Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

Does anyone complain of the ruthlessness of the sun as it moves along its determined course?

That’s it. There were detailed, apparently reliable, descriptions too, of all kinds of political intrigues and maneuvers, and perhaps it was these that led Oded to describe the book as a textbook. I only encountered the word “rape” once: Europe could not be seduced with sweet words — wrote the first person — the bitch had to be raped. There was also some banal philosophizing, clichés such as: the morality of history is determined by the victors, and so on. I can no longer remember all the various incarnations of the so-called “first person,” on some of them I dwelled, others I glanced through. But overall, the spirit of the text can be summed up in what I have described above.

It was a monologue by Satan; it was his apologia, and it concluded with a reference to the sun. This text, which through the use of the first person tried to turn me and all its readers into Hitler, this thing that turned Hitler’s underpants into “my underpants” and stuck them to my skin — this thing was not written particularly badly, nor particularly well. It was beyond such literary judgments. When I closed it I could not immediately find a name for it, and then the word came to me, loud and clear: the thing in my hands was unclean.

The plane had already begun its descent when I finished reading. “That’s it. That’s all,” I said to Oded when he returned from the bathroom and threaded himself into his seat, glancing at the closed book on my tray.

But the pair of words “that’s all” can be pronounced in different tones, and I repeated them over and over, and ran my voice over the entire spectrum, without knowing what exactly I meant, and what “that” was and what “all” was.

The words came gushing out of my mouth in a range of different ways—“you understand, you get it, you get it that that’s all?”—until my husband put a silencing finger on my lips.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry you decided to read it, I’m really sorry that you’re allowing that thing get inside your head, and now of all times. We already decided that it was complete garbage. I can see what it’s done to you.”

“You’re allowing” he said to me, assuming the existence of some other possibility. But it wasn’t me who created a serpent, and it wasn’t me who let it in to infect me.

“It didn’t do anything to me,” I said to him when he took his finger away. “Don’t you understand, that it didn’t do anything to me? That nothing got into me? You don’t understand. You can’t understand. Nothing got in, because it’s nothing at all, it’s empty. It’s like a vacuum. That’s it, that there’s nothing there.”

As I’ve already said, I had no idea what I was trying to say, but I know that with the words “there’s nothing there” I started laughing quite hysterically, and a few minutes later we landed.

My husband said that he would need a stop over in Chicago to rest before the drive. I assumed that Chicago was part of the tourist game intended to calm his wife’s nerves before being shut up in the car with her for four hours. Although I might have been wrong, and my salt of the earth was not so calculating in planning our trip, and all he wanted was to put off for a while the involvement with the religious cranks I was about to drag into his life.

In any case, neither of us had anything to complain about in Chicago. The woman who got off the plane laughing enigmatically found favor in the eyes of her husband, and Oded, as I have already said, always found favor in mine. Taking into account what lay ahead of us down the road, he suggested I book a room in the best hotel available—“If it’s only for one night, why shouldn’t we go wild?”—and I did as he said.

Five minutes after the bellboy left the room and shut the door behind him, I fell on the mini bar and straight afterward on the best of men. I was desperate to drown, and in my desperation I nipped the usual foreplay in the bud, until Oded rose up hard and shining to settle my mind, and then to settle it again, exactly as I wanted. I screamed for many waters to come and silence all the things that had no name, and my husband came and swept all the names away.

It was already evening when we decided that once we were already in Chicago we might as well go out to see the sights. And even when we went out and walked around we wanted no more than ourselves, our intoxication, and what we saw before our eyes, and we uttered only our own names and our names alone.

Oded, who had drunk only a little and whose delight in me knew no bounds, was not embarrassed even when I created a small scene in Millennium Park. A cyclist who had invaded the footpath came racing toward us and braked a few centimeters in front of me, and I grabbed hold of his handlebars with both hands and said right to his face and his dirty dreadlocks what I thought of him and his ilk. The stares of the passersby did no more than tickle me. I expressed myself in no uncertain terms and at length, and my husband made no attempt to stop me. My Black Belt stood beside me in silence, and after I finally let go and we went on walking he drew me to him and said only: “You know what, you’re dangerous. .”

A little after darkness fell we returned to the hotel, where we went on devouring each other with the concentration of people preparing for a great hunger.

Did we know that we were about to be expelled from the Garden of Eden? Something unknown and irrational — something unclean was invading our lives, and unthinkingly we tried to banish it by means of the irrational passion with which we were familiar.

The mutual conflagration died down in the morning, when Oded picked me up in the hired car at the entrance to the hotel; or more accurately I put it out myself with the aggressive coldness that overcame me and which I could not control.

I moved the seat back, preparing for the long drive ahead of us, pushed my bag under my feet, and asked in a casual, matter of fact tone: “Have you ever read The 120 Days of Sodom ?

“Read what?” he asked, folding the road map and setting it in front of him.

“The Marquis de Sade.” The name, and even more so the voice in which I said it, made him turn sharply to face me. It was the voice revealed to him on our first date — perhaps not the first, perhaps it was the third — when I first told him about the rape.

“Why would I want to read something like that?”

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

My husband opened the map and folded it again. “I’m not interested in pornography,” he said dryly. “You know me. Playboy is as far as I’ve ever gone, and that only when it came into my hands in the army.”

“There are some people, learned people, who claim that he was the prophet of the twentieth century even more so than Kafka.”

“In what sense?”

“Relations based on power, power is all that matters, total oppression, the complete absence of morality and hope. There are professors who see him as the great prophet of the gulag and the extermination camps.”

“And that’s what you want us to talk about this morning? The gulag and the Nazis?”

I didn’t answer him: if he didn’t want to know, we wouldn’t talk. Fine. Nobody really wants to know, that’s the system, and there’s logic to the system. It exists for a reason.

“I understand that you have read it,” he said when we were already in one of the slum districts in the south of the city, on our way out.

“Read what?” I asked maliciously.

“The great prophet of the gulag and the extermination camps.”