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.”
- 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.
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