On several occasions he lay in wait for me outside the house. And once he popped up in the rain and barred my way. “So this is what you want, so this is how you like it,” he hissed at me as he pushed me against the fence. His hair was wet, his face was wet, and his teeth were clenched over me. My pregnancy was already showing and my five-month belly was crushed against the trousers of his uniform. He had received a twenty-four-hour pass on the pretext of needing to have a wisdom
tooth extracted, and after the tooth which didn’t need to be extracted at all had been extracted, straight from the dental clinic, with half his jaw still numb, he came to wait for me in the street. I learned all this later, from another letter he wrote me, and this too did not touch me.
I don’t want to think about him. He’s not my fault, and it’s not my fault that his expression looked ridiculous to me. As ridiculous as the way he grabbed my hands and held them behind my back, as if he was copying some manly gesture he’d seen in the movies, only the imitation was too transparent, like an actor in a bad audition. I shook him off without any difficulty. Without any difficulty because at this point I had nothing to offer in any case and nothing to give. Not to Amikam or to anyone else who wasn’t Alek.
He asked: “Are you expected at home? Should I take you home now?” And I said: “There’s no need, I’m allowed to stay over, I’ve got my final exams in literature tomorrow.” He was amused by the literature exam. “What are you being examined on?” “Tons of stuff. The poets of medieval Spain, Tchernikhowsky, Bialik, Leah Goldberg, Amir Gilboa, five Agnon stories,
Pere Goriot(??), Crime and Punishment
, and that’s not all. I like
Crime and Punishment
best, in my opinion it’s the most profound, except for the character of Sonia which isn’t very convincing.” This amused him even more. I didn’t yet know that Alek was studying Comparative Literature. “Interesting … why don’t you find Sonia convincing?”
“Because she’s too one-dimensional, too saintly, as if she isn’t a prostitute at all. It’s obvious that no such prostitute exists.”
“You mean that Dostoevsky failed with her from point of view of social realism?’ ”
“I mean that a prostitute can’t be a saint.”
“And you know this, that a prostitute can’t be saint,” he stated, without a question mark. I didn’t know what to say to him, and I simply repeated like a literature teacher that Sonia was “a one-dimensional character, much more one-dimensional that Raskolnikov.”
He pulled on a pair of pants and got up to make us tea. I remained naked. “If you have an exam tomorrow, you must sleep,” he said and pulled the sheet up to my chin.
How did I come by the illusion that I “understood him,” having only the vaguest notion of what he was talking about?
“Only someone with an individual voice of his own can describe what is impossible to describe,” he quoted to me once, I don’t know from where.
Alek turned off the reading lamp and went to his cubbyhole of a study, the little room where I am writing now. In the light coming from his room and the light of the street lamp coming from outside, I could still see things, and everything I saw gave rise in me to a feeling of wonder, as if something very wonderful and joyful were dancing and twinkling in all the objects in the world. As if something beyond comprehension and steeped in magic pervaded everything, and I had only just found out. An old wooden cupboard, a mirror in a wooden frame hanging on the wall, a picture of a pale green demon woman reflected in the mirror, the bamboo armchair with a white bedspread thrown onto it. And a chilly breeze sharpening the edges of my body, the touch of the sheet and the configuration of the cascading fabric on the armchair.
Wide awake, more wide awake than I had ever been in my life, I sensed everything with my gaze, and it seemed to me that my eyes could feel textures: the lingering touch of a fold of pale cloth; the dry touch of a pile of books; the hooked green touch of the she-devil’s fingernails; the cold green touch of her figure in the mirror and the curly cold green of her hair. Below her, four patterned floor tiles, patched into the yellowish floor, the tendrils of a vine gaily twining over them.
With this gaze came the sensation that I was filling my body, that I was inhabiting all of it, and that I had been given a form. This was me-my-body, and these were my edges, and beyond them was living air. I extracted my hands from under the sheet, I twiddled my fingers in front of my eyes like a baby, and laughed softly with their movements.
Hello, hello, this is me in space.
At some point I got up and went to Alek. I stood behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He didn’t turn around, just held one of my hands with his and went on writing with the other. On the desk the German book I had seen before in the kitchen lay open, together with a German-Russian dictionary.
“What are you doing?” A question that in the days to come I learned not to ask.
“If I’m already going to Heidelberg, I should learn German.”
“Tell me more.”
“More about what?”
“More about the army. You were in the army weren’t you?”
“Once a million years ago I studied medicine for half a year, so they made me medical orderly in the Golani Brigade. Logic of the Israeli Defense Forces.”
“So why shouldn’t a girl serve in the army?”
Alek sighed, turned round to face me, and sat me naked on his knees.
Woman (flirtatiously stubborn, arching her neck back and distancing her face from his kisses): No, explain to me.…
Man (kissing her neck, slipping his hand between her legs): Explain to you what? You know everything.
Woman: But still … explain.…
Man: What can I explain to you? What? A soldier is a slave (turning her face towards him and giving her a deep kiss), a soldier is a slave (another kiss with his eyes closed), and a woman in the army is … how do you say it? Slave of the slave.
Woman (with her eyes closed too): A bondmaid.
Man: Right.
Alek wasn’t keen on presenting his biography in an orderly fashion: “It doesn’t matter now,” “that’s prehistory,” “it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.” So that it took me months to put the facts of his CV together, and a lot longer to begin to understand something about them. And indeed, what could I understand from a sentence like “My mother’s husband is Polish by origin, and because of that in ’58 they let us leave.” Because what did I know about it? I loved Dostoevsky and to a lesser degree also Tolstoy, they “spoke to me” and for some reason I assumed that I understood them. I liked the “Russian songs” we sang in the youth movement, until I saw that Alek detested them. And
I was fascinated by the tales my father used to tell about the “Russian lunacies” of the early days on the kibbutz. My mother would purse her lips whenever he told these stories. She was born on the kibbutz and he wasn’t, so: “Not everything has to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.”
Apart from that, there were the almost daily articles about the “Jews of Silence” and a lot of arguments about the dropouts at the transit station in Austria, and one graffiti on Gaza Street next to the Prime Minister’s house: “The Russian Jews want to go home? Let them go home.” To put it plainly, I didn’t have what’s called a background, I didn’t know a thing, not about the country Alek called his “prehistoric motherland”—France he sometimes referred to as his “historic motherland”—and not even about a mother’s husbands. I didn’t know anyone who had a “mother’s husband.”
Alek wasn’t any keener on explaining the facts than he was on revealing them, and in this he was completely different not only from Amikam but in fact from anyone else I knew. Questions like “If you were already studying in Paris, why did you actually come to Israel?” would make him close up completely.
“I thought this was a country of Jews,” “The students there, in Paris, didn’t really understand. They didn’t have any clue about what their slogans meant. It was clear from the outset that the Communists would take over the whole thing, it couldn’t have happened any other way.” Sometimes he would produce sentences like this, but I didn’t know what to make of them, even though I tried to look as if I understood. Somehow I grasped that Alek’s politics too were different from those of the crowd that hung around in his house, but nothing in my education had prepared me to actually understand what he was saying.
More than twenty years later, in ’93, when I came to him in Moscow, he began to talk to me about Russians and Russia, and he continued to do so in the six further visits I paid him. Perhaps the changed times made it easier for him to explain, and perhaps he needed the years of our common history to trust me. Perhaps he was also influenced by the fact that in these meetings he was the host, and therefore the guide by force of circumstance. In any event, one of the many things I didn’t understand in ’72 was how much of an Israeli I was in his eyes. And that “Israeli” meant foreign. It was enough for me that his Hebrew was almost flawless, it was enough that he had spent six months on a kibbutz and then served in the Golani Brigade, to take it for granted that he understood everything as I did. And more than that, that he understood me as I did.
Close to my final exams in Bible studies—an exam in which Alek showed a surprising interest—I adopted the verb “to know” as it is used in the Book of Genesis as part of my inner language: What, for example, did Adam know about his wife Eve? He didn’t ask, investigate, clarify things to enable him to “know about” her, and nor did she, for her part, “know about” him. Adam knew Eve his wife, and Eve, so I decided, knew Adam. And this primordial knowledge, whatever its meaning, seemed to me the highest level of relationship. A kind of pristine knowledge, preceding words and names. An illumination that does not need biographical data, and is always felt as a miracle.
And even today, years later, I’m not sure that this subliminal knowledge was a total illusion. That is to say, if I were asked my official, rational opinion, it would be that it is impossible to know someone whose language you don’t speak, whose memories you haven’t investigated,
whose associations are all foreign to you. A man for whom sounds and smells, words and tastes and concepts are associated with images about which you haven’t got a clue. That’s my opinion, I have no argument to contradict it, and nevertheless, in spite of my irrefutable opinion, what is it that happens when he turns my face to him, when he looks into my face, when I look at him while we’re fucking? What else can I call it but pure knowledge? And a kind of recognition, as if we were predestined to know, and that nothing else is possible for me.
With the passing of the years, the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much bullshit is involved in this kind of “knowing.” “He looked into her eyes until he saw to the depths of her soul.” “And then, in a moment of grace, his soul was revealed to her.” “They were soul mates,” and all the rest of that romantic novelette rubbish. So he fucks me with his eyes open, so I look at him without fantasizing, so I come at the same time as him without taking my eyes off him, so—what does it mean?
I say: It’s sentimental crap, I think it’s crap, it’s clear to me that it’s crap, and nevertheless, against my better judgement, I still feel it as a miracle, and I am still full of the grace of that knowledge.
I say that I had and still have a deep sense of knowledge, but this subcutaneous knowledge did nothing to abate my curiosity. I wanted to know everything—no detail was too trivial for me—and every detail I accumulated immediately split up into lots of new details charged with magic that also split up at the edges into radiant new reflections of light. Alert as a stalker, I spent my days watching him, me, us, trying to learn things from every word and gesture. This was a new, focussed activity that demanded all of me and concentrated all of me, very far from the
soft, dazed state usually associated with lovers. And even now, when I recall those memories, it still seems to me that there is yet something to be learned in this story.
In the evenings the house would often be full of people. Looking back it’s clear to me that he didn’t regard them as friends or even like them, but for some reason he simply put his place at their disposal. Sometimes he would make them coffee, sometimes he let somebody else wash glasses or grapes from the market and serve, for the most part he seemed to observe them and their arguments from the side.
In the living room behind me—though for some reason I feel as if their scenes took place somewhere else—they chewed over the third world and the cultural revolution, capitalist technocracy and the tyranny of tolerance, artistic fetishism and the right to violence, and suchlike subjects. Menachem Levy wanted to burn down all the museums. Menachem Becker agreed to burn down the lot—except for Van Gogh. And with sentences like these they would burn entire evenings. Becker was a Trotskyite and Levy was a Maoist, or maybe the opposite, in any case I didn’t know the difference, I just sat on the mattress and soaked up Marcuse and Sartre, the Red Brigades, the Rage Brigade, and urban guerrilla warfare.
Alek intervened only rarely, and when he did they listened to him. Once, I remember, it happened when they were arguing about Godard, what he was actually saying and exactly what kind of revolutionary he was. They appealed to Alek because Dalit had heard from somebody that he had met Godard and interviewed him for a student newspaper in Paris. And Alek, with demonstrative reluctance, said that Godard’s political opinions were of no interest to him, nor were Mao’s sayings in
La Chinoise
, nor what Godard thought about Mao’s sayings. He had
interviewed Godard because he was asked to do so, it was a job, there were people who thought that this was the way to write in a newspaper and these were the questions that should be asked, but they were in a house now, not a newspaper. “Of course Godard is a revolutionary, from ideological point of view the worst kind possible, but Godard is nevertheless the Schoenberg of cinema, and the important thing is the revolution an artist makes with his camera, and all the rest is just rubbish for politicians.”