Black Box (6 page)

[Signed] A. Maimon, Investigator
S. Zand Private Investigations Ltd., Tel Aviv

ITEM C:
The parts underlined in red pencil by Mr. Zakheim in the material he enclosed with his letter to A. A. Gideon in London dated 28.3.76.

1. From the decision of the Rabbinical Court in the case of the divorce suit of A. A. Gideon versus Halina Brandstetter-Gideon, Jerusalem, 1968: “. . . we therefore find that the wife committed adultery, on her own admission . . . she therefore forfeits her
ketubah
and maintenance. . . .”

2. From the decision of the Jerusalem District Court, 1968: “As for her claim for maintenance for herself and her small child . . . because of the father’s insistence that he is not the child’s father . . . in the light of the inconclusive results of the blood test . . . this court advised the parties to undergo a tissue test . . . the wife declined to undergo this test . . . the husband also declined to undergo a tissue test . . . the wife withdrew her claim for maintenance for herself and the child . . . the court therefore strikes out her claim, both parties having declared that henceforth they have no further demands on each other.”

***

Dr. Alexander Gideon
Political Science Department
Midwest University
Chicago, Ill., U.S.A.

Jerusalem
19.4.1976

Distant Alec,

I am writing to you again to your Illinois address in the hope that some secretary will take the trouble to forward my letter to you. I do not know where you are. The black-and-white room, your empty desk, the empty bottle, and the empty glass surround you always in my thoughts like the capsule of a spacecraft in which you are constantly moving from continent to continent. And the fire burning in the grate, lighting up your monkish body and your greying, balding head, and the deserted snowfields you can see from your window stretching away until they fade into the mist. Everything as in a woodcut. Always. Wherever you are.

So what do I want this time? What more can the fisherman’s wife ask the golden fish to give her? Another hundred thousand? Or a palace of emerald?

Nothing, Alec. I have no request. I am only writing so as to talk to you. Even though I already know all the answers. Why you have such long ears. And why your eyes are flashing and sparkling at me. And why such sharp teeth.

There’s nothing new, Alec.

At this point you can crumple the letter up and throw it on the fire. The paper will flare up for a moment and then vanish to another world, a tongue of flame will stretch up and die down as though kindled by an empty passion, a fine charred strip will take off and flutter around the room, perhaps to land at your feet. And you will be alone again. You can pour yourself a whisky and celebrate your victory, all alone: there she is, groveling at my feet. She has lost interest in her African discovery and now she is begging for mercy.

Because apart from malicious glee you have never known any other joy in your life, wicked, solitary Alec. So read this and rejoice. Read this and laugh silently to the moon at the end of the snow at your window.

This time I am writing to you behind Michel’s back. And without telling him. At ten-thirty he switched off the television, went around the flat systematically turning out the lights, covered the child, checked that the door was bolted, put a sweater around my shoulders, wrapped himself up in a blanket, glanced at the evening paper, muttered something, and fell asleep. Now his spectacles and his cigarettes are on the desk next to me, his gentle breathing blends in with the ticking of the brown clock, which was a present from his parents. And I am sitting at his desk and writing to you, and so I am sinning both against him and against our child. This time I cannot even use Boaz. Your son is all right: your money and Michel’s wisdom extricated him from trouble. The friends of the Sommo family got his police record closed. Little by little Michel is finding his way toward Boaz. Like making a way through a thicket. Can you believe it? He managed to make Boaz come and see us here in Jerusalem last weekend, and several times I could not help laughing at the sight of my tiny husband and my giant of a son competing with each other all day for the favors of the little girl, who seemed to be enjoying the contest and even fanning the flames. When the Sabbath was over, Michel made us all a salad with olives and hot peppers, hamburgers and fried potatoes, and asked the neighbors’ son to baby-sit so we could go to the second show at the cinema.

Does this rapprochement complicate your strategy? I’m sorry. You have lost a point. How did you put it to me once? When the battle is at its height there is no more sense in the initial briefings. In any case, the enemy now knows about the briefing and does not act in accordance with it. That’s how it happened to you that Boaz and Michel are almost friends now, while I watch and smile: for instance, when Michel climbed up on Boaz’s shoulders to change a light bulb on the veranda. Or when Yifat tried to put Michel’s slippers on Boaz’s feet.

Why am I telling you all this?

In fact we ought to have gone back to our established silence. From now to the end of our days. To accept your money and say nothing. But there is a will-o’-the-wisp that persists in flickering over the marsh at night, and neither of us can take our eyes off it.

If despite everything you have decided to go on reading these pages, if you have not shot them onto the fire burning in your room, I suspect that at this moment your face is wearing that mask of contempt and arrogance that suits you so well and gives you an air of arctic strength. The frozen ray at the touch of which I melt as though under a spell. Right from the start. I melt and hate you. I melt and give myself to you.

I know: from the letter you are holding in your hands right now there is no going back.

But then, my two previous letters would be enough for you, if you want to destroy me.

What have you done with my previous letters? Are they in the fire, or in the safe?

As a matter of fact, there’s hardly any difference.

Because you do not trample to death, Alec, you sting. Your poison is fine and slow; it does not slay at once but destroys and dissolves me over the years.

Your prolonged silence: For seven years I tried to withstand it, to exorcise it with the noises of my new home. And in the eighth year I have given in.

I was not lying to you when I wrote you my first and second letters in February. All the details I brought to your knowledge about Boaz were accurate, as Zakheim has no doubt already confirmed to you. And yet, it was all a lie. I was deceiving you. I was setting a trap for you. In my heart I was perfectly certain, from the very first moment, that it was Michel who would rescue Boaz from his troubles. Michel, not you. And so indeed it turned out. And I knew from the very first moment that Michel, even without your money, would do the right thing. And at the right time and in the right way.

And I knew this too, Alec: that even if the Devil made you try to help your son, in fact you would not know what to do. You would not even know where to begin. You have never in your whole life known how to do something on your own. Even when you made up your mind to propose to me, you couldn’t go through with it. Your father had to ask me for you. All your Olympian wisdom and all your titanic powers always begin and end with one thing—your checkbook. Or else with transatlantic telephone calls to Zakheim or to some government minister or general from your old gang (and they, in their turn, call you when the time comes to get their sons into some prestigious college or to fix themselves a nice cushy sabbatical year).

And what else can you do? Spread charm or icy fear with your air of drowsy condescension. Classify historic zealots. Send thirty tanks charging across the desert to crush and trample Arabs. Dispatch a woman and a child with a cold knockout. Have you ever managed, at any time in your life, to arouse a single smile of joy on the face of a man or a woman? To wipe a tear from any eye? Checks and phone calls, Alec. A small-time Howard Hughes.

And indeed it was not you, but Michel, who picked Boaz up and found a place for him.

So, if I knew in advance that it would turn out like that, why did I write to you?

You’d better stop here. Have a little pause. Light your pipe. Let your grey glance roam a little over the snow. Emptiness meeting emptiness. Then try to concentrate and read what follows with the same surgical severity with which you analyze a text by a nineteenth-century Russian nihilist or a virulent patristic sermon.

My real motive for writing those two letters to you in February was a desire to place myself in your hands. Do you really not understand? It’s not at all like you to have your enemy in the center of your sights and to forget to pull the trigger.

Or perhaps I wrote to you like a beautiful damsel in a fairy story sending to the faraway knight the sword with which he can slay the dragon and set her free. There, now that predatory smile of yours is spreading on your face, that bitter, fascinating smile. Do you know, Alec, I’d like to dress you up one night in a black robe and put a black cowl over your head. You wouldn’t regret it, because it’s an image that excites me.

Or perhaps I reckoned anyway that you could somehow help Boaz. But much more than this, I wanted you to send me the bill. I was longing to pay.

Why didn’t you come? Have you really forgotten what you and I can do to each other? The fusing of fire and ice?

That was a lie too. I knew you wouldn’t come. I shall now remove my last veil: the real truth is that even in my most lunatic longing I never forgot for an instant what you are. And I knew that I would never receive a punch from your fist or an order to report. I knew that the only thing I would get from you would be an arctic gust of pale, deathly silence. Or at most a spit of venomous contempt. No less, but no more, either. I knew that it was all lost.

And yet I have to admit that your spit when it came stunned me completely. Of all the thousand and one things I might have anticipated, it never occurred to me that you would simply pull out the plug and drown Michel in money. This time you’ve left me reeling. That’s what I always loved. There’s no limit to your devilish talent for invention. And from the puddle you’ve rolled me into, I offer you myself fouled with mud. That’s what you always loved, Alec. That’s what we both loved.

So, nothing is lost after all?

There is no going back from this letter. There never will be. I am deceiving Michel just as I deceived you so many times for six of the nine years of our marriage.

A born harlot.

Yes, I knew you would say that, with your oceanic wickedness glimmering like the northern lights in the depths of your grey eyes. But no, Alec. You are mistaken. This deceit is different: every time I deceived you with your friends, with your superiors in the army, with your pupils, with the electrician or the plumber, I was always trying to approach you by deceiving you. It was always you I had in my mind. Even when I was screaming aloud. Especially then. As it is written in letters of gold above the Holy Ark in Michel’s synagogue: I have placed the Lord before me always.

And now it is two o’clock in the morning here in Jerusalem, Michel is curled up fetuslike between the sweat-soaked sheets, the smell of his hairy body mingles in the warm air with the smell of pee that comes from a pile of the child’s sheets in a corner of the cramped room, a hot dry wind comes from the desert through my open window and blows hatefully in my face. I am in my nightdress, sitting at Michel’s desk surrounded by exercise books, writing to you by the light of a hunchbacked table lamp, with a demented mosquito humming overhead and distant Arab lights looking back at me from the other side of the wadi, writing to you out of the depths and by so doing deceiving Michel and deceiving my child in an entirely different way. In a way that I never deceived you. And deceiving him precisely with you. And deceiving him after years in which not the faintest shadow of a lie has passed between us.

Am I going out of my mind? Have I gone mad like you?

My husband Michel is a rare man. I have never met anyone like him. “Daddy,” I call him, ever since before Yifat was born. And there are times when I call him child, and hug his thin, hot body as though I were his mother. Even though in fact Michel is not only my father and my child but above all my brother. If we have some sort of life after we die, if we ever get to some world where lies are impossible, Michel will be my brother there.

But you were and remain my husband. My lord and master. Forever. And in the life after life Michel will hold my arm and lead me to the bridal canopy to my marriage ceremony with you. You are the lord of my hatred and my longing. The master of my dreams at night. Ruler of my hair and my throat and the soles of my feet. Sovereign of my breasts my belly my private parts my womb. Like a slave girl I am in thrall to you. I love my lord. I do not want to be set free. Even if you sent me away in disgrace to the ends of the kingdom, to the desert like Hagar with her son Ishmael, to die of thirst in the wilderness, it would be thirst for you, my lord. Even if you dismissed me from your presence to be a plaything for your servants in the dungeons of the palace.