an event that was over in a few seconds as a great drama is pointless, and in most cases is also a kind of lie: true betrayal creeps up slowly and lasts longer.
Traitors have hour after hour, day after day, in which they could choose differently.
Reality as it is, is never concentrated into one symbolic picture, and focusing the eye on a single picture is nothing but a literary device; an impudent sleight of hand, just like directing our attention to a bit of dust so we won’t notice the other dirt.
No, I won’t exaggerate the significance of this event or inflate its symbolism. It’s true that after Oded told me about the intrusion of the snake, this picture stuck in my mind, that’s true, but the mind is a capricious organ, and one of its caprices, one of its associative twists, certainly doesn’t account for the entire unfolding of my plot.
Be that as it may, this was the picture I thought about, this was the one that stuck in my mind, and by the time Oded, fresh and pink, emerged from the shower, I knew what I had to do.
“I have to talk to Elisheva.”
Tired from the day’s work and the scalding water he likes to shower in, my husband confirmed I might be right, if that’s how I really felt, and somehow it seemed to me that he hadn’t understood what I said. “We have to warn her,” I added, “if he found us, he might find her too. These days you can find anyone.”
Only about an hour later, when his breathing turned into the breathing of sleep, I realized that he still hadn’t understood, and I said out loud: “What I meant to say is that I’m going to go see her in America.”
- 9 -
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
