Читать книгу Lies, First Person - Gail Hareven - Страница 16

- 7 -

I remember the clicking of the typewriter from room number twenty-two, the one at the end of the corridor on the second floor, the one that to the regret of my parents did not have a pastoral window, but ensured privacy. There, it appears, he began to write the cause of the scandal to which they looked forward, and there, in the privacy that was respected to an exaggerated, ritualistic degree, he conducted experiments on my sister. Once he made her crouch like a footstool at his feet, and forced her to remain in this position for hours without moving. And another time, when he had finished hurting her, he said that she had to understand how difficult all this was for him. If she thought that he had no feelings, she was a fool. He wasn’t a psychopath, there were goals for which it was right and proper to sacrifice the moral sentiment, and “only history will judge the value of the work of literature to which our project gave birth.”

The worst thing, she said, was when he talked to her. And also when he forced her to read aloud to him from the book. “The one he was writing? His manuscript?” I asked. No, she wasn’t allowed to touch his manuscript when she cleaned the room. There were a lot of books there, but he always wanted one book in English. He would instruct her to read, and then sneer at her reading and do it to her. But there also times when he would first read aloud from it himself.

The things I know accumulated slowly: a statement here, a statement there. Sometimes she came out with something horribly coherent, but a lot of the time what she said was unintelligible. And I, choking on it, didn’t know what was worse: when she spoke clearly I longed for vagueness, and when she was vague I wanted to shake her until she told me exactly what and how and when. Maybe with her psychiatrist she was different, but when I pressed her she was unable to answer, looking blank and stammering in reply to my questions.

Only when she was about to leave for the United States in her new incarnation, she revealed, as if by the way, the name of the book: The 120 days of Sodom. Because of the name she believed that she was destined to be tortured by him for one hundred twenty days, but the clue deceived her. She was tortured for longer.

He was a brutal, pornographic sadist, that’s what he was. A filthy rat dressed up in sordid intellectual pretensions. He was something that I wouldn’t even call human. A rat. A warped rat who decided he had it in his power to gnaw his way into the black box of Hitler and solve its riddle from the inside. Before he left he gave my sister a potted orchid. Elisheva put it on the reception desk, and there this gift remained until it died. I have no idea why I mentioned this now. I mention it because I remember. This detail of the white orchid I actually told Oded quite early on, but he wasn’t very impressed by it; he only remarked that giving flowers seemed like part of the window dressing. But I knew, and kept it to myself, that the purpose of the orchid was completely different, and that in this final act of parting too, the Not-man meant to mock her. Like he did when he met me and kissed my hand.

•

When the book my parents had so eagerly awaited came out in America, Erica was already resting in her grave, my father was apparently resting with his lady love in Verona, and Elisheva and I were going crazy together in the renovated, three-and-a-half-room basement flat where my father set us up nicely before he deserted us.

I had no idea that the book had come out, or about anything else, except for the fact that I was responsible for a sister who, according to the official authorities, posed no danger to herself or others, and consequently did not need to be hospitalized.

Only months later, after I had put her back, not so nicely, in the hospital, I learned about the book from a newspaper article, and my first thought was: I hope they don’t hand out newspapers in the psychiatric ward.

The article reported on a dispute between the literary editor and the owner of one of the big publishing houses in Israel. The owner wanted to bring out a Hebrew translation of Hitler, First Person, and the editor, it was reported, threatened to resign. Neither of the parties to the dispute agreed to be interviewed on record, but it appeared that they had given the reporter a broad overview of the reasons for the standoff.

Hitler, First Person, as may be gleaned from the title, attempts to present “an autobiography of the fiend.” According to the blurb on the back of the English edition, the book was not a forgery like the so-called “Hitler Diaries,” nor yet pure historical research, but rather “an attempt to deepen human consciousness by literary means” and by “a significant and chilling contribution to the self-knowledge of human beings as such.” The book relies on hundreds of documents and historical research. It attempts to penetrate beneath the persona the Führer presented to the public, and shows the reader not the “real” Hitler, but Hitler as he might have been, and as he would have described himself if he had written a personal autobiography as a kind of complement to Mein Kampf.

According to the article, the controversial manuscript had been rejected by a long line of publishers in the United States, until it found one willing to bring it out, and but for the fact that two well known historians had violently condemned the book, it would probably have disappeared among the piles of trash written on the subject.

The growing campaign in denunciation of the book had given the author, Professor Aaron Gotthilf, exceptional media exposure, at the height of which he had been attacked at the entrance to a television studio by an elderly Holocaust survivor who tried to throw acid in his face.

Gotthilf, a controversial historian and a refugee from the Holocaust himself, stands by his opinion that giving voice to Hitler is not only a legitimate literary device that should be accepted in the framework of the principle of freedom of expression, but an important tool in advancing our understanding of the horrors of the twentieth century. “Hitler was a human being,” he stresses, “and as such, he is not beyond the bounds of explanation.” He adds: “To understand does not mean to forgive.”

However, there are those who do not forgive Gotthilf for his book, among them our greatest Holocaust researcher, who described it as “a vile piece of filth not worthy of relating to.”

Up to now the book has been translated into French, German, Finnish, and Italian, although it should be mentioned that the publishers who chose to bring it out in these countries are also regarded as marginal. Among the reactions to the book in France, the words “provocative” and “interesting” were used. In Germany, on the other hand, the book was widely denounced by critics.

The article also mentioned that the author chose to let Hitler tell his story only up to October 1938, a few days before Kristallnacht, and that some critics have argued that this choice plays into the hands, even if indirectly, of Holocaust deniers.

“It will soon become clear whether Gotthilf’s fictional Hitler will be allowed to have his say in Hebrew too.”

I tore the newspaper to shreds and threw it in the trash, poured the dregs of my coffee onto the scraps, and took the bag of trash out of the house.

I hadn’t forgotten my parents’ talk. I hadn’t forgotten the sound of the typewriter, but for some reason I never thought about the book as something real that could actually happen. I never thought it would happen, too much had happened already.

All kinds of crazy ideas went around in my head, like writing to the publisher that I would kill myself if the book came out in Hebrew—because what other way did I have to preserve the fragments of my sister? But in the end I didn’t even write a letter of protest from a concerned citizen.

I’ll never know whether my mother meant to kill herself with her Digoxin games. I learned to live with the not knowing, let’s say I learned, let’s say I did, but one thing I do know today for certain: my mother did not pass on suicidal genes to me. I never really wanted to go away and die. I wanted other people not to be here.

When Elisheva broke down and was hospitalized for the first time, I was still in my senior year in high school and, surrounded by a protective wall of friends and activities, I spent most of my time at a relatively safe distance from the family.

When I banished her from our basement apartment to her second hospitalization I was already alone. Our parents had flown. My friends had joined the army, and I had been exempted from this obligation, too, which I had no possibility of meeting.

The way things turned out I didn’t have a single soul I could talk to when Hitler, First Person came down on me in the kitchen like a ton of bricks. And after I destroyed the newspaper, not long after that, somehow or other I decided to live. Somehow or other, the decision was taken to live, live like crazy and as quick-sharp as possible. I left the apartment in Talpioth and threw myself giddily into to all kinds of stimulating experiments. I consumed quantities of alcohol, and men, and wild talk, and ups and downs at night and sleeplessness. One morning, after waking up alone in the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv without remembering exactly how I got there, I snuck outside, and as I wandered the streets my eye fell on a tattoo emporium; I went in and had myself tattooed with my tiger face. It took two days to do it, and in between I fell asleep on a bench in the park among the smell of dog shit. All this isn’t important now, and also irrelevant to Hitler, First Person, which I had started to talk about.

Three years after I met Oded and fell on him with false accusations, he traveled to London for the firm and there, between his real-estate negotiations, he was tempted to buy the book. He bought it, came home, and immediately told me. Presumably he believed that the act of confession would atone for the sin of voyeurism he had committed by reading it.

Alice had not yet been born then, but Yachin was lying at my feet on his baby blanket, and I was already pregnant with Nimrod, although I didn’t yet know it—so my drive to attack had faded to a considerable degree.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“What? The book? I left it in the office. I thought you wouldn’t want it in the house.”

“You thought right. It’s none of my business that you read it, I just don’t have to hear about it,” I said, and a minute later: “Okay. Now that you did it, you’d better tell me about it.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he picked up our son and clasped him like a soft shield to his chest. “I’m not a big expert on literature. I didn’t even finish reading it, it’s over three hundred pages long, and I don’t think I’ll finish it.”

“Is it that dreadful?”

“Dreadful?” My husband deliberated for a moment, and then pronounced the magic word, because of which, and only because of which, even though I have a thousand other reasons—I’ll love him to the end of time. “Boring,” he said.

I’m sure he didn’t understand what made me burst out laughing and go on laughing, but my laughter infected him, and the two of us laughed and laughed until I slid off the sofa and he had to sit down on the carpet with Yachin.

“What did you say? Go on, say it again.”

“Boring,” he repeated.

“Boring,” I bellowed. “Oded Brandeis, you’re one of a kind. Hitler bores you.”

Only when Yachin’s face twisted and turned red did we calm down, even though we went on sitting on the floor. “So now explain to me, please.”

“Look, I don’t know, it’s kind of banal. If it’s supposed to be a mystery, if Hitler’s a mystery, then I didn’t get the impression it was about to be solved. I know this sounds a bit tasteless, but if I think of it as, let’s say, a detective story, then up to now, up to the place I’ve reached in the book, I haven’t understood the motive.”

“Hitler’s motive?”

“Yes. That’s to say, there’s all the usual stuff about the Jews, the vermin, and the cancer, there’s a kind of paranoid person who believes in all those things—which, by the way, poses a certain problem, because if he’s insane and honestly believes that the Jews are a deadly danger, then from the legal point of view at least, you could argue diminished responsibility. On the other hand the book presents his so-to-speak rational calculations with regard to political interests, and quite impressive political manipulations, especially after his relative failure in the 1933 elections, but all this doesn’t add up to anything. In fact I hardly learned anything new from it. What I’m trying to tell you is that the book is actually banal: a kind of primary textbook for students who need to be provoked. Basic history for the lazy.”

“And the first person?”

“What about it?”

“It doesn’t bother you that Hitler speaks in the first person? Didn’t you feel it was terrible to read ‘I’ when that ‘I’ is actually Hitler? The first person acts to create identification.”

Oded thought for a moment; it was clear that until I asked the question it hadn’t occurred to him.

“The truth is that I didn’t feel like I was reading about Hitler,” he concluded in the end. “I don’t know how to explain it, but that Hitler somehow wasn’t Hitler, not that I’m presuming to know who Hitler really was. So his father hit him and for some reason he brags about it. So he loved his mother and she died in agony and she had a Jewish doctor, so what does that prove? There could be all kinds of people who had things like that happen to them.”

I thought he was finished, but he had something else to say, and in order to say it he had to put our son down first.

“Look, I don’t have to explain to you why I was tempted to read it. I thought it would help me to understand something, you know, about that man and everything you went through.”

“Yes?” I tensed.

Oded lowered his gaze and slowly rubbed his thighs. “Well, you know, because the author is a total pervert, somehow I expected his book to be full of perversions too.”

“Yes?”

“From the little I know about history, he had enough material to base all kinds of pornographic descriptions on. The rumors about the single testicle,” he blushed, “problems with normal functioning, obsessions, never mind, it doesn’t matter, there are all kinds of theories, you know, but as far as I could tell, there’s nothing like that in the book. It’s true that I haven’t finished reading it, but in the chapter I did read, he talks about some woman, Geli Rampal, he describes her as some chaste childish nymph who goes into the forest with him, and then, right after that, he blathers on endlessly about the purple velvet armchairs that he wanted to buy with her. Purple velvet armchairs! Can you imagine?”

“Yes?”

My clipped responses only increased his uneasiness, and nevertheless my husband persisted like a diligent schoolboy. He went on and on describing the book, and it seemed that his embarrassment prevented him from leaving out anything in the review he had prepared for me. My tenseness didn’t go away completely, but at the same time I was overwhelmed by a kind of weariness that turned my “yes” into a mechanical murmur. It seemed that my previous wild laughter had exhausted all my wakefulness. Oded went on at length about the niece Geli Rampal, the affair of whose suicide wasn’t solved or given any explanation for in the book, and at this stage I was hardly listening. While my husband unburdened himself by talking, my eyelids grew heavy, and it was only with an effort that I kept my eyes open until he finished coming clean. I understood his need to tell me about his plunge into Hitler, First Person. I myself would have insisted on his not hiding anything from me. And at the same time, the longer he went on, the more I wanted him to get it over with and let me go. Yachin, who was teething, had worn me out during the day—a good reason to be exhausted. But why didn’t Oded get to the point? He told me. I got it. We were done. Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t we done? How long was he going to go on lecturing me after he himself said that the book was boring. If it was boring, why didn’t he stop? Why drag it out and mull it over.

I went on nodding. I went on muttering “yes” whenever I surfaced to listen. I remember the word “songbird” and after that something about suspect witnesses and that Hitler was well known as a cunning liar, and in any case you couldn’t believe a word he said; and something about a statue of a horse, and about horses in general, but maybe I’m confused because why on earth should my husband have presented me with horses.

“In short,” he said after shifting here and there, “it’s a bad, shallow book out to create a sensation, but there’s no German porno in it. And if I hadn’t known it was written by a pervert, I never would’ve guessed.”

“Yes, I understand.” Sleep was already taking over me completely, and I still had to put Yachin down in his crib and lead myself to our bed. How was I going to drag myself there?

Aware of my situation at last, Oded stood up and pulled me to my feet.

“All I can tell you is that if I imagined that the book would help me understand something, I was wrong; I don’t understand anything about that man.” I should have asked him who he meant by “that man,” but I was overcome by a fit of yawning and the pressing need to surrender to the tide of sleep and sink into the depths. Which is what I did. I allowed my husband, purified and clarified, to lead me to the bedroom. He put Yachin to bed and joined me. And enveloped by the clean white smell of the salt of the earth I slept dreamlessly till morning, and in the morning we spoke no more about the book.

Hitler, First Person was not translated into Hebrew in the end and it soon disappeared from the shelves of the bookshops. And nevertheless, it happened that people who knew my maiden name asked me if I had any connection to Gotthilf, the historian or author: hadn’t there been some kind of scandal? Remind me, what was it exactly?

Years before the appearance of the pigtail-sucking Alice, I already knew that a partial truth was more acceptable than a lie, and I always answered: “I think he may be related somehow to my father, but I’m not really sure”—and changed the subject.

The book disappeared from the shelves in the bookshops, but not from the bookcase in which Oded had buried it in his office, and from which it came back to attack me six years later, after it had already faded from my mind.

This happened during the Passover holidays. Yachin was then almost seven and Nimrod had already turned five. We were in Spain. Chemi had decided that the family needed and deserved a vacation, and to the delight of all concerned he chose to take us to a charming hotel on top of a hill overlooking the Costa del Sol.

The weather was pleasant, Oded spent hours with the boys in the pool, Yachin was already able to hold himself above water with an energetic dog-paddle, and I, who don’t know how to swim, spent the days reading, wandering around the village, and dozing in the mild warmth of the sun.

I was just a little drowsy when Menachem appeared in shorts and a shirt, set a chair beside my sunbed, looked down at my exposed face, and asked me the question about your-connection-to-the-historian-Gotthilf.

“To my regret, he’s apparently some kind of cousin of my father’s,” the sun gave me an excuse to cover my eyes. “Sorry, one more relation I have no cause to be proud of.”

My reply did not stop him, and he went on to ask me what I could tell him about the man.

“Hardly anything, in fact. I know that his mother got him out of Vienna at the same time as my grandmother escaped with my father, but my grandmother came to Palestine while they, I think, emigrated to England. What was his mother’s name? Hannah, I think.”

He was more experienced than I was in conducting interrogations, or perhaps he didn’t mean to interrogate, but simply fastened his teeth on a subject he found of interest.

“And all those years you didn’t have any contact with him? That’s quite unusual, especially with people who suffered the common trauma of being refugees. None of the other members of the family, I understand, survived.”

“I think he visited Israel once,” I sank further into the artificial darkness of my arm. “I don’t remember exactly. Maybe there was something like that. I think there was. Perhaps it was when I was already in boarding school.”

“Interesting,” he observed. The sounds of splashing and warning cries together with mild rebukes from my husband rose from the direction of the pool. “Interesting,” his father repeated and put something down next to my thigh. “In any case, I’m curious to know what you have to say about this. I found it in my library in the office.”

Menachem had the old-fashioned habit of wrapping the books he was reading in paper, so as not to stain them with his fingers—he had a collection of bookmarks too—and so, when he set the book down next to me and I finally opened my eyes, even though I should have realized at once what it was—for a moment I failed to do so.

“You’re the expert on literature in our family, so take a look and let’s hear your verdict.”

With my face to the sun going down over the sea beneath us, I picked up Hitler, First Person and opened it.

“You want me to read it now?”

“Why not? At least have a look for a few minutes. As far as I can see you’re not reading anything else at the moment. I’d like to hear what you think.”

I could have told him that I didn’t want to read about Hitler. I could have claimed that the book wasn’t suitable for holiday reading and that he hadn’t brought us to the pampering sunshine only to thrust us into the darkness with Hitler. I could have said all kinds of things to get out of it, the only problem was that I couldn’t. Anyone who has once dwelled in the Garden of Eden will forever fear being cast out. And among the inhabitants of the rose-tinted heavens there must be more than a few fearful souls of those who, even in their previous lives were braver than me. Anyone who has tasted the honey of the leviathan and the milk of the pomegranates, will be terrified at the mere thought of exile. And only because of the fear of the flaming sword turning every which way, only because of my cowardice and my dread of the turning flame, only because of this and for no other reason I went on holding the book in my hands, and saw myself as compelled to read it.

•

Menachem went on sitting beside me, paging through a magazine, and appeared to be waiting for me to present him with a speedy report, and I stood up and raised the back of my sunbed. As I stood there I saw Oded coming out of the water, and carrying Nimrod quickly toward the showers. Yachin ran after them, and nobody came to me with a question or a complaint or a request for a kiss on a place that hurt.

The painted clay pots of plants hanging over the bar gleamed in the sunlight: the ladybugs painted on them, red against the yellow, were as big as the painted flowers. A pair of hotel employees walked past behind us chatting in musical Spanish: the tone of their voices was enough to tell me that that they’d finished work for the day and were on their way home. A third worker slowly and patiently unrolled a green net over the blue of the pool.

Chemi’s imperial, bald head shone. He pored over his magazine with his lips closed, and in profile he looked like a statue of a man poring over a document. Menachem is the only person I know whose lips are never parted: neither parted, nor pursed. One lip rests on the other in perfect, unquestionable order. Once he had instructed me to read, he turned to his affairs, taking it for granted that I would do what was expected of me.

I learned to read at the age of four, and I read as easily as breathing. I have a BA in literature; in my prehistory I managed to write seminar papers with half a bottle of alcohol in my belly. I told myself that there was no reason I would not be able to read these pages that didn’t belong to this place, or to me, or to Hitler, this text that didn’t touch anyone or anything, and that I certainly would not allow it to do so.

I put on my blouse and skirt, again picked up the book wrapped in brown paper, and sat down to do as I was told.

The text opened with a boastful sentence. The narrator bragged that he had looked into depths where no one before him had dared to look. From there he launched into a description of a vision he’d had: an apocalyptic scene in the style of a science-fiction comic, or a description of killing fields in the World War I.

In November 1918, the speaker is in a convalescent home in Pasewalk, recovering from the effects of a gas attack—or perhaps from hysteria—and, blind as Tiresias, he prophesies the destruction of the world. Carcasses of horses. Scampering rats. Dogs falling onto piles of bodies. Steam rises from spilled intestines, steam rises from the earth, and everything is pervaded by an obscure evil.

Laughter rings without stopping in the narrator’s ears, the poisonous ringing prevents him from sleeping at night, and he realizes that the laughter is the laughter of the Jews, and that the evil ever changing its shape is the Jews.

With this realization his vocation is revealed to him. From his earliest childhood he knew that he had a vocation, and from this moment his mission is clear to him: to choke the laughter.

The style of the writing seems portentous to me, bloated by the excessive and repetitive use of adjectives. My meager acquaintance with original texts written by Hitler did not enable me to determine whether the text in my hands was attempting to copy his style. I turned the pages. The narrator speaks about what he calls his “natural love of beauty.” About experiencing the magnificence of the church festivals as a choirboy, about the sublimity of snowy mountain peaks, certain statues, and buildings. Almost three pages are devoted to his prodigious loathing of wood carvings, which is his opinion should all be burned.

I skipped to the “charms of friendship” with one August Kubizec, and the “monkey cages” of the schools that suppress the spark of genius in their pupils. The style had changed, and the hero now came across as a sensitive, rebellious boy, something along the lines of a Holden Caulfield kicking over the traces and protesting against suffocating adult hypocrisy.

More ambitious and robust than the hero of The Catcher in the Rye the adolescent boy confronts his father’s iron will. He longs for the transcendence of art, the splendor of the opera, exalting torrents of music, and wherever he goes his horrified ears are infiltrated by the shrill, discordant voices of the Jews, which he, like Wagner, finds unbearable.

I went on, skipping forward and backward. Wherever I turned I found a narrator different from the one before, and with every new page the adjectives I had decided only moments before would describe my impressions of the text to Chemi became irrelevant.

Somewhere in the patchwork of the text I found myself in a green meadow strewn with flowers where an elegant and aristocratic lady was riding a white colt. And a little further on an elderly housekeeper appears, also aristocratic, her hair sprinkled with white. The angry adolescent is now replaced by a romantic novelist of an old-fashioned kind, and for a few pages it seems that this unbelievably archaic tone is taking over the story.

This impression lasted until the affair of the niece, where I stopped skipping and read right through.

She is a poor, fatherless teenager, and he, recently released from prison, carries her off to his eagle’s nest. The canary receives private lessons and learns to sing. The pure voice of the young girl as she practices her singing at the end of the corridor enchants the hero, and on his return from his travels he occasionally finds the time to accompany her on a musical instrument.

One day the exquisite bird grows hoarse, and the doctor is called in to examine her and diagnose inflammation. Up to now everything seems more or less normal for the genre, if you ignore the identity of the first person narrator, as I succeeded—almost succeeded—in doing. But then, at this stage of the story, the narrator takes the flashlight from the doctor, and curious to know what lies hidden inside the golden canary, he too insists on looking inside. He takes hold of the seated girl’s chin, shines the flashlight into the depths of her throat, and discovers a moist, gleaming tunnel spotted with white, apart from which there is “nothing there.” There is nothing there. And since there is nothing there, nothing remains to distract him from his mission to purify the bloodstream and save Germany.

Oded didn’t tell me about this scene. Perhaps he skipped it, perhaps he didn’t understand its significance, and perhaps he read it and understood and decided to spare me. I put the book down and covered myself with the towel.

“So what does the literary expert say?” Chemi took off his glasses, ready to listen.

The last pages had numbed my ability to produce new adjectives, and this is apparently the reason why I answered weakly in Oded’s words: “It’s banal,” even though as far as I was concerned there was nothing banal about the last scene. To this day I don’t know if it was based on any historical source, or if this event of looking into the flesh and the subsequent conclusion that “there’s nothing there” was concocted from start to finish in the author’s black box.

“Banal?” the tone told me that I had to hurry up and rewrite my report. And to make himself clear Menachem added: “This abomination seems banal to you?”

“That’s what your son said about it. That was his impression,” I defended myself. But what is perhaps permitted to the son is forbidden to the daughter-in-law, who also happens to be related to the author of the abomination. Relationship by blood demands a far more vigorous denunciation, of a kind that will differentiate sharply between the daughter-in-law and the abominator.

“Oded’s right, that’s to say, in the sense that this text doesn’t tell us anything new,” I squirmed, “in the sense that it seems to be written for ignorant high school students who are too lazy to read history. But the attempt itself, the writing itself, the pretension itself—that’s sick. The whole thing is so sick and so repulsive that I’m sorry I even touched it. It’s sick.”

Ignoring my feeble hints, whining tone, and huddling underneath the towel, Menchem picked up the book and got ready for the discussion he was intent on having. “So you can’t tell me anything about this man?” he examined me again over his glasses.

“I’m sorry.”

“Because if you ask my opinion, what your father’s cousin did here is a hundred times worse, a thousand times worse, that what Nabokov did in Lolita. I’m surprised that you, someone who understands literature, didn’t make this comparison yourself.”

“Nabokov?”

“Nabokov. Because what is Lolita if not the justification of a pedophile and a rapist?”

It took me more than a minute to digest this entire sentence. Because what I heard at first was only “the justification of a pedophile and a rapist,” and the words “pedophile and rapist” threw me for a loop, and made me think that Menachem either suspected or knew.

In the days when Elisheva and I were going insane together in our basement apartment in Talpioth, my sister developed a fantasy of being transparent: it seemed to her that all her privacy was leaking out, and that everyone who passed her could read her thoughts and see what was going on inside her. A feeling just like this took hold of me when Chemi started to talk about Lolita, because where did he get “rapist” from? Where if not from my own mind?

The next morning I was already able to tell him that he was making a big, if common, mistake in his reading of Lolita; that the book was pervaded by a consciousness of sin; that the utter ruin of Lolita is conveyed through the unreliable narrator, and that the reader together with Humbert Humbert are clearly aware of the fact that there is no restoration and that atonement is impossible.

That morning I already had the strength to get into general and comparative literature, but at that private moment next to the pool, what I mumbled to him was: “But Hitler wasn’t a rapist.” I imagine that he looked at me as if I were an idiot: I’m not certain, because under the threat of the flaming sword I couldn’t lift my head and look him in the face.

“Fortunately for us,” said Menachem, “the author of this abomination doesn’t have one thousandth of the satanic talent of Nabokov. Just imagine if a really talented writer had written Hitler’s autobiography.”

“What does he want from me?” I wailed to Oded about two hours later, when we stood in the bathroom getting ready to go downstairs for dinner. “Just because I was once a Gotthilf, I have to prove to him that that crap makes me vomit? What does he expect me to prove? That I’m not a Gotthilf?”

Oded put a finger on his shaving cream mustache to signal me to lower my voice so as not to upset the boys.

“Apart from which,” I went on in a lower voice, “even though your father is the nicest person in the world, let’s not forget that he’s a lawyer.”

“What’s that got to do with it and how is it relevant?” Asked my husband without taking his eyes off the mirror. I didn’t know how it was relevant, but once I had begun, I went on unburdening myself, letting the words take over. “It means that he’s not exactly Mother Theresa, either. Anyone would think that all the clients he represents are saints. What gives him the right to interrogate me like that just because I’m . . .”

My husband steadied his chin with one hand and with the other shaved off specks of foam, while setting the record straight for my benefit: Possibly, in my sensitivity, I had read his father’s intentions correctly, or possibly not. And perhaps Menachem, who as I well knew had a lot of respect for my opinions, honestly wanted to hear what I thought about a book that had shaken him to the core. He often asked my opinion on books, after all. Oded was sorry for the unpleasant experience I had endured, and he was especially sorry to know that he could have spared me if he had only done the obvious thing and thrown the book in the trash instead of putting it in the bookcase in the office.

“And as for Mother Theresa, nobody is Mother Theresa, maybe not even Mother Theresa herself. Lawyers, in the nature of the profession, represent all kinds, that’s true, but to the extent that I know my father, and to the extent that I know myself—neither of us is cut out to be a criminal lawyer.”

I sat down on the lid of the toilet, and from there I raised my eyes to the handsome profile of my attorney.

“Do you think I’m completely crazy?” I asked meekly when he appeared to be finished.

“An interesting question,” he shot at me. “I’ll have to consider it.”

“But do you think you’ll still want to go on being with me?”

“Be with you? Let’s see, I need time to think about it, but after the boys fall asleep I’ll definitely check it out.” He patted his face smugly with a towel, obviously pleased with himself and the charms that had enabled him to silence the howls of a madwoman so efficiently.

I imagine he said something in the course of the evening to his parents, or at least to his mother. Presumably he reminded them that any reference to the subject of my family upset me and “brought back the tragedy.” Because after dinner my mother-in-law drew me outside for a breath of fresh air, and when we walked down the steep street she linked arms with me and said: “Menachem can sometimes be so tactless. Mostly it happens when he gets carried away by some intellectual question. When he gets started on one of his hobbyhorses he can be as inconsiderate as a child, even though I don’t have to tell you what a kind-hearted man he is. Over the years I’ve learned not to take it to heart. In married life it’s sometimes best to keep quiet and overlook things.”