It took him almost two weeks, after the first rain fell, and perhaps it wasn’t the first real rain of the year but only a summer shower, because it was still hot. We left the windows open, and with the fresh air that came in he said, “Elinor, there’s something I should have told you before, it’s just that I’m such an idiot I didn’t know how. I received an email. That man sent me an email to the office.”
“That man,” he called him, and there was no need to explain who he meant. Innocent and blind as a puppy, my Oded expected me to ask immediately, “What did he write?” but I was unable to hear a word. The blindness, the wicked blindness of my good husband threatened me where I lived. And it was clear to me that if I didn’t open my husband’s eyes we would fall, fall deep underground: we had already begun to fall.
And so, instead of asking “What did he write?” I demanded: “When? When exactly did you get it? What’s ‘a few days ago’? How many days? What were you thinking? When exactly were you going to tell me? How dare you not tell me? By what right?”
Oded rubbed his brow and apologized again, and again admitted that he had behaved like a fool.
“But explain to me, explain to me what you were thinking? How could you come into the house every evening and know that you were going to lie to me?”
“Lie to you?”
“Not tell me the truth. What else would you call it?”
Oded’s thick eyebrows bristled with all the rubbing, lending him the air of an angry troll. The bristling gray hairs did not suit the neatness of his close-cropped head, but I did not lick my thumb to smooth and straighten them.
“Sorry,” he said. “Look at me, Elinor. Look at me. 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