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.
