As soon as she started talking like this I understood that she meant that people could see the abuse on her, and I couldn’t avoid the thought that in a certain sense she was right. Slow, dragging her feet, blinking even more than she used to, her large breasts emphasized by the sailor collars or the lace collars in one of the exotic costumes my mother had bought her, her fleshy shoulders making a kind of little hump under her blouse—the word “victim” was branded on her. And back when she still left the house from time to time, and went to the grocery store, visions of horror appeared before my eyes—a van slowed down next to my sister and started following her, a gang of teenagers accosted her and barred her way, at first as a game and then as something else—that kind of thing. And sometimes, because of these hallucinations, I went with her.
She spent her days in front of the huge television set that had accompanied us from the pension, watching children’s programs. Staring at the screen, eating bread, bread and hummus, bread and chocolate spread. Slicing the loaf, and then as if absent-mindedly, rolling the slice into a kind of doughy sausage, dipping it in the spread, and cramming it into her mouth. Whenever I went out she would remind me in a fawning tone to bring her more bread, and even when I filled the freezer with loaves of bread she didn’t stop. “What if you don’t come back, what if you can’t come back . . .” she would reply when I asked her for a logical explanation.
Every departure from the apartment and every return to it became a nightmare. Her eyes blinked at me anxiously from the armchair when I picked up my bag. Puppyish joy flooded her when I came in the door. Her attempts to please me. Her unintentional spite.
Once it occurred to her that if she dyed her hair black like mine, the black would help her. The idea became fixed in her mind, and after she repeated it again and again, I went and bought the dye and helped her color her hair. That night she went to sleep happy smelling of chemicals—shampooing with a lemon rinse failed to get rid of the smell, but at least she went to sleep and didn’t keep me awake all night. She said she knew that in the morning everything would be different. And the next morning the same terrified eyes accompanied me to the door.
Most of the time I didn’t know what to talk to her about, and I would babble on at random about whatever object came into my head: cheese with holes, cheese without holes, why did cheese have holes? Years before I invented Alice, I learned to inflate the figures of a bus driver and an old lady with a parasol, until they turned into colorful plastic dolls, which I brought my sister as a gift.
But sometimes I would go straight from the door to my room, and lock myself in until the next day.
For a few weeks I tried to read out loud to her from the list of required reading for the English Literature course. Comic passages from Chaucer, Shakespeare’s sonnets, secular and religious poems by Donne, Dylan Thomas.
“After the first death there is no other,” I pronounced. Elisheva didn’t move, but my blood turned cold. I couldn’t determine whether this conclusion of Dylan Thomas’s poem was a promise or a consolation or a threat, but it was clear to me that it wasn’t suitable, and in the days to come I was more careful and selective in my readings.
One night I read to her in a flat voice intended to put the poetry of the “Ancient Mariner” to sleep.
“Water, water every where / And all the boards did shrink / Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink.”
My voice was so dull that I myself stopped paying any attention to the words, and I went on intoning Coleridge night after night until in the end, not the same night, but out of the blue, one day in the kitchen, my sister informed me that “she didn’t really like being read to.”
A few days later, when I had finished swallowing the insult, I started reading my lecture notes to her, to which she didn’t object. It even seemed to me that she was taking an interest, but I never knew for certain. And all the time I was afraid that my sister, the student with difficulties, was only trying to please me.
Her passivity drove me to despair. Most of the time she only spoke back to me when I hurled strong words of my own at her. And nevertheless one Saturday, when I was absorbed in writing a seminar paper, she came into my room and without any logical connection, asked if I knew whether Schopenhauer was “someone real who lived.”
“Who?”
“Schopenhauer.” She had always had an excellent memory for names.
“He was a German philosopher,” I summed up everything I knew for her. “Why do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. No reason,” she replied noncommittally, and went back to the living room to knead her bread into dough. In spite of her disinterested tone I decided to see in the surprising question evidence of some mental awakening, which provided me with a reason to linger for an hour and a half in the library the next day. In the evening I brought my notes from “The Great Philosophers” into the kitchen and tried to tell her what I had learned, but she looked so blank and miserable that I stopped immediately.
“Why did you ask me about Schopenhauer if it doesn’t interest you at all? I was stuck in the library for hours just because of you.”
“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
“Never mind about forgiving you. What exactly got into your head?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry.”
I looked at her, and only then, at a criminal delay of nearly twenty-four hours, I realized who it was who had entered her head. Because where else could she had heard about Schopenhauer? Certainly not in the children’s programs on television. I knew, and I didn’t want to know.
“All right, only next time don’t ask me about things that don’t interest you. If you’re not interested—don’t ask.”
“Sorry . . .”
•
But there were also, of course there were, happier moments. One afternoon when I came home I discovered that she had prepared a surprise for me, she had taken all my trousers out of the closet and hemmed them all at exactly the 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