Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

She went into the living room and “there was nothing there,” in other words he himself wasn’t there on the screen. But the newscaster described how Professor Gotthilf had been attacked when he entered the television studio of some other network: a woman, a holocaust survivor, who was lying in wait for him tried to spray his face with acid.

“I called my husband,” my sister said. “But he was nowhere to be found. It was before cellphones, and without cellphones the situation was difficult. I know that if God hadn’t been there with me. .”

But this time my sister’s God didn’t abandon her, and the survivor who had tried to burn Aaron’s face with acid didn’t go away either.

“I thought about her a lot, all the time, in an obsessive kind of way, as if it was important to me to understand how she missed, if she had been standing closer maybe she wouldn’t have missed. They didn’t describe it on TV, how exactly it happened, but I put myself in her place and asked myself if I would’ve missed too. You see, I had this kind of fantasy that I was in her place and that I didn’t miss, and in the picture stuck in my head I kept on and on burning his face. Let him burn, let him die. And then let him die again, but slowly. Like in Hell. Where it goes on forever and you know that it will never end because Hell is the end.”

I loved my sister. Am I permitted to say that I loved her in spite of the miserable way I treated her? I loved her. But I never loved her as much as I did at that moment, when she bit her glove, and at the same time I saw her going up in flames: she never even noticed when I put my hand on her knee.

And then she continued, in the same voice as before, in the same compulsive rush: “That was my nightmare, that I couldn’t stop. As if there was no end to it, all the time I saw his face. And it’s strange, because before that, before I heard about that old woman with the acid, I never thought about his face at all, as if I didn’t remember it at all. And only when I imagined the acid, corroding, did I suddenly began to remember, and all the time that face of his, as if it were getting into my eyes. I wanted it to stop, I prayed, but it was as if my will didn’t count, as if I was nothing, as if I didn’t exist any more. And I wanted to exist. I already existed, God had brought me back to life. So I couldn’t understand, I just couldn’t understand why, how come God, who had been so good to me, was letting him haunt me, and poison my existence.”

My sister kneaded and rubbed her forehead and her cheeks; there were no tears, she rubbed at her dry skin. “They sometimes say about God that he ‘hides his face,’” she said, “it’s a saying. But God’s God, and he doesn’t really hide his face, it only seems that way to us. Today I understand that God didn’t abandon me even for a minute. That’s absurd, because God doesn’t abandon. Today I believe that he was only waiting for me to banish that other face, the face of Aaron that was hiding him from me. It took me time, it took me a lot of time to understand that that’s what he was waiting for, and years before I gradually succeeded in getting rid of Aaron’s face. But then, whenever I succeeded a little, I saw Jesus better. It’s hard to explain in words, but every time like that when I felt his patience — how lovingly he was waiting for me — every time like that gave me a little more strength to move what was hiding him from me aside. Because without the love of God, I know, without his showing me his love, I would never have been able to get it out of me.”

My sister prayed and her husband prayed: “And that helped me a lot too. He would ask for me to succeed in letting go of the acid and the pictures that had stuck in my mind. Because it was hard for him too, this poison that I had inside me. Because I — maybe I’ve said this before — hardly knew how to be his wife. .

“I’m trying to tell you in one morning about years; I’ve been wanting to tell you all this for years. You know how much I missed you, and if only I’d known how to tell you before, so you wouldn’t worry about me. I know how you worried about me all the time. And you’re an angel, simply an angel for not being angry. How come you’re not angry? But please understand, I know you understand: even if I had the talent, even if I knew how to write like you, at the time when all this happened — it was simply impossible to put it all down on paper. That’s why I did something ugly and didn’t keep in touch with you. After everything you suffered for my sake, I didn’t keep in touch. But in my heart, in my heart inside me, I wish you could see straight into my heart, I always knew that one day you would come and I would tell you everything.”

•

I put out a lying hand and took her hand, and she squeezed it with surprising strength. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“Are you cold?”

I was cold. The chill crept from the wooden steps through my coat and climbed up my spine. My back was stiff. But until I asked her about the cold, somehow I hadn’t been aware of the discomfort I was suffering, and when I became aware, I felt no impulse to escape from it. So I was cold. So what? It was only my body.

“I don’t want you to think that we were sad all the time, because truly we weren’t sad, not at all,” my sister said without letting go of my hand. “You know how it is when you clean the house, and then somebody comes in with mud on his shoes? So that’s how I began to think about this obsession of mine to see Aaron burn. That it was like the dirt you have clean out of the house every day. What can we do? God gave us a house, and he also gave us the work to do. Barnett also began to see it this way, and sometimes we even laughed about it a little, just so you know. He would come home in the evening and ask me: ‘Well, how did you get on with the cleaning today?’ But then something amazing happened: little by little, it happened gradually, the house actually grew cleaner and cleaner until I hardly had to clean it at all.

“I was busy. The people here accepted me into their lives. Barnett found me all kinds of things to do, and suddenly I discovered that a day had passed without the obsession, and after that two days, and then more. It was like a miracle from heaven, can you understand what a miracle it is when your house cleans itself? When you wake up in the morning and know there won’t be any dirt? Maybe just a little soot in the stove, but one wipe with a rag and, like in the commercials here, your stove is clean and you didn’t even get dirty from the soot. How can you ever be thankful enough for such a miracle when you wake up in the morning? I know you’re waiting for me to tell you what I wrote to Aaron. But in order to tell you, in order for you to understand, there are so many other things, so much to tell. Because in my wish to thank God for the miracle he had performed for me, I began thinking and thinking what I could do to show him my thanks. And the fact is that I knew from the beginning, because this is the whole truth of Jesus, but it took me time, it took me time to be capable of it. And only with time I understood that if God had forgiven me, that just as God forgives us, just as our savior Jesus was the sacrifice that atoned for our sins, the sacrifice that God demanded from me — was for me to forgive Aaron.”

Her grip on my hand loosened, she raised her face to the sky, and I didn’t pull my hand away or take it back. To sit like this, only to sit still and let the incomprehensible words be heard. Without a movement, without an echo, without a single question, definitely without a scream. Because only thus, in this frozen state, in this lovely landscape in which I am nothing more than a detail, will it be possible to survive all this and get through it.