It must be eleven o’clock or maybe a little earlier, and there’s not a soul in sight. The street of my triumphs is deep asleep; its lamps are distressingly dull. Deprived of its romance, my house looks like a haunted place—there’s something terrifying about the darkness it’s wrapped in. You’d think it had been abandoned for generations. We neglected to close the shutters, and some windows are broken. Pieces of paper litter the lawn and lie among the garden’s withered flowers. In our flight the other day, Kim forgot to lock the gate; malicious visitors have swung it wide open and left it that way, and now it’s making a low clanking sound, piercing the silence like a diabolical complaint. The lock has been literally gutted with an iron bar. They’ve also ripped one of the gate’s hinges out of the ground and wrecked the doorbell cover. The newspaper cuttings attached to my wall as signs of public condemnation flap in the breeze among some heinous graffiti. A lot has happened while I’ve been away.
There’s mail in my mailbox. A little envelope among the bills attracts my attention. No return address, just a stamp and a postmark. The envelope was mailed from Bethlehem. My heart nearly jumps out of my chest when I recognize Sihem’s handwriting. I run into the bedroom, turn on the lights, and sit down near the bedside table, where the photograph of my wife has pride of place.
Suddenly, I freeze.
Why Bethlehem? What news is it bringing me, this letter from beyond the grave? My fingers tremble and I begin a series of dry-throated gulps. For a moment, I think about waiting until later to open the envelope. I don’t feel up to turning the other cheek or adding to the sum of the misfortune that’s been following me around like a dog ever since the attack. The tornado that knocked down all my supports has left me terribly fragile; I wouldn’t have the strength to live through another dirty trick—and at the same time, I don’t feel capable of waiting a second longer. All my fibers are stretched to the breaking point; my exposed nerves are on the verge of shorting out completely. I take a deep breath and rip open the envelope. I could slit my wrists and feel less threatened, less endangered, than I do now. Prickly sweat runs down my back. My heart beats faster and faster, resounding dully in my temples and filling the room with giddy echoes.
The letter is short, without any date or salutation. Barely five lines, hastily scribbled on a piece of paper torn from a school notebook.
What use is happiness when it’s not shared, Amin, my love? My joys faded away every time yours didn’t follow. You wanted children. I wanted to deserve them. No child is completely safe if it has no country. Don’t hate me.
Sihem
The sheet of paper gets away from me, falls from my hands. With one blow, everything collapses. The woman I married for better or worse, forever, the woman who pulled me through my most difficult years, the woman who hung my projects with shimmering garlands and filled my soul with her sweet presence—I can’t find that woman anywhere. Nothing of her remains, not on me, not in my memories. I snatch the frame that holds her captive, now irredeemably out of date, and turn it around; I can’t reconcile myself to its image of what I used to think was the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s as though I’ve been catapulted over a cliff and sucked into a bottomless abyss. I shake my head, no; I shake my hands, no; I shake my whole being, no. I think, I’m going to wake up. But I’m awake. I’m not dreaming. The letter lies at my feet, exceedingly real, calling the totality of my convictions into question, pulverizing one by one all my most rock-ribbed certitudes. My last reference points have hit the fucking road. It’s not fair. The movie of my three-day captivity replays in my mind. Captain Moshé’s voice returns to persecute me; its hollow cries conjure up inextricably swirling images. A bright flash occasionally lights up one or another of them: I see Navid waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, Kim picking me up in pieces from my driveway, my attackers trying to lynch me in my own yard. I put my hands on my head and abandon myself to the growing, stupefying weariness inside me.
What the hell is this supposed to mean, Sihem, my love?
You think you know. Then you lower your guard and act as though everything’s just great. With the passage of time, you stop paying as much attention to things as you should. You’re confident. What more can you do? Life is smiling on you. So is luck. You love and are loved. You can afford your dreams. Everything’s fine, everything blesses you. . . . and then, without warning, the sky falls in on your head. And once you’re flat on your back, you realize that your life, your whole life—with its ups and downs, its pains and pleasures, its promises and failures—hangs and has always hung by a thread as flimsy and imperceptible as the threads in a spider’s web. Suddenly, the slightest sound terrifies you, and you no longer feel like believing in anything whatsoever. All you want to do is close your eyes and think no more.
* * *
“You forgot to close your door again!” Kim scolds me.
She’s standing in the bedroom doorway with her arms folded over her chest. I didn’t hear her come in.
“Why did you leave tonight? Navid and Ezra came over just to see you. What’s the matter, can’t you bear the sight of your friends anymore?”
Her smile grows confused and fades away.
“Say, what’s up? You look really strange.”
My appearance is sufficiently substandard to cause her to lunge at me, grab my wrists, and examine them to make sure they’re unharmed. “You haven’t cut yourself, have you? Man! You don’t have a drop of blood in your face. Have you seen a ghost, or what? What’s wrong? Say something, damn it! You took some shit, is that it? Look in my eyes and tell me whether you took some shit. It’s crazy, what you’re doing to yourself, Amin!” she shouts, all the while looking around for the poison capsule or the bottle of sleeping pills. “I can’t leave you alone for one minute!”
I watch her get on her knees and look under the bed, feeling around here and there.
I don’t recognize my voice when I blurt it out to her: “It was her, Kim! My God! How could she?”
Kim stops all words and gestures, draws herself up but remains on her knees. She doesn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”
She spots the letter at my feet, grabs it, reads it. Her brow furrows gradually, notch by notch, as she reads. “God Almighty!” She sighs.
She looks me up and down, unsure how to behave. An awkward moment ensues, and then she spreads her arms. I nestle against her, making myself very small, and for the second time in fewer than ten days, I begin bawling like a whole pack of babies, me, who hadn’t shed a single tear since Grandfather died, more than thirty years ago.
* * *
Kim stays with me until morning. When I awaken, I find her curled up in an armchair near my bed, visibly exhausted. Sleep surprised us when we least expected it. I don’t know which of us went down first. I passed out with my shoes on my feet and my jacket zipped up to my throat. Curiously, I feel as though a great storm has passed. Sihem’s photograph on the bedside table touches nothing in me. Her smile has faded; her eyes have rolled up into her head. My grief has crushed me without finishing me off.
Outside, a few twittering birds fray the morning silence. It’s over, I tell myself. The sun’s coming up, on the street and in my mind.
Kim takes me to visit her grandfather, who lives in a little house at the seashore. Old Yehuda hasn’t been informed about my troubles, and so much the better, as far as I’m concerned. I need people to look at me the way they always have done. If they fall silent, I don’t want to attribute that to embarrassment; if they smile, I don’t want to take that as a sign of pity.
During the drive, Kim and I avoid talking about the letter. To keep from running any risks, we keep silent. Kim’s in the driver’s seat of her Nissan, looking through her sunglasses. Her hair flutters in the wind of our passage. She looks straight ahead and keeps a tight grip on the steering wheel. For my part, I contemplate my bandaged wrist and try to take an interest in the purring of the engine.
Old Yehuda welcomes us with his h
abitual courtesy. His wife died a generation ago, and his children have all gone to other lands to live their lives. He’s recovering from a bout of prostate cancer that shriveled him in the course of a few months and left him an emaciated old man with bony cheekbones and immobile eyes in a ravaged face. Still, he’s always happy to receive visitors. For him, it’s like being brought back to life. He lives like a hermit in spite of himself, forgotten inside the house he built with his own hands, in the midst of books and photographs depicting, in great detail, the horrors of the Shoah. So when a relative or friend comes and knocks on his door, it’s as if someone were lifting the trapdoor of his underground lair to let a little light shine into his night.
The three of us have lunch in a restaurant close to the beach. It’s a beautiful day. Except for a ruffled cloud that’s dissolving into thin air, the sun has the sky to itself. A few families are on the sand: Some lounge around an improvised picnic; others walk along the shoreline in water up to their calves. Children chase one another, chirping like birds.
“Why didn’t you bring Sihem with you?” old Yehuda asks me point-blank.
My heart stops beating.
Kim, likewise taken by surprise, nearly chokes on an olive. She’d been afraid her grandfather would come out with something like this, but she’d expected it to happen much sooner, and when it didn’t, she relaxed her vigilance. I see her stiffen as her face goes crimson, and she waits for my response like a guilty man awaiting his sentence. I wipe my lips, and at the end of a meditative silence, I reply that Sihem was unavoidably detained. Old Yehuda nods and goes back to stirring his soup. I realize that he was just making small talk, probably to break the silence that had quarantined each of us in his own corner.
After the meal, old Yehuda goes back home for his siesta and Kim and I leave to take a walk in the sand. We patrol the beach from one end to the other, our hands behind our backs, our heads elsewhere. From time to time, a bold wave rolls up to us, licks our ankles, and surreptitiously withdraws.
Exhausted and recharged at the same time, we climb a dune to watch the sunset. The night shields us from the disorder of things. That does us good, both of us.
Yehuda comes and gets us. We have dinner on his veranda, listening to the sea tearing at the rocks. Every time the old man starts to tell us the story of his family, victims of the German concentration camps, Kim reminds him that he’s promised not to spoil the evening. He acknowledges that he has indeed agreed not to trot out the miseries of yesteryear once again and then sinks back into his chair, a little miffed at having to keep his memories to himself.
Kim suggests I sleep on the cot in the upstairs room; she takes the foam mattress on the floor. It’s still early when we turn out the lights.
All night long, I try to understand how Sihem arrived at the point she reached. What was the moment when she started to get away from me? How could I have failed to notice anything? Surely, she tried to give me some sign, to tell me something I wasn’t quick enough to catch. What was I thinking? It’s true, her eyes had lost a great deal of their brilliance recently, and she laughed less and less; but was that the message I had to decipher, the outstretched hand I absolutely had to grasp in order to prevent the flood from sweeping her away from me? Pretty pathetic clues for someone who spared no effort to give each kiss its celebration and every embrace its orgasm. I turn my memories over from top to bottom in search of a detail that might soothe my soul, but I find nothing conclusive. Between Sihem and me, there was a perfect love, a harmonious serenade that seemed unmarred by a single false note. We didn’t talk; we told ourselves, the way a storyteller tells a romantic idyll. Had she ever uttered a groan, I would have taken it for singing, for I couldn’t suspect that she was on the periphery of my happiness when she embodied it utterly. Only once did she speak of dying. We were on the shore of a Swiss lake, gazing on a sunset that turned the horizon into a work of art. “I wouldn’t survive you by as much as a minute,” she confided to me. “You’re all the world to me. Whenever I can’t see you, I die a little.” She was radiant that evening, Sihem was, in her white dress. The men seated at the tables around us devoured her with their eyes. As though inspired by her freshness, the lake welcomed the freshness of the night. . . . No, she wasn’t warning me then, not in that place; she was so happy, so attentive to the soft breeze ruffling the surface of the lake; she was the most beautiful gift life could offer me.
* * *
Old Yehuda gets up first. I hear him making coffee. I push away the covers and put on my trousers and my shoes, and then I step over Kim, who’s lying curled up at the foot of my bed with the sheet twisted around her legs.
Outside, the night’s packing up.
I go downstairs to the kitchen, where Yehuda’s sitting at the table with his hands around a bowl of steaming coffee. “Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning, Amin. There’s coffee on the stove.”
“Later,” I tell him. “First I want to see the sunrise.”
“An excellent idea.”
I go down a little path to the beach, sit on a rock, and concentrate on the infinitesimal crack that’s starting to appear in the darkness. The breeze rummages around under my shirt and tousles my hair. I wrap my arms around my knees, delicately place my chin on them, and stare unwaveringly at the opalescent streaks gently lifting the horizon’s coattails. . . .
“Let the sound of the waves drown out all that racket inside you,” old Yehuda says, surprising me as he eases himself down to sit at my side. “It’s the best way to clear your mind of thoughts.”
He listens to a wave gargling in the hollow of the rock, wipes his nose with his fist, and speaks in a confiding tone: “One should always look at the sea. It’s a mirror that can’t lie. Among other things, looking at it has taught me to stop looking behind me. Before, every time I looked over my shoulder, I found my old sorrows and my old ghosts, still intact. They were preventing me from regaining my taste for living. Do you understand what I mean? They were spoiling my chances of rising from my ashes.”
He digs up a pebble and holds it distractedly, as though weighing it.
“That’s the reason why I chose to spend my last years here and die in my house on the seashore. A man who looks at the sea turns his back on the misfortunes of the world. Somehow, he resigns himself to them.”
His arm describes an arc when he flings the stone into the waves.
“I spent the better part of my life tracking down past suffering,” he says. “As far as I was concerned, nothing could beat a remembrance ceremony or a memorial dedication. I was convinced that the only reason I’d survived the Holocaust was to keep its memory alive. All I wanted to look at was gravestones. Whenever I heard that a big one was being unveiled somewhere, I’d jump on a plane at once so I could get a seat in one of the rows in front. I recorded all the conferences that dealt with the Jewish genocide and traveled the world from one end to the other so I could recount what our people endured in the concentration camps, suspended between the gas chambers and the crematory ovens. And yet, personally, I didn’t see much of the Holocaust. I was four years old. I occasionally wonder whether some of my memories aren’t really the result of traumatic experiences I had well after the war, in dark theaters where they showed documentaries about the Nazi atrocities.”
After a long silence, during which he has to struggle to control his emotions, he goes on. “I was born to be happy. Providence seemed to have stacked all the cards in my favor. I was sound in body and mind. My family was well-off. My father was a physician in Berlin’s most prestigious clinic. My mother taught art history at the university. We lived in a splendid house in a fashionable neighborhood—with a yard like a big meadow. I was the youngest of six children, and we had servants who attended to my every need.
“In the city, it was obvious that things weren’t exactly rosy. Racial discrimination was gaining ground—every day there was a little more. People made disagreeable remarks when they passed us in the street. But as soo
n as we got back to our house, we were in the very bosom of happiness.
“Then one morning, we had to give up our tranquil haven and join the cohorts of the innumerable, confused families who’d been driven from their homes and delivered up to the demons of Kristallnacht. Some mornings are just more night. And that long night in the fall of 1938 was certainly the blackest. I’ll always remember those people, their empty eyes, the yellow stars that so clashed with the cut of their clothes, and, especially, the silence that accompanied their misfortune.”
“The yellow star made its first appearance in September 1941.”
“I know. However, there it is, pinned to each of my memories, deeply entrenched in every corner of my brain. I wonder if I wasn’t born with it. I was only knee-high, but it seems to me I could see above the adults’ heads without ever catching even a glimpse of the horizon. It was a most unusual morning, totally gray. Grayness surrounded us, and the mist erased our tracks on the road of no return. I remember every tremor in the stricken faces around me. I remember their fraught stupor; I remember how they smelled of carrion. When one of the damned became too exhausted to go on and a blow from a rifle butt stretched him out on the ground, I raised my eyes to my father, trying to understand; he rooted around in my hair and whispered, ‘It’s nothing. Everything will be all right. . . .’ I swear to you, right now, as I’m speaking to you, I feel his fingers against my skull, and they give me gooseflesh. . . .”
The Attack Page 6
