To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  Yoel asked himself whether this hypothesis could also help him in his present investigations; for example, in connection with the African beam guiding the migrating birds? Could a patient, protracted, systematic examination of a reflection of a reflection reveal a hint, a crack through which you could peer at something that was not accessible to us? Or was it, rather, the opposite: do the contours become fainter from reflection to reflection, as in a copy of a copy, the colors fading, the shapes becoming blurred, the whole being darkened and distorted?

  One way or another, at least in the matter of the cripple, his mind was at rest for the time being. Only, he observed that most forms of evil are out of the question for somebody with no arms or legs. The invalid in Helsinki really did have the face of a girl. Or, rather, of something gentler still, gentler than a child, shining and wide-eyed as though he knew what the answer was, and quietly rejoiced over its unbelievable simplicity, though here it was, before your very eyes.

  31

  Yet there was still the question of whether the wheelchair was self-propelled or whether, which seemed more reasonable, there was somebody pushing it. And if so, what did that person look like?

  Yoel knew that here he must stop himself. This was a line that must not be crossed.

  That evening, sitting in front of the television, he looked at his daughter. With her hair cropped so fiercely that only bristles were left, with her forceful jawline whose undoubted origin was in the Lublin family, but which had skipped Ivria to reappear in Netta, with her clothes that struck him as neglected, his child looked to him like a lean recruit who has been put into trousers that are too big and baggy for him, but who tightens his lips and says nothing. In her eyes there sometimes flickered a sharp, greenish glint, which preceded by a few seconds the utterance "Suit yourself." This evening she had chosen as usual to sit stiffly upright on one of the dark straight-backed chairs in the corner by the dining table. As far away as possible from her father sprawling on the sofa and her grandmothers in their armchairs. When the plot thickened on the television screen, she would make her usual asides, such as "The cashier is the killer," or "Either way she won't be able to forget him," or "He'll end up crawling back to her on all fours." Sometimes she would say: "How stupid. How can she know that he doesn't know yet?"

  If one of the grandmothers (it was generally Avigail) asked her to make tea or get something from the refrigerator, Netta would obey without a word. But whenever anyone commented on her clothes, her haircut, her bare feet, her fingernails (generally these comments emanated from Lisa), Netta would silence her with a single acid remark and continue sitting silently on her stiff-backed chair. On one occasion Yoel tried to come to his mother's aid on the question of Netta's social isolation or her unfeminine appearance. Netta said:

  "Femininity isn't exactly your subject, is it?"

  And so she silenced him.

  What was his subject? Avigail implored him to sign up for some courses at the university, both for the pleasure and to broaden his horizons. His mother maintained that he ought to go into business. Several times she hinted to him about a considerable sum of money she had available for a sensible investment. And there was a persistent appeal from a former colleague who kept promising Yoel the moon if he would agree to join him as a partner in a private detective agency. Krantz tried to inveigle him into some sort of nocturnal adventures in a hospital; Yoel did not even bother to grasp what he was talking about. Meanwhile Netta sometimes lent him a book of poetry that he would leaf through to the accompaniment of the rain beating at the windows as he lay in bed at night. Occasionally he would stop and read a few lines, sometimes even a single line over and over again. Among the poems of Y. Sharon in his book A Period in a City he discovered the last five lines on page 46 and he read them four times in succession before deciding to agree with the poet, even though he was not entirely certain that he had fully understood his meaning.

  Yoel had a blue notebook in which over the years he had been writing down general notes about epilepsy, which was the disease it was generally agreed that Netta had suffered from—albeit in a mild form—since she was four. Some of the doctors, admittedly, were not entirely in agreement with this diagnosis. Ivria had joined them with a poignant fervor that verged at times on hatred. Yoel had dreaded this state, but he was also fascinated by it, and occasionally, indirectly, somewhat inflamed it. He had never shown the notebook to Ivria. He had always kept it locked in the safe. After he left his job and took early retirement, the safe was emptied and transferred from Jerusalem to Ramat Lotan, and Yoel saw no further need to hide it in the floor, nor even to keep it always locked. If he did lock it, it was only because of the notebook. And the drawings of cyclamens that his daughter had made for him when she was at nursery school or starting primary school, because it was his favorite flower. Had it not been for Ivria, he thought, not for the first time, he might have called his daughter Rakefet, "cyclamen." But between Ivria and himself there was a permanent state of mutual awareness and compromise. Hence he had not put his foot down about the name. Both Ivria and Yoel had hoped that their daughter would get better when the time finally came for her to become a woman. And they were both revolted by the thought that one day some thick-limbed youth would take her away from them. They were sometimes aware that Netta came between them, and yet they knew that when she went away they would be left face to face with each other. Yoel was ashamed of the secret joy he sometimes derived from the thought that Ivria's death meant her defeat and that he and Netta had finally been victorious. The word "epilepsy" means "fit" or "seizure." Sometimes it is an idiopathic disease and sometimes it is organic, and there are cases where it is both. In the second case it is a question of a disease of the brain, not a mental illness. The symptoms are attacks of contractions accompanied by loss of consciousness, occurring at irregular intervals. Frequently the attacks are announced by manifestations, known collectively as the aura, such as dizziness, tinnitus, blurred vision, and melancholia, or else its opposite, euphoria. The fit itself takes the form of a stiffening of the muscles, difficulty in breathing, cyanosis, and sometimes also biting the tongue, and the appearance of blood-flecked foam on the lips. This phase, known as the tonic phase, rapidly passes. It is generally followed by the clonic phase, which lasts for a few minutes and is manifested in violent involuntary contractions of various muscles. These contractions too gradually pass. Then the patient may immediately wake up or may lapse into a deep and prolonged slumber. In either case he will have no recollection of the fit on waking. There are some patients who have several attacks a day, and others who have only one in three or even five years. Some experience them during the day and others while they are asleep at night.

  And Yoel had also written this in his notebook:

  Apart from grand mal, there are those who suffer only from petit mal, the only symptom of which is a momentary loss of consciousness. Approximately half of epileptic children suffer initially only from this minor form of the disease. Some, either in the absence of major or minor fits or in addition to them, experience various kinds of psychologically based attacks, which occur with varying frequency, but always suddenly: vagueness, phobias, paresthesia (disturbance of the sensations), migration urges, fantasies accompanied by hallucinations, outbursts of rage, and states of stupor during which the patient may perform dangerous or even criminal acts that he will entirely forget about on waking.

  Over the years the illness in its more severe forms is liable to bring about a change of personality or even a mental breakdown. But in most cases the patient, between attacks, is as sane as anybody else. It is common knowledge that constant insomnia is liable to aggravate the illness, just as the aggravation of the illness is liable to cause constant insomnia in the patient.

  Nowadays the illness is diagnosed, except in marginal and ambiguous cases, by psychomotor encephalography, which consists of measuring and recording the electrical waves in the brain. The focus of the problem is in the temporal lobe. Sophisticated
tests may sometimes reveal latent epilepsy, an electrical impulse in the brain with no external manifestation, in members of patients' families. These relations are not ill themselves, they do not even suspect that anything is wrong, but they are liable to pass the illness on to their offspring. The illness is almost always hereditary, even if it is usually passed on in quiescent or dormant form from generation to generation, and manifests itself in only a few of the descendants.

  And because there have always been a lot of people who pretended to suffer attacks, as long ago as 1760 de Haan discovered in Vienna that a simple inspection of the pupil of the eye generally suffices to detect malingerers. Only in the case of a genuine fit do the pupils not react by contracting when a light is shone into them.

  The most widely practiced form of treatment is the avoidance of physical or mental shocks and the controlled use of tranquilizers such as various combinations of bromides and barbiturates.

  The saying "Coitus is a kind of epileptic fit" is variously ascribed to the ancient writers Hippocrates and Democritus. Aristotle, on the other hand, in his treatise On Sleep and Waking, maintains that epilepsy resembles sleep and that in a certain sense sleep is epilepsy. Here Yoel inserted a question mark in brackets, because at least on the surface he had imagined that coitus and sleep were opposites. A medieval Jewish sage applied to the illness the words of Jeremiah 17:9: "The heart is the most deceitful of all things, desperately sick; who can fathom it?"

  Yoel also wrote the following in his notebook, among other things:

  Ever since ancient times the falling sickness has trailed a sort of magic train behind it. Many different people have attributed to sufferers either inspiration or possession or prophecy, enslavement to demons or the opposite, a special closeness to the divine. Hence such appellations as morbus divus or morbus sacer or morbus unaticus astralis or morbus daemoniacus.

  Yoel, who, in spite of Ivria's fury, had accepted that Netta was suffering from a mild form of the illness, refused to be impressed by all these names. There was no sign of lunacy or astral influence in his daughter the day the thing first made its appearance when she was four years old. It was not he, but Ivria who rushed off and called for an ambulance. He, though he had been trained to react quickly, had hesitated because he thought he noticed a faint trembling on the little girl's lips, as though she were teasing them, and holding back her laughter. And then when he pulled himself together and ran toward the ambulance carrying her in his arms, he fell down the steps with her and his head hit the railing; when he came to, he was in the emergency ward and the diagnosis had been virtually agreed on and Ivria only said to him quietly: I'm surprised at you.

  Since the end of August there had been no symptoms. Yoel was mainly worried now about the question of her call-up. After weighing various ideas in his head, including Le Patron's influence, he decided to wait and not do anything until the results of the physical examinations she would have to undergo at the recruiting center came.

  During these windy, rainy nights he sometimes went to the kitchen at two or three in the morning in his pajamas, his face crumpled from tiredness, and there was his daughter sitting stiffly at the kitchen table, with an empty teacup in front of her and with her ugly glasses on, indifferent to a moth fluttering around the ceiling light, totally absorbed in her reading.

  "Good morning, young lady. May I inquire what her ladyship is reading?"

  Netta calmly finished the paragraph, or the page, and only then, without raising her eyes, she answered:

  "A book."

  "Shall I make us some tea? Or a sandwich?"

  To which she always replied merely:

  "Suit yourself."

  So the pair of them sat eating and drinking tea in the kitchen in silence. Though they sometimes put their books down and conversed in low, intimate voices. About the freedom of the press, for example. Or the appointment of a new attorney general. Or the disaster at Chernobyl. And sometimes they sat and drew up a shopping list to replenish the supply of drugs in the bathroom cabinet. Until the newspaper thudded on the garden path, and Yoel dashed out in vain to catch the delivery man. Who had invariably vanished.

  32

  As the festival of Hanukkah approached, Lisa made doughnuts and latkes, bought a new Hanukkah menorah and a pack of colored candles, and asked Yoel to find out the order of lighting the candles. When Yoel protested in astonishment, his mother, in the grip of a powerful emotion that almost made her shoulders shake, replied that always, every year, poor dear Ivria had wanted this, to celebrate the Jewish festivals a little according to the tradition, but you, Yoel, you were never at home, and whenever you were, you never let her say a word.

  Yoel, taken aback, began to remonstrate with her, but for once his mother interrupted him and rebuked him forgivingly, in a tone of faint sadness: You always remember only what suits you.

  To his surprise, Netta chose to take Lisa's side for once. She said:

  "So what, if it makes somebody feel good. For all I care, you can light Hanakkuah candles or even bonfires for Lag B'Omer. Whichever." Just as Yoel was about to shrug and give in, Avigail stormed onto the battleground with fresh forces. She put her arm around Lisa's shoulder and said in her warm, patiently pedagogical voice:

  "Excuse me, Lisa, but I am a little surprised at you: Ivria never believed in God, and she had no respect for him either. She could never tolerate all that religious ceremonial. We cannot understand what you are talking about all of a sudden."

  Lisa, stubbornly repeating the expression "poor dear Ivria," fought pugnaciously for her view, with a ferocious expression on her face and a captiously sarcastic tone in her voice:

  "You should all be ashamed of yourselves. It's not even a year yet since the poor dear died, and already I can see you want to kill her again."

  "Lisa. Stop it. That's enough for today. Go and have a rest."

  "All right then. I'll stop it. There's no need. She is not here any more and I'm the weakest one here, so all right. Let it be. I'll give in to you. Just like she always gave in about everything. Only don't you think we've forgotten already, Yoel, who didn't say kaddish for her. Her brother had to say it instead of you. Only from shame I thought I would die on the spot."

  Avigail gently expressed an anxiety that since the operation, and of course because of it, Lisa's memory was going. These things did happen and the medical literature was full of examples. Even her specialist, Dr. Litwin, had said that there might be some mental changes. On the one hand, she couldn't remember where she'd just put her duster or where the ironing board was, and on the other hand, she could remember things that never happened. This religiosity must be yet another disturbing symptom.

  Lisa said:

  "Myself, I'm not religious. On the contrary. It revolts me. But poor dear Ivria always wanted to have a bit of tradition in the house and you always laughed in her face, and now you are spitting on her. Less than a year she's been dead and you're trampling on her grave already."

  Netta said:

  "I don't remember her as a religious freak. A bit spaced out maybe, but not religious. It could be my memory's gone too."

  And Lisa:

  "All right then, why not. So let them bring the biggest medical specialist and he can examine everybody one after the other and decide once and for all who is mental and who is normal and who is senile already and who wants to banish the memory of poor dear Ivria out of this house."

  Yoel said:

  "That's enough. The three of you. We're through now. If it goes on like this they'll have to call in the border patrol."

  Avigail remarked sweetly:

  "In that case, I give in. There's no need to quarrel. Let it be as Lisa wishes. Let her have her candles and her unleavened bread. In her present condition we must all give in to her."

  So the argument was brought to an end and peace reigned until that evening. Then it became clear that Lisa had forgotten her original wish. She dressed up in her black velvet party dress and laid out her homemade
doughnuts and latkes. But the menorah, unused, was silently placed on the shelf over the fireplace in the living room. Not far from the figurine of the tormented predator.

  Three days later, on the same shelf and without asking anyone, Lisa suddenly placed a small photograph of Ivria that she had fitted in a dark wooden frame.

  "So that we should remember her a bit," she said, "so that she should have some memorial in this house."

  For ten days the photograph stood at the en of the shelf in the living room and none of them said a word. Through her glasses that suggested a stern family doctor of an earlier generation Ivria looked out of the photograph at her ruined Romanesque abbeys, which hung on the wall opposite. Her face looked even thinner than it had when she was alive, her skin fine and pale; her eyes behind her glasses were bright and long-lashed. In her expression in the photograph, Yoel deciphered, or thought he could decipher, an unlikely mixture of melancholy and slyness. Her hair streaming down over her shoulders had turned half gray. Her fading beauty still had the power to compel Yoel to avoid looking that way. Almost to avoid going into the living room. Several times he even missed the nine o'clock news. More and more he found himself glued to the biography of Chief of Staff Elazar that he had found in Mr. Kramer's bookcase. The details of the judicial inquiry fascinated him. He spent long hours shut in his room, bent over Mr. Kramer's desk, arranging various details on charts he had drawn on graph paper. He used the fine-nibbed pen, and derived a certain satisfaction from the need to dip it in the inkwell every ten words or so. Sometimes he imagined he had sniffed out a certain inconsistency in the findings of the Commission of Inquiry that had found the Chief of Staff guilty, even though he knew well that without access to the primary sources he could produce nothing more than guesses. Nevertheless, he strained to dismantle what was written in the book, down to the finest details, and then to piece them together again, first in one sequence and then in another. Facing him on the desk stood Mr. Kramer in his neatly pressed uniform adorned with badges of rank and decorations, his face radiant with self-satisfaction, clasping the hand of Lieutenant General Elazar, who looked tired and withdrawn, his attention held by something far beyond Kramer's shoulder. There were moments when Yoel imagined he could hear from the living room the strains of ragtime or quiet jazz. He did not hear it with his ears but through the pores of his skin. For some reason, the result was that he went often, almost every other evening, into the forests of Annemarie and Ralph's living room.