“First of all because it’s my sister’s rape, not mine, okay? That’s the first thing. And apart from that . . . Never mind.”
“Apart from that—what?”
“Forget it.”
“No, tell me.”
“Apart from that you’re a man. Can you honestly tell me that you never fantasized about rape? Can you tell me that your imagination never wanted, even a little, to look and see? That’s not a real question, so you don’t need to answer it.”
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. Oded Brandeis, salt of the earth, black belt in the gifted students track of the University High School, graduate with the distinction of a paratrooper commando unit, volunteer in a legal clinic in the Negev—Oded Brandeis was offended.
We met during the end-of-year exams, and the guy took the evening off to drive me to a spot on top of the Mount of Olives where he had only taken one girl he loved before. He brought a pique blanket for us to sit on and a bottle of white wine, and offered me the nocturnal view as if it belonged to him and he was free to give it away for nothing.
If people in this world got what they deserved he would have given me my marching orders on the spot. After jumping on him like that I deserved to have him cross me off the map. But in our world people don’t get what they deserve, and the sudden ferocity of my attack didn’t prompt him to get rid of me, but somehow made me more interesting in his eyes. Later on, when he dropped me off outside my apartment next to the market, I apologized, and he accepted my apology like an aristocrat: he made the broad, sweeping gesture of a man who can permit himself anything, even a crazy woman, even though it was clear that he was alarmed. Because not only was my ferocity intimidating, but my entire manner of speech. I said: “My sister was raped and she went mad”; “went mad” I said and not “was traumatized” or “suffered a mental breakdown.”
The laws of attraction work deceptively: things are not what they seem. Beneath every marriage contract another document lies hidden, written in invisible ink that only time reveals, and with Oded and me time worked fast on what was hidden from sight.
When we met, Oded was about to complete his studies and was making up his mind whether to do what it was obvious to everyone he would do after he finished making up his mind: first, clerking for Judge Brenner, who was a friend of his father’s, and from there straight to his father’s office to take up his position as the third generation of the firm. But the third generation had, in his words, “second thoughts about the path,” and his thoughts wavered between joining legal aid, changing to studying history, or maybe something else, even more revolutionary, exactly what he didn’t know himself.
When he met me it seemed that he had found his rebellion: a rebellion with spiky hair, a tiger face on its arm, and the exaggerated halo of a kind of desperate kamikaze pilot. Everything about me looked romantic to him: studies leading nowhere in the English Literature department, missing classes, the day I forgot to get out of bed for an exam, the small literary prize I received for a dubious volume of poetry—most of the copies of which I succeeded in destroying in later years. My squalid apartment, the wall I peeled pieces of plaster off, the bits of plaster on the bed, the empty vodka bottles—everything seemed romantic, even my orphaned state was perceived as romantic. I was not the girl suitable to be taken to Friday night dinner with his parents, and precisely for that reason, only a little more than a month after we met, he took me to his parents’ house.
Wise people, Menachem and Rachel, very wise. Is it possible that they read the message in the invisible ink? Did some intuition tell Rachel that the girl in the see-through green tank top with the chopped hair who bit her nails in public till they bled—this girl would give her two grandchildren within the space of three and a half years? And that she would always, always gratefully accept her help in raising them, to the point where their house and ours appeared to be one unit, whose rooms were only accidentally scattered around the town?
Perhaps they were nice simply because it was their nature, certainly Rachel’s nature. And perhaps they considered that any opposition on their part would only fan the flames of their son’s rebelliousness.
Whatever the reason, when I accompanied Oded’s mother to the smell of the pot roast in the kitchen, she took the empty soup bowls from me and put them down, and then, with a twinkle in her eyes she stopped to admire my tattoo: she had never seen one close-up. How beautiful, like an artistic piece of jewelry, even more beautiful, more integrated, definitely more beautiful than jewelry—and with her little hand she stroked my tiger face.
“It suits your arm very well, but tell me, isn’t it awfully painful to have it done?”
Suddenly feeling faint from the smell of the food I shrugged my shoulders, and she, without removing her hand, added something jovial about how much we women were prepared to suffer for the sake of beauty, perhaps it was a question of education, but what could we do? That’s the way we were. She too would like to have a cute little tiger like mine, but she was too old already, and anyway she lacked the courage.
Oded sometimes jokingly claims that that I fell in love with his parents before I fell in love with him. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn’t, but in any case, according to my mythological memory, on that Friday night I already lay down my arms. The cleanliness, the white cleanliness of the house acted on me like a drug as soon as I walked through the door. Without my noticing it made me feel disgusted by the filth of my own apartment, and what’s more it made me yearn for something I had never had and of whose absence I had never been aware; for even before I took up residence in my squalid cave in the marketplace—in my parents’ home, in the boarding school, in all the places where I had ended up, there was nowhere that was really clean, and it was only when I stepped into the quiet whiteness of the Brandeis residence that I could look back and be revolted, and only then did I begin to yearn for this new wonder.
The comfortable cleanliness, which was deep but not sterile, the vaulted white ceilings, the solid, welcoming wooden furniture—everything invited me to lean back, to close my eyes, and sail to a land where nothing bad had ever happened. And I closed my eyes and sailed to that Neverland, because after she had turned my tattoo into an ornament, Oded’s mother went on calmly stroking me without hurrying to the stove. She traced the lines of the predator’s face with her finger, touched the bared fangs, and in parting also gave its nose a friendly little poke. And with this gentle poke I fell asleep and I went on sleeping for a long time, until Aaron Gotthilf came back to ambush me and invade my dreams. For with the passing of time I had succeeded in banishing him from my dreams as well as my waking thoughts.
My lack of a mother and the absence of any other significant relations in my life were the main dowry I brought to my marriage with the Brandeis family. This was not a dowry to be admired out loud, but over the years we all came to appreciate its worth.
Free of parents, I relieved my father- and mother-in-law of the need to share the title “grandparents” with a pair of strangers, and gave them the gift of taking for granted the fact that their son and grandsons spent almost every holiday and Saturday with them. A picture in which they sit around the table with my pre-historic family is not one that I want to imagine. My father squirming and bragging and never still for a minute, the lock of hair stuck to his forehead growing greasy with effort. My mother raising her fair, plucked eyebrows, thin as a hair, in an exaggerated expression of amazement, and raising a hand to her operatically plunging neckline to feel her heart. Disgusting. I don’t want to think about the disgust. For a long time I succeeded in not thinking about it, and I succeeded so well that I was close to believing that we are the masters of our thoughts.
- 3 -
Disgust is a cunning infiltrator; it’s hard to keep its stealthy invasions at bay, and sometimes you have to recruit guards to protect you from them. The guardian of my soul against disgust was the idiotic Alice, the heroine of my newspaper column.
Alice appeared in