Gail Hareven - Lies, First Person

Chemi stirred the noodles into his soup, and laid the spoon down next to his bowl. Menachem Brandeis was not a man to be hurried, and in any case it was impossible to hurry what had already happened and was now a fact in the present. As he was speaking my ears seemed to fill with water, and the rising tide slowed everything down and made me very passive. I felt as passive as after a drunken hamsin night. The river flowed and I was borne along in it, there was no point in swimming.

“So Mordechai remembered — actually Hanita reminded him — that we have a Gotthilf in the family — Gotthilf isn’t a common name — and he phoned to ask if there was indeed a connection between us, and if Rachel and I would be interested in attending a dinner to which your uncle is also invited.”

I sent Oded an S.O.S. No, I didn’t even look at him. I concentrated my gaze on the steam rising from the soup and Oded came to the rescue without being sent for: “I thought we had all agreed that the man is beyond the pale. I still remember how you said so yourself, in Spain, about the book. I can’t understand how they could’ve invited someone like him in the first place, his book wasn’t even considered worthy of being translated into Hebrew. How can an apologist for Hitler be invited to Jerusalem?”

“Oded, listen to what your father has to say.”

“Good, so I hadn’t forgotten Hitler, First Person either, and I didn’t spare Mordechai my opinion, which is no different from yours. But then he told me that Elinor’s uncle has completely renounced that abomination — begging your pardon, Elinor — he signed his name to has devoted the last years of his career to what Mordechai called “a campaign of self-condemnation.” It sounded quite interesting to me. To repent of something you did, to admit your mistake, is certainly not common, not in our academic life or in our political culture, and in my humble opinion it’s definitely something that wouldn’t do us any harm to adopt. But to return to the matter at hand, since I was still skeptical, Mordechai sent me a long essay in which the man presents his main points of criticism of his book. I haven’t finished reading it yet, I admit that not all his arguments satisfy me, I see some sophistry there, but the bottom line is that there’s something to discuss. That’s to say that, if in the past, Elinor, I defined your uncle as ‘beyond the pale,’ as far as I’m concerned that no longer applies, and as I said to Mordechai, an informal dinner isn’t out of the question.”

The patriarch gave his wife a questioning look — I had no doubt as to who had written the script — and when she sent him an approving smile, he picked up his spoon and started on his soup.

Years after he had taken me to task because of my relationship to the First Person, my mother-in-law had found an opportunity to prompt him to make up for the distress he had caused me then: Something’s upsetting the girl, Oded says so too, and whatever it is, we now have a chance to do something to make her happy. And Menachem didn’t even have to admit that he had gone too far back, in Spain.

There was no appeal against the favorable sentence that had now been passed on me, and in any case the truth was impossible to pronounce: at the heirloom wooden table there was no place for my sister, who had been turned into a stool.

But Oded still tried, and from my superior vantage point at the apex of my scalp I didn’t miss a word: “And I wonder exactly why he set out on this so-called journey of self-condemnation. My guess is that he must have realized it was the only way to save his career.”

Now my mother-in-law sent her son a look of rebuke, and Chemi looked at his wife and at me, and they all looked at me to measure the movement of the mercury. But there was nothing to see. I was empty and silent, a unit isolated in space — what would be would be, and the serpent would always be a serpent. Only a kind of laughter stirred and rose on the margins of my passive mind, because I knew, because all the time I knew that a serpent was creeping, and the movement of the heads and the looks around me looked ridiculously slow and exaggerated.

“If we start examining personal motivations, we’ll open up a witch hunt that has no end,” Menachem announced. “Everyone has his own interests at heart. That’s true in politics, it’s true in academic life, it’s always true, even at this table. So I say that with regard to Elinor’s uncle, ‘he who admits his wrongdoing and forswears it should be shown mercy.’ It’s enough for me that he’s admitted he was wrong, and that he travels from one university to the next to present this new position. We’re not going to start checking up on his motivations, because let’s not deceive ourselves, intellectuals are no better than anyone else. People are people, none of us is pure and we are all influenced by considerations of personal interest.”

“Except for George Orwell,” I piped up, because the main course was still before us and after it the dessert, and only an utter boor would consign so much generosity to the trash.

They knew hardly anything about Orwell, and from my point of view this was fine, because it was very important to know Orwell and important for me to make him known to them. And with my ears full of water I was very eloquent and I explained everything to them at length and in order: how Orwell had fought both the Fascists and the Bolsheviks, and how he had been censored because he hadn’t beautified any aspect of reality and hadn’t covered anything up, and how he had seen what others preferred not to see, and how he hadn’t ignored or concealed, and how he had always been able to recognize Satan in all his disguises.

By the time I was finished Rachel had already served the cake.

“Thank you, Elinor, that was very informative,” said Menachem.

“I’m sorry,” my husband took a deep breath once we were standing outside the door, “I had no idea. .”

“It’s all right,” I replied, checking my exalted sense of calm.

“What I say is: imprison him in a box of armor-plated glass. .” he said when we got into the car, giving me a gift, or perhaps checking my temperature.

The sun shone brightly. Families of Jews in their Sabbath clothes strolled past us, walking slowly, carrying aluminum trays. April is the cruelest month. It wasn’t April yet. When did spring begin? Not yet. Soon.

“Room number 101,” I said and started the car. “That’s Orwell too. 1984 .”

Numbers are a beautiful thing, real, more precise than poetry. Flight number. Date of arrival. Hotel room number. The sound of the typewriter came from the second floor room number 22. For over a hundred days it typed there. Room 22 was my sister’s 101. No, that’s not right. Things happened in room 22 that no young girl could have imagined in her nightmares.

The sun, as already mentioned, shone brightly, and I went on expounding on Orwell. “Room 101 isn’t simply a torture cell,” I explained to my husband. “It’s the lowest level of the private hell. It’s the place where everyone’s most private nightmares come true. Because everyone has his own worst nightmare: being slowly burned, slowly suffocated, being buried alive. You don’t read pornography, so maybe you don’t know that there are some people who are into asphyxiation. But that’s not the point. That’s not what I’m talking about. Not about the perversions that perverts enjoy. I’m talking about the victims of torture, about Orwell’s tortured. Orwell’s hero, Winston’s worst nightmare is rats, and so that’s exactly what his torturer prepares for him in room 101: he puts a famished rat inside a mask and fastens it to his face. And before he fastens the mask to his face the torturer gives him the benefit of his experience by explaining that the rat will gnaw his eyes, but that sometimes it prefers to start with the cheeks.”