Читать книгу Lies, First Person - Gail Hareven - Страница 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lie to you?”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t see it like that.”

“No? So how do you see it?”

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

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

“Do you really think that I felt comfortable?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me what he wrote you.”

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

“Understood. But what does he want?”

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

“Did you read it?”

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

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

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

“There’s no such thing.”

“As what?”

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

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

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