public, and shows the reader not the “real” Hitler, but Hitler as he might have been, and as he would have described himself if he had written a personal autobiography as a kind of complement to Mein Kampf.

According to the article, the controversial manuscript had been rejected by a long line of publishers in the United States, until it found one willing to bring it out, and but for the fact that two well known historians had violently condemned the book, it would probably have disappeared among the piles of trash written on the subject.

The growing campaign in denunciation of the book had given the author, Professor Aaron Gotthilf, exceptional media exposure, at the height of which he had been attacked at the entrance to a television studio by an elderly Holocaust survivor who tried to throw acid in his face.

Gotthilf, a controversial historian and a refugee from the Holocaust himself, stands by his opinion that giving voice to Hitler is not only a legitimate literary device that should be accepted in the framework of the principle of freedom of expression, but an important tool in advancing our understanding of the horrors of the twentieth century. “Hitler was a human being,” he stresses, “and as such, he is not beyond the bounds of explanation.” He adds: “To understand does not mean to forgive.”

However, there are those who do not forgive Gotthilf for his book, among them our greatest Holocaust researcher, who described it as “a vile piece of filth not worthy of relating to.”

Up to now the book has been translated into French, German, Finnish, and Italian, although it should be mentioned that the publishers who chose to bring it out in these countries are also regarded as marginal. Among the reactions to the book in France, the words “provocative” and “interesting” were used. In Germany, on the other hand, the book was widely denounced by critics.

The article also mentioned that the author chose to let Hitler tell his story only up to October 1938, a few days before Kristallnacht, and that some critics have argued that this choice plays into the hands, even if indirectly, of Holocaust deniers.

“It will soon become clear whether Gotthilf’s fictional Hitler will be allowed to have his say in Hebrew too.”

I tore the newspaper to shreds and threw it in the trash, poured the dregs of my coffee onto the scraps, and took the bag of trash out of the house.

I hadn’t forgotten my parents’ talk. I hadn’t forgotten the sound of the typewriter, but for some reason I never thought about the book as something real that could actually happen. I never thought it would happen, too much had happened already.

All kinds of crazy ideas went around in my head, like writing to the publisher that I would kill myself if the book came out in Hebrew — because what other way did I have to preserve the fragments of my sister? But in the end I didn’t even write a letter of protest from a concerned citizen.

I’ll never know whether my mother meant to kill herself with her Digoxin games. I learned to live with the not knowing, let’s say I learned, let’s say I did, but one thing I do know today for certain: my mother did not pass on suicidal genes to me. I never really wanted to go away and die. I wanted other people not to be here.

When Elisheva broke down and was hospitalized for the first time, I was still in my senior year in high school and, surrounded by a protective wall of friends and activities, I spent most of my time at a relatively safe distance from the family.

When I banished her from our basement apartment to her second hospitalization I was already alone. Our parents had flown. My friends had joined the army, and I had been exempted from this obligation, too, which I had no possibility of meeting.

The way things turned out I didn’t have a single soul I could talk to when Hitler, First Person came down on me in the kitchen like a ton of bricks. And after I destroyed the newspaper, not long after that, somehow or other I decided to live. Somehow or other, the decision was taken to live, live like crazy and as quick-sharp as possible. I left the apartment in Talpioth and threw myself giddily into to all kinds of stimulating experiments. I consumed quantities of alcohol, and men, and wild talk, and ups and downs at night and sleeplessness. One morning, after waking up alone in the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv without remembering exactly how I got there, I snuck outside, and as I wandered the streets my eye fell on a tattoo emporium; I went in and had myself tattooed with my tiger face. It took two days to do it, and in between I fell asleep on a bench in the park among the smell of dog shit. All this isn’t important now, and also irrelevant to Hitler, First Person, which I had started to talk about.

Three years after I met Oded and fell on him with false accusations, he traveled to London for the firm and there, between his real-estate negotiations, he was tempted to buy the book. He bought it, came home, and immediately told me. Presumably he believed that the act of confession would atone for the sin of voyeurism he had committed by reading it.

Alice had not yet been born then, but Yachin was lying at my feet on his baby blanket, and I was already pregnant with Nimrod, although I didn’t yet know it — so my drive to attack had faded to a considerable degree.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“What? The book? I left it in the office. I thought you wouldn’t want it in the house.”

“You thought right. It’s none of my business that you read it, I just don’t have to hear about it,” I said, and a minute later: “Okay. Now that you did it, you’d better tell me about it.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he picked up our son and clasped him like a soft shield to his chest. “I’m not a big expert on literature. I didn’t even finish reading it, it’s over three hundred pages long, and I don’t think I’ll finish it.”

“Is it that dreadful?”

“Dreadful?” My husband deliberated for a moment, and then pronounced the magic word, because of which, and only because of which, even though I have a thousand other reasons — I’ll love him to the end of time. “Boring,” he said.

I’m sure he didn’t understand what made me burst out laughing and go on laughing, but my laughter infected him, and the two of us laughed and laughed until I slid off the sofa and he had to sit down on the carpet with Yachin.

“What did you say? Go on, say it again.”

“Boring,” he repeated.

“Boring,” I bellowed. “Oded Brandeis, you’re one of a kind. Hitler bores you.”

Only when Yachin’s face twisted and turned red did we calm down, even though we went on sitting on the floor. “So now explain to me, please.”

“Look, I don’t know, it’s kind of banal. If it’s supposed to be a mystery, if Hitler’s a mystery, then I didn’t get the impression it was about to be solved. I know this sounds a bit tasteless, but if I think of it as, let’s say, a detective story, then up to now, up to the place I’ve reached in the book, I haven’t understood the motive.”

“Hitler’s motive?”

“Yes. That’s to say, there’s all the usual stuff about the Jews, the vermin, and the cancer, there’s a kind of paranoid person who believes in all those things — which, by the way, poses a certain problem, because if he’s insane and honestly believes that the Jews are a deadly danger, then from the legal point of view at least, you could argue diminished responsibility. On the other hand the book presents his so-to-speak rational calculations with regard to political interests, and quite impressive political manipulations, especially after his relative failure in the 1933 elections, but all this doesn’t add up to anything. In fact I hardly learned anything new from it. What I’m trying to tell you is that the book is actually banal: a kind of primary textbook for students who need to be provoked. Basic history for the lazy.”

“And the first person?”

“What about it?”

“It doesn’t bother you that Hitler speaks in the first person? Didn’t you feel it was terrible to read ‘I’ when that ‘I’ is actually Hitler? The first person acts to create identification.”

Oded thought for a moment; it was clear that until I asked the question it hadn’t occurred to him.

“The truth is that I didn’t feel like I was reading about Hitler,” he concluded in the end. “I don’t know how to explain it, but that Hitler somehow wasn’t Hitler, not that I’m presuming to know who Hitler really was. So his father hit him and for some reason he brags about it. So he loved his mother and she died in agony and she had a Jewish doctor, so what does that prove? There could be all kinds of people who had things like that happen to them.”

I thought he was finished, but he had something else to say, and in order to say it he had to put our son down first.

“Look, I don’t have to explain to you why I was tempted to read it. I thought it would help me to understand something, you know, about that man and everything you went through.”

“Yes?” I tensed.

Oded lowered his gaze and slowly rubbed his thighs. “Well, you know, because the author is a total pervert, somehow I expected his book to be full of perversions too.”

“Yes?”

“From the little I know about history, he had enough material to base all kinds of pornographic descriptions on. The rumors about the single testicle,” he blushed, “problems with normal functioning, obsessions, never mind, it doesn’t matter, there are all kinds of theories, you know, but as far as I could tell, there’s nothing like that in the book. It’s true that I haven’t finished reading it, but in the chapter I did read, he talks about some woman, Geli Rampal, he describes her as some chaste childish nymph who goes into the forest with him, and then, right after that, he blathers on endlessly about the purple velvet armchairs that he wanted to buy with her. Purple velvet armchairs! Can you imagine?”

“Yes?”

My clipped responses only increased his uneasiness, and nevertheless my husband persisted like a diligent schoolboy. He went on and on describing the book, and it seemed that his embarrassment prevented him from leaving out anything in the review he had prepared for me. My tenseness didn’t go away completely, but at the same time I was overwhelmed by a kind of weariness that turned my “yes” into a mechanical murmur. It seemed that my previous wild laughter had exhausted all my wakefulness. Oded went on at length about the niece Geli Rampal, the affair of whose suicide wasn’t solved or given any explanation for in the book, and at this stage I was hardly listening. While my husband unburdened himself by talking, my eyelids grew heavy, and it was only with an effort that I kept my eyes open until he finished coming clean. I understood his need to tell me about his plunge into Hitler, First Person. I myself would have insisted on his not hiding anything from me. And at the same time, the longer he went on, the more I wanted him to get it over with and let me go. Yachin, who was teething, had worn me out during the day — a good reason to be exhausted. But why didn’t Oded get to the point? He told me. I got it. We were done. Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t we done? How long was he going to go on lecturing me after he himself said that the book was boring. If it was boring, why didn’t he stop? Why drag it out and mull it over.

I went on nodding. I went on muttering “yes” whenever I surfaced to listen. I remember the word “songbird” and after that something about suspect witnesses and that Hitler was well known as a cunning liar, and in any case you couldn’t believe a word he said; and something about a statue of a horse, and about horses in general, but maybe I’m confused because why on earth should my husband have presented me with horses.

“In short,” he said after shifting here and there, “it’s a bad, shallow book out to create a sensation, but there’s no German porno in it. And if I hadn’t known it was written by a pervert, I never would’ve guessed.”

“Yes, I understand.” Sleep was already taking over me completely, and I still had to put Yachin down in his crib and lead myself to our bed. How was I going to drag myself there?

Aware of my situation at last, Oded stood up and pulled me to my feet.

“All I can tell you is that if I imagined that the book would help me understand something, I was wrong; I don’t understand anything about that man.” I should have asked him who he meant by “that man,” but I was overcome by a fit of yawning and the pressing need to surrender to the tide of sleep and sink into the depths. Which is what I did. I allowed my husband, purified and clarified, to lead me to the bedroom. He put Yachin to bed and joined me. And enveloped by the clean white smell of the salt of the earth I slept dreamlessly till morning, and in the morning we spoke no more about the book.

Hitler, First Person was not translated into Hebrew in the end and it soon disappeared from the shelves of the bookshops. And nevertheless, it happened that people who knew my maiden name asked me if I had any connection to Gotthilf, the historian or author: hadn’t there been some kind of scandal? Remind me, what was it exactly?

Years before the appearance of the pigtail-sucking Alice, I already knew that a partial truth was more acceptable than a lie, and I always answered: “I think he may be related somehow to my father, but I’m not really sure”—and changed the subject.

The book disappeared from the shelves in the bookshops, but not from the bookcase in which Oded had buried it in his office, and from which it came back to attack me six years later, after it had already faded from my mind.

This happened during the Passover holidays. Yachin was then almost seven and Nimrod had already turned five. We were in Spain. Chemi had decided that the family needed and deserved a vacation, and to the delight of all concerned he chose to take us to a charming hotel on top of a hill overlooking the Costa del Sol.

The weather was pleasant, Oded spent hours with the boys in the pool, Yachin was already able to hold himself above water with an energetic dog-paddle, and I, who don’t know how to swim, spent the days reading, wandering around the village, and dozing in the mild warmth of the sun.

I was just a little drowsy when Menachem appeared in shorts and a shirt, set a chair beside my sunbed, looked down at my exposed face, and asked me the question about your-connection-to-the-historian-Gotthilf.

“To my regret, he’s apparently some kind of cousin of my father’s,” the sun gave me an excuse to cover my eyes. “Sorry, one more relation I have no cause to be proud of.”

My reply did not stop him, and he went on to ask me what I could tell him about the man.

“Hardly anything, in fact. I know that his mother got him out of Vienna at the same time as my grandmother escaped with my father, but my grandmother came to Palestine while they, I think, emigrated to England. What was his mother’s name? Hannah, I think.”

He was more experienced than I was in conducting interrogations, or perhaps he didn’t mean to interrogate, but simply fastened his teeth on a subject he found of interest.

“And all those years you didn’t have any contact with him? That’s quite unusual, especially with people who suffered the common trauma of being refugees. None of the other members of the family, I understand, survived.”

“I think he visited Israel once,” I sank further into the artificial darkness of my arm. “I don’t remember exactly. Maybe there was something like that. I think there was. Perhaps it was when I was already in boarding school.”

“Interesting,” he observed. The sounds of splashing and warning cries together with mild rebukes from my husband rose from the direction of the pool. “Interesting,” his father repeated and put something down next to my thigh. “In any case, I’m curious to know what you have to say about this. I found it in my library in the office.”

Menachem had the old-fashioned habit of wrapping the books he was reading in paper, so as not to stain them with his fingers — he had a collection of bookmarks too — and so, when he set the book down next to me and I finally opened my eyes, even though I should have realized at once what it was — for a moment I failed to do so.

“You’re the expert on literature in our family, so take a look and let’s hear your verdict.”

With my face to the sun going down over the sea beneath us, I picked up Hitler, First Person and opened it.

“You want me to read it now?”

“Why not? At least have a look for a few minutes. As far as I can see you’re not reading anything else at the moment. I’d like to hear what you think.”

I could have told him that I didn’t want to read about Hitler. I could have claimed that the book wasn’t suitable for holiday reading and that he hadn’t brought us to the pampering sunshine only to thrust us into the darkness with Hitler. I could have said all kinds of things to get out of it, the only problem was that I couldn’t. Anyone who has once dwelled in the Garden of Eden will forever fear being cast out. And among the inhabitants of the rose-tinted heavens there must be more than a few fearful souls of those who, even in their previous lives were braver than me. Anyone who has tasted the honey of the leviathan and the milk of the pomegranates, will be terrified at the mere thought of exile. And only because of the fear of the flaming sword turning every which way, only because of my cowardice and my dread of the turning flame, only because of this and for no other reason I went on holding the book in my hands, and saw myself as compelled to read it.

•

Menachem went on sitting beside me, paging through a magazine, and appeared to be waiting for me to present him with a speedy report, and I stood up and raised the back of my sunbed. As I stood there I saw Oded coming out of the water, and carrying Nimrod quickly toward the showers. Yachin ran after them, and nobody came to me with a question or a complaint or a request for a kiss on a place that hurt.

The painted clay pots of plants hanging over the bar gleamed in the sunlight: the ladybugs painted on them, red against the yellow, were as big as the painted flowers. A pair of hotel employees walked past behind us chatting in musical Spanish: the tone of their voices was enough to tell me that that they’d finished work for the day and were on their way home. A third worker slowly and patiently unrolled a green net over the blue of the pool.

Chemi’s imperial, bald head shone. He pored over his magazine with his lips closed, and in profile he looked like a statue of a man poring over a document. Menachem is the only person I know whose lips are never parted: neither parted, nor pursed. One lip rests on the other in perfect, unquestionable order. Once he had instructed me to read, he turned to his affairs, taking it for granted that I would do what was expected of me.

I learned to read at the age of four, and I read as easily as breathing. I have a BA in literature; in my prehistory I managed to write seminar papers with half a bottle of alcohol in my belly. I told myself that there was no reason I would not be able to read these pages that didn’t belong to this place, or to me, or to Hitler, this text that didn’t touch anyone or anything, and that I certainly would not allow it to do so.

I put on my blouse and skirt, again picked up the book wrapped in brown paper, and sat down to do as I was told.

The text opened with a boastful sentence. The narrator bragged that he had looked into depths where no one before him had dared to look. From there he launched into a description of a vision he’d had: an apocalyptic scene in the style of a science-fiction comic, or a description of killing fields in the World War I.

In November 1918, the speaker is in a convalescent home in Pasewalk, recovering from the effects of a gas attack — or perhaps from hysteria — and, blind as Tiresias, he prophesies the destruction of the world. Carcasses of horses. Scampering rats. Dogs falling onto piles of bodies. Steam rises from spilled intestines, steam rises from the earth, and everything is pervaded by an obscure evil.

Laughter rings without stopping in the narrator’s ears, the poisonous ringing prevents him from sleeping at night, and he realizes that the laughter is the laughter of the Jews, and that the evil ever changing its shape is the Jews.

With this realization his vocation is revealed to him. From his earliest childhood he knew that he had a vocation, and from this moment his mission is clear to him: to choke the laughter.

The style of the writing seems portentous to me, bloated by the excessive and repetitive use of adjectives. My meager acquaintance with original texts written by Hitler did not enable me to determine whether the text in my hands was attempting to copy his style. I turned the pages. The narrator speaks about what he calls his “natural love of beauty.” About experiencing the magnificence of the church festivals as a choirboy, about the sublimity of snowy mountain peaks, certain statues, and buildings. Almost three pages are devoted to his prodigious loathing of wood carvings, which is his opinion should all be burned.

I skipped to the “charms of friendship” with one August Kubizec, and the “monkey cages” of the schools that suppress the spark of genius in their pupils. The style had changed, and the hero now came across as a sensitive, rebellious boy, something along the lines of a Holden Caulfield kicking over the traces and protesting against suffocating adult hypocrisy.

More ambitious and robust than the hero of The Catcher in the Rye the adolescent boy confronts his father’s iron will. He longs for the transcendence of art, the splendor of the opera, exalting torrents of music, and wherever he goes his horrified ears are infiltrated by the shrill, discordant voices of the Jews, which he, like Wagner, finds unbearable.

I went on, skipping forward and backward. Wherever I turned I found a narrator different from the one before, and with every new page the adjectives I had decided only moments before would describe my impressions of the text to Chemi became irrelevant.

Somewhere in the patchwork of the text I found myself in a green meadow strewn with flowers where an elegant and aristocratic lady was riding a white colt. And a little further on an elderly housekeeper appears, also aristocratic, her hair sprinkled with white. The angry adolescent is now replaced by a romantic novelist of an old-fashioned kind, and for a few pages it seems that this unbelievably archaic tone is taking over the story.

This impression lasted until the affair of the niece, where I stopped skipping and read right through.

She is a poor, fatherless teenager, and he, recently released from prison, carries her off to his eagle’s nest. The canary receives private lessons and learns to sing. The pure voice of the young girl as she practices her singing at the end of the corridor enchants the hero, and on his return from his travels he occasionally finds the time to accompany her on a musical instrument.

One day the exquisite bird grows hoarse, and the doctor is called in to examine her and diagnose inflammation. Up to now everything seems more or less normal for the genre, if you ignore the identity of the first person narrator, as I succeeded — almost succeeded — in doing. But then, at this stage of the story, the narrator takes the flashlight from the doctor, and curious to know what lies hidden inside the golden canary, he too insists on looking inside. He takes hold of the seated girl’s chin, shines the flashlight into the depths of her throat, and discovers a moist, gleaming tunnel spotted with white, apart from which there is “nothing there.” There is nothing there. And since there is nothing there, nothing remains to distract him from his mission to purify the bloodstream and save Germany.

Oded didn’t tell me about this scene. Perhaps he skipped it, perhaps he didn’t understand its significance, and perhaps he read it and understood and decided to spare me. I put the book down and covered myself with the towel.

“So what does the literary expert say?” Chemi took off his glasses, ready to listen.

The last pages had numbed my ability to produce new adjectives, and this is apparently the reason why I answered weakly in Oded’s words: “It’s banal,” even though as far as I was concerned there was nothing banal about the last scene. To this day I don’t know if it was based on any historical source, or if this event of looking into the flesh and the subsequent conclusion that “there’s nothing there” was concocted from start to finish in the author’s black box.

“Banal?” the tone told me that I had to hurry up and rewrite my report. And to make himself clear Menachem added: “This abomination seems banal to you?”

“That’s what your son said about it. That was his impression,” I defended myself. But what is perhaps permitted to the son is forbidden to the daughter-in-law, who also happens to be related to the author of the abomination. Relationship by blood demands a far more vigorous denunciation, of a kind that will differentiate sharply between the daughter-in-law and the abominator.

“Oded’s right, that’s to say, in the sense that this text doesn’t tell us anything new,” I squirmed, “in the sense that it seems to be written for ignorant high school students who are too lazy to read history. But the attempt itself, the writing itself, the pretension itself — that’s sick. The whole thing is so sick and so repulsive that I’m sorry I even touched it. It’s sick.”

Ignoring my feeble hints, whining tone, and huddling underneath the towel, Menchem picked up the book and got ready for the discussion he was intent on having. “So you can’t tell me anything about this man?” he examined me again over his glasses.

“I’m sorry.”

“Because if you ask my opinion, what your father’s cousin did here is a hundred times worse, a thousand times worse, that what Nabokov did in Lolita. I’m surprised that you, someone who understands literature, didn’t make this comparison yourself.”

“Nabokov?”

“Nabokov. Because what is Lolita if not the justification of a pedophile and a rapist?”

It took me more than a minute to digest this entire sentence. Because what I heard at first was only “the justification of a pedophile and a rapist,” and the words “pedophile and rapist” threw me for a loop, and made me think that Menachem either suspected or knew.

In the days when Elisheva and I were going insane together in our basement apartment in Talpioth, my sister developed a fantasy of being transparent: it seemed to her that all her privacy was leaking out, and that everyone who passed her could read her thoughts and see what was going on inside her. A feeling just like this took hold of me when Chemi started to talk about Lolita, because where did he get “rapist” from? Where if not from my own mind?

The next morning I was already able to tell him that he was making a big, if common, mistake in his reading of Lolita; that the book was pervaded by a consciousness of sin; that the utter ruin of Lolita is conveyed through the unreliable narrator, and that the reader together with Humbert Humbert are clearly aware of the fact that there is no restoration and that atonement is impossible.

That morning I already had the strength to get into general and comparative literature, but at that private moment next to the pool, what I mumbled to him was: “But Hitler wasn’t a rapist.” I imagine that he looked at me as if I were an idiot: I’m not certain, because under the threat of the flaming sword I couldn’t lift my head and look him in the face.

“Fortunately for us,” said Menachem, “the author of this abomination doesn’t have one thousandth of the satanic talent of Nabokov. Just imagine if a really talented writer had written Hitler’s autobiography.”

“What does he want from me?” I wailed to Oded about two hours later, when we stood in the bathroom getting ready to go downstairs for dinner. “Just because I was once a Gotthilf, I have to prove to him that that crap makes me vomit? What does he expect me to prove? That I’m not a Gotthilf?”

Oded put a finger on his shaving cream mustache to signal me to lower my voice so as not to upset the boys.

“Apart from which,” I went on in a lower voice, “even though your father is the nicest person in the world, let’s not forget that he’s a lawyer.”

“What’s that got to do with it and how is it relevant?” Asked my husband without taking his eyes off the mirror. I didn’t know how it was relevant, but once I had begun, I went on unburdening myself, letting the words take over. “It means that he’s not exactly Mother Theresa, either. Anyone would think that all the clients he represents are saints. What gives him the right to interrogate me like that just because I’m. .”

My husband steadied his chin with one hand and with the other shaved off specks of foam, while setting the record straight for my benefit: Possibly, in my sensitivity, I had read his father’s intentions correctly, or possibly not. And perhaps Menachem, who as I well knew had a lot of respect for my opinions, honestly wanted to hear what I thought about a book that had shaken him to the core. He often asked my opinion on books, after all. Oded was sorry for the unpleasant experience I had endured, and he was especially sorry to know that he could have spared me if he had only done the obvious thing and thrown the book in the trash instead of putting it in the bookcase in the office.

“And as for Mother Theresa, nobody is Mother Theresa, maybe not even Mother Theresa herself. Lawyers, in the nature of the profession, represent all kinds, that’s true, but to the extent that I know my father, and to the extent that I know myself — neither of us is cut out to be a criminal lawyer.”

I sat down on the lid of the toilet, and from there I raised my eyes to the handsome profile of my attorney.

“Do you think I’m completely crazy?” I asked meekly when he appeared to be finished.

“An interesting question,” he shot at me. “I’ll have to consider it.”

“But do you think you’ll still want to go on being with me?”

“Be with you? Let’s see, I need time to think about it, but after the boys fall asleep I’ll definitely check it out.” He patted his face smugly with a towel, obviously pleased with himself and the charms that had enabled him to silence the howls of a madwoman so efficiently.

I imagine he said something in the course of the evening to his parents, or at least to his mother. Presumably he reminded them that any reference to the subject of my family upset me and “brought back the tragedy.” Because after dinner my mother-in-law drew me outside for a breath of fresh air, and when we walked down the steep street she linked arms with me and said: “Menachem can sometimes be so tactless. Mostly it happens when he gets carried away by some intellectual question. When he gets started on one of his hobbyhorses he can be as inconsiderate as a child, even though I don’t have to tell you what a kind-hearted man he is. Over the years I’ve learned not to take it to heart. In married life it’s sometimes best to keep quiet and overlook things.”

— 8 -

My husband said there was no going back, that we had to look to the future, that the river would flow where it wanted, but the two of us would go forward together.

“There’s no going back,” my husband said to me after the bottom feeder had phoned me and sent an email to his office. He raised his chin and directed my eyes to the horizon, and all that was missing was a brass band playing a march in the background, so enthused was he by the future.

After he finished singing me his song about our future, my boy-husband of the beetling brows went to take a shower, while I went on sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea and a mental image of a vice squeezing my head.

It was the second month of the Not-man’s stay in our house, on a fine Saturday morning in the middle of winter. My mother came into our room and asked me to put on “something nice” and come down, because we were all going to have our photo taken with Uncle Aaron: and would I please hurry up, before the sky clouded over, and not detain our important guest who wanted to get back to work.

I didn’t put on anything nice, but I went out to the garden as I was bidden. The endless fuss with which my parents surrounded our guest embarrassed me, but to be honest I have to admit that part of my embarrassment stemmed from the thought of how we must look to him. His manners were exemplary, but the hint of a curl in his lip sometimes made me wonder whether they weren’t too perfect, as if he were playing a part and mocking us with a parody of a gentleman of the old school. Justice and honesty oblige me to admit that the supposed mockery hurt me, and that his opinion mattered to me. If I lie about this, I am liable to give the impression that I was wiser than my sister. I wasn’t wiser than her, and on the few occasions that I met him, I was stupid enough to try to impress him with my cleverness. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and in my need to make an impression I was not so different from my mother. Among other things, I bragged about having read Kafka, and after he made a few remarks about “The Penal Colony,” I found the story and sat down to read it again through his eyes.

Our mother sat on a cushion she had placed on the damp seat of the swing-bench, and he on a cushion next to her, his legs stretched out in front of him, his heels dug into the ground to prevent any rocking. My mother was wearing one of her fancy ensembles, a white dress with a white striped jacket; all that was missing to complete the picture was a frilly parasol. I don’t remember what Elisheva was wearing, she was standing and waiting for me, fiddling with dad’s Leica camera. Our father wasn’t there. Perhaps he had already had his photo taken. Perhaps he had popped into the office to answer the phone. My sister’s hair was loose and combed with a neat part down the middle, a pink flower stuck crookedly over her ear: perhaps it was a pin, perhaps a blossom plucked from one of the vases in the dining room. It’s hard to remember. All I remember is a flower, and my guess is that our mother decorated her like this in honor of the photograph and our uncle.

If I had told Oded this, he would presumably have said that maybe I was right and maybe I wasn’t. My sister liked dressing up, and among her treasures was a collection of pins, mainly enamel lapel pins: a Bambi, a giraffe, a glittering black cat — like little toys. So perhaps she had a flower pin too, and perhaps she stuck it in her hair on her own initiative.

At first I was summoned to the swing. When it appeared that the sun was behind us and threatening to spoil the photograph, we got up and stood under the cypress tree, and then our mother said that with the rhododendron behind us would be prettier, and we moved to the flowers. Looking bored with all these consultations and moves, our uncle complimented our mother on her eye for aesthetics.

We arranged ourselves for the photograph: man in the middle, mother on one side and daughter on the other, as demanded by both family and aesthetic considerations. And while the photographer focused the lens, the man put his arms around the mother and the daughter.

I won’t say that he felt my breast. While it was happening I couldn’t be sure. His hand groped up my ribs, a little above the waist, the fingers were outspread, and something, a raised thumb, moved and fastened itself under my armpit.

I’m not claiming trauma. I didn’t experience any trauma, just a trivial and off-putting event. Every woman in the course of her life experiences ambiguous events of this kind.

My reaction to the thumb was instinctive. “Instinctive” I say; I latch onto instinct because I have no other excuse for what I did. Because what I did was this: I shook off his hand and stepped forward, took the camera from my sister, and said curtly: “I’ll take the picture.”

Our mother murmured “pity” and “souvenir,” but my voice and expression were the same voice and expression that forced my parents to let me go to boarding school and to pay my fees: on my face — I know — was the same expression with which I ignored my mother’s warnings that, if I left home, she would have a heart attack; the expression that even when I was a child would make her say ingratiatingly to the guests: “Sometimes that child frightens me.”

“I’m not being photographed. I’m taking the picture,” I repeated. And with these words I sent my sister to take my place.

And it could have been different. In retrospect it’s clear that there was a different way, and not only one but several. The voice that knew how to talk could have said different things. The body was free to go and not to take the camera or her sister’s place.

I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of this picture. I didn’t cause my sister to be raped, I know. It’s very possible that the abuse began before, and in any case, even if I hadn’t sent her into his hands, he would have abused her anyway.

My sister joined the line. She was photographed. I took the picture. That’s all that happened. A matter of seconds.

I never saw the photographs. I assume my parents had the film developed. When my father made haste to sell the pension, property that had been accumulated for years was removed or thrown out in a few days, and it’s possible that the evidence was thrown out with the garbage — in any case, what can you already learn from a photograph, and what can a photograph add to what I saw with my eyes?

Portraying an event that was over in a few seconds as a great drama is pointless, and in most cases is also a kind of lie: true betrayal creeps up slowly and lasts longer.

Traitors have hour after hour, day after day, in which they could choose differently.

Reality as it is, is never concentrated into one symbolic picture, and focusing the eye on a single picture is nothing but a literary device; an impudent sleight of hand, just like directing our attention to a bit of dust so we won’t notice the other dirt.

No, I won’t exaggerate the significance of this event or inflate its symbolism. It’s true that after Oded told me about the intrusion of the snake, this picture stuck in my mind, that’s true, but the mind is a capricious organ, and one of its caprices, one of its associative twists, certainly doesn’t account for the entire unfolding of my plot.

Be that as it may, this was the picture I thought about, this was the one that stuck in my mind, and by the time Oded, fresh and pink, emerged from the shower, I knew what I had to do.

“I have to talk to Elisheva.”

Tired from the day’s work and the scalding water he likes to shower in, my husband confirmed I might be right, if that’s how I really felt, and somehow it seemed to me that he hadn’t understood what I said. “We have to warn her,” I added, “if he found us, he might find her too. These days you can find anyone.”

Only about an hour later, when his breathing turned into the breathing of sleep, I realized that he still hadn’t understood, and I said out loud: “What I meant to say is that I’m going to go see her in America.”

— 9 -

After my sister met her redeemer, converted to Christianity, and married, we lost contact. In the days when I was living in my lair in Nahlaoth I didn’t even have her phone number, and it was only when I got married myself that a tenuous relationship with big intervals in time came into being between us.

In order to maintain the kind of telephone relationship I’ve had with my sons since they went to America, there needs to be common ground on which news can be exchanged: and the new Christian continent where my sister lived in her new incarnation was too far for me to be able to relate to it.

There was nothing that could be taken for granted between us, not even holiday greetings. Should I call her on my New Year? Was it still in some way hers? “Passover and Easter are the same thing,” she promised, but how did I know when Easter fell, and what did you ask a sister preparing for Easter: do you buy ready-made harosset or make it yourself? And what was the point in talking about harosset in the first place? I didn’t want to talk to her about harosset and most of the time I didn’t want to talk to her about anything else, either. We had talked enough: the months when her demented ravings had held us in their grip, before she left for America, had apparently exhausted my strength to listen to her, and my life was full of other voices demanding my attention.

In later years, when the boys were already older, Elisheva, who from childhood had experienced difficulty in writing, discovered email as a means through which she was able to express herself in text. And since then every few months I would receive a well-written composition in English, whose lower margins were decorated with deer footprints. The person who composed these decorated compositions was a complete stranger, but in one of them I was informed of the birth of my niece Sarah, and this was already after it had seemed that my sister and her Barnett would not bring any children into the world.

Elisheva wrote that she was blessed, and that an entire lifetime would not suffice to give thanks for the grace of this fertility of which she was certainly unworthy. But even before the birth of Sarah she would enthusiastically list the blessings showered on her by God in every letter: the beauty of the autumn foliage in Illinois; a member of the church congregation who had ridden his horse into a truck and escaped unhurt. A checked jacket of Barnett’s that had been lost and found by a stranger who became a friend — the hand of God was visible in all these things.

Under the personal supervision of a benevolent God and a benevolent husband, it was clear that my sister was in no need of my supervision, which had in any case been found wanting. I sent a box full of expensive gifts for the baby, my sister replied with exaggerated expressions of gratitude, and I deleted her reply just as I deleted everything else, and went back to tending my vine.

Nobody will ever know what my sister intended to do on the evening she locked herself in the girls’ showers on base 12 with an Uzi. She probably didn’t know herself, and I — who was away that week on a class trip, and only found out when I returned — definitely don’t know.

I wasn’t there during the four hours she locked herself in before she was persuaded to give up the weapon, I wasn’t there when she was hospitalized, I didn’t visit her in Kfar Shaul, and I wasn’t present at the session when she told our parents about the abuse.

My role in this part of the story is that of the person who wasn’t there.

Months later I heard from a graduate of the boarding school who was an officer on the base that “there were actually warning signs, the kind that are hard to ignore.” Other girls complained that Elisheva didn’t shower, that she slept in her uniform, that she was maddeningly slow, and that it wasn’t fair for the whole unit to be punished because of one soldier. “It was hard to ignore,” the officer said, but in the end everyone overcame the difficulty and succeeded in ignoring it.

She was nineteen when she enlisted. Height one meter fifty-eight, weight that rose with stubborn persistence to over eighty kilos. My parents attributed her obesity to the pressure of studying for her exams, and promised anyone ready to listen that in the army, with new friends and new experiences, her weight would go down of its own accord. I didn’t even take the trouble to understand and relate to all this. I was busy with my own affairs, I had matriculation exams to prepare for. When I did go home my sister didn’t stink. We shared a room, so I should know.

When it comes down to it, I don’t think she has suicidal genes either. I believe that even in the swamps of hell, my sister never stopped hoping for a redeemer who would come and purify her. Later too, when both of us were locked into her madness, and I, in order to save my life, pushed her into the hospital — what she really wanted was to survive.

Our parents deserted, each in his own way, but our widowed father did not abandon his daughters without a plan: the one discharged from the army with disability benefits would continue her treatment and recover, perhaps she would even start studying something practical; whereas the other, who had skipped a grade and was in any case not yet old enough to be conscripted — she would register at the Hebrew University and get a degree. It would be a shame for a mind like hers to go to waste in the army, and as a student with an apartment of her own and a tidy sum of money set aside to pay for her studies — there was no doubt that this daughter at least was set to enjoy her life. How many students, after all, were as privileged as she was?

Our father found us a quiet three-and-a-half-room basement apartment in the neighborhood of Talpioth, and flew off to Italy — two years later he decided to let me know in an airmail letter that, prior to moving to Italy, he had not been in contact with Gemma and, in fact, in his terrible grief, hadn’t even remembered that this former pension guest lived in the city of Verona, where he’d since settled down.

“A marvelous coincidence brought us face to face among all the thousands of people at the entrance to the arena,” he wrote to me. “And even then I, like Job, doubted whether I was fit for a new life.” I assumed that he was lying, but at this stage I had already cut myself off to such an extent that I only wondered why he had even taken the trouble to lie to me.

Later on he latched onto Elisheva’s “new life” in order to justify his right “to devote the few years I still have left to try and create a little corner of peace and beauty.” After that I no longer replied to his preening letters with their curlicues and circles for dots. I was revolted by his grandiose handwriting just as I was revolted by the words themselves, and I hoped that he would give up and leave me alone.

I registered in the English Literature department, and in this, and only this, the prophesies of the deserter came true: the clever daughter did indeed enjoy her studies. I enjoyed sitting in the lecture halls in an atmosphere of order and knowledge. I read a lot more than I was required to. I loved the excitement of the carefully chosen words, and no less the theories that calmed the storm in a completely different language.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” I would declaim when I stood up and when I sat down and when I went on my way. “The art of losing isn’t hard. .” I declaimed until it was almost an article of faith.

But Elisheva increasingly failed to acquire this faith. At first she stopped going to both her group therapy and her new psychologist. The first excuses she made were still couched in acceptable terms: a stomach ache, the worst heat wave in years, an ingrown toenail that turned every step into torture. But then, gradually, she stopped going out of the house, and her reasons grew weirder and weirder: People could see through her. The day was too fine. The light was too bright, everything was like glass, and through glass people could see everything. Didn’t I understand? There were types. Like colors. Luckily I, her sister, was made of blue, because blue was the outside, the outside was blue and you didn’t notice blue against the blue.

As soon as she started talking like this I understood that she meant that people could see the abuse on her, and I couldn’t avoid the thought that in a certain sense she was right. Slow, dragging her feet, blinking even more than she used to, her large breasts emphasized by the sailor collars or the lace collars in one of the exotic costumes my mother had bought her, her fleshy shoulders making a kind of little hump under her blouse — the word “victim” was branded on her. And back when she still left the house from time to time, and went to the grocery store, visions of horror appeared before my eyes — a van slowed down next to my sister and started following her, a gang of teenagers accosted her and barred her way, at first as a game and then as something else — that kind of thing. And sometimes, because of these hallucinations, I went with her.

She spent her days in front of the huge television set that had accompanied us from the pension, watching children’s programs. Staring at the screen, eating bread, bread and hummus, bread and chocolate spread. Slicing the loaf, and then as if absent-mindedly, rolling the slice into a kind of doughy sausage, dipping it in the spread, and cramming it into her mouth. Whenever I went out she would remind me in a fawning tone to bring her more bread, and even when I filled the freezer with loaves of bread she didn’t stop. “What if you don’t come back, what if you can’t come back. .” she would reply when I asked her for a logical explanation.

Every departure from the apartment and every return to it became a nightmare. Her eyes blinked at me anxiously from the armchair when I picked up my bag. Puppyish joy flooded her when I came in the door. Her attempts to please me. Her unintentional spite.

Once it occurred to her that if she dyed her hair black like mine, the black would help her. The idea became fixed in her mind, and after she repeated it again and again, I went and bought the dye and helped her color her hair. That night she went to sleep happy smelling of chemicals — shampooing with a lemon rinse failed to get rid of the smell, but at least she went to sleep and didn’t keep me awake all night. She said she knew that in the morning everything would be different. And the next morning the same terrified eyes accompanied me to the door.

Most of the time I didn’t know what to talk to her about, and I would babble on at random about whatever object came into my head: cheese with holes, cheese without holes, why did cheese have holes? Years before I invented Alice, I learned to inflate the figures of a bus driver and an old lady with a parasol, until they turned into colorful plastic dolls, which I brought my sister as a gift.

But sometimes I would go straight from the door to my room, and lock myself in until the next day.

For a few weeks I tried to read out loud to her from the list of required reading for the English Literature course. Comic passages from Chaucer, Shakespeare’s sonnets, secular and religious poems by Donne, Dylan Thomas.

“After the first death there is no other,” I pronounced. Elisheva didn’t move, but my blood turned cold. I couldn’t determine whether this conclusion of Dylan Thomas’s poem was a promise or a consolation or a threat, but it was clear to me that it wasn’t suitable, and in the days to come I was more careful and selective in my readings.

One night I read to her in a flat voice intended to put the poetry of the “Ancient Mariner” to sleep.

“Water, water every where / And all the boards did shrink / Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink.”

My voice was so dull that I myself stopped paying any attention to the words, and I went on intoning Coleridge night after night until in the end, not the same night, but out of the blue, one day in the kitchen, my sister informed me that “she didn’t really like being read to.”

A few days later, when I had finished swallowing the insult, I started reading my lecture notes to her, to which she didn’t object. It even seemed to me that she was taking an interest, but I never knew for certain. And all the time I was afraid that my sister, the student with difficulties, was only trying to please me.

Her passivity drove me to despair. Most of the time she only spoke back to me when I hurled strong words of my own at her. And nevertheless one Saturday, when I was absorbed in writing a seminar paper, she came into my room and without any logical connection, asked if I knew whether Schopenhauer was “someone real who lived.”

“Who?”

“Schopenhauer.” She had always had an excellent memory for names.

“He was a German philosopher,” I summed up everything I knew for her. “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. No reason,” she replied noncommittally, and went back to the living room to knead her bread into dough. In spite of her disinterested tone I decided to see in the surprising question evidence of some mental awakening, which provided me with a reason to linger for an hour and a half in the library the next day. In the evening I brought my notes from “The Great Philosophers” into the kitchen and tried to tell her what I had learned, but she looked so blank and miserable that I stopped immediately.

“Why did you ask me about Schopenhauer if it doesn’t interest you at all? I was stuck in the library for hours just because of you.”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“Never mind about forgiving you. What exactly got into your head?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

I looked at her, and only then, at a criminal delay of nearly twenty-four hours, I realized who it was who had entered her head. Because where else could she had heard about Schopenhauer? Certainly not in the children’s programs on television. I knew, and I didn’t want to know.

“All right, only next time don’t ask me about things that don’t interest you. If you’re not interested — don’t ask.”

“Sorry. .”

•

But there were also, of course there were, happier moments. One afternoon when I came home I discovered that she had prepared a surprise for me, she had taken all my trousers out of the closet and hemmed them all at exactly the right fashionable length. Or another time, when she embroidered a purple flower on my jeans by request.

One day she questioned me with untoward severity about the people I was seeing, and added that she hoped that I was “keeping company only with good people.”

Sometimes she came out with funny, infantile sayings, such as: “You’re a bread tiger. You’re a tigress that goes out to hunt bread for us,” and then for a moment it seemed the it was all a game, that the two of us had gone back to being little girls again, and she was only playing, and in a moment the game would be over.

But for the sleepless nights, perhaps I would have lasted longer than I did. But for the sleepless nights and for the malicious obsequiousness with which she innocently tortured me. How beautiful I was, how beautiful my hair was. Why wasn’t I happy? Wasn’t I happy to be so beautiful? Wasn’t I happy not to be “one of the downstairs people?”

She referred frequently to “the downstairs people,” and in the beginning I thought she was referring to our neighbors in the ground floor apartment opposite us. But of course she wasn’t talking about them.

My sister never explained to me who the “downstairs people” were, as if it were self-evident to us and to the rest of the world, just as we all understood what a lamp was and what a table was.

“The upstairs people” were at liberty to go out whenever they wished, while even on the clearest and finest of days “the downstairs people” were sentenced to sit in a three-and-a-half-room basement apartment with the blinds down and watch old episodes of Sesame Street.

Wasn’t I happy that from the day I was born and by my very nature I had not been sentenced to bring down the blind, or, more clearly, in words she never pronounced: Aren’t you happy you’re not like me?

And there was something else, and perhaps it was this that really finished me off: my role as the one who had believed her from the outset.

Weeks after the meeting during which, under medical confidentiality and the protection of the psychologist, Elisheva told them what had happened to her, my parents had not yet made up their minds whether their daughter was telling the truth. Whereas I, after hearing their abbreviated account, believed her at once, and later on, after she was discharged from the hospital, I found a way to prove it to both of them and to rub their faces in the truth.

Until I rubbed their faces in it, they said things like: “Not that we doubt what she says, but still, it’s a fact that to this day no one has complained about him.”

Or: “What sense does it make for a respectable man of his age, a man who never lacked for women — what sense does it make for such a charming man to molest a child?”

Things like: “From what we saw, and we can only judge from that, he treated her like a little lady. Don’t you remember the orchid? And the way he stood up whenever she approached the table to serve him? And how patiently he tried to help her with her homework? Perhaps he exaggerated a little, and she was confused by his gentlemanly European manners? Perhaps she misunderstood him and began to develop all kinds of hopes and fantasies? Perhaps we sinned by thoughtlessness, by not imagining how a young girl like her was liable to interpret that kind of attention from an interesting man. We should have told him to behave differently with her. That was apparently our sin, that we didn’t say anything to him.”

And mainly they kept repeating, to each other and to me, pious declarations such as: “We shouldn’t be in a hurry to judge. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial and we won’t hold a kangaroo court here. Maybe all kinds of inconceivable things happened, but sometimes it takes time for the truth to come out. We hear what she says now, but in the future, after she gets well, who knows. .?”

But I, who made my judgment immediately and who had no doubts, succeeded in proving the truth of the one fact that they both tended in particular to deny.

This is what I did: Elisheva didn’t remember, or perhaps she didn’t know the name of the doctor to whom her rapist had taken her to perform an abortion. About which they both said to me: “What doctor would do such a thing without the father and the mother? Why would any doctor take the risk? And supposing something so shocking and inconceivable actually happened, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that he would have taken her to some out of town clinic? Because according to what she says it took place here, in Jerusalem.”

My sister couldn’t tell us the name of the doctor, but one Saturday when the two of us were alone in our room, it turned out that she remembered the place where he operated on her perfectly well. Not the exact address, but a more or less exact description. Not a stone house, the outside wall covered in pale yellow stucco, a little street into which the taxi had turned from Palmach Street.

I took the Yellow Pages from the office desk, found a gynecologist who worked in Hachovshim Street, and in my father’s presence, without our mother or Elisheva, I called the clinic. I told the secretary that it was Elisheva Gotthilf speaking, and that I wanted to make an appointment. “I already consulted him once, about a pregnancy,” I added, and in the same breath I asked her to check and see if my medical file was there.

That’s what I did, trembling all over, that’s all, no more. And what I did was enough. Although even after the existence of the medical file was proved, they could, on principle at least, have gone on contorting themselves in additional doubts and hesitations. They simply no longer had the strength to keep up their denial.

When finally dispelled their doubts, our parents started to blame each other for what they called “our calamity”—“Your cousin,” “Your refusal to sell this accursed place and get the girls out of here,” “Your blindness,” “All the times I begged you to sell. You know yourself how I pleaded with you.” And so on, until Erica fled the scene with another bout of sickness.

I imagine that it was the confrontation with the truth that pushed her into the arms of the Digoxin. And I don’t care. After years of hypochondria, at least she died of a genuine heart disease.

The important thing is that Elisheva couldn’t avoid sensing their disbelief. Even though they never expressed it to her in so many words. And no less important is that from the outset she received my explicit and unconditional belief. I was the one who believed it all immediately, and this being the case, it was up to me to go on believing her: even when she talked about people who were blue, and days when the dangers outside were particularly grave.

Her wounded eyes never left me, begging for my belief, and I was incapable of betraying the belief that she begged for. This is my explanation for what happened in me, I have no other, and what happened was that gradually I began to see reality as if through her eyes, and even when I was sitting in class at the university, far from her, my eyes would seek out the “downstairs people” and separate them from the others: the boy with the big backside who jiggled his legs until the desk shook and couldn’t stop; the girl whose facial skin was stretched in the direction of her ears by hidden screws. How did they dare go out on this fine day and come and sit among us?

I beat around the bush, sat myself in a classroom among strangers, and accused myself of trivialities, simply in order to put off admitting the most shameful thing of all. And the most shameful thing of all, the most despicable, is that drop by drop I absorbed my sister’s beliefs until I began to see her as she saw herself, and for longer and longer stretches of time I put her in a different category from myself, as if she had been born into another race. She said that she was ugly, and I looked at her and saw ugliness. She believed that people like her shouldn’t go out, and I was embarrassed by the thought of walking next to her in the street and being associated with her.

As sleepless night followed sleepless night I found myself turning into a creature made of blue, and into one of the “upstairs people.” I began to see myself as being of a different substance, destined for a separate fate, naturally and essentially different from her sister-by-accident. It was a fact that I had been endowed from birth with a quick mind and a firm resolve. A fact that I knew how to say “I’m not having my photo taken.”

I didn’t see things like this all the time. There were also times of tender compassion and times when I was seized by a terrible, wrenching pity. There were definitely moments when I succeeded in conjuring up memories of a hand holding mine, and an older sister who insisted on bathing me. But these hours and moments grew fewer and fewer, and my pity for myself — sentenced as I was to live at close quarters with someone of her kind — increasingly filled the space left by that other pity. I was revolted by her flip-flops decorated with plastic flowers, by the movements with which she shook crumbs off her clothes, and by the way she came too close to me in the kitchen. I loathed the electric light in the apartment, the stupid sound of the television, and the pleas that stuck to me even when I went out. It happened that I cruelly refused to tell her when I was coming back.

And once it happened that I came home very late. It didn’t just “happen.” “Happen” means “happenstance.” I deliberately came back hours late.

I don’t remember how much vodka I downed in order to steel myself for this piece of cruelty, but I know very well that when I was already back in the apartment I crawled on all fours to the bathroom to vomit my guts out, and that the frightened Elisheva followed me like a shadow with a damp cloth and a glass of water. I told her that I had been attacked by a virus on my way home, “it’s nothing, it’s just a virus,” and she of course believed me, because in our folie à deux we believed everything and the deal was mutual.

On fine days, on the clear days when objects shine as if they’re under glass, on such days in particular I would imagine that I wouldn’t return to the crumb-strewn gloom; that I would run away, go to Italy to scream at our father, put my sister on a plane and send her to him like a parcel. But until I broke, for those ten months — is ten a lot or a little? — I returned and returned, because I couldn’t do otherwise. Today I say that my sister doesn’t have suicidal genes, and that all her madness was directed toward survival, but then — what did I know?

— 10 -

When I informed my husband of my intention to go to America to see my sister, he immediately took me into his arms, assured me of my worth and the worthiness of my decision, and promised while combing his fingers through my hair to accompany me on the journey.

On the basis of everything I have said so far about the two of us and our relationship, I could have pulled an Alice here, adopted her style and written this chapter accordingly. Some of you would no doubt have believed it. People like swallowing sugar-coated rubbish. But that’s not really the way things happened, and my husband’s reaction was rather different, although I found sweetness in it too.

We were in bed, I announced, “I’m going to see my sister,” and Oded put his hand on my thigh and without opening his eyes stated in the royal first person plural: “We’re sleeping now, not talking.” Even half-asleep he could be charming, and I smiled into the darkness of our bedroom and remembered to count my blessings, which included lying in my own beautiful home next to my own unruffled Prince Charming. I kissed his warm shoulder and let him sleep till morning.

Oded was then busy writing a complicated appeal — Menachem had begun to cut down on the hours he spent in the office — and in the morning he asked me to wait until Thursday at least before coming to any decision about the journey. “If you feel that you’re ready for this, then obviously you should go, but after so many years when you haven’t seen each other, the decision can wait for another three or four days.” And I waited, not until Thursday, when he came home exhausted in the middle of the night, and not until Friday, when we had house guests, but until the Eden of Saturday afternoon, after the guests had gone. I didn’t mind waiting. I was determined to go, and once I had made up my mind, making generous gestures to match my husband’s didn’t present a problem.

We sat in the living room; it was getting too cold outside, Oded smoked his Saturday joint and outlined the compromise agenda he had worked out for me. As much as he longed to get rid of the disturbance in our lives, my practical husband realized that getting rid of it completely wasn’t an option. What was on the cards was only to distance the disturbance and minimize it until his wife saw things in a different light. With innocent cunning he tried to raise me to the heights of people of his ilk, people who were capable of seeing things in perspective.

Oded was obviously worried about my mental state and about what the meeting with my sister was liable to do to me, but he didn’t talk about me, only about her, that it would be a mistake to suddenly shock and upset her by sounding an alarm that might prove to be groundless. He refrained from explicitly mentioning my own evident panic.

“She’s your sister, it’s natural for you to want to see her, it would be wonderful if you could improve your relationship with her, I’m one hundred percent behind it. But what do we know about her situation right now? We both hope and believe that she’s fine, but we should take into account the possibility that if we come crashing down on her, from one day to the next, it might unbalance her.” He snuck in the plural almost casually, “if we come crashing down on her,” and without further discussion I accepted it.

I thought about the flight, about all those long hours in the air, I saw myself on the plane snuggling into that “we,” and felt relieved. Once I had accepted the “we” my husband had slipped into the subject, other elements to be taken into account immediately made their appearance: with Menachem working fewer hours, Oded couldn’t abandon the office until November at the earliest. We had sons in the U.S., and since we were already going there we should take the opportunity to stay on a while and visit them. “Perhaps you should write to Elisheva and tell her that we’re coming to visit the children, and that we’d be happy to drop in on her on the way. That would be best, and then when she answers you, we can get some kind of indication and sense what her situation is. Let’s talk to the boys and find out what their plans are. The four of us could meet somewhere, maybe Nimrod will want to come to Yachin in Seattle, we should check out the dates, maybe it’ll even work out so that we can light the first candle of Hanukkah together. They say that Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” With talk like this, full of good sense and good taste, his feet on the coffee table, my husband redrew my trip as a family reunion with our sons. You had to know him as I did, to grasp that he was afraid. Not of the intrusion of the snake — in the land of the salt of the earth, a Black Belt isn’t afraid of a snake — but of the women who, in spite of their charms, and perhaps this is their charm, tend to react without perspective.

I missed my sons, I longed to see my three men together, and even though I went on believing that I had to warn Elisheva, my sense of urgency was somewhat diluted by other feelings.

“Should we phone and wake the boys now, or should we let them sleep a little longer?” I asked. I moved the wine bottle and put my feet up on the coffee table next to my husband’s.

•

Now that he had redirected the flight onto a routine tourist track, the trip began to take on the aspect he intended.

I sent my sister an email, and an hour after I sent it, an overjoyed deer-track decorated response arrived. We should come for as long as possible. She was delighted, Barnett was delighted, Sarah was so excited at the prospect of meeting her aunt and uncle at last. God had blessed the three of them. May God bless the two of us as well. They had a spare bedroom in their house, but she and Barnett had decided to give us their bedroom, which was bigger and where we would be more comfortable. Did Oded have any dietary restrictions? Did I think he would like to go fishing? There was a beautiful lake a two-hour drive away, in November the weather was chilly, but it seldom rained, and if we dressed warmly we might be able to go to the lake anyway.

Oded remarked that perhaps it would be better if we found somewhere else to stay: “Look for some motel or nice bed and breakfast, if you can manage it without insulting her, I think we’ll feel freer.”

Elisheva wasn’t insulted, or if she was she didn’t show it. She sent another mail with a list of small hotels in the vicinity, which didn’t boast of many attractions, but had one spectacular nature reserve, and also a fine little historical museum of the area. She was attaching a link to its internet site. Did I think we would like to visit it?

This was an Elisheva I didn’t know; apparently it was time for me to get to know her. I began to think that perhaps there was a degree of truth in Oded’s approach, and perhaps because the time was ripe, perhaps because of that too, I began to look forward to the trip.

•

Nimrod informed us that he would be able to drop in to his brother’s for a weekend. Yachin said that he would be able to take the Thursday and Friday off from work.

Nimrod asked us to bring him coffee ground with cardamom from Danon’s and not from the Old City, and Yachin said that we didn’t have to bother bringing egg barley. Today you could get anything in Seattle, and in any case Mom shouldn’t have to cook on her vacation. Did we ever have the chance to eat Vietnamese food?

The days filled with preparations before the trip. In the course of the years Oded and I had often flown together, to see buildings, people, art works, and animals. Planning the trip was always part of the fun, and as I planned and consulted and shopped and packed, the routine activity in anticipation of a well-earned holiday flooded me with an unexpected joy.

Should we fly via Atlanta or via Chicago? Land in Bloomington or Champaign? “Let’s spend a fun day in Chicago,” said Oded, and for the sake of this fun shortened our stay with my sister even further. “We’ll take a look at Millennium Park, get some sleep, and in the morning we’ll rent a car and get to their place relaxed and refreshed and without jet lag. Can you check out hotels in Chicago too?”

The serpent didn’t disappear. He only settled into the dark of my belly like a parasite, and until close to the flight, with this sleeping parasite in my belly, I went on pursuing my usual activities. Housework and gardening, agreeable and less agreeable guests. Regular maintenance of my face and my body.

For a few days I sat in the National Library, and on the basis of the material I collected, I sent Alice on a three-column excursion in the wake of fictional and semi-fictional researchers into the Dead Sea Scrolls. People said that they were among the best columns I’d ever written. And a polite researcher from Bar Ilan University even wrote to me with a request for bibliographical references to the “riveting character of the man from the Freemasons,” a character who was purely a figment of my imagination.

I brought the letter to Friday night dinner to entertain Chemi, and the patron of the braid-sucker from Alaska was as delighted by the fantasies of his protégé as I had hoped.

“You gave your Freemason yellow eyes,” he remarked, “but since nobody in the real world has yellow eyes, I would have expected the Doctor from Bar Ilan to understand that he was a fictional character. Interesting how people, even serious people, think that there is some secret about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The truth is that Alice’s story was so successful that I myself almost began to believe that the Scrolls were written in a secret code.”

Did we have windbreakers? We needn’t worry if we didn’t. My sister and her husband would be very happy to let us borrow theirs — what size was Oded? If we preferred to buy our own, we could find them here on sale. Barnett didn’t like shopping much, but the little one adored shops, and if I liked, we women could shop till we dropped. What did I think?

What could I think? A foreign sister was showering me with a foreign love at the rate of two or three emails a week, as if I had done her nothing but good during all those years we were together, and as if we had never been together in our lives: she didn’t write me a single word in the past tense.

Elisheva wasn’t faking, no such doubt entered my mind for a minute, my sister didn’t know how to fake, but what did I know about this American Elisheva? The tone of her American voice didn’t sound as if it was addressed to me, presumably it was addressed to someone, but I had no idea who this person might be.

I was afraid of the past, naturally I was afraid, and I was very afraid of what I would have to tell her. And at the same time, as the emails accumulated, with all the diligent little plans, the historical museum and the nature reserve with the Indian name, with all the details about the hotels and the sales, my responses became increasingly soured by a feeling that was surprisingly similar to insult.

Above the decorative deer tracks my new sister was revealed as an organized woman. She went into detail more than I did. Her writing was orderly. If from time to time she still made spelling mistakes, her computer corrected them all.

Wasn’t this what I wished for? Wasn’t this exactly what I hadn’t even dared wish for?

My new sister didn’t remember my betrayals and the unkindness of my youth when I walked with her in the wilderness. She didn’t resent me for all the times I abandoned her, and she didn’t resent me for my collapse and the relief I obtained in the wake of the collapse.

What else could I hope for?

When I made up my mind to go and see her, as soon as the decision was made, I understood that I would have to prepare myself for different possibilities. But love like this wasn’t one of them.

— 11 -

My collapse at the end of the period of the three-and-a-half-room apartment took me by surprise: like waking up in a hotel room without knowing why you were there or what had happened on the way. Until that afternoon I hadn’t taken a collapse into account, and I had no idea that I was about to collapse.

It wasn’t even an oppressively fine day. Just a rather dull day, neither winter nor summer.

I finished listening to my lectures and went to the administration office to hand in an application for a grant. They told me that the woman whose job it was to deal with the application forms would be back from lunch soon, but she didn’t come back. I remember that her dereliction of duty gave rise in me to an illogical rage, but by the time I stopped in the center of town to buy myself a packet of burekas, the rage had subsided. I had only one beer in an old bar in Rivlin Alley. I intended to take a bus home, but when I was already on my way to the bus stop, I suddenly felt I couldn’t go on and I had to sit down for a minute.

I sat on the doorstep of a watchmaker shop on Ben Yehuda Street, and I went on sitting there, unable to get up. I didn’t feel weak, I wasn’t ill and I didn’t faint, that wasn’t it. I couldn’t even say, “I don’t feel well.” The only thing I know is that my body detached itself from me, as if some thread through which the will transmitted its commands had snapped. At first, I remember, there was even something interesting about it, and I regarded the black sport shoes stuffed with my feet as a curious phenomenon — I thought that if I stopped paying attention to the phenomenon, the disconnection would go away. After a while I did indeed stop paying attention, and in hindsight it seems that I stopped thinking altogether.

Evening fell, I was aware that it was evening, shops closed, the watchmaker locked his door behind him and walked past me. Groups of entertainment seekers crowded the street. Near the square people were playing salsa music, and I went on sitting. Just sitting.

Any Jerusalemite coming to the center of town will always bump into somebody he knows, and at some stage, I have no idea what the time was, a friend from the prehistory of my boarding-school writing club walked down the street, and stopped next to me. She asked if everything was alright, and I answered with a “yes” that sounded alright to me, but she went on standing there anyway. Later on she told me that I didn’t stop crying, and that was strange too, because I didn’t remember any activity from my tear glands.

A friend of my friend happened by, they lifted me to my feet — once I was standing it transpired that I could walk — and together the two of them led me to the apartment of a third, an acquaintance who lived nearby; just a few buildings from there, a stone’s throw, the fourth floor overlooking the street.

I climbed the stairs without difficulty, and when they asked me again what they could do to help me, I was already able to speak, and replied that I needed a phone because I had to get in touch with the municipal emergency services. This was the extent of my collapse. I, the competent, resourceful person who had figured out all on my own how to track down the gynecologist who had performed the abortion on my sister, said that I needed the “municipal emergency services,” because my logic told me there was an emergency here and that it was urgent to contact the authorities in charge of dealing with it. And as I pronounced these words I felt a flicker of satisfaction with myself and with the logic that had started to operate again in spite of the emergency.

They gave me water, a lot of water, and by the time I finished drinking it I already knew that no municipality was going to rid me of my problem or take care of it, and I gave back the glass, thanked them kindly, and said that I had to go now. The three angels who had come to my aid wouldn’t let me go. They went on questioning me until I found the right way to put it and confessed that there was a big problem with my sister; they fearfully inquired what kind of problem, and when I said “a psychological problem” their relief was evident. Not terminal skin cancer, only a mental problem, and there were people with expertise in solving such problems.

We settled in to tackle the matter in a purposeful manner. The name of the last psychologist who had treated my sister was Tamar Cohen, and in the telephone directory we found at least ten women with this name. We called the Talbiyeh mental hospital, and the person who answered the phone was unable to help us. We phoned the Kfar Shaul hospital, and the person who answered the phone there remembered my sister, and helped us get in touch with someone in Talbiyeh who knew how to contact Tamar. All this took some time, and during this time the angels made toasted pita bread and tea with mint.

It was already quite late when I got hold of my sister’s last therapist at her home number. Strengthened with tea, toast, and a sense of practical purpose, I was able to tell her that my sister was deteriorating, that I was alone with her, and that I was lost. And the three angels surrounding me nodded, confirming the correctness of my words and actions.

Until the therapist asked me if I thought there was a danger of suicide, I had no clear idea of what I hoped for from this conversation. Until this moment, the voice in the earpiece was only one of the concerned voices surrounding and supporting me and redirecting me between them. But with this question I was shocked into a hope that up till then had been out of bounds.

And from the moment that the hope struck me, from the moment it penetrated my mind, all thought of any other outcome became too dark to bear.

I didn’t want to lie, but I said: “Our mother killed herself. Apparently she committed suicide. My sister must’ve told you.”

This was the first time I ever spoke this sentence. In public. In the coming, crazy years, I used it to stun and shock until it lost its edge and I turned it into a joke, but the first time it wasn’t addressed to an audience but only to the one person who could save me from the dark.

There were more questions and more answers, and then came the sentence I was dying to hear: “Can you bring her to me? We may have to consider hospitalizing her, for observation, at least.” I explained again that there was no way I could make Elisheva leave the house. And I added: “And I can’t be there all the time. I’m not with her now.”

The therapist asked me to wait a moment, she went to consult her diary full of other people’s troubles, and came back and said that she could come the next day, if we could make it early, at half past seven in the morning.

Three orderlies had to take hold of my sister in order to carry her to the car. The psychiatrist who signed the committal order had to inject her in the arm. I rolled up her sleeve. .

That’s not how it happened.

Tamar, the therapist, and I persuaded her to admit herself to hospital for observation, and Elisheva — who didn’t want to go to hospital, tried to promise us that she would improve and that she could already feel signs of improvement — went quietly in the end. She packed her bag herself.

No three orderlies had to hold her by force, there was no need for an injection, none of that happened, but it could have happened, it could have, because if three stalwarts had been needed to distance her from me and to distance me from the dark — I would have let them do it. I think she knew it.

My sister was persuaded, and all the persuasion took place in the morning. That night, when I returned to our basement flat, I had only enough courage to tell her that both of us needed help, and that tomorrow morning her therapist would be coming to see us. I asked her if she wanted an omelet and if she would like to watch television with me, and when we were both sitting in front of the television screen, I muttered that I was exhausted and pretended that my eyes were closing against my will. And I sat like that until I was overcome by real exhaustion and really fell asleep. A few hours later, when I woke up, I discovered that she had covered me with a blanket.

My sister’s final hospitalization lasted less than a month, during the course of which I visited her three or four times a week, and hardly stepped foot in our three-and-a-half-room basement apartment. I spent a few nights in my benefactor’s apartment in Ben Yehuda Street, and after that other places were found.

After she went into the hospital Elisheva cooperated willingly with all her therapists, and when she came out her spirit had been renewed: not by the professional staff, but by another patient.

Barnett was in Talbiyeh for less than two weeks. That was apparently enough for him to rid my sister’s mind of all manifest traces of Satan’s presence and to instill in her the belief that he was the man intended to be her husband, and that she was intended — and therefore also worthy and capable — to be his wife.

When she returned to the apartment she no longer needed me and my presence. Barnett and his friends accompanied her when she applied for a passport and arranged for a visa.

The little I did was to buy her a suitcase, two days before she left. And after that we said goodbye.

— 12 -

The illusion of the family trip began to crack about a week before we flew. And at the same time the first mail arrived from Elisheva in which she made some kind of reference to the past.

My sister reiterated her excitement at the prospect of my expected visit, and said that she had been praying for it to happen for years, and that if it had been possible, she would have come to Jerusalem a long time ago. Many of the members of her congregation had visited Israel, some of them saved up and made a pilgrimage every year, and she couldn’t describe the strength they drew from it. And she also added that she hadn’t stopped loving me for a moment, that she and Barnett never stopped loving Jerusalem and speaking of it, and her words seemed to imply that Jerusalem and I were one and the same.

Both of them hoped that one day they would be able to visit, but they were still waiting for a sign that it was already possible. No doubt I understood that for Barnett Jerusalem was liable to be dangerous.

“Tell me more about your mysterious brother-in-law,” requested Oded. For some reason he appeared to be more worried by the thought of spending time with her husband than by the meeting with my sister, but I couldn’t tell him any more than he already knew.

Barnett Davis, a student of veterinary medicine at the University of Illinois, came to Israel with a group of evangelical pilgrims, and the holy city spoke to him. It spoke to him so loudly that he apparently started to hear voices. His initial symptoms were presumably attributed to religious exaltation within the bounds of the normal. But when the muscular round-cheeked blond man stood in the middle of Zion Square — not far from the place where I later collapsed, in the very same month — when Barnett stood there barefoot dressed in a galabieh, and prophesied about the city for two days straight, the members of his group decided that he had to be hospitalized.

Barnett was diagnosed as suffering from the “Jerusalem syndrome,” in addition to which he was also suffering from pneumonia.

The hospitalization was brief. When I met him he was evidently embarrassed by the whole affair, and to the best of my understanding he saw himself not only as having gone out of his mind, but also as a sinner led astray by the devil. “I let myself be blinded by my vanity,” he said to me. My loyal sister, on the other hand, saw things differently: “He was so full of that holy fire, that he couldn’t stand having clothes on his body,” she confided in me, and I, afraid of breaking the spell of the miracle that had been granted me, held my tongue and refrained from remarking that pneumonia gave you a fever.

The first time I met my future brother-in-law he came to our apartment alone. The second time he was accompanied by a couple of old ladies from his group — actually they weren’t old, they just had gray hair, but then they seemed old to me.

It took a few days for me to realize that this deputation had come to ask me for my sister’s hand. In the absence of other relations they hoped for my consent and blessing, and tried to supply all the information that a loving father and mother might have asked for.

Barnett’s father, a dealer in agricultural produce, and a beloved member of his community, had suddenly passed away when his youngest son was a child of ten. His mother, a respected member of her community, supported her four sons by managing a stable where people from the surroundings kept their horses. Two of the sons grew up to become doctors, a third became a farmer, and Barnett, as I probably knew, was going to be a vet. From childhood he had known how to get along with animals. He had learned to ride before he learned to walk, and he had always enjoyed excellent health. In high school he had been on the football team, and today he served as a volunteer assistant to the coach. The intended lived with his mother, a forty minutes’ drive from his university in Urbana. On Sundays, after church, he was in the habit of drinking a modest amount of beer, and outside the football season he spent a lot of time with those of his nephews who lived nearby: all three of them delightful children.

When they had finished introducing my intended brother-in-law to me, and thanking me for the wonderful tea I had prepared — that at least I did, made them tea — one of the ladies hesitantly approached the subject of religion. There were all kinds of Christians, needless to say, and they, as Christian women, were very well aware of the tremendous suffering, the terrible atrocities visited on the Jews in the name of our Lord. In their congregation everyone was very sensitive regarding this subject, and they never let anyone forget it. And so, even though they were Christians of a different kind, and she herself wondered whether those who had committed the atrocities were entitled to call themselves Christians at all, she would understand, understand perfectly, if I, as a Jewess, found it difficult to distinguish between one Christian and another. It would be inhuman and immoral to expect anything else.

I don’t remember what exactly I mumbled in reply, presumably that I didn’t judge people by the groups they were affiliated to, because what else could I say? But I do remember how the gray-haired auntie took off her glasses, wiped away a blue-tinted tear, and said that even though she shouldn’t perhaps say what she was about to say, she would like me to know that she, as a Christian, felt a great need to ask for my forgiveness.

In my embarrassment I blurted out that there was nothing to forgive, and immediately corrected myself and said that she was not among those who needed to ask for forgiveness, and certainly not from me. The auntie replaced her glasses, even though there were still tears in her eyes, patted the back of my hand, and thanked me with a gentle smile “for being so kind and so understanding.”

Politeness obliged me to thank them for their kindness to my sister: from the moment of her release from the hospital she had spent most of her time with their group.

Respect for my sister obliged me to at least make a show of reluctance to part with her.

But I behaved without politeness and without respect.

The five of us parted outside the front door. My sister went with the three evangelists to meet the other members of their group, and I went to hell.

I told Oded that what little I knew about Barnett, he already knew. “As far as I remember he’s rather short, much shorter than you are, that’s for sure. I don’t have a picture of him, but Elisheva sent a photo of Sarah this morning. Come and have a look.”

Sitting on a picket fence in denim overalls, shining wavy ginger hair and two front teeth missing — the little girl on the computer screen looked like the cheeky heroine of a children’s book, or the star of a commercial for vitamins. She was as cute as they come, but it was almost impossible for me to grasp that she was family.

My sister became pregnant with Sarah when she was already over forty. Without her saying it in so many words, I understood that she had had difficulties in becoming pregnant, and I guessed, perhaps wrongly, that the problem was connected to what had happened to her. Rosemary’s baby had been disposed of a long time ago, but the womb — so I imagined — had been damaged.

“Nice,” Oded said looking at the picture, and massaged the back of his neck. “In the meantime it all looks very nice.”

We told Menachem and Rachel that on our way to the boys in Seattle we would meet my sister, and on the Friday when we said goodbye, Rachel hugged me and carefully said that she hoped I would find my sister in good health and that we would have a good meeting.

And Menachem said: “Enjoy the boys and the trip, and come back to us soon. I understand that Alice is taking a break, and two weekends without ‘Alice in the Holy City’ is more than enough. In all the negativity of the weekend papers a person wants to find a ray of light as well.”

Two days before the flight, when I was downtown making final arrangements, I suddenly changed direction and completely cast off the illusion of the tourist vacation. In a last minute decision I went up to the men’s office, and after greeting the secretary, without waiting to hang up my coat — I slipped into the library.

When I left the house to do some last minute shopping for the trip, I had no idea that I was about to do an about-face, no such plan entered my mind, and only when I was standing in a children’s boutique to choose one more cute little garment for my niece, I was suddenly overtaken by a recognition of what was really ahead of us. Suddenly I couldn’t stand the illusion of sweetness and light and the pretense. Things are not what they seem, and collaboration with deceivers is a crime.

I left the pile of sweet little dresses and blouses on the counter, and got ready to prepare myself — and perhaps also my husband — to confront reality. I had been cocooned enough, I had let him cocoon me enough, and I couldn’t carry on like this.

Among the thick law books it wasn’t hard to locate the single paperback. It was still covered in the brown wrapping paper in which Menachem had covered it a few years before.

A moment after I took Hitler, First Person from the shelf, Oded entered the room. My husband immediately recognized the book, and the welcoming smile died on his face.

“What are you doing?” he blurted, and then: “Aren’t we done with that business yet?”

“What’s the problem?” I looked him in the eye. “We have a long flight ahead of us, you know, I need something to read on the way.”

My husband pulled up a chair and sat down on it with the ostentatious slowness of a long-suffering man. He was in the middle of the day’s work. They told him that his wife had come, he popped out of his office to say hello, and was greeted by her crazy bitch version, smiling coldly as if to say, “Go on, let’s see you handle this.”

“Be serious. Talk to me seriously: I remember how reluctant you were when my father pressed you to read it.”

“That’s true.”

“And you didn’t want to go on reading it.”

“No, I didn’t want to. But apparently I’ve changed my mind.”

“Elinor. . Elinor, do you really seriously believe that that book is relevant to anything?”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t it be relevant? What, don’t you think Hitler is always relevant?”

— 13 -

Flying is an inconceivable situation. When I sit in a plane, for moments at a time it seems to me that the movement of the metal through the air is nothing but a figment of my imagination. But precisely in this setting, within this inconceivability and between here and there, I succeeded in facing what had to be faced and doing what I should have done a long time ago.

The flight attendants served and cleared. Oded tried to make me read a new novel he had bought in the duty free shop. In front of us a baby cried and cried with earache. And I, strapped into my seat, the book on the tray in front of me, persevered in my task, even when we passed from light to darkness, and after the exhausted baby fell asleep, and after my husband gave up and switched off the light over his head and fell asleep.

I didn’t read page by page. Submitting to the order imposed on me by this first person was out of the question. But chapter by chapter, skipping back and forth, I got through it anyway, and I read almost all of it.

On a second and calmer reading, without Chemi breathing down my neck, I realized how wrong Oded had been when he described it as “history for lazy students.” Although it’s possible that he wasn’t really mistaken, and that he had wrapped the book in a disdainful definition simply in order to appease his wife.

No high school student could have learned history from this voice, which moved back and forth in time and mixed fact with fantasy. I am only familiar with the well-known bits of Mein Kampf, perhaps there were parts of this book that drew their inspiration from it, but I can say that it wasn’t a manifesto along the lines of Mein Kampf. And as a one-time student of literature, I was struck again, this time more forcefully, by the lack of stylistic unity.

The stream of consciousness spoke in different voices that changed frequently, as if in the absence of some fixed “I”: one minute it was that of a young boy gripped by self-doubt and criticism, searching for meaning, and sensitive to insult — the same Holden Caulfield with whom I was already familiar — and the next minute he was boring his readers with a bourgeois discussion of furniture. Certain paragraphs were sentimental to the point of parody — with the speaker unable to call simple things by their names — and others were full of obscenities. A pretentious philosopher gave way to a dry strategist, followed by a hurt child, a political cynic, an inspired Messiah, and a bully. Pedantry gave way to fantasy. The allusive dreams of a psychoanalytic patient were stuck onto speeches. An artist with a stereotypical sensitive and stormy soul was pasted onto an inarticulate, unfeeling brute.

The text was written in the first person singular, but the arbitrary changes of personality and style created the impression that it was not one but a number of people speaking, and therefore, in some sense, it was no one: a kind of entity that lacked permanence and solidity, that could be called by any name you chose to give it, that evaporated and evaded description by any fixed adjective. It wasn’t Chemi’s fault that I failed to describe the thing he put in my hands by the poolside that day on the Costa del Sol.

One of the many “I”s in the book suffers from an agonizing hypersensitivity of the senses: an ugly building, the discordant performance of a sonata, a stuffy office, all bring him to the point of fainting and the desire to put a bullet through his brain. But on the battlefield, in the stench of the trenches of the Western Front, the very same first person doesn’t smell a thing, and even brags about reading Homer and feeling quite at home.

Another “I” burdens his readers with surrealistic memories and visions of death: animal carcasses and grinning skulls pile up in heaps. Living people, corpses and inanimate objects are all mixed up together, and most of the characters have no names. In this part of the text, and perhaps in the book as a whole, there seem to be more inanimate objects than humans.

One lengthy vision of a woman’s body covered with “filthy snails” reminded me of something, and later on I remembered what it was: a drawing by Salvador Dali.

You couldn’t call any of the narrators a necrophile, because the morbid interest of the “I” is focused mainly on the moments preceding death itself. The death in agony of “my poor, dear mother” is described in banal generalizations, but from this description the monologue passes directly to the horrors of the spring offensive at Arras where the “I” lingers at length next to a dying soldier from his company. And by the light of a hurricane lamp he observes like a scientist the seconds when life retreats and “death conquers my comrade.”

The narrator hopes to see something there, some kind of revelation, he doesn’t know what himself, and when he gets up and stands over the dead body of his comrade, he realizes that “there is nothing there.”

This obscure conclusion is strengthened later on when the same apparent “I” goes on to observe dying enemy soldiers. He admits that the sight of their dying holds him spellbound. And years later, on the Night of the Long Knives, the narrator is unable to restrain himself from asking about the murdered men: did any of the executioners “see anything there”? The embarrassed interlocutor assures his Führer that nothing out of the ordinary was reported, and in the wake of this confirmation, the narrator is overjoyed, and confesses that he now feels as clean as a baby.

Looking into the void — says the first person — freed him from the cunning bonds of the devil.

“There’s nothing there,” the voice proclaims defiantly, and with the seductive swagger of a rock star he challenges his readers: “Who but me would dare to feel the pure terror of the void?”

Time and time again he fantasizes about clean ground and an unprecedented conflagration that would burn a thousand years and return its virginity to the soil. And at great length he prophecies a planet empty of human beings, where giant marble statues would take the place of the empty rotten flesh.

The first person decorated with a medal and two iron crosses is not afraid of being killed in battle, but for all his boasting, a constant dread of oblivion encircles him and threatens him like “a cloud of gas.” Mocking laughter accompanies the continuing erosion of the void, the laughter returns again and again like a motif, until ringing laughter, erosion, and rot all seem one and the same.

A few of the first persons endure undoubted suffering. The reader is invited to pity the lonely, beaten, and haunted sufferer: the defeated soldier, the failed artist shivering in his poverty-stricken shelter, and especially the child, who is of course abused. But the expected empathy diminishes with the rise in the self-pitying pathos, and evaporates in the sudden transitions from self-pity to satanic pride, crude hectoring, or tedious lectures.

The hero is as proud of his suffering as his achievements, and points out among other things that at moments when others are overcome by hesitation, he alone understands that the choice is between existence and extinction, and in his genius and “the exhilaration of being backed against the wall” is able to turn defeat into victory.

On a number of occasions he compares himself to Jesus: in one place he says that death had him in its grip like Jesus, and like him he was destined to rise again, to resurrect others and to purify the earth. And in the fifth chapter, if I’m not mistaken, he threatens to expel the Jewish speculators from the Temple with a whip, just like Jesus.

The whip is also a motif: failures spur him into action like a whip. His voice lashes his audience in the beer cellar like a whip. A whip is thrust down the throat of a reporter from the Munich Post in a scene that seems very realistic. And in another scene, no less realistic, he beats his dog with a whip because if you don’t master the dogs — the dogs will master you.

These are the whips I remember, but there were certainly more.

In one of the more coherent transitions the narrator, in his terror of the void, attempts to realize his existence in ecstasy. The ecstasy is born on the night when the boy “I” emerges from Wagner’s Rienzi with his “faithful friend” and unfolds his “visions” to him with Linz spread out at their feet. He knows that he is destined to lead, and draws his strength from the friend and the city beneath him. Years later, during a course on “National Thinking” this formative experience returns to him before an audience of a few people, later on their numbers multiply, first tens and hundreds and then thousands and millions, and the roar of their blood “crystallizes in my flesh” into a single spirit, and silences the laughter. From now on — the narrator threatens — he is the only one who will laugh.

Art is ecstasy and ecstasy is art, he states, and as artist-actor he continuously teaches himself methods to summon the spirit and lift it from peak to peak and thrill to thrill, until it reaches the absolute realization, which is also oblivion. Loneliness vanishes when the “I” and the crowd become one, and it sometimes happens that “I come to the end of a rally so bathed in sweat that my underwear is dyed by the color of my uniform.”

When he speaks of the mass rallies, the narrator ridicules the people he calls “the Jesuits,” who eat the flesh of their savior and drink his blood. In a series of cannibalistic metaphors he describes how the flesh and blood of the destined redeemer is not consumed, but on the contrary: he is nourished by his audience and sucks his strength from them, until their voices emerge from his throat as one voice and their dreams unite within him into one idealistic vision.

The first person sometimes appears at three rallies on the same day, and declares that he is never tired. Youngsters like “my dear Heidrich” sit around his table at night struggling to stay awake and trying to hide their exhaustion from him, while he, who is not deceived by their attempts, has no need to struggle: strength and movement are what create reality, and the strength that realizes itself in movement never tires and knows no mercy. It tramples those that stand in its way and grinds them to dust. One of the knights of his round table shows him a letter he received from a childhood neighbor, in which she pleads for mercy for her brother. Humanistic sentiment must be rooted out, is the leader’s response. Pleas for mercy are the cunning venom of the parasites, and must be treated like the poison they are.

Does anyone complain of the ruthlessness of the sun as it moves along its determined course?

That’s it. There were detailed, apparently reliable, descriptions too, of all kinds of political intrigues and maneuvers, and perhaps it was these that led Oded to describe the book as a textbook. I only encountered the word “rape” once: Europe could not be seduced with sweet words — wrote the first person — the bitch had to be raped. There was also some banal philosophizing, clichés such as: the morality of history is determined by the victors, and so on. I can no longer remember all the various incarnations of the so-called “first person,” on some of them I dwelled, others I glanced through. But overall, the spirit of the text can be summed up in what I have described above.

It was a monologue by Satan; it was his apologia, and it concluded with a reference to the sun. This text, which through the use of the first person tried to turn me and all its readers into Hitler, this thing that turned Hitler’s underpants into “my underpants” and stuck them to my skin — this thing was not written particularly badly, nor particularly well. It was beyond such literary judgments. When I closed it I could not immediately find a name for it, and then the word came to me, loud and clear: the thing in my hands was unclean.

The plane had already begun its descent when I finished reading. “That’s it. That’s all,” I said to Oded when he returned from the bathroom and threaded himself into his seat, glancing at the closed book on my tray.

But the pair of words “that’s all” can be pronounced in different tones, and I repeated them over and over, and ran my voice over the entire spectrum, without knowing what exactly I meant, and what “that” was and what “all” was.

The words came gushing out of my mouth in a range of different ways—“you understand, you get it, you get it that that’s all?”—until my husband put a silencing finger on my lips.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you decided to read it, I’m really sorry that you’re allowing that thing get inside your head, and now of all times. We already decided that it was complete garbage. I can see what it’s done to you.”

“You’re allowing” he said to me, assuming the existence of some other possibility. But it wasn’t me who created a serpent, and it wasn’t me who let it in to infect me.

“It didn’t do anything to me,” I said to him when he took his finger away. “Don’t you understand, that it didn’t do anything to me? That nothing got into me? You don’t understand. You can’t understand. Nothing got in, because it’s nothing at all, it’s empty. It’s like a vacuum. That’s it, that there’s nothing there.”

As I’ve already said, I had no idea what I was trying to say, but I know that with the words “there’s nothing there” I started laughing quite hysterically, and a few minutes later we landed.