Lies, First Person

— 1 -

“So you didn’t save that email. .” I’d gotten up from the computer a few minutes before in order to greet my husband in the way I once did. I no longer needed the screen saver to hide my occupation, nor did I need to explain which email I was asking about.

He had deleted it. “Sorry, it was foolish of me. I would have fired myself if I did something so idiotic at work. I should have saved it in case of the extremely improbable event of his deciding to bother us again. I think I felt a childish need to simply delete it from our lives.”

“And you’re positive he didn’t mention exactly when he’s coming or for what conference.” Oded shrugged his shoulders. He had already answered this question before.

None of my web searches came up with an announcement for a conference in Jerusalem that could conceivably have invited Hitler, First Person to attend, but I assumed that the information must be somewhere in one of the three hundred one thousand tentacles, and that I couldn’t find it because I wasn’t doing the search properly.

I couldn’t keep away from the computer for more than a few hours, but I also wasn’t capable of sitting in front of the proliferating cells for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I sat down, got up, sat down again: Not-man slipped through the holes in the web, and sometimes I had the strange illusion that “Mr. Gotthilf” was not a singular but a plural. I couldn’t find a proper biography, he didn’t have a website of his own, but in different contexts he was represented as professor at six different universities. The last of these was the University of Indiana, where he had written “My Mistake.” Taking into account the frequency with which he changed his place of employment, he could be anywhere.

I thought that perhaps there was no conference, that this too was a lie meant to mislead us. And perhaps he wasn’t arriving in spring either, but earlier. And what do people mean anyway when they talk about spring? Some people claim that there aren’t any seasons between winter and summer in Israel. Passover is also called the “Festival of Spring” but it often takes place in a heat wave. He has a son in the country, and maybe he’s already here with him.

“In November he’s giving a lecture in Frankfurt,” I said. “‘Is to understand to forgive?’—that’s what he calls it. There’s nothing about Jerusalem.”

“Maybe he’s dead,” said Oded. “What do we know? Maybe he was run over by a truck, or even better: maybe he had a stroke, and now he’s lying drooling in some hospital.”

“Nothing like that happened,” I said.

“No?”

“I just know.” I couldn’t explain to him or to myself how I knew that the pollution was still alive, or how I felt its existence like a presence. But I felt it and I knew, and somehow it was clear to me that when it left the world — I would know. How? Perhaps I would simply get up in the morning and discover that our rapist uncle, Uncle Aaron, the ha-ha uncle had disappeared and I could breathe.

“Good, at least let’s take comfort in the fact that at his age he isn’t capable of raping anyone any more, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to write another book about Hitler either.”

“And if he was?”

“Capable of raping?” Oded studied his hands. “I imagine that in that case I might think of all kinds of things that aren’t exactly within the bounds of the law.”

“And what about what was?”

“What about it? Go on, Elinor, explain yourself. Don’t run away from me.”

But I didn’t know how to explain that to him either: that there was no such thing as “was,” that everything that was is, and that the past tense was simply a convenient grammatical lie. Nothing passes.

I didn’t know how to explain, but I no longer wanted to run away from him, and so I backed myself into a corner and banged my head against the fridge, over and over again.

“Elinor, don’t.” Oded stood up and took hold of my shoulders.

At this stage we were already touching again, but circumspectly. We embraced, but carefully, avoiding hip to hip contact, the way my husband hugged our sons. Early in the morning, when the heat evaporated from the house, it sometimes happened that one sleeping body wrapped itself around the other. And all this time Oded went on waiting patiently for a sign I did not give. He was patient and respectful and dignified, all anyone could wish for, but the situation made him tense and wore him out; I know very well how tense it made him.

It isn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault that we had been deprived of all our desire, all our delight, because I was the first to have been robbed, as if something had invaded me and taken my life away. Oded at least went on wanting, and wanting means being alive.

•

“Tell me what you want.” I stood with my back to the fridge, my husband protecting my head and the back of my neck. “Talk to me. At least that. Tell me what I can do. You’re not going to bang your head again. I won’t let you.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I can’t. You don’t understand.” Over his shoulder, without any connection to anything, I counted nine wine glasses — there were nine on the shelf, we had originally bought twelve, where had the other three disappeared to? — and when I finished counting the answer came out of its own accord, rising in a childish wail: “Make him be gone — that’s what I want.”

We went on standing there for another moment: I with my back to the fridge, and my bodyguard stroking my hair, against the direction of growth, like you do with a child. The caressing hand was confused, and I knew that it felt the absence of the locks it could sink its fingers into.

The weakness, the idiotic, childish weakness was intolerable, as was the disappearance of the control and of everything I had worked so hard to acquire. And after that shameful incident with Oded, it even happened that I thought of Erica and her games with the Digoxin in a new way. Because, but for her desertion, but for who she was, I might have been tempted to put an end to the weakness the same way she did.

It occurred to me that thanks to my mother, the medicine cupboard and the carving knives did not tempt me and that, not only for this reason, I might very well visit her grave one day and clean the dust off it. Elisheva believed that I did so every year, and I let her believe it.

No, the medicine cupboard did not beckon me, and as far as harming myself was concerned the furthest I went in my fantasies was getting another tattoo. I remembered almost with longing the concentrated, draining pain with which my tiger-face appeared on my arm, and I thought that exactly this kind of pain was capable of providing some kind of relief: a burning fire on the calf, or maybe a big one on my back could cool my head.

But I didn’t get a tattoo either. Maybe because it would require me to sit still for a long time, maybe because I hadn’t really gone back to being nineteen, and I hadn’t lost everything. My ability to feel love had gone into hiding. My telephone conversations with the boys no longer brought me joy. But the memory of love had not disappeared, and even though I didn’t feel anything, I still knew with a kind of intellectual knowledge that there were people I loved, even if they weren’t there.

Two weeks after I had asked her not to give our father my email address, Elisheva sent me another message. She reported on the snow, which had not melted but only hardened on the ground, on a field race in which Sarah was supposed to take part and which had been postponed because of the snow hardening on the ground, and at the end she wrote, “Don’t worry your head about Daddy. He’s in a good mood and he’s started learning to play the harmonica. At his age — don’t you think that’s sweet?’

As always, I knew that she was sincere, that she had no demands and bore no grudge. And I had already realized that the moment she finished telling me her story, her interest in me had waned considerably. The robber of her birthright continued to figure in her life, but now she had been sentenced to stand still in one place, like an ice monument.

At this stage I seemed to have two sisters. One in a red sweater, sending emails in English from a town with a musical name and listening to the sound of a harmonica in Verona. The other, plagued by loathsome torments about which my sister never told me. Because every cruel, vicious spectacle I had ever heard about rose up in my mind to haunt me, with my sister in the middle of it: images of rape that went on and on endlessly, because it had no point. Because the boot that set itself directly down on the stomach and trampled it was itself the point. The boot and the laughter.

Images instilled in me during the course of my life merged with one another to spawn new nightmare births, and sometimes in the company of others I was attacked by the fear that the things I saw in my mind’s eye were seeping out of me like sweat, like a radioactive odor. I didn’t want them to see what was happening to me, but at the same time I wanted people to open their eyes and see.

How could I make Oded understand without defiling him with the filth, especially since the filth — something I didn’t forget — was the product of my own imagination? How was it possible to talk at all, without polluting the land of the salt of the earth?

One Saturday I told him something that had happened. We were sitting in the car in the parking lot of the Armon Hanatziv Promenade. My husband told me that if I felt the need to walk, at least let’s walk on the promenade, which was intended for walking. But when we set out, the wind blew so strongly in our faces that we found it difficult to breathe, and we returned to the car and went on sitting there for a while.

My husband talked about Nimrod and his vague plans for the future, and when I was miserly with my responses, he went on to talk at length about himself.

He asked with a certain coyness if, in my opinion, he had been a good father to our sons, and immediately announced that in his estimation “he had done quite a good job with them.” He had actually particularly enjoyed the boys during the period of their adolescence, which was supposed to be so difficult. The sincerity of their seeking, their rebelliousness, the totality they had possessed then — in some strange way it appeared that he found it easy to connect to the mind-set characteristic of this age: which led him to think that one day, when he retired from the firm, he should work with adolescents. It could be fun. When he was still doing reserve duty, he had never complained when he was sent to command young soldiers. At the age of fifteen, he picked up playing sports and lost more than ten kilos. The guy who had influenced him then — I probably remembered — was a substitute biology teacher, biology of all things. Every teacher, it seemed, could have a decisive influence. And this was why he was coming around more and more to the idea that perhaps his true vocation was to be a high school homeroom teacher. He was also beginning to think seriously that, in a few years time, he might even go ahead and check out this possibility.

I told him that my sister had always hated school, that she hadn’t had the good fortune to come across an influential educator there, and then I added that I didn’t know what things were like during the period of the abuse. I wasn’t there to see what was happening to her. I was in boarding school, and there, far away from her, I actually did come into the orbit of a number of impressive teachers — but perhaps at that time school actually served as an escape from the things he was doing to her, because school could be a kind of refuge.

“I know that he turned her into a piece of furniture,” I said, without having clearly decided to tell him. From his reaction I understood that he thought “furniture” was simply a metaphor I had thrown out instead of saying “object,” and so it came about that I explained to him: he wiped his shoes on her. He put a suitcase on her and remarked that in every normal hotel room there was a special stool provided for this purpose.

And he once explained to her that everything he did was a kind of experiment, only she was too stupid to understand what he was talking about.

While I was telling my husband this, the potted plant he brought her came into my head, and the final significance of the orchid became clear: that flower was like the banana offered to the monkey after the rubber gloves are removed at the conclusion of the experiment. But I kept this insight to myself.

“So tell me, is there some article in your law book, is there some punishment that covers a situation in which a high-school student is turned into a stool?”

Oded’s face twisted. “I don’t know about the law. Personally, I would castrate him, and I’m not talking about the chemical variety.”

“Is that what you would do? Really?”

“I think so. And I would give him time, too, enough to think about what I was going to do to him.”

His mouth remained twisted. I touched the corner with the tip of my finger. “What do you think?”

“I actually thought about a cage. I would shut him up in a glass cage and then would put the cage somewhere where people could come and look. Look at him until he died.”

“A glass coffin or box,” he said without turning to face me, as if absent-mindedly. He stroked my bare neck. “Armor-plated glass. That man should be stuck standing up in a glass box where he can’t move: not sit, not bend down, nothing.”

Our car was the only one standing in the parking lot. Our breath covered the windshield with vapors, and Oded wiped them away with his sleeve so we could go on seeing the hard, gray city below us. I think that the sight of the city supported him like it supported me, because the Saturday after that, when we left his parents’ house after lunch, he again suggested that we drive to the promenade.

Writers are not in the business of sticking strictly to the facts, and the scenes I’ve chosen to describe above could give the impression that there was nothing but contention, strife, the Not-man between my husband and myself. But there were other things too, and there are also other images: a woman vacuums, and a husband and wife carry the carpet outside together and hang it on the clothesline to air out; a gardener comes to dig up a tree, and the couple visit various nurseries together to decide what to plant in its place; a father and mother look at the photographs their younger son has sent them from a trip he took to a pueblo reservation, and speculate about the bespectacled young woman with the yellow backpack who appears in most of them.

Oded rolls his Sabbath joint. I make popcorn. I smooth and straighten his eyebrows. We sit together on the sofa, our legs parallel on the coffee table, and watch a movie. We watched quite a lot of movies then, and my husband chose them all, because during that period when I had a hard time making him happy in other ways, I learned to enjoy the movies he liked with him. Aliens, germs, terrorists, a comet, a storm, or a volcano — something threatens to wreak destruction on the world. A good man finds himself in an intolerable situation, and in order to rescue whoever needs to be rescued, he sets the place on fire. He does what has to be done.

I discovered that blood and fire and columns of smoke calmed my feverish imagination, and when we sat like brother and sister and watched Oded’s guy flicks, I had no difficulty sitting still in one place for even two hours at a time. The cinematic adrenaline was an efficient antiseptic, and I occasionally fell asleep on the sofa when the movie was over.

— 2 -

I don’t know what other people thought of me during this period. I have no doubt that my concerned and observant mother-in-law, keeping a watchful eye on her household and loved ones, heard the seething of my inner ferment, and that she went on hearing it even after her son and I started meeting each other’s eyes again.

It’s clear to me, and in fact it was clear to me even then, that after a while she no longer accepted my “Alice crisis” as a cause, and began to see it as part of a syndrome.

Personal temperament, family culture, and the hidden but rigid rules that had been laid down between us from the day we met prevented any direct interrogation, but they did not stop her from buzzing discreetly around the subject.

One Saturday she launched into a long monologue about two of her friends who suffered from “empty nest syndrome” after the last of their children left home.

“When the children are in the army it’s different, as long as you do their laundry they’re still your babies. When Oded moved into his first apartment, he went on bringing me his laundry, and I’ll tell you honestly, even if it’s anti-feminist, doing his laundry for him gave me a good feeling. They say that the telephone and the computer cancel out distances, but in my opinion, and from the experience of my friends, there’s simply no substitute for being face to face. It’s only natural for a mother to want to see her child’s face, and also to know if he has holes in his socks.”

A woman who didn’t want to see her children face to face was beyond the bounds of her imagination. If she had been compelled to acknowledge such a possibility she would have been outraged, and she would have regarded me as a monster. But I wasn’t a monster, not at all.

I remembered the times before the spoiling, the days when it was enough for me to imagine one of my sons — Yachin kicking his legs in his bay carriage as if he was already in a hurry to run, Nimrod learning from his brother the correct way to lace his army boots — these memories were enough for me to brim over with a great joy at the mere fact of my beautiful sons’ existence in the world.

I missed those accessible waves of joy, I missed the joy, but I didn’t miss my sons themselves. There is a time for embracing and there is a time to desist from embracing, and I was responsible enough and balanced enough to know that this was not the time to embrace.

The pictures my sister had in her head seeped into me, and the smell of my sweaty visions began to stick to Oded. The sound of the ferment that reached my mother-in-law’s ears was the sound of the sights crowding and seething inside me, threatening to overflow and spill out. Sights that I didn’t know existed rose up in me and clamored loudly. And I could only be thankful that Yachin and Nimrod were far from the poison, which could burn holes in socks too. The harm I had caused in Seattle was enough.

At another Saturday lunch my mother-in-law showed me an article she had cut out of the newspaper about the various advantages of eating tofu, especially for women of a certain age. She even started cooking it for us, the white stuff that “constituted a natural source of estrogen and calcium. Many studies show that Asian women do not suffer from the change-of-life syndrome, and exhibit a very low incidence of cancer of the uterus and the ovaries. Isn’t that interesting? The Asians, it says here, eat tofu all the time, even children and young people like you eat it. The Japanese and the Chinese put a big emphasis on preventative medicine.”

The white stuff did not prevent anything or rid her daughter-in-law’s system of the dirt, and soon afterward she began to refer mysteriously to “experiences that take time to digest.” As much as I loved her, as much as I remembered that I loved her, these metaphoric ramblings about “digestion” only enflamed my rage: as if I needed some mental castor oil to accelerate the exorcism of the vileness from my twisted bowels. As if the vileness had no poisonous life outside my bowels. As if its pollution was only a metaphor and not something real.

It occurred to me to tell her that her son and I had tried psychotherapy, but I didn’t want to give her any opening. And in the end my good mother-in-law dared to ask me directly if I thought a lot about my meeting with my sister, because it was only natural for such a meeting after so many years to give rise to all kinds of memories, and it was only natural for me to think about it.

“I never asked you if your sister felt the same as you do, you know, about your parents.”

Of all the emotional problems I had brought with me as a dowry, the only one that really worried her was my undisguised hostility toward my mother. She regarded the enmity as an armor with which I covered my wounds, and even more, as the result of a regrettable misunderstanding: a hot-headedness that might be expected to cool down and disappear with the onset of maturity.

“At my age, Elinor, we understand that in our relations with our parents, and definitely with our mothers, there is no black and white.”

When Yachin was a baby and suffered from colic, and Oded and I were suffering from a lack of sleep, my angelic mother-in-law would come by almost every day to allow me to rest. And when she cradled her screaming grandson in her arms, I could see how she was secretly cherishing the fantasy that my motherhood would help me understand my own weak-hearted mother, and to make peace with the dead.

Once, out of the blue, she asked me when exactly the anniversary of my mother’s death fell, and whether I never felt the urge to visit her grave.

I tried to brush it off by saying that in general “graveyards didn’t mean anything to me,” but she, with uncharacteristic stubbornness, persevered: “I can tell you that for many years Menachem was in the habit of declaring that he was going to donate his body to science. With all his modesty, and he really is modest, you know he can sometimes be a bit of a show-off too. So for years he would boast to us about how rational his attitude was, but he never put it in his will. In any event, I’m surprised to hear such intellectualism from you. I’m not judging, God forbid, or telling you what’s right, but if you ever feel that you would like to visit the grave, just remember that we’ll all be with you.”

My new motherhood did indeed give rise in me to various thoughts about my own mother; mainly, it finished off any hint of understanding I might have felt for her desertion.

Rachel, in her womanly way, gave in to me without really giving in. She went on cherishing a sentimental fantasy about reconciliation with the past, and after we returned from America and the contamination flared up and silently threatened us all, she got it into her head again that for me to find peace of mind it was necessary for me to make peace with my dead mother. Not everything was black and white, there were also pastel shades and nuances, and the way to heal both body and soul was to come to terms with your ghosts. I was burning up in the loathsome intimacy of my knowledge of the vermin — for the pot will boil and the water will roil — and she, in her pastel ignorance, wanted me lukewarm.

‘Does your sister feel the same as you do, you know. .?”

I swallowed and spat out that my sister had always been a better person than I was and so, apparently, she was in this case too. I saw how my mother-in-law’s eyes clouded over in sorrow, I think because of the coarseness of my tone more than my words, and I made haste to add: “Look, I imagine that we both experienced our parents a little differently, that happens with a lot of siblings. But all that’s over and done with, and as far as I’m concerned, at least, it’s fine for us to feel a little differently.”

Quick to take fright and quick to retire graciously from the field, my mother-in-law agreed that “everyone is entitled to feel what they feel. You were sent to boarding school and your sister wasn’t, so it’s natural for you to feel differently. Being in boarding school probably isn’t so simple. Just don’t say about yourself that you’re not a good person, because if you run yourself down like that in the end I’ll tell Oded on you.”

Good intentions, only good intentions were behind the following scene:

We sat around the lunch table, the same heirloom wooden table to which an eon ago a young man had brought a tattooed girl to horrify his parents.

“This week Menachem received an interesting invitation”—it was exactly the same tone my mother-in-law would use to say to her grandsons “Let’s see if there’s something here for you,” before she set her bag down in front of them and invited them to open it and look inside. Only this time it was Menachem who opened it.

“It seems that a week after Passover, in less than a month’s time, a big international conference is going to be held here in Jerusalem, on ‘Representations of the Holocaust in Art.’ I understand that they’ve been working on it for some time already, because a good number of institutions in Israel and abroad are involved in the project. A friend of ours, Mordechai Kushnir — I think you met him, Elinor, on my birthday, Hanita’s husband — he’s in charge of most of the logistical aspects. Artists and scholars from all over the world are coming, at one stage they even thought that Spielberg was going to come, and Mordechai is responsible for hosting them. To cut a long story short, on Tuesday Mordechai calls to tell me that among the participants is Professor Aaron Gotthilf. Let me say that your controversial uncle is not among the guests of honor, he’s apparently paying for his own flight and hotel expenses, but in any case he appears among the list of speakers. One of Mordechai’s initiatives, one of the things he’s in charge of, is the organization of informal meetings between the scholars. Most of the forums of the conference will be open to the public and will take place not only at the university. The opening, I understand, will be held at the International Conference Center, and among other things they’re planning some kind of marathon at the Cinematheque. What my friend refers to as a ‘multifocal event.’”

Chemi stirred the noodles into his soup, and laid the spoon down next to his bowl. Menachem Brandeis was not a man to be hurried, and in any case it was impossible to hurry what had already happened and was now a fact in the present. As he was speaking my ears seemed to fill with water, and the rising tide slowed everything down and made me very passive. I felt as passive as after a drunken hamsin night. The river flowed and I was borne along in it, there was no point in swimming.

“So Mordechai remembered — actually Hanita reminded him — that we have a Gotthilf in the family — Gotthilf isn’t a common name — and he phoned to ask if there was indeed a connection between us, and if Rachel and I would be interested in attending a dinner to which your uncle is also invited.”

I sent Oded an S.O.S. No, I didn’t even look at him. I concentrated my gaze on the steam rising from the soup and Oded came to the rescue without being sent for: “I thought we had all agreed that the man is beyond the pale. I still remember how you said so yourself, in Spain, about the book. I can’t understand how they could’ve invited someone like him in the first place, his book wasn’t even considered worthy of being translated into Hebrew. How can an apologist for Hitler be invited to Jerusalem?”

“Oded, listen to what your father has to say.”

“Good, so I hadn’t forgotten Hitler, First Person either, and I didn’t spare Mordechai my opinion, which is no different from yours. But then he told me that Elinor’s uncle has completely renounced that abomination — begging your pardon, Elinor — he signed his name to has devoted the last years of his career to what Mordechai called “a campaign of self-condemnation.” It sounded quite interesting to me. To repent of something you did, to admit your mistake, is certainly not common, not in our academic life or in our political culture, and in my humble opinion it’s definitely something that wouldn’t do us any harm to adopt. But to return to the matter at hand, since I was still skeptical, Mordechai sent me a long essay in which the man presents his main points of criticism of his book. I haven’t finished reading it yet, I admit that not all his arguments satisfy me, I see some sophistry there, but the bottom line is that there’s something to discuss. That’s to say that, if in the past, Elinor, I defined your uncle as ‘beyond the pale,’ as far as I’m concerned that no longer applies, and as I said to Mordechai, an informal dinner isn’t out of the question.”

The patriarch gave his wife a questioning look — I had no doubt as to who had written the script — and when she sent him an approving smile, he picked up his spoon and started on his soup.

Years after he had taken me to task because of my relationship to the First Person, my mother-in-law had found an opportunity to prompt him to make up for the distress he had caused me then: Something’s upsetting the girl, Oded says so too, and whatever it is, we now have a chance to do something to make her happy. And Menachem didn’t even have to admit that he had gone too far back, in Spain.

There was no appeal against the favorable sentence that had now been passed on me, and in any case the truth was impossible to pronounce: at the heirloom wooden table there was no place for my sister, who had been turned into a stool.

But Oded still tried, and from my superior vantage point at the apex of my scalp I didn’t miss a word: “And I wonder exactly why he set out on this so-called journey of self-condemnation. My guess is that he must have realized it was the only way to save his career.”

Now my mother-in-law sent her son a look of rebuke, and Chemi looked at his wife and at me, and they all looked at me to measure the movement of the mercury. But there was nothing to see. I was empty and silent, a unit isolated in space — what would be would be, and the serpent would always be a serpent. Only a kind of laughter stirred and rose on the margins of my passive mind, because I knew, because all the time I knew that a serpent was creeping, and the movement of the heads and the looks around me looked ridiculously slow and exaggerated.

“If we start examining personal motivations, we’ll open up a witch hunt that has no end,” Menachem announced. “Everyone has his own interests at heart. That’s true in politics, it’s true in academic life, it’s always true, even at this table. So I say that with regard to Elinor’s uncle, ‘he who admits his wrongdoing and forswears it should be shown mercy.’ It’s enough for me that he’s admitted he was wrong, and that he travels from one university to the next to present this new position. We’re not going to start checking up on his motivations, because let’s not deceive ourselves, intellectuals are no better than anyone else. People are people, none of us is pure and we are all influenced by considerations of personal interest.”

“Except for George Orwell,” I piped up, because the main course was still before us and after it the dessert, and only an utter boor would consign so much generosity to the trash.

They knew hardly anything about Orwell, and from my point of view this was fine, because it was very important to know Orwell and important for me to make him known to them. And with my ears full of water I was very eloquent and I explained everything to them at length and in order: how Orwell had fought both the Fascists and the Bolsheviks, and how he had been censored because he hadn’t beautified any aspect of reality and hadn’t covered anything up, and how he had seen what others preferred not to see, and how he hadn’t ignored or concealed, and how he had always been able to recognize Satan in all his disguises.

By the time I was finished Rachel had already served the cake.

“Thank you, Elinor, that was very informative,” said Menachem.

— 3 -

“I’m sorry,” my husband took a deep breath once we were standing outside the door, “I had no idea. .”

“It’s all right,” I replied, checking my exalted sense of calm.

“What I say is: imprison him in a box of armor-plated glass. .” he said when we got into the car, giving me a gift, or perhaps checking my temperature.

The sun shone brightly. Families of Jews in their Sabbath clothes strolled past us, walking slowly, carrying aluminum trays. April is the cruelest month. It wasn’t April yet. When did spring begin? Not yet. Soon.

“Room number 101,” I said and started the car. “That’s Orwell too. 1984.”

Numbers are a beautiful thing, real, more precise than poetry. Flight number. Date of arrival. Hotel room number. The sound of the typewriter came from the second floor room number 22. For over a hundred days it typed there. Room 22 was my sister’s 101. No, that’s not right. Things happened in room 22 that no young girl could have imagined in her nightmares.

The sun, as already mentioned, shone brightly, and I went on expounding on Orwell. “Room 101 isn’t simply a torture cell,” I explained to my husband. “It’s the lowest level of the private hell. It’s the place where everyone’s most private nightmares come true. Because everyone has his own worst nightmare: being slowly burned, slowly suffocated, being buried alive. You don’t read pornography, so maybe you don’t know that there are some people who are into asphyxiation. But that’s not the point. That’s not what I’m talking about. Not about the perversions that perverts enjoy. I’m talking about the victims of torture, about Orwell’s tortured. Orwell’s hero, Winston’s worst nightmare is rats, and so that’s exactly what his torturer prepares for him in room 101: he puts a famished rat inside a mask and fastens it to his face. And before he fastens the mask to his face the torturer gives him the benefit of his experience by explaining that the rat will gnaw his eyes, but that sometimes it prefers to start with the cheeks.”

About what happens afterward, about Winston’s betrayal, about how he pleads for his beloved to be tortured instead of him, about the monstrous passage when he screams “Do it to her,” about the chapter where it says in so many words, “I’m taking the photograph. Take my sister as my ransom, take her instead of me”—about this I said nothing. This chapter was forgotten for the moment.

This chapter was forgotten, and maybe it isn’t important. In the end it turns out that Winston’s lover underwent the torture too, that she would have undergone it anyway, without any connection to his betrayal and what he screamed.

Saturday afternoon, people walk with measured steps, pious Jews on their way to visit their families.

“Let’s go for a little walk.”

I drove my husband to the place where I had refused to take him during the time when we started living together. Jerusalem is small, but it’s easy to avoid the end of a street that was once on the outskirts of the neighborhood of Beth Hakerem, but no longer. I hadn’t been there on my own either since my father got into a taxi with my sister and me to accompany us to our basement apartment and our folie à deux.

In my memory I see that taxi driving away in a cloud of loose pages. The developer who purchased the property from my father conditioned the purchase on its immediate evacuation — so Shaya explained to us — and under the pressure of the haste and the mourning there was no time to find a buyer for the library my father had collected over the years. Works in French, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Romanian, piles of books he didn’t know how to read—“my foundlings” he called them — were hurriedly parceled up to be sent to the shredders. Jamilla, the cleaning woman, sympathized with the three of us — for Elisheva, I knew, she had always felt a measure of affection — but Jamilla was already too old to climb up a ladder, and I was the one who climbed the ladder and threw the volumes down to Shaya. There were no fond farewells, books hit the floor and sent up clouds of dust. Covers split apart. Parts of books were trampled. Pages came out and flew about the room. But, as should be obvious to any person of sense, the pages couldn’t possibly have flown into the street and remained floating of their own accord — it was my literary imagination that sent them flying around the taxi and left them suspended in the air. Ever since I can remember myself I have attached an exaggerated importance to books.

My parents met when the place was still called “Palm Pension.” The young employee took the heart of the owners’ daughter by storm. The student who came to support himself while he studied was snared in the daughter’s net — with the Gotthilf family you can never know what the truth may be.

But wherever the truth lies, after Shaya had become a partner in the business, and once he realized that his wife would never allow him to sell their common property, one day he decided to make his fate his choice, and in a flamboyant gesture of commitment he changed the name of the place to his own: Pension Gotthilf.

“The truth is that there was never a palm growing here,” I said to Oded. “But this fact never bothered anyone, certainly not my parents.”

The developer who bought the property demolished the hotel and put up a new building in its place: four stories with balconies for Sukkoth booths and a thin coating of industrial stone. The garden was turned into a parking lot. Residents on the third floor had grown cascading geraniums in planters on their balcony: white, red, purple and mauve.

The demolished hotel was a Jerusalem palace whose stones had all been hewn by hand. Each stone with its own shade of rosy pink. Lovingly cultivated, luxuriantly leafy trees spread their shade from the swing in the garden to the upper windows. In the cool summer evening the guests would sit outside around little tables set with Armenian tiles. A glass chandelier, the sole survivor of European elegance, twinkled at them from inside the house, and the smell of the coffee on the copper trays mingled with the scent of the jasmine.

With the dying down of the fever of my impatience, the spirit of literary imagination rested on me again, and for a moment I was tempted to lie to my husband like a tourist guide or the pigtail-sucker. The destruction of the old hotel prepared the ground for the sprouting of any fancy that came into my head. Because the truth is that not only was there no palm tree, there weren’t any Armenian tables or copper trays either, and the uniqueness of the pink stones was a blatant lie too. Pension Gotthilf was a perfectly ordinary building, and the air was not scented by anything except for the dust of the cypresses that clung to the chandelier, which was never cleaned.

But even though there were many things I had kept to myself and never told Oded, I had never lied to him or prettified anything. I had been taken into the land of the salt of the earth from an insignificant and pretentious nowhere, but it was nevertheless the place that for many years, all the years of my childhood, I had called home.

Does Satan’s evil begin with his attack on the “downstairs people”? The insignificant people with their foolish pretensions? Because he was elegant, the First Person. He drank his coffee elegantly, declined the cake made with margarine elegantly. “Elinor and Elisheva, Eli and Eli,” he said and kissed my hand.

Oded has to understand without my dragging Armenian tables and copper trays into the picture.

“They gave him the corner room on the second floor,” I said. On the end of the North side, at the back. He insisted that he required maximum privacy. He even prevented Jamilla from coming in to clean on the grounds that he was busy with his research in the mornings. It was supposed to be a quiet room, but from downstairs, especially from the garden, you could hear the noise of the typewriter.”

“Trash,” said Oded. “Just stinking trash and not a human being. You know what I think I would do to a creature like him? What I would really do with that trash? I would bury him in the Ramat Hovev landfill in the Negev. Let him choke there under the mountains of garbage. That’s the best thing for him.”

The new image he offered me caught my fancy and I lingered on it. A bulldozer trundles up. A blade turns the garbage over. Another bulldozer approaches and covers it up. Something twitches in the mound, something stirs among the garbage, or perhaps not. Garbage covers a multitude of sins. The camera moves away, and now we see a clean, arid desert. The noise of the bulldozers fades. In the distance they look like two upturned yellow scorpions. There is no sound.

As my husband said, that would be good. Better than room 101, considerably better than a mask and rats. Dirty things get thrown out in the garbage, and the imagination has no need to fasten the mask to the face and at the same time look into the face of the trash. In Ramat Hovev, the imagination does not drown in the picture and the throat does not choke.

“So your parents are going to sit down to dinner with him. Okay. I knew it. From the beginning I said he’d find a way to get to us in the end.”

“I’m sorry,” my knight repeated, and refrained from questioning my logic. “But there’s still some time before it happens, more than a month in fact. Let me see what I can do.”

I opened a window. “I’m not saying that he initiated or plotted this dinner, I’m not completely crazy, so you needn’t look at me like that. I’m just saying that he’s not coming here for nothing. Nothing’s changed. He wants something. I’m sure. This isn’t paranoia on my part, I just know.”

“Don’t you want to get out of the car? To see how the street has changed?”

“What for? There’s nothing to see here. Even before they built this thing there wasn’t. Just another ordinary house.”

“Still, isn’t it a shame they tore it down? Developers. They could have built additional stories on the existing ones. Houses are history.”

Isn’t it a shame? I carefully considered the alternatives, as if my opinion counted and I had actually been called upon to choose between them: the building would stand. The building would be torn down. The building would go on standing and new stories would be built on the old foundations. Tour guides would be able to pass here with their flocks, point to the old and tell their tales: the lower floors belong to what was once Pension Gotthilf. A pension was here. Gotthilf was here.

“I don’t know,” I said in the end. “You’re the one who knows about real estate and urban planning. In my opinion at least, there was nothing here worth preserving. It’s probably better this way.”

— 4 -

When we got home I went straight to the computer, only now that I already knew exactly what information I required, there was no need to search: Menachem had made haste to send me the program of the conference. “You’ll find your uncle on the evening of the second day, on a panel at the Cinematheque. Rachel says to tell you that to her regret we won’t be able to make it, the daughter of friends of ours from Nahalal is getting married. I’m sorry too. The program looks interesting.”

Professor Gotthilf of Queen’s College would be the third of four speakers under the lengthy heading “Popular Portraits of Evil — the Borders and Limits of Representation.” Later on in the evening the film The Night Watchman would be screened in the small hall, and The Bunker in the big hall. The title of the Professor’s presentation was also long, taking into account the twenty minutes at his disposal: “Hitler, First Person as a Test Case: Regrets and Errors in the Exploration of the Roots of Evil.”

The last speaker’s subject was “Education versus Vulgarization — the Test Case of Oprah Winfrey”; I don’t remember what test cases the first two speakers were going to discuss, I wasn’t paying attention, because the date of the only test that concerned me was already more or less clear.

“I’m sorry,” my husband repeated, looking over my shoulder. “My mother has gotten it into her head that we all need to start relating to your family with respect, because that’s what will make you happy. I’ll find a way to change her mind somehow.”

“Your mother is too good for this world. The Brandeis family is too good for this world,” I replied unemotionally.

“It’s a terrible shame that we can’t go there and simply shout the truth, so people will know who that man is and what he did.”

“Because what would happen then, exactly?”

“I don’t know. He’d be lynched.”

“Do you really think so?” I inquired politely. I moved my chair back so that I would be able to look at my husband when he replied.

“But it’s inconceivable that they’re letting him get away with it, making a second career out of a so-called admission of guilt! What, are they all idiots? It’s intolerable how stupid people are. How can they let someone profit from an admission of guilt?”

I went on sitting, watching him contort himself above me in rising rage, as if the snake writhing inside me had escaped and entered into him. “That’s the way of the world,” I fanned the flames in a tone of indifference. “There are a lot of things that people don’t understand.”

“My father does somehow smell a rat, of that I’m certain, only he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. If he had the faintest idea. .”

“Elisheva’s okay,” I said. “My sister’s happy, isn’t that what’s important? She’s been born again. She’s forgiven him. If she has any ambition at all, it’s to save Hitler from hell.”

“Your sister can forgive until the cows come home. Let her forgive. It’s her right, but I don’t forgive.”

I closed my email, stood up and gave my husband a non-committal kiss between the eyebrows. And this time it was my turn to imitate our single-session therapist: “Accepting injustice is a very painful thing,” I said.

“Shit,” he groaned as I withdrew my face from his. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Cursing and scowling demonstratively, he looked very much like our Yachin when he was a teenager. And for a moment, like then, I felt like ruffling his hair, and like then — I refrained. Nobody likes having his hair ruffled.

“Okay, but what shit are you talking about?”

“Everything. That a person like that exists at all, and that he’s coming here, and his colossal nerve in getting in touch with us. Just the thought of him walking the streets here makes me sick. I know you can ask how come I woke up all of a sudden, but try to understand that your sister and brother-in-law and all that Limoncello — somehow it didn’t seem real to me. A place like that, people like that — I know we were there, but somehow it’s as if it weren’t real.”

“So you’re claiming again that my sister’s a fake.”

“I’m not claiming anything. Apparently I’m a simple person, so perhaps your sister is beyond my comprehension. Perhaps she’s too great for me, your sister. But it’s precisely because of that, I think, precisely because of her greatness that I can’t even comprehend, precisely because of this greatness everything suddenly seems utterly loathsome to me. So you can say that I just woke up, and it’s true, because it’s only now that it’s suddenly become real to me: what happened, what he did, that man who’s traveling the world now. All the ruin and destruction, the extent of the impudence of evil. I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve seen where you grew up in order to realize how close it all is: where you, where the two of you were while I was playing games in the scouts. You know that I once took my troop there for a camp fire in the valley, five minutes from you? You were still a child then, and so was Elisheva. You still had a few years before the real shit arrived.”

Years of maternal self-restraint helped me suppress my smile. Because I was so relieved, and the joy of the relief succeeded in rising to the fortress at the top of my scalp, from which I looked down on everything: inferior families, inferior childhoods also had a right to exist. I didn’t need to offer my husband copper trays and wrap my childhood up for him in scents of jasmine for him to understand this. My husband increasingly understood as well as any outsider could, and when the day came — I thought — the day of the deed, rapidly approaching, maybe he would understand then as well, and would not hate me and be revolted by me.

“Look,” I said, “look, what happened happened. At his age he isn’t going to put suitcases on any more little girls. The main thing is that Elisheva is better now. She’s balanced, the world is balanced. The good God saved her. End of story. It’s all over.”

“What’s over? Nothing’s over. The good God. . you know what I feel like doing? What I feel like doing is taking a truck full of dynamite and driving it into your sister’s god and blowing him up.”

I kissed him again, this time on his lips, and when I retreated he looked a little ashamed.

“Good. As far as this dinner that my parents are supposed to eat with him is concerned, you can stop worrying about that at least. Because it isn’t going to happen.”

•

A Jerusalem restaurant. Menachem didn’t say which one. Perhaps it hadn’t been decided on yet. But I needed to know even if it hadn’t been decided on. Taking into account the fact that the people invited to the dinner were not among the important guests, it wouldn’t be a luxury restaurant. If it was only visitors from abroad we were talking about, the choice may have fallen on one of the tourist restaurants that boasted of their authenticity, for example the one in the first alley on the left, immediately after entering the Old City from the Jaffa Gate. But people like Menachem and Ruth had also been invited, who would not want to walk down the first alley on the left after the Jaffa Gate. And on top of everything else, the place would probably have to be kosher.

I looked at the program again. There was a long list of speakers, most of them had Jewish names, although not all of them, and from the few lines written about each, it was impossible to guess which of them, if any, kept kosher.

My new, exalted calm was grounded in fact, and required facts. On such and such a date, the Not-man would deliver his lecture. On such and such a date he would eat dinner with my father-in-law and mother-in-law. Where? Where? After racking my brains and conjuring up the façades of various restaurants in my mind’s eye, the choice fell on one of three restaurants on Keren Hayesod Street. All three were popular, and not only with tourists, all three offered big tables and what was called “atmosphere,” and the prices were reasonable.

I was unable to decide which of them would be the venue of the meeting, and after going in and out and in and out again, my imagination agreed to compromise, and without further ado it merged the three into one.

My in-laws would arrive on time, and together with their friend the host they would take their places at the middle of the table, which had been reserved in advance. The waitress would light a candle for the sake of atmosphere: the lighting in the place was dim but adequate. Wine? A drink from the bar? We’ll wait for the others. For the time being, only water for everyone.

In the meantime, until everyone arrives, Rachel would enter into conversation — with whom? Perhaps the woman who was going to lecture on the “Test Case of Oprah Winfrey”—What is the case? she would ask. A program Oprah did with Elie Wiesel, the professor would explain. The professor is in her late fifties, she teaches in the Department of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, a pleasant, friendly woman. Nevertheless my mother-in-law will feel a little embarrassed by her far from perfect English.

I do not dwell on their conversation with the intention of postponing the entrance of Not-man. Not this time. I am already prepared to look at him, but he is late and the last to join the table, around which how many are seated now? Seven. Seven people stand up to shake his hand when he comes in.

“Did Mordechai tell you that we are related?” Rachel will ask and send him a sunny, welcoming smile. But she won’t ask right away: my mother-in-law is the soul of tact, and she would never, God forbid, give him cause to feel that he was being ambushed. First of all, they will consult the menu and talk about the media coverage of the conference. Its contents will presumably not be discussed, the Holocaust and Hitler not being suitable dinner table topics.

Not-man will sit at the head of the table, on Rachel’s right, his legs sliding out uncomfortably. My mother-in-law will address him in English, because to put one over her and his hosts, Not-man will hide his knowledge of Hebrew.

“My daughter-in-law’s name is Elinor,” she will explain, because the expression on his face will show no sign that he heard what she said or understood her words. “She is the daughter of Shaya Gotthilf, he had a pension, Pension Gotthilf. .?” Her voice will gradually peter out. She will grope for her handbag and press it to her body. Is her English so unintelligible? Or perhaps she has embarrassed him by mentioning something unmentionable? The candle will flicker on the table, and someone on the other side will remark that the Israeli wine has nothing to be ashamed of.

“Elinor,” the Not-man will say to Rachel after a long pause. “I met her once, I remember her as a child. Elinor and Elisheva. Eli and Eli. . so you’re her mother-in-law. .” And then he will clink his glass with hers in a gesture that will be only half-mocking “Lehayim. .” And her freckled hand will hesitantly raise her glass.

My imagination will reach no further than the expression of confusion on the innocent face of my mother-in-law. There are too many questions which may be asked or not asked. The moments after the clinking of the glasses spawned too many possibilities. Not-man changes his faces and his attitudes, and in any case there is no point in thinking about something that isn’t going to happen.

Nobody could say that I behaved nervously in the days after Not-man took on a date and a body. Reality slowed down. I slowed down. I went on wandering the city, but now I wandered slowly.

Sometimes when I walked past a display window I would see an ancient Chinese Mandarin reflected in it: a wise figure on rice paper, proceeding patiently with its hands in its sleeves. Water stains shadowed my forehead and the hollows under my eyes, and the lines running down the sides of my mouth darkened into a moustache.

Sometimes I would find myself a bench, sitting on the wet wood in lotus position, and emulate the gilded example of the statue of the Buddha. But I never sat for long.

I also remember a kind of popping sensation in my ears, as in a rapid descent, but this sensation of a difference in pressure did not bother me. A monument to patience, I would stand and watch the kettle till it boiled, and like an old man I would wait for the road to empty of traffic before I crossed.

Only the thought of the clinking wine glasses went on echoing loudly, and it widened in me like a crack in insulation.

“Did you talk to your mother today?”

“Yes, in the end she went to the dentist. He said she didn’t have to have the tooth out.”

“Did you talk to your mother today?”

“Do you mean that business with the dinner? I thought about it a lot. It seems to me that it would be best to deal with it at the last minute. At the last minute it’ll be easier for me to find an excuse to prevent them from going.”

I understood the difficulty and felt no indignation toward my husband. Elinor would prefer you not meet her father’s cousin. Why? Because we know that he’s no good. All of a sudden she remembered that she heard bad things about him from her parents.

My well-known hostility toward my parents militated against the possibility of my attorney quoting their attitude toward someone or their opinion of him in arguing his case.

I understood and I felt no bitterness. And the sun rose and sank, the chariot of the sun proceeded along its predetermined path, and the river could only flow along the course ordained for it.

“You know, I thought. . did you ever think, maybe you’re prepared to think about. .” Oded played with a pencil: first he balanced it on one finger, then he rolled it on his thigh. I observed him with interest. This was out of character for him. He was never one of those people who need to handle an object. “Maybe you’d be prepared to consider what would happen if we simply told them. If we told them who and what he is.”

“Your parents aren’t exactly young. Believe me, you don’t want to do that to them.”

“You know them. They wouldn’t. .”

“Have you noticed,” I interrupted him, “have you noticed that your father calls him ‘Elinor’s uncle’? ‘Your uncle’s coming,’ ‘Your uncle’s giving a lecture.’”

“That at least I can easily correct.”

“Yes you could, only it wouldn’t correct anything,” I explained patiently. Oded tapped the pencil on his knee as if he wanted to check his reflexes, and when I continued he went on tapping and poking himself. “Your father knows very well that he’s my father’s cousin. He took the trouble to check the exact degree of kinship with me, and don’t tell me that he simply got mixed up and forgot, because your father never forgets facts. Just remember how he reacted in Spain after he read the book. Remember how he went berserk at the very thought of having Hitler in his family. Your father will be eighty soon. We’re not going to do it to him, and certainly not to your mother. There are some people who deserve to remain clean.”

“My father sometimes gets carried away, that’s true. Lately in the office. . but that doesn’t mean that in relation to you he. .”

“And besides, after all these years, you know, it’s a little late to come down on them,” I said and leaned over to gently take the pencil from his fingers. Because I felt gentleness toward him in those days. All kinds of gentle feelings popped up again, sometimes accompanied by a sensation of déjà vu and sometimes the opposite, in a kind of anticipated nostalgia.

One Friday noon, after three days without rain, I stood and watched him diligently scrubbing at some invisible stain on the door of the Jeep, and my heart went out to his childish concentration.

Another time I saw him beheading a wilted anemone in the garden, and it seemed to me that I had already experienced this very moment, my man and the white, wet, wilted, beheaded anemone, before. He turned his head toward me over his shoulder, and I felt a pang at the knowledge of how I would one day remember this exact movement, this smile of his, and this beautiful shoulder.

Like an old woman full of experiences I rose above time again and again: I mourned the passing of the moment even before it passed, and I tasted the past and the future in the present.

When the consciousness of the conductivity of time broadened, and events increasingly poured through the insulation of the tenses, I sometimes brimmed over to our sons too. One night after Nimrod called and told us about some trivial matter of etiquette in which he had failed in relation to one of his teachers, I sent him a mail whose lines I would prefer to forget. “Whatever happens and whatever they tell you, remember that your mother will always, always love you more than anything in the world”—this is the kind of thing I wrote. Such outpourings were not our style, certainly not since the boys had grown up, and presumably it only embarrassed him. It was a letter that a sentimental drunk might have written, and I wasn’t drunk. And long before morning broke I knew that it was a good thing that Nimrod was grown up and living safely in Atlanta, far from my cloying convulsions.

I didn’t behave like this all the time — Oded testifies that I looked “disconnected and detached,” and so I apparently was for most of the time — but every few days the picture of a particular moment would begin to vibrate inside me, and all of a tremor I would shower people with out-of-place emotions.

I bought a girlfriend an expensive antique alarm clock, even though her birthday was two months away.

I baked a pecan pie and took it to the neighbors, “in honor of the fact that we finally uprooted the Ailanthus tree and it won’t be undermining our fence any more.” This was the kind of thing I did.

•

One afternoon I dropped in on my mother-in-law without letting her know in advance.

“That haircut really suits you, but tell me, don’t you feel cold? I remember when I was a little girl and my mother made me get my hair cut, I was cold all winter.”

I put down my cup of tea and got up and kissed her on the top of her head. Since the day that Oded had brought me to their house her hair had gone completely white, but it still felt to me as if this were that very first time, and that this good woman was now stroking my tiger face and asking me if it didn’t hurt.

“You always ask the right questions,” I gushed, and as if this wasn’t enough I added tastelessly: “You should have had a daughter. If you’d had a daughter, I’m sure she would have been the happiest woman in the world.”

In the moronic fantasy world I was now inhabiting, my mother-in-law would have kissed me back and said: “But I have a daughter, you’re my daughter,” but instead of this Rachel gave me a suspicious look and asked: “So what are your plans for the rest of the day?”

It was obvious that she wanted me to finish my tea and leave.

The question of what I was planning to do kept coming up, with my husband returning to it almost every morning.

The liquidation of Alice left me with a lot of time on my hands, not only writing time as such. Alice had been regularly invited to cultural events in the city, and ever since her disappearance the invitations, which I had no desire for in the first place, had dried up.

My family used to joke about my ability to fall asleep and dream at will, but this ability had abandoned me.

I fell asleep only when I was exhausted. I slept lightly. I would be awoken by sounds that fell silent the second I opened my eyes, and I could remember only snatches of my dreams.

Oded, who loved my dreams and the wife who dreamed them, was worried, but what worried him even more was the fact that I had completely stopped reading books.

“What are you reading now?”

“Nothing interesting. The truth is, nothing at all.”

I went on buying books. The books piled up next to the bed, but ever since Hitler, First Person, the interest I had in fictional worlds had simply vanished. I would read a paragraph, see no point in it, and immediately forget it. First Person had deprived me of my ability to read.

Everyone around me thought that I would have a problem “filling my time,” but as far as I was concerned time was brim-full of itself and in no need of filling. Everyday activities, when I paid attention to them, swelled with meaning, and each and every one of them thrilled and moved me in its own right. One day I sat down to write a check to the electric company, and I remember how the check and the account focused my mind as intently as the finest of the poetry I had read.

Two monthly account

To: Oded and Elinor Brandeis

7 Bat Yiftah Street Jerusalem

Pay to the account of: The Electric Company

Amount, date, signature.

And at the top right of the check, too, Oded and Elinor Brandeis and our home address.

Like a new bride from some earlier century I signed “Elinor Brandeis,” full of gratitude for the new name that had been given me. Gotthilf, as my father-in-law had pointed out, was not a common name. Gotthilf was a rare name, and it could become extinct.

“Elinor, are you listening at all to what I’m telling you?”

“What?”

“I was talking about the possibility of getting an adjournment in the case. . oh, never mind.”

“But I want you to talk.” And indeed I did, for there was something uniquely beautiful about my husband when he explained legal matters to me. I was eager to see him talk: only listening presented a problem.

“I was going to say that my father interferes for nothing, and that if the judge agrees to an adjournment, there’ll be a possibility. . forget it, it isn’t interesting: legal nonsense.”

“But why do you say that? I want to hear. You know, I had an idea about that dinner, maybe the best solution would be for your father to organize an invitation for me, too.”

— 5 -

The seder that year was the first that both Nimrod and Yachin didn’t come home for, and in the days before Passover this thought saddened their father: “Up to now we’ve been really lucky, at the last minute at least one of them was always able to make it. Just because a person realizes how lucky he was doesn’t mean that he’s prepared to stop being lucky.”

My husband missed our sons; I didn’t, but in my increasingly warped mind the thought occurred to me that the sadness everybody assumed I was feeling could serve as an excuse for my strangeness: April is the cruelest month. Passover is the hardest holiday. Overnight it became very hot, and in the sudden heat the swollen moon turned orange, and the wolves bared their teeth and howled with longing.

All families were tested by this gathering of the clan under the full orange moon, and it was only natural for the mother wolf to grieve the absence of her sons.

Passover is also the family Day of Atonement, of the mutual settling of accounts. And it seems that there is no better time than this for the plot to take a turn. Isn’t it obvious that the Brandeis family seder should provide the setting for a dramatic turning point?

Here sits the family, reclining around the table, the grandfather at the head and the grandmother opposite him. Old conflicts seethe beneath the surface of the conversation, gradually the conflicts heat up and the tension rises and boils over. Dark secrets are revealed. Forbidden feelings burst and come violently to light. Father against son. Son against father. Daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, fighting in possessive fury for the soul of the only son. Everything held back for years breaks out.

Will anyone believe me when I say that there were no secrets or darkness in the Brandeis family except for mine? That these good people had succeeded in achieving the no-longer-believable: a happy family?

The land of the salt of the earth was clean, and I was cleansed in the sunshine of this land, until the filth came back to infect me.

The natives of the land that adopted me were not foolish or naïve, they knew about the existence of evil. But they had never known it as I was forced to know it, and they never carried it in their guts.

So no family turning-point took place at the Passover seder, I succeeded in damming the darkness, and the only change that took place that night was that I almost stopped talking.

Our movements appeared pleasant and relaxed. Oded wore a blue shirt he had bought in Seattle — for him white shirts belonged to the daily grind of the courts — and I got up from the computer to undo his top button.

Elisheva sent holiday greetings with the usual decoration of deer tracks, and added in Hebrew in English letters: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

“What should I answer her? Happy holiday to you too? Amen? Hallelujah?”

“Whatever you say will make her happy. Come on, let’s go.”

The radio was on, my husband hummed along with “sheaves of wheat standing in the fields” and the newscaster announced that “preparations for the holiday have been completed throughout the land.” I remember that I became a little obsessed with the word “completed”—what was complete here, what had concluded? — but I got over it quite quickly.

I was wearing sandals for the first time since the winter. I took the haroset out of the fridge. Oded carried the salad bowl. When we were already standing at the door, Yachin called, and his father told him we would talk later from his grandparents’ house.

Determined not to let the absence of the boys cloud the occasion, Rachel and Menachem had invited another couple whose four children were abroad or in the army, and a distant relative of Menachem’s who had come for a visit from Argentina with her youth movement, and whom they referred to incorrectly as their “niece.” At the last minute one of the legal clerks in the office had also been invited, after it transpired that he was on bad terms with his parents.

Grandfather sat at the head of the table, Grandmother opposite him. Grandfather rose to say the blessing. We answered “Amen” and read the Haggadah with the businesslike seriousness of people fulfilling a not unpleasant obligation.

Until “blood and fire and pillars of smoke” I sat quietly and behaved normally. I even noticed how the clerk’s expression softened when the Zionist niece read “How is this night different from all other nights” syllable by syllable. Her face was bright red from the Masada sun, and as she read the four questions — which aren’t really four questions at all but only one nagging question — her lowered face grew even redder.

I waited for the reading to be over, for an opportunity to ask if the date for the dinner with the conference guests had already been fixed. It was important for me to know, but the Chinese Mandarin who had taken up residence inside me went on guiding me in the path of patience, and I went on being patient.

Reality descended on me when we dipped our fingers in our glasses to sprinkle blood and fire and pillars of smoke and the other ten plagues, one drop per plague. From the house of the neighbors who had begun the ritual early rose sounds of singing, and with “Once we were slaves” in my ears and the drops of wine that had merged into a red puddle on my plate, all the seders in the country merged into one in my mind, and suddenly I knew with a certain knowledge that the Not-man was also sitting at a seder table, and it seemed that he too was sitting with us and he too was dipping his finger into his glass opposite us. And I also knew that he was already in Israel and I was not yet ready, not ready at all, my preparations had not been completed.

I had not taken leave of my senses: he had an ultra-Orthodox son. Those people, as Erica said, were scrupulous in obeying the commandment to honor their parents, and if the father was coming to Israel anyway, they would certainly have invited him to join them at the seder. So it was only logical to conclude that at this very moment he was sitting with a skullcap on his head and dipping his finger into his wine, perhaps singing. Not singing — I corrected myself — not singing yet. With the religious the reading went on forever, so at this moment he was still reading the Haggadah in his hard-to-place accent.

Soup was served and I ate. A conversation developed and I was silent. At some stage, when my husband was helping his mother clear the soup plates from the table, the Zionist niece asked me: “What do you do?” What did I do? I considered the question seriously. “I think I’m busy going crazy.” Nobody heard me but her. And from her nod it was clear that she wasn’t sure she had heard right. Immediately after that she resumed her conversation with the clerk, and I went back to being quietly driven mad by reality.

•

The opportunity to ask what I wanted to ask came with the roast and green beans and potatoes.

Because of the holiday, and in honor of the Zionist niece who had come to Israel to study and deepen her identity, the conversation turned to the Jewish destiny. And I, from where I was sitting at the archetypical seder table together with all the rest of the House of Israel, went on listening: Rachel mentioned her uncle who had been murdered by the Arabs in 1929. Her friend mentioned a large family lost in the Holocaust. The Zionist niece said something enthusiastic about “the uniqueness of our history.” The clerk said that perhaps the uniqueness lay not in history itself but in the ability to turn it into a story, just as we had done now.

“So what do you say to a Jew, a professor, a survivor of the Holocaust himself, who chooses of all things to tell the story of Hitler?”

Menachem’s voice promised his guests that he was about to serve them a conversational delicacy, and he kept his promise. He set it all before them: the First Person and the professor’s retreat from the First Person, and also the fact that they were going to meet said professor in person. “That professor” Chemi called him, without mentioning his relation to “our Elinor.”

I was given the opportunity and I failed to take advantage of it. The women directed the conversation into less fraught channels: Israeli Prime Ministers, the increasing frequency of allergies in the spring season, the importance of using sun screens, and such matters. And plates were cleared and bowls were brought, more wine was poured, and dessert was served.

I must point out that I had not been struck dumb by hysteria. When I was addressed I replied “yes” and “no” and “apparently,” I went on following the conversation and I can remember every word. My abstinence was voluntary, I retired of my own free will because I had things to do.

Suddenly I realized how close the day was when I would have to act and how unprepared I was, and therefore I removed myself in order to enable myself to prepare.

There was no point in asking Chemi exactly when they were going to meet “that professor,” because the date was no longer important. Because already with the “blood and fire and pillars of smoke” and the puddle on my plate, I had grasped that the dinner with the conference guests was only one of the illusions I had allowed myself to harbor: Not-man sowed confusion, and I in my fear and foolishness had become confused and wasted my time on fantasies of some imaginary restaurant on Keren Hayesod Street.

There would be no meeting between my family and First Person, and even if there were, I could not permit myself to waste any more time on restaurants, because it was not there, not in a restaurant, not in the presence of my loved ones, that I would finish him off.

When did I know that I would have to kill him? On the Saturday when he phoned and invaded my home? During our stay in Seattle, when I realized how he was robbing me of my family? And perhaps long before that, in the days of the basement apartment when my sister told me things, or even before that, when a thumb had been poked into my breast, or perhaps when I called the gynecologist and confirmed that the abortion had taken place, while the orchid in its flowerpot still stood on the counter of Pension Gotthilf.

Even now I can’t say when it became inevitable. But after Monticello and after Elisheva’s pardon, ever since I had remained alone with the First Person, ever since then — you could say that I knew.

When a normal human being, a normal woman, begins to think about how to kill someone, her first thoughts naturally tend toward art and fantasy. One day it came into my head that I would follow Menachem and Rachel into the restaurant in Keren Hayesod Street, and poison him there. The first image I saw was of a cyanide capsule bursting between his teeth. Did such capsules still exist and if so, where would I find one? Because one was enough, that was what was so good about cyanide. I remembered reading somewhere that cyanide had a “pronounced smell of bitter almonds.” A smell of bitter almonds — a pronounced smell of bitter almonds would therefore rise from his open mouth. And what if somebody identified the smell and tried to bring him back to life? Cyanide kills instantly. And I didn’t want it to be quick, and I also didn’t want his body twitching and convulsing in front of Rachel and Menachem. And I was also afraid of the resuscitation attempts on the part of some paramedic sitting at the next table, rushing to breathe into a mouth full of cyanide.

It was important to me to protect Rachel and Menachem; I feared for the young paramedic enjoying a long-awaited date.

And then I went on to think of other substances, the kind that kill slowly: gold dust, copper, lead, which in the opinion of certain scholars destroyed the Roman empire. I once read that the Romans believed that copper protected the body from the effects of lead poisoning. Was it possible that the water in the restaurant was served in copper jars? Could the copper neutralize the effect of the lead?

Digoxin, which is prescribed for cardiac patients and destroys the healthy, was a much surer bet, and also readily available. It would be easy enough to find a doctor who would prescribe digoxin without a second thought.

These were the amazing fantasies that came into my head, but I don’t blame myself for them. I was prevented from serving in the army, I had never held a weapon in my hands, and almost everything I knew about killing I had learned from works of art.

•

For many years the roof of the Jewish Agency building in King George Street had prominently displayed a sign that read: “What to do? Do!” At some point during the course of the seder, it was when we were already eating dessert, I suddenly remembered this sign, and its words silenced the turmoil of my thoughts: What to do? Do! And after a moment I think I giggled, because the observer inside me observed that you can never know what will calm the troubled soul: a poem, a philosophical saying, or a silly slogan on the roof of the Jewish Agency.

The Passover seder came to an end. The guests thanked their hosts and dispersed. The two couples whose children were abroad kissed the hostess. And the clerk offered to drive the niece to the hotel where her group was staying. Three couples got into three cars and drove off in three directions.

No plot twist took place on that night. And no secret was revealed. The only change that took place was that as I sat at the table together with all the House of Israel and the First Person, I returned to reality and was able to once more distinguish between a plan and a fantasy: time was short, and I needed a plan.

— 6 -

Heavy with wine and too much to eat, Oded went straight to bed. If he noticed my silence that same night he probably attributed it to a physical condition similar to his own. My husband fell asleep; it was close to midnight, and I embarked on a thorough spring-cleaning of my house.

From the day that I moved in with Oded I became a house-proud woman, and the traces of the cave-dweller I had been till then disappeared. Even when we could afford to hire a maid, I refused to allow a stranger deal with our dirt like most of our friends did, and for the most part I found a measure of unfashionable satisfaction in keeping our territory spick and span.

The house was clean and tidy, which somewhat eased the complicated task of making it kosher for Passover. Cupboards were opened. Files were stacked on the table. Papers were packed into one big garbage bag, worn out kitchen utensils in another. Shoes were consigned to a third. There’s something sad about old shoes, and when I closed the bag I thought that I would at least not leave this sadness of worn out shoes behind me.

There were thirteen days left to the official appearance of the First Person on the scene, and I was determined to leave a clean space behind me: this was the least I could do for those who had been my Garden of Eden.

I was about to end it, and even though I still didn’t know how, it was clear to me that however much I thought and planned, the chances of my getting away after the deed was done were slim. I didn’t have the strength to consider what would happen afterward. I assumed I’d go to jail. I assumed that I would be interrogated, and I assumed that I would say nothing. Because what kind of discourse could there be with a world where a god exists who expects a rape victim to forgive, what could you say to those who duplicate the First Person three hundred one thousand times, who fly him from country to country, give him a life, work, and an audience, and set cream cakes in front of him?

Come what may, I thought, I would not hide behind the inarticulate little girl who was turned into a reader aloud of the works of the Marquis de Sade. Her, that little girl, I would not give them. I wasn’t that little girl. And in any case now, I too was alone and locked up and suffocating, and those outside didn’t hear, and even if they heard they wouldn’t understand, because from outside it’s impossible. It takes two to understand.

What to do? Do! Because in the beginning was the act. What would happened afterward was out of my hands.

My vision of after-the-act was patchy and full of holes. I saw myself silent, I realized how the sick world would interpret my silence, and in one of the less-faded patches of my imagination I heard a smug, self-satisfied male voice explaining:

“We have before us a case of a morbid obsession regarding a book. According to our information, it appears that Elinor Brandeis believed that she was destroying not the author of Hitler, First Person but Hitler himself. This kind of confusion between author and narrator is not uncommon among unsophisticated readers, and a learned writer such as Professor Gotthilf was no doubt aware of the risk he was taking when he chose to speak in the devil’s voice.”

I didn’t expect understanding, but I admit that a flicker of anger flared up in me at the thought of some idiot presenting me as a primitive reader. I suffered no confusion as to the facts: Hitler died on the 30^th of April, 1945. He shot himself, apparently at the same time biting down on a capsule of cyanide.

And what about my loved ones? someone will ask. Didn’t you think about all the sorrow and shame you were about to bring down on your loved ones? Didn’t you take them into account?

I thought — I reply to the rebuking questioner — I thought, and the more I thought and took into account, the clearer it became to me that my dearly beloved would be better off without me, because even if they don’t know it, a quick, clean cut is best.

On our visit to Seattle I was a cause of grave concern to our sons, my husband told me so, and even without him I’m not blind. And when we were in Seattle, the gangrene inside me had not yet spread. A mother is not supposed to frighten her cubs, cubs are not supposed to be afraid for their mother, and what happened to us was against nature: the corrosive corruption of Not-man has reached as far as the land of the salt of the earth, and the most faithful of men is already suffocating in its stench.

If my dearly beloved had known what I knew, if they had seen, they themselves would have understood that this was the humane thing to do. I would end it, and afterward I would be locked up and removed. Anyway, it makes no difference if I don’t exist in any case. And in leaving them like this, at least I will leave them a better world.

Is there a prosecutor in existence who would dare to argue that a world in which Not-man draws breath is preferable to one in which he no longer exists? If anyone deserves to suffer, to suffer in agony for far longer than a hundred and twenty days, it’s him, and I only intended to put an end to him quickly and allow myself to breathe. A humane sentence according to any human logic.

At four o’clock on the morning after the Passover seder, I carried six securely tied garbage bags to the bins outside. On my desk I left a stack of files that required patient sorting. My clothes closet demanded more deliberation than anything I was capable of producing during the course of that night; the kitchen, on the other hand, gave me satisfaction. Twelve days until the official appearance of the First Person; at some point during their course I would have to remember to replace the microwave: a man without a wife to cook for him needs a reliable microwave oven.

The streets were deserted, exhausted in the aftermath of the holiday. The streetlamps were still on, and in the rustic quiet I heard a donkey bray in the distance.

My husband was sleeping in same position as he had fallen asleep. And with the nagging thought about the microwave — maybe I should write myself a note so as not to forget — I took a blanket out of the linen chest and collapsed onto the bed in what had once been Yachin’s room, and in recent years had been at the disposal of both boys on their visits.

Ever since I had moved in with Oded, apart from his reserve duty in the army and his business trips, we had always slept together. Is that strictly accurate? Writers tend to round corners for the sake of elegance and beauty, and here too I have rounded a little. Once in a while when I had a bad cold and realized that I was snoring, I’d retire to the living-room sofa. Once in a while Oded fell asleep in the armchair opposite the television and only woke up in the morning, and once when we quarreled. . I enjoyed the privilege of living in the Garden of Eden, on that I insist, but it doesn’t mean that I was an angel.

“Him again?” When my husband paused in the doorway to the boys’ room, to examine the rumpled evidence that I had spent the night there, I was already busy with the coffee. I shrugged.

“I know I haven’t solved the problem of that dinner yet. I promised you, Elinor, I’ll deal with it. But in the meantime, do me a favor, make an effort and just try to put it out of your head.”

The understanding I had reached during the seder had made the meeting between my in-laws and Not-man what my husband called “irrelevant,” and I shrugged again.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes you do or yes you don’t?”

“Yes I do.”

“Elinor?”

“Yes.”

He stood next to me and blocked my way to the sink. “The landfill in the Negev?” he suggested lamely. I looked at him, a nervous, empty smile distorted his face. If only because of that foreign smile, if only because of the way I had distorted his face, I had to remove myself from him.

After it’s all over, I thought, perhaps he’ll find somebody else, better than me. Of course he’d find another woman, or more likely she would find him, but one way or another she would very soon be found. She would have bigger breasts than me, the kind all men like even if they don’t admit it. Without a doubt she would be an intellectual, because this modest husband of mine admires intellectuals. An artist. Perhaps a painter, come to Israel to capture the desert light.

I don’t want to go into details about what happened in the next twelve days, and it seems there’s no need to, because what had already happened only went on happening. “Are you going to sleep there tonight too?” “Yes.” “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ “Not now.”

My husband watches me as I sort out newspaper cuttings, old receipts and photographed texts from my student days. “What are you doing?” “Spring cleaning.” “Don’t you want to go out for a bit?” “No.” “What’s that photograph?” “A poem.”

Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop: I myself am hell/ nobody’s here/ only skunks. .

. . I didn’t crumple up the page, simply added it to the pile to be thrown away.

The weather suddenly turned dry and blazing. The desert invaded the city. Penetrated the houses and covered surfaces with sand. Asthmatics had difficulty breathing. And my husband, who had planned a jeep trip with friends, was reluctant to leave his wife on her own. He came back after only one day and returned to the office, and was still reluctant to leave his wife on her own.

My husband on the phone: “What’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

After a few days I stopped answering the phone and ignored the messages he left me. At some point during the intermediate days of Passover I drove to electrical appliance stores to acquire a new microwave, and there, in Givat Shaul, as I was putting the parcel into the trunk, like a presence behind my back and a kind of intensification inside me, I sensed the presence of Not-man, and then I knew that he was coming closer and that he was already in Jerusalem. I knew — just as I had known before that he had arrived in Israel, and as I knew that he lived in New York even before I saw the program of the conference.

Professor Gotthilf of Queen’s College. According to the college site he taught two seminars to third year students there. One had the complicated name of “‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’: The Realities of the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Joder, and Franz Kafka,” while the other was called simply “Stalin and the Jews.”

I did not feel threatened by the closeness of his person. I was going to meet him. For a moment I was even eager for it to happen right away. I only wanted to avoid being taken by surprise, and so in the few days remaining, I seldom left the house. I didn’t miss going out, because with the clarification of reality and the progress of the plan, all traces of the old itch to keep moving had melted away.

My husband on the phone: “Elinor isn’t feeling too well. It’s nothing to worry about. She’ll call you back.”

My husband to his mother on the eve of the second Passover holiday: “I’m afraid we’re not going to make it. Elinor’s caught some bug. . no, not at the moment. . I think it’s best just to let her sleep.”

But I didn’t sleep, or I slept very little, and it occurred to me that it was a good thing that I’d spent so much time sleeping in previous years and stored up reserves: now my thoughts no longer escaped me or turned to pointless fantasies.

My abstinence from small talk also intensified my ability to concentrate on reality, and from day to day it became clear to me how I would do the deed: no more vain thoughts of cyanide and nonsensical fantasies about gold dust.

There were no weapons in the house ever since the boys had completed their army service and Oded had been relieved of reserve duty, and in any case, since I myself had been prevented from serving in the army, even if I had known how to get my hands on a gun — I wouldn’t have know how to fire it.

My black-belt-salt-of-the-earth, my worried love, was capable in principle of breaking someone’s neck, while I couldn’t even imagine myself using a knife.

The only realistic weapon available to me was the car, and from the moment it occurred to me I wondered how I hadn’t thought of it before, it seemed so obvious.

In order to run him over I would have to somehow get him to place himself in front of the wheels, because a scenario in which I lay in wait and ambushed him was far from obvious, and in fact improbable in the extreme. In order to place him in front of the wheels I would have to see him, meet him, get into conversation with him and entice him to some lonely place: the edge of a cliff? Not realistic. More realistic to think of a deserted street or a parking lot. In any case, I would have to meet him, and I would meet him, this would present no difficulties, since he wanted to meet me. At the end of the meeting I would see to it that he accompanied me to the car. I could offer him a ride. I could ask him to guide me out of the parking lot. Or maybe I could ask him to get out and check if the headlights were working: but in order to send him out of the car I would first have to get into it with him, and for this I would need to prepare myself. Stepping on the gas, on the other hand, was a routine activity, that would be the easy part, even easier than pulling a trigger. I would sit high up in front of the steering wheel, he would be opposite me but low down, opposite the silver front of the Defender. Because from the moment I began to see the picture, I saw myself in Oded’s 4x4 and not in my dilapidated little Toyota.

My husband, who is far from any kind of ostentation, bought the 4x4 less than a year before, after a long hesitation centering round his self-image, not the price of the vehicle. “Tell me honestly, at my age, with my way of life, doesn’t it seem pathetic to you?”

“You’re a man, men are pathetic, enjoy it at least.”

And he did enjoy it, even though the Jeep left the parking space no more than twice a week. Oded walked to work, but occasional drives along dirt tracks and the religious polishing of the vehicle were enough for him to delight in his acquisition.

“Do I make you laugh?”

“You bet you do. Take me for a drive on Saturday — or are you cleaning it on Saturday?”

I assumed that I would find some pretext for explaining to my husband why I needed his car. I didn’t worry too much about finding one in advance. And only a few days after the plan was born, I realized that I was going to stain my man’s precious toy so that he wouldn’t want to touch it any more. Oded wouldn’t touch it and he wouldn’t touch me, and his next woman, the artistic woman with the big breasts, he would take out for drives in a different car.

I was sorry for what I was about to do to him, but no other possibility and no other weapon was available to me. I would befoul my husband’s car, but a greater foulness would be wiped out as a result.

In the shock of his sorrow my husband would not sense the difference — perhaps he would never sense it — but after the deed was done, the ground would be more balanced, and everybody’s air, not just his, would go back to being something breathable.

•

On the last night before Not-man’s appearance in person, I went to look at my husband in his sleep. To be more precise, it was early in the morning, and to the best of my recollection, in the moments before I did so I thought again about how he would be robbed of his pleasure in his car. The thought came back, and presumably it made me sad, because I wanted very much to give, not to take away.

I stood in the bedroom doorway like a ghost. It was very hot, the hamsin was closing in without any relief. The light in the garden shed, which we left on at night, came in through the window and cast a faint light on his face. My husband had fallen asleep exposed on his back, in a trusting position that touched my heart, one arm bent above his head, the other stretched out at his side, his limp palm turned upward. Very soon, when I was caught, he would no longer sleep like this. And if I wasn’t caught? This thought was forbidden. There is nothing more weakening than the scent of happiness seeping through the wall of time and threatening to disappear, dimming the eyes with longing. There is nothing more weakening than the smell of my husband.

Will he miss me? Perhaps only in his sleep will he remember how it was between us, because the shadow of the act I was about to commit would fall backward and darken all our past for him. He would divorce me and I would accept it immediately, without any arguments I would agree to the divorce, and this moment and I would be cast out of his life forever.

I came closer to the bed, my dreaming love let out a long breath between closed lips, and I bent over and pulled down his underwear and wrapped my lips around his sleeping penis. The member woke up immediately. The rest of him a moment or two later.

At first, still half asleep, he sent a drowsy hand to my breast, and I instinctively removed his hand and returned it to the side of his body. I wanted to make him happy, with all my heart and soul I longed to give him pleasure, but I couldn’t let my love give me anything. It was enough. He had given me enough already.

But the hand I removed refused to lie still, and again it rose to underneath my jaw and moved over my throat in the dark. Again I removed it, and this time it made no more overtures, but reached for the switch of the reading lamp as soon as I laid it down.

The light went on, and a man looked at his wife. He sat up, touched my chin and took it in his hand, and without taking his eyes off me pulled up his underpants.

“Not like that,” he said, his voice hoarse and hostile.

I thought that if only he agreed to turn off the light I might be able to explain. What could I explain to him? From the look in his eyes I could see that there would be no exemptions. It was a rare expression that I knew from the rare occasions on which one of our sons crossed the line not to be crossed. “You’ll have to talk to me,” he said.

I played with the strap of my nightgown and kept quiet. There were too many things clamoring in my head: pictures, snatches of words, and what all that clamor produced in the end was: “Tomorrow night, that is, tonight, can I take your car?”

“Take my car. . and for that. .?” Judging by the disgust on his face you would have thought that I had already done the deed. This is how he would look at me from now on, if he looked at me at all. This is how he would look whenever he thought of me, and why shouldn’t he? I came from another land, and he and I were a mistake from the beginning. How I had deluded myself when I took him to Beth Hakerem. How I had let myself go on and on, talking and explaining. Just as with the foolish fantasies of gold dust and lead, I had been wasting my time. Now he was looking at me as if I were a whore.

•

“Of course you can take the car. You can take whatever you like, no problem, just don’t try to pretend that you’re not all there, because it won’t work. And now please tell me why you need my car.”

What had gotten into him? He was quicker than me. I had always been the quick-witted one, and he the thorough one.

This was the spirit, if not the exact letter, of the exchange between us: I was blindsided, and my husband, who had just woken up, was quick and focused.

What did I need the car for? To run him over and end it? In any case, I didn’t think that I would have an opportunity to do it this evening. But nevertheless, the Defender was very important to me.

“There’s a lecture this evening,” I said.

“And to listen to a lecture you need my car.”

“Yes.”

“Good. That makes a lot of sense. I told you, Elinor, you can get away with pretending to be crazy with other people, but not with me.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“No, you’re not, and you don’t need the Defender tonight either.” Oded got out of bed and turned off the alarm clock. “We won’t need the alarm this morning. In any case I was going to go for a run before it gets too hot. Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Right. You’re not going anywhere. And you know why you don’t need the car? You won’t need it because you’ve got a driver. I happen to be going to the Cinematheque this evening too.”

Going to the Cinematheque. He knew.

“So listen up, my dear,” he leaned with demonstrative ease on the iron headrest of the bed. He had never, ever, called me “my dear” before. “So listen: my first thought was that if I went to hear him talk, perhaps it would give me an idea of how to stop my parents from going to that dinner. Now I realize that that was only an excuse.”

He fell silent, obliging me to ask him “What do you mean?” and then he outflanked me again, forcing me to speak: “An excuse. You know, an excuse.”

“An excuse for what?”

“My curiosity, let’s say. The guy’s going to talk about ‘Questions and errors in pursuit of the roots of evil.’ It appears that I too am interested in the roots of evil.”

I hugged my knees, and the bed floated and swayed on the sea. I felt as if I had spent hours under a blazing sun: the liquid in my brain was shifting from side to side, my eyes were deluded into seeing land in shadows on the water.

“Only you won’t understand,” I blurted out, without knowing exactly what, out of everything, I was referring to.

“And why won’t I understand? Because I’m not clever enough? Because he’s too intellectual for me? You think I might be confused by some child rapist? Do me a favor. . I can see what that swine is doing to you, and I think it’s about time I know what he looks like. I have to know.”

The raft went on swaying, and words rolled about and escaped me.

During the deliberate silence in which I had immersed myself I had lost the old confidence in my ability to make myself clear to my audience.

“What did you think? That I wasn’t aware of the date of his lecture? That I wouldn’t find out when it was?”

“There’s a problem with facts,” I said weakly.

“Yes, and what exactly is the problem? It’s clear to me that what I know, what you’ve told me, is only the tip of the iceberg, we’ve talked about it more than once, but even so I think I understand quite well. You know what? Why don’t you tell me something you think I’m not capable of understanding? Go on, tell me, try me, at least. I think I deserve that at least — for you to try me. So here I am, and I’m listening.”

His wish to know was loving and pure, untainted by any appetite for sensational thrills. He was not a glutton for suffering. But being who he was, he could not but believe that understanding is acquired by a comprehensive knowledge of all the facts. He sincerely wanted to understand, but what could I tell him? All the facts seemed as hollow as headlines in a newspaper. Talking wasn’t the thing itself. In order to understand something you need to be immersed in it, you need the folie à deux in a three-and-a-half room basement apartment, you need images that seep through your skin until they change the composition of your blood. And as for the jangling facts — I myself didn’t know them all: he did, she cried, what exactly did he do? When did she cry? Perhaps she never cried at all.

“Elinor? Talk to me.”

Oded was coming to the lecture. He was going to prevent me from laying my trap and maneuvering the First Person to stand in front of the Defender. I knew that talking to him would only tie me tighter to the bed. But he looked at me as if he was pinning all his hope on me, and if only because of the hope, if only for the sake of the memory of this night, I could not keep silent or leave.

“Okay, here’s something,” I opened slowly and paused a moment. “Okay. You remember how my parents didn’t really believe it, and how I tracked down the gynecologist he took her to, and confirmed it all over the phone, so they didn’t have any option but to believe it.”

Carefully my husband stroked my tattooed tiger face, a gesture of encouragement to the woman telling the story and an expression of appreciation for the resourceful young girl she had once been.

“Okay,” I said for the third time and switched off the reading lamp. “So that story with the gynecologist — it happened, but not exactly the way you know. .”

Writers fantasize and round corners, and the first time I told my husband this chapter I didn’t exactly lie, but I shortened and skipped, let’s say for beauty’s sake.

It’s true that Elisheva remembered more or less where the clinic was, and it’s true that I searched the Yellow Pages and found a gynecological clinic in Hahovshim Street in the vicinity she remembered. It’s also correct that I phoned the gynecologist’s secretary and pretended to be Elisheva, but nothing was verified in that conversation. The idea of getting confirmation over the phone simply never occurred to me, and all I did was to make an appointment for the person pretending to be Elisheva Gotthilf.

I went to the clinic. It was early evening. There were about ten women in the waiting room, some of them pregnant. More women arrived and we all waited for a long time. That doctor let women wait. About two hours after the hour of my appointment, I was told to go in. On the desk was a gray cardboard file with the name Gotthilf, Elisheva written on it in a black marker.

“How can I help you?”

At this point I could ostensibly have left, since the existence of the file was enough to fling the truth in my parents’ faces. But I had already taken a seat in the chair facing the doctor, and a normal person who walks into a doctor’s office and sits down doesn’t suddenly stand up and walk out. That would be very impolite, and I was very young, and I didn’t have the courage to be abnormal and impolite.

I stammered that I was having problems with my period. “I thought that perhaps it was because of the abortion, probably not, but I wanted to be sure that I can get pregnant one day.” Until then I had never thought about my womb, and certainly not about fertility. Nor did I think about such things for years afterward, at that age you think about all kinds of things but not about your womb — apparently the thought popped into my head because of the pregnant women in the waiting room.

Since entering the room I hadn’t dared to look the man opposite me in the face. If I had met him in the street two day later I wouldn’t have recognized him. I was sure that he was about to unmask me as an imposter and then. . I don’t know, maybe he would call in the police, even though he was actually the one who should have been afraid of the police, not me, but that didn’t occur to me.

It turned out that there was nothing to fear: apparently the good doctor was not in the habit of looking at the faces of the women on whom he performed abortions, or maybe he just had a lousy memory. The first thing he said was that everything was in order after the procedure, and that if a problem existed it was certainly not connected to the procedure. I don’t remember how many times he repeated the word, procedure, but that was the word he used.

“Let me examine you anyway.”

There were a thousand things the girl could have done: told him who she was, threatened him, said that she didn’t want to be examined and she only came for a consultation, asked him if he was in the habit of performing abortions on girls brought in by men old enough to be their fathers.

She could have done a thousand things, but she didn’t do any of them. She neither confronted him nor found a way out. She stood up and obeyed his instructions, went behind the screen, took off her jeans and panties and put them on a stool, sat in the chair and parted her legs. That’s what she did. Because that’s what he told her to do, and she was Elisheva, and before she could think her feet were already in the stirrups, and a hand in a rubber glove was rummaging inside her.

“That’s it, that’s all. A gynecological examination,” I said to Oded. “And if you want to know, I wasn’t a virgin either. I wonder if he would have noticed if I was. Never mind, people pay a far higher price when they’re fighting for the truth. And in the end, what price did I already pay? A medical examination, that’s all. Women have them all the time. It just happened to be the first gynecological examination I ever had.”

If I had any clear wishes as to my husband’s reaction, I would have said that he fulfilled them all.

He didn’t ask “But why? Why did you let him do it?” He didn’t question me at all, or try to caress me, or comfort the child I was then from the heights of the present.

“A bad business,” he said shortly after I had finished, “a very bad business, but I’m glad you told me.”

He went to make coffee and after he put the cup in my hand, he spoke about “trained and experienced fighting men’ who were overtaken by paralysis. He mentioned a case involving one of his commanding officers, and another involving a well-known lawyer suddenly struck dumb in court.

I needed to hear his voice speaking, and he gave me his voice, and so we lay side by side while he spoke to me of this and that: about Nimrod’s new love affair — was it true love or simply the product of loneliness? About his father who kept announcing his intentions of winding down his activities in the office, and in complete contradiction to his declarations had started to interfere in his son’s cases to an extent he had never done before; and again about his old dream of teaching school: “It’s just a dream, I don’t think I’ll ever realize it, but lately I’ve been thinking that if I could only find the right place, maybe I could teach for a few hours on a volunteer basis. To teach judo, for example. Maybe I’d just teach girls. What do you say? You think something could come of it?”

And I listened to my husband’s soothing chit-chat, I really did listen, and I even replied. Only when the light in the shed vanished into the light of the rising sun, his voice departed from its gentle, everyday tone and took on an exaggerated casualness. “So I’ll pick you up at home tonight and we’ll go to the seminar to see and hear. And two other things: one, the dinner my parents aren’t going to attend is supposed to take place the day after tomorrow. And two, if you’re interested, I assume you’re interested and that you’ve already found out for yourself: he’s staying at the Hyatt.”

“How do you know?”

“So you didn’t check it out. Good, then you have to admit that there are a few advantages to being married to a lawyer. Even though it wasn’t something I needed a detective to find out. I simply phoned the university and asked the spokeswoman.”

“But what did you say to her? Did you give her your name?”

“Certainly not. I gave her a false name and said that I ran a book club. And that we wanted to invite him to speak to us.”

The question of the First Person’s location had been preying on my mind for the past few days, but why did it concern my husband? I didn’t know.

It was a morning of surprises, and worn out by surprises I could only surmise that he had located the predator in order to minimize the anxieties of his preyed-upon wife.

The hands of the clock approached the hour when the alarm was supposed to go off, and in the moments remaining we said no more.

I remembered the arrowhead of the wild geese in the sky. For some reason it occurred to me that after reaching its destination, whenever it did so, perhaps even now, the slow, screeching arrow would turn around and return to the country from which it had departed.

I imagined geese and clouds and saw continents from above, I sailed with them in the sky. I must have dozed off, and when I woke Oded was already dressed in his jogging outfit and busy tying his shoes, and I was covered with a sheet.

With the pale satin material covering my body, I went on lying there and thinking about what could never be.

I thought that if I could only do what needed to be done and live to see more mornings like this, I would go down on my knees and wash the feet of all the gods.

And I vowed that if only it could be, then I would never, ever again want to get into some car bomb and blow myself up in the role of some god or other.

— 7 -

Evening started to fall, and the terrible heat did not abate. My husband picked me up at the house and we drove to the Cinematheque, and parked the Defender next to the Scottish church. In the dusky light we crossed the narrow bridge leading to the Valley of Hinnom and went down the steps to the Cinematheque, and at ten past six I saw the First Person.

I heard him speak to the audience, and no doubts entered my mind: I knew with a certain knowledge that the past, the present, and the future would be better without him, and that I had to erase him. But that’s no way to tell a story. There are details without which the truth does not become a story, and the truth does not become a story without cold shivers running down my spine, and hairs standing up on the back of my neck, and my heart beating faster as the hands of the clock advanced. Heart beats are imperative, because the heart creates credibility, and without it nobody will believe me.

My wrist watch has no hands, but my heart definitely beat faster: here is my heart, pounding at an ever-increasing rhythm as we cross the bridge — who is that walking behind me? — my heart pounds in my ears, and here I am opening it, revealing all.

There was indeed a dark red pounding in my ears, but at the same time I should point out that I didn’t miss a word, and that I heard every sound that the First Person uttered. Because from the moment he started to speak my thoughts no longer strayed: no images of loathsome tortures invaded my mind, I had no sister, nor did I imagine a body in front of the car. Everything that had haunted me went away now that I was face to face with the haunter.

He took the stage and spoke, he had been invited to lecture, and I was present at his lecture, in full possession of all my faculties, and therefore I am competent to bear witness. So to hell with the cardiology report. The increase in the rate of my heartbeat is only a marginal symptom.

I intended to arrive exactly on time for the beginning of the panel. In places like the Cinematheque, there are always people you have to wave or nod to, and I wanted to avoid waves and nods and definitely from having to reply to “What are you doing here, research for Alice?” or “Where did you disappear to? We heard you were in America.”

A late entry, on the other hand, can lead to the turning of heads, and even though I assumed that he would not be able to recognize me, this logical assumption did not put my mind at rest.

We wanted to get there just in time for the opening of the proceedings, the gods of parking were on our side — bless them — and so we succeeded in entering the hall on time after sitting in the car for less than ten minutes.

I mentioned “the audience” before. The big hall of the Cinematheque was about three-quarters full, which means about three hundred people. Three hundred people had assembled to view “popular portraits of evil.” The tickets cost thirty shekels, Oded and I paid sixty together, and took our places at the back of the hall, close to the exit. Two lecturers spoke before the First Person took the stage, and if we count the host of the panel as well, then he was preceded by three speakers.

What they spoke about — I don’t remember. I started to pay attention only when the host approached the podium for the third time and introduced Hitler, First Person. Until then my eyes were busy searching the front rows for him. My ears were increasingly deafened by the drumming inside them. My nose was dry from sniffing.

As the host reached the podium for the third, time Oded bent down to his bag at my left, took out a yellow legal pad and placed it on his lap, as if about to take notes.

Oded set a pen to the paper, and my eyes no longer searched for Not-man. He rose from his seat in the audience only after the host said: “many publications,” “a range of subjects,” and “a book that gave rise to mixed reactions and a controversy which will no doubt be of interest to us all.”

Hitler, First Person rose, and now there is presumably no option but to raise him up in person.

Evil needs flesh to be incarnated, and who will believe me unless I portray him in the flesh?

The bottom of the portrait shows spider legs so long as to be out of proportion to the rest of the body, the top a coif of wavy hair unaffected by the passage of the years, no doubt further proof of his satanic nature. Before he began to speak he took a pair of narrow reading glasses out of his jacket pocket and set them low on his nose. . and that’s enough. Never mind what the rest of him looked like. He was there, standing on the stage below us, he was there and nothing had changed.

It was evident that most of the audience had no idea of what to expect. A generation had passed since that book first came out, and it never came out in Hebrew at all. People’s memories are short, and in any case they don’t want to remember and they don’t want to know.

Even before he opened his mouth he began to draw attention to himself, sucking it in and gobbling it up: seducing the audience to look at him as he unfolded the arms of his reading glasses, riveting their gaze as he produced a page and smoothed it out slowly on the lectern.

Evil is deceptive, and I was not surprised by the failure of the spectators to recognize it in its present incarnation. And in view of their failure, it occurred to me that I should put an end to him in public, because only thus would a great cry go up — instead of this gullible silence in which they watched him smoothing out his sheet of paper on the lectern.

But I wouldn’t end it in a minute. First he would scream, and shouts would rise from the audience, and at some point I would ask the screaming mouth if he agreed with Schopenhauer and others that pain was more real than pleasure.

We were there. Not-man was close at hand. The possibility was at hand, and until he started to speak I imagined a great shout deafening a different scream, and after that silence. A sentence would wipe out a sentence, as if it had never been pronounced.

When he opened his mouth it spoke English. Then I thought again that it amused him to hide the fact that he knew Hebrew well and understood what people around him were saying. Now I think that perhaps he chose English in order to benefit from the politeness with which strangers and guests are treated.

The mouth opened and shut and opened again. Shall I allow it to make itself heard?

I heard it all, I took in everything from beginning to end, there was never a more attentive listener than me, and even if by doing so I will serve as his mouthpiece, I think that the story obliges me to give an account of his words.

First of all he thanked the moderator for introducing him and the conference hosts for inviting him, and he didn’t simply thank them but tugged his humble forelock, bowed his head, touched his long vulture’s neck, and cooed as modestly as a dove. The imposter thanked, and then he explained that he was going to talk about a grave mistake that he had made, and for a variety of reasons it was important for him to come and admit his painful error here in Jerusalem.

In order to clarify the personal and intellectual background to his fall from grace — he said — he should first explain what he had sought to do in his writing, and what was the nature of the trap into which he had fallen. In his humble opinion, the temptation in question was almost as old as the human race itself.

He had always believed — many people here would no doubt agree with him — that the preeminence of man could be described in one simple and wonderful word: “Why?” A whipped horse does not ask “Why?” A dog — a doubtlessly intelligent animal — when it is kicked will only try to escape from the next kick. A human being expresses his humanity when in confronting the greatest of horrors he insists on demanding “Why?” When Faust seeks to know what holds the world together he does not expect a reply from the field of quantum mechanics or string theory. Faust seeks meaning. He wants to understand.

A human being expresses his humanity in insisting on his need for an explanation.

I could describe how the audience hung on his every word, and say that what I did later on that evening was aimed at liberating all those gullible souls who were seduced and led astray. But the truth is a little different, and the truth is that the more he progressed in his lecture, the less spellbound the audience as a whole became, and I could sense their attention gradually wandering. There were some who leaned forward to catch every word. But there were also not a few who dropped by the wayside: they didn’t understand his English, they had come to see one of the films that were going to be shown later on in the evening. They were impatient to see Magda Goebbels poisoning her children in the bunker, and they had no patience for philosophizing.

Are there some things for which we should not seek an explanation? the mouth asked. Is it wrong to seek an explanation for Hitler? Was this the fateful error he had made? Some see Hitler as a demon, a monster — not in the metaphorical sense, but literally. There are those who see him as a phenomenon originating in the world of darkness, whose meaning or explanation, if they exist, should be sought in the fields of mysticism and theology.

“While I respect this approach, I don’t agree with it,” said the First Person. “Hitler was a human being. He belonged to the human species and, therefore, in principle at least, he can be understood by other human beings. I am not referring, God forbid, to the vulgar notion that claims that ‘there’s a little Hitler inside every one of us,’” the rich voice dried with scorn as it drew out the syllables of a “lit-tile Hit-ler.” Even if it had been incarnated in a different body I would have recognized that mocking voice, pouring scorn on those who don’t understand and all the “downstairs people.”

“Mother Theresa is not Hitler,” he said. “And to say that there is a ‘little Hitler’ inside her, too, is meaningless. But even Mother Theresa, even Janusz Korczak are capable, in principle at least, of understanding who Hitler was. Because no human being is an angel, the boot that tramples and crushes is not beyond the horizons of the understanding of any one of us. Moreover, it is tremendously important for us as human beings to understand what motivates the boot and what lifts the foot to trample a human face.”

The mouth coughed, First Person withdrew a little from the lectern to cough, he straightened his reading glasses on his nose. He moved at his will and uttered whatever sounds came into his head, and I saw every movement and heard every sound. The pounding in my ears died down, and no fire alarm or invitation to the most delightful pleasure imaginable would have uprooted me from my seat: more than anything in the world I needed to see and hear.

He spoke about others who had preceded him in the attempt to solve the dark riddle of Hitler, right from the beginning of the Führer’s career. Any library worthy of the name possessed books on the subject. Some of the explanations they provided were cheap and sensational, not worth commenting on, others gave food for thought, but he would not dwell even now on the serious attempts to come to grips with the subject. There were thousands of such texts in existence, he had not read them all, but let’s say he had read quite a few, and some of them he had even had the opportunity to teach.

After years of studying and teaching, after all the explanations, he felt that we were left with a black hole, with an unsolved riddle, and that all the explanations, even the most profound, were only words, words, words. . that every explanation and every theory collapsed into a black hole of surpassing evil, supreme evil, pure and distilled.

This awareness, this growing despair with words, gave rise to the idea that in order to crack Hitler a completely different way of thinking was required. And this led to the conclusion that what was required in order to plumb the depths of the abyss was not the rational vision of a man of science and theory, but the vision of an artist, the intuitions of an artist, and the courage of an artist.

The speaker bowed his head for a moment in silence, and massaged his cheek with his index finger, as if to pause for reflection before he continued:

When he embarked on this ambitious — today he would not hesitate to use the word “presumptuous”—project of writing about Hitler in the first person, he sincerely believed that only art had the power to plumb the depths of the most evil of souls, and investigate its contents. Scholars and scientists could tell us about Hitler, but only art could make Hitler present to us.

Various accusations had been hurled at him with regard to the book. He agreed with most of his critics, and he was even prepared to add self-criticism of his own to their criticism of him. But of one sin he stood accused of, at least, he was innocent: he had not taken the heavy burden of writing the novel upon himself lightly, and not out of any lust for fame or provocation. Since he had come to confess his error, he would say frankly that from the outset it was clear to him that some people would not understand, and some people would be hurt. In this sense at least he embarked on his project with his eyes open: in the clear knowledge that both art and truth were ruthless.

As far as the criticism of the book was concerned, he was his own harshest critic. As we could see for ourselves, he was no longer young, and he had devoted the last years of his life to the single purpose of exposing the error of his work. He had made a grave mistake in the assumptions he had made, but one thing he could say for certain and in all honesty was that the author had undertaken the writing of the book as a sacred task. The author believed with all his heart that if there was ever anything worth doing, it was writing Hitler, First Person.

His voice. I should describe the elusive quality of his voice, without which this report would be lacking. I have already mentioned the unidentifiable accent, but an accent is not a voice. His voice aspired to pathos when he spoke of art, but at the same time it held a note of parody, as if he were presenting us with an imitation. He sounded like a kind of clown mimicking himself — a clown mimicking a clown imitating an imitation, an imposter pretending to be an imposter — until the listener felt lost and foolish, because he had no idea what was at the bottom of the voice and what it intended. One minute he sounded sincere, and the next he seemed to be mocking the very notion of sincerity. I remembered well the effect of this voice of his, but this time I no longer waited uncertainly for his next sentence in the hope that it would reveal his intention to me. I already knew who he was. And I already knew better than to expect any meaning.

The passing of the years, or perhaps the fact that he was standing on a stage, had intensified the ambivalence of his tone to the point it actually jarred, and I could sense an undercurrent of unease in the audience. On my left, Oded kept rubbing his wrist against the arm of the chair, as if absent-mindedly scratching an insect bite.

The voice dropped to a tone almost of complaint when he went on to review two of the writers who had crossed the line before him. Richard Lourie, a professor of literature, had written a novel called The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin which, as the name implies, tells the story of the Soviet Czar in the first person. If we judge the degree of evil by the number of the tyrant’s victims, then Stalin was even worse than Hitler, but nobody accused Professor Lourie, who was a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize for another of his novels, of doing anything outrageous, and nobody identified him with the subject of his novel or called him “Stalin.”

George Steiner, an outstanding scholar and intellectual, gave Hitler the right to speak and argue in his provocative novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. Steiner came in for a ton of criticism — he himself thought the text very courageous — but in his humble opinion, Steiner didn’t go far enough in looking into the abyss. Steiner’s Hitler was a polemical Hitler, not a personality in the full sense of the word, but rather a collection of bold claims regarding the role of the Jews in history, the author’s argument with himself and his identity.

In writing Hitler, First Person the author strove to advance beyond what Steiner, for whom he had the greatest admiration, had done. He aimed at plumbing the depths of Hitler’s soul, his soul and not his arguments. He wanted to present Hitler not as a series of arguments, and not as a case study under a psychiatric label of one kind or another, but as a human being who experienced reality in his own unique way.

How did this human being experience reality? asked the voice, and his finger rose to massage his cheekbone again.

What conflicts created his stormy stream of consciousness? What did he dream about in his sleep? What images were seared into his mind as a child? These were the questions that would not let him be, and his need for answers, his prayer for answers, he addressed to the muse of literature. More and more he came to believe that only there, only in the realms of art, only under the trance-like inspiration of Mnemosyne, might he come to understand.

In a little while we were about to watch the movie The Fall. What had made us leave home in the heat of thirty eight degrees Celsius, and come here? A purely academic interest in the last days of the Third Reich? Curiosity about the way in which contemporary Germans tell the story of those days? Let us be honest with ourselves. We came here because secretly, in our hearts, we wanted to see Hitler. We came to see Hitler, and we need not feel ashamed of it, because the dark riddle of Hitler still holds us spellbound after all this time; it calls to us and will not let us be until we succeed in solving it.

Steiner’s novella was made into a play. A very talented English actor played Hitler. A no less talented actor plays the Führer in the film we are about to see. We should consider the immense spiritual resources these good people had to bring to bear in order to get under the skin of the character and to understand it. In his opinion, regardless of what we thought of the play or the film, we should respect these two artists for the spiritual sacrifice they were called to make in order to bring Satan before us. Let us consider the possibility that by means of their art and through the personal sacrifice they made — and under the mysterious trance of the muse — these two actors came closer to solving the Hitlerian riddle than a thousand professors with their theories.

The lecture ended abruptly. The mouth fell silent, and Not-man folded the sheet of paper at which he had hardly glanced. Later on I wondered if the members of the audience who were less alert than me had noticed that the speaker had failed to describe the “error’ he was supposed to talk about. The applause was rather weak: neither more nor less enthusiastic than that which had greeted the speakers who had preceded him. And nevertheless, about eighty people clapped their hands for him, in other words a hundred sixty hands moved and struck each other in his honor; in other words, the voice moved hands.

•

The moderator said that there was time for a question or two, and a dwarfish little old lady with hunched shoulders in a sleeveless dress stood up in the third row. Her English was poor and bad, but “Auschwitz” is not an English word, and there is no need for any great linguistic powers in order to say “mother,” “father,” “grandfather,” “grandmother,” “other grandmother,” “little brother,” and “six sisters.”

Her language failed her only when she insisted on trying to say something about each of the relatives she had mentioned, and the incoherent rush of words had to be taken apart and put together again in a sentence that made sense: Manya played the piano. Father believed in the progress of humanity. The little brother had connections with certain elements — even after the deconstruction and re-assembling it was impossible to know who they were — and when the Germans marched in he tried to contact them.

A murmur of impatience gradually spread through the hall. “She didn’t understand a word he said,” a young man complained in front of me, without lowering his voice.

The moderator came to the podium again, and stood to the right of the First Person in a demonstrative waiting position, but two or three more minutes passed before he interrupted the woman and asked her to come to her question, if she had one.

Only then she shifted to Hebrew and said: “I didn’t read the book, but in the newspaper it said that the esteemed professor lost his family in the Holocaust, and I would very much like to understand how a Jew. . how a Jew who went thought what you, sir, went through, can speak in the name of the Nazi monster and spread his propaganda.”

A sigh of disdain rose in front of me. And I thought: if only she had known English better, if only she had worn a more suitable dress, a dress with sleeves, if only. . it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Without losing his composure First Person waited for the moderator to translate the words he understood. He took off his reading glasses, put them in his jacket pocket, and in the patient and emphatic tone of a person obliged for the umpteenth time to reply to the same childish question, he replied that the horror affected all human beings insofar as they were human. And therefore, while in this case what was written in the newspaper was correct, he would say that his personal closeness to the subject was irrelevant to how the book should be judged. At the same time, he was also prepared to say that precisely because of his closeness to the subject — and such a closeness did in fact exist — precisely because of this, he possessed a particularly burning need to understand what — paraphrasing Faust—”what it is that holds evil up from inside.” And it was very important to him too, to point out that in opposition to the facile conclusion of a certain Hollywood movie to understand was not to forgive. A person could understand and not forgive, and sometimes people forgave only because they did not understand.

“I imagine that if I had succeeded in what I attempted to do, I would be judged differently. But when I myself look at the text today, it is clear to me that I failed miserably: the muse did not choose me. And I have no choice but to admit that in the end all my efforts and sacrifices resulted in a trivial work. I failed to solve the secret and added nothing to what my learned predecessors had already written. It appears that I am not the kind of artist I thought I was, and the limitations I refused to recognize, the limitations and the original sin of hubris, are the basis of my mistake. The task I undertook was too great for me. I still believe that one day a greater artist than me will enter the little breakthrough I achieved, and shed light on one of the greatest of human mysteries. But this evening I stand here before you and openly confess: I wrote a mediocre work, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the word “banal,” and this is without a doubt my fault, mea culpa.” He raised his hands and in an ancient, sickeningly familiar gesture he beat his breast. “Mea maxima culpa. This is my greatest fault.”

Not-man descended from the stage and took his seat in the first row. The moderator rose to introduce the next speaker, who asked us to watch with her part of the popular television program hosted by Oprah Winfrey: an interview with Elie Wiesel. But perhaps the Professor would like to say something beforehand? The speaker rose briskly to her feet, a plump, energetic young woman: not at all like the lady professor my imagination had sent to have dinner with my in-laws in that kosher restaurant on Keren Hayesod Street.

I took the yellow notepad, on which Oded had not written a single word, and wrote: “I’m going up to the Baradanshvilis. If you love me, please tell him that I want to talk, and bring him there.”

I was in desperate need of oxygen, but when I was already getting up I lingered for a moment more, and crossed out “if you love me” with two lines, and only then gave the pad back to Oded. The air was thick with First Person’s presence, my lungs urged me to leave, and I was in a hurry, my redaction was slipshod. He could still read what was written underneath it.

— 8 -

The Baradanshvilis gallery had opened a few months previously on the hillside opposite Mount Zion, right above the Cinematheque. I had met Lilly and Shabtai Baradanshvilis, a sculptor and a painter, during my research for Alice, and but for the demise of my pigtailed heroine I would have written about their place, and presumably succeeded in attracting a few more visitors to it.

They had a studio in Tbilisi that also served as a gallery and a club for the discerning. Artists and poets, students and members of the diplomatic corps — the Belgian consul himself accompanied by his mistress — would come and stay till morning: drinking tea, wine, and vodka, eating pastries and fruit whose taste surpassed anything to be found in Israel, and arguing about art and ideas. The finest artists had their first shows there, the best known were exposed to criticism. Those who had the money paid, those who were short of cash paid another time.

Lilly and Shabtai had succeeded in opening a gallery in Jerusalem, but their dream of renewing the nights of Tbilisi had not yet been realized. Optimistic, they cleaned the little inner courtyard adjoining the building, built a small pond for goldfish, planted orange trees and ferns in pots, and installed lighting, and when their preparations were completed, they returned to their sculpting and painting without losing heart, and kept on hoping for guests to arrive and make their dream reality.

There was not a hint of desert light in Shabtai’s abstract charcoal drawings, but when Alice was still sucking her pigtails, I planned to connect their studio to the monastery in the Valley of the Crucifixion, and to give the beautiful Lilly a secret relationship to Shotha Rusthaveli, who had composed his great epic there.

I intended to read The Man in the Panther’s Skin. I got hold of a copy, but everything that had happened, and what had happened to Alice, sentenced it to remain unread. And so the gallery-studio of the Baradanshvilis was doomed to remain in its desolation. As I climbed the steps leading from the Cinematheque, I noted this loss too.

When I entered the gallery the only person there was Lilly and Shabtai’s oldest son, busy sorting a pile of photographs into envelopes. He apologized for the disorder in the gallery and the fact that the courtyard was full of stuff: they had cleaned the place out today and not yet managed to put everything back. I said it didn’t matter, I felt quite at home, he could carry on working and I would take care of myself.

And so I did. I went to the fridge, took a bottle of vodka from the freezer, and poured myself a double shot. I didn’t forget to leave a banknote in the box, and with the brimming glass in my hand I went out to the courtyard, which, as he said, was not arranged for guests: the iron chairs were collected in one corner, their cushions stacked on a table, the other three tables were loaded with painting equipment.

I put a couple of cushions on one chair next to the ornamental fishpond, and dragged up another chair, set it next to the wall on the other side of the table and measured the distance between the two. Two chairs. Oded would have to take the hint. And what if he insisted on ignoring it and stayed?

Of all the events for which I had to prepare myself, I fixated on this foolishness and wasted the little time at my disposal contemplating it.

The last and only time I had asked Oded to go away was in the delivery room at the Hadassah Hospital, two hours before Yachin saw the light of day. Now too I had something to do, and I needed to concentrate all my strength and prevent it from dissolving under an anxious look and a tender touch.

But what could I say to him now, what exactly was I going to say to my husband? “Go away now, please be good enough in your great, your tremendous, your incomprehensible and incomparable goodness, to go away and leave me alone with this thing?” How would I say it? I was indeed alone with this thing, that was the truth and had been the truth since Monticello. So why tell any more lies? Elisheva had forgiven, and only I was alone with him, forced to be alone with him. And in a minute face to face. On my own. Myself and Not-man. Enough deception and pretending that it wasn’t so.

The enclosed courtyard stored the heat of the day, and the heat closed in on me like a dense physical entity. I hadn’t eaten all day, it was a long time since I had drunk vodka neat, and my guts, weakened by being treated so delicately, reacted instantly to the icy liquid setting them on fire.

The woman who had taken the stage to discuss the case of Oprah Winfrey was the last of the speakers, and I estimated that I had about half an hour to wait, no more, before my husband arrived on the scene and brought me the First Person. The possibility that he would decide not to bring him or that he would fail in his attempt to bring him didn’t occur to me; in fact, nothing much occurred to me at all. It was hot. The vodka went to my head. The goldfish darted nervously above the gleaming pebbles. One of the fish leapt out of the water and dived back again. Another one leapt in a mute suicide attempt. The pond was small and the water was overheated. The deep boils over and the cauldron hisses unappeased. Fish don’t hiss.

I thought of going to the fridge and bringing ice to cool the water down, and then I thought, “Fuck it,” and “Enough, enough already.” And I thought “Stop it, what are you thinking,” and “You’re so dumb,” and “What is this? What’s going on here? Don’t you understand? I’m not being photographed, I’m taking the photograph.”

And then they were there, my black belt and the spider legs about a meter behind him, and already opposite me: my husband in front, separating me from them, preventing any attempt to shake hands, gesturing Not-man to sit down and only then picking up a chair for himself and carrying it into the pool of light around the pond: carrying it, not dragging it.

“I told Professor Gotthilf that as a result of his lecture you’ve changed your mind and you’re prepared to talk to him. The professor realizes that it’s not a simple matter.”

“Aaron,” the voice corrected him courteously, “Aaron.”

The relative darkness under the wall blurred the deep furrows under his nose. What emerged in the relative darkness was the wavy crest of hair, the skinny vulture’s neck, and the movement of the lips.

“Family, as you say, Oded, is not a simple matter. Sometimes people make do with correct relations, but polite formalities in the family circle, and among Jews what’s more. . With my two sons the relationship is far from simple, but neither of them calls me professor.” Now he spoke in Hebrew.

“Aaron,” I pronounced, tasting the poison in my mouth.

“Thank you,” he said.

I was aware of the fact that I was sitting up stiffly in a theatrical manner, but even when I shifted my position slightly and unobtrusively, my limbs continued to arrange themselves in a self-conscious pose. I looked in silence at the stone wall opposite me, as a chatty voice — very different from his voice on the stage, but still, always the same deceptive, buffoonish voice — launched into a monologue about his sons.

His eldest—”who is in fact your second cousin”—his eldest was Orthodox, and not simply an Orthodox Jew but an important rabbi in Bnei Brak. He was said to be a great Torah scholar, and perhaps he was, to his regret he was not competent to judge. This son had given him nine grandchildren, and he had celebrated the Passover Seder with all of them: his son, his son’s children, their husbands and wives, and their children. A big family.

Did we too tend to regard Orthodoxy as Judaism in its purist form? — the lips chattered. Because it was his impression that many Israelis held this view. And at the same time, it would not be a mistake to say that their attitude toward the ultra-Orthodox smacked of more than a hint of anti-Semitism. We would agree with him that this was a fascinating phenomenon. He himself was of the opinion that it was connected to Zionism, connected — but not entirely dependent on. Had we read Otto Weininger? Every Jew should read Weininger once. His passion, the passionate eloquence of his self-hatred. . Hitler, by the way, said of him that he was the only decent Jew who ever existed. Decent? That perhaps not. But the authenticity of the emotion cannot be denied, however infuriating. To be honest, he was ready to confess to us that although he was of course grateful to his son and daughter-in-law for hosting him and observing the mitzvah of “honor thy father,” there were certain aspects of the ultra-Orthodox way of life, unaesthetic aspects that — how should he put it? — jarred on him. No doubt we understood what he was referring to. .

•

I glanced at Oded. He neither nodded nor shook his head, he never moved a muscle. Illuminated from the side in the hazy orange light of the garden lamps, he looked like the character of the bodyguard in one of the movies he liked, not any particular bodyguard but all the best ones put together: still, holding himself in suspense, but fully present. The voice that had moved an audience to clap its hands did not move my husband.

Three times in the past we had slipped away together here, when the Cinematheque café was crowded. That was in the distant days whose sweetness was liable to befuddle and weaken me even more than the heat. We would not sit together again.

The irony of fate — the voice continued — his younger son was in many ways the complete opposite of his brother: that is to say an American Jew, in other words an ignoramus. And perhaps it wasn’t the irony of fate but simply a typical Jewish fate. With this son too he has difficulties, but in his case the reasons are different. This son lives in Texas, and from him he has one granddaughter. She was born a year and a half ago, and to the grandfather’s regret he has not yet seen her.

There was a moment of silence. The talkative grandfather took out his wallet. The being disguised as a boring old grandfather opened his wallet, took out a little picture and held it out to the light: whether to look at it himself or to show to the others. The bodyguard sat still as a statue, the hand retreated and withdrew the picture.

“Fathers and sons. .” The voice sighed. “You too, so I hear, have sons. They must be grown up now. .”

“Elinor. .” said my husband, the perfect gentleman, opening the door for me.

“I have a question,” I croaked. And immediately my throat cleared and the continuation flowed as if of its own accord: “I have a question, which is actually the reason we asked you to come. I wanted to know: how many women have you actually raped?” I hadn’t planned this question. The way things turned out, I didn’t plan anything.

A hand reached for the table, picked up a purple pastel crayon and rubbed it between its fingers. A hand spotted with freckles like that of an old man turned upward and balanced the crayon on its palm. A hand that was not that of an old man gave itself away and didn’t tremble. The orange lighting illuminated a steady hand weighing a purple pastel crayon in its palm.

When it began to answer, the voice was as steady as the hand and the chatty tone was gone.

He appreciated my directness, and more than that, he thanked me for it. They said that directness was a characteristic of native born Israelis. Some saw this characteristic as indicative of a lack of culture and sophistication, but he thought otherwise. He remembered that even as a young girl I was very direct: in my speech and especially in my eyes, a very particular look I had in my eyes.

His difficulty in answering my question was related to the presumption of guilt it contained. There was a lawyer sitting with us, and he would no doubt confirm that such a startling question belonged to the stage when the so-called criminal had already admitted his guilt and the counts of the charge were being negotiated. We weren’t children, and it was clear to us all that the only direct answer he could give would make it impossible to continue this conversation. Speaking for himself, he would be sorry, since the reason he had contacted me a few weeks ago was that he was eager for a chance to do something else. When my charming husband had invited him to come up here, he imagined that I — with every right — was going to ask him for explanations for all kinds of troubling questions, such as for example why the relations between my father and himself had been broken off. In this as in other matters he did not see himself as free of guilt, certainly not, human life by its very nature involved guilt. But things were complicated, very complicated, and they could on no account be summed up in the shallow medium called “an admission.” He had been told that Elinor wrote a literary column for the newspaper, and as someone close to literature she had surely taken note of the fact that while there was a literary genre of confession, there was no genre of “admission.” The admissions extorted by the police in the course of their interrogations never amounted to a text worth anything.

He was a professor, the habits of a lifetime were hard to uproot, and therefore we would allow him to further remark that questions to which the answers were “yes” or “no” would accomplish nothing in furthering the understandings of any one of us. Did Stalin have signs that the Germans were about to invade? Yes. Were there Jews in key positions in Stalin’s terror apparatus? Yes indeed. The problem is that this “yes” does not really enrich our understanding, and it will not help us to prevent any tragedies in the future.

As he had mentioned in his presentation, which he was very grateful to us for being kind enough to attend, the great human question is “why?” and to this “why?” there are not, and cannot be short two- or three-letter answers.

In any event, it saddened him greatly to think that two wonderful young people like us, two of his own relations, should regard him as a hardened criminal. He wasn’t complaining, he understood that in the light of our partial information perhaps it was impossible for us to come to a different conclusion, but he had not yet lost hope of trying to correct our impression.

Did the name Hannah Arendt mean anything to us? If so, perhaps it would interest us to know that she wrote that the Eichmann trial was an indescribably low and repulsive event. Whatever we thought of him — the voice smirked — he wasn’t Eichmann, and none of us would gain anything by holding a show trial for him here in this courtyard.

•

The shadowy profile of the mask turned toward Oded. Even when he was addressing me he avoided turning his face to me. Perhaps he thought that the debate should be conducted with the man, and perhaps it was one of his parodies of politeness: not to look a woman in the eye in the presence of her husband.

So the head was turned to Oded. One spidery leg was crossed on the other. One sharp knee rose above the table. A dark wave of gray hair crested over a huge head. The hand that had weighed the pastel crayon came to a satisfactory conclusion and returned it to its jar. And the voice that had fallen silent in order to assess our silence saw it as confirmation and continued into the enclosed space of the courtyard:

If we were ready to do without the show trial and listen to him, he would like to tell us about a certain text, a novel, in fact, which he had been working on for over two years now. It could be argued that after the mistake of Hitler, First Person he should have abandoned literary writing, he understood this argument, but sometimes, and there were a number of examples of this, great achievements grew precisely out of what on the face of it seemed a failure, out of the strange joy that seized hold of a man when his back was to the wall.

In any case, it was about this novel that he wanted to talk to us when he tried to make contact with us that time. We were family, and as such it was important to him to clarify certain things with us before the book came out. And since he was going to be in Israel anyway he thought that he would take advantage of the opportunity.

As we may have already guessed, his novel contained certain biographical elements, but it was on no account an autobiography or a roman à clef in the usual sense. That is to say, it did not present events as they had happened, or seek to portray real people in disguise. In the words of the poet, the best of the poem is its fabrication, and the same holds true for prose. While the book enlarged upon issues he had already touched on in his essay, “My Mistake,” it was important to understand that it was basically a work of fiction, and should be read as such.

Reducing a work of literature to its plot was doing it an injustice. In time to come perhaps we would do him the honor of wishing to read his book, but in order for this happen he had no option but to do himself and his book this very injustice, if we would have the patience to listen.

The plot takes place in the present day. The hero, whose name is Albert, is the French cultural attaché in Phnom Penh, a far from simple challenge considering the history of France in the country. But this, of course, is something the average Western reader knows nothing about. He himself, who knew a little history, had to do a lot of reading in order to create a convincing factual foundation for his novel. The research, by the way, was highly instructive, but this was a matter for another conversation. He didn’t want to digress too far from the subject. Up to now we had shown extraordinary patience, which he appreciated very much, and he had no wish to impose upon it any further.

Albert, the hero, is a European intellectual of the old school, a little like himself: a graduate of the Sorbonne, not exactly the type commonly found in the foreign service, and his present post is the last before his retirement. The special situation in which Albert finds himself gives rise in him to a sense of freedom — a consciousness of his personal freedom, perhaps — and thus, more than occupying himself with the dissemination of French culture, the consul devotes himself to the local culture.

At first he broadens his knowledge of Sanskrit, and also tries to learn Khmer. For a certain period he explores the roots of Buddhism. His journey begins with the ancient Khmer traditions, and shifts to the horrors of the history of Cambodia in the second half of the twentieth century.

Do we know, by the way, what the Americans called their carpet bombing of Cambodia? These murderous daily flights were referred to in the American air force as “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dinner” and “snacks.” Two hundred thousand people were slaughtered in this manner. To remind us that the jackboot comes in different colors. But to get back to the book.

Phnom Penh, as we know, is surrounded by mass graves. And the proximity of the murderous hell oppresses Albert. The terrible past seems more real to him than the present, and he is increasingly repelled by the pleasures of the new life of the city. It is important to point out that we are talking about a serious-minded person here, an intellectual with no hedonistic inclinations, who sees the pleasure-seeking life around him not as frivolous but as sinful: as a denial of the horror and the truth.

The hero’s research becomes increasingly focused on the four years of Khmer-Rouge rule.

Opinion is divided on the question of how many people were liquidated by the regime of Pol Pot. So divided that the estimates vary from less than a million to two million. A similar confusion, a shocking confusion concerning millions of human lives, can be found in the research into the Stalinist terror, but he is straying from the subject again. The crux of the matter is that Albert is increasingly absorbed by Pol Pot’s penal colony, and the more the subject absorbs him, the greater his need to understand the mind that came up with the idea of the slave labor camps and strewed mines around them.

Albert is a bachelor. Apart from one sister, an old maid who lives in Lyon, he has no family, and he has hardly any friends. The diplomatic way of life combined with a difficult character make him a solitary figure and turns him into a stranger wherever he found himself. From his earliest youth he has kept a diary — the novel in fact consists of Albert’s diary — and in his diary he documents his growing disgust with the official banquets, ceremonies, and other vanities of the empty diplomatic life.

The crux of the matter is that the empty space in his life is increasingly filled with thoughts about the Pol Pot regime, his diary is increasingly filled with these thoughts, to the point where they could be described as an obsession.

Like one possessed he returns again and again to the killing fields of Chvang Ack, and stands before the thousands of skulls in the memorial sepulcher. Albert visits and revisits the skulls, the dry bones, but his thoughts are mainly on the mind. He feels compelled to understand the living mind that smashed the heads of infants only because they were born into the wrong class. He has to understand. And this sense of inner duty gives birth in him to the realization that it is his mission to write a book: he understands that he must write about Pol Pot.

From the point of view of class, the consul belongs to the urban intelligentsia, that specific urban race which Pol Pot described as the root of all evil. And nonetheless he has two things in common with the mass murderer: they had both been educated in Catholic schools, and they were both graduates of the Sorbonne. At the beginning of his research, the naïve scholar believes that with these keys in his hands he will be able to penetrate the layers of ideology and get inside the brain. And only gradually, in the fourth and fifth parts of the diary, does he come to realize how empty his hands are, and how far he is from understanding anything.

To sum up, in banal terms: Albert goes mad. Since he was a child Albert has never experienced a need so absolute, a drive so lacking in doubt, and the thought of giving up the most meaningful project of his life — on what he sees as his vocation — is equal in his eyes to the embrace of death.

In the seventh part of the diary, which is perhaps the most important, Albert has a vision. This happens in the month of May, at the beginning of the monsoon season, when the hero goes to visit the lost towns in the depths of the jungle and returns home burning with fever. There is no clear diagnosis. Different doctors provide him with advice and medications, but he is not healed. In the middle of a restless night of delirium, Albert leaves the house without knowing why, and gets on a plane to Angkor. And there, among the ancient temples of Angkor, under sheets of torrential rain, Satan reveals himself to him.

If this sounds like nonsense to you, please remember that the man was educated as a Catholic. And even though he has lost his childhood faith, and in spite of his philosophical atheism, in utter contradiction to his intellectual convictions — Satan still exists in his mind as a real entity.

So Albert meets Satan, and the Prince of Darkness laughs at Albert. He mocks the insignificance of his life, and throws at him that an urban intellectual will never be able to understand even the least of his representatives. The King of Horrors — he tells him — is not a butterfly to be stuck on a pin and examined under a microscope. There is only once way to understand the acts of Satan, and Albert is too weak and cowardly to embark on it.

The provocative apparition is about to disappear, and Albert, on the point of losing consciousness, understands the choice before him without the need for explanations. This is, of course, an archetypical choice: he must choose between knowledge and the Garden of Eden, between his creation and the immortality of his soul.

Albert falls to his knees and implores Satan not to leave him. He is ready for any sacrifice. And a moment before he loses consciousness he hears Satan instruct him: seek me inside you.

The voice changed its tone, quick and agile as a monkey: one minute it was intimate and engaging, ingratiating almost to the point of parody in its eagerness for our belief; and distant and dry the next, clipped in its pronunciation, as if cynical, and as if flattering our disbelief as if insolently asking us to enter into a clandestine alliance of shared mockery. A liquid voice seeking a crack to seep into. A voice evaporating around us into gas. And not a single, solid word.

Every summary of a plot sounds superficial, says the voice. Like questions demanding a “yes” or “no” answer, a summary too sins against the spirit, and when he was required to send a summary to a publisher, he struggled with the task more than in the composition of the book itself. We had to believe him that the book was far from being as superficial as it sounded when he described it like this.

And so, as we had no doubt guessed, Albert recovers his health, there is no need to go into the details now, but the words of Satan will not leave him be. He understands that evil is not an object, and certainly not an external object to be examined with surgical gloves behind the masks of theory. In order to get to the bottom of the mind that refers to burning people with napalm as a “snack”; in order to mine the depths of a brain that empties an entire city of its inhabitants, a man must expose himself to true and honest contact. He must have the courage to penetrate the abyss of the soul of evil and to be truly penetrated by it.

Albert’s serious difficulty, his problem, is that in every accepted sense of the words he is a good man. And however much he examines his mind and his past, he cannot find any dimension of Satanic evil in them. A miserable affair of a broken engagement, the firing of a secretary for no good reason: the only reason he fired her was that he couldn’t stand the silly way she laughed — it was all as petty as a child stealing apples. In order to understand the workings of pure, distilled, inhuman Satanic evil, you had to experience it in action. And this meant that Albert would have to get rid of humanist sentiments and become evil himself.

Months of mental agonies follow. He falls ill again. He thinks of suicide. His nerves are exhausted. The diary grows more and more confused. But to cut a long story short — Not-man suddenly started talking very fast, as if in a show of self-contempt — the long and the short of it is that in the month of October, at the end of the monsoon season, Albert defiles himself with a terrible act. Nothing could be more foreign to his soul than the crime he commits, and it is precisely for this reason that he believes he must commit it.

He seduces his maidservant’s daughter, he forces himself on a child of ten.

— 9 -

Oded suddenly moves. For a moment it seems to me that his movement is directed toward the figure in the shadow of the wall, but no: he signals to the Baradanshvilis’s son who peeks into the courtyard. My bodyguard is sitting with his back to the entrance, and nevertheless he senses his presence, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and now he signals him that we’re fine, we don’t need anything. The lad asks if it’s okay with us if he goes out for a few minutes to load some paintings into the car, and Oded signals his agreement. Only when the son leaves does my husband open his mouth and addresses the First Person:

“So that’s it, that’s your story?”

“Actually we’ve only reached as far as two thirds of the novel, and I must emphasize again that it is a novel, in other words, a work of fiction. What happens in the last third of the book, which I haven’t finished writing yet, is that Albert comes to realize that he has fallen victim to a Satanic trick. The great work that Albert thought he would write does not get written, and all that he succeeds in producing despite all his efforts is a confused, childish text. There is a philosophical concept called ‘moral luck,’ and Albert in a certain sense is unlucky, a man with no luck. The victim of a mistake in evaluation. If he had been lucky and succeeded in writing a work of cultural significance, something that would really have enriched his fellow man, then perhaps, I say perhaps. . with thoughts like these he tortures and flagellates himself. But Albert’s tragedy is that he is a poor, mediocre writer, and from now on he will have to live with the knowledge that he defiled his soul for nothing. The book is not yet finished, but as intelligent readers it must be clear to you how it ends. Albert has to die, the only question is how. How will he die — this is not yet clear: by a human hand or by the hand of providence; the intervention of what we might call force majeure; what could be interpreted as divine intervention, seen as the intervention of a higher power. As potential readers, I would be glad to hear your opinion.”

“And this is the book you’re going to publish,” my husband says as if weighing the words in the balance, and the voice replies, “A superficial summary of it,” and adds the name of a publisher unfamiliar to me.

I’m holding something in my hand: a metal can. And the metal doesn’t cool my hand. The voice had gone on forever, like a nightmare, and stopped in a second, like a nightmare, and at some point I had started to play absent-mindedly with the painting gear on the table. There was a moment when I caught myself playing with a piece of chalk, only to return it with disgust to the jar. Now this metal object: wet with the sweat on my hand, resisting my attempts to crush it.

“I’m quite an unsophisticated reader, so explain to me,” says my husband, “explain to me: did Pol Pot rape children?”

A moment ago he was alert enough to register a movement behind his back, and now like a blind child he steps right into the filth in front of him. In a minute he’ll touch it, in a minute the pus will infect him.

Red shame, red rage, something red flares and spreads over the nape of my neck: I should have found the strength to tell Oded to go. Go away, go, go now — soundlessly I implore the good man innocently asking and sincerely wanting to know.

And already the tongue clucks, pouncing triumphantly on the obtuse student, and the mouth replies in the same patronizing tone of weary disappointment with which it replied to the hump-backed old lady in the Cinematheque.

“Pol Pot engaged in social engineering, not rape,” the voice says, “but in the eyes of Albert, as in the story as a whole, this crime has an obvious metaphorical meaning. Because what in fact is rape, if not pure metaphor? The Marquis de Sade did not write erotic literature. And it is not by coincidence that Hitler spoke of the rape of Europe. It is only by metaphor that we can construct the monstrous meaning of this act, which is a degree higher than ordinary torture. Torture is usually justified as a means to an end: the whip and the vice are intended to achieve something of benefit. Rape has no purpose apart from symbolic expression. Rape is the universal symbol of the relations between master and slave. It is the most distilled metaphor for de-humanization, for turning people into objects, for treating a human being as something no different from a table or a stool.”

I stand up. At some point I removed the lid from the metal receptacle. Now I circle the seated Oded, still in the pool of light, the lamp shining directly on me. How can I describe the beauty of my movement?

Among the yogis there are some who achieve perfection in the art of archery only by constantly enacting the drawing of the bow and the shooting of the arrow in their imagination. There are some who develop the body of a wrestler only by the imaginary flexing of their muscles — so I have read.

My sister practiced this movement in her mind and practiced it until she dropped the weapon from her hand; I, who never practiced, caught the dropped receptacle and aimed at the face, as if I had inherited her spiritual exercises. The movement is perfect, and I am completed, perfectly fulfilled in making it.

I spray. The eyes close instinctively, but the foolish mouth gapes, perhaps to scream. He doesn’t scream. A gleaming dark void absorbs more and more of the spray, and a smell like that of acetone fills the air. The gaping mask is covered with moisture and the moisture evaporates fast. The body recoils, the back of the iron chair hits the wall, hands go up to protect, in an instant both hands and mask are wet and dripping, and I go on pressing, and the spray is constant and quicker than it takes to evaporate. The space between the hands is mute. My head spins a little, and the spinning too is the perfection of movement. Only when the hissing changes its sound and the can is already light do I lower my hand, and only then does Oded say with a strange quiver glinting in his voice: “Elinor, my God, Elinor, how careless you are.”

My husband is standing by my side. He takes the empty can from me, and I feel the laughter tickling me when he holds the can up to the light, away from his face, as if he’s reading a book.

“Fixative,” he reads and immediately afterward pronounces the words: “an accident,” “sir,” and “emergency room.”

The mask coated with the fixative spray moves crookedly. The gleaming hole mumbles, closes and opens and closes again, in a moment it will vomit its guts up. Lips move and try to say something. Around the hole more moisture drips, now from the eyes. “Wasser,” croaks the voice behind the mask, and again: “Wasser,” and then: “Water.”

Oded grabs hold of a garment and lifts the slumped body, and walking backward in a strange kind of slow motion, he drags it step by step to the fish pond and drops it on the edge.

“Can you drive?”

On its knees, the body stretches its hands to the water.

“Elinor, I’m asking you, can you go and get the car and bring it here?”

“Yes. What?”

My husband puts both hands on my shoulders and brings his face close to mine. “Ramat Hovav. The garbage dump,” he says with a crooked smile, “the garbage dump. Now go, bring the car. I’ll meet you outside in five minutes.” And then he almost pushes me to the door.

When I come out into the street, accompanied by my husband’s condolences, the heat closes in on me again, and my feeling of completion is shattered by a crushing realization. Ramat Hovav. With absolute clarity I realize that from now on there would be no retribution, nothing but miserable condolences such as these. Because I would never succeed in getting the First Person to confront the Defender.

I had one chance to lay my trap and I failed to take advantage of it: I wasted it childishly, and my punishment from now on would be the consoling words intended to mollify a foolish child.

At the top of the road, at the entrance to Emek Refaim Street, they were repairing the street for the umpteenth time. A bulldozer trundled, the air was steamy and reeking of tar. Behind my back, beyond the Valley of Hinnom, the Old City was illuminated by a lighting display, and the ancients mocked me from inside the walls. No fire burned. No famine arose. No heads were smashed on a stone. I was given a single opportunity, and I sprayed fixative.

My husband would clean up after me, the way you clean up the mess made by a wild, wayward child. He would take him to the Emergency Room, and say “an accident,” and “hormonal imbalance” and “vodka.” He would talk and explain until Not-man forgave me. “My wife this and my wife that,” he would say. My lawyer would undertake to see that I went to therapy on condition that no charges were brought. And Not-man would go on walking the land, and Not-man would forgive me, and no charges would be brought.

I climb the two hundred meters to the Scottish church. With great difficulty I climb. The metastasis of the abomination had not been excised, and it would only go on growing inside me. And as I climb I think: I’d be better off dead, and I know that Oded remains behind me, and that I won’t die and leave him there, behind me. Five minutes, he said.

— 10 -

Five minutes later my husband opens the back door of the car. “I’m sorry,” he says over the recalcitrant bundle. “I’m really sorry, but I have no option but to take you to the hospital. Both as a human being and as a lawyer I must insist.” And then he guides or pushes the bundle onto the seat behind me. From the way he talks it’s clear that he had started this prattle earlier, and perhaps he had been keeping it up throughout my absence.

Until Oded gets him into the car I register an image: First Person’s eyes have narrowed to motionless slits. The bouffant crest of hair around the huge mask of his face looks as if it has been set with hair spray. The front of his jacket is wet.

Oded slams the door, and through the open window for the second time this evening he brings his face close to mine, and for the second time he asks me: “Can you drive?” I nod, and again he says: “The garbage dump,” and only then, so quietly I can hardly hear: “Ramat Hovav is quite far. Take the road to Mishor Adumim. You know the way. I’ll direct you from there.”

For a moment I am alone in space with First Person and his wheezing breath, and then Oded circles the car and gets into the back seat next to him. His movements are exaggerated, as if directed at the eyes of distant spectators; every movement is a gesture, and in a magnified gesture of a routine action he fastens the safety-belt around him. “Here, allow me. .” another click. And the seatbelt on the other side is locked as well.

I step on the gas. I sit high up in the Defender. Behind me Not-man is half blind, motionless, making queasy sounds of nausea, and Oded who doesn’t stop talking to him confirms in an exaggeratedly loud and emphatic voice that I understood the unbelievable correctly. “Hadassah Mount Scopus, the ER,” he says. “Just to be on the safe side, so we can all have peace of mind. We’ll go in and get it over. An unfortunate accident. In any case it’s better for all of us to have documentation. According to what’s written on the can washing with water should be enough, but nevertheless. .”

A wind blows in and snatches away some of his words. The car is blazing hot. And I can’t bring myself to close the windows and turn on the air-conditioner.

After the Jaffa Gate the road enters a tunnel and comes out on the south side of the Old City wall with a split-second view of the Dome of the Rock in all its glory. Only ten minutes walk from here, in a parallel universe, is our house. And we drive ahead, into the distance. Oded babbles on about “the pace of the infrastructure construction, even the people who live here get lost. The city must look very different to you from your last visit.” And the road takes us on, to the south.

The First Person, as I said, is half blind. The fixative presumably makes it difficult for his eyes to move. Even Jerusalemites lose their way on the roads. But a few minutes after the car drives past the Hyatt Hotel and the turn off to Mount Scopus on the left, as we approach the traffic lights, the mouth behind me whispers: “I want to go to the hotel. To the hotel. Please be good enough to take me there.”

Another spate of talk from Oded. Whenever we stop at a traffic light he increases the volume. And I no longer listen to the words, only to the artificial tone that once again confirms that I was not mistaken, that it’s true: we drive on.

“Pay attention. In a little while at the intersection. Turn right.”

We pass a police roadblock. We don’t stop. And when the car starts to descend the Ma’aleh Adumim road I marvel at the breadth of the road, which I haven’t traveled on for a long time, at the number of the vehicles, and at the fact that my ears remain open on the descent. On almost every journey to Tel Aviv my ears are blocked by the difference in the pressure, and now, on this steep descent, they remain open. It occurs to me that this may be the effect of the vodka, since alcohol dries, and it’s lucky that I drank vodka.

“Hail me a cab,” the not-voice requests.

The lights of the town dwindle, and soon they are behind us. The streetlamps draw a bridge in the desert. A blazing wind closes my pores, and my skin has resumed its function and again separates me from what is outside me.

A dark night. The bridge of light slides between the curves and hollows of the clean desert darkness. My two hands on the unaccustomed steering wheel. My foot on the gas pedal. A Muslim moon, a slender sliver of a moon, appears in the east beyond a hill.

Not-man says “Hail a cab for me,” and again, “a cab.” His breath wheezes and creaks. His mouth breathes heavily, and then he says something long that I don’t catch.

“What did he say?”

“He says that he can cancel his contract for the book. That he only wanted to hear our opinion.”

“Tell me,” I almost shout at Oded, “do you also think that suffering is more real than happiness? That happiness is only a momentary relief from suffering? No more than that?”

“After Mitzpe Jericho take a right. There should be a sign for Nebi Musa.”

“As if you put something heavy on someone, say a suitcase, and then lift it,” I say.

“Or as if someone is dying of thirst and then you give him water,” replies my husband. “Pay attention now, here’s the sign.”

There’s a certain movement on the back seat. I don’t look in the mirror. My eyes are on the road. A turn right, and we’re on a dirt track. We pass a white-domed building. A big pothole yawns in the road, the Defender takes it in its stride. The headlamps illuminate a black tent, the sliver of moon right over it.

“You know how to distinguish the new moon from the moon at the end of the month?” our tour guide asks in a loud voice. “I’m sure Elinor knows, it’s a trick for people who know Hebrew. You add a little line at the top, if it comes out like the letter ‘gimmel,’ the first letter of the word ‘gorea,’ diminish, it means it’s the end.”

The car jumps over bumps in the ground. The road is becoming more and more rocky. Our car is big and strong and high. It skips over mountains and leaps over hills like a roller coaster. The movement is liberating, and only the bundle in the back oppresses.

A jackal runs across the road. Not a jackal. Probably a dog. Another dark animal emerges from nowhere, a meter in front of us, and freezes. I brake, and the second dog disappears in the wake of the first. The dirt track twists and turns. The path disappears for a moment and then appears again. We cross some kind of bridge. Pass concrete huts. Suddenly a clear desert plain in front of us.

“Not good. A military training ground. Turn around here,” says Oded, and we go back a little. “Take a right. Now left.” My salt of the earth in the middle of the desert. “Give it more gas.” We’re almost at the top of the ridge, opposite us, a little to the left is an escarpment. “Okay. The Kidron River. We can stop here.”

I turn off the ignition and leave the lights on. Whistling sounds of breathing spoil the silence. “Thirty six degrees tomorrow in Jerusalem, forty at the Dead Sea,” says Oded, and the artificial sentence is swallowed up in a genuine yawn. The whistling breather swallows all the oxygen in the car, and others have to yawn in order to get their share of air.

“Okay,” repeats Oded, this time as if to himself. And then again: “Okay, I think we’ve reached the emergency room. Elinor, you stay in the car.”

Not-man says that he doesn’t need the emergency room, he doesn’t want the emergency room. “Your sister,” he says, “your sister Elisheva forgave me. She wrote me a letter. I can show you. I have it in writing.”

Oded gets out of the car, leaving the door open, and from outside he opens the other door. “Come on, professor, out.”

Once more there are sounds of movement in the back, and I am still holding the steering wheel when the voice pleads: “But there’s no need: I understand that it was an accident. I won’t complain.”

“Out.”

My husband and Not-man stand in front of the Defender. I get out of the car. All the police procedurals I’ve ever seen go into action fast. “Empty your pockets,” says my super-cop. “All of them, please.” A handkerchief, notebook, cell phone, hotel-room key and old-fashioned leather wallet are piled on the hood. Oded wraps the handkerchief around his hand, picks up the cell phone, and throws it like a pro into the wadi.

“But listen to me, I swear by all that’s holy to me. .”

“Calm down, we’re only going to talk. So just relax and put your things back in your pockets. You really think I would harm my wife’s only uncle? Does that sound logical to you?” I’m sure I heard something similar in a movie. Where did I hear it?

“I swear to you that I’ve forgiven. .”

“Let’s go. It’s time to talk.”

My husband guides him in the direction of the escarpment of the wadi. He keeps a few steps behind him, without touching. “Go on.” A winding goat track, hardly a path at all. A stone is dislodged when Not-man begins the descent, and he lets out a hoarse cry.

“Keep going.”

The beam of the headlights catches a bush and stones and a body sinking slowly, step by step, into the wadi. The legs, the torso, and finally the head.

Only when the First Person has completely disappeared, Oded begins climbing down after him. Again the sound of tumbling stones, this time a lot of them: one stone dislodging another. I go closer to the edge. The silhouettes creep with unreal slowness. At moments they seem to be standing still, but at no moment does the figure bringing up the rear send out its hand to touch the one in front. And all the time I watch to make sure that it is not sent. The pounding in my chest cries out for the movement to be speeded up. The pounding that rises to my ears refuses to adapt itself to the slowness of the scene, but I am patient and even my accelerated heartbeat does not urge Oded to hurry: to speed things up and bring them to an end he would have to touch, and come what may, on no account do I want my husband to touch him.

When the silhouettes vanish behind a dark fold in the ground, I remain where I am, and only when Oded reappears, climbing up easily toward me, do I return to the car, because at last it’s okay to hurry.

— 11 -

“Should I drive?”

“No, let me.”

Risen from the darkness, bending forward, my husband directs me back to the main road. Even though I didn’t have a clue about the way, I anticipated most of his directions, as if I had heard them even before he opened his mouth, and at the same time I was glad of every word he said, simply because of the fact that he was speaking. He was sweating as if he had been running, but he didn’t smell strange, and his clipped instructions, “pay attention, right turn coming up,” or “straight ahead,” sounded normal. Oded is always short and to the point when he’s giving directions, and like our sons, he too doesn’t tolerate being spoken to or distracted when he’s concentrating.

If there had been any other vehicle on the road we would have seen its lights from far in the distance. We didn’t see any lights, and there was no reason to imagine that any of the Bedouin we passed would be interested in our doings, yet it was obvious that our first priority was to get out of there in a hurry.

A new time was born. Events were still too pressing and urgent for my mind to take in the breadth of the grace, but even as I hurried forward I knew with a certain knowledge that there would be time for the two of us to talk: even if a shadow had coiled itself around us, I would not rest until I had undone it knot by knot. Limitless expanses of patience would be granted me in the new time.

Oded didn’t make a single mistake. Even before the air-conditioner had time to cool the car we were at the junction, and I negotiated it with the greatest possible care. I hadn’t driven so carefully since our sons were small and everything dear to me was inside the car. I was careful of myself too then, when they were babies, simply because they needed me so much. From the minute I started driving back from the wadi, I became aware that the frightening feeling of the fragility of the body had returned, and that I could no longer take any pleasure in the capricious leaps of the car.

When we reached the bridge of light of the expressway, Oded leaned back. “Good, so he won’t be publishing his novel now. I don’t want to think about what that book would have done to your sister.” His voice sounded hollow under its armor, and that boastful, contemptuous sentence—“so he won’t be publishing his novel now”—still seemed like something I had once heard in a movie.

I allowed a truck to pass us, and after it receded into the distance I dropped my hand from the wheel and took hold of his hand. With only my left hand on the wheel, I needed to concentrate even more on the traffic, now I leaned forward, but I didn’t take back my right hand, and Oded linked his fingers in mine.

“They won’t find him,” I said.

“Alive? Not a chance. In this weather no one hikes in the desert, except perhaps for a couple of yeshiva boys who decide to get lost in the wadis. Even the army has cancelled their maneuvers. No, in this weather there isn’t a chance.”

“But they’ll find a body.”

“That’s doubtful too. I don’t know what will be left of him.”

“Maybe the dogs will eat him?”

“Maybe.”

“A wild beast,” I persevered, and my voice sounded like that of a child listening to a bedtime story. “A wild beast will eat him.”

“Maybe in winter, with the floods, the bones will be washed into the Dead Sea, that’s possible.”

I thought about bones and the sea, and I didn’t want him to die slowly. I hoped he would died quickly, as quickly as possible, for him to be dead already and for the wild beast to hurry up and pick the bones clean.

“You understand that it’s not about the book or the possibility that he would have sued me for attacking him,” I said, because it was very important for him to understand, and in the new time that was opening up, he could understand everything.

“It isn’t relevant. .”

“No it isn’t. Not at all. It’s got nothing to do with anything like that; with anything else he was liable to do. It has to do with cleaning. Erasing. Think simply. We erased, that’s all. Now I’m clean. Free. It’s erased.”

Oded raised our linked hands, and put them on my thigh. For a few minutes we drove like this in silence, and then he said in a thick but slightly more normal voice: “So do you think that you’ll start wearing dresses again?”

“I — what? What did you say?”

“Nothing, just that it’s already summer and you haven’t worn any of your sexy summer dresses yet. It just came into my head. I’m allowed. Stop it, don’t laugh. .”

The house was amazingly close, and as soon as we entered the dazzling lights of the city its presence became very concrete: first we have to look for a parking spot, maybe I’ll let Oded direct me, at this hour the street is full of revelers going out on the town, and the Defender really isn’t suitable for the city. The key to the front door is in my pocket, it isn’t hot inside the house, inside the house it’s pleasant, and this time we have no bags and parcels to carry in.

But then, when the car was already rolling as if of its own accord down the familiar path, when the miraculous everyday actions were only a few minutes away, an idea came to me, and when it became clear I realized that I had to postpone — if only for a little while — the miracle.

“Elinor, what exactly are we doing?”

The same cunning antic spirit that had taken me many years before to the gynecologist in Hahovshim Street, now took me in the direction of the Hyatt. Back then, at the doctor’s, the spirit betrayed me and abandoned me and I failed: like a sheep I gave in and mounted the stirrup chair when he told me to. This time, sitting high next to my husband in the Defender, I knew that I wouldn’t fall down, that the spirit wouldn’t desert me, and that one more thing remained to be done.

I drove right up to the hotel entrance and stopped.

“Let’s wait a bit. It won’t take long.”

We waited more than a bit. I almost gave up on the ingenious present with which I intended to surprise my husband: in another minute I would have answered his questions that grew more and more stressed, I was close to surrendering to the impatient drumming of his fingers on the seat — when the security guard came up to us. He looked exactly as he was supposed to look and said exactly the words he was supposed to say: “Excuse me, ma’am, you can’t stand here.”

Before Oded was the player, now I could play too, I wasn’t going to leave him alone in the game. Jerusalem’s a small town, Oded had left the Cinematheque with Not-man. There was a good chance that someone who knew him had seen them leave together and that he would remember. It was my turn to look after him. My turn to look after both of us, and according to the rules we both needed an alibi.

Conscious as a wayward girl of my husband’s fascinated gaze, I said to the security guard: “Sorry, we just let someone off here, one of your guests. He’s supposed to call me from his room and tell me if he’s coming down to give us something. It will only take a second.”

The security guard stood his ground, and I stood mine with all the exhibitionism of an insistent drunk: “Come on, show a little flexibility, we’re in a hurry, we’re late already, we’re not blocking anyone’s way here. He’ll call in a minute, be nice, do me this favor. .” And I carried on as long as I could, debating with him face to face about my right to stand there, and when I was convinced that the conversation was etched in his memory I gave up gracefully. “Oh all right, we’ll move. In any case it’s taking him too long,” I threw demonstratively at Oded, and started the engine.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” said my comrade, prodded into muscling in on the act. “In the movies the immediate suspect is always the last one to be seen with the victim. But if we’re already doing it, then tell me what he was supposed to be bringing us from his room.”

“I have no idea.” My scene was concluded, I felt that it was perfect, the wind had gone out of my sails and I had no desire to go on with the game.

“‘I have no idea’ doesn’t cut it, it’s not good enough,” boasted Oded in his commando voice. “How about for example a chapter or a synopsis of his book? Let’s say that’s what he was supposed to be bringing us: the synopsis of Pol Pot, First Person.”

“You weren’t listening. There is no first person of Pol Pot.”

“Too much literature for me. I told you the first time we met: I hardly managed to get eighty for literature in my finals. You can’t accuse me of failing to come clean. How about turning down the air-conditioning? It’s freezing in here.”

“My Mistake,” I said in a tired voice.

“What?”

“That’s what he was supposed to bring us from his room: that article of his, ‘My Mistake.’ He said that he would check to see if he had a copy. In the end he didn’t come down.”

“‘My Mistake’ is good. And in the end he didn’t come down and he didn’t call. Just so you know: tomorrow my father isn’t in the office, so my plan was to tell Hodaya to call the hotel and leave a message that I was looking for him and ask him to get back to me. I’m just wondering whether it would be best to do it tomorrow or to wait one more day.”

“It makes no difference. In any case he isn’t going to get back to you.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Because what was never there can’t come back. It’s as simple as that.”

“Right.”

We reached the street next to the house. In the end it was me who maneuvered the Defender into the parking spot. We parked close to the house and went on sitting in the car, like when the boys were still living with us and we would stay in the car to conclude our business.

“So we attended the lecture and met him and gave him a lift to the hotel,” Oded insisted on getting things straight. “He said he would call us and for some reason he didn’t come back. Didn’t it seem a little strange to us, weren’t we worried by him disappearing like that?”

“We weren’t worried. He was a drag and we were rid of him. What was there to worry about. It’s only out of good manners that you called him the next day.”

We seemed to have agreed not to take this conversation with us into the house. But although I was already ready to get down from the high seat, my husband went polishing his act in the darkness. I was already itching to shed the part of my character in the movie, but he still needed her to stay with him.

“I’m texting Hodaya to ask her to type me some document first thing tomorrow morning,” he said to her. And I was jarred and stumbled on the erratic rhythm of his speech: one minute blustering, with the words gushing out thick and fast, the next slow and arrogant.

“All right.”

“And you should get in touch with someone too, some girlfriend or someone, so it’ll register with someone somewhere that you were going about your usual affairs this evening.”

The past weeks had distanced me from all the people I could have called up spontaneously. I needed a minute or two to think, and then I did as he asked.

“It’s a pleasure doing business with you,” he delivered himself of this cliché when I was done. “Now let’s see: he had the key on him, and if he had it on him, then on principle he could have returned to his room.”

“I know. I already told you, I took it into account.”

“You’re a panther, you are. Next time I think we’ll rob a bank.”

The moment had arrived to go into the house, into the new time opening up: to be with the real Oded who would get off the screen already, with my three-dimensional man, with him — and not with the role.

“Stop it, that’s enough. It’s enough. This is me, and I don’t want you to talk to me like that.” I put my hand on his cheek, and it was dry and cold. “Oded, what’s going on?” He clamped his lips and took a deep breath and breathed out slowly — for a long moment he sat next to me empty of oxygen and emptied of himself — and then, like light floating up from below I saw, I actually saw, his soul returning to him, and his skin sunk under my hand coming back to life. He pressed my hand to his cheek, and then moved it away and looked intently at the palm as if he wanted to read the lines in the dark.

“What’s going on? Tell me what’s happening.”

He raised my hand and slowly kissed the center of my palm, and slowly closed my fingers over it like we used to do with our sons when they were babies, so the kiss wouldn’t escape.

“It’s not that simple. Not quite so simple. I think it will take me a few days to get used to it, but whatever happens — I want you to know that I don’t have any doubts and I won’t regret it,” he said in his normal voice.

And only then we went back into the house.