Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

I sensed Oded shudder, he tightened his grip on my fingers, and the flat gray sky closed in over our heads.

“Look, geese,” my big sister said, and pointed.

There was nothing left that there was any point in doing together. Because where could we go from here? To the historical museum and the nature reserve with the Indian name? And nevertheless we drove to the next town, because Elisheva and Barnett insisted on us tasting Dutch food. The food was tasteless, and the conversation bubbled with artificial additives. My sister kept touching the back of my hand and my sleeve and saying things like: “But you haven’t told me anything yet. Tell me everything about the boys. Tell me about your work. Tell me about Alice. I want to hear everything,” and she wasn’t put off by the paucity of my replies, as if she didn’t notice that I scarcely answered. The geese that had frightened me had robbed me of the vestiges of my strength, and it was hard for me just to sit up straight in my chair.

My sister’s story was told, and after it there seemed nothing else to say. She was honest. More honest than I had ever been. She had always known only one way, and had never known how to cheat. The story she told me had not been tailored to suit me, and knowing her it was also clear to me that she had not tailored it to suit any other audience either, but as we sat there in the restaurant over the puréed Dutch food, I imagined her presenting the very same testimony to a beaming group of women, daughters of the congregation: a partial testimony — I thought — bits and pieces assembled into a fairy tale. An invisible seam sewed up all the ends, and there were no loose threads to continue the tale. I was the only one coming unraveled here, with no closure in sight.

Once she had finished telling me her story, and I had no doubt that she had very much been looking forward to telling me, it seemed that all my sister’s expectations of me had been satisfied, and she looked happy and untroubled. She ate with a hearty appetite, praised the dish set before her, and invited us all to taste it.

We said goodbye to Barnett. We took Elisheva home, drank tea, and waited for my niece to return so we could say goodbye to her.

If the child was disappointed by the briefness of our visit, she was too well brought up and too good tempered to show it.

Happy and obedient, the little girl from the little white house kissed her aunt, and skipped out to the yard to talk to Soda the dog.

Nobody mentioned the possibility of another visit, but Elisheva announced that from now on she would not be lazy and she would write to me more often. “And please, please send me your newspaper columns, a few of them at least. I told Sarah that her aunt is a writer, and we’re all so proud of you. ‘Alice in the Holy City,’ what an original idea!”

There were the last words she said to me when she accompanied us to the car. After that we hugged, and a woman with the shoulders of a swimmer, in a red sweater with a reindeer pattern, waved to us from the gate until we disappeared around the bend in the road.

“So how was it really?” asked Oded when my sister’s image vanished from the side mirror of the car.

“Fine. There’s nothing to worry about, the matter’s closed. He has her address, she sent it to him, and she isn’t afraid of anything any more,” my voice sounded old and tired, as if I were answering him about some distant memory.

“What? How come?”

“As I said. The matter’s closed. It’s over. She’s forgiven him.”

“Elinor, please, you can’t go to sleep now.”

“What’s not clear here? She forgave him, she wrote him a letter in which she forgave him, conditionally at least. The condition being that he admitted what he did to her.”

“Did a lawyer advise her to do it?”

“Why a lawyer?”

“Because if I was a criminal lawyer, and if I were her lawyer, that’s exactly what I would have advised her: to try to get him to confess.”

“There wasn’t any lawyer, and in any case he didn’t bother to reply.”

“Obviously he didn’t reply. I have no idea what the law of limitations is here in America regarding rape, it’s worth looking into, but in any case a man would have to be an idiot to incriminate himself like that in writing.”

“She doesn’t want a trial. She wants him to ascend to heaven with her, that’s what she said.”

“You’re joking. I don’t believe it.”

I said nothing.

“It can’t be true. I mean, I’m not accusing your sister, God forbid, of lying.”

I said nothing.

“There’s such a thing as self-deception, you know. Not that a person’s lying, God forbid, he’s simply unaware: not reading himself correctly.”

But I, who had heard my sister, knew with exhausting clarity that there was nothing here to read between the lines. And that if my sister Elisheva had been standing next to the woman who tried to destroy the face of the monster, she would have arrested the upraised hand herself. She would have jumped in and stopped her.

Tomorrow — I thought — perhaps I would be able to take in the full horror of that act of pardon, which at the moment was only a frozen pain in my muscles. Tomorrow, when I thawed out a little, or maybe in the plane, from above. Because down here, on the ground of this prairie where there was nothing to take hold of, it was beyond me.

I wasn’t tired but felt a great need to get onto my own private escalator and disappear: my husband wanted to close the events of the day with words, and my husband could wait till tomorrow. Maybe when I got back from my disappearance the right words would come to me.

“Their Sarah seems like a really great kid,” Oded tried another tack.

I should say something to him — surely I was capable of saying something, I wasn’t sick or paralyzed. A healthy living person should be capable of showing signs of life — so I discovered a sign of life and asked him if he remembered the business with the acid. There was no need to explain what I was talking about, he remembered that “the woman had missed.”

“So my sister gives him credit for somehow preventing the attack from coming to trial.”

My husband sighed. “Your sister is a fine person, but without really knowing her, I would say that she’s a little naïve. The guy had just published his disgusting book. The last thing he needed in the middle of the publicity campaign was a legal confrontation with a Holocaust survivor. A trial like that would have led to his being conclusively identified with Hitler.”

I didn’t feel tired, but I was overcome by a fit of yawning. The sun was hidden behind a bank of clouds, and it seemed that this gray non-day and non-night would be interminable. Yesterday it got dark. Why couldn’t I remember when it got dark here?

“Why all of a sudden a ‘disgusting book’? I thought that in your opinion it was a text book for high school students.”

“Okay, that’s what I said. And I’m telling you again: it’s not a serious piece of research. Definitely not. But you know what? Since we talked I thought about it and came to the conclusion that precisely the attempt to present things in a popular way could be dangerous. So yes, it’s a popularization, and yes, it’s disgusting.”

“I see what you mean.”

The more my voice retreated and grew weaker, the more loquacious he became. “I’m not a big reader, that’s for sure, but if my wife who’s a writer tells me that a book is beyond the pale, and my father whose opinion I also respect says exactly the same thing — it makes me think. Let’s say I felt the need to make light of it. I felt the need to belittle its importance, don’t ask me why. But after you read the book. . what’s going on here? Are you falling asleep?”