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
