Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

“In your opinion would they prefer a male or a female therapist?” she asked.

“Does it make a difference?”

My friend gave me the name of a psychologist “who is both professional and human.” And after checking my husband’s schedule with his secretary, I made an appointment for the two of us.

At noon on the day we were supposed to meet our therapist, my feet carried me to circle the Old City walls again. When I passed the Church of All Nations, I did not cross the road to admire the Byzantine-style pillars on the façade. Antonio Barluzzi had designed them. An eminent architect. A half-rhyme. And Barluzzi went with Monticello, even though it didn’t rhyme at all. Monticello reminded Oded of Limoncello and the only thing it rhymed with was cello. How did a little town in Illinois come to have an Italian name in the first place? Another pretense, another fraud — if not an outright lie.

I climbed as far as the Zion Gate, and went inside with the intention of taking a shortcut home. In one of the streets I came across a ladies’ hairdressing salon: the façade was of an old established business, I must have passed it many times before without noticing it. I had time to kill before the meeting in the evening, so I went inside, and in the air perfumed with the scent of roses, among the gleaming posters of foreign singers and dancers and actresses with painted faces — I had my hair cut so short that it stood up in bristles.

When I first met Oded my head was almost shaved; not a lock of hair to take hold of, and Oded, in my opinion, thought it was sexy. But with the passage of the years he seemed to take credit for every centimeter of hair I grew, and he would run his fingers through the results with an air of self-congratulation.

My mother-in-law remarked on more than one occasion that “with your face anything would look good, but long hair really is more feminine,” and I was happy to let myself be persuaded and to let my hair grow down to my shoulders.

I was the only customer, and the tiny hairdresser — bright as a bird in her blue polyester trouser suit — tried to bargain with me. “Why don’t we wait until the summer to cut it shorter? Perhaps for now we’ll only cut it up to here?”

She demonstrated by pulling my hair up to my ears, and her eyes, heavily fringed with artificial black eyelashes, looked at me suspiciously in the mirror, as if I was setting a trap for her with my outrageous request.

Alice would have milked a jug full of stories from this colorful creature. I could have thrown her head into the hairdressing salon instead of the meat market. But it was too late now, one of her pigtails was already sticking out of a heap of butchered meat, and “after the first death there is no other.”

In the end I compromised: the perfumed heat made me feel faintly dizzy, the massaging of my scalp lessened the constant itching a little, but even so I was too impatient to haggle over any further inroads. I declined the tiny hairdresser’s offer to spray my hair, thanked her, and paid. She looked happy to see the last of me, and I walked out of there with my hair a little longer than it had been at my mother’s funeral.

When I picked Oded up outside the office, it was cold, five degrees Celsius inside the car. And so it was only when I took off my hat in the psychologist’s clinic that he saw my old-new hairstyle. Saw it, and refrained from reacting, since any reaction in this situation would have seemed out of proportion, against the background of a décor unsupportive of any deviation from the norm.

The clinic in Abu-Tor was a perfect example of correct proportions. The ceiling was just the right height, a little lower than ours at home. An appropriate wooden table, half-way between office and domestic furniture. A single, flourishing potted plant, recommending the good care of its owner. Two original still-life paintings, containing nothing to distract or remind. A soft wool carpet in shades of golden-brown and cream.

Had we found the place easily? Were we cold? If we were, she could switch on the heating.

In another era, I would probably have liked her. Even as I sat down next to Oded, I acknowledged this. Appropriately feminine jeans, a white linen blouse creased to precisely the right degree, undyeds graying hair, and a face that had rounded and matured in a dignified manner, without a trace of sentimentality. The eyes too, I noted to myself, looked intelligent.

She could have been my husband’s older sister. She could have been his older wife, because a glance was enough to establish that she belonged, with inborn naturalness, to “the upstairs people”—at the top. The nice-looking daughter of a professor from Rehavia, or perhaps from Beit Hakerem. Academic success achieved by dint of hard work and perseverance, but never at the cost of crushing effort. In the course of her professional training she had paid thousands of pounds in order to complain about her parents, who were by all accounts perfectly satisfactory. Had her father paid for her analysis or her husband?

An obscure sense of guilt — I thought — drew her to occupy herself with human suffering. Her sympathy for her clients was sincere and so was the attention she paid them. But of the other side of suffering, of evil, she knew nothing. People like her didn’t have pictures proliferating in their heads. They didn’t know.

Would we like to tell her what had brought us to her?

The husband leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, giving his wife the stage.

Did all the soul-doctors only know one opening into the hell of the mind?

Before I finished with Alice, I would devote a lot of thought to the opening sentences of each of my columns. Did these people not have the imagination to accommodate more than a single opening? It was possible, for instance, for her to tap her pencil on the table and say: “Name please, address, and serial number,” in which case I would be able to tell her why I failed to serve in the IDF, even though all my friends had joined up and I wanted to too, only at exactly the time in question my mother had killed herself and my sister had been released from a psychiatric hospital.

•

The land of those who know no evil has habits of its own. My husband shifted uneasily on my right, and I said to myself that since I had been asked it was up to me to honor the customs of the land.

“My sister suffered sexual abuse, continuous abuse,” I stated. “She became pregnant as a result. This was when we were both in high school, and ever since then, the person who did it to her has been walking around free. Do you think you can help me with this?” I was quite proud of my clear pronunciation of the words, because it was quite hard for me to pronounce them.

“I’d like to hear more, if you can tell me.”

“Not only is he not suffering, he’s a well-known personality, three hundred one thousand hits on Google. Tchernichovsky has less, just to give you a sense of proportion,” I explained, and I was even prouder of myself for the “sense of proportion,” something the inhabitants of this land hold in high esteem.

“And since this terrible thing happened — how many years have passed?”

“Thirty.”

“Thirty years have passed. And this is the first time you’ve considered therapy.”

“Are you hinting at a statute of limitation on rape?”

“I’m only trying to understand the timing. Why now?”

“Because if you’re trying to hint that I woke up too late, if what you’re asking is how I agreed, until now, to let this thing go on growing — because you see, it wasn’t only rape, it was an ideology of raping and raping and never stopping because there’s no end to it. The Marquis de Sade and Hitler. That’s what it is. And it grows, because it’s there. Because for thirty years it was ignored, as if it didn’t exist, as if it could stay this way, for someone to suffer such torture, and the person who did it to her. . as if it can’t be cleaned.” All at once, without any preparation or intent, I’d been swept away by a torrent of words, but my tongue couldn’t keep up, and I remember that I thought about blood, because as my tongue swelled and stumbled in my mouth, I felt my blood rising and bursting through my skin.