Lies, First Person

— 1 -

When the two of them enter the house they fall on each other voraciously. The man kicks the door closed behind him. The woman presses her loins to the loins of the man leaning against the door. There is the sound of a tear when he pulls of her blouse. Articles of clothing are scattered on the way to the living-room carpet: jeans, a black lace bra, a skirt. The man’s violent grunts of lust mingle with the woman’s screams of ecstasy.

The next day the breach opens. A brief item on the morning news says that a mortally ill man of about seventy was discovered by an IDF patrol in the Judean desert, in the vicinity of the Kidron River. The man whose identity was not known was in a coma, the police were investigating how he got there.

Days of fear. Sleepless nights of terror. The breach widens. Will the patient wake up? The woman’s nerves fail her and she accuses the man of not being man enough: a real man would have finished what he started, she says. And the man curses the day he met the woman.

The phone rings. It’s the police and a polite detective comes to meet the couple. The victim has been identified, and the investigators already know about the meeting in the gallery. The man pours himself a whiskey and his face sweats. He is afraid that his wife is about to betray him and make him take the blame. After the detective leaves, the woman says to the man that they have to go to the hospital and finish him off. She tries to seduce him. She sits on his lap and licks his lips, and he goes on drinking and ignores her. The woman gets up, sweeps glasses off the shelf and smashes them. In general, this character has a habit of breaking things, and when the couple go to visit the man’s parents, and the white-haired mother starts talking about the mystery of the uncle’s disappearance — the heroine drops the dish she was about to put on the table. Red spaghetti sprays and stains the mother’s respectable dress. A meatball rolls and touches the bare foot of the heroine. Her mouth gapes in a silent scream.

When Alice’s ghost appeared and brought me this scene, I was so surprised that it took me some time to recognize her. Alice had undone her pigtails. As befitting a ghost she was dressed in a white kaftan, apparently picked up on her way out of the Old City. And only when she came closer to me in a wild cascade of auburn hair — when she became truly manifest — I finally recognized her, and understood that she had disguised herself as Nemesis.

But not only the appearance of the tourist from Alaska, also the narrative voice which preceded her manifestation took me time to identify: during all those years, on all our expeditions, the teller of my tales had happily blown soap bubbles in the air. Under the protection of a rosy Providence which for some reason favored ignorance and naïveté, the little pigtail-sucker had been oblivious to sex, and any hint of violence had slid away from her like water off the feathers of a goose.

And now all of a sudden my little Pollyanna was strewing items of clothing from the door to the carpet and giving voice to shrieks of ecstasy.

Her rude sexual awakening embarrassed and confused me. If she feared for me and my safety and thought that I needed a cover story to sign off on, why was it necessary for her to strip me of my clothes in this story? What was the point of stripping me naked if the intention was a cover up?

Her crude violence was as new to me as the cunning with which she tried to satisfy it. Presumably these characteristics had been latent in her before, but she had somehow succeeded in concealing them even from me.

Alice’s ghost was lying for me again. The fictions she was trying to weave into my plot were intended to protect me in case I decided one day to tell it. But the content of the fiction also exposed an opposite wish: a clear desire to see me punished.

Despite my embarrassment, this sly wish was actually easy for me to understand: I had done what I had done, and deeds have consequences. Which is as it should be.

Which is presumably as it should be, but at the same time I noticed that my red-haired goddess of vengeance was not demanding blood for blood. Her kaftan looked as if it had been taken from a school fancy-dress box, and the flush of anger did not hide the freckles on her nose.

The more I thought about the ending she proposed, the more convinced I became that she had no desire to smash my skull and shed my blood. My little Nemesis was satisfied with smashing a dish and spraying spaghetti sauce, and these symbolic acts did not disturb me unduly. I didn’t smash a dish, but in the days preceding her appearance I somehow succeeded in dropping and breaking three wine glasses from the set standing on the kitchen shelf, and one precious Wedgwood plate. I was a little sorry about the plate. It was part of a set I had received as a gift from my mother-in-law for my fortieth birthday. I accepted my distraction and temporary unsteadiness, accepted it and understood it. Deeds necessarily have consequences, and until their effects wear off, what you need to do is take a deep, mindful breath: count to eight with the in-breath, count to eight with the slow out-breath — and wait patiently until the panic subsides, in the certain knowledge that the terror has passed and this is nothing but a simple panic-attack: a transient symptom like the chicken pox that are still visible after the patient has already recovered. The main thing is to leave them alone and not to scratch.

There was one thing and one thing only that I was on no account ready to accept, and this was Alice’s attempt to make trouble between me and my husband with her scorpion stings. I rebelled against this sabotage of what was most precious to me. And after I had scrupulously examined myself, Oded, and the slanders of the narrator of clichés, after days of examination, I decided that I had to talk to him about it. If only in order to make sure that the virus of punishment had not settled in his bloodstream, and that it was not about to break out and lead him to curse the day he had met me and followed me into the desert and the darkness.

I could not see any signs of the virus, but in the situation in which we found ourselves then, what could be considered normal and what abnormal? So I needed my husband to confirm my diagnosis: to verify it in words.

When I approached him I didn’t mention Alice. Alice only confused the issue. And I have to admit that in spite of her weakness, her reappearance had somewhat undermined me. Apparently I was quite undermined already — yes, I was definitely a little undermined. And therefore I, who never approached Oded in roundabout ways, approached him one evening with a story-telling expression, and taking the coward’s way out told him about these two people who had started to hate one another.

“Let’s suppose,” I asked, because this was the only way I dared to ask, “let’s suppose that somebody wrote our story, and that the writer decided to end it like this. What do you think?”

“You’re not going to write it?” he recoiled.

“I’m just wondering.”

My good husband rubbed the cleft in his chin and said that with all his ignorance of literature, the story I had described sounded to him more like a movie than a novel, and that, as I was well aware, he wasn’t a fan of film noir. In any case, he wasn’t turned on by the particular fantasy I had outlined — except perhaps by the black lace bra, the bra was okay, even though it was a bit pornographic — but altogether it was hard for him to believe that any audience would enjoy this scenario, and he was sure that he wasn’t the only one who would be put off by it.

What do we need art for? said my husband. For wisdom and pleasure. But what kind of pleasure and what kind of wisdom is there in your characters fighting each other? Why should they be punished? For what? In accordance with what logic? And according to what justice and what kind of psychology? These two people loved each other, that was the main thing, and in the circumstances I had described it seemed to him that their love would only grow stronger.

“When you think about it, Elinor,” he toughened his voice, “when you think about it, then as a soldier in Lebanon I probably killed people who did a lot less harm than that scum. I liquidated people I didn’t know and whose lives I knew nothing about, and as you know I sleep very well at night. So tell me why your guy, who only wanted to save his wife, wouldn’t sleep soundly?”

For a moment it seemed to me that I was listening again to the character bragging to me on a movie screen on our way back from the desert. For a moment it seemed to me that the character my husband had put on in order to save me and taken off afterward in order to be with me fully, had stolen into the house again.

He’ll never hate me, I thought, not that, definitely not that. But perhaps the price and the punishment is that this is the only way we’ll be able to talk about ourselves and about what happened: indirectly, putting on fictional characters, in a language that isn’t ours. Hadn’t he just said to me “Why should they be punished, for what?” Because that’s what he thinks, that’s what he really thinks. “Why should they,” he thinks in the third person. . and says. And I too don’t see myself as deserving of punishment. I don’t deserve it, I don’t, and Oded definitely deserves only good. We’d suffered enough evil. And we had done no evil — uprooting evil isn’t a sin. So why was it impossible now to speak directly? It didn’t make sense. Not us. So why?

Oded went on expressing his opinion to me, according to which most of the audience would probably find a proper degree of satisfaction in “the hand of cosmic justice,” and also volunteered to offer me what he called “a theoretical alternative script”:

Your two gave Gotthilf a lift to his hotel, he explained to me, fluent and prepared as if he had been waiting for the opportunity to explain. The two of them took him to his hotel. Before that they had hauled him over the coals, but still, he was an old man, and in the heavy heat they didn’t like to send him to look for a cab. Decent people didn’t do things like that, and we’re talking here about a respectable couple — that goes without saying. You can also add that before that, when they were still in the gallery, the swine told them that he was sick: let’s say he complained of visual disturbances and dizziness. So they gave him a lift, and after that, it’s not clear when, he simply disappeared. Months later, in winter, let’s say, a group of hikers discovered human bones in some wadi near the Dead Sea. And a pathological examination confirmed that they were the remains of the missing man. Who knows what happened to him? Anything’s possible. Perhaps in some attack of senility he decided to go for a hike in the desert in the middle of summer. Perhaps he was the victim of a terror attack, and perhaps he simply got on the nerves of his taxi diver. In any case, cosmic justice did its work, and the sadistic swine got what was coming to him.

“Unconvincing,” I said emphatically. “You can’t rely on cosmic justice. You yourself don’t believe in it.”

“You yourself,” I said. I succeeded in saying “you.”

He looked into my eyes, up to then he hadn’t looked straight at me, and I felt an unexpected warmth flooding my face. My husband was looking at me and I was blushing — the awareness that this was happening only deepened my blush.

For a moment we sat like this, him looking and me blushing and not lowering my eyes. This went on for a moment, until he smiled faintly and shrugged his shoulders, and said that he trusted me. “You. .” he said. “If you ever decide for some reason to write that fantasy, I believe that as an artist you’ll find a solution.” His living voice sounded almost laughing. As if he was laughing with me. There would be no punishment. There should be none and there would be none, because Oded and I wouldn’t allow it. There was nothing to be punished for.

Oded said that he trusted me. My husband smiled at me as if at a young girl. “Their love will only grow stronger,” he said to me. But the rubbing of his chin that followed immediately betrayed anxiety over my thoughts about writing. And thus, in the same breath as he expressed his belief in me, he suggested bringing Alice back to life and renewing my walks in our city with her. “Think about it. Just think about it. In fact it isn’t even a question of bringing her back to life like in all kinds of rubbishy serials, and you don’t have to explain to anyone how come she isn’t dead. Apart from your editor and me nobody knows what happened to her in the last column you wrote, because in the end they never printed it, and you can relate to it as if it never really happened.”

•

My husband was always stubborn, but ever since the incident in the desert he had shown a new kind of self-assertion — anyone who knows him will confirm this — and things reached such pass that last month he went head to head with his father in the office. Oded abandoned the way of quiet diplomacy, and from the secretaries I heard about the shouts coming from behind the door. Menachem, I imagine, did not raise his voice, but afterward, for four days, the two of them didn’t exchange a word, and my husband, who was calm and resolute, made it clear that if his father refused to back down and or stop interfering in his cases this time, he would walk out.

My mother-in-law called me every day with soothing small talk, as if I was the one who had to be appeased. But by the time our usual Friday night visit came round, Menachem had already surrendered unconditionally, with patriarchal dignity, because his son refused to be satisfied with less.

The men came to whatever agreement they came to. In response to his father’s surrender, my husband conducted himself with ironclad politeness — for the first time since we met I noticed the resemblance between the two men — and when we all sat down at the table Menachem put his arm round Oded’s shoulder.

“My son has beaten me,” he said to me, and his son did not bow his head or raise his hand to touch him. He looked straight ahead, his face was hard to read, in those days it was hard even for me — I can only say that he looked reflective.

Deeds have consequences. Necessarily so, but was this a late development leading from our actions? Was it the events of that night that had brought about a change in my husband’s personality? From the point of view of the plot it could be presented like this: one thing leads to another, until everything is made plain. But the truth is that I don’t know what led to what or how my husband was affected, just as I don’t know what exactly led me in the end to visit my mother’s grave. There are never any definite reasons for such things, neither in life nor in truth, and my immediate and apparent reason was Elisheva.

The anniversary of our mother’s death was approaching, it was clear that she would ask me, and I didn’t want to be evasive or lie to her.

I didn’t want to disappoint her; at this stage I already felt stable and I knew that I had it in my power to please her. And once I had decided to fulfill her wishes, I realized that going to the cemetery was not going to be a sacrifice or a forced concession made for her sake. I understood this when instead of the resentment I expected to feel, I was actually seized by a kind of curiosity; a wish to reassess myself at the graveside of the mother who had deserted us. I had not undertaken such a fundamental self-examination since I gave birth to my first son, when my motherhood was still new to me. A lot had happened since then. I did what I did, I made an end, I removed a Not-man from the face of the earth. I had no alternative, the earth could not bear him, and neither could I. Had this act of removal somehow softened my attitude toward my mother? Perhaps she too could bear no more, and therefore she made an end.

Once I had made my decision I had to find out where the grave was located; I had simply forgotten the dead woman’s address, and when we got there, Oded and I — not on the date of her death but two days before it — could hardly recognize the place. The trees on the slopes had grown tall. New roads cut through the mountain, and the whiteness of the graveyard had spread far around. It was dusk, and from the spot where we were standing I counted five bulldozers parked in the area.

The view awoke nothing in me, no tender forgotten memory, but I did what was expected of me: I got hold of a pail, filled it with water, and washed away the yellow dust that had accumulated on the tombstone.

There was no sense of reconciliation in this act, no purification, and I point this out because I could actually have concocted a catharsis out of this scene: mixed the water of purification with the amniotic fluid of birth, and holy water with tears at the end of a drought.

Alice had retired. Ever since her attempt to stir up strife between me and my husband I no longer heard her voice or saw her. Perhaps she had despaired of me when I failed to respond to her Nemesis act, perhaps she had gone to look for another disguise. Perhaps she had gone to join the dead whose place of burial is unknown. One day I will have to give her a proper funeral. In any case, wherever she may be, Alice had not put in an appearance these many months.

Alice had retired. But even without her, even now that my winsome little charmer was gone, the impudent symbolism of many waters went on paying court to me and seducing me: the tourist had departed, but apparently she had not packed up all her seductions and taken them with her.

The deceptive symbolism winked at me. Symbolism likes to wink, inviting the writer to cheat and prettify the picture, to inflate the nothing I felt into something. Because the truth is that I hardly felt anything at all: no feeling of symbolic uplift visited me as I lifted the pail and poured tepid water over the gravestone of the woman who had been my mother. No ceremonial uplift and no blurring tenderness either. I was very well able to differentiate between water and water, and above all between mother and daughter. My mother deserted and abandoned and I, when all is said and done, did the opposite: I did not desert my beloved and I did not abandon the world to the serpent. For all my sins against my beloved this was the end of the matter, this was the end, and in the end I did not abandon.

This is the thought that came to me at the gravesite, but it too did not come as a sudden revelation. The verdict had been delivered and upheld before. I had been aware of the great difference between us before, and therefore the awareness did not strike me, so to say, but simply concentrated itself there. For one concentrated moment I measured myself against my mother. For a moment more I stood there with the empty pail in my hand, but already when Oded took it from me I looked down at my toes, which had been a little muddied, and immediately started to think about the lamb I would prepare for my son Nimrod in honor of his homecoming. The day after tomorrow, I thought, the day after tomorrow would be a good time to go to the butcher. The weather was reasonable, the walk to the Nablus Gate into the Old City would be pleasant. But for the root vegetables I would wait till Friday morning, because roots dying in the fridge spoil the pleasure.

So that’s it, that’s the story as it was: we drove to the cemetery and returned — during the entire visit I did not splash with my mother in a bath of reconciliation, and wellsprings of consolation did not well up in me — but as soon as we got home I wrote an email to my sister, because it was mainly for her sake that we had gone there in the first place.

I informed her that we had visited the grave, and explained that because we were so busy and because of Nimrod’s imminent homecoming, we were unable to go on the actual date of the anniversary itself. “In spite of the hard summer we have had here the trees in the cemetery look good. The plants are flourishing in our garden too. We watered them a lot and it seems that the combination of the heat and the water encouraged the plants and made them think that they were in a tropical country.”

The next morning the reply was already waiting for me, and the letter that opened with an expression of sorrow trembled on the screen with more than the usual emotion.

Elisheva had sad news for me: their good friend Martha, dear Martha who had visited us in our apartment in Talpioth and whom I had met in their home, had passed away this week after a long illness. When I saw her I must have noticed how sick she was. And exactly yesterday, perhaps exactly when Oded and I were at the cemetery, they had accompanied to “Mount Hope” the woman who had been like a mother to her since she came to America. Wasn’t it strange that Oded and I had been obliged to visit our mother’s grave before the anniversary, and that we in Jerusalem and they in Monticello — had visited cemeteries on the very same day?

Martha will be sorely missed by us all, wrote my sister, but it was important for me to know that up to the last minute she was very brave and continued to be an inspiration to all who loved her.

“Tell me,” I said to Oded, “do you remember any mountain in the area where my sister lives?”

“Mountain — what mountain? Where do you get a mountain from? There isn’t even a hillock there.” He was busy organizing his briefcase for the office, leafing through some documents or other, and had no inclination to chat.

“I don’t know, Elisheva wrote about some funeral, and I’m trying to understand what kind of people call a cemetery situated on a plain—‘Mount Hope.’ It’s the same deceit as calling a town where there isn’t a single Italian Monticello. ‘Mount Hope.’ What hope is there exactly in death?”

My husband wasn’t in the mood for wondering and didn’t answer me. But after he left the house, I thought that I would like to be sure that there was no hope and no eternity. Because if there was hope in death, then what had been erased wasn’t erased. And the serpent still existed, and I had to believe that he had no existence. Not even in hell.

After the first death, there is no other.

Years and years after I had read Dylan Thomas to my sister and been appalled, an entire era afterward, I understood at last that this was a sentence of consolation: there was no eternity in which I and Not-man could dwell together. There was no eternity in which we would breathe the same air. There was no eternity — and therefore none either for “two little sisters, Eli and Eli” and a pointing finger, and “Ha-ha, said the uncles, this one or that one?”

After the first death there is no other. The First Person would not be reincarnated. What was dead — was dead, and only the living existed. My sister had survived the Valley of the Shadow of Death, she was fine with her life, and I was here, and I had mine.

Here I was washing dishes in the kitchen, turning the tap right and left, enjoying the control over the jet of water as if I had made a new discovery. Here I was rubbing cream into my hands and breathing in the smell of camphor, lemon, and lavender; the vapors of the camphor deepened my breath and tickled my nose.

And here in two and a half days’ time my arms would embrace Nimrod and Nimrod would embrace me back without embarrassment, because my youngest knew how to embrace. Cleansed, I would drive to the airport with Oded to meet our son, and clean and free I would sit here with the two of them afterward at the table: if I spread a tablecloth over it, would the festivity seem exaggerated to Nimrod? After I had pulled false sugary faces at him, and after I had ruined the trip to Seattle I could not burden him further with any exaggerations: it was important for everything to be ordinary, quiet and normal, it was important for us all — and that’s what it would be, quiet and normal.

Quiet and normal because there were no more images clamoring for attention and spawning nightmarish litters.

Quiet and normal because everything I had been dragging after me, all that vociferous, metastasizing abomination, had been cut off and cast into oblivion.

That’s how it would be, yes, as quiet as it was now, because after the first death there is no other.

•

I didn’t know what to write to my sister: I hardly knew her friend Martha and I had never seen her Mount Hope. So instead of a reply I simply sent her an up-to-date photo of Yachin; it was a beautiful picture, a really beautiful picture of my handsome son, with a clean sea and boats in the background.

— 2 -

The narrator has jumped the plot months forward: skipping smartly over certain difficulties and solving them without any problems. Now all is well with the couple who were saved and returned to the Garden of Eden, and soon their son will be back too.

I jumped the plot months forward, and this acrobatic act, which no doubt did not escape the notice of the reader, may perhaps give rise to the impression that I have something to hide:

For what happened, what actually happened after we came home from the desert? Is it conceivable that we simply wrote off that night and went back to our old routine? That we put the lid on the past and hardly spoke about it? That our actions had no effects or that the consequences were all beneficial?

That’s not possible, things by their nature happen differently: you can’t put a lid on the past so easily and that’s no way to end my story.

Silence hints at a secret, and if so — what is it? Is there really a secret that I’m keeping quiet about? Am I pulling an Alice and directing the eyes of the observer to the dust bunnies so they won’t notice anything else? I don’t think so, but to remove any doubt, let me pick up the story where I left off:

We came home. Oded, who was sweating profusely, went into the shower first, and I went in after him. While he was showering I prepared iced tea. We emptied the jug quickly, I prepared another one, in case one of us grew thirsty in the night, and in the meantime we talked a little, saying things that sounded almost routine—“Are you going in to the office tomorrow?” “Will you be okay? What will you do all day?”

The fridge chugged loudly like it sometimes does. Oded gave it a shove to shut it up like he sometimes does. We said that we would try to sleep.

According to Oded he slept like a log, and I dreamt a surprising dream whose details I didn’t remember in the morning: I only knew that it was full of brilliant color and sweetness perfumed with rose water. This was the first in a series of Oriental dreams that came to me in the following weeks: dreams flowing in shiny brocades and silks. When I opened my eyes I would smile in wonder — and almost in embarrassment at the memory of the tickle of their peacock feathers. No actual pictures of these fantasy trips remained with me, but their sweetness seemed to seep into me gradually, and gradually it padded and rounded me.

The heat wave broke in the early hours of the morning. The next day Oded cut his hours in the office short, and I spent most of the day weeding the neglected garden. Approximately every hour I went inside to check the news sites on the internet, but nothing relevant to us came up.

On his way home Oded stopped at the video store and took out two thrillers, which we watched one after the other.

“I still can’t take in just how warped he was, it’s simply incomprehensible,” he said to me between one movie and the next, and for a moment it seemed that he was referring to the main villain we had seen on the screen. “So many words he had. Do you think that all that intellectualism simply provided him with an excuse, or that he really believed. .”

I put a warning finger on my mouth. “Don’t start with that. Just don’t start with it.”

“With what?”

“With trying to understand. Don’t even try to get close to his head, and don’t ask about that thing, what it was. There was nothing there. You saved me from what there was, and now there’s nothing.”

Then we watched another movie. And in the coming days, many more.

In those days of the beginning of our return, I caught myself keeping a fearful eye on my husband, assuring myself that he was doing his work, keeping to his schedule, sleeping enough and eating what I cooked with a reasonable appetite. I knew that he wouldn’t fail me and that he wouldn’t crack, but I still couldn’t stop myself from keeping an eye on him — but secretly, so he wouldn’t sense that he was being tested. After he fell asleep I would examine his face, trying to guess his dreams and watching for signs of disquiet. His features looked calm. He slept uninterruptedly and rose early as usual. Early in the morning in my dreams I would hear him busying himself in the kitchen, going out to the garden and after that a silence, in which I wrapped myself in my dreams again. Only several days and many dreams later I realized that he stayed in the garden and that he had stopped going out for his morning run. And when I realized, I got out of bed and went out into the air of the new day to join him and asked him why.

Leaning forward in his chair, Oded rested his chin on his thumb and rubbed one eyebrow with the tip of his forefinger. “Look, it’s like this: running empties your head, it’s a physiological thing. When you indulge in intensive physical exercise — you can’t really think. Often this is helpful. But for me at this moment in time not thinking would be like running away.” I licked my finger and tidied the wayward hairs of his eyebrows, but a moment later his hand went up to push them out of place again. He looked impatient to me, and somehow it was clear that his impatience was not directed at me but at himself.

“So at the moment your exercise is getting up early in order to sit here in the garden and not run away,” I said.

“You should know that I don’t have any new thoughts or perceptions regarding what happened, believe me, that’s for sure: no new thoughts and no new conclusions. Only without any thoughts my mind somehow insists on going back and replaying the film. It simply runs the scenes over and over, and at this stage it seems to me that I have no option but to let it. In any case my idea is that if this is what needs to be, in other words if I already have to let the film run, it’s better to try and do it in an orderly way: to get it over first thing in the morning, before I begin the day.

“Don’t worry. I’m okay. In the end everything will be fine,” he added, and I crouched down in front of him like a Bedouin and peered into his eyes.

“In the end?”

“It’s already fine. And as soon as I’m finished playing the movie I’ll go back to exercising.”

“You’ll do exactly the right thing, always, I have no doubt,” I said eagerly. For some reason I was ashamed to tell him what he would probably have been happy to hear: that I was not haunted and that I didn’t see any pictures. That with me it was perhaps the exact opposite. For a considerable part of the day I still felt shaky. But within this shakiness it happened that I sometimes stopped with a sudden sense of wonder, and with every stop I needed a moment to grasp the thing that filled me with wonder was the new cleanness of my mind. Perhaps it was also because of the novelty of this cleanness that I felt shaky. I needed to rest. I needed time to get used to the existing restfulness. But somehow I knew too that soon, really soon, when I recovered my strength, my eyes would be cleared to see whatever I wanted to look at, and I was already beginning to feel a little curious about what things I would see when I went out to look: the garden was big and there was much to see in it.

“Everything you do is right,” I said to my beloved, whose suffering I did not share. Because what could I say that had not already been said? And who would I help by repeating to him what he already knew? I knew very well that no words and no arguments would help against pressing pictures. “Would you like me to make us an omelet? To put on more coffee?”

I believed him when he said that he was okay. I believed what I said to him too, that he always knew the right thing to do. I believed, and at the same time for a certain period I went on watching him for signs of any subcutaneous wounds. I knew that the blue-black of subcutaneous bleeding does not appear at once. And I thought that if there was indeed an injury, I had to make sure that the dawn watches to which he had sentenced himself were not making the bleeding worse. Oded went on sitting in the garden until almost the end of summer, but no blue-black bruises made their appearance. And all this time he remained clear to me.

In my concern for him, watching over his sleep and food, and showering him with positive reinforcements, I was close to becoming a mother and sister to him. For moments we came close to it, it almost happened, but my husband wouldn’t permit it. My husband wouldn’t permit it, and even as I worried about his well-being, he insisted on behaving toward me with a gentle and slightly weary authority, and as if he had appointed himself to be my big brother he would repeatedly say things like: “Are you eating lunch?” “Let me, I’ll peel it for you,” and “Careful with that armchair, it’s heavy”; to which I would reply in sentences like: “What’s the matter with you? It’s not at all heavy and I’m not an invalid.”

And so we worried about each other until, in time, reality showed us that all our worries and concerns were superfluous.

Eight days and nights passed until two newspapers printed brief items on the disappearance of the professor, and almost a week more until one of the weekend papers ran a longer article: about eight hundred words under the headline “The Mystery of the Missing Professor.” Not-man was described as an “enigmatic figure” and once more presented as “a controversial figure both among historians and in the Jewish community in the United States.” One historian interviewed anonymously defined him as “a intellectual with bold intuitions tending to over-hasty conclusions” and another said that he was “an impetuous charlatan and dangerous populist.” The police, the article said, were still groping in the dark.

Oded and I had heard abut the disappearance even earlier. We heard abut it from my mother-in-law, after she and Menachem returned from the dinner which took place in the steak house at Ramat Rachel and not in a vegetarian restaurant on Keren Yayesod Street: “The meal was excellent but your uncle didn’t come. Mordechai says that he didn’t even get in touch with him to say he couldn’t come. It’s a pity we didn’t get to meet him.”

No dish fell and smashed, and no red sauce splashed on my mother-in-law’s dress. Oded folded his arms on his chest and without blinking an eye said “Maybe it isn’t a pity at all. In the end Elinor and I went to listen to his lecture and both of us felt that he wasn’t the kind of person we would want to have any connection with.”

“May I ask why?” inquired Menachem.

“He was disgusting. The whole thing was nothing but a piece of self-advertisement. He didn’t even come close to understanding his mistake.”

Accustomed to treating the sensitive subject of “Elinor’s family” with kid gloves, and somewhat shocked by the rare tactlessness of their son, my in-laws let the matter drop, and the conversation turned to other participants in the conference, serious and interesting people, who had come to the dinner.

I have no idea when Not-man was officially recognized as a missing person. Perhaps when he was supposed to check out of the Hyatt.

Presumably he had other appointments for which he failed to show up: encounters of one kind or another with people who saw him as a “bold intellectual,” coffee with a journalist writing up the conference, meetings with other lecturers; perhaps his son came up to Jerusalem to put a note in the Western Wall and took the opportunity to try and get in touch with his father. Perhaps on his way back from the Wall he passed the hotel and left a note there too. In any case, the First Person wasn’t important enough for anyone to search for him in earnest. Messages like the one Oded’s secretary left for him presumably piled up at the reception desk of the hotel, in the pigeon-hole where there was no key to the room; but the addressee was no longer there. He had vanished into thin air.

Alice had once investigated the fate of notes fallen out of the Wall, and on one of her first expeditions she had accompanied the sacks of these fallen notes to a dignified burial on the Mount of Olives. My computer contains no trace of this column, but people read it and I still remember. And this, in short, is the story:

As she stands and watches the burial of the sacks a faded note flies straight up to Alice, and when she dares to open it she discovers a letter from a little girl with cancer. Without knowing why, she puts the decorated exercise-book page into her pocket, and only on her way back from the cemetery an inner voice tells her to return the lost wish to the Wall. Someone who landed in our city to seek for desert light will always follow her inner voice. And she does so this time too. And as the sun sets and Alice stands on tiptoe to reach for a crack in which to insert the letter, a little girl comes up to her and offers to put the note in one of the relatively empty cracks lower down. The child says that this is what she did with her own note a moment ago, and adds that she came to thank God for curing her of leukemia. She completed her last treatment a week ago.

Even the constantly thrilled and amazed Alice understands that she will never know if the little girl she encountered at the Wailing Wall is the same one whose prayer flew up into the air opposite the grave. Perhaps there were two sick little girls — she reflects at the end of the story — and perhaps there was only one. But if there were in fact two, all we can do is wish: if only this miraculous encounter was a sign from the cosmos, a cosmic sign that both of them were cured.

If only it wasn’t me who had written this transparent tale. But I did write it, and I wrote it without the faintest idea of what and who I was writing about. It was so forced and affected that on the Friday it came out even Menachem refrained from calling me to give me his reactions, but I was so obtuse then that I didn’t even wonder about his silence. Was I transparent to him? Or perhaps Rachel read me between the lines? I think not, I would like not to believe it, and in any case it’s not important any more. Not important, no, only disturbing. Two sick little girls, I wrote. If only they would get well, I wrote. Unthinkingly I faked this bluff. Unthinkingly I faked, because that’s what I was like and it didn’t bother me a bit. And for years for a large part of my time I definitely enjoyed wandering the city in pigtails.

Later on I’ll give it my attention. I have to, it’s impossible not to think. Later on I shall certainly give it attention, a lot of attention — but not now, not at this minute, when there’s something else entirely on the agenda and when there’s another truth I have to tell:

Notes that fall from the Wall are indeed given a respectful burial just as I wrote, whereas as notes with messages left behind by hotel guests are thrown into the trash.

It occurred to me, it definitely occurred to me that the police might well have confiscated the messages received by the missing person and examined them. But weeks went by and nobody from the police contacted us to ask us any questions, or if they did, and I don’t think they did — my protective husband, my guardian angel, didn’t tell me about it. If that’s what actually happened, I’m okay with it, and even now, at a distance in time, I have no need to ask him and to know.

Once we returned home it was clear to me that the possibility of the police tracking us down was purely theoretical, and that the truth was there was nothing more to fear. I did what was necessary to make sure that there would be no deviations from the successful outcome of our plot. I acted according to the rules of the game. But in fact, on our way back, when I was busy preparing our alibi, I already knew, I knew for certain, that all this preparing-for-any-eventuality was superfluous, and that it was only a mental game that Oded and I were supposed to play, as if in obedience to the rules of some genre.

There would be no deviation, because the deviations were over and done, and from now on there was no more terror but only flickers and flashes of panic. My husband and I returned home, we were at home, and in the land of I-shall-fear-no-evil you don’t fear evil.

The new time opened out in front of us. The Garden of Eden once more opened its gates, and I was determined not to delay and not to set up a way station on the threshold.

Our relief grew steadily, whether quickly or slowly. In the first days the domestic environment seemed fragile and gleaming, as if everything was made of crystal sparkling with light. I remember myself holding a frying pan with tremendous care — the bottom reflected a ray of sunlight, a spot of refracted orange light danced on the wall — and I held onto the pan with both hands so it wouldn’t shatter in pieces.

Carefully I moved between one precious object and another, until the fragility gradually abated and only the gleam remained.

Three or four weeks passed before I started getting in touch with friends and bringing people back into my life, and in a rather vague way I prepared myself for difficulty: decades of reading had prepared me for the feeling that what I had done had set up a barrier between me and the rest of the world. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Perhaps because I didn’t think much, the apprehension didn’t swell in me. I felt no real anxiety, but when I started to make contact again I was nevertheless sometimes astonished by the ease of the contact and the absence of any barrier. When I was with people it did sometimes cross my mind that I had a secret, but this awareness when it surfaced was almost neutral, neutral and weightless as the fact that I had brown eyes. Not-man had disappeared, and it seemed that the weight of the secrecy had disappeared with him.

Three or four weeks passed before I got in touch with a girlfriend and suggested that we go to buy sandals together, but even before that, even before I started contacting people, when Oded was still following the news on the internet and keeping his dawn watch in the garden — I had already given myself back our grocer’s morning smile. I had already recovered the pleasure of eavesdropping on the conversations of passersby, the surprising charm of an incorrect word, the smell of freshly ground coffee, the smoothness and sweetness left by the taste of halva between my teeth. I recovered the sight of the tender shoot of a fig tree breaking out bravely between the paving stones, the sense of solidity afforded by stone walls, even when they turn pink in the evening. I recovered many things like this.

The relief grew steadily, and the new freedom left more and more space for happiness. After what I had survived, after what we had been through — who would begrudge me my delight in coffee and halva, and who would say that we had no right?

As for books, I confess that I needed time, and that for weeks everything I tried to read still seemed boring, absurd, or trivial. Again and again I bent over the water in my thirst, and each time the water receded and my mouth remained parched.

My road back to reading was completely and accidentally paved once, in groping thirst, I opened the Bible and began to read the Book of Judges. The bible was neither boring nor trivial, and I spent weeks with Judges, Kings, and Prophets.

Like a turbaned Orthodox woman moving her lips in the bus over a little Book of Psalms, I carried the Bible with me wherever I went: I read it in a café waiting for friends, I read it in the hotel in Safed where we went for the weekend with Chemi and Rachel, and I read it almost every night before gong to sleep.

“What is this, Elinor, in the end you’ll be like Elisheva.”

I ignored the teasing and went on reading. I liked the severe Old Testament God: his passionate temperament and acts seemed more convincing and believable to me than those of many other fictional characters I knew. I understood this fiery God and occasionally, in some strange way, it seemed to me that he understood me too.

For many days I clung to my blue-covered Bible, until in the end — perhaps simply because I persevered in the habit of reading — I found that I could read other books too.

In Zion Square, close to the place where I had collapsed before having my sister hospitalized, a frightening old beggar stands on a permanent spot. Twenty years ago this man had terrified my sons with a smoky voice that seemed to rise from the depths of some enormous sound box, and they were so frightened of him that they would always tug my hand and demand that we make a wide detour around the square. On purpose, I think, he would suddenly hurl this dreadful voice at them to frighten them, and so he continued to do to other passersby in all the years that followed.

One morning, not long ago, I walked past this beggar, and all of a sudden, in a quite low, perfectly normal voice, he asked me to give him a few shekels. I stood still for a moment to ascertain that the voice was indeed coming from his throat. I had already become so accustomed to the terrible voice that it had ceased to frighten me, but that morning, when I dropped a few coins in his hand — his “thank you, ma’am” sounded quite natural and normal.

The bass voice was the same, but now it came from an ordinary human throat and not from a smoky sound box.

Something in reality had changed since the disappearance of Not-man. The ground had balanced out, or steadied a little. The air above the ground had lightened. The change was very subtle. Perhaps only beggars and raging madmen were able to sense it, perhaps it was mainly evident in them. But something real had changed, an actual shift had taken place — this I know with sober, clear-headed awareness.

I’m not crazy, and in this matter I am not subject to any delusions: the man we got rid of was not Hitler, and with the elimination of the First Person the world has not been redeemed of all evil. The world is not redeemed, this is clear to me, but it is no less clear to me that it has changed.

Those close to me, with the possible exception of Oded, apparently do not sense the change, and if they sometimes feel relief, they do not know what to attribute it to, or wonder what it stems from. People go out into the street, people walk in the streets and breathe cleaner air — so, what does it tell them? But it’s a fact, a palpable fact that the air is lighter.

Small, elusive things have changed their shape and conduct, and I myself, who have not been blessed with a scientific mind, can only rarely catch them and point to them.

The plants, not only in our own garden but also in the public parks, looked stronger and healthier than they have ever been. Our neighbor’s dog has stopped howling and wailing at night. Our sons are already grown, but I guess that fewer babies cry now for no defined reason.

Presumably some statistical study exists showing that asthmatics now suffer fewer attacks than before, or that the attacks are less severe. I expect I could find such a study on the Internet, but I’m sick of the Internet.

And I feel no desire to check it out.

In brief: the earth still cries out. Perhaps it always will. But now — of this I have no doubt because I have the evidence of my ears — it cries out less.

— 3 -

One infinitely sweet Sabbath. The fragrance of figs bursting with ripeness fills the inner courtyard of the house. Clouds filter the gold of the sun between the leaves of our grapevine pergola. A short while ago we returned from a visit to Oded’s parents, and now, relaxing in wicker chairs, he rolls himself a joint. Lately my husband has been smoking grass on weekday evenings too. He does this only rarely, and according to him he doesn’t smoke to calm down but in order to express the calmness inside him.

My husband pours me a glass of wine, and I hold the glass up to the sun while he rubs the cold bottle against my arm. In the past I sometimes considered having the tattoo surgically removed, but with time my doubts disappeared and today it’s clear to me that my tiger face is better than a scar.

The golden Sabbath time pervades our surroundings without reference points. A muezzin calls the faithful from inside the Old City, but he is calling to others, not to us. Oded slides the bottle lazily around my nipples. The lust is there, it’s palpable, but we have plenty of time.

•

When we came back from the desert we were not sexually aroused, that’s clear, and there was no trail of garments leading from the front door to the living room. Anything like that would have been inconceivable.

In the first days we simply treated each other gently, very gently, as if we were recovering from a long illness. Desire, when it existed, was also cautious, and only gradually, movement by movement, step by step, did it come into its own.

“Elisheva sends us regards from my father,” I tell my husband, because I have all the time in the world. “She says that if he feels well, he and his lady friend will come and visit them in the autumn. Gemma wants to paint the autumn leaves.”

Oded raises his eyebrows questioningly and keeps the bottle on my breasts.

“I asked her to give him our regards too. Why not, what do I care.”

“Right, who cares. I adore this dress. Is it new?”

I taste the wine, and before I dive into the glass my eyes seek to capture the scene and I take the photograph: a picture of a garden with me and my husband in it.

Photographed thus in my mind’s eye, I take a few more sips of wine, and only then slowly abandon my thoughts and yield to the primacy of the body. A sunlit redness gradually spreads through me, and when I close my eyes, I see the light through my eyelids, playing in our courtyard and giving rise to sparkling spots of color.

A motorcycle drives past in the alley and leaves a palpable silence in its wake. Close to me a bee buzzes, and a purple spot on the screen of my eyelids vibrates to the sound of the buzzing. Inside the house the phone rings, and we don’t bother to get up to answer it. Nimrod, apparently: wanting to let his father know that he’ll be late in returning his new Jeep to him.

Inside the Sabbath time there is space for everything. There is no early or late, now everything is permitted to me, and permitted too to others.

The skin on my arm tingles. I smell the joint going out and my husband asking “Should I pour you another glass?” I hear the vine growing. And the vibrating purple expands.

A wind, a light Northern wind carries the scent of rose from outside — in our garden there are no roses — and I see the wind and more: I see the points of the compass rose. In the East the desert, in the South the basement apartment — it must still be standing — in the West there was once a pension. Puffs of wind move the petals. The four petals of the compass flap like wings. The wings of the earth slowly rise and fall, and our garden is planted in the center. One of my bare feet is on the ground. The earth beneath me is firm and still. The garden will not move.

The purple tide rises and separates into shades, and the tide covers and the tide opens to see an infinity of purples opening out and spreading through space. The purple spreads and flows, an infinity of shades of purple, with a black eye at its center.

“Elinor? My love?”

A wind of words tickles my ear. Now a spark of gold beats in the heart of the eye. I close my eyes tighter, dive into the flickering blackness and make for the gold.

The Garden of Eden. A swooning Sabbath time with a ripe smell of fig and vine stretching immeasurably around us.

The Garden of Eden. The present is the only time.

The Garden of Eden. My body is present in itself and in the garden, and my body is the truth, and all of me in it is one: here I am, and from here there is no other.