“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 people” were sentenced to sit in a three-and-a-half-room basement apartment with the blinds down and watch old episodes of Sesame Street.
Wasn’t I happy that from the day I was born and by my very nature I had not been sentenced to bring down the blind, or, more clearly, in words she never pronounced: Aren’t you happy you’re not like me?
And there was something else, and perhaps it was this that really finished me off: my role as the one who had believed her from the outset.
Weeks after the meeting during which, under medical confidentiality and the protection of the psychologist, Elisheva told them what had happened to her, my parents had not yet made up their minds whether their daughter was telling the truth. Whereas I, after hearing their abbreviated account, believed her at once, and later on, after she was discharged from the hospital, I found a way to prove it to both of them and to rub their faces in the truth.
Until I rubbed their faces in it, they said things like: “Not that we doubt what she says, but still, it’s a fact that to this day no one has complained about him.”
Or: “What sense does it make for a respectable man of his age, a man who never lacked for women — what sense does it make for such a charming man to molest a child?”
Things like: “From what we saw, and we can only judge from that, he treated her like a little lady. Don’t you remember the orchid? And the way he stood up whenever she approached the table to serve him? And how patiently he tried to help her with her homework? Perhaps he exaggerated a little, and she was confused by his gentlemanly European manners? Perhaps she misunderstood him and began to develop all kinds of hopes and fantasies? Perhaps we sinned by thoughtlessness, by not imagining how a young girl like her was liable to interpret that kind of attention from an interesting man. We should have told him to behave differently with her. That was apparently our sin, that we didn’t say anything to him.”
And mainly they kept repeating, to each other and to me, pious declarations such as: “We shouldn’t be in a hurry to judge. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial and we won’t hold a kangaroo court here. Maybe all kinds of inconceivable things happened, but sometimes it takes time for the truth to come out. We hear what she says now, but in the future, after she gets well, who knows. .?”
But I, who made my judgment immediately and who had no doubts, succeeded in proving the truth of the one fact that they both tended in particular to deny.
This is what I did: Elisheva didn’t remember, or perhaps she didn’t know the name of the doctor to whom her rapist had taken her to perform an abortion. About which they both said to me: “What doctor would do such a thing without the father and the mother? Why would any doctor take the risk? And supposing something so shocking and inconceivable actually happened, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that he would have taken her to some out of town clinic? Because according to what she says it took place here, in Jerusalem.”
My sister couldn’t tell us the name of the doctor, but one Saturday when the two of us were alone in our room, it turned out that she remembered the place where he operated on her perfectly well. Not the exact address, but a more or less exact description. Not a stone house, the outside wall covered in pale yellow stucco, a little street into which the taxi had turned from Palmach Street.