Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

Oded was obviously worried about my mental state and about what the meeting with my sister was liable to do to me, but he didn’t talk about me, only about her, that it would be a mistake to suddenly shock and upset her by sounding an alarm that might prove to be groundless. He refrained from explicitly mentioning my own evident panic.

“She’s your sister, it’s natural for you to want to see her, it would be wonderful if you could improve your relationship with her, I’m one hundred percent behind it. But what do we know about her situation right now? We both hope and believe that she’s fine, but we should take into account the possibility that if we come crashing down on her, from one day to the next, it might unbalance her.” He snuck in the plural almost casually, “if we come crashing down on her,” and without further discussion I accepted it.

I thought about the flight, about all those long hours in the air, I saw myself on the plane snuggling into that “we,” and felt relieved. Once I had accepted the “we” my husband had slipped into the subject, other elements to be taken into account immediately made their appearance: with Menachem working fewer hours, Oded couldn’t abandon the office until November at the earliest. We had sons in the U.S., and since we were already going there we should take the opportunity to stay on a while and visit them. “Perhaps you should write to Elisheva and tell her that we’re coming to visit the children, and that we’d be happy to drop in on her on the way. That would be best, and then when she answers you, we can get some kind of indication and sense what her situation is. Let’s talk to the boys and find out what their plans are. The four of us could meet somewhere, maybe Nimrod will want to come to Yachin in Seattle, we should check out the dates, maybe it’ll even work out so that we can light the first candle of Hanukkah together. They say that Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” With talk like this, full of good sense and good taste, his feet on the coffee table, my husband redrew my trip as a family reunion with our sons. You had to know him as I did, to grasp that he was afraid. Not of the intrusion of the snake — in the land of the salt of the earth, a Black Belt isn’t afraid of a snake — but of the women who, in spite of their charms, and perhaps this is their charm, tend to react without perspective.

I missed my sons, I longed to see my three men together, and even though I went on believing that I had to warn Elisheva, my sense of urgency was somewhat diluted by other feelings.

“Should we phone and wake the boys now, or should we let them sleep a little longer?” I asked. I moved the wine bottle and put my feet up on the coffee table next to my husband’s.

•

Now that he had redirected the flight onto a routine tourist track, the trip began to take on the aspect he intended.

I sent my sister an email, and an hour after I sent it, an overjoyed deer-track decorated response arrived. We should come for as long as possible. She was delighted, Barnett was delighted, Sarah was so excited at the prospect of meeting her aunt and uncle at last. God had blessed the three of them. May God bless the two of us as well. They had a spare bedroom in their house, but she and Barnett had decided to give us their bedroom, which was bigger and where we would be more comfortable. Did Oded have any dietary restrictions? Did I think he would like to go fishing? There was a beautiful lake a two-hour drive away, in November the weather was chilly, but it seldom rained, and if we dressed warmly we might be able to go to the lake anyway.

Oded remarked that perhaps it would be better if we found somewhere else to stay: “Look for some motel or nice bed and breakfast, if you can manage it without insulting her, I think we’ll feel freer.”

Elisheva wasn’t insulted, or if she was she didn’t show it. She sent another mail with a list of small hotels in the vicinity, which didn’t boast of many attractions, but had one spectacular nature reserve, and also a fine little historical museum of the area. She was attaching a link to its internet site. Did I think we would like to visit it?

This was an Elisheva I didn’t know; apparently it was time for me to get to know her. I began to think that perhaps there was a degree of truth in Oded’s approach, and perhaps because the time was ripe, perhaps because of that too, I began to look forward to the trip.

•

Nimrod informed us that he would be able to drop in to his brother’s for a weekend. Yachin said that he would be able to take the Thursday and Friday off from work.

Nimrod asked us to bring him coffee ground with cardamom from Danon’s and not from the Old City, and Yachin said that we didn’t have to bother bringing egg barley. Today you could get anything in Seattle, and in any case Mom shouldn’t have to cook on her vacation. Did we ever have the chance to eat Vietnamese food?

The days filled with preparations before the trip. In the course of the years Oded and I had often flown together, to see buildings, people, art works, and animals. Planning the trip was always part of the fun, and as I planned and consulted and shopped and packed, the routine activity in anticipation of a well-earned holiday flooded me with an unexpected joy.

Should we fly via Atlanta or via Chicago? Land in Bloomington or Champaign? “Let’s spend a fun day in Chicago,” said Oded, and for the sake of this fun shortened our stay with my sister even further. “We’ll take a look at Millennium Park, get some sleep, and in the morning we’ll rent a car and get to their place relaxed and refreshed and without jet lag. Can you check out hotels in Chicago too?”

The serpent didn’t disappear. He only settled into the dark of my belly like a parasite, and until close to the flight, with this sleeping parasite in my belly, I went on pursuing my usual activities. Housework and gardening, agreeable and less agreeable guests. Regular maintenance of my face and my body.

For a few days I sat in the National Library, and on the basis of the material I collected, I sent Alice on a three-column excursion in the wake of fictional and semi-fictional researchers into the Dead Sea Scrolls. People said that they were among the best columns I’d ever written. And a polite researcher from Bar Ilan University even wrote to me with a request for bibliographical references to the “riveting character of the man from the Freemasons,” a character who was purely a figment of my imagination.

I brought the letter to Friday night dinner to entertain Chemi, and the patron of the braid-sucker from Alaska was as delighted by the fantasies of his protégé as I had hoped.

“You gave your Freemason yellow eyes,” he remarked, “but since nobody in the real world has yellow eyes, I would have expected the Doctor from Bar Ilan to understand that he was a fictional character. Interesting how people, even serious people, think that there is some secret about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The truth is that Alice’s story was so successful that I myself almost began to believe that the Scrolls were written in a secret code.”

Did we have windbreakers? We needn’t worry if we didn’t. My sister and her husband would be very happy to let us borrow theirs — what size was Oded? If we preferred to buy our own, we could find them here on sale. Barnett didn’t like shopping much, but the little one adored shops, and if I liked, we women could shop till we dropped. What did I think?

What could I think? A foreign sister was showering me with a foreign love at the rate of two or three emails a week, as if I had done her nothing but good during all those years we were together, and as if we had never been together in our lives: she didn’t write me a single word in the past tense.