Lies, First Person. Gail Hareven
A persona. A persona on vacation, in a jacket with leather elbow patches.
Is that enough? For me it’s definitely enough, and even if it isn’t enough, how the hell am I supposed to remember exactly how he looked to me then, when all my memories are colored by what happened afterward? Am I supposed to fabricate a description of Satan in order to convince you that he exists?
He came. He was there, he sat there in the dining room—all these are facts. And I wondered in my embarrassment whether to wait for my mother or to go up to him and introduce myself, or not to introduce myself and simply to ask in a professional manner if he wanted tea or coffee. In any case the water hadn’t boiled yet.
Is that important? What’s important?
It’s important that he stayed with us for almost six months, and that during this time he raped my sister consistently.
It’s important that after he got her pregnant, he arranged for her to have an abortion and, immediately afterward, when she was still bleeding, he raped her again. He was turned on by the blood. And by her pain. Do I have to go into detail about that too? And why, exactly? In order to justify myself and what I did years later? In order to justify myself do I have to paint a close-up picture of my sister with a tear trickling down her round baby face? Or perhaps I should paint her holding a teddy bear, like in the pictures they publish in the papers to illustrate a story about child abuse? Elisheva didn’t have a teddy bear. She collected make-up and little scent bottles, empty ones too, and she’d left her toys behind her a long time ago.
She actually had chubby cheeks, but at the time in question she suffered from adolescent pimples, which my mother forbade her to squeeze. She never had a lot of pimples, only a few, but for people like Alice it only takes a hint of that yellow pus to spoil the whole picture.
This story can be briefly told, the facts can be summed up as follows: he raped her consistently, but two years passed before she broke down. It happened when she was already in boot camp, and more time passed before she spoke about it, first to her psychologist in the mental hospital, and afterward to us. But up till then her weight gain and all the other symptoms of depression were attributed to her difficulties in school and her fear of the few matriculation exams that she sat for. We found this explanation convenient, and even when the psychologist invited my parents to come in for a joint session, they refused to believe it, at first anyway: my sister was crazy, and crazy people invent all kinds of things. To the important psychologist they said nothing, of course, they only made shocked noises, but I understood that they didn’t believe it and I was the one who had to make them believe.
That’s it, that’s the whole story. Except that after I made them believe it, my mother took off with Digoxin, my father got on a plane to Italy, and I stayed with my sister until I couldn’t stay with her another minute. And that’s really everything.
Really everything?
When my mother came into the dining room, perfectly made up, she introduced me to my uncle immediately: “You haven’t yet met our clever Elinor.”
“Elinor and Elisheva,” he said in his strange accent. “Two daughters. Eli and Eli.” And then, as if playfully, he took my hand and lifted it to his mouth, and fixing me with a colorless stare under half-lidded, he kissed it.
- 6 -
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