Читать книгу Lies, First Person - Gail Hareven - Страница 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, the quick daughter, saved myself.

I deserted and abandoned my sister to her fate.