Читать книгу Lies, First Person - Gail Hareven - Страница 18

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After my sister met her redeemer, converted to Christianity, and married, we lost contact. In the days when I was living in my lair in Nahlaoth I didn’t even have her phone number, and it was only when I got married myself that a tenuous relationship with big intervals in time came into being between us.

In order to maintain the kind of telephone relationship I’ve had with my sons since they went to America, there needs to be common ground on which news can be exchanged: and the new Christian continent where my sister lived in her new incarnation was too far for me to be able to relate to it.

There was nothing that could be taken for granted between us, not even holiday greetings. Should I call her on my New Year? Was it still in some way hers? “Passover and Easter are the same thing,” she promised, but how did I know when Easter fell, and what did you ask a sister preparing for Easter: do you buy ready-made harosset or make it yourself? And what was the point in talking about harosset in the first place? I didn’t want to talk to her about harosset and most of the time I didn’t want to talk to her about anything else, either. We had talked enough: the months when her demented ravings had held us in their grip, before she left for America, had apparently exhausted my strength to listen to her, and my life was full of other voices demanding my attention.

In later years, when the boys were already older, Elisheva, who from childhood had experienced difficulty in writing, discovered email as a means through which she was able to express herself in text. And since then every few months I would receive a well-written composition in English, whose lower margins were decorated with deer footprints. The person who composed these decorated compositions was a complete stranger, but in one of them I was informed of the birth of my niece Sarah, and this was already after it had seemed that my sister and her Barnett would not bring any children into the world.

Elisheva wrote that she was blessed, and that an entire lifetime would not suffice to give thanks for the grace of this fertility of which she was certainly unworthy. But even before the birth of Sarah she would enthusiastically list the blessings showered on her by God in every letter: the beauty of the autumn foliage in Illinois; a member of the church congregation who had ridden his horse into a truck and escaped unhurt. A checked jacket of Barnett’s that had been lost and found by a stranger who became a friend—the hand of God was visible in all these things.

Under the personal supervision of a benevolent God and a benevolent husband, it was clear that my sister was in no need of my supervision, which had in any case been found wanting. I sent a box full of expensive gifts for the baby, my sister replied with exaggerated expressions of gratitude, and I deleted her reply just as I deleted everything else, and went back to tending my vine.

Nobody will ever know what my sister intended to do on the evening she locked herself in the girls’ showers on base 12 with an Uzi. She probably didn’t know herself, and I—who was away that week on a class trip, and only found out when I returned—definitely don’t know.

I wasn’t there during the four hours she locked herself in before she was persuaded to give up the weapon, I wasn’t there when she was hospitalized, I didn’t visit her in Kfar Shaul, and I wasn’t present at the session when she told our parents about the abuse.

My role in this part of the story is that of the person who wasn’t there.

Months later I heard from a graduate of the boarding school who was an officer on the base that “there were actually warning signs, the kind that are hard to ignore.” Other girls complained that Elisheva didn’t shower, that she slept in her uniform, that she was maddeningly slow, and that it wasn’t fair for the whole unit to be punished because of one soldier. “It was hard to ignore,” the officer said, but in the end everyone overcame the difficulty and succeeded in ignoring it.

She was nineteen when she enlisted. Height one meter fifty-eight, weight that rose with stubborn persistence to over eighty kilos. My parents attributed her obesity to the pressure of studying for her exams, and promised anyone ready to listen that in the army, with new friends and new experiences, her weight would go down of its own accord. I didn’t even take the trouble to understand and relate to all this. I was busy with my own affairs, I had matriculation exams to prepare for. When I did go home my sister didn’t stink. We shared a room, so I should know.

When it comes down to it, I don’t think she has suicidal genes either. I believe that even in the swamps of hell, my sister never stopped hoping for a redeemer who would come and purify her. Later too, when both of us were locked into her madness, and I, in order to save my life, pushed her into the hospital—what she really wanted was to survive.

Our parents deserted, each in his own way, but our widowed father did not abandon his daughters without a plan: the one discharged from the army with disability benefits would continue her treatment and recover, perhaps she would even start studying something practical; whereas the other, who had skipped a grade and was in any case not yet old enough to be conscripted—she would register at the Hebrew University and get a degree. It would be a shame for a mind like hers to go to waste in the army, and as a student with an apartment of her own and a tidy sum of money set aside to pay for her studies—there was no doubt that this daughter at least was set to enjoy her life. How many students, after all, were as privileged as she was?

Our father found us a quiet three-and-a-half-room basement apartment in the neighborhood of Talpioth, and flew off to Italy—two years later he decided to let me know in an airmail letter that, prior to moving to Italy, he had not been in contact with Gemma and, in fact, in his terrible grief, hadn’t even remembered that this former pension guest lived in the city of Verona, where he’d since settled down.

“A marvelous coincidence brought us face to face among all the thousands of people at the entrance to the arena,” he wrote to me. “And even then I, like Job, doubted whether I was fit for a new life.” I assumed that he was lying, but at this stage I had already cut myself off to such an extent that I only wondered why he had even taken the trouble to lie to me.

Later on he latched onto Elisheva’s “new life” in order to justify his right “to devote the few years I still have left to try and create a little corner of peace and beauty.” After that I no longer replied to his preening letters with their curlicues and circles for dots. I was revolted by his grandiose handwriting just as I was revolted by the words themselves, and I hoped that he would give up and leave me alone.

I registered in the English Literature department, and in this, and only this, the prophesies of the deserter came true: the clever daughter did indeed enjoy her studies. I enjoyed sitting in the lecture halls in an atmosphere of order and knowledge. I read a lot more than I was required to. I loved the excitement of the carefully chosen words, and no less the theories that calmed the storm in a completely different language.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” I would declaim when I stood up and when I sat down and when I went on my way. “The art of losing isn’t hard . . .” I declaimed until it was almost an article of faith.

But Elisheva increasingly failed to acquire this faith. At first she stopped going to both her group therapy and her new psychologist. The first excuses she made were still couched in acceptable terms: a stomach ache, the worst heat wave in years, an ingrown toenail that turned every step into torture. But then, gradually, she stopped going out of the house, and her reasons grew weirder and weirder: People could see through her. The day was too fine. The light was too bright, everything was like glass, and through glass people could see everything. Didn’t I understand? There were types. Like colors. Luckily I, her sister, was made of blue, because blue was the outside, the outside was blue and you didn’t notice blue against the blue.

As soon as she started talking like this I understood that she meant that people could see the abuse on her, and I couldn’t avoid the thought that in a certain sense she was right. Slow, dragging her feet, blinking even more than she used to, her large breasts emphasized by the sailor collars or the lace collars in one of the exotic costumes my mother had bought her, her fleshy shoulders making a kind of little hump under her blouse—the word “victim” was branded on her. And back when she still left the house from time to time, and went to the grocery store, visions of horror appeared before my eyes—a van slowed down next to my sister and started following her, a gang of teenagers accosted her and barred her way, at first as a game and then as something else—that kind of thing. And sometimes, because of these hallucinations, I went with her.

She spent her days in front of the huge television set that had accompanied us from the pension, watching children’s programs. Staring at the screen, eating bread, bread and hummus, bread and chocolate spread. Slicing the loaf, and then as if absent-mindedly, rolling the slice into a kind of doughy sausage, dipping it in the spread, and cramming it into her mouth. Whenever I went out she would remind me in a fawning tone to bring her more bread, and even when I filled the freezer with loaves of bread she didn’t stop. “What if you don’t come back, what if you can’t come back . . .” she would reply when I asked her for a logical explanation.

Every departure from the apartment and every return to it became a nightmare. Her eyes blinked at me anxiously from the armchair when I picked up my bag. Puppyish joy flooded her when I came in the door. Her attempts to please me. Her unintentional spite.

Once it occurred to her that if she dyed her hair black like mine, the black would help her. The idea became fixed in her mind, and after she repeated it again and again, I went and bought the dye and helped her color her hair. That night she went to sleep happy smelling of chemicals—shampooing with a lemon rinse failed to get rid of the smell, but at least she went to sleep and didn’t keep me awake all night. She said she knew that in the morning everything would be different. And the next morning the same terrified eyes accompanied me to the door.

Most of the time I didn’t know what to talk to her about, and I would babble on at random about whatever object came into my head: cheese with holes, cheese without holes, why did cheese have holes? Years before I invented Alice, I learned to inflate the figures of a bus driver and an old lady with a parasol, until they turned into colorful plastic dolls, which I brought my sister as a gift.

But sometimes I would go straight from the door to my room, and lock myself in until the next day.

For a few weeks I tried to read out loud to her from the list of required reading for the English Literature course. Comic passages from Chaucer, Shakespeare’s sonnets, secular and religious poems by Donne, Dylan Thomas.

“After the first death there is no other,” I pronounced. Elisheva didn’t move, but my blood turned cold. I couldn’t determine whether this conclusion of Dylan Thomas’s poem was a promise or a consolation or a threat, but it was clear to me that it wasn’t suitable, and in the days to come I was more careful and selective in my readings.

One night I read to her in a flat voice intended to put the poetry of the “Ancient Mariner” to sleep.

“Water, water every where / And all the boards did shrink / Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink.”

My voice was so dull that I myself stopped paying any attention to the words, and I went on intoning Coleridge night after night until in the end, not the same night, but out of the blue, one day in the kitchen, my sister informed me that “she didn’t really like being read to.”

A few days later, when I had finished swallowing the insult, I started reading my lecture notes to her, to which she didn’t object. It even seemed to me that she was taking an interest, but I never knew for certain. And all the time I was afraid that my sister, the student with difficulties, was only trying to please me.

Her passivity drove me to despair. Most of the time she only spoke back to me when I hurled strong words of my own at her. And nevertheless one Saturday, when I was absorbed in writing a seminar paper, she came into my room and without any logical connection, asked if I knew whether Schopenhauer was “someone real who lived.”

“Who?”

“Schopenhauer.” She had always had an excellent memory for names.

“He was a German philosopher,” I summed up everything I knew for her. “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. No reason,” she replied noncommittally, and went back to the living room to knead her bread into dough. In spite of her disinterested tone I decided to see in the surprising question evidence of some mental awakening, which provided me with a reason to linger for an hour and a half in the library the next day. In the evening I brought my notes from “The Great Philosophers” into the kitchen and tried to tell her what I had learned, but she looked so blank and miserable that I stopped immediately.

“Why did you ask me about Schopenhauer if it doesn’t interest you at all? I was stuck in the library for hours just because of you.”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“Never mind about forgiving you. What exactly got into your head?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

I looked at her, and only then, at a criminal delay of nearly twenty-four hours, I realized who it was who had entered her head. Because where else could she had heard about Schopenhauer? Certainly not in the children’s programs on television. I knew, and I didn’t want to know.

“All right, only next time don’t ask me about things that don’t interest you. If you’re not interested—don’t ask.”

“Sorry . . .”

•

But there were also, of course there were, happier moments. One afternoon when I came home I discovered that she had prepared a surprise for me, she had taken all my trousers out of the closet and hemmed them all at exactly the right fashionable length. Or another time, when she embroidered a purple flower on my jeans by request.

One day she questioned me with untoward severity about the people I was seeing, and added that she hoped that I was “keeping company only with good people.”

Sometimes she came out with funny, infantile sayings, such as: “You’re a bread tiger. You’re a tigress that goes out to hunt bread for us,” and then for a moment it seemed the it was all a game, that the two of us had gone back to being little girls again, and she was only playing, and in a moment the game would be over.

But for the sleepless nights, perhaps I would have lasted longer than I did. But for the sleepless nights and for the malicious obsequiousness with which she innocently tortured me. How beautiful I was, how beautiful my hair was. Why wasn’t I happy? Wasn’t I happy to be so beautiful? Wasn’t I happy not to be “one of the downstairs people?”

She referred frequently to “the downstairs people,” and in the beginning I thought she was referring to our neighbors in the ground floor apartment opposite us. But of course she wasn’t talking about them.

My sister never explained to me who the “downstairs people” were, as if it were self-evident to us and to the rest of the world, just as we all understood what a lamp was and what a table was.

“The upstairs people” were at liberty to go out whenever they wished, while even on the clearest and finest of days “the downstairs people” were sentenced to sit in a three-and-a-half-room basement apartment with the blinds down and watch old episodes of Sesame Street.

Wasn’t I happy that from the day I was born and by my very nature I had not been sentenced to bring down the blind, or, more clearly, in words she never pronounced: Aren’t you happy you’re not like me?

And there was something else, and perhaps it was this that really finished me off: my role as the one who had believed her from the outset.

Weeks after the meeting during which, under medical confidentiality and the protection of the psychologist, Elisheva told them what had happened to her, my parents had not yet made up their minds whether their daughter was telling the truth. Whereas I, after hearing their abbreviated account, believed her at once, and later on, after she was discharged from the hospital, I found a way to prove it to both of them and to rub their faces in the truth.

Until I rubbed their faces in it, they said things like: “Not that we doubt what she says, but still, it’s a fact that to this day no one has complained about him.”

Or: “What sense does it make for a respectable man of his age, a man who never lacked for women—what sense does it make for such a charming man to molest a child?”

Things like: “From what we saw, and we can only judge from that, he treated her like a little lady. Don’t you remember the orchid? And the way he stood up whenever she approached the table to serve him? And how patiently he tried to help her with her homework? Perhaps he exaggerated a little, and she was confused by his gentlemanly European manners? Perhaps she misunderstood him and began to develop all kinds of hopes and fantasies? Perhaps we sinned by thoughtlessness, by not imagining how a young girl like her was liable to interpret that kind of attention from an interesting man. We should have told him to behave differently with her. That was apparently our sin, that we didn’t say anything to him.”

And mainly they kept repeating, to each other and to me, pious declarations such as: “We shouldn’t be in a hurry to judge. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial and we won’t hold a kangaroo court here. Maybe all kinds of inconceivable things happened, but sometimes it takes time for the truth to come out. We hear what she says now, but in the future, after she gets well, who knows . . .?”

But I, who made my judgment immediately and who had no doubts, succeeded in proving the truth of the one fact that they both tended in particular to deny.

This is what I did: Elisheva didn’t remember, or perhaps she didn’t know the name of the doctor to whom her rapist had taken her to perform an abortion. About which they both said to me: “What doctor would do such a thing without the father and the mother? Why would any doctor take the risk? And supposing something so shocking and inconceivable actually happened, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that he would have taken her to some out of town clinic? Because according to what she says it took place here, in Jerusalem.”

My sister couldn’t tell us the name of the doctor, but one Saturday when the two of us were alone in our room, it turned out that she remembered the place where he operated on her perfectly well. Not the exact address, but a more or less exact description. Not a stone house, the outside wall covered in pale yellow stucco, a little street into which the taxi had turned from Palmach Street.

I took the Yellow Pages from the office desk, found a gynecologist who worked in Hachovshim Street, and in my father’s presence, without our mother or Elisheva, I called the clinic. I told the secretary that it was Elisheva Gotthilf speaking, and that I wanted to make an appointment. “I already consulted him once, about a pregnancy,” I added, and in the same breath I asked her to check and see if my medical file was there.

That’s what I did, trembling all over, that’s all, no more. And what I did was enough. Although even after the existence of the medical file was proved, they could, on principle at least, have gone on contorting themselves in additional doubts and hesitations. They simply no longer had the strength to keep up their denial.

When finally dispelled their doubts, our parents started to blame each other for what they called “our calamity”—“Your cousin,” “Your refusal to sell this accursed place and get the girls out of here,” “Your blindness,” “All the times I begged you to sell. You know yourself how I pleaded with you.” And so on, until Erica fled the scene with another bout of sickness.

I imagine that it was the confrontation with the truth that pushed her into the arms of the Digoxin. And I don’t care. After years of hypochondria, at least she died of a genuine heart disease.

The important thing is that Elisheva couldn’t avoid sensing their disbelief. Even though they never expressed it to her in so many words. And no less important is that from the outset she received my explicit and unconditional belief. I was the one who believed it all immediately, and this being the case, it was up to me to go on believing her: even when she talked about people who were blue, and days when the dangers outside were particularly grave.

Her wounded eyes never left me, begging for my belief, and I was incapable of betraying the belief that she begged for. This is my explanation for what happened in me, I have no other, and what happened was that gradually I began to see reality as if through her eyes, and even when I was sitting in class at the university, far from her, my eyes would seek out the “downstairs people” and separate them from the others: the boy with the big backside who jiggled his legs until the desk shook and couldn’t stop; the girl whose facial skin was stretched in the direction of her ears by hidden screws. How did they dare go out on this fine day and come and sit among us?

I beat around the bush, sat myself in a classroom among strangers, and accused myself of trivialities, simply in order to put off admitting the most shameful thing of all. And the most shameful thing of all, the most despicable, is that drop by drop I absorbed my sister’s beliefs until I began to see her as she saw herself, and for longer and longer stretches of time I put her in a different category from myself, as if she had been born into another race. She said that she was ugly, and I looked at her and saw ugliness. She believed that people like her shouldn’t go out, and I was embarrassed by the thought of walking next to her in the street and being associated with her.

As sleepless night followed sleepless night I found myself turning into a creature made of blue, and into one of the “upstairs people.” I began to see myself as being of a different substance, destined for a separate fate, naturally and essentially different from her sister-by-accident. It was a fact that I had been endowed from birth with a quick mind and a firm resolve. A fact that I knew how to say “I’m not having my photo taken.”

I didn’t see things like this all the time. There were also times of tender compassion and times when I was seized by a terrible, wrenching pity. There were definitely moments when I succeeded in conjuring up memories of a hand holding mine, and an older sister who insisted on bathing me. But these hours and moments grew fewer and fewer, and my pity for myself—sentenced as I was to live at close quarters with someone of her kind—increasingly filled the space left by that other pity. I was revolted by her flip-flops decorated with plastic flowers, by the movements with which she shook crumbs off her clothes, and by the way she came too close to me in the kitchen. I loathed the electric light in the apartment, the stupid sound of the television, and the pleas that stuck to me even when I went out. It happened that I cruelly refused to tell her when I was coming back.

And once it happened that I came home very late. It didn’t just “happen.” “Happen” means “happenstance.” I deliberately came back hours late.

I don’t remember how much vodka I downed in order to steel myself for this piece of cruelty, but I know very well that when I was already back in the apartment I crawled on all fours to the bathroom to vomit my guts out, and that the frightened Elisheva followed me like a shadow with a damp cloth and a glass of water. I told her that I had been attacked by a virus on my way home, “it’s nothing, it’s just a virus,” and she of course believed me, because in our folie à deux we believed everything and the deal was mutual.