Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

“Dad says that she’s in excellent shape,” he protested.

“Dad’s right. Everything’s fine. It’s just that after not seeing each other for years. .”

“Memories. .” He pronounced with the knowingness of the young. And what did he know about memories? Memory to my son appeared in the guise of a kind of computer library: click on “search,” read, and delete. He knew nothing of the dogs of memory, how they search you out and hunt you down, to stick their teeth into you until things come out that you didn’t even know you knew.

“I suppose you remembered all kinds of stories,” he said and blushed a little. “I mean from before what happened to her. It’s quite unusual to have a mother who grew up in a hotel. There must have been a whole lot of interesting stories, like in that children’s book we once had. What was the girl’s name again? Eloise.”

“There was one old lady, a Yiddish singer. She came back every year. .”

“And?”

“Nothing. She stopped coming. I suppose she died.”

Nimrod had inherited his father’s persistence, not to the same extent as Yachin, but nevertheless: “A friend of mine, a girl from Jerusalem who’s studying here, came up with an interesting idea. She said that part of your inspiration for ‘Alice’ may have come from the experiences you had with all kinds of tourists as a child in the hotel.”

“Are you still in touch with Tamar?”

“Not on a regular basis. Do you think that you and your sister will keep in touch more now?”

“We’ll see. Don’t you want to go and take a shower?”

“Because with your father I can understand why you don’t want to have anything to do with him. Just leaving your daughter after something like that happens to her. .”

As far as my father was concerned I had gone relatively easy on the censorship. In the stories I told my son, Shaya Gotthilf was the dust under the radiator. The little bit of dirt that distracts attention from the rest of the filth.

“You know what, if you’re not going to shower, I will.”

“I just want you to know,” my son said and stood up at last, “I just want to tell you that I feel strange that I don’t really have any roots.”

“You have Grandma Rachel and Grandpa Menachem. Others have less.”

“I’m not saying. .”

“If you’re not saying then stop talking. And by the way, if you’ve already decided to lose the beard, it might be a good idea to get used to shaving every day.”

But I didn’t behave like that the whole time: I love my sons, I know that we had a good time together, and that we were happy too. After many months of separation, obviously a mother is happy to see her children.

We drove to see forests. We ate together in twelve different restaurants. When the boys sang out of tune in the recording studio in the “Musical Experience” Museum, their father and I kept time for them; when we crossed the bay in the ferry, and went up on the deck, the three men circled me to protect me from the wind.

Despite Yachin’s blondness, the two boys look delightfully like their father, and as in Israel, the sight of the matching trio brought smiles to the faces of the passersby. Two handsome sons and the father in the middle. The younger son takes advantage of the picture to flirt inoffensively with the waitresses.

The visit we had paid to my sister on our way had made a breach, and in a moment of privacy Yachin also questioned me about her.

I expected him as was his wont to be satisfied with “she’s fine,” but this time he surprised me. My stand-offish firstborn buried his hands deep into his coat pockets, drew up his shoulders, and after a moment of angry silence remarked while scrutinizing the horizon: “I can’t believe they never even looked for the maniac who raped her.”

We were standing on a jetty. One jetty is very like another, and there was nothing to distinguish this one from all the others we had stood on and strolled on during the course of our visit: seagulls and boats and the blue of the sea and the froth of the waves. A green mountain rose from a billow of clouds on the other side of the water, on the left of the picture.

“He was a tourist, you know,” I said into the wind. “He left the country, and she didn’t talk.”

“But after that, after you already knew, it wasn’t actually some stranger in the street who raped her after all. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time: what was so difficult about finding him? That’s what I don’t get. He was registered at the hotel, you must have had a name, an address, a credit card number. . you already had credit cards then, no? Your father had all the information. So how come nobody used it?”

“I have no idea what my father knew. Time passed before Elisheva spoke up, and in any event she wouldn’t have testified.”

“And you didn’t try to persuade her that she should?”

A light plane swooped down over the water, for a moment it seemed that the gray body was nose-diving into it, but then it straightened out and plowed through the waves, turned around and slowed down, leaving a frothy white cut in its wake. A seaplane. There are airplanes that can sail on the surface of the water but none that can sail below it. It’s submarines that sail on the bottom of the sea, and there is no more terrible death than slowly suffocating in the coffin of a drowning submarine.

“Are you accusing me of something?” I asked my son.

“Mom, no. .”

The “no” and the sharp movement of the head that accompanied it, warned me. “Stop it,” they said, and “What are you doing?” and “Don’t ruin everything, Mom,” but I didn’t stop: “Because if you’re accusing me of something. .”

“Mom, what’s the matter with you? You’re completely out of line.”

“Really? Because if you’ve got something to say to me, let’s hear it.”

Oded’s son took a deep breath and dropped his shoulders. “I never thought to blame you. I know it’s complicated, and with your father abandoning the two of you like that as well. I’m not stupid and I’m not blaming anybody. It’s just that the thought of that man going free, never paying for what he did — the thought of it drives me crazy. A person who rapes a child, I don’t know what should’ve been done to him.”

“And what do you think should have been done to him?”

“I don’t know. Castration, I suppose. That’s the usual answer people give. They say that even the most hardened criminals in jail are disgusted by rapists. So maybe that’s what I’d like, and that’s also what people always say: let the toughest criminals deal with him. The main thing in my opinion is just knowing that this maniac is suffering like you and your sister suffered, because otherwise, you know, the world seems really fucked up.”

I was happy to see my son, but these last minutes on the jetty were the only moments of our stay in Seattle when I succeeded in really feeling my happiness. In my mind’s eye I saw a heavy-bodied criminal closing the lavatory door and gagging the Not-man — presumably the image came to me from some movie or other — and then my eyes cleared and I was able to see Yachin again. A young man in a checked coat, the most beautiful jawline in the world, authoritative, strict and laconic, tending from childhood to bristle, and only very rarely confused. This was the fruit of my womb. How did I get so lucky?

•

My love for my children was always a given, but already in the car on the way from the airport, something in me seemed to have gone wrong. And after months of feeling the lack of them by my side, and missing the effortless closeness to them — that simple pleasure now escaped me. Nor did what should have been self-evident awaken in me when we arrived at Yachin’s tidy condominium, and later too, when Nimrod appeared and beamed at us beardless at the door, and in all the hours when we sat in the twelve restaurants and visited the two museums and strolled on the jetties. The mother’s love did not disappear. If need be, the mother would have given her life for theirs. Sacrificed her right hand. Given her eyes. The love had not gone, I knew it was present somewhere beyond my inability to reach for it. But the feeling had stopped moving me and had been flattened into a kind of annoying intellectual awareness: insistent and irritating as an itchy scalp, as the reminder of a fossilized memory.