Black Box (11 page)

***

From world-wide press reviews of
The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism
by Alexander A. Gideon (1976).

“This monumental work by an Israeli scholar sheds new light—or, rather, deep shade—on the psychopathology of various faiths and ideologies from the Middle Ages to the present day. . . .”

Times Literary Supplement

“A must . . . an ice-cold analysis of the phenomenon of messianic fervor in both its religious and its secular guise . . .”

New York Times

“Fascinating reading . . . vital for an understanding of the movements that have shaken and still shake our century . . . Professor Gideon describes the phenomenon of faith . . . any faith . . . not as a source of morality but as its precise opposite. . . .”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“The Israeli scholar maintains that all world-reformers since the dawn of history have actually sold their souls to the devil of fanaticism. . . . The fanatic’s latent desire to die a martyr’s death on the altar of his idea is, in the author’s view, what enables him to sacrifice the lives of others, sometimes of millions, without batting an eyelid. . . . In the fanatic’s soul, violence, salvation and death are fused into a single mass. . . . Professor Gideon bases this conclusion not on psychological speculations but on a precise linguistic analysis of the vocabulary which is characteristic of all fanatics of all ages and of all positions in the religious and ideological spectrum. . . . This is one of those rare books that force the reader to re-examine himself and all his views fundamentally and to seek within himself and his surroundings manifestations of latent sickness. . . .”

New Statesman

“Ruthlessly lays bare the true face of feudalism and capitalism. . . . With great skill he exposes the Church, Fascism, nationalism, Zionism, racism, militarism, and the extreme right. . . .”

Literatumaya Pravda

“You sometimes have the feeling as you read that you are looking at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. . . .”

Die Zeit

***

To Dr. A. Gideon
Via Mr. M. Zakheim

Jerusalem
13.6.76

Dear Monk,

If only you had given me a hint seven years ago, at the trial, that you were not plotting to take advantage of my admitting adultery to take Boaz away from me I should have had no reason to object to the paternity test, which in any case would have been unnecessary. How much suffering could have been spared if you had only said two words then. But what’s the point of asking a vampire how he can drink fresh blood?

I am doing you an injustice. You forfeited your son because you wanted to spare him. You were even intending to donate a kidney to him. Even now you could photocopy these letters of mine and send them to Michel. But something interferes with your hatred. Something whispers to you like wind in dry grass, interrupting the arctic silence. I can remember you with your friends having the usual ritual Friday-night argument: your long legs stretched out under the coffee table, your eyes only half opened, the rough suntanned skin of your arms, your pensive fingers slowly kneading some absent object. For the rest, a motionless fossil. Like a lizard watching an insect. Your glass precariously balanced on the arm of your chair. The din of voices in the room, the arguments, the counterarguments, the cigarette smoke—they all seem to be happening a long way below you. Your best white shirt, starched and neatly pressed. And your face sealed in contemplation. And all of a sudden, like a viper, you dart your head forward and spit into the conversation: “Just a minute. I’m sorry. I must have missed something.” The din of the argument fades instantly. And you scythe through the discussion with a sentence or two, cut across the positions from a sharp, unexpected angle, demolish the point of departure, and conclude with, “Sorry. Carry on.” Then you settle back into your disconnected position. Indifferent to the silence that you have generated. Letting someone else formulate in your name the conclusion that might possibly be implied by the question you have put. Slowly, sheepishly, the argument warms up again. Without you. By then you are completely engrossed in a solemn study of the ice cubes in your glass. Until the next interjection. Who was it who warped your mind and made you see compassion as weakness, gentleness and sensitivity as shameful, love as a sign of effeminacy in a man? Who was it who banished you to the snowy steppes? Who was it who corrupted a man like you into obliterating the stain of his compassion for his son, the shame of his longing for his wife? What a grim horror, Alec. And the crime is its own punishment. Your monstrous suffering is like a thunderstorm behind the mountains at dawn. I hug you.

Meanwhile the Hebrew edition of your book is all the rage here now. Your picture stares out at me from every newspaper. Except that the picture is ten years old at least. It shows your face as lean and concentrated, with your military sternness stretched the width of your lips, as if you are about to give the order to fire. Was it taken when you left the regular army and went back to the university to finish your doctorate? As I look at it the arctic brilliance flashes opposite me out of the grey cloud. Like a spark trapped in an iceberg.

Ten years ago. Even before you finished building the house that looks like a castle in Yefe Nof, from the money that Zakheim managed to extract for you from your father, who was already disappearing into the distance toward the steppes of his melancholy, like an old Indian heading for the happy hunting ground.

We were still living in our old flat in Abu Tor, with that rocky yard and its pine trees. And I remember particularly the rainy winter weekends. We would stay in bed till ten o’clock, battered and exhausted from the cruelty of our night, almost tolerating each other, like a pair of boxers between rounds. Almost leaning on each other. Punch-drunk. When we emerged from the bedroom we would find Boaz already awake. He had dressed himself two hours earlier (with his shirt buttoned up wrongly and with odd socks) and would be sitting in academic earnestness at your desk, with your lamp lit in front of him, your pipe in his mouth, drawing instrument panels of spaceships on one sheet of paper after another. Or an airplane crashing in flames. Sometimes cutting out for you a pile of wonderfully neat rectangular little cards, his contribution to your doctorate. Or for the Armored Corps. It was before the period of the balsa airplanes.

Outside it was raining gloomily, persistently. The wind dashed the rain against the tops of the pine trees and the rusty iron shutters. Through the streaming window the yard seemed to have been drawn with a Japanese brush: pine needles trembling in the mist with droplets of water trapped at their tips. In the distance, between blocks of cloud, domes and minarets floated as though also joining the caravan that was rolling with the thunder eastward toward the desert.

When I went to the kitchen to get breakfast ready I discovered that Boaz had already laid the table for three. Red-eyed you and I would avoid looking at each other. Sometimes I would fix you with my eyes as though I were hypnotizing you, only so you would not be able to look at me. And the child, like a social worker, would act as intermediary for us, asking me to pour you more coffee, you to pass me the cream cheese.

After breakfast I would put on that blue woolen dress, comb my hair and make my face up, and sit down with a book in the armchair. Except that the book would almost always stay open upside down on my lap: I could not take my eyes off you and your son. You would sit together at the desk, cutting out, sorting, and pasting pictures from your
Geographical Magazine.
You worked in almost total silence, the child skillfully guessing your wishes; passing you just at the right moment scissors, paste, penknife, even before you could ask for them. As though you were practicing some ritual together. And all in deep seriousness. Apart from the hum of the kerosene heater, there was no sound to be heard in the flat. And occasionally you would unconsciously lay your strong hand on his fair hair, and dirty it with glue. How different was that purposeful masculine silence from the desperate silence that came down on you and me the moment the last spasm of desire left us. How I trembled to see the touch of your fingers on his head, and compared it with the nocturnal rage they had bestowed on me a few hours earlier. When did we see Death winning at chess in
The Seventh Seal?
Where were the frozen tundras that gave you the vicious strength to disown that child? Where do you draw the frozen power from to compel your fingers to write the words “your son”?

And at the end of those Saturdays, at the close of the Sabbath in the twilight between rain showers, even before we had put Boaz to bed, you would suddenly stand up, angrily pour yourself a quick brandy, down it in one gulp without screwing up your face, deliver a couple of violent pats on your son’s back, as if he were a horse, roughly shrug on your coat, and hurl at me from the doorway: “I’ll be back on Tuesday evening. Try to evacuate the zone before then if you can.” Then you would go out, closing the door with a sort of desperate self-control beyond all slamming. Through the window I would see your back disappearing into the gathering darkness. You have not forgotten that winter. In you it goes on and on, but growing ever greyer, moss-covered, sinking into the ground, like an old tombstone.

If you can, try to believe me when I say that Michel does not read your letters. Even though I have mentioned to him that we are corresponding through Zakheim. Don’t worry. Or perhaps I should write: Don’t hope?

Despite your denial, I still see you sitting at your window with a vista of snowfields, brilliant plains without tree, hill, or bird, stretching away until they merge with masses of grey fog, all as in a woodcut. All in the heart of the winter.

Whereas here, meanwhile, the summer has arrived. The nights are short and cool. The days are blazing, dazzling like molten steel. Through the window of my room I can see the three Arab laborers that Michel has hired digging trenches for the foundations of the extension that Michel is building with your money. Michel himself works with these laborers every day when he gets home from school. He doesn’t need a contractor, since he was once a builder himself, the first year after he came to Israel. Every couple of hours he takes some coffee out to them and exchanges jokes and sayings with them. His brother-in-law’s nephew, who is an official in the City Council, got us our building permit early. A cousin of his friend Janine has promised to do the electrical wiring for us, and to charge us only for the materials.

On the other side of the fence are two fig trees and an olive. Beyond them begin the steep slopes of the wadi. And you can see on the other side of the wadi the Arab quarter, half suburb and half village, a flock of little stone houses clustering around a minaret. Before dawn the cocks call to me from there insistently, as though trying to seduce me. At sunrise goats bleat, and sometimes I manage to hear the bells of the herd going off to nibble on the edge of the desert. A whole battalion of dogs bursts at times into a barking that is dulled by the distance. Like the ashes of old passions. At night their barking descends to a strangled howling. The muezzin responds with his own wailing, guttural, unbridled, consumed with veiled longings. It is summer in Jerusalem, Alec. Summer has come and you have not.

But Boaz has turned up—the day before yesterday. As if nothing had happened. And his manner was almost joking: “Hi, Michel. Ilana. I’ve come to eat up your Yifat. But first of all, here, little one, eat these sweets so that you’ll be sweeter for me to eat.” A Bedouin Viking, sun-scorched, smelling of sea and dust, his shoulder-length hair white-hot, like burnished gold. He already has to stoop when he comes through the doorway. He turns and addresses Michel with a deep bow, as though of reverence, as though performing deliberately and consciously a ritual gesture of respect. Whereas for Yifat he went down on all fours, and she, a dark-skinned monkey, climbed up and clung to his limbs until she could touch the ceiling. And dribbled a sticky mess from the candy he had given her into his hair.

Boaz brought with him a skinny, silent girl, who was neither pretty nor ugly. A math student from France, a good four years older than he is. Michel, after investigating her background and discovering that she came from a Jewish family, calmed down and suggested that they stay the night on the carpet in front of the television. For greater security he left the light on in the shower and the door between us and them wide open, so as to insure “that Boaz doesn’t get up to any nonsense in my house.”

What brings Boaz here? It appears that he turned to Zakheim and asked for a sum of money for purposes you know. For some reason Zakheim decided to tell him about the hundred thousand you gave Michel, but refused to give Boaz so much as pocket money. Some sort of sly scheme which I can’t decipher is apparently brewing inside his devilish shaven skull, and that’s why he suggested to Boaz that he come and see Michel “and claim what is rightfully yours.”

Perhaps you are also a party to this plot? Perhaps it’s your very own? Is it just obtuseness that always prevents me from anticipating your next blow, even when it is just about to hit me? Surely Zakheim is merely a kind of exuberant operetta puppet in which you sometimes choose to conceal your grim fist.

Boaz came to suggest nothing less than to take Michel into partnership in some business to do with tourist boats in the Red Sea. That was why he came up to Jerusalem. He needs, as he puts it, a preliminary investment, which, he is sure, he will recover in a few months. While he was talking, he dismantled a matchbox and made Yifat a sort of camel on chicken’s legs. This child is you: enthralled, I watched his fingers recklessly squandering rivers of strength just to refrain from breaking a matchstick. Such a dazzling waste, at the sight of which I was nearly filled instantly with an overwhelming physical envy of his French dropout.