right fashionable length. Or another time, when she embroidered a purple flower on my jeans by request.
One day she questioned me with untoward severity about the people I was seeing, and added that she hoped that I was “keeping company only with good people.”
Sometimes she came out with funny, infantile sayings, such as: “You’re a bread tiger. You’re a tigress that goes out to hunt bread for us,” and then for a moment it seemed the it was all a game, that the two of us had gone back to being little girls again, and she was only playing, and in a moment the game would be over.
But for the sleepless nights, perhaps I would have lasted longer than I did. But for the sleepless nights and for the malicious obsequiousness with which she innocently tortured me. How beautiful I was, how beautiful my hair was. Why wasn’t I happy? Wasn’t I happy to be so beautiful? Wasn’t I happy not to be “one of the downstairs people?”
She referred frequently to “the downstairs people,” and in the beginning I thought she was referring to our neighbors in the ground floor apartment opposite us. But of course she wasn’t talking about them.
My sister never explained to me who the “downstairs people” were, as if it were self-evident to us and to the rest of the world, just as we all understood what a lamp was and what a table was.
“The upstairs people” were at liberty to go out whenever they wished, while even on the clearest and finest of days “the downstairs people” were sentenced to sit in a three-and-a-half-room basement apartment with the blinds down and watch old episodes of Sesame Street.
Wasn’t I happy that from the day I was born and by my very nature I had not been sentenced to bring down the blind, or, more clearly, in words she never pronounced: Aren’t you happy you’re not like me?
And there was something else, and perhaps it was this that really finished me off: my role as the one who had believed her from the outset.
Weeks after the meeting during which, under medical confidentiality and the protection of the psychologist, Elisheva told them what had happened to her, my parents had not yet made up their minds whether their daughter was telling the truth. Whereas I, after hearing their abbreviated account, believed her at once, and later on, after she was discharged from the hospital, I found a way to prove it to both of them and to rub their faces in the truth.
Until I rubbed their faces in it, they said things like: “Not that we doubt what she says, but still, it’s a fact that to this day no one has complained about him.”
Or: “What sense does it make for a respectable man of his age, a man who never lacked for women—what sense does it make for such a charming man to molest a child?”
Things like: “From what we saw, and we can only judge from that, he treated her like a little lady. Don’t you remember the orchid? And the way he stood up whenever she approached the table to serve him? And how patiently he tried to help her with her homework? Perhaps he exaggerated a little, and she was confused by his gentlemanly European manners? Perhaps she misunderstood him and began to develop all kinds of hopes and fantasies? Perhaps we sinned by thoughtlessness, by not imagining how a young girl like her was liable to interpret that kind of attention from an interesting man. We should have told him to behave differently with her. That was apparently our sin, that we didn’t say anything to him.”
And mainly they kept repeating, to each other and to me, pious declarations such as: “We shouldn’t be in a hurry to judge. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial and we won’t hold a kangaroo court here. Maybe all kinds of inconceivable things happened, but sometimes it takes time for the truth to come out. We hear what she says now, but in the future, after she gets well, who knows . . .?”
But I, who made my judgment immediately and who had no doubts, succeeded in proving the truth of the one fact that they both tended in particular to deny.
This is what I did: Elisheva didn’t remember, or perhaps she didn’t know the name of the doctor to whom her rapist had taken her to perform an abortion. About which they both said to me: “What doctor would do such a thing without the father and the mother? Why would any doctor take the risk? And supposing something so shocking and inconceivable actually happened, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that he would have taken her to some out of town clinic? Because according to what she says it took place here, in Jerusalem.”
My sister couldn’t tell us the name of the doctor, but one Saturday when the two of us were alone in our room, it turned out that she remembered the place where he operated on her perfectly well. Not the exact address, but a more or less exact description. Not a stone house, the outside wall covered in pale yellow stucco, a little street into which the taxi had turned from Palmach Street.
I took the Yellow Pages from the office desk, found a gynecologist who worked in Hachovshim Street, and in my father’s presence, without our mother or Elisheva, I called the clinic. I told the secretary that it was Elisheva Gotthilf speaking, and that I wanted to make an appointment. “I already consulted him once, about a pregnancy,” I added, and in the same breath I asked her to check and see if my medical file was there.
That’s what I did, trembling all over, that’s all, no more. And what I did was enough. Although even after the existence of the medical file was proved, they could, on principle at least, have gone on contorting themselves in additional doubts and hesitations. They simply no longer had the strength to keep up their denial.
When finally dispelled their doubts, our parents started to blame each other for what they called “our calamity”—“Your cousin,” “Your refusal to sell this accursed place and get the girls out of here,” “Your blindness,” “All the times I begged you to sell. You know yourself how I pleaded with you.” And so on, until Erica fled the scene with another bout of sickness.
I imagine that it was the confrontation with the truth that pushed her into the arms of the Digoxin. And I don’t care. After years of hypochondria, at least she died of a genuine heart disease.
The important thing is that Elisheva couldn’t avoid sensing their disbelief. Even though they never expressed it to her in so many words. And no less important is that from the outset she received my explicit and unconditional belief. I was the one who believed it all immediately, and this being the case, it was up to me to go on believing her: even when she talked about people who were blue, and days when the dangers outside were particularly grave.
Her wounded eyes never left me, begging for my belief, and I was incapable of betraying the belief that she begged for. This is my explanation for what happened in me, I have no other, and what happened was that gradually I began to see reality as if through her eyes, and even when I was sitting in class at the university, far from her, my eyes would seek out the “downstairs people” and separate them from the others: the boy with the big backside who jiggled his legs until the desk shook and couldn’t stop; the girl whose facial skin was stretched in the direction of her ears by hidden screws. How did they dare go out on this fine day and come and sit among us?
I beat around the bush, sat myself in a classroom among strangers, and accused myself of trivialities, simply in order to put off admitting the most shameful thing of all. And the most shameful thing of all, the most despicable, is that drop by drop I absorbed my sister’s beliefs until I began to see her as she saw herself, and for longer and longer stretches of time I put her in a different category from myself, as if she had been born into another race. She said that she was ugly, and I looked at her and saw ugliness. She believed that people like her shouldn’t go out, and I was embarrassed by the thought of walking next to her in the street and being associated with her.
As
