I wasn’t there during the four hours she locked herself in before she was persuaded to give up the weapon, I wasn’t there when she was hospitalized, I didn’t visit her in Kfar Shaul, and I wasn’t present at the session when she told our parents about the abuse.
My role in this part of the story is that of the person who wasn’t there.
Months later I heard from a graduate of the boarding school who was an officer on the base that “there were actually warning signs, the kind that are hard to ignore.” Other girls complained that Elisheva didn’t shower, that she slept in her uniform, that she was maddeningly slow, and that it wasn’t fair for the whole unit to be punished because of one soldier. “It was hard to ignore,” the officer said, but in the end everyone overcame the difficulty and succeeded in ignoring it.
She was nineteen when she enlisted. Height one meter fifty-eight, weight that rose with stubborn persistence to over eighty kilos. My parents attributed her obesity to the pressure of studying for her exams, and promised anyone ready to listen that in the army, with new friends and new experiences, her weight would go down of its own accord. I didn’t even take the trouble to understand and relate to all this. I was busy with my own affairs, I had matriculation exams to prepare for. When I did go home my sister didn’t stink. We shared a room, so I should know.
When it comes down to it, I don’t think she has suicidal genes either. I believe that even in the swamps of hell, my sister never stopped hoping for a redeemer who would come and purify her. Later too, when both of us were locked into her madness, and I, in order to save my life, pushed her into the hospital — what she really wanted was to survive.
Our parents deserted, each in his own way, but our widowed father did not abandon his daughters without a plan: the one discharged from the army with disability benefits would continue her treatment and recover, perhaps she would even start studying something practical; whereas the other, who had skipped a grade and was in any case not yet old enough to be conscripted — she would register at the Hebrew University and get a degree. It would be a shame for a mind like hers to go to waste in the army, and as a student with an apartment of her own and a tidy sum of money set aside to pay for her studies — there was no doubt that this daughter at least was set to enjoy her life. How many students, after all, were as privileged as she was?
Our father found us a quiet three-and-a-half-room basement apartment in the neighborhood of Talpioth, and flew off to Italy — two years later he decided to let me know in an airmail letter that, prior to moving to Italy, he had not been in contact with Gemma and, in fact, in his terrible grief, hadn’t even remembered that this former pension guest lived in the city of Verona, where he’d since settled down.
“A marvelous coincidence brought us face to face among all the thousands of people at the entrance to the arena,” he wrote to me. “And even then I, like Job, doubted whether I was fit for a new life.” I assumed that he was lying, but at this stage I had already cut myself off to such an extent that I only wondered why he had even taken the trouble to lie to me.
Later on he latched onto Elisheva’s “new life” in order to justify his right “to devote the few years I still have left to try and create a little corner of peace and beauty.” After that I no longer replied to his preening letters with their curlicues and circles for dots. I was revolted by his grandiose handwriting just as I was revolted by the words themselves, and I hoped that he would give up and leave me alone.
I registered in the English Literature department, and in this, and only this, the prophesies of the deserter came true: the clever daughter did indeed enjoy her studies. I enjoyed sitting in the lecture halls in an atmosphere of order and knowledge. I read a lot more than I was required to. I loved the excitement of the carefully chosen words, and no less the theories that calmed the storm in a completely different language.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” I would declaim when I stood up and when I sat down and when I went on my way. “The art of losing isn’t hard. .” I declaimed until it was almost an article of faith.
But Elisheva increasingly failed to acquire this faith. At first she stopped going to both her group therapy and her new psychologist. The first excuses she made were still couched in acceptable terms: a stomach ache, the worst heat wave in years, an ingrown toenail that turned every step into torture. But then, gradually, she stopped going out of the house, and her reasons grew weirder and weirder: People could see through her. The day was too fine. The light was too bright, everything was like glass, and through glass people could see everything. Didn’t I understand? There were types. Like colors. Luckily I, her sister, was made of blue, because blue was the outside, the outside was blue and you didn’t notice blue against the blue.
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.