Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

“If you let me close my eyes until we reach the hotel, I’ll be able to drive to O’Hare afterward.”

“I’ve got no problem driving. I’d prefer it if I drove and you talked to me a bit more, but if you’re tired, go ahead and sleep.”

“You’re an even better Christian than my sister.”

“I’m not a Christian at all. Don’t say that. If anyone dared to hurt you, I don’t want to think of what I’d do to him.”

“What would you do to him?”

“Something hellish. I don’t know.”

“Okay, when you do know what you’d do to him, tell me about it.”

“One of the things that surprised me,” he said, “was how normal those people are. When you and Elisheva were talking I was walking with Barnett. We spoke a little about his work. I only wish I enjoyed my work as much as he does. Even though it’s quite sad, what’s happening here. All these farms we’re passing — what Barnett explained to me is that they’re on their way to becoming extinct. With the taxes that go up all the time, and the dominance of the fast food industry, people are being forced to sell their land. But what I wanted to say is this, that in the meantime with all these processes going on, these Christians are living their lives very contentedly. They enjoy what they do, and the people we met yesterday too, you can see they’re happy with their lives, maybe even more than we are. I confess that I expected freaks, and instead I met serious, educated people, connected to what’s happening around them. This community seems to me very healthy and completely normal.”

“A colorful community,” I said slowly. “Broken-winged birds sing again. Dogs bleat in the meadows.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tell me, tell me: encouraging Elisheva to forgive — is that normal?”

“I’m not saying it is, obviously they’re got their peculiarities, but that’s all they are, peculiarities. On the whole, in my opinion your sister is in an excellent environment. It really couldn’t be better.”

“Just that in this environment they preach that abortion is murder, and Elisheva has to beg their God to pardon her for terminating a pregnancy from rape,” I said and closed my eyes.

“And did God pardon her?”

“He gave her Sarah,” I said without opening them.

“Well, so what more do you want? If I believed in miracles, I would say that what’s she’s done with herself is a miracle. If you take into account what she went through, and it’s clear to me that what I know is just the tip of the iceberg, when you think about it, your sister might have been in a completely different place today, completely different, you know. Isn’t that what worried you all these years? First of all shows you what tremendous strength she has. And actually I’m not surprised, she’s your sister after all. So if somehow or other God helps her a bit, why be petty, and who cares exactly how he helps her? She forgave, she didn’t forgive. In my opinion the whole business of this forgiveness is an illusion — self-deception I’d say, without actually knowing. But what does it matter? It’s insignificant. The main thing is that what we have here is recovery from ruin on an unimaginable scale. What I’m trying to tell you is that after this visit of ours, I feel as if we can lift a heavy weight from our hearts.”

My husband went on lecturing me and setting the record straight all the way to the hotel: he renovated ruins, pointed to tips of icebergs, and lifted weights off hearts like a mythological giant. My husband set the record straight, and I agreed with much of what he said. I agreed and I said nothing, because I didn’t know what to think.

Elisheva had found salvation. My fair sister had found more than salvation, she had found happiness that tore the sky wide open. And I, who had abandoned her and fenced off a corner of my own, I, instead of rejoicing in her happiness, felt that a stone was rolling down on me and sealing me into a cave. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth lest I call her and confound her after she has been set free.

My sister was at peace. Calm and at peace. My fair sister had pardoned me. She had pardoned me and our parents, she had pardoned the Not-man. And the pardon I had not asked for, the pure and horrifying pardon she had pardoned me, was closing in on me.

And I would remain alone, I thought. I would remain by myself in my selfishness, because my sister bore no grudge — not against me and not against him. Now only I, the keeper of the grudge, was left to guard and to remember. Remember what? It was necessary to remember, it was impossible not to remember, and now I was pardoned and erased and dismissed. My sister had told me a story. My sister had rolled the stone. From now on I was on my own.

We stopped in the parking lot of the hotel opposite the swaying plastic figure of Santa Claus. My husband got out to fetch the luggage we had left at the reception desk, and by the time he returned I became sickeningly aware of the fact that I was not as alone as I thought.

My sister had erased me and my sin against her, together with the person of the rapist. And at the same time, as she wiped the two of us clean with her celestial forgiveness, it was as if she had lumped us together and joined me to his person.

From now on to eternity no longer on my own, because from now on only I and the First Person were on our own, because Elisheva was no longer in the world, my sister was now in heaven. She was in heaven, and the person of the Not-man and I were pardoned and left to choke in the dirt of this world together, imprisoned by the pardon.

For some reason the thought of choking was linked in my mind to the geese, as if it was this that the arrowhead was announcing with its screeching as it cut through the sky.

The flight of the geese is heavy and slow — how is it that they don’t fall? Barnett said that they migrated from Alaska. Alice the goose also came from Alaska. However hard she flapped her pigtails and screeched her colorful nonsense, the pigtails would not hold her up in the air. Alice fell and she is a sack of feathers on the ground. The screeching geese are gone. My mind is going. I’m going out of my mind and that’s why I shall remain alone with the First Person. Because I’m out of my mind and I don’t know how to get him out of my mind.

“That’s it. Are we awake? Ready to fly to the boys? I’m dying to see what Nimrod looks like without the beard. I never liked that beard,” my husband said and closed the door.

After we got home Oded remarked that it seemed to him that I had “worried the boys a little,” which was putting it mildly. I could have said that I was too upset to notice, but the truth is that I did notice, and it was even pointed out to me, but I didn’t have the strength or the will to stop myself from worrying them.

On the second morning of our stay in Seattle, Yachin took his father for a tour of one of the Bowing plants, and Nimrod, who from childhood had been more interested in heart-to-hearts than his brother, deliberately got up early, and over the first cup of coffee of the morning sat me down for a talk on the topic: “So what’s really going on with you, Mom?”

The night before, after returning from the Thai restaurant, I had made the men egg barley from Israel for dessert, but my younger son, after satisfying himself with the comfort food from home, was now demanding nourishment of a different order: “There’s a sense here that you’re not completely with us,” he said. My child wanted his mother “complete,” in the innocence of his heart he wanted to taste the root of the poison.

I replied that I didn’t know why anyone should feel that way, because actually I was perfectly happy, really. I confirmed that I had missed him and his brother and said that “perhaps I’m just exhausted from the visit with Elisheva.”