When Elisheva broke down and was hospitalized for the first time, I was still in my senior year in high school and, surrounded by a protective wall of friends and activities, I spent most of my time at a relatively safe distance from the family.
When I banished her from our basement apartment to her second hospitalization I was already alone. Our parents had flown. My friends had joined the army, and I had been exempted from this obligation, too, which I had no possibility of meeting.
The way things turned out I didn’t have a single soul I could talk to when Hitler, First Person came down on me in the kitchen like a ton of bricks. And after I destroyed the newspaper, not long after that, somehow or other I decided to live. Somehow or other, the decision was taken to live, live like crazy and as quick-sharp as possible. I left the apartment in Talpioth and threw myself giddily into to all kinds of stimulating experiments. I consumed quantities of alcohol, and men, and wild talk, and ups and downs at night and sleeplessness. One morning, after waking up alone in the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv without remembering exactly how I got there, I snuck outside, and as I wandered the streets my eye fell on a tattoo emporium; I went in and had myself tattooed with my tiger face. It took two days to do it, and in between I fell asleep on a bench in the park among the smell of dog shit. All this isn’t important now, and also irrelevant to Hitler, First Person, which I had started to talk about.
Three years after I met Oded and fell on him with false accusations, he traveled to London for the firm and there, between his real-estate negotiations, he was tempted to buy the book. He bought it, came home, and immediately told me. Presumably he believed that the act of confession would atone for the sin of voyeurism he had committed by reading it.
Alice had not yet been born then, but Yachin was lying at my feet on his baby blanket, and I was already pregnant with Nimrod, although I didn’t yet know it — so my drive to attack had faded to a considerable degree.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“What? The book? I left it in the office. I thought you wouldn’t want it in the house.”
“You thought right. It’s none of my business that you read it, I just don’t have to hear about it,” I said, and a minute later: “Okay. Now that you did it, you’d better tell me about it.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he picked up our son and clasped him like a soft shield to his chest. “I’m not a big expert on literature. I didn’t even finish reading it, it’s over three hundred pages long, and I don’t think I’ll finish it.”
“Is it that dreadful?”
“Dreadful?” My husband deliberated for a moment, and then pronounced the magic word, because of which, and only because of which, even though I have a thousand other reasons — I’ll love him to the end of time. “Boring,” he said.
I’m sure he didn’t understand what made me burst out laughing and go on laughing, but my laughter infected him, and the two of us laughed and laughed until I slid off the sofa and he had to sit down on the carpet with Yachin.
“What did you say? Go on, say it again.”
“Boring,” he repeated.
“Boring,” I bellowed. “Oded Brandeis, you’re one of a kind. Hitler bores you.”
Only when Yachin’s face twisted and turned red did we calm down, even though we went on sitting on the floor. “So now explain to me, please.”
“Look, I don’t know, it’s kind of banal. If it’s supposed to be a mystery, if Hitler’s a mystery, then I didn’t get the impression it was about to be solved. I know this sounds a bit tasteless, but if I think of it as, let’s say, a detective story, then up to now, up to the place I’ve reached in the book, I haven’t understood the motive.”
“Hitler’s motive?”
“Yes. That’s to say, there’s all the usual stuff about the Jews, the vermin, and the cancer, there’s a kind of paranoid person who believes in all those things — which, by the way, poses a certain problem, because if he’s insane and honestly believes that the Jews are a deadly danger, then from the legal point of view at least, you could argue diminished responsibility. On the other hand the book presents his so-to-speak rational calculations with regard to political interests, and quite impressive political manipulations, especially after his relative failure in the 1933 elections, but all this doesn’t add up to anything. In fact I hardly learned anything new from it. What I’m trying to tell you is that the book is actually banaclass="underline" a kind of primary textbook for students who need to be provoked. Basic history for the lazy.”
“And the first person?”
“What about it?”
“It doesn’t bother you that Hitler speaks in the first person? Didn’t you feel it was terrible to read ‘I’ when that ‘I’ is actually Hitler? The first person acts to create identification.”
Oded thought for a moment; it was clear that until I asked the question it hadn’t occurred to him.
“The truth is that I didn’t feel like I was reading about Hitler,” he concluded in the end. “I don’t know how to explain it, but that Hitler somehow wasn’t Hitler, not that I’m presuming to know who Hitler really was. So his father hit him and for some reason he brags about it. So he loved his mother and she died in agony and she had a Jewish doctor, so what does that prove? There could be all kinds of people who had things like that happen to them.”
I thought he was finished, but he had something else to say, and in order to say it he had to put our son down first.
“Look, I don’t have to explain to you why I was tempted to read it. I thought it would help me to understand something, you know, about that man and everything you went through.”
“Yes?” I tensed.
Oded lowered his gaze and slowly rubbed his thighs. “Well, you know, because the author is a total pervert, somehow I expected his book to be full of perversions too.”
“Yes?”
“From the little I know about history, he had enough material to base all kinds of pornographic descriptions on. The rumors about the single testicle,” he blushed, “problems with normal functioning, obsessions, never mind, it doesn’t matter, there are all kinds of theories, you know, but as far as I could tell, there’s nothing like that in the book. It’s true that I haven’t finished reading it, but in the chapter I did read, he talks about some woman, Geli Rampal, he describes her as some chaste childish nymph who goes into the forest with him, and then, right after that, he blathers on endlessly about the purple velvet armchairs that he wanted to buy with her. Purple velvet armchairs! Can you imagine?”
“Yes?”
My clipped responses only increased his uneasiness, and nevertheless my husband persisted like a diligent schoolboy. He went on and on describing the book, and it seemed that his embarrassment prevented him from leaving out anything in the review he had prepared for me. My tenseness didn’t go away completely, but at the same time I was overwhelmed by a kind of weariness that turned my “yes” into a mechanical murmur. It seemed that my previous wild laughter had exhausted all my wakefulness. Oded went on at length about the niece Geli Rampal, the affair of whose suicide wasn’t solved or given any explanation for in the book, and at this stage I was hardly listening. While my husband unburdened himself by talking, my eyelids grew heavy, and it was only with an effort that I kept my eyes open until he finished coming clean. I understood his need to tell me about his plunge into Hitler, First Person. I myself would have insisted on his not hiding anything from me. And at the same time, the longer he went on, the more I wanted him to get it over with and let me go. Yachin, who was teething, had worn me out during the day — a good reason to be exhausted. But why didn’t Oded get to the point? He told me. I got it. We were done. Wasn’t that the point? Weren’t we done? How long was he going to go on lecturing me after he himself said that the book was boring. If it was boring, why didn’t he stop? Why drag it out and mull it over.