“Hysteria,” pronounces the Yiddish singer calmly, “with her it’s simply hysteria, we’ve seen it all before.”
“Manipulations,” whispers Gemma, the amateur painter from Verona, to her English girlfriend. “That’s how she controls her husband.”
“Problem with regulation of the spleen,” announces the guest who claims he was a very great doctor in Georgia, and my father looks gratified as the three of us are given a picturesque lesson on the gall bladder and its effluents.
But no doctor confirms my mother’s self-diagnosis, according to which she suffers from a sick heart. In one of the emergency rooms somebody once mentions “anxiety attacks.” At the age of seven or eight I learn the word “hypochondria,” but when I use it, my father scolds me for a crudeness he would not have expected to hear from his clever daughter. The soul, he tells me, is mysterious and as delicate as a spider web.
“Who are we and what are we to judge our fellows,” he adds to the Jesuit who is sitting with us. And to me he continues: “What would help your mother is for all of us to go and live in Italy. For a refugee like me, everywhere is both exile and home, but for your mother’s nerves, a quiet village in Italy would be best.”
“Hypochondriac, hypochondriac, hypochondriac,” I chant in spite of him after the two of them have left the table.
“Hypochondriac,” I insist over the remains of their breakfast, which I have already made up my mind not to clear away.
When did my mother begin to treat herself with Digoxin? Who was the criminal doctor who prescribed Digoxin for a woman who was physically healthy? Did she swallow these pills for years in secret like a junkie, producing the terrible vomiting and irregular heartbeat that won her a bed in all the emergency rooms of the city?
“Doctors don’t understand anything,” she liked to say. Perhaps it was only after she understood what had happened to my sister that she began to use the drug seriously, because it can’t be possible that she took it consistently for years, certainly not in lethal amounts, perhaps only one pampering pill from time to time, and straight to the hospital for a few hours of pleasurable care and concern.
“Do you think she took those pills to make herself sick, or that she really believed that she had a cardiac disease and that they’d cure her?” Oded asked me once, a long time ago. And he went on probing: “Do you think it was connected to what happened to your sister?” This was soon after we met, in the period when I was still running around and saying things to people I’d just met such as: “My mother’s dead. She poisoned herself,” and “My mother was a junkie, she killed herself with prescription drugs.” I would say things like this and smile.
“Don’t you get that I’m not interested in what it’s connected to? That I really, really don’t give a damn?” I growled at my well-meaning boyfriend. “That woman nearly ruined my life, that’s what she did. So do you expect me to understand what went on in her head? There’s nothing to understand and I don’t want to go anywhere near her head. Or maybe you expect me to feel sorry for her too? Is that what you think? That I should pity her? Empathize?”
Oded didn’t protest or argue. My love accepted it, like he accepted everything, without questioning or nagging. He simply let it go, he set my mind at rest, and cradled me until I learned to sleep for nine hours at a stretch to the lullaby of his no-no-no-I-shall-fear-no-evil, for he was with me.
•
My pigtail-sucking Alice is a perfect idiot and a chronic faker. She isn’t capable of producing a single straightforward sentence, and her description of my childhood is, of course, completely false. That’s what she’s like, that’s how I created her, and I take full responsibility for her falsifications and for the small pleasures they afforded me.
But what about my own account? Is it truer? More reliable? Was my childhood really as grim as I describe it? Were there no moments of grace in it? No dewy lawns of happiness?
You could say that I came out okay: I’m sane most of the time, functioning, and I raised two good sons well enough. By any accepted criterion I’m okay, and accordingly any reasonable person would assume that my parents did a few things right, and that there were presumably also a few corners of light in Pension Gotthilf. Because anything else is impossible. Impossible that there were no corners of light. Logic says there were. Perhaps later events cast their shadow backward, and perhaps this shadow makes me see my entire childhood as black.
Words of wisdom such as these were offered by Rachel, my mother-in-law, when we told her, only a little and in general, about my past—and what can I say? Maybe there was something good, too. Let’s say there was. I’m prepared to admit that there was. But how does this good that may have existed help me, how does it help me if I don’t remember any of it? What I do remember and know for certain is that from a very young age I began to calculate and calculate how long I would have to go on staying with my family until I could be free of them.
My mother, it seems, was not the only one who wanted to get away, and perhaps the need to get away is in my genes.
•
“Tomorrow your mother will feel better and the three of you will go to buy coats fit for princesses,” promised Shaya, and the coats were indeed bought at the WIZO shop, even though it was the beginning of summer.
My father hoarded books, and my mother, Erica, collected theatrical clothes. Her sartorial inclinations always met my father’s fantasies, and her closets were stuffed with exotic garments. The fair-haired elder daughter loved being dressed, and even as a young girl she adored having her hair combed. Her eyelids stopped twitching then, and her green eyes slowly closed, leaving slits like a cat’s.
Alice described my sister as “slow,” which was also the word used by our parents, as if they wanted and didn’t want to say “retarded.” But my sister wasn’t retarded. Elisheva’s movements were perhaps a little strange, the way she held a pencil awkward, and simple arithmetic exercises made her cry. And nevertheless, I am sure that today nobody would have kept her back a class in school or pushed her into the vocational track. Because, for example, in spite of her oddities, she loved to read, and not only books for girls but also, and above all historical romances: I remember her poring over old volumes of Ivanhoe and Quo Vadis. She read very slowly, it took her months to finish a book. When asked to read aloud she would pronounce the words with the exaggerated emphasis of a kindergarten teacher, and stress the wrong words in the sentence, but she understood what she read very well, and found interest in it; Elisheva learned English easily simply by listening to the guests, and she also knew how to recognize birds by their calls, which I myself never succeeded in doing; she remembered the names of people who had only stayed with us a single night; and after her breakdown, through her cracks, my sister shed a stream of statements that were terrible in their accuracy. “I’m your Jew,” she said to me.
“What do you mean?”
“That I’m your Jew. So because you’re a good person, you look after me and keep me from dying again. But what you would really like in your heart is for there to be no Jews. You won’t let anyone hurt me, but in your heart of hearts you’re revolted by me, for not being born like you.”
A cold summer afternoon. My sister stands in the yard, wearing a red coat trimmed with fake black fur. Her eyes are covered with a dark scarf and she holds out blind hands to catch a rubber ball. Jamie the acrobat, a minor performer in the street shows of the Jerusalem Festival, speaks to her in English, with a Scottish accent she can barely understand—the acrobat is neither deaf nor dumb. The handicap is a whimsical fiction of Alice’s—and Elisheva turns her body in the direction of his voice. My sister isn’t laughing, neither laughter like the chiming of bells nor any other kind of laughter. Her fleshy shoulders are thrust forward, her hands stretched out stiffly, suspended in the air. A cold wind makes the clouds