Lies, First Person

— 1 -

My husband said that he would need a stop over in Chicago to rest before the drive. I assumed that Chicago was part of the tourist game intended to calm his wife’s nerves before being shut up in the car with her for four hours. Although I might have been wrong, and my salt of the earth was not so calculating in planning our trip, and all he wanted was to put off for a while the involvement with the religious cranks I was about to drag into his life.

In any case, neither of us had anything to complain about in Chicago. The woman who got off the plane laughing enigmatically found favor in the eyes of her husband, and Oded, as I have already said, always found favor in mine. Taking into account what lay ahead of us down the road, he suggested I book a room in the best hotel available—“If it’s only for one night, why shouldn’t we go wild?”—and I did as he said.

Five minutes after the bellboy left the room and shut the door behind him, I fell on the mini bar and straight afterward on the best of men. I was desperate to drown, and in my desperation I nipped the usual foreplay in the bud, until Oded rose up hard and shining to settle my mind, and then to settle it again, exactly as I wanted. I screamed for many waters to come and silence all the things that had no name, and my husband came and swept all the names away.

It was already evening when we decided that once we were already in Chicago we might as well go out to see the sights. And even when we went out and walked around we wanted no more than ourselves, our intoxication, and what we saw before our eyes, and we uttered only our own names and our names alone.

Oded, who had drunk only a little and whose delight in me knew no bounds, was not embarrassed even when I created a small scene in Millennium Park. A cyclist who had invaded the footpath came racing toward us and braked a few centimeters in front of me, and I grabbed hold of his handlebars with both hands and said right to his face and his dirty dreadlocks what I thought of him and his ilk. The stares of the passersby did no more than tickle me. I expressed myself in no uncertain terms and at length, and my husband made no attempt to stop me. My Black Belt stood beside me in silence, and after I finally let go and we went on walking he drew me to him and said only: “You know what, you’re dangerous. .”

A little after darkness fell we returned to the hotel, where we went on devouring each other with the concentration of people preparing for a great hunger.

Did we know that we were about to be expelled from the Garden of Eden? Something unknown and irrational — something unclean was invading our lives, and unthinkingly we tried to banish it by means of the irrational passion with which we were familiar.

The mutual conflagration died down in the morning, when Oded picked me up in the hired car at the entrance to the hotel; or more accurately I put it out myself with the aggressive coldness that overcame me and which I could not control.

I moved the seat back, preparing for the long drive ahead of us, pushed my bag under my feet, and asked in a casual, matter of fact tone: “Have you ever read The 120 Days of Sodom?

“Read what?” he asked, folding the road map and setting it in front of him.

“The Marquis de Sade.” The name, and even more so the voice in which I said it, made him turn sharply to face me. It was the voice revealed to him on our first date — perhaps not the first, perhaps it was the third — when I first told him about the rape.

“Why would I want to read something like that?”

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

My husband opened the map and folded it again. “I’m not interested in pornography,” he said dryly. “You know me. Playboy is as far as I’ve ever gone, and that only when it came into my hands in the army.”

“There are some people, learned people, who claim that he was the prophet of the twentieth century even more so than Kafka.”

“In what sense?”

“Relations based on power, power is all that matters, total oppression, the complete absence of morality and hope. There are professors who see him as the great prophet of the gulag and the extermination camps.”

“And that’s what you want us to talk about this morning? The gulag and the Nazis?”

I didn’t answer him: if he didn’t want to know, we wouldn’t talk. Fine. Nobody really wants to know, that’s the system, and there’s logic to the system. It exists for a reason.

“I understand that you have read it,” he said when we were already in one of the slum districts in the south of the city, on our way out.

“Read what?” I asked maliciously.

“The great prophet of the gulag and the extermination camps.”

“The Marquis de Sade. I may have read something once. A long time ago.”

I read The 120 Days of Sodom, large parts of it anyway, in the university library. I read it there. The book was on the psychology department’s “reserved” list, the ones you can’t check out, and I sat in the library among the well-meaning psychology students, and in the exhausting neon light I forced myself to read the volume that, according to the stamps on it, had seldom been taken down from the shelves.

I read The 120 Days of Sodom because the Not-man had forced my sister to read it aloud to him, and because she had difficulty in reading, he read it aloud to her. That’s why.

And mainly I read it because before he forced my sister, the Not-man almost tempted me to read it.

It was on one of my visits home, when with the encouragement of Erica and Shaya—“You know what our Elinor is studying now at school? They’re studying Kafka”—we entered into a conversation, he and I.

I was well aware of the fact that the remarks made in a loud voice when I joined the table were directed at the guests sitting at the next table, and intended to feed my parent’s self-esteem. I was aware of this, and the slightly amused expression on the face of the professor told me that he was aware of it too. The look he gave the high school student invited her to share in his amusement before the eyes and behind the backs and at the expense of the vulgar people who happened to be her mother and father.

He leaned toward me, singling me out from the others, and questioned me about what I was studying and what I thought about what I was studying. Shaya, I remember, tried to embark on one of his speeches about our-Israeli-education-system, but his cousin ignored him, and concentrated his attention on the clever daughter. He said that he was not familiar with the Hebrew translation of Kafka, and made some remark about translations into other languages. He asked me how I imagined Samsa as an insect — I shrugged my shoulders and replied “an insect”—and then he turned to the table at large and told them that Kafka had forbade any illustrations of the metamorphosis, because he wanted his readers to imagine the insect for themselves, each according to his own nightmares.

He said that he had another question for Elinor, and proceeded to ask me a question that I had not considered: was there any sense, in my opinion, in which “this petty clerk, Samsa” deserved the fate that befell him? I clearly remember this sentence with the “petty clerk” and the “befell him.” The Not-man, perhaps I have already said, spoke impressive Hebrew. Embarrassed, I replied, “Obviously no one, even if he’s a petty clerk, deserves to turn into an insect,” and as far as I remember he took off from my reply to the Marquis, whose writings I might be interested in reading one day, and in whose opinion virtue could not expect a reward: in this world of ours the very expectation of a deserved reward was foolishness.

I think that the conversation was along these lines, perhaps it was a little different, but these were the main points, and once the name of de Sade was mentioned my mother raised the threads of her eyebrows and said: “Really, Aaron, our Elinor is still too young for such things,” and Aaron replied: “Your mother is right. Your mother is always right,” and smirked apologetically. And then, as if to relieve her embarrassment, he went on to play the buffoon and thumped himself a couple of times on the chest and said: “Forgive me, I am at fault. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.” And my mother giggled.

If he had informed me that he had works by the Marquis in his room, I would have followed him upstairs to borrow them. The Not-man was interesting: far more intriguing than a Jesuit monk and an acrobat. And that same week, when I returned to boarding school, I was foolish and innocent enough to go to the school library and search the shelves for a book by the French writer de Sade.

If I had been asked, if I had spoken to anyone about it, I wouldn’t have been able to point to any resemblance between Hitler, First Person and The 120 Days; no resemblance but for the piles of bodies heaped up by their writers: dead bodies in one, and copulating bodies in the other.

A different reader would have put them in two different categories. But I, even though I could see that the monotonous recording of the Marquis was obviously different from the elaborately detailed zigzags in style and consciousness of the First Person — nevertheless I sensed — more than sensed, it was as if I knew — that a single hand, a single entity, stood behind them both.

“Hand,” I say, and “entity,” but it wasn’t really a hand. And it definitely didn’t “stand.” More accurately: a kind of buffoonish essence that seeped and soiled, a single fluid presence stealing in, changing one face for another.

Hitler, First Person remained in the garbage can of the O’Hare Airport, where I dumped it with a demonstrative flourish, to my husband’s relief. But the person wasn’t a person, and it had no boundaries, and the filth I had read penetrated and remained, with me and in me. I thought that I had to stabilize myself and confront the filth rationally and with my eyes open.

I thought: today I’m stable, stable and rational. Today it’s different.

The more I thought about the First Person, the less rational my thoughts became, and the more difficult it became to fence them in or hold them in check. And it was impossible to explain any of this to the clean-shaven profile of the man by my side. Did I honestly believe that the Not-man was pursuing me and might still harm my sister? That’s what the profile would have asked, that’s the question my husband put to me, repeatedly and tactfully, and this rhetorical question is one that I wholeheartedly reject, because it has no right to exist.

This man, this First Person Hitler crushed my sister and destroyed what little dysfunctional family I had. But dysfunctional families have the right to exist too, and it’s the only one I had. He came and crushed, and from the moment he reappeared, he haunted me, and I was indeed pursued.

— 2 -

It took us close to an hour to find our way out of Chicago, and when we got onto Route 57 I covered myself with my coat and fell asleep. Even during the most difficult periods, sleep was always available to me and it always came to me easily. One small step in my mind and I was already on the escalator carrying me to sweetness.

Oded kept quiet. I kept quiet. We drove south into plains of brown fields. Dry stalks of cut corn stretching to the horizon. Huge trucks. Road signs, a passing tractor, a bird of prey — in this yellow-brown limbo there was almost nothing for the eye or the imagination to take hold of. What could I do but sleep? I was nasty to my husband, and I knew that he would restrain himself and forgive me. The sun faded and paled beyond the flat gray expanse of clouds, and shortly before I fell asleep I was deceived into thinking that it was a full moon shining in the morning sky.

My sister lived in a town with a musical name, Monticello—“Limoncello” Oded called it jokingly — and not in Monticello itself but nearby, in a place we would be hard put to find by ourselves. After discussing it with my husband, who was confident of his ability to navigate anywhere, I arranged with Elisheva for her and her Barnett to meet us in the hotel where we were to stay, in a different town, a twenty minute drive from their home.

About thirty minutes after I fell asleep, Oded woke me up in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in a quasi urban landscape. “Did you sleep a bit?” he asked in a relaxed tone and put a warm Styrofoam cup in my hand.

“I slept a lot. Did I miss anything?”

“Plenty. Especially a lot more corn. So, we’re in Urbana, and because we got stuck on the way out of Chicago, we’re a little behind schedule. If your sister is a punctual person, then they’re already waiting for us at the hotel. I thought you’d want to wake up before we got there.”

I rested my head on his shoulder. He removed the lid of my drink, and I smelled coffee and Styrofoam and the smell of my good luck’s neck.

“I think everything’s going to be fine. Even the weather is on our side in the meantime,” said my good luck.

In hindsight I find a nice literary logic in the fact that my sister and I arranged to meet in the lobby of a hotel. We spent our childhood in a pension, many of our private experiences took place in its public space: wasn’t it natural for our reunion to take place against the background of a similar décor? Wasn’t it apt for the sisters to fall into each other’s arms in a hotel lobby, and for their tears to mingle in precisely that place? Isn’t that a pretty picture? My little pigtail-sucking Alice would have made a meal of it, and no doubt ended my story on this charming note. How nice it would be to conclude it like this, a decorative ending that massages the glands and gently strokes the heart. But to hell with the pigtail sucker from Alaska, and to hell with literature. The literary logic is false and the charm is a lie. I can definitely say that if Elisheva had lived in a normal place, Oded and I would have driven straight to her house, and that the reunion would have taken place there, not in any hotel reminiscent of any childhood pension.

Elisheva was a punctual person, and when my husband and I wheeled our suitcases into the lobby, she and Barnett were already waiting for us. At first I didn’t see her, that is to say I saw someone, but not exactly my sister. All I took in was a flash of recognition and a rapid, familiar blinking, and a second later her coat exploded into mine. I think we stood there for quite a long time, in a bear hug, and I think that I closed my eyes. And when we disengaged our arms my sister said: “Oh my God, I’m so happy to see you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, my Lord, I’m so blessed.”

That’s what my sister said. In English.

When we disengaged our arms, I suddenly didn’t know what to do. Barnett and I shook hands. The men shook hands, Oded went up to the reception desk to get the key, and Barnett insisted on taking my suitcase and accompanying us to our room. Did we want to rest? No need, the drive was very comfortable, apart from the exit from Chicago.

My brother-in-law suggested that the four of us go in their car, and although I still wasn’t seeing very well, I could see that my husband had no desire to let go of the wheel. Somehow it was decided that we would take both cars, the men in one and the women in the other, and only when Elisheva opened the door of the gleaming pick-up for me, I realized that she was going to drive, my sister drove, and in fact how could she possibly live here without driving? Of course she drove, and moreover she was going to drive me.

Even before she took off her coat I noticed the change in her appearance, not exactly the details of the change, but mainly in what her body gave off. The woman who took the car keys out of her pocket was so different from the girl who walked down the corridors of the Pension Gotthilf with the bunch of keys in her hand, that they hardly seemed to be the same person. Without her coat I could see that she had grown thinner, and I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed right away, because her face, framed in a stylish bob, had lost its roundness. I, who in my childhood had refused to eat, had grown rounder after my marriage, and after the pregnancies and births, in my twenties, I had started to wear a bra. Whereas my sister in the meantime had concentrated herself into a smaller body. Only her breasts under the blue sweater were still heavier than mine.

I complimented her on her appearance. “You look like a swimmer,” I said and it was true, because her thick shoulders had taken on an efficient firmness that they didn’t have before.

My sister smiled a gentle, grateful smile, which was familiar to me, and to my relief she began to speak to me in Hebrew. She said that while she didn’t swim, she did quite a lot to keep fit: most of the people here engaged in some kind of activity, and Barnett had encouraged her in this, he was so supportive. So with all this support, she had started to run, at first only very short distances, later more and more, and today she could no longer imagine her life without it. Last Saturday Sarah’s class had gone out for a country run, parents and children together, and she was so glad that she could take part and that her little girl had no cause to be ashamed of her.

Barnett’s mother, she added, would take Sarah to school today, and later on, in the afternoon, Granny would bring her home to meet her uncle and aunt at last. I had no idea how excited the child was.

The men overtook us in the hired Chevrolet and disappeared around the bend in the road. The colors of the town we were passing through departed from the dreary uniform yellow of the road leading to it. Giant green trees rose high above the houses they dwarfed. Other trees blazed in autumn colors. The pavements were decorated with the red and orange of the fallen leaves, and a few orange pumpkins left over from Halloween grinned at us from doorways. Next to the street corner where the men had turned off, a huge plastic Santa Claus swayed next to a reindeer made of extinguished light bulbs lowering its head to the lawn.

“I have so many things to talk to you about,” my sister said, and the old blinking gathered new wrinkles under her eyes. Her hair was dyed a darker shade than her natural color. A week before I had gone to the hairdresser to have mine dyed again.

Two little girls, one dark and one fair, which of the two is the prettiest — the grownups said — the dark one or the fair?

We drove and drove, and my sister did indeed talk without stopping, she talked like a tourist guide. This is Urbana, our big town. Our house is in this direction, in the north part of Monticello, there isn’t much in the town itself, actually we only come here to visit friends. Everything you see to the right is part of the university campus. This is the football stadium, the baseball stadium is on the left. There, at the back, is the faculty of medicine and veterinary medicine where Barnett teaches one day a week, and this is the learning dairy for the students, they moved it out of the town not long ago.

When we approached the fields of stubble again, I asked her to tell me about her life, what she did every day, and my sister shrugged her shoulders: “You know how it is, there’s so much to do that you never get it all done.” She kept house, she helped Barnett in the clinic, especially with the paperwork — ever since she had discovered computers it turned out that she was capable of even coping with the bookkeeping. She worked slowly—“You know how it is with me”—but Barnett never stops thanking her. With his support, her self-confidence had grown to such an extent that she even sometimes helped his mother with the paperwork for her business, which was the least she could do, because for all the urging and all the attempts, she was still afraid of horses, and she couldn’t overcome this foolishness. Sarah, just like her father, sat on a horse even before she learned to walk, but this was apparently something you had to grow up with. Apart from all this, there was always community work: there were activities for the church and the Sunday school, there were sick people who needed assistance, and there was one disabled old lady, a wonderful lady, whom she assisted on a regular basis.

“So you’re happy with your life,” I said. My voice sounded artificial and stiff, but my sister didn’t notice. “Happy? I’m blessed. I don’t know why God saw fit to bless me with so much happiness.”

— 3 -

A little house on the prairie, built of wood painted white, a chimney, and the triangular tower of an attic rising from its roof. Sheltered by luxuriant trees, with a squirrel trembling on a window sill and nibbling some orange vegetable. The kind of house children draw. And on the door a sign written in a childish hand: “Welcome Aunt Elinor and Uncle Oded.”

A giant bulldozer had flattened hundreds of kilometers in this part of the planet. But in the place where my sister lived, on the outskirts of a little town with a musical name, the vegetation fenced off the horizon, and even hid the neighboring houses.

When we arrived the Chevrolet was already parked in the yard. My brother-in-law waved to us from the kitchen window, and an ugly old mongrel dog lying on the porch stood up to wag its tail in our honor.

“This is Soda. She’s twenty-one years old,” said my sister, and as she opened the door she added: “Did you hear that Daddy and his girlfriend adopted a puppy?”

As soon as we entered the house we were caught up in the inevitable exchange: were we very hungry?

“Tonight we’re celebrating,” Barnett announced. “But in the meantime there’s lasagna for lunch. Should I make a salad as well? Will it be enough?” Were we cold? Would we like him to light a fire? What exactly were our sons doing in America? And how did they feel here? There were quite a few Israelis in Urbana, most of them connected to the university. A lot of Israelis did very well in the United States.

Oded talked about his work, and elaborated a little on the question of land ownership in Jerusalem and its political context: “The Holy City is a conflicted city.”

I talked about “Alice in the Holy City” and my sister, in response, clapped her hands excitedly like a baby penguin. “So Daddy was right,” she said. “Daddy always said that you would be a writer.”

It was only when we laid the table that I dared to remark, and against my will my voice came out stiff and flat again: “So I understand that you’re in touch with Shaya,” and this time my sister registered the tone, and reacted with a look of alarm.

“Sometimes by email. More often since Sarah was born. I know how angry you are with him, because of how he left me with you and everything. You were such a heroine, I know how awful it was for you. .” She fixed her eyes on her husband coming out of the kitchen and switched to English, and in the flood of English words coming out of her mouth everything sounded different.

In English her father was “a good man but weak, who never really recovered from all the sorrow he endured.” Her father was an old man now—“we should be forgiving toward the old,” my sister stated — and after Sarah was born, the old man wrote a really wonderful letter to them both, she’d been wanting to tell me about it for a long time. Among other things he wished Barnett that he would be a better father to his daughter than he himself had been to his daughters—“isn’t that touching?”—and also expressed his confidence that he would be. Grandpa also sent his granddaughter an antique music box in the shape of a merry-go-round, which was one of her favorite toys. When the little girl arrived she would show me.

“I haven’t forgotten,” my sister said when we sat down at the table. “I know what a terrible thing he did to you and to both of us, but Daddy was never a strong person, and after Mother died, he was simply unable to function. It was so sudden. Nobody took her sickness seriously, and until the ambulance arrived, none of her doctors really listened to her or believed her. And neither did Daddy. So he must have felt. .”

My sister’s eyes filled with tears; later on I discovered that whenever our mother was mentioned, her eyes welled up like this, and my brother-in-law reached out over his plate to take her hand. As they held hands, my husband’s leg moved under the table and lightly nudged my foot, but I withdrew my leg and looked down stubbornly at my lap. I felt enough, I felt too much, and my leg quickly drew back from an additional helping of feeling.

We were silent for a moment, not necessarily in embarrassment, and Barnett broke the silence by politely and rather shyly asking our permission to say a few words of prayer before we ate. With his hands clasped and his eyes closed my brother-in-law thanked God for the food before us, and went on to thank him “for bringing us Elinor and Oded who we always prayed to meet. May they take joy in us as we take joy in them. And may each of us find in this coming together what he wishes for and what he needs.”

After that we ate lasagna.

Believable things order themselves. Those that are beyond belief have to be described in an orderly fashion: We drove, we arrived, we spoke. She said to me. I replied. And I shall try to record things in order: the first day with my sister, the second day, the third day—

There was no third day with my sister. I stayed in her unbelievable world for only two days, and after we parted, things became disturbed and disordered in the extreme. Not things — everything became disturbed and disordered, but in the meantime there was order: order and sweetness, bright sweetness and order, and unbelievable goodness poured down abundantly on the white wooden house on the prairies of Illinois.

It seemed that my sister was eager to present me with the entire contents of her life in the brief time we spent together, and the afternoon of the first day was crammed with introductions, here’s a ginger tomcat and here’s a she cat. This iron pot Barnett inherited from his grandmother, feel how heavy it is. Here, in the back, is the entrance to the clinic. Barnett doesn’t actually spend much time there, he does most of his work on the farms. He bought those two peacocks last summer. He calls them his conceit. They’re beautiful, that’s true, but their screaming is really ghastly, and the worst of all is when they suddenly scream in the middle of the night. You’d think that such a beautiful bird would sing like a canary, but no. The Creator likes surprises.

If we go past the clump of trees over there, we’ll be able to see the stream. The water’s clean, in the summer Sarah swims in it with the dog, but now that Soda’s getting old she’s begun to develop an aversion to swimming. Perhaps they should get another dog for the child, take in a puppy like Daddy and Gemma did, but Barnett says that even though Soda’s very tolerant with the cats, another dog in the house is liable to make her jealous and embitter her old age.

•

The house is crammed full of photographs. Group portraits with gleaming teeth. Children stiff in suits. Children in swimsuits decorated with medals on ribbons. Sports teams, one row kneeling and two standing. The boy Barnett on a horse. The adult Barnett on a horse. Sarah on a horse. Barnett with the baby Sarah on a horse. My sister carrying a white tower of a cake.

Bright testimonies to happiness as happiness ought to be hung in the living room and the bedrooms and even on the wall of the clinic. And because of this overload of family happiness it was only in the evening that I noticed the photographs of our parents, standing side by side on a shelf over the fireplace. They were photographs that I knew: the young Shaya, in faded half-profile, emphasizing the jaw muscle and exposing the weak mouth, holding a sheet of music, and directing his gaze obliquely upward.

Erica, about half my age, looks as if she has dressed up as an actress from the thirties: eyebrows thin as a hair. Eyelids shining with Vaseline. Mouth darkly painted. A perfect complexion and an exhausted expression. A wreath of babies-breath flowers on her wavy hair.

In the ugly, hasty days during which the place we called home was emptied of its contents — among gaping boxes, and furniture pushed aside and waiting to be sold, and cast off objects that nobody wanted; among heaps of dust, and scattered papers bearing footprints, and the stacks of Shaya’s books sent in one lot to the shredders — in those hasty and ugly days, I paid no attention to the photograph albums. And even if I had, I don’t think I would have taken a single photograph from them. But Elisheva in the depths of her grief and her sickness paid attention and took and hid. I suppose she hid, because in our basement flat, of that I’m certain, no photograph revealed its presence.

•

When we were finished with the house and the yard, we got back into the pick-up, and my new sister drove her guest to smear additional layers of paint on the picture of the little town in the background: this is Monticello’s square, this is Monticello’s café, this is its church—“not ours, ours is in Urbana.”

And I was driven and escorted, and I nodded and murmured appreciatively, and expressed my admiration at the beauty of it all. And all the time I never stopped thinking about my blindness: how could I have failed to understand that my sister in the midst of her insanity was also mourning our mother?

The death of our mother was, as they say, a difficult event. It also led to a chain of events that were very difficult for me indeed. But even with all the difficulty, Erica herself — my mother the deserter, the perfumed narcissist who opened the door — I didn’t miss for a moment.

And on the great days of a woman’s life, her wedding day and the birth of her children, this woman said to herself that she was actually glad to be rid of her mother’s lilac scent.

My father and my sister wept bitterly on our mother’s grave, and I looked on skeptically at my father’s impressive mourning and his gestures of grief, and closed my eyes to my sister’s sorrow.

In any case, whatever I did and whatever I didn’t do in the days of the basement apartment, the damage was already done, and it was irreparable. And the little I could do to repair it was to accept: to accept the fact that Elisheva missed our mother. My sister pined for the woman who had exploited and abandoned her, and absconded to her eternal rest when she could no longer deny her crimes, and all I could do was to accept it without challenging or arguing with her.

•

I promised order, and I shall now accordingly return to the proper order of things, where afternoon is followed by evening, an evening in which the white wooden house filled with guests.

“This is Mark, he works with Barnett at the university, Eve is his wife, a very dear soul. This is Iris, and Martha you must remember, she visited us when we were still living in our apartment in Talpioth.”

One after the other they deposited their aluminum trays in the kitchen and came to shake our hands and inquire after the peace of Jerusalem. And then they stood around beaming brightly at us, because God loves the Jews, and because we came from the Holy City, and because I was the sister of dear Elisheva: I was the heroic sister who had taken care of her so devotedly after the tragedy.

For all these things they admired and loved us so much that the air grew steamy with love, relaxing tense muscles as in a sauna.

“I remember your special tea,” Martha said to me and patted my shoulder.

Barnett’s mother brought Sarah. Bearing a towering chocolate cake before her, the beautiful little girl greeted her uncle and aunt with self-confident courtesy, without a trace of shyness, and after her father relieved her of the cake she wrapped herself around us and listened with a frown of concentration to every word we said.

It occurred to me that our Nimrod, who was fond of children and got on well with them, would have fallen in love with his little cousin at first sight. And it was a good thing that Atlanta was far away, and he wouldn’t have the opportunity to fall in love with her. Little children take in things that adults have no idea of. This was without a doubt a child who listened, and there was no knowing what she had heard from her parents and what might come out of her mouth even without her understanding what she was saying.

During the course of the years I had fed my children quite a consistent version of “our tragedy”, so to speak — a difficult, but not dangerously poisonous story. A story you could cope with. A world you could live in, a picture of the world you could live with, the provision of which, like a meal and a shower, is no more than the basic duty a mother owes her children, and which every healthy instinct prompts her to provide.

Atlanta was far away, and no innocent remark would reach my son’s ears to injure and agitate him.

More guests arrived: one of Barnett’s brothers, tall and hollow-cheeked and not at all like him, and the son of another brother, and others as well. The women, without waiting for instructions, laid the table. Amid the buzz of conversation I heard my husband’s voice talking about politics, and I saw people standing around him and nodding with expressions of sincere concern inappropriate to the occasion.

After making sure that all the guests were equipped with plates of food, my brother-in-law invited his mother to say grace, and once again the Lord was praised for the food and for “our very dear guests. You all know how Elisheva and Barnett longed to see them.”

Later on in the evening the mother hobbled over to me. Mrs. Davis, a sturdy woman with lizard-like skin, her white hair tied up in a pony tail with a redundant and rather dirty velvet ribbon, gave me a clumsy pat on the shoulder. And almost immediately, without preamble, she said to me: “Your sister is a real treasure. Did she tell you that last Sunday she agreed to read to us from the Bible in Hebrew? Up to then we understood that she was shy and we didn’t want to press her. But we’re all so happy that she succeeded in overcoming her shyness: hearing the Psalms in Hebrew was an experience that people here won’t forget. I just want you to know how much we all love her, and how much we all admire the way you cared for her. I have an eye for these things and I can see that you’re a very special person.”

Once again, the legend about my devotion and strength. I didn’t know how to react to this falsification, whose source was without a doubt in my sister; my sister, who — and this too is certain — didn’t have a clue that she was falsifying.

I muttered something to the effect that Elisheva had always been wonderful and that I hadn’t done anything, and was immediately overcome by disgust. The expression on Mrs. Davis’s face told me that she had interpreted my automatic disclaimer as evidence of the virtue of modesty. My father had been an expert in such affectations of humility.

“I also want to thank you for the accepting way in which you related to my son,” she continued complimenting me in Americanese. “He told me how understanding you were when you first met in Jerusalem.”

“It wasn’t difficult. You have a wonderful son,” I mumbled, because what could I say?

She agreed that Barnett was a good boy, but not everyone would have seen this when the child was in the throes of his crisis. “Thank you for being so non-judgmental and accepting. In the state he was in then, a lot of people would have had a hard time seeing who my son really is.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper that sounded louder than a normal speaking voice in my ears, “And they would have been concerned, you know, about the genetic question. I hope your mind has been put at ease in this matter and that you’ve been informed that there have never been any cases of schizophrenia in our family: neither in mine nor in my late husband’s.”

I wondered what the horse breeder would have said if she had known that our genetic dowry included a suicide and a rapist.

For one wild moment I was tempted to tell her the whole truth about us, just to see how she would react.

“Barnett is a very special person,” I said instead. And as I parroted this American cliché my palate sensed a taste of parody, and for a moment I felt a pang of guilt. Mrs. Davis was good to my sister, what right did I have to mock her? I didn’t want to mock her, not even secretly to myself.

As far as I could judge, it seemed that the version Mrs. Davis had heard about the rape was similar to the one that my father-in-law and mother-in-law had heard from me. But unlike in our family, in the little white house on the prairie, the horror was simply registered as a given: a foal was born, the corn grew, the winter was late, one of our pilgrims went out of his mind in Jerusalem, and the wife he brought home with him was a victim of rape.

Because it was clear to me at this stage that not only her mother-in-law but everyone in the room knew everything about Barnett’s hospitalization and also something about my sister’s ordeal. The knowledge lay there in the room like the “Israeli salad’ Elisheva had prepared in our honor, and the next day I received an explanation when we went for a walk in the park.

Elisheva, of course, hadn’t divulged the details of the rape to anyone, but everyone in the room knew that she had been “sexually molested,” and the whole congregation had heard about the breakdown of her family and the miraculous manner in which the Lord had brought about her meeting with the man intended for her.

“Imagine that somebody saves your life,” my sister explained, “not only saves your life but really saves you, your soul. Wouldn’t you want people to know about him and what he did for you? Think how ungrateful it would be to hide it. Our Lord Jesus raised me from the depths. Even if I lived for a thousand years, a million years, it wouldn’t be enough to thank him. What kind of a person would try to hide such a miracle?”

Neither at that moment, nor at any subsequent moment was I tempted to enter into a theological debate with my sister and to ask her who had plunged her into the depths in the first place. Her face was radiant with a shy confidence, and I thought that “our Lord Jesus” as she called him had given her what no psychologist had been able to give her. I couldn’t fail to be impressed by his power.

In a little village somewhere on the prairie lived a modest old couple whose fame had spread far and wide. They were known as “The teachers of love,” and heartsick people came to them from the ends of the land to be taught the secret of the healing powers of love.

Many years ago the old man brought his wife to the village. He was very sick. She was wounded. Even the woolly sheep in the pen could sense her terrible pain, and whenever she stroked them they would bleat sadly under her hand.

But the man and his wife did not despair or sink into self-pity. Love is a balm that works slowly, and with endless patience they continued to brew their balm, until its effect became evident in them both. Their eyes grew bright. Their complexions grew fresh. The woman’s figure grew shapely. Love covers a multitude of sins. And love covered all and ransomed every wound. And it shed its grace on their beautiful daughter, and on their neighbors, and on every living thing around them, and all their eyes brightened. Broken-winged songbirds began to sing again. Blind dogs regained their sight and frolicked in the meadows. A vicious thief who came to steal their cattle went to work as an orderly in the hospital.

“Love is a daily labor,” the old woman instructs the lost youth who finds his way to their door. At the beginning of summer the youth ran away from home; in the course of his wanderings he heard about the “teachers of love,” and one morning he simply knocked at their door.

“We do our daily work,” the old woman said to him, “and the Lord performs his labor of love. As he did for me. Sit here, at my feet, next to the stove, and I’ll tell you my story. You’re old enough to hear it.”

Far, far away in a little village, in a village where all the people are radiant, a magical old man and woman lived in happiness and love. Perhaps they are still living there to this day, and in this happiness our story concludes.

Nothing was concluded. What was concluded? How could it possibly end like this? The voice was the voice of Alice, coming to seduce me into this happy final solution. But it was as false and deceitful as usual, and my sister, even if she lived to be a hundred, would never say a sentence like: “Sit at my feet and I’ll tell you my story.”

The story wasn’t over and done with, and even as the voice of the chronic enthusiast tried to seduce me into locking it up like this, I knew that it would go on twisting and turning in my guts. Not for a moment did I forget the mission on which I had come — a slithering snake, a poisonous Not-man was threatening to invade the walls — and even then I doubted the power of love to seal them.

My sister would go on living long after her fair hair went completely white. Amen. And I, the dark sister, whose duty is was to tell her — this time I would know how to protect her. I would protect her so that she lived a long and happy life and so that in her old age people would come from the ends of the earth to witness the miracle of the resurrection she deserved.

I will not allow my sister to be hurt again. I will not allow it — I swear. I am no longer what I was, I am not a child, I am not a fool, I have strength, and the past will not repeat itself. There will be no more harm done.

I repeated these things to myself. And even as I repeated them, my heart sickened and rejected the foreign transplant of the happy end.

•

But once again I’m losing the thread and getting ahead of myself. Because at this stage nothing had yet been explained to me — my marveling eyes saw only happiness — and at this stage it was still evening in the little white house: snatches of small talk sail through the air, someone puts on a CD of soul music. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Oded putting on his coat and going outside to talk on his cell phone. Elisheva, who had left the room to put her daughter to bed, came back and said that the child was asking for her aunt to come and kiss her good night.

Sarah’s room was in the attic, and when I came in a ginger head rose behind a mauve net canopy, and a lively voice inquired: “So what are our plans for tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow you’re going to school, after that you have athletic club, and now we’re going to sleep,” my sister replied and bent down to tuck in the blanket.

“I know, but what about after that?”

“We’ll see.”

“Will we have time to play?” The little face turned toward me and my heart contracted at the sight of its perfect innocence. “I know a game that you and Mommy used to play. Mommy taught it to me. You tie a scarf around your eyes and then you throw a ball and try to catch it.” She seemed about to get up and demonstrate, and Elisheva gently pushed her back. “Goodnight, goodnight now.”

“I know who taught you to play that game,” said Sarah after we kissed her and turned to leave the room. The experienced mothers took no notice, but when we were at the door, a little voice full of satisfaction said: “I really do know. He was an acrobat, that’s what he was. And you were both little and you were dressed like princesses.”

— 4 -

After all these experiences, all this emotion, isn’t it time for me to give myself and others a bit of a rest? Time to slow down and take a breath?

I could, for example, turn my gaze from people and their distraught passions and follies to the splendors of nature. I could rest my eyes on the natural miracle of the leaves, and their famous glories.

Leaves, how wonderful are the mysteries of the leaves: the green that year after year with the coming of the cold flames into shades of red on the trees. The crimson that dies into brown and yellow on the ground. The delicate skeletons of damp, transparent leaves — isn’t this a work of art? The changing of the seasons, the carnival of colors, the invisible hand of the creator of the leaf — such things, they say, calm the mind. The tired head rests on a hill, the eye follows the complex dance of the clouds mating in the sky. The hand caresses clods of earth. Calm caresses the eyelids. Breathing grows quiet. Eyes slowly close and languidly open again. The sun goes down behind the trees and sets them on fire before it finally sinks. And a great consolation comes with the setting of the sun, a great consolation, because we know that tomorrow the sun will surely rise and shine again, and the dead will live again, and we can sense the cycle of life and death in its eternity. The stillness of nature in all its glory. Quiet, hush. How great is the glory that surrounds us, sublime beyond comprehension, and the silence of the falling leaves and the mystery of their beauty is mightier than all our noise.

Perhaps we should pause here to contemplate the magnificence of nature in this place, but when we left my sister’s house it was already dark. Apart from the distant lights of the expressway we couldn’t see a thing, and even in daylight I did not and do not tend to take an interest in the scenery. Nature in all its mystery and glory doesn’t speak to me or tell me anything, apart from whatever is preoccupying my thoughts in any case.

My good Oded differs from me in this. My husband loves taking trips to the desert, he likes the silence and the quiet.

What he doesn’t like, however, are the mysterious silences of his wife.

“Nice people,” he remarked when my silence lasted all the way to the interchange. “It’s quite strange to meet people who love Israel so much today. It seems as if nothing we do could make them speak a word of criticism against us.” His wife kept quiet and he, in response, started to babble: “So yes, it’s strange when you think about the kind of country we actually live in. But on the other hand. . on the other hand, I wouldn’t object to adopting a bit of their love, five percent, say, just as an antidote, because in contrast to these people you suddenly realize how exaggerated our self-hatred is: how we hate ourselves out of all proportion.”

“At least you can’t say that I lied to you,” I blurted.

“You? Me?”

“I told you from the beginning that I had a crazy sister.”

“Crazy?’ he pronounced the word as if examining a new concept.

“Do me a favor. .”

“Do you mean the religious thing? So, as a Jew, even though I’m secular, obviously all that Christianity gets on my nerves a bit. Jesus was never our best friend. But if we’re talking about believers in general: I know quite a few religious people from work, you know some too, and neither of us would say that a belief in God is a sign of insanity.”

“Are you telling me you didn’t see that she’s crazy?”

“Not at all,” he cut straight into the summing-up speech he had prepared for me, a speech he had definitely prepared in advance. “Look, I know something, I know a little about the hell she went through. And the woman I met there is a woman who has completely, completely rehabilitated herself. Her life is full, she has a husband and a lovely little girl. You can see she’s a wonderful mother. If these aren’t measurements of sanity, I don’t know what are. And apart from all that, she seems to be happy. How many people can you say that about? A lot of people could wish for a life like hers.”

“Fine,” I said shortly.

“What’s fine?”

“Fine. You also read Hitler, First Person and thought it was a history book for high school students.”

“And that’s not legitimate?”

“Legitimate? No, it’s not legitimate to not see.”

“To not see what?”

“What’s right in front of your eyes.”

If he hadn’t been so tired he would probably have left it at that and avoided confrontation. He knew his wife. In most cases he knew very well when to let sleeping dogs lie, and in general my husband was an expert at the art of letting things be. But Oded was exhausted. Before the flight he had worn himself out at the office. In Chicago we hardly slept. On the way there, while I slept, he drove. And despite all this, and despite the jet lag, my aristocrat had not lost his civility and graciousness among the crowd of religious cranks into which I had dragged him, and apart from one brief escape into the yard, he had shown no sign of sulking.

Like a lot of other men, Oded tends to deny fatigue. And I think that it was this denied fatigue which overcame his restraint and good judgment, and which made him provoke me by asking if I still believed that I should warn my sister. The resentment in his tone revealed his opinion, which he immediately went on to explain, without waiting for my reply: My sister was happy, she had been beside herself with joy to see me, so why ruin her happiness for nothing? Who would it help, and how, exactly? What had happened had happened, what was done was done, and I knew as well as he did that no concrete danger was at hand. True, our insolent uncle had tried to make contact, but so what? If we were serious for a minute, we could agree that this did not constitute a real danger. My sister had found stability, after all she had been through — she was happy now, and anyone who took the risk of undermining that stability would be making a big mistake. You didn’t spoil people’s happiness, you didn’t wake sleeping dogs, or cry over spilled milk — it would be both unfair and unwise to do so.

I leaned my head against the back of the seat, I looked into the darkness and I listened to my husband telling me that I was, in effect, not normal: seeing the shadow of mountains as wolves, about to terrorize my sister and pour cold water on her illusion of happiness. That I was not wise and not fair.

And he went on to interpret and rewrite the real meaning of my journey to me: what he saw as its hidden purpose and what in his innocent cunning he hoped that I would adopt as its purpose.

Estrangement between sisters was an unnatural and unhealthy situation, he said, especially when the women in question were fundamentally dear to each other. Families were always complicated. Sometimes people needed a time-out in their relationships, but he believed that by now I had matured sufficiently to renew the connection, and it seemed to him that the intrusion of that creep had simply provided me with a pretext to renew it.

I touched the frosty window and yawned. We had turned onto the expressway, which in fifteen minutes would lead us to the hotel and to bed.

The lighting on the road was meager and Urbana, which still lay ahead, was also in darkness. Ten o’clock at night, not even ten. People here went to bed early.

“We had a good day,” said my husband. “You had a good day with your sister. Why spoil a good thing?”

It was time to speak. “Tell me,” I asked, “did you get the impression that my sister is retarded?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tell me.”

I heard him take a deep breath. He opened the window a little to let the air in, perhaps to pray for patience before he answered me.

“Did I say anything or do anything to make you think that’s what I thought? I don’t think so. And no, Elinor, the answer is no. I don’t think your sister is retarded. Apart from the religious business, which is beside the point, the impression your sister made was one of a pleasant and intelligent person.”

“I’m glad to hear that you think so. I’m glad to hear this is your diagnosis, because a lot of people think or thought that my sister is retarded. And retards, as you know, can’t make decisions on their own. I, as opposed to all kinds of people, definitely don’t think she’s retarded, and if that insolent creep, as you call him, if that creep has now emerged from the sewers to intrude on our lives, then to the best of my understanding, to the best of my understanding she has the full right to know. Just make up your mind what you think: either she’s a retard who needs to be protected from the facts, or not. Just make up your mind and tell me if my sister has any rights.”

He didn’t make up his mind and he didn’t tell me, and the last kilometers of the road passed by in silence. We drove into the town, passed more inflated reindeers and Santas, and didn’t see a living soul until we reached the hotel.

By the time Oded had finished tidying the car and removing various items from the bags we had left there before, I was already in the shower, and by the time I emerged from the shower, he was already asleep. I slipped in under the blanket and waited. For quite a long time I waited, patiently and humbly, until my good, tired soldier turned on his side, and without waking up put his arm around me.

— 5 -

Allerton Park is just the thing for souls seeking consolation in the glories of nature: for this purpose precisely, explained my brother-in-law, had the English garden been planted here in the first place, in the heart of the prairie.

A man named Allerton had planted it, and after he himself had found healing there, he had bequeathed his garden and estate to the community, so that anyone in need would always find consolation in it.

Kilometer upon kilometer of the glories of nature: trees and ferns and autumn leaves, etc., and in the heart of the park an avenue, and at its end a pagoda, where seekers of serenity could emulate the golden example of a statue of the Buddha.

Allerton Park, to which we had driven after dismissing the options of the historical-ethnological museum and the Urbana shopping mall.

I wanted a place where I could conduct a private conversation with my sister, and all the glories of the setting left me indifferent, even though Elisheva kept pointing them out to me: Look how tall that tree is. Quick, look over there, a wild bird.

My sister announced the objects to me as if she were out walking with an infant who needed to be taught to look and call things by their names.

The considerate men went ahead of us down the avenue, the tall one and the one who looked short next to him, and when they turned a bend and disappeared into the vegetation, I stopped and stood still.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said to her.

The toes of her shoes were a little scuffed: only when I had finished saying what I had to say I raised my eyes from them. “Oded thinks there’s no need to tell you,” I added straight to her face, which had already turned pink from the cold, “but I think that if he succeeded in tracing my cell phone, then there’s a possibility, a faint possibility, that he’ll find you too. So even if there’s only a small chance, it seems to me that you have the right to know.”

This time it was Elisheva who averted her eyes, turning toward me a cheek that still preserved a degree of childish plumpness. “He doesn’t have to search for my address,” she said. “I gave it to him.”

“You what?”

“I sent it to him. I didn’t give him my phone number, but once he has my address. .” Her voice petered out. She blinked madly; yesterday I had noticed that she blinked a lot less than in the past, and now she seemed frightened again: frightened like a child caught red-handed, her profile trembled, and to my horror I realized that my sister was afraid of me. Of me, and not of the serpent. I wanted to shake her, to grab hold of her shoulders and shake her hard until it rid her of the unfairness, the shocking unfairness of being afraid of me.

I looked into the distance, all the way down to the end of the avenue, and only then raised my hand to gently touched her cheek.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Take your time. I understand. Sometimes when something frightens us, we almost want it to happen already. I know. Precisely when the enemy hides. . sometimes the most terrible thing is not knowing.”

What did you write to him? When did you write to him? Where did you get his address? And perhaps it wasn’t just one letter but several that you wrote? And how did he keep his hold on you without my having a clue, without anyone having a clue, because it was inconceivable that anyone would know this terrible thing and not scream so loudly that it reached your idiot sister in Jerusalem, your blind and deaf sister, so that she could come and save you, snatch you away, lock you up if necessary, whatever was needed to separate you from this thing, who perhaps you hadn’t only written to but also met, because he instructed you to meet him, and you didn’t know any better and you could do nothing else, because one-hundred-twenty days of Sodom are never over? I know, I know how they’re never over. Not even one day is ever over.

“It’s all right,” I repeated, gathering all my strength to stop the whirlpool sucking us in, demanding that we face what would come afterward: after she had confessed everything to me.

My sister inclined her head in a movement that signaled neither “yes” nor “no,” and with a confused expression repeated that she had a lot to tell me, and for a long time now she had really wanted to tell me, but she wanted to so badly and there was so much to tell that she didn’t know how to begin.

There wasn’t a single bench to sit on in the whole park, only damp, freezing ground from the long nights. Elisheva seemed to be thinking the same thing.

“Will you be cold if we sit on the steps?” she suddenly came up with a solution.

We sat in the partial cover underneath the statue of the Buddha, my sister on my right, the green of the park in the background woven into the latticework of the pagoda. The bright red of a bird flitted past the white of the latticework, and Elisheva smiled unexpectedly and asked me if I remembered the Belgian birdwatchers, the ones we called “the twins,” and who were actually husband and wife? They were funny, weren’t they, with their pointed noses, and their binoculars? But thanks to them she had learned to pay attention to the birds, and perhaps thanks to them she had bought bird-feeders last year and hung them on the trees in the yard, when we got home she would show them to me. The winters here were hard, and for the little birds they were particularly difficult.

I tucked my coat in underneath me, Elisheva played with her glove, and I waited, my head lowered, for her to begin.

Her first years here hadn’t been easy. She was like a person who had suddenly come into a fortune, a person to whom God had suddenly granted this fortune. A person who at first doesn’t comprehend the extent of his riches. Who doesn’t understand and doesn’t really know how to live with such a great blessing, the likes of which he didn’t know existed, and for which he was not prepared. Back in Jerusalem, when she was in the hospital, she had started to read the bible, and while she was still there she had accepted that God was her Lord, and that everything that was written, every word, was the truth. This was the first treasure that our Lord had given her: that he had revealed his gospel to her. But even after she had accepted the gospel of Christ, she still had a lot to learn, because she read slowly, and because she was, as I knew, “slow in general.” Barnett didn’t press her. He said over and over that everything in creation was the will of God, and that everything had a purpose, including her difficulties and his difficulties and the difficulties of both of them together. And she really knew even then, with her whole heart she knew, that God loved her, that he loved all his children, and God, who knew everything and saw everything, also knew how hard she was trying to understand what he wanted of her and how to give him all of herself, to give him her whole heart, which he had given her.

But even with this knowledge, even with all the love that God granted her, it still wasn’t easy. People were wonderful to her. So wonderful and so generous. They were so generous in giving her the time she needed. And she really needed time to learn the simplest things: to drive a car, to get onto the expressway. To go to the bank, to be a wife. Because this, being Barnett’s wife, being his mate, was one of the most difficult challenges in the inconceivable bounty that had been showered on her. The pastor’s wife advised them to go to therapy, and they did indeed go to the psychologist Mindy found them, they went together and also separately. The therapy was yet another gift. Their therapist in Urbana had helped her more than all the others she had seen previously, not because the previous ones had been bad, most of them were good people and they had really tried to help her, but now the whole situation was completely different, because she was now able to receive the gift.

“My God who bore the cross with me and for me, Jesus Christ who subjected himself to suffering and to the most terrible humiliations to which a person can be subjected. .” My sister’s voice grew full. I dared to glance at her: her eyes were full of tears, and she blinked to get rid of them. “Jesus told me that I was clean, that he had cleansed me when he was crucified for my sake. When you realize this, that you have been purified and that you are pure, then you really are, from the moment you accept God you are no longer dirty, and after that you are open to receive his grace. And what happened was that I was opened to receive his grace, and all the other wonderful gifts that he in his grace granted me. Including the gift of psychotherapy.”

The new psychologist helped her, as she said, “with the problems of self-image” that she had, and it also helped that she referred her to an additional specialist who diagnosed her particular learning disabilities: it turned out that she suffered not from a single disability, but from two syndromes combined, which clouded the diagnostic picture. The process took time, actually years, during the course of which there was an interval of nearly two years because the money she and Barnett could allocate to treatment ran out, but little by little she understood that “there are methods of coping with a problem like mine, methods developed by different people that can help me and a lot of others like me.”

And then, with the new abilities she had acquired: “I also gradually internalized the fact that even if I’m not brilliant — I’m not stupid either, like I thought I was before.”

I looked at her again; this time she saw me looking, and blushed and smiled at me without resentment, as if she was telling me a story that was all happiness.

And what did I do? I rested my cheek on my knees drawn up under my chin, and listened to my little big sister, this sister who many, many years ago had tucked me into bed. I listened until I was all attention and nothing but attention, and let the story cover me.

Long, long ago we had shared a room. Later on we shared madness and an apartment. In the times we shared she told me stories, but she had never been the heroine of any of the stories she told.

The red bird came back and perched on the lattice, and in a place with a red bird and a white pagoda anything is possible, if only for a moment — even entering into a story without any resentment in it.

•

The man and his wife longed for a child—“In the beginning Barnett would joke about persuading me to have four”—it seemed that God had blessed them with everything, except the child they yearned for more and more. The woman tried fertility treatment, five attempts failed, the money ran out, and the couple accepted that it was God’s will directing them for the time being along another path.

“One of Barnett’s sisters-in-law, a brilliant woman, is a professor at the university, and she often left her two little ones with us. Among the other problems I had with my self-image were quite a few fears about what kind of a mother I would be to my own children. That’s another thing I worked on in therapy. But it turned out that these two kids were the ones who helped me most. Does that make sense? Then I didn’t understand it, but it was as if God were saying to me: Be patient, before I entrust a new soul to your hands, we’ll give you a course to complete. So I completed the course,” her voice filled with an unfamiliar mischievousness, “and apparently nobody has any complaints about the results.”

From the way my sister spoke it was clear to me that this wasn’t the first time she was telling the story about the man and his wife, and presumably not only to herself. But from the moment she embarked on the story of which she was the heroine, from the moment she began telling this fairytale, with pauses in just the right places, I became a willing audience, happy to let her proceed at her own pace, to postpone the entrance of the snake, and put off everything I still had to say to her.

The nephews grew. Their parents found work in another country. The house emptied of children’s laughter, and Elisheva went on waiting patiently for a sign from her God. “All the gospels say clearly that we mustn’t be egoists, and that we shouldn’t think too much about ourselves,” she said to me, not as a stern sermonizer but like a serious, rather tired, little girl being tested on what the sermon said. “What the gospels try to teach us is to go beyond ourselves, beyond our private needs in order to serve others. When I was in therapy I thought a lot about myself, because that’s what it’s like in therapy, you know. But Barnett, and also our pastor’s wife, both of them persuaded me that it was what I had to do in order to be able to serve our Lord better. And they were right. . they were right. Because you see, after everything Jesus gave me, after everything, this was what I prayed for most: for God to show me how he wanted me to serve him.”

The voice of the storyteller faltered, retreated, and died. It seemed that my sister’s thoughts were wandering and that she wouldn’t be able to lead her story to its happy end — and what would I do with this end? And what would I do after it? What could you do with something once it was done? Maybe it was better this way, without an end because that was, in fact, the truth, that it went on and was still going on, not for one hundred twenty days, but forever.

The hand playing with the glove clenched into a fist and then opened again, a hollow palm lying limply on her knee.

“Sometimes I thought that God hadn’t completely forgiven me yet. That was hard for me,” she said and I felt my insides tensing like a bowstring. “Because after the Valley of the Shadow of Death that Aaron put me through, somehow I believed. .” She pronounced the name “Aaron” with the same simplicity as she had pronounced the names of the birds before.

“You remember how his typewriter clattered?” she suddenly asked. “You remember how we could hear it even downstairs? So all the time I knew that somehow it belonged to me too, the book about Hitler. That’s what I knew, that the clacking belonged to those things he did to me, even if I didn’t understand how. Even now I think, and Barnett says so too: there were so many victims in the Holocaust, all the people. . the children who suffered, the mothers who lost everything, so why Hitler? Why about him? How come? How come people don’t know about all the children, why just about Satan. .”

She knew about the publication of the book. One evening, about two years after she arrived in her little town—“We were still living in a different house then”—when she was taking clothes out of the dryer, she heard his name on TV.

For a minute she wasn’t sure if it was his name she had heard. “You know, there are all kinds of people called Aaron, and even though I was stronger, I still wasn’t so strong, so sometimes when people said “Aaron” or some name that sounded like it, I would suddenly panic as if it were him.”

She went into the living room and “there was nothing there,” in other words he himself wasn’t there on the screen. But the newscaster described how Professor Gotthilf had been attacked when he entered the television studio of some other network: a woman, a holocaust survivor, who was lying in wait for him tried to spray his face with acid.

“I called my husband,” my sister said. “But he was nowhere to be found. It was before cellphones, and without cellphones the situation was difficult. I know that if God hadn’t been there with me. .”

But this time my sister’s God didn’t abandon her, and the survivor who had tried to burn Aaron’s face with acid didn’t go away either.

“I thought about her a lot, all the time, in an obsessive kind of way, as if it was important to me to understand how she missed, if she had been standing closer maybe she wouldn’t have missed. They didn’t describe it on TV, how exactly it happened, but I put myself in her place and asked myself if I would’ve missed too. You see, I had this kind of fantasy that I was in her place and that I didn’t miss, and in the picture stuck in my head I kept on and on burning his face. Let him burn, let him die. And then let him die again, but slowly. Like in Hell. Where it goes on forever and you know that it will never end because Hell is the end.”

I loved my sister. Am I permitted to say that I loved her in spite of the miserable way I treated her? I loved her. But I never loved her as much as I did at that moment, when she bit her glove, and at the same time I saw her going up in flames: she never even noticed when I put my hand on her knee.

And then she continued, in the same voice as before, in the same compulsive rush: “That was my nightmare, that I couldn’t stop. As if there was no end to it, all the time I saw his face. And it’s strange, because before that, before I heard about that old woman with the acid, I never thought about his face at all, as if I didn’t remember it at all. And only when I imagined the acid, corroding, did I suddenly began to remember, and all the time that face of his, as if it were getting into my eyes. I wanted it to stop, I prayed, but it was as if my will didn’t count, as if I was nothing, as if I didn’t exist any more. And I wanted to exist. I already existed, God had brought me back to life. So I couldn’t understand, I just couldn’t understand why, how come God, who had been so good to me, was letting him haunt me, and poison my existence.”

My sister kneaded and rubbed her forehead and her cheeks; there were no tears, she rubbed at her dry skin. “They sometimes say about God that he ‘hides his face,’” she said, “it’s a saying. But God’s God, and he doesn’t really hide his face, it only seems that way to us. Today I understand that God didn’t abandon me even for a minute. That’s absurd, because God doesn’t abandon. Today I believe that he was only waiting for me to banish that other face, the face of Aaron that was hiding him from me. It took me time, it took me a lot of time to understand that that’s what he was waiting for, and years before I gradually succeeded in getting rid of Aaron’s face. But then, whenever I succeeded a little, I saw Jesus better. It’s hard to explain in words, but every time like that when I felt his patience — how lovingly he was waiting for me — every time like that gave me a little more strength to move what was hiding him from me aside. Because without the love of God, I know, without his showing me his love, I would never have been able to get it out of me.”

My sister prayed and her husband prayed: “And that helped me a lot too. He would ask for me to succeed in letting go of the acid and the pictures that had stuck in my mind. Because it was hard for him too, this poison that I had inside me. Because I — maybe I’ve said this before — hardly knew how to be his wife. .

“I’m trying to tell you in one morning about years; I’ve been wanting to tell you all this for years. You know how much I missed you, and if only I’d known how to tell you before, so you wouldn’t worry about me. I know how you worried about me all the time. And you’re an angel, simply an angel for not being angry. How come you’re not angry? But please understand, I know you understand: even if I had the talent, even if I knew how to write like you, at the time when all this happened — it was simply impossible to put it all down on paper. That’s why I did something ugly and didn’t keep in touch with you. After everything you suffered for my sake, I didn’t keep in touch. But in my heart, in my heart inside me, I wish you could see straight into my heart, I always knew that one day you would come and I would tell you everything.”

•

I put out a lying hand and took her hand, and she squeezed it with surprising strength. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“Are you cold?”

I was cold. The chill crept from the wooden steps through my coat and climbed up my spine. My back was stiff. But until I asked her about the cold, somehow I hadn’t been aware of the discomfort I was suffering, and when I became aware, I felt no impulse to escape from it. So I was cold. So what? It was only my body.

“I don’t want you to think that we were sad all the time, because truly we weren’t sad, not at all,” my sister said without letting go of my hand. “You know how it is when you clean the house, and then somebody comes in with mud on his shoes? So that’s how I began to think about this obsession of mine to see Aaron burn. That it was like the dirt you have clean out of the house every day. What can we do? God gave us a house, and he also gave us the work to do. Barnett also began to see it this way, and sometimes we even laughed about it a little, just so you know. He would come home in the evening and ask me: ‘Well, how did you get on with the cleaning today?’ But then something amazing happened: little by little, it happened gradually, the house actually grew cleaner and cleaner until I hardly had to clean it at all.

“I was busy. The people here accepted me into their lives. Barnett found me all kinds of things to do, and suddenly I discovered that a day had passed without the obsession, and after that two days, and then more. It was like a miracle from heaven, can you understand what a miracle it is when your house cleans itself? When you wake up in the morning and know there won’t be any dirt? Maybe just a little soot in the stove, but one wipe with a rag and, like in the commercials here, your stove is clean and you didn’t even get dirty from the soot. How can you ever be thankful enough for such a miracle when you wake up in the morning? I know you’re waiting for me to tell you what I wrote to Aaron. But in order to tell you, in order for you to understand, there are so many other things, so much to tell. Because in my wish to thank God for the miracle he had performed for me, I began thinking and thinking what I could do to show him my thanks. And the fact is that I knew from the beginning, because this is the whole truth of Jesus, but it took me time, it took me time to be capable of it. And only with time I understood that if God had forgiven me, that just as God forgives us, just as our savior Jesus was the sacrifice that atoned for our sins, the sacrifice that God demanded from me — was for me to forgive Aaron.”

Her grip on my hand loosened, she raised her face to the sky, and I didn’t pull my hand away or take it back. To sit like this, only to sit still and let the incomprehensible words be heard. Without a movement, without an echo, without a single question, definitely without a scream. Because only thus, in this frozen state, in this lovely landscape in which I am nothing more than a detail, will it be possible to survive all this and get through it.

A bird twitters. A squirrel scurries past and suddenly stops dead for no reason. Hush, quiet. The fair, slow sister is speaking in a spate of words.

If necessary I’ll be a squirrel frozen on the spot, or a transparent cloud in the sky. If necessary I’ll be the step at her feet, because she deserves to have me at her feet, and this is what I deserve too: to be silent, to be still, to be as if I’m not there, because it’s better for her, definitely better for my sister for me not to be there. For years I overshadowed her and for years she was silenced. This is her chapter, now she is speaking. From here on to the end I’ll suspend myself and I won’t interrupt her. The sister who thought it was urgent to rush to the rescue will no longer push in. The dark sister will be the audience only.

A transparent, barely perceptible cloud hangs in the sky. A squirrel bites its nail till it bleeds.

“I talked about it to my husband, and he had doubts. You know, Aaron never showed any sign of repentance. I’m not even sure if he understood what he did, though how could he not understand? After all, he’s a learned man and he knew how to write a book. Anyone who can write a book must surely be capable of understanding.

“So however much we talked it over, Barnett still wasn’t sure that it was the right thing to do. And when we went to talk to our pastor and his wife they both still had questions. Mindy — who’s a very clever woman — Mindy told me that true forgiveness is a very high challenge, and before I took any steps, it was important for me to be sure that I could really and truly meet the challenge. Sometimes a Christian can deceive himself that he’s forgiven, but his forgiveness is actually a kind of fraud, and God, who sees into our hearts, doesn’t buy the fraud, even if the person who forgave really wants his fraud to be true. That’s how she explained it to me and I’m sure her words were wise. But however much I looked into my heart, and examined it, I couldn’t see any lie there. I hadn’t yet forgiven. Not yet. But I was ready to ask God to help me to forgive. The four of us met a few more times and talked. We prayed together for understanding. And in the end what we understood was that it was forbidden to pardon someone who had no repentance, but what was possible, what I as a Christian could do, was to forgive Aaron as if on condition. That is to say, to tell him or write to him that if he was ever ready to confess what he had done to me, that if he succeeded in doing that, acknowledging his sin and admitting it and taking responsibility — if that happened, then he would have my forgiveness. That I would give it fully. And that’s what I did in the end. That’s what I wrote to Aaron. Not right away, but a few months after our last consultation, because we had several. I wasn’t sure where to send my letter, and Barnett said that we could send it to the university. We didn’t know if he was still working there, but Barnett said that even if he wasn’t, they would forward his mail to him. He got the address for me, and then, once I already had the address, one evening I sat down and wrote the letter. It wasn’t a long letter, and when I finished it, I asked my husband to read it and correct my spelling mistakes. And again something wonderful happened, you won’t believe it, which is that I didn’t have any spelling mistakes, not a single one, as if some invisible hand was guiding mine when I wrote it. That’s what I felt.

“We went to bed. In the morning Barnett drove to one of the farms here, and I went with him. On the way I dropped the letter in a mailbox.

“I know that you want to hear what happened with the letter. That’s what you asked me at the beginning, and in the meantime I’m talking and talking, and you with your patience. . I’m so grateful to you. I’m sure there’s a different way of telling it, but I don’t know how to explain in any other way. So if you’re worried, I know how you worry, I sent the letter and it was as if nothing happened. He never answered me. As if I had never written that letter. But the truth is, that in reality my letter actually changed things, it changed them a lot. Wait, I’ll tell you.

“Barnett drove to the farm, and I went along. And while he was working I sat in the kitchen with the farmer’s wife, but I was in a state because all kinds of things were going round in my head, including the things Mindy said to me. Even though I knew, I really knew that I wasn’t lying to God, what she said stayed with me. My heart was beating so hard, like I’d been running, I could hardly speak, and so I left her in the kitchen and went out for a walk to try to calm down.

“I’m not a writer like you, I don’t exactly know how to tell you what happened next: it was autumn, like now, before the leaves finish falling, when the trees are bright red, and the ones that aren’t are green as can be. The sun was shining, a kindly sun, not a bit like the sun in Israel, and I simply walked in the sun, and as I walked I started to see the beauty, such beauty, and this beauty increased. You know how it is when beauty is like a pain, only the opposite? You go deeper and deeper in, and the beauty becomes like a wave that wipes out everything until there’s nothing left but beauty.

“That’s how it was for me, suddenly I started to see, to see how that beauty was really there, and how God had really given us such beauty, and how he was giving me the gift of seeing it. And my heart filled with the sun, as if the sun were honey on my heart, and I walked and walked with that honey, and suddenly I started to cry because I understood what it was that God had given me because I had forgiven. Because I had forgiven, I would always be able to see that green and that red of the autumn leaves, and now that my heart was full of sun I would never, ever have to remember what Aaron had done to me again.

“I had forgiven him the sin he had sinned against me, and then God had given me this gift of taking what had happened and making it go away. Because what Aaron had done, the things he did, the sin he committed against me — was like a dark prison where I had been locked up together with him, and then, when I forgave him, when I freed him of the sin, the prison was no longer there, and I was no longer a prisoner of the sin, and suddenly — beauty and sun.

“The prison guard had vanished, and he would never return because I had set him free. And that’s it, that’s it, there’s no more guard to cover my eyes. It’s not that I’ve forgotten, the memory hasn’t been wiped out, but Uncle Aaron isn’t important anymore, and he can’t be important, and he’ll never be important again. This was the grace that I suddenly understood.

“I walked for a long time. I don’t know how long I went on walking in the fields, because the time that I walked was like years and also like a single minute, in which you suddenly see everything, and everything that exists is contained in that minute. At some point I saw Barnett and the farmer, and Barnett saw me and started walking in my direction. He was holding something white in his hands, and when he came close I saw he was carrying a lamb in his arms. You see, it wasn’t the season for giving birth at all, and nevertheless a sheep there had given birth, and perhaps because it wasn’t the season her lamb didn’t want to come out and it got stuck, so that Barnett had to pull it out by force.

“So in the midst of all the beauty I see Barnett coming toward me with a wet lamb in his arms, in the midst of all the beauty. . you understand what happened? No, how can you understand if I don’t tell you? A year later Sarah was born. Exactly one year later. Even though I was past the age of child-bearing, like Sarah in the Bible, and both Barnett and I had resigned ourselves to being childless, God in his infinite patience and mercy gave us a child.

“That’s it, that’s one thing that came of the letter, and there’s something else too, something I’m not sure about, I just think it’s connected. We have a few friends who teach at the university. You met two of them. One of our friends teaches Jewish history and also helps with Hillel House programs — and he somehow remembered my maiden name. So a few months ago he asks me if I’m related to the Professor Gotthilf who wrote that evil book. And when I said yes, he told me that Gotthilf had published an article apologizing to everyone offended by his book and it had caused quite a sensation.

“I don’t know anything, all I know is that the book and its evil — I know they’re connected to the way he abused me. So I have this thought, maybe it’s conceited of me to think so, that my letter is also connected to the fact that he’s apologizing now. Maybe in some small way, even though he never answered me. And it may be too that this process began in him before. You know that he refused to sue that woman who wanted to spray him with acid? When I first heard this it just went in one ear and out the other. It didn’t mean anything to me. Even when I wrote him my letter, and even when I consulted our pastor. But after this friend of ours told me about his article, and how he travels from place to place and appears in public and admits that he made a terrible mistake: after I heard this, I started to think that maybe it does mean something, that he could have sued that poor survivor but he didn’t. Maybe already then he wasn’t just Satan, and because he wasn’t just Satan, the forgiveness I forgave him did change something, and what I wrote did count. It’s just a thought I have. It’s really not important, and for some reason it’s not important to me to know. I don’t need him to answer me, I don’t even want him to. He can answer or never answer. The important thing is that even if he gets in touch again — never mind what he says — you don’t have to be afraid for my sake. I know how you worry, and there really and truly is no need to worry any more. Even if the phone rings now. Even then.

“There are people who walk in darkness. I don’t know why this is, but I know that he’s one of them, like a bat that can’t see in the light.

“He talked a lot, you probably remember. There was this thing that he talked to me all the time, and I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. As if he meant something by it but at the same time I never knew what he really meant.

“He’d be this way one day and that way another, different every time.

“Sometimes — it was as if it was some kind of joke of his, but perhaps he wasn’t joking — sometimes he’d speak to me in a voice like a professor’s, and in this voice he would say all kinds of things about a ‘project.’ About the ‘project’ and the thing that ‘we’re doing together.’ As if it were all some kind of experiment and he was consulting a colleague. Never mind. It doesn’t matter: but once, when I was very thirsty he suddenly brought me a glass of water and in that same voice he asked me a question that I didn’t understand at all: if I agreed with Schopenhauer that pain was more real than pleasure. Does that make sense? And then he forced me to answer him, even though I didn’t understand what answer he wanted from me.

“It doesn’t matter now. It really doesn’t. I’m just upsetting you, and I don’t want to, I don’t, because I don’t even think about it any more, that story isn’t in the least important. I only want you to know that when I wrote my letter, I told him that I am truly happy now, that’s what I wrote to him. Because that’s important, it is. You see, if someone is like a bat, then you have to tell him that there is such a thing as light, otherwise how will he know? So I wrote to him, and maybe, maybe what I wrote did have a little influence.

“I want to ask you, when we were small, were you afraid a lot? Because you know, even before Aaron I was afraid a lot, and I’ve only now stopped being afraid. I had all kinds of foolish fears, not only of school. You remember the pine tree that used to creak in the wind, and we would imagine that it was uprooting itself and coming to get us? I was also afraid of those two yeshiva boys in Two Kuni Lemel, it was when you were still a baby. Daddy took me to see the movie, it was supposed to be a comedy, but something there gave me the creeps, and for a long time afterward whenever I walked down the passage I imagined two figures in black following me. Walking behind me with dancing steps and laughing and wanting to do something bad to me. I had all kinds of scary fantasies, kids are like that, it’s not important, but the point is that all my fear, all the fears, even the oldest ones are gone.

“In the prayer ‘Our father, who art in heaven’ we ask God to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. So you see, do you understand? Now, ever since Sarah was born, I really feel that God has forgiven me.

“And if our father in heaven has forgiven me, what do I have to fear?”

— 6 -

I vowed to keep silent. I vowed not to interrupt, not to push or prompt, to let my sister deliver her speech from the podium of the pagoda without interference.

My old-new sister told a practiced story, but her voice was as eager and alert as if this was the first time she was telling it, and she was only now making the connections as she spoke.

My sister was the heroine of her life story, and who was I to push myself into the feats of her heroism and spoil them?

A transparent cloud does not speak. A squirrel nibbles in silence. May my black tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth lest I ruin this intolerable beauty. Intolerable — yet I would tolerate it. Because it was not for me that a carpet of autumn leaves had been spread here, and not in my honor that a bird flew and a rabbit sprang.

Praise waiteth for thee in silence, and I wait, in silent anesthetized worship I wait.

I am a detail in a still life: a detail bowing my head on my knee beneath a statue of the Buddha. I am an object. I can be an object. Even an isolated object can sometimes survive in a landscape.

Only a bird will twitter. No other sound will be heard. No doubt about it, the whole of creation is united in harmony. There will be no doubt in this place, I won’t allow it, and nothing, no word of mine, will mar this triumphant beauty.

In this way, with thoughts along these lines I tried to hypnotize myself. Years after I had collapsed on the watchmaker’s doorstep and lost the connection with my legs, I tried as hard as I could to cut the connection of my own free will.

I hypnotized myself until I was a detail in a still life at her feet, until I was almost nothing at all: an object willed into paralysis. And so I remained, still and mute, until my sister said: “Our father in heaven forgave me,” and this sentence galvanized me into speech.

“For what?” I begged her, with my soul overflowing and filling the inanimate object with life. “What in God’s name did you have to be forgiven for?” My hand wandered to the toe of her shoe, and my fingers pressed the rough cold of the material and fawned on it imploringly.

“First of all for you,” Elisheva answered with the slightest hint of a smile in her voice. “For you, and for how I tormented you when you were like an angel. Do you think you succeeded in hiding the price you paid from me? The way I was then I didn’t have a choice, but I know that you didn’t join the army because of me. That first of all. First of all, you. But apart from that, even before that, before I fell on you, there was that business I’m so ashamed of, what I did when I was still in the army. .” her voice grew graver. “You know, when I locked myself in with the Uzi, please don’t ask me what I intended to, because it’s all dark. I only know that it’s something that happened, that I threatened to do something with the Uzi, and only God, who watched over me then knows how it could have ended.”

“And because of that you believe. .”

“Wait a minute, please, give me another minute, because I have no idea. These are things that neither I, nor any man, things only God can know, because only he knows how sick I was. I was so sick and so weak then, and mother. .”

My sister fell silent, and I sat up to see the tears that I knew were coming. “Mother was always sick. And for a long time I never stopped thinking that if only I were a little stronger, if only I were a little more capable, perhaps she would have, that is to say maybe, maybe we’d still have a mother. And then Sarah, and your sons. . I’m sure she would have loved Sarah. It was her heart, you know, you know what she was like. And everything that happened to me, everything I told them, it was too much for her heart, obviously it was. Only I couldn’t, and because of that, because I couldn’t. . but how could I have? How?”

The sobs overpowered her voice and threatened to choke her.

“You didn’t do anything to Mother,” I cut her short. “You can’t think that, you can’t. It’s something he put into your head. I’m sure it comes from him. I’m sure it was him who frightened you so that you wouldn’t tell her. I know where this comes from. I know. But everything he tried to make you think, everything he said would happen to Mother — I know exactly what he said to you — get it into your head, at least now, it was all just a threat.” My sister blew her nose, and I didn’t stop.

“Get it into your head that our mother was an egoist. An egoist and a narcissist. Who wrecked her own heart on purpose, without any connection to us. That woman couldn’t stand having any other sick person around apart from herself. Whatever anyone tried to tell her — if it wasn’t about her, she simply shut her ears.” I didn’t have to harden my heart. I was ice and I was a chisel, and the chisel cut the ice so I could breathe.

“No, don’t say that, please don’t. A mother is a mother, and it’s a fact that her heart couldn’t take it. At first it could, but after she found out, after she heard about my abortion. . I think about you every year, I want you to know, every anniversary I think of you alone at the grave. How you have to do it alone. One day, I promise you, I’ll come to Jerusalem and both of us, together. . Our mother should have been a princess. She wanted you and me to be princesses too. And she worked so hard. Her life was really hard for her. And nevertheless, even though she was sick, you remember how hard she tried to make us happy with the dresses and everything? And if only Aaron hadn’t come, perhaps then. . I don’t judge her, because who am I to judge, and now I’m a mother myself. You have sons. But if I even imagine that somebody, that Sarah. . I don’t imagine and I don’t judge. But if you want to know what else I ask God to forgive me for — you were my angel and I want to tell you everything — then there’s also the fact that I had the abortion.”

I stood up. “Are you trying to tell me that God expected you to give birth after being raped? To have the rapist Hitler’s baby? To have the baby of your father’s cousin — is that what your God expected of you?”

This time she wasn’t alarmed. She was prepared. “God is merciful. God is the father of mercy, God is the king of mercy.” She answered me quietly and confidently, as if I hadn’t raised my voice and towered over her. “But I know why you’re talking like that. You love me, and you don’t want me to suffer. But it isn’t in our hands, you have to understand. God said: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and Uncle Aaron. . sometimes I wanted to die. There was a time. . I can’t exactly. . there were times when I believed that I was actually already dead. But nevertheless, nevertheless, however many times it was as if he killed me, he didn’t really kill me. He didn’t. And I did have an abortion. Because I couldn’t. . So maybe I am guilty, even though how could I have? I’m not saying that a woman can. A woman, a child has the right. So I’m not saying that anyone could, I don’t know who in this world of ours could, and that’s what our pastor told me too. Leave it to God — he said to me — Elisheva, leave that to God. And so I did. I really did. I left it to God. And after I forgave Aaron and after Sarah was born, I know that God forgave me.”

A strange lunar sun glittered on the golden face of the Buddha. My sister looked up at me like a supplicant, praying for the miracle of understanding for her story, which had now concluded. Very far away, at the end of the avenue I saw the men looking toward us. The two of them walked back and forth, and when they saw me standing up they still waited for a sign that they could approach. We were supposed to drive to another little town for lunch. Barnett, who had taken a day and a half off in our honor, was supposed to go back to work. The numbed thumb I had been gnawing came back to life with a pulsing pain. I was growing colder, or perhaps it was the cold that had accumulated in my bones while sitting on the step, and which was beginning to spread through me, to remind me that you can never really part from your body.

But there was one last thing remaining, a “last chance”—I thought to myself — even though if anyone had asked me I wouldn’t have been able to say a chance of what.

“I understand that you forgave him. You forgave him, that’s what you told me. But apparently I’m too stupid to understand what that means. I just don’t get it. Let’s say there’s a hell. There’s a hell, and at this minute, this precise second, God is about to send this Hitler there, to burn. To burn — you know, for all I care not even for eternity, only a hundred days. To roast for a hundred days in the stench and the fire. Now, let’s say that your forgiveness is his pardon, and that with this ticket he won’t have to spend a single minute there. Let’s say that he’ll fly up straight from the grave to heaven with you. Will you give him the ticket?”

The frown between her brows deepened. She blinked hard once, and then her face suddenly relaxed, and she clapped her hands in the penguin flap with which I was already familiar.

“But why do you say that you’re stupid? You understand everything. You always understood. Because that’s exactly it: that’s the thing, that I forgave.”

There was nothing left. My sister stood up. The good men came toward us, we advanced toward them, and my husband sent me a questioning look. “Everything’s fine,” I said too loudly, “we’re done. The story’s over. I told Elisheva. She’s not worried.” Later he told me that my sister looked to him “as fresh as if she’d just come out of the shower.”

“And me?” I asked.

“You looked as if you needed a bath.”

We walked toward the parking lot. Oded held my hand. My sister tucked her arm into her husband’s. They took the lead down the path and we followed them. More cathedrals of trees, more arabesques of vines, and more natural temples of climbing ferns; and in front of us a woman’s stylishly bobbed head and a man’s wispy thinning hair. If I hadn’t known who they were, if I had just landed up behind them, I would never have recognized those heads and those bodies.

We were already next to the car when four heads rose in unison at the sound of a screech in the sky. A flock of geese flew over us in an arrowhead formation, and pierced me with a superstitious dread that rose in a flash from my tailbone to the bottom of my skull. The wild geese flapped heavy wings, and their screeching seemed to announce some curse to come. One after the other they screeched above our heads. Flapping and flapping and emitting remote, obscure cries, like a distant witness. One tortured screech after the other, never together.

I sensed Oded shudder, he tightened his grip on my fingers, and the flat gray sky closed in over our heads.

“Look, geese,” my big sister said, and pointed.

There was nothing left that there was any point in doing together. Because where could we go from here? To the historical museum and the nature reserve with the Indian name? And nevertheless we drove to the next town, because Elisheva and Barnett insisted on us tasting Dutch food. The food was tasteless, and the conversation bubbled with artificial additives. My sister kept touching the back of my hand and my sleeve and saying things like: “But you haven’t told me anything yet. Tell me everything about the boys. Tell me about your work. Tell me about Alice. I want to hear everything,” and she wasn’t put off by the paucity of my replies, as if she didn’t notice that I scarcely answered. The geese that had frightened me had robbed me of the vestiges of my strength, and it was hard for me just to sit up straight in my chair.

My sister’s story was told, and after it there seemed nothing else to say. She was honest. More honest than I had ever been. She had always known only one way, and had never known how to cheat. The story she told me had not been tailored to suit me, and knowing her it was also clear to me that she had not tailored it to suit any other audience either, but as we sat there in the restaurant over the puréed Dutch food, I imagined her presenting the very same testimony to a beaming group of women, daughters of the congregation: a partial testimony — I thought — bits and pieces assembled into a fairy tale. An invisible seam sewed up all the ends, and there were no loose threads to continue the tale. I was the only one coming unraveled here, with no closure in sight.

Once she had finished telling me her story, and I had no doubt that she had very much been looking forward to telling me, it seemed that all my sister’s expectations of me had been satisfied, and she looked happy and untroubled. She ate with a hearty appetite, praised the dish set before her, and invited us all to taste it.

We said goodbye to Barnett. We took Elisheva home, drank tea, and waited for my niece to return so we could say goodbye to her.

If the child was disappointed by the briefness of our visit, she was too well brought up and too good tempered to show it.

Happy and obedient, the little girl from the little white house kissed her aunt, and skipped out to the yard to talk to Soda the dog.

Nobody mentioned the possibility of another visit, but Elisheva announced that from now on she would not be lazy and she would write to me more often. “And please, please send me your newspaper columns, a few of them at least. I told Sarah that her aunt is a writer, and we’re all so proud of you. ‘Alice in the Holy City,’ what an original idea!”

There were the last words she said to me when she accompanied us to the car. After that we hugged, and a woman with the shoulders of a swimmer, in a red sweater with a reindeer pattern, waved to us from the gate until we disappeared around the bend in the road.

— 7 -

“So how was it really?” asked Oded when my sister’s image vanished from the side mirror of the car.

“Fine. There’s nothing to worry about, the matter’s closed. He has her address, she sent it to him, and she isn’t afraid of anything any more,” my voice sounded old and tired, as if I were answering him about some distant memory.

“What? How come?”

“As I said. The matter’s closed. It’s over. She’s forgiven him.”

“Elinor, please, you can’t go to sleep now.”

“What’s not clear here? She forgave him, she wrote him a letter in which she forgave him, conditionally at least. The condition being that he admitted what he did to her.”

“Did a lawyer advise her to do it?”

“Why a lawyer?”

“Because if I was a criminal lawyer, and if I were her lawyer, that’s exactly what I would have advised her: to try to get him to confess.”

“There wasn’t any lawyer, and in any case he didn’t bother to reply.”

“Obviously he didn’t reply. I have no idea what the law of limitations is here in America regarding rape, it’s worth looking into, but in any case a man would have to be an idiot to incriminate himself like that in writing.”

“She doesn’t want a trial. She wants him to ascend to heaven with her, that’s what she said.”

“You’re joking. I don’t believe it.”

I said nothing.

“It can’t be true. I mean, I’m not accusing your sister, God forbid, of lying.”

I said nothing.

“There’s such a thing as self-deception, you know. Not that a person’s lying, God forbid, he’s simply unaware: not reading himself correctly.”

But I, who had heard my sister, knew with exhausting clarity that there was nothing here to read between the lines. And that if my sister Elisheva had been standing next to the woman who tried to destroy the face of the monster, she would have arrested the upraised hand herself. She would have jumped in and stopped her.

Tomorrow — I thought — perhaps I would be able to take in the full horror of that act of pardon, which at the moment was only a frozen pain in my muscles. Tomorrow, when I thawed out a little, or maybe in the plane, from above. Because down here, on the ground of this prairie where there was nothing to take hold of, it was beyond me.

I wasn’t tired but felt a great need to get onto my own private escalator and disappear: my husband wanted to close the events of the day with words, and my husband could wait till tomorrow. Maybe when I got back from my disappearance the right words would come to me.

“Their Sarah seems like a really great kid,” Oded tried another tack.

I should say something to him — surely I was capable of saying something, I wasn’t sick or paralyzed. A healthy living person should be capable of showing signs of life — so I discovered a sign of life and asked him if he remembered the business with the acid. There was no need to explain what I was talking about, he remembered that “the woman had missed.”

“So my sister gives him credit for somehow preventing the attack from coming to trial.”

My husband sighed. “Your sister is a fine person, but without really knowing her, I would say that she’s a little naïve. The guy had just published his disgusting book. The last thing he needed in the middle of the publicity campaign was a legal confrontation with a Holocaust survivor. A trial like that would have led to his being conclusively identified with Hitler.”

I didn’t feel tired, but I was overcome by a fit of yawning. The sun was hidden behind a bank of clouds, and it seemed that this gray non-day and non-night would be interminable. Yesterday it got dark. Why couldn’t I remember when it got dark here?

“Why all of a sudden a ‘disgusting book’? I thought that in your opinion it was a text book for high school students.”

“Okay, that’s what I said. And I’m telling you again: it’s not a serious piece of research. Definitely not. But you know what? Since we talked I thought about it and came to the conclusion that precisely the attempt to present things in a popular way could be dangerous. So yes, it’s a popularization, and yes, it’s disgusting.”

“I see what you mean.”

The more my voice retreated and grew weaker, the more loquacious he became. “I’m not a big reader, that’s for sure, but if my wife who’s a writer tells me that a book is beyond the pale, and my father whose opinion I also respect says exactly the same thing — it makes me think. Let’s say I felt the need to make light of it. I felt the need to belittle its importance, don’t ask me why. But after you read the book. . what’s going on here? Are you falling asleep?”

“If you let me close my eyes until we reach the hotel, I’ll be able to drive to O’Hare afterward.”

“I’ve got no problem driving. I’d prefer it if I drove and you talked to me a bit more, but if you’re tired, go ahead and sleep.”

“You’re an even better Christian than my sister.”

“I’m not a Christian at all. Don’t say that. If anyone dared to hurt you, I don’t want to think of what I’d do to him.”

“What would you do to him?”

“Something hellish. I don’t know.”

“Okay, when you do know what you’d do to him, tell me about it.”

“One of the things that surprised me,” he said, “was how normal those people are. When you and Elisheva were talking I was walking with Barnett. We spoke a little about his work. I only wish I enjoyed my work as much as he does. Even though it’s quite sad, what’s happening here. All these farms we’re passing — what Barnett explained to me is that they’re on their way to becoming extinct. With the taxes that go up all the time, and the dominance of the fast food industry, people are being forced to sell their land. But what I wanted to say is this, that in the meantime with all these processes going on, these Christians are living their lives very contentedly. They enjoy what they do, and the people we met yesterday too, you can see they’re happy with their lives, maybe even more than we are. I confess that I expected freaks, and instead I met serious, educated people, connected to what’s happening around them. This community seems to me very healthy and completely normal.”

“A colorful community,” I said slowly. “Broken-winged birds sing again. Dogs bleat in the meadows.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tell me, tell me: encouraging Elisheva to forgive — is that normal?”

“I’m not saying it is, obviously they’re got their peculiarities, but that’s all they are, peculiarities. On the whole, in my opinion your sister is in an excellent environment. It really couldn’t be better.”

“Just that in this environment they preach that abortion is murder, and Elisheva has to beg their God to pardon her for terminating a pregnancy from rape,” I said and closed my eyes.

“And did God pardon her?”

“He gave her Sarah,” I said without opening them.

“Well, so what more do you want? If I believed in miracles, I would say that what’s she’s done with herself is a miracle. If you take into account what she went through, and it’s clear to me that what I know is just the tip of the iceberg, when you think about it, your sister might have been in a completely different place today, completely different, you know. Isn’t that what worried you all these years? First of all shows you what tremendous strength she has. And actually I’m not surprised, she’s your sister after all. So if somehow or other God helps her a bit, why be petty, and who cares exactly how he helps her? She forgave, she didn’t forgive. In my opinion the whole business of this forgiveness is an illusion — self-deception I’d say, without actually knowing. But what does it matter? It’s insignificant. The main thing is that what we have here is recovery from ruin on an unimaginable scale. What I’m trying to tell you is that after this visit of ours, I feel as if we can lift a heavy weight from our hearts.”

My husband went on lecturing me and setting the record straight all the way to the hotel: he renovated ruins, pointed to tips of icebergs, and lifted weights off hearts like a mythological giant. My husband set the record straight, and I agreed with much of what he said. I agreed and I said nothing, because I didn’t know what to think.

Elisheva had found salvation. My fair sister had found more than salvation, she had found happiness that tore the sky wide open. And I, who had abandoned her and fenced off a corner of my own, I, instead of rejoicing in her happiness, felt that a stone was rolling down on me and sealing me into a cave. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth lest I call her and confound her after she has been set free.

My sister was at peace. Calm and at peace. My fair sister had pardoned me. She had pardoned me and our parents, she had pardoned the Not-man. And the pardon I had not asked for, the pure and horrifying pardon she had pardoned me, was closing in on me.

And I would remain alone, I thought. I would remain by myself in my selfishness, because my sister bore no grudge — not against me and not against him. Now only I, the keeper of the grudge, was left to guard and to remember. Remember what? It was necessary to remember, it was impossible not to remember, and now I was pardoned and erased and dismissed. My sister had told me a story. My sister had rolled the stone. From now on I was on my own.

We stopped in the parking lot of the hotel opposite the swaying plastic figure of Santa Claus. My husband got out to fetch the luggage we had left at the reception desk, and by the time he returned I became sickeningly aware of the fact that I was not as alone as I thought.

My sister had erased me and my sin against her, together with the person of the rapist. And at the same time, as she wiped the two of us clean with her celestial forgiveness, it was as if she had lumped us together and joined me to his person.

From now on to eternity no longer on my own, because from now on only I and the First Person were on our own, because Elisheva was no longer in the world, my sister was now in heaven. She was in heaven, and the person of the Not-man and I were pardoned and left to choke in the dirt of this world together, imprisoned by the pardon.

For some reason the thought of choking was linked in my mind to the geese, as if it was this that the arrowhead was announcing with its screeching as it cut through the sky.

The flight of the geese is heavy and slow — how is it that they don’t fall? Barnett said that they migrated from Alaska. Alice the goose also came from Alaska. However hard she flapped her pigtails and screeched her colorful nonsense, the pigtails would not hold her up in the air. Alice fell and she is a sack of feathers on the ground. The screeching geese are gone. My mind is going. I’m going out of my mind and that’s why I shall remain alone with the First Person. Because I’m out of my mind and I don’t know how to get him out of my mind.

“That’s it. Are we awake? Ready to fly to the boys? I’m dying to see what Nimrod looks like without the beard. I never liked that beard,” my husband said and closed the door.

After we got home Oded remarked that it seemed to him that I had “worried the boys a little,” which was putting it mildly. I could have said that I was too upset to notice, but the truth is that I did notice, and it was even pointed out to me, but I didn’t have the strength or the will to stop myself from worrying them.

On the second morning of our stay in Seattle, Yachin took his father for a tour of one of the Bowing plants, and Nimrod, who from childhood had been more interested in heart-to-hearts than his brother, deliberately got up early, and over the first cup of coffee of the morning sat me down for a talk on the topic: “So what’s really going on with you, Mom?”

The night before, after returning from the Thai restaurant, I had made the men egg barley from Israel for dessert, but my younger son, after satisfying himself with the comfort food from home, was now demanding nourishment of a different order: “There’s a sense here that you’re not completely with us,” he said. My child wanted his mother “complete,” in the innocence of his heart he wanted to taste the root of the poison.

I replied that I didn’t know why anyone should feel that way, because actually I was perfectly happy, really. I confirmed that I had missed him and his brother and said that “perhaps I’m just exhausted from the visit with Elisheva.”

“Dad says that she’s in excellent shape,” he protested.

“Dad’s right. Everything’s fine. It’s just that after not seeing each other for years. .”

“Memories. .” He pronounced with the knowingness of the young. And what did he know about memories? Memory to my son appeared in the guise of a kind of computer library: click on “search,” read, and delete. He knew nothing of the dogs of memory, how they search you out and hunt you down, to stick their teeth into you until things come out that you didn’t even know you knew.

“I suppose you remembered all kinds of stories,” he said and blushed a little. “I mean from before what happened to her. It’s quite unusual to have a mother who grew up in a hotel. There must have been a whole lot of interesting stories, like in that children’s book we once had. What was the girl’s name again? Eloise.”

“There was one old lady, a Yiddish singer. She came back every year. .”

“And?”

“Nothing. She stopped coming. I suppose she died.”

Nimrod had inherited his father’s persistence, not to the same extent as Yachin, but nevertheless: “A friend of mine, a girl from Jerusalem who’s studying here, came up with an interesting idea. She said that part of your inspiration for ‘Alice’ may have come from the experiences you had with all kinds of tourists as a child in the hotel.”

“Are you still in touch with Tamar?”

“Not on a regular basis. Do you think that you and your sister will keep in touch more now?”

“We’ll see. Don’t you want to go and take a shower?”

“Because with your father I can understand why you don’t want to have anything to do with him. Just leaving your daughter after something like that happens to her. .”

As far as my father was concerned I had gone relatively easy on the censorship. In the stories I told my son, Shaya Gotthilf was the dust under the radiator. The little bit of dirt that distracts attention from the rest of the filth.

“You know what, if you’re not going to shower, I will.”

“I just want you to know,” my son said and stood up at last, “I just want to tell you that I feel strange that I don’t really have any roots.”

“You have Grandma Rachel and Grandpa Menachem. Others have less.”

“I’m not saying. .”

“If you’re not saying then stop talking. And by the way, if you’ve already decided to lose the beard, it might be a good idea to get used to shaving every day.”

But I didn’t behave like that the whole time: I love my sons, I know that we had a good time together, and that we were happy too. After many months of separation, obviously a mother is happy to see her children.

We drove to see forests. We ate together in twelve different restaurants. When the boys sang out of tune in the recording studio in the “Musical Experience” Museum, their father and I kept time for them; when we crossed the bay in the ferry, and went up on the deck, the three men circled me to protect me from the wind.

Despite Yachin’s blondness, the two boys look delightfully like their father, and as in Israel, the sight of the matching trio brought smiles to the faces of the passersby. Two handsome sons and the father in the middle. The younger son takes advantage of the picture to flirt inoffensively with the waitresses.

The visit we had paid to my sister on our way had made a breach, and in a moment of privacy Yachin also questioned me about her.

I expected him as was his wont to be satisfied with “she’s fine,” but this time he surprised me. My stand-offish firstborn buried his hands deep into his coat pockets, drew up his shoulders, and after a moment of angry silence remarked while scrutinizing the horizon: “I can’t believe they never even looked for the maniac who raped her.”

We were standing on a jetty. One jetty is very like another, and there was nothing to distinguish this one from all the others we had stood on and strolled on during the course of our visit: seagulls and boats and the blue of the sea and the froth of the waves. A green mountain rose from a billow of clouds on the other side of the water, on the left of the picture.

“He was a tourist, you know,” I said into the wind. “He left the country, and she didn’t talk.”

“But after that, after you already knew, it wasn’t actually some stranger in the street who raped her after all. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time: what was so difficult about finding him? That’s what I don’t get. He was registered at the hotel, you must have had a name, an address, a credit card number. . you already had credit cards then, no? Your father had all the information. So how come nobody used it?”

“I have no idea what my father knew. Time passed before Elisheva spoke up, and in any event she wouldn’t have testified.”

“And you didn’t try to persuade her that she should?”

A light plane swooped down over the water, for a moment it seemed that the gray body was nose-diving into it, but then it straightened out and plowed through the waves, turned around and slowed down, leaving a frothy white cut in its wake. A seaplane. There are airplanes that can sail on the surface of the water but none that can sail below it. It’s submarines that sail on the bottom of the sea, and there is no more terrible death than slowly suffocating in the coffin of a drowning submarine.

“Are you accusing me of something?” I asked my son.

“Mom, no. .”

The “no” and the sharp movement of the head that accompanied it, warned me. “Stop it,” they said, and “What are you doing?” and “Don’t ruin everything, Mom,” but I didn’t stop: “Because if you’re accusing me of something. .”

“Mom, what’s the matter with you? You’re completely out of line.”

“Really? Because if you’ve got something to say to me, let’s hear it.”

Oded’s son took a deep breath and dropped his shoulders. “I never thought to blame you. I know it’s complicated, and with your father abandoning the two of you like that as well. I’m not stupid and I’m not blaming anybody. It’s just that the thought of that man going free, never paying for what he did — the thought of it drives me crazy. A person who rapes a child, I don’t know what should’ve been done to him.”

“And what do you think should have been done to him?”

“I don’t know. Castration, I suppose. That’s the usual answer people give. They say that even the most hardened criminals in jail are disgusted by rapists. So maybe that’s what I’d like, and that’s also what people always say: let the toughest criminals deal with him. The main thing in my opinion is just knowing that this maniac is suffering like you and your sister suffered, because otherwise, you know, the world seems really fucked up.”

I was happy to see my son, but these last minutes on the jetty were the only moments of our stay in Seattle when I succeeded in really feeling my happiness. In my mind’s eye I saw a heavy-bodied criminal closing the lavatory door and gagging the Not-man — presumably the image came to me from some movie or other — and then my eyes cleared and I was able to see Yachin again. A young man in a checked coat, the most beautiful jawline in the world, authoritative, strict and laconic, tending from childhood to bristle, and only very rarely confused. This was the fruit of my womb. How did I get so lucky?

•

My love for my children was always a given, but already in the car on the way from the airport, something in me seemed to have gone wrong. And after months of feeling the lack of them by my side, and missing the effortless closeness to them — that simple pleasure now escaped me. Nor did what should have been self-evident awaken in me when we arrived at Yachin’s tidy condominium, and later too, when Nimrod appeared and beamed at us beardless at the door, and in all the hours when we sat in the twelve restaurants and visited the two museums and strolled on the jetties. The mother’s love did not disappear. If need be, the mother would have given her life for theirs. Sacrificed her right hand. Given her eyes. The love had not gone, I knew it was present somewhere beyond my inability to reach for it. But the feeling had stopped moving me and had been flattened into a kind of annoying intellectual awareness: insistent and irritating as an itchy scalp, as the reminder of a fossilized memory.

Seattle is beautiful: beautiful buildings, beautiful people, a city open to the ocean and the forest. On our first day there I apologized for being tired. Afterward I said things like: “How lovely, a sailboat,” or “What an exquisite design,” but the piercing beauty was unable to penetrate the transparent coat of impermeable insulation tightening around me and cutting me off from anything capable of arousing natural admiration. Because ever since leaving the park with my sister my vision seemed to be clouding, and no amount of blinking on my part could clear the picture.

I stood before the ocean, I knew that the crashing waves were “beautiful,” but the beauty remained external to me, like a concept learned in literature classes: these are metonymies, this is irony, and the gray-blue crashing of the waves is called beauty.

Oded and the boys gazed and gazed and rejoiced in the sight of their eyes, and I alone gave voice to empty exclamations in the faint hope that feeling would somehow come and fill my voice.

•

On the evening of the first candle of Hanukkah Menachem and Rachel called to wish us all a happy holiday. A pair of hands peeled potatoes, another pair grated them, and while I spoke to my in-laws, the three men laughed themselves silly by stamping on the wooden kitchen floor in time to shouts of “to banish the darkness we have come.” A friend of Rachel’s read an old column of mine at the hairdressers: “From that series you wrote about the zoo, the one where Alice rides an elephant all the way to Bethlehem. My friend simply fell in love with your description of how the baby elephant escapes from the convoy and lands up in the square of the Church of the Nativity. She phoned the zoo to ask if the animal trainer really takes the elephants out for a walk on the road, and what nights he does it, but they didn’t want to tell her. She knows you don’t like telling the public what’s true and what isn’t in the Alice stories, but she wonders if you might be willing to make an exception in her case. My friend says that if it’s true, she has to wake her grandchildren up and take them to see the convoy, especially the little baby elephant marching. So what do you say?”

What do I say? A baby elephant didn’t know where to go, and an elephant is liable to trample a child. Elazar the Hasmonean was crushed to death under an elephant, and he wasn’t a child.

“Elinor?”

“Tell her to drop it, I made it all up, there’s no such animal as an elephant.”

“What did you say? I can hardly hear you.”

“The boys are making a lot of noise here.”

“I can hear that you’re enjoying yourselves. We’ll talk when you get home. Kisses to everyone and a happy Hanukkah to all.”

•

Among the holiday greetings that arrived by email was a flowery one from my sister. “May the holiday candles always light your way” she wrote in big letters, and in smaller ones she added: “Daddy and Gemma send warm regards to you all, and join us in wishing you a happy holiday.”

Did she remember our father’s amateur painter from her stay in the pension? Did she ever suspect that his meeting with her in Verona was not as accidental as he made out? And perhaps my sister did remember his Italian mistress sitting in the garden of the pension with her skinny, ugly English girlfriend; perhaps she remembered her and forgave him for that too. Because after pardoning the first person, after lumping the two of us together, how could she fail to pardon her father too? And why not bless his happiness too, which was also perhaps thanks to the grace of God? Because perhaps it was none other than the hand of God that had united the broken-hearted betrayer with his Gemma, and our father too was blessed, and only I was cursed.

I did not investigate Elisheva’s memory and I was not about to investigate her thoughts. A terrible pardon had corroded everything and there was no point. What was the point? Shaya wasn’t important, as far as I was concerned Shaya might as well be dead, and now I alone heard the laughter of the one who had kissed the back of my hand, and bought my sister a potted orchid.

The men fooled around, giggling and nudging each other, as playfully as puppies, while the floorboards creaked under their stamping feet: “Look out, you almost sent Mom flying with the frying pan.”

The more I shrank into myself, the more they increased their hilarity, covering up for me with their noise and exaggerated mirth, for my isolation and everything I was unable to provide.

Again and again I said to them that I was “just thinking,” but most of the things twisting and turning in my mind could hardly be called “thoughts,” and it’s only now that I can put them in any kind of order. Odd lines from children’s rhymes stuck in my mind and kept buzzing repeatedly in my head, as if I was stuck in a telephone exchange, waiting on the line. I thought: “How sweet is Elisheva / how pretty is my dear / lovely is my love.”

I thought: “Two little girls, two little dollies / one called Tzili and one called Gili.”

I thought: “My little candles have so many stories to tell,” and as soon as the words ma raboo, “so many,” came into my head I smiled without thinking.

“What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing. Stories. .” Mom’s thinking about stories. Perhaps she’s writing in her head. Maybe she’s resurrecting the faded figure of a tourist from Verona and soon she’ll put her into Alice’s adventures in the Holy City. Mom’s weaving a plot. Mom’s fine. Everything’s fine.

But I wasn’t weaving anything. I was becoming unraveled. And as I unraveled, the words “ma raboo / ma raboo,” so many, so many, kept repeating themselves in my head without rhyme or reason, and at some point it occurred to me that “marabou” was actually the name of a bird. So many birds with curved beaks feeding on flesh. So many birds hovering over the killing fields, laying their eggs in the gaping bellies of the corpses. And from their eggs the parasites of anecdotes are born. Parasites are disgusting, but nobody dies of anecdotes. With them you can live.

On the morning of the holiday I woke at seven o’clock in complete darkness. A story from Hitler, First Person had been gnawing at me while I slept and it was this story that woke me. I don’t know if it is based on some kind of historical truth, but the story is well told from the point of view of the first person. The late thirties, no exact date is given as far as I remember, the Führer meets someone whose name he doesn’t mention in his office, someone he calls “the English Bolshevik.” A Labor member of Parliament who had come to Germany in order to try to persuade its leader to stop the rearmament of the country, and carried away by the passion of his mission he quotes from the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount. The description focuses on the body of the self-appointed missionary: he looks like a squishy pear that has already begun to rot. All you have to do is touch him for your finger to penetrate the skin, into the liquefaction of the flesh. On the fat Bolshevik pear the writer draws the mouth of a frog, and this self-righteous mouth croaks the gospel of Jesus Christ’s meek and humiliated in so grotesque a manner that even the Fräulein who brings the coffee has to lift up her apron to hide her sniggers. But it is not only in the Fräulein that the self-righteous pear gives rise to ridicule, the reader too feels an impulse to crush; a kind of desire to pinch the juicy flesh of the sermonizer until he shuts his mouth and opens his eyes.

With this picture I woke up, and with the thought of my sister’s letter of pardon and the fact that the First Person did not answer her.

How sweet is Elisheva / how pretty is my dear / a flowered dress I sewed her / exactly like my own.

I got out of bed and made my way to the kitchen in the dark, and to the sound of the gurgling of the percolator I began to collect myself in anticipation of the men about to wake up and another day of fun in the beautiful city of Seattle.

Fortified by the strong coffee, after I had already stretched my skin tight, it occurred to me to crawl back under the covers, and then to whisper in Oded’s ear and beg him to save me from yet another day of sightseeing, I didn’t have the strength for it, I couldn’t stand another day here, and would he please take me away to somewhere else.

“Where do you want me to take you?” my husband would ask me.

“To an ugly place,” I would answer him — if only I could.

— 8 -

Nimrod left first for Atlanta, where he was to remain until the end of the academic year. Oded and I took off a few hours after him into weather that grew stormier the farther east we flew.

“So what do you say about our sons?” My husband tried to distract me from the rocking of the plane, but there was no need to do so. Every jolt interrupted a thought, and I was glad of the jolting and interruptions, as if this was exactly what my body needed in order to purge itself.

“So what do you say?” Something thudded. The beverage cart. It was jolted from its place and crashed into the back of the plane, and the riders on the Ferris Wheel let out a groan in chorus. A flight attendant grabbed hold of the cart and hurried to sit down and fasten her safety belt, and someone behind us threw up.

“What do I say? I say that we’re blessed,” I gasped out loud.

At the beginning of my relationship with Oded, when I was very much in love, I would sometimes imagine myself bumping into him in places where there was no chance at all of coming across him: what would happen if he suddenly walked into the auditorium of the arts faculty? Would he see me sitting there? Would I signal him in the middle of the class?

Say he had been invited to the party too, and at this very moment he was standing in the kitchen with the people who weren’t dancing, drinking beer.

Say he had been relieved from reserve duty early, say the whole company had been relieved, and on their way home his mates decided to stop at precisely this bit of the beach, and now he was sitting with them in the shade of that hut. All kinds of nonsense along those lines. That’s what people do when they’re in love, and it’s not completely illogical: coincidences sometimes happen, and why shouldn’t they happen to me?

Five weeks after he took me to Mount Scopus, Oded and I were already living together, so that this kind of suspense didn’t last long, and turned into a sweet, vague background to our days in the Garden of Eden.

At the Seattle airport I went back to seeing someone who wasn’t there, just around the corner, and there, opposite the entrance doors, in a kind of sick reversal, I began to see the Not-man.

I hugged Yachin, who drove to the airport twice that day, first for Nimrod, and now for us. I looked at my husband and my son clumsily embracing in the embarrassment of an emotional farewell, and as I looked at them, one hand on the handle of my suitcase, it occurred to me that perhaps First Person was there.

He lived in America. He was invited to lecture all over the country. There were a number of universities in Seattle, maybe one of them had invited him to give a talk, or maybe he was there on vacation, to ski, and in a minute he would get out of a cab, carrying his gear on his back, like the sun-burnt German couple advancing toward us.

I remembered that there were about three hundred million people living in the United States, I knew that the thought of coming across him, of all people, here, was absurd. But coincidences happen, that was a fact, and a rational person needed to be aware of the facts. Things happened. Events could take place.

It never occurred to me for a second that I might not recognize him, but what did occur to me was the fear that the moment I fixed my eyes on him, he would recognize me. I would have to be careful not to stare, because a gaze that lasts too long is the one that betrays. And so is the one that immediately looks away again. What happened would be determined in the blink of an eye, because the first to blink is the one who goes down. Because eyes that fail to keep guard are the ones that leave the throat exposed.

In the line to hand over our luggage, and in the departures hall, and in the narrow sleeve leading to the plane, I didn’t stop looking around alertly, and even after we took our seats I saw fit to peer behind and in front of us, in case he had been among the first to get on the plane. Perhaps he was behind the curtain, traveling business class. Opening his tray and signaling the flight attendant to pour him a glass of wine. Perhaps he was sipping the wine now, nibbling a nut, and studying the menu.

The jolting of the plane did not rid me of the delusion, which continued to obsess me in the New York airport. First Person had once lived in New York, and maybe he still did. Cosmopolitan First Person traveled a lot, he visited many places, and soon he would be in Israel too, in Jerusalem, for the conference.

With this thought and with the darting of my eyes, the awareness that he had a life in the present spread though me like fire.

Not-man was a controversial intellectual. People were curious to hear a controversial intellectual. And a controversial intellectual liked people who listened to him. Perhaps at this very moment he was sitting in a café and dunking a croissant in his coffee — maybe not a croissant, maybe like his hero he had a weakness for cream cakes — never mind, it was nonsense to worry about what he ate — in any case, First Person is sitting in a café and talking to a female student about the Marquis de Sade, explaining how he had preceded “The Penal Colony” in his vision, and how he had foretold the events of the twentieth century. The student sees herself as daring, in anticipation of her meeting with him she wore a black leather skirt, and now she asks him to supervise her doctoral dissertation. In the evening perhaps they would see an art movie at MoMA.

In the evening they would go to MoMA. But now it’s morning in New York. Early morning. Too early to have coffee with a student, but not too early for him to wake up. The person who had forced a blinking child to read The 120 Days of Sodom to him, is presumably awake already, and now as he gets ready to go out he listens to an old record of Wagner’s Rienzi. A record, not a disc, because he is no doubt a collector of old records. Yesterday while strolling in the city he bought it, now he listens to it while he shaves. His tiny bristles dot the washbasin, and the wind blows bits of his hair into the air. Hair doesn’t disintegrate, even after a hundred years it doesn’t disintegrate. For years First Person has been shaving, the air outside is full of microscopic bristles, and people walking in the street breathe Not-man’s invisible bristles into their throats. Pedantic Not-man rinses the washbasin, and water carries the black insects of the bristles to the sea, more of them every day.

Bristles don’t do anything — I thought — there are no bristles, all this is delusional nonsense, I’m coming unhinged. I’m out of my mind because I breathed in the bristles. My sister’s penal colony breathes the air of the city below us, and my sister pardoned him; people breathe in the breath of his mouth.

•

The fire of my imagination spread through me, and as it raged and lit up more pictures, as if at a distance, high above the flames, I realized that I was no longer afraid. The plane leaned sideways, the land slanted below us, Not-man walked the crooked land, and I was not afraid: my imagination was just measuring my strength, testing me with images. There was nothing in the air, nothing microscopic in the sea, I was not a child to be frightened of imaginings. And in reality too, I had the strength to confront the Not-man, as long as it wasn’t by surprise — just not that, not by surprise. I wasn’t a child, but coming face to face with him in person if he took me by surprise, that was even beyond me now.

Among the various parasites preying on my mind the book I had thrown into the trash in the Chicago airport popped up again. This was already after the plane had steadied itself over the ocean, after the lights had gone off and the flight attendant had asked the passengers to pull down the blinds, when I was feeling a little sleepy at last.

It occurred to me that perhaps one of the cleaning staff in O’Hare had picked First Person out of the trash. A woman, perhaps. And presumably she had no idea what it was. She saw a book in good condition, saw the sensational subject of Hitler, and decided to keep it. Before she hid it on her person she presumably removed her rubber gloves. Not a young woman. Her fingernails dirty and painted red, her teeth crooked and in need of dental care she could not afford. She brought her find to her boyfriend, as she was in the habit of doing with all her other windfalls. Many different things can be found in an airport, and this one too she presented to her boyfriend — who was he? A follower of Louis Farrakhan, I imagined. Her boyfriend read it, in the week that had passed since then he told his friends about it, and one night he would order the woman to read it aloud to him. She would stumble over the words, he would snatch the book from her hands and say, “You’re so stupid,” and when he went to bed with her he would hurt her and look into the gaping void of her mouth and say, “There’s nothing there.”

And maybe it wasn’t a cleaning woman who plucked the book from the trash, but Not-man himself who happened to be passing through the airport at precisely that moment and fished First Person out of the bin — so I thought, and with this paranoid fantasy my sleepiness vanished. The thing I threw into the trash was covered in brown paper, Menachem had covered it, and anyone who didn’t know what was underneath the paper, even the Not-man himself, wouldn’t have been able to recognize it. Why hadn’t I removed the paper to look at the cover of the book?

“You never told me what he put on the cover,” I said to Oded.

“What?” My husband was sleeping, his mouth was slightly open, to a degree that was not aesthetically unpleasing. My husband was exhausted and asleep, and even in his sleep he did not allow his mouth to sag and gape. The biggest prize of my life. The land of the salt of the earth into which I had come by chance, not by right. Why was I nagging him?

— 9 -

And then we were home. I was always happy to return. I was happy when we returned to our first apartment from our first backpacking trip to Europe, and no less happy on our return from expensive luxury hotels.

Anyone who grew up like I did will always see the room from the point of view of the maid who comes to clean it. And even though I enjoyed the luxuries my husband provided without any pangs of conscience, I never left a hotel room without making sure that our trash was securely bagged, that the sheets betrayed nothing, and that no garments or towels had been left on the floor.

I enjoyed most of my trips with Oded and also the ones in which we were joined by our children, but when they were coming to an end I was always happily aware of the fact that we would soon be going home. To our own house and sheets that were ours alone.

My father would collect old books left next to garbage bins. My mother would buy her fancy-dress costumes from second-hand shops. And therefore, apparently, even in the fanciest hotel it did not escape me that the bed linen covering us was used.

Sheets that had covered us alone, kitchen utensils that no strangers had touched were among the first pleasures of my life with my husband, and on our return home from our holidays I would always spoil the boys by frying real chips or devote the whole morning to preparing a pot of stuffed vegetables. This was also the time when I particularly enjoyed hosting friends. We often invited people to dinner, both real friends and people my husband needed in order to increase our luxuries, and among the latter there were some who became real friends too.

I always enjoyed returning to my chosen books. I enjoyed seeing what was new in the garden — surprises sprouting in the ground even after one week’s absence — and I liked knowing that at almost any moment I desired, I could escape to our clean bed and rise from it to the land of dreams. The gates of this land were always close to me, and most of the time they opened easily.

The return from Seattle was different, and both on the drive to Jerusalem and when the taxi was already going down Prophets Street, the happy feeling did not come to me. I said to my husband: “Here we are, we’re home,” but the fault remained, and the cosmic fault emptied the words and the voice that spoke them.

I had wasted the few days I had with my sons, I had soured and embittered them, and now I felt sour and bitter, and there was bile in my throat. Was it my fault that an evil for which there was no atonement had entered my home with me? My sister had pardoned. And I would remain alone in the prison of the pardon with the sour smell of a Not-man.

It was cold. We turned on the heating. It had rained during our absence. There was no need to water the garden, and Oded only took the pots of grass he had shut up in the shed when we left out into the light.

I threw out a few potatoes that had rotted. I cleaned the muddy prints of a cat that had stolen in and dirtied the marble counter. We unpacked — we both hate luggage standing in the middle of the room — and while Oded listened to the many messages on the voice mail I crammed the first load of clothes into the washing machine, and sorted out the things destined for the dry-cleaners.

“Emails can wait for tomorrow?” he asked when he handed me a list of my messages. We had already called his parents from the taxi. “I need another hour here,” I replied and pointed to the kitchen and living room which were not in any need of cleaning or tidying. My husband rubbed his nose against the nape of my neck and bent down to kiss my tiger face through my sweater. “If you don’t need me here I’m going to shower, and if anyone phones tell them we’re not back yet.”

Oded fell asleep in the light of the reading lamp awaiting me; in the meantime I emptied the vegetable compartment in the fridge and scrubbed it. After that I hung up the washing and, for a few moments in the smell of the laundry softener for babies, I had a sense of normality.

Only after I had made sure that my husband was already asleep, I switched on my computer. The emails could indeed wait for tomorrow, but there was one thing I had to check, and I promised myself that the moment I finished and satisfied the need, I would slip under the goose down and perhaps I would even wake Oded.

I went onto Amazon and located the book. I checked that the same picture appeared on the first edition and on the paperbacks, and then I enlarged what Menachem had hidden.

The face of the first person took up a quarter of the screen, and it was the face of a child. The chin was raised a little, the nostrils looked flared because of the tilt of the head, which stared straight ahead, the eyelids drooping in a way that was too tired for his age. The arms were folded high on the chest, presumably so they would be seen in the photograph. The way the black hair was plastered to his scalp made his ears stand out. The graphic artist had added a bleeding swastika on the left side of his forehead, and the impression created was that the arrogant child bore his wound heroically, perhaps even defying those who had stamped the crooked cross on his face. Hitler, First Person and “Aaron Gotthilf,” were written in white letters.

I didn’t linger long opposite the picture. The need to see had been satisfied. Enough for now, time to go to bed.

And still I didn’t get up, not right away, because there were other things out there that I also needed to know.

I opened Google and ran a search. The globe spun in the upper right hand corner — as it turned I remembered that Hitler had called it “the challenge and the prize.” And when the earth stopped turning, the search results showed three hundred one thousand.

Three hundred one thousand links to Aaron Gotthilf, situated in virtual space and leading to — how many people all over the world? There were those who wrote the texts and those who posted them online, because the one who wrote wasn’t always the one who posted; and there were those who read and spread the word to others, and not only in writing but also by word of mouth.

An octopus that embraced the world, a world-wide web of tentacles spreading through space. Not one “First Person” but many. A body that multiplied itself.

On page number one the words “mistake” and “my mistake” were repeated: “‘My Mistake’—years after the publication of his controversial book about Hitler, Professor Gotthilf explains. .”; “Although Gotthilf admits that he made a mistake. .”; “Professor Gotthilf’s great mistake. .”; “There is no mistaking his new position. .”

I scrolled quickly through a few of the following links. Texts in English, French, German, and Italian, or maybe Spanish, a text by someone with an Indian name, Hitler, First Person; Hitler, First Person, the program of a conference at the University of San Jose, the bibliography of a course at the University of Michigan; a link to an article published in the New York Review of Books; another program of another conference; “Professor Gotthilf is the son of scholar Hannah Gotthilf, whose study of. .”; Hitler, First Person—I didn’t open any of these links, not yet. I’d had enough for now. The hours of typing and reading, conscious of my sleeping husband, pricking up my ears to listen for his movements, hurrying to close the browser whenever he got up to go to the bathroom — those pornographic nights came later. Because on the first night when I started tracking the cells multiplying on the web, on that night I actually felt the sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing clearly; I’d even say I felt almost calm. When I shut down the computer I didn’t send myself straight to bed. I went out into the inner courtyard and stood there without switching on the light until the cold climbed into my bones and cooled the fever of my satisfaction, increasing the sense of calm I had begun to feel. I picked a moist branch of sage and crushed the leaves to smell them, and with the smell of the sage and the penetrating cold my breath opened and a possibility of cleanliness appeared. I didn’t know where it would come from, what would bring it, and how it would clean everything. Nevertheless, for a few minutes “cleanliness” was there as something that might be possible.

Penetrated by cold and clear-sighted knowledge, I slipped into bed next to my husband, and in the dark I smelled the sage on my fingers until the scent faded.

— 10 -

We returned to a routine that became increasingly false, and whose falsities both of us in our weakness went out of our way to hide. My husband was incapable of listening. I didn’t have the words to explain. I don’t blame him or myself, because the spreading infection was stronger than both of us, and like a disease it had to be allowed to take its course until it reached its climax.

Oded was sucked back into the office, and from time to time he complained that he was sick of his work and sick of being at the beck and call of entrepreneurs and landowners. “You read, write, develop, and look at me — I can’t even read detective stories any more. Just look at the kind of characters I have to spend my days with. In the end I’ll bore you to tears.”

Like he used to in the period when we had just met, he spoke of “changing direction” and his wish “to do something completely different,” only now he was talking about taking early retirement, after which “I’ll finally be able to read something serious, or go and study something for the sake of my soul.”

A few days after we came back, he began to get up early in the morning and go for long runs. He complained of growing a paunch in America, that one hour with Yachin in his gym was enough for him to realize how he’d allowed his body to deteriorate, that if he only had the time he would’ve liked to go back to judo or even to get into some other martial art: “You probably don’t remember, but I was once pretty good at that stuff.” And in the meantime, until he retired, and until he finished with the mall-owners’ case, and until he became a street gang counselor and taught the boys judo, he set the alarm clock for 6 AM.

One evening when I popped out of the bathroom for a minute to get a towel, I passed the bedroom door and saw him standing naked in front of the mirror and examining his body in profile. My handsome husband pinched his belly like a woman, and I hurried away. Love covers a multitude of sins, but I wasn’t going to lend a hand to the cover-up any more.

A physical restlessness like Oded’s attacked me too. I didn’t go for runs, but apart from the stolen hours I spent with Not-man on Google, I had a hard time sitting still. And no occupation, no book I opened, succeeded in keeping me in one place. I gave up the car almost completely, and instead of driving I started to walk. A meeting on the Mount Scopus campus, an upholsterer’s in Talpioth, a dentist’s appointment on the south end of Hebron Road — I went everywhere on foot; speed-walking, but not for the sake of my health. I walked fast to dissipate the infectious itch that refused to go away and made my skin crawl. All it needed was the touch of a finger for all my thoughts to spill out of me like blood.

The winter was more rainy than usual: a blessing, people said, Lake Kinnereth is overflowing, it’s already past the upper red line. The ground water is brimming over. It rained a lot, and I didn’t even try to adapt my movements to the intervals in the rain. I simply left the house and started walking, breathing in the air of the Judean Hills together with the stench of exhaust and rotting vegetables in the market, breathing the same air as the First Person, sharing the same sweeping, sickening pardon with him.

My sister spoke in general terms about pictures she labored to banish from her mind, and the pictures she didn’t describe haunted me more than the ones I knew about, more than what I gathered during the days of our basement apartment.

At the age of eighteen I was too ignorant to picture things that were obvious, and in any case all I wanted then was to distance myself from the confused vortex of my sister’s imagination. But now, all the details she had been incapable of recounting, and everything I had avoided hearing, took on shape, and the shapes moved inside me and hurt like punishment and sent me on punishing walks all over the city.

I won’t describe the things I imagined then. My sister was raped, not me. I did not suffer her torture with her, and I won’t pander pictures of her body here like some pimp.

Regarding the pictures in which I myself played part, the picture that haunted me most frequently was the one after the first meeting, the one in which First Person kisses my hand. Raises the palm a little, bows his head, lingers for a second, and pecks my skin with his mouth like a clown. A clown making himself ridiculous to make others laugh, and in the meantime laughs at everybody else. Pecks and pierces and laughs.

On the surface, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, things went on as usual, at least in the beginning. I walked all over town, but my walks almost always had an ostensibly normal reason: a visit to the nursery to choose a new tree to plant, to replace the alder uprooting the fence. I returned empty-handed, since it was only once I was there that I realized I wouldn’t be able to carry the sapling back on foot, but at least I had gone to check it out, and this too was an activity with a purpose. I went to order new upholstery fabric for the armchair, and I went to a meeting at the Youth Center to discuss the neighborhood parking problems, which were growing increasingly severe. And I went to meet friends.

The truth is that I avoided inviting people over: I didn’t stuff leaves from my vine, and I didn’t prepare sauces from my figs.

I didn’t have the patience for it. But I did spend time with people.

Acquaintances asked after the boys, and closer friends asked discreetly “And how was your sister?” And my answer to all inquiries was: “An interesting story. Elisheva is an interesting woman. Jesus is good for her.”

My sister was okay. And I was definitely okay, and the world was okay too.

“Christians or Buddhists, what difference does it make. The main thing is, you say she’s happy?”

“Elisheva is one of the happiest people I’ve ever met in my life,” I replied again and again, and I meant it sincerely.

“Good, that’s what’s important and it’s great. The fact that there are all kinds of beliefs in the world is what makes it so fascinating. The way you describe her house and all those Christian types is so picturesque — isn’t it a pity it’s not like that in Jerusalem? What a waste that your Alice is limited to our Holy City. And with all that amazing nature over there too. You could easily have based a column on the whole thing.”

A certain nosy-nelly, who isn’t among my close friends and who presumably picked up various rumors, asked if now, after I’d “broken the ice” with my sister, would my sons go and visit her too: “Wouldn’t they be able to, with the two of them in America anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “What’s America? From the point of view of distance, from where they are to where she is, it’s like flying from here to Paris. Even farther, because at least there are direct flights to Paris, and my sister’s Monticello is buried somewhere at the end of the world, getting there is a real hassle. “And besides,” I added, “for young people their age, as I’m sure you know, family relations aren’t exactly a big attraction. The last thing they need there is uncles and aunts.”

I made the same sort of reassuring noises to Chemi and my mother-in-law: my sister had left me far behind and she didn’t need me. She had benefactors of her own, leaving me free to enjoy the benevolence of those close to me.

But Rachel did not seem completely reassured. She asked if I had started being more active like Oded — the two of us agreed that the running did him good even though he wasn’t at all overweight. Because he’d been fat as a child, the fear of fatness had remained with him to this day; she asked if I was eating properly; she wanted to know if she was imagining it or if I had really started biting my nails again; if it was very hard for me to part from the boys — when was Nimrod coming home exactly? — in the end she arrived at Alice.

Alice was a problem I was unable to hide. Before we left for America I informed the editor that I was taking a two-week vacation, but soon after our return I discovered that I didn’t have the strength to take my tourist out on her weekly excursion.

Like many other newspaper columnists, I had one column in stock, needing only a little polishing and an appropriate ending.

My pigtail-sucker made friends with a lecturer in the Jewish Philosophy department, who let her in on the secret of the man who had taught him Kabala: it appeared that this admired teacher and scholar, one of the founding fathers of the Hebrew University, was a secret practitioner of Kabalistic magic. In deadly secret the professor had tried to create a Golem, and some said that he had succeeded; some also said that on nights of the new moon the Golem could still be seen wandering the labyrinthine corridors of the Mount Scopus campus.

Did Alice meet the Golem? And if she came across him, what would happen to her?

Every day I opened the file and after a minute or two closed it again without being able to write a single word. The Golem devoured Alice. My Alice was eaten up. A Golem swallowed the Golem.

I told my editor I’d returned from America with a virus — it hadn’t been diagnosed yet, maybe mono, it could take time — the lie came to me with the naturalness of a fiction writer; and to my in-laws I explained that I was suffering from the kind of drought that periodically attacked writers. “Writer’s block. Let’s hope I get over it soon,” I said and spread my hands in a helpless gesture, as if praying for inspiration to drop into them from heaven.

My writer’s block was as a successful alibi for all the eccentricities in my behavior during those days. Our Elinor is coping with a period of drought, it happens to creative people. She understands that such things happen, but it isn’t easy for her. The process of creation is a great mystery.

The truth behind the cliché is that in the midst of my feverish rushing about, I did indeed try to overcome the drying up of the wellsprings that in the past had always provided me with an abundance of ideas: I threaded my way through winding alleys, I peeped into narrow entrances, I eavesdropped on the snatches of conversations coming from all-night bakeries, and I opened galleries. But the pigtail-sucker refused to appear, and her delight in the world was gone.

Jerusalem became filthy. The pouring rain had brought the trash to the surface. And I, without my puppy-Alice, nevertheless went walking, on dug-up pavements filled with water and sludge, between wet piles of building debris. Here an old plastic bag floats up and sticks to a shoe, there a shoe treads on a comb and smashes its teeth. A broken bottle threatens to cut the sole, and in the background a radio screams artificial enthusiasm. A curtain of murky mist was coming down and covering everything.

Discordant neighs of laugher and an affectation of vivacious chatter greeted my ears at every function I forced myself to attend. And the artificiality and pretense and the lies and concealment in all this forced gaiety was almost unbearable. It occurred to me that the authorities had introduced some drug of deception into the city’s drinking water.

A fawning client sent Chemi a present, a purple orchid, magnificent and aggressive. “Would you like to take it?” my mother-in-law asked me.

“No, thank you. I’ll forget to water it and kill it without meaning to.”

“I’m sure your writing will come back to you, you’re so creative,” she dared to console me for what she assumed was making my face fall. “Everything has its own logic, and everything takes its own time. Menachem came up with the idea that, in the meantime, until you recharge your batteries — in the meantime perhaps you should reconsider bringing out what you’ve written up to now as a book. Menachem thinks that perhaps at the time, when the suggestion came up, you didn’t maybe give it enough thought. You’re a writer. You’re our writer. Our friends never stop saying how delightful they find your writing. One of my friends asked me to photocopy your columns about the zoo for her, she wants to make them into a book for her grandchildren and stick in pictures, too. Why don’t you make all Alice’s fans happy and bring out a book?”

The thought of having to go over all the delightful nonsense I’d written was more repellent than ever. I didn’t have the faintest desire to read all Alice’s colorful bullshit, but there were other things I did want to read, I wanted to very much. I went on buying books. The shelf of as yet unread books filled up, but nothing succeeded in catching my attention, and after a few pages they all fell flat.

Reading has always filled a significant part of my day, and the restlessness increased and invaded the new gaps opening in my time. My brain craved the drug of reading, and the same brain rejected the books. Until, in this state of deprivation, the cells started to excrete remnants of matter they had previously absorbed, and to mix them up.

Alone, alone, all alone / Alone on the wide wide sea

Alone, alone, all all alone

Water, water everywhere

The ship is sick, it rises and falls

And the eye seeks the sailors everywhere

For the pot will boil and the water will roil

Sail, sail my boat

For I am poured out like water.

A woman takes herself for a walk as if she were a dog. She steps out briskly, rhyming rhymes with her lips grimacing pointlessly. And the ship is sick / it sinks to the depths of the sea / thou hast ravished my heart / my sister my spouse. My ravished sister has ravished me, she has done for me by forgiving me. The day is done, Elisheva has won.

Scrambled sentences like these beat time for my steps, and sometimes they made me giggle to myself like a madwoman. You don’t know, ha-ha, oh no, you don’t know. What do you say? I say, laugh till you’re blue, you haven’t got a clue, soon you’ll be six feet under too.

One afternoon, on the path circling the stadium on the Givat Ram campus, I kicked a rock, because all the way from Musrara I couldn’t come up with a good rhyme for “the wicked will rejoice.” The kick hurt, but since I couldn’t find a rhyme, I had to find an outlet somehow.

— 11 -

Elisheva wrote to say that they were having a winter unlike any they’d seen for the last fifteen years at least. The university closed down for two days. Barnett helped his mother bring the horses in from the meadow, and the poor things were huddled together in the stable now. This morning she went out to clear the snow off the bird feeders, after it had blocked all the openings. Everything was covered in a spectacular blanket of white, and the little birds were having a hard time finding anything to eat. Sarah scattered peanuts on the windowsill, and the squirrels looked grateful. At this very minute, as she wrote, a squirrel was standing and nibbling a peanut on the windowsill.

Only at the end did she add that she had told our father about our wonderful visit, and that he wanted to know if he could have my email address.

I replied to my sister that “even though I wish Shaya nothing but happiness,” I could see no point in corresponding with him.

I imagined that the roundabout nature of the sentence came across well in English. Elisheva’s computer didn’t read Hebrew, and I found that it was easier for me to avoid giving offense in English.

To myself I said that Shaya might as well be dead as far as I was concerned, and that if his ghost was happy in Verona, it was no skin off my nose.

Our father was dead to me, and in any case it wasn’t his death that I wanted.

I sent the email and was about to return to Google. A few hours before I had started to read an article by some bigwig at the Jewish Federation. The article I had opened last night discussed the question of whether the members of our congregation in Los Angeles had been right to invite Professor Gotthilf to talk about “My Mistake.” Judging by what I had managed to read before Oded got up to have a drink of water, the VIP had found reasons both for and against the invitation. “Although we believe the mode veozev yerucham he wrote,” and explained the words in English as “a person who admits his wrongdoing and forswears it should be shown mercy,” “at the same time it should be taken into consideration”—and here I had to stop.

I brought up the article with the intention of finishing it. In these moments of sickening intimacy opposite the screen, the maddening discordance of all the pretense around me disappeared. But I was unable to sit still and read continuously for more than a few minutes at a time. I brought up the article, and then I heard the front door opening.

It was the second week of February. An ordinary weekday at the beginning of the week. Half past ten in the morning. Outside it was flooding. Water poured down from the sky, welled up from the ground. And my husband was supposed to be at work.

I got up quickly, and before I had time to wipe out the evidence I hurried to greet him. The face that filled the space in front of me for a moment sent alarm bells ringing: it was Oded’s face, alien and distorted, the cheeks sucked in with tension. “Okay. I think we need to talk,” he said.

I stood confronting him, and the theatrical nature of this confrontation in the middle of the living room propelled me out of the anxiety like the push of a strong hand. One moment I panicked, the next I felt the tickle of ironic laughter: that tone. That dramatic severity. Those clichéd words.

What could happen? What else could happen that hadn’t already happened?

“I’d like you to tell me what this is.” And without sitting down and without taking off his coat he threw a printout onto the table next to us. A glance from above was enough to identify the column that I had sent my editor sometime during the night. I had sent it, and the idiot had sent it to my husband. Or perhaps he had called my husband first to complain, and my lawyer had asked him to send it to him to read.

“Just a joke, what’s the big deal?”

“Elinor, if this is what you call a joke, then I really don’t know. .” his voice petered out, and the hand that had thrown the document down rose to steady his forehead. “Can I ask you to sit down? Can I? Then will you please sit down.”

I had composed the story of Alice’s last excursion not many hours previously, when sleep continued to evade me. The editor had learned from the heading of the return of the prodigal daughter, and in his delight he sat down to read the text immediately after he entered his office.

In her final adventure, Alice visits the Church of All Nations in Gethsemane. About two weeks earlier my feet had indeed carried me to the church, whose real name is actually “The Basilica of the Agony.” This was the place where the fear of death had come upon Jesus and his sweat “fell like great drops of blood to the ground.” There he prayed to his God to take the cup from him, and there he said to the priests, “This is your hour and this is the reign of darkness.” I know all this because I did the research. Like most of Alice’s trips, this final one also enabled me to occupy myself with research.

The story began with a classic joke; a cliché of a joke. Under the Byzantine pillars of the façade — the pillars were designed by the Italian architect Antonio Barluzzi, and their construction was completed in 1924, as I pointed out punctiliously in my column — under the Byzantine style pillars of the Church of All Nations, Alice meets three men: a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim. The three are standing together in a group, and the pigtail-sucker is delighted to have come across this manifestation of religious diversity: in the colorful tapestry of the city, religious variety is what delights her above all.

The Jew, the Christian, and the Muslim are also very happy to meet a girl from Alaska, and the interesting conversation between the four of them continues until darkness falls, and they set out together to stroll among the olive trees on the higher slopes of the hill. Someone remarks that “It may have been on one of these very tree trunks that Jesus rested his head,” but from the story it is not clear who the speaker is.

Alice’s body is found the next day — that is to say most of her body. One severed leg is found lying at the entrance to a pottery shop in the Armenian quarter, the other on the fantastic roof of Papa Andreas, a restaurant with one of our city’s finest observation points. The torso is discovered in the Hurva synagogue in the Jewish quarter. Another forty-eight hours pass before a fair, red-tinted pigtail comes to light in a bin of cast-off scraps in the heart of the meat market in the Muslim Quarter.

Elisheva my darling, my pretty one! Why they call you lame I do not know / Even if you cannot run / Of the usual pair of legs / you are missing only one.

— 12 -

In the end we talked, my husband and I. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that we sat down and my husband talked a lot, while I mainly mumbled that he was right, something was apparently happening to me, and all right, I was sorry.

I really did feel sorry. When he mentioned Seattle, I was sorry for everything that was missed and everything that went sour there — how I had failed to ask Nimrod about his roommate in the dormitories: even when he mentioned his exotic friend and roommate, an original native of Hawaii, I didn’t ask a thing. I was sorry for my evasiveness and for my aimless wandering and for the sleep that evaded me — it crossed my mind that I was really very tired, perhaps because of this, too.

I was sorry for my husband’s sorrowful face, and for his voice that kept trying to feel me out, and for the fact that part of the time I wasn’t really listening to what he said.

At a certain stage when he had almost despaired of me and my replies, he got up and walked around the house, but by the time he passed the computer in my work corner, the screen saver had already come on, and an artificial aquarium with tropical fish hid the First Person.

In the few minutes when Oded was walking around and around like this, I remember that I even felt a certain sorrow for Alice.

Years ago, in my first column, she came to Jerusalem with the intention of learning to paint in desert light. I had invented this detail and later abandoned it, and since I had abandoned it, the girl from Alaska would never, never paint any kind of light, or anything at all.

My Alice would never paint any more — she had hardly managed to paint at all — and I would never learn if such a thing as “desert light’ even existed in painting, because without her, what was the point.

“I don’t know what else to say,” Oded said when he came back and sat down on the edge of the armchair. “I think both of us are stuck here, and that we need some help. I mean psychological help.”

My husband said “both of us,” and it was clear to me what he was saying. “Both of us” was the hook on which he meant to catch the madwoman and lead her to a shrink. My husband, I guessed, was thinking of the complete collapse of our sex life, he was thinking of its death — and being what he was, in other words, the best of all possible men — it never crossed his mind to put all the blame for what had gone wrong on his wife.

Let me say in short that ever since the twenty-four hours in Chicago, this pleasure too had vanished from our lives, and the almost continuous presence of this absence had made all our movements awkward and clumsy. How pathetic and insulting is the choreography of avoidance. Here I am, hurrying past my husband wrapped in a towel, averting my eyes as he looks at me; trying to look like somebody who has forgotten some chore urgently in need of execution. Here I am scouring the oven and the gas rings, and here is my husband already asleep, wrapped in the bedspread, leaving the blanket for me.

“Both of us” my good husband said. But the problem was with me and in me, because it wasn’t Oded who crouched to clean the oven in the middle of the night, and he never avoided my eyes.

Pregnancies and breast-feeding and quarrels and a son in a pilots’ course, examinations for the Bar Association and urgent appeals to the supreme court — nothing in our lives thus far had interfered with the flowing current of our sex. It was the city of refuge to which we retreated, it was also open ground. Sex was perfunctory and sleepy, it was wild and anarchic, sweet and boring, but it was always there. Always there — until it was taken from me in the green woods of a little town with a musical name.

Because even before we returned to Israel something went wrong with our touch. Oded’s hand on my inflamed skin became heavy and oppressive, and sometimes the opposite — it was light and irritating, as if an insect had landed on my belly and I had to brush it off.

Even in sleep it sometimes happened that he touched me, and I reacted by crying out and recoiling. There was no part of my body left that wanted to be touched.

I was familiar with the usual advice in such situations: close your eyes and think of the queen. Go with it, abandon yourself, pretend, and pleasure will find an opening. Go through the motions and the real thing will come. And in general, all couples go through rough patches, and what can you expect after so many years of marriage?

But I didn’t want to. However out of control I was, kicking at rocks and deliberately hurting my toes, one thing was out of bounds. There was one thing at least I would not do: I would not tell a lie with my body.

•

“If that’s what you think, then all right, we’ll go to therapy,” I said. It was clear to me that no Freudian interpretations would give my husband the right touch back. But he laced his fingers, propped his elbows on his thighs, and pressed his knuckles to his forehead. And even after there was no point left, I could not deprive Oded of hope.

“I’m glad,” he said and removed his hands from his face. “Thank you. One of the things you learn in my problematic profession is when to call on expert assistance, and that it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s what intelligent people do. The important thing is to find ourselves a good guy, someone we can both respect. I don’t really know how to go about it, it’s not exactly a field. . you know. But maybe one of your girlfriends, someone whose opinion you respect, can give us a name.” Even in stressful negotiations my husband is adept, as he puts it, in “maximizing his achievements.”

I undertook to find us a therapist, and my responsible Oded got up to go back to work, leaving behind him a partner who had become a little more responsible. Like a guest I accompanied him to the door, and we both lingered a moment on the threshold, he rubbing his cheeks, I playing with a lock of hair and tucking in my shirt. For a moment he seemed about to kiss me on the cheek, and then he controlled himself and left. Only as he turned to go I noticed that he had cut himself while shaving in the morning. Once, an eon ago, when he cut himself like this, his wife would have licked the blood from his neck.

A wave of sardonic malice rose in me to the sound of the car driving away, and with this wave the idea of looking up the “expert” soul doctor in the Yellow Pages I had promised to find. I even opened the phone book. “Spiritual psychotherapy”; “Expert clinical psychologist, therapy by hypnosis available”; “Short-term power therapy”; “Dynamic short-term therapy”; “Depression, anxiety, sex”; “Hypnosis and workshops’; “Relationships, dreams, and anger’; “Mid-life transitions.”

Who presumed to know when life ended and when it was at its middle?

Power therapy — I said to Oded in my heart — let’s not pretend at least, because you must see that this will only work by force: perhaps by hypnosis combined with drugs in the water. In any case, no workshops, and we haven’t got the time for “dynamic therapy” because it’s impossible to carry on like this, because how long can we go on suffering like this? You understand — how long? Don’t you understand that an affliction like this can only be eradicated by force?

And yet, I didn’t pluck a magician at random from the Yellow Pages. I was fair, I behaved like a good sport, I gave it a chance. I called a girlfriend, a child psychologist, and told her about some friends of ours “who were experiencing a mid-life crisis in their relationship.” And in order to be even fairer I added that I happened to know that the man — I deliberately avoided saying the woman—“had experienced some sort of trauma at an early age.”

“In your opinion would they prefer a male or a female therapist?” she asked.

“Does it make a difference?”

My friend gave me the name of a psychologist “who is both professional and human.” And after checking my husband’s schedule with his secretary, I made an appointment for the two of us.

At noon on the day we were supposed to meet our therapist, my feet carried me to circle the Old City walls again. When I passed the Church of All Nations, I did not cross the road to admire the Byzantine-style pillars on the façade. Antonio Barluzzi had designed them. An eminent architect. A half-rhyme. And Barluzzi went with Monticello, even though it didn’t rhyme at all. Monticello reminded Oded of Limoncello and the only thing it rhymed with was cello. How did a little town in Illinois come to have an Italian name in the first place? Another pretense, another fraud — if not an outright lie.

I climbed as far as the Zion Gate, and went inside with the intention of taking a shortcut home. In one of the streets I came across a ladies’ hairdressing salon: the façade was of an old established business, I must have passed it many times before without noticing it. I had time to kill before the meeting in the evening, so I went inside, and in the air perfumed with the scent of roses, among the gleaming posters of foreign singers and dancers and actresses with painted faces — I had my hair cut so short that it stood up in bristles.

When I first met Oded my head was almost shaved; not a lock of hair to take hold of, and Oded, in my opinion, thought it was sexy. But with the passage of the years he seemed to take credit for every centimeter of hair I grew, and he would run his fingers through the results with an air of self-congratulation.

My mother-in-law remarked on more than one occasion that “with your face anything would look good, but long hair really is more feminine,” and I was happy to let myself be persuaded and to let my hair grow down to my shoulders.

I was the only customer, and the tiny hairdresser — bright as a bird in her blue polyester trouser suit — tried to bargain with me. “Why don’t we wait until the summer to cut it shorter? Perhaps for now we’ll only cut it up to here?”

She demonstrated by pulling my hair up to my ears, and her eyes, heavily fringed with artificial black eyelashes, looked at me suspiciously in the mirror, as if I was setting a trap for her with my outrageous request.

Alice would have milked a jug full of stories from this colorful creature. I could have thrown her head into the hairdressing salon instead of the meat market. But it was too late now, one of her pigtails was already sticking out of a heap of butchered meat, and “after the first death there is no other.”

In the end I compromised: the perfumed heat made me feel faintly dizzy, the massaging of my scalp lessened the constant itching a little, but even so I was too impatient to haggle over any further inroads. I declined the tiny hairdresser’s offer to spray my hair, thanked her, and paid. She looked happy to see the last of me, and I walked out of there with my hair a little longer than it had been at my mother’s funeral.

When I picked Oded up outside the office, it was cold, five degrees Celsius inside the car. And so it was only when I took off my hat in the psychologist’s clinic that he saw my old-new hairstyle. Saw it, and refrained from reacting, since any reaction in this situation would have seemed out of proportion, against the background of a décor unsupportive of any deviation from the norm.

The clinic in Abu-Tor was a perfect example of correct proportions. The ceiling was just the right height, a little lower than ours at home. An appropriate wooden table, half-way between office and domestic furniture. A single, flourishing potted plant, recommending the good care of its owner. Two original still-life paintings, containing nothing to distract or remind. A soft wool carpet in shades of golden-brown and cream.

Had we found the place easily? Were we cold? If we were, she could switch on the heating.

In another era, I would probably have liked her. Even as I sat down next to Oded, I acknowledged this. Appropriately feminine jeans, a white linen blouse creased to precisely the right degree, undyeds graying hair, and a face that had rounded and matured in a dignified manner, without a trace of sentimentality. The eyes too, I noted to myself, looked intelligent.

She could have been my husband’s older sister. She could have been his older wife, because a glance was enough to establish that she belonged, with inborn naturalness, to “the upstairs people”—at the top. The nice-looking daughter of a professor from Rehavia, or perhaps from Beit Hakerem. Academic success achieved by dint of hard work and perseverance, but never at the cost of crushing effort. In the course of her professional training she had paid thousands of pounds in order to complain about her parents, who were by all accounts perfectly satisfactory. Had her father paid for her analysis or her husband?

An obscure sense of guilt — I thought — drew her to occupy herself with human suffering. Her sympathy for her clients was sincere and so was the attention she paid them. But of the other side of suffering, of evil, she knew nothing. People like her didn’t have pictures proliferating in their heads. They didn’t know.

Would we like to tell her what had brought us to her?

The husband leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, giving his wife the stage.

Did all the soul-doctors only know one opening into the hell of the mind?

Before I finished with Alice, I would devote a lot of thought to the opening sentences of each of my columns. Did these people not have the imagination to accommodate more than a single opening? It was possible, for instance, for her to tap her pencil on the table and say: “Name please, address, and serial number,” in which case I would be able to tell her why I failed to serve in the IDF, even though all my friends had joined up and I wanted to too, only at exactly the time in question my mother had killed herself and my sister had been released from a psychiatric hospital.

•

The land of those who know no evil has habits of its own. My husband shifted uneasily on my right, and I said to myself that since I had been asked it was up to me to honor the customs of the land.

“My sister suffered sexual abuse, continuous abuse,” I stated. “She became pregnant as a result. This was when we were both in high school, and ever since then, the person who did it to her has been walking around free. Do you think you can help me with this?” I was quite proud of my clear pronunciation of the words, because it was quite hard for me to pronounce them.

“I’d like to hear more, if you can tell me.”

“Not only is he not suffering, he’s a well-known personality, three hundred one thousand hits on Google. Tchernichovsky has less, just to give you a sense of proportion,” I explained, and I was even prouder of myself for the “sense of proportion,” something the inhabitants of this land hold in high esteem.

“And since this terrible thing happened — how many years have passed?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty years have passed. And this is the first time you’ve considered therapy.”

“Are you hinting at a statute of limitation on rape?”

“I’m only trying to understand the timing. Why now?”

“Because if you’re trying to hint that I woke up too late, if what you’re asking is how I agreed, until now, to let this thing go on growing — because you see, it wasn’t only rape, it was an ideology of raping and raping and never stopping because there’s no end to it. The Marquis de Sade and Hitler. That’s what it is. And it grows, because it’s there. Because for thirty years it was ignored, as if it didn’t exist, as if it could stay this way, for someone to suffer such torture, and the person who did it to her. . as if it can’t be cleaned.” All at once, without any preparation or intent, I’d been swept away by a torrent of words, but my tongue couldn’t keep up, and I remember that I thought about blood, because as my tongue swelled and stumbled in my mouth, I felt my blood rising and bursting through my skin.

In the face of this outburst, the therapist said, “So many painful things, so many painful feelings,” and something else about “inundation,” as if I had opened the sewage pipes under her cream carpet. On my left, on my skin, I sensed Oded’s tide rising, I sensed it very strongly, but I didn’t turn my head.

“I don’t know how much this word helps, if it helps at all, but what you’re talking about is called trauma. And if I understand correctly, then the far from simple issue that the two of you are coping with is how to live with trauma.”

“How to live?”

“How to live. .” She repeated, and it wasn’t clear if she meant to answer or to ask.

“I’m not talking about life, why life? I’m saying the opposite. The complete opposite. I’m talking about the person who has to pay, about payment, that’s what I’m talking about, about that twisted ha-ha jokiness of his, about the fact that he’s still carrying on out there with his two little girls Tzili and Gili, ha-ha, but also about balance. If I came here in the first place, then obviously I want to be balanced. But for me to be balanced inside, there must first of all be balance outside. That’s what I meant when I asked you if you could help me.”

“To live with injustice, to accept, make peace, or come to terms with injustice, is a very painful thing.”

“Accept? Make peace? Come to terms?” I stood up, recovering my self-respect and my tongue, which obeyed me again. Inarticulateness was never one of my characteristics. “Excuse me,” I said, “I think there’s been a mistake here. I didn’t come here to look for any kind of acceptance/peace/coming to terms. That’s not what I came for at all, and if I gave the wrong impression, then I apologize.”

“Elinor, nobody here. . I would very much like to understand. .”

“I’m sorry.” I grabbed my coat and walked out of the tasteful clinic with its correct proportions, leaving my husband to write a check or make inquiries about how to hospitalize his wife. I didn’t care. I didn’t care, because somehow in the course of this farce something inside me had clarified, leaving me with an unexpected sense of relief, and the social embarrassment I knew I should feel didn’t even materialize once I was outside.

I circled the car, crossed the street, and walked up to the promenade a few buildings higher up, where the view of East Jerusalem lay spread out below me. The sky was cloudless. The strong light of the stars overcame the lights of the city, and a wind blew and dispersed the clean vapors of mist. For a moment, the movement of the wet air dimmed the lights reflected in the stone, and then it once again revealed ancient views — valley, severe wall, inhabitation.

The city found favor in my eyes, and as I stood there with squared shoulders, I had a strange sense that I too found favor in its eyes, that even if there was no one else in sight, I was not alone. Jerusalem that knew no peace. A city of blood and wrath, jealousy and war, hunger and wild beasts and plague. A city whose stones cry out for vengeance. The price will be paid, and the guilty will not be cleared. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. And I will bring this evil upon you, and I will send a fire and cut off man and beast, and break the heads of babes on rocks.

All the weight of the rocks, the stones, and the destruction tilted the scales in my favor to bring balance to the world again. The city was with me in the place where I stood because it could not be otherwise. Supported by the hard, still Jerusalem, I felt steady for the first time since I had parted from my sister. Ever since we parted, I had felt a sense of exile, and now a great city spread out in the darkness before me and spoke to me in my language, and with all the force of its presence it said the things that my tongue, swollen until it was black, had been unable to say. A God of vengeance is the Lord thy God. And He will never pardon the guilty, for the Lord hath a dispute with the inhabitants of the land to rid it of radioactive pollution.

I don’t know how long I stood there before hearing Oded’s footsteps behind me on the pavement. I don’t think it was more than a few minutes before he was at my side.

“So that’s what’s been occupying you all this time. Him? That’s what it’s all about — him?” His voice was free of complaint, surprisingly relaxed. I considered the word “occupying.” A hobby occupies you. Your business affairs. Your job.

“So it seems,” I said.

“Okay, so now I understand a bit better what’s going on. Accepting injustice is a very painful thing,” he said, and for a moment I thought I was mistaken, but I wasn’t mistaken, I had heard right: my husband was teasingly, flirtatiously mimicking the psychologist’s calm, deliberate tone. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how much I like your haircut,” he went on quickly before I could take in what was happening here. “Can we go to the car now? I don’t know about you, but I’m going to freeze if we keep standing here.”

I accompanied him to the car and we drove home, and so it happened that we began to talk again, my husband and I, thanks to our brief visit to the soul-doctor.

We didn’t talk about everything at once, and we didn’t talk about everything: but there were bits of conversations at night, and in the morning before he left the house — exchanges that meant something took place between us.

And there were longer talks as well, on the Saturdays when he joined me on my walks. Because the restlessness that propelled me didn’t go away, only now it began to seem to me like something that was necessary, and its existence troubled me less.

Volatile Jerusalem changed its face all the time, sometimes it supported me in its clarity, and sometimes it covered itself in a filthy film of pollution. And not for a moment did I forget: First Person was arriving in the spring.