Black Box (23 page)

And indeed I found you a virgin. And clumsy. And stiff. You didn’t even manage to pronounce my name without stammering. When I got undressed, you averted your gaze. At least six weeks passed before you allowed me to leave the light on and look at your naked body: slim, youthful, as if your uniform was part of your flesh. You were very strong and timid, and my caresses seemed to tickle you. They made you shudder. The hairs on the back of your neck stood on end whenever I ran my hand up and down your back. Every time I touched your manhood it was as though you got an electric shock. Sometimes in the crux of pleasure I burst out laughing, and you immediately recoiled.

And yet also the wildness of your desperate craving during our first nights, your overwhelming desire, which could not be extinguished but would flare up anew almost as soon as it was gratified. Your orgasms, which were wrenched out of you with a piercing roar, like someone being shot with a hail of bullets. All this set my senses in a whirl. I was unquenchable too.

Every morning, during office hours, my loins would melt at the sight of your taut body in the uniform that you used to starch and press ruthlessly. If my eyes happened on that spot that I tried so hard not to look at, where the zip of your trousers met the buckle of your military belt, my nipples stiffened. Our secret was kept for a fortnight. Then dumbfounded gossip erupted among the secretaries and typists.

Slowly our nights were enriched. How happy I was in my heart of hearts about the experiments I had had before you. You were an eager pupil, and I an enthusiastic teacher. Almost until dawn we used to drink each other like a pair of vampires. Our backs were covered with scratches and our shoulders with love bites. In the mornings our eyes were so red from lack of sleep it looked as though we had both been crying. In my little room, at night, between one surge of desire and the next, you used to lecture me in that resonant bass voice of yours about the Roman Empire. About the battle of the Horns of Hattin. About the Thirty Years’ War. About Clausewitz, von Schlieffen, De Gaulle. About what you termed the “morphological absurdities” of the Israeli Army. I could not understand it all, but I found a strange fascination in the troop movements, the bugles, the standards, the cries of the dying Romans that you conjured up between my sheets. Sometimes I would climb on top of you in mid-sentence and make your lecture tail off in a grunt.

Then you gave in and agreed to go with me to the theater. To sit in a café with me on a Friday afternoon. Even to go swimming. I went off with you for long weekend trips to remote valleys in Galilee. We slept in your German sleeping bag. Your submachine gun, cocked and in a safe position, was by your head the whole time. Our bodies amazed us. Words hardly existed. If I asked myself what was happening, what you meant to me, what would happen to us, I did not find the shadow of an answer, only my feverish desire.

Until one day—it was after I’d finished my military service, six months or so after the night of the jeep and the lightning, and of all places in the shabby restaurant of the gas station at Gedera—you said to me suddenly: “Let’s talk seriously.”

“About Kutuzov? About the battle for Monte Cassino?”

“No. Let’s talk about us.”

“While on the subject of excellence on the battlefield?”

“While on the subject of changing the subject. Be serious, Brandstetter.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, as though teasing, and suddenly, belatedly noticing a tormented film over your eyes, I said: “Has something happened, Alec?”

You shut up. For a long while you eyed the cheap plastic salt shaker. Then, without looking at me, you said that you did not think you were “an easy man.” Perhaps I tried to answer, but you laid your hand on top of mine and said: “Give me a moment, Ilana, don’t interrupt. This is difficult for me.” I said nothing. And you fell silent again. At the end of your silence you said that you lived “all your life apart, in the inner meaning of the word.” You asked whether I understood. You asked what I could see in “such a . . . stiff man.” Without waiting for an answer you went on hurriedly, with a slight stammer: “You’re my only friend. Of either sex. And my first. You’re also . . . Shall I pour you some beer? Do you mind if I . . . talk a little?” You poured out the rest of the beer for me, absent-mindedly drank it yourself, and told me that you intended never to marry. “A family—you know I have no idea how to handle all that. Are you hot? Do you want us to leave?” Your dream was to be a strategist. Or something like a military theoretician. And not in uniform. To leave the army, go back to the university in Jerusalem, take a second and a third degree, “and in fact apart from you, Brandstetter. That is . . . up to the time you raped me . . . girls weren’t exactly my territory. Nothing doing. Even though I’m a big boy of twenty-eight. Nothing. That is . . . apart from . . . sexual urges. Which actually gave me quite a lot of trouble. But apart from the urge . . . not a thing. I’ve never managed to . . . to make friends. Or to study up on romance. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even made friends with men particularly. Don’t get me wrong. In the intellectual, or professional, area I do have a sort of . . . circle. More or less. A group of like-minded people. But as for emotion and all that . . . it always made me feel pressured. I used to ask myself why I should start having feelings for strangers. Or for strange women. Until I . . . met you. Until you took up with me. The fact of the matter is that even with you I felt under pressure. Only, there’s something between us, isn’t there? I can’t define it. Maybe we’re . . . two of a kind.”

Then you talked about your plans again: to finish writing your doctoral thesis by 1964, and then work on a theory. War studies. Perhaps something more general, a thesis about violence in history. In all periods. Look for a common denominator. Maybe reach something like a personal solution. That is, a personal solution to a fundamental philosophical problem. So you said, and you continued for a little longer; then suddenly you shouted at the waiter that the place was swarming with flies, you started killing them, and you shut up. You asked for my “reaction.”

And I, for the first time with you, used the word
love.
I said to you, more or less, that your sadness was my love. That you had aroused an emotional ambition in me. That you and I, the two of us, perhaps really were two of a kind. That I wanted to have a child with you. That you were a fascinating person. That if you would marry me, I would marry you.

And that was the night, after that conversation in the filling station at Gedera, that your virility let you down in my bed. And you fell into a panic and desperate shame such as I have never seen in you ever, either before or since. And as your anxiety and your embarrassment grew, so your organ shrank at my fingers’ touch until it was almost swallowed up in its lair, like a little boy’s. And I, close to tears of joy, covered your whole body with my kisses and cradled your handsome, crew-cut head all night long in my arms, and I kissed you even in the corners of your eyes, because you were as precious to me that night as you would have been had I given birth to you. Then I knew that we were fused in each other. That we had become one flesh.

It was a few weeks after that that you took me to see your father.

And by the autumn we were married.

Now you tell me this: Why have I written to you about these long-forgotten events? To scratch at old scars? To reopen our wounds for no reason? To decipher a black box? To hurt you all over again? To arouse your longings? Perhaps this too is a scheme to catch you once again in my net?

I plead guilty on all six counts. I know no extenuating circumstances. Except perhaps for one: I loved you not despite your cruelty; I loved the dragon itself. And those Friday evenings when we used to entertain five or six Jerusalem couples, high-ranking army officers, clever young university lecturers, promising politicians. You used to serve the drinks at the start of the evening, exchange some witticisms with the female partners, and curl up in a corner armchair in the shade of your bookshelves. You followed the political discussion with an expression of suppressed irony, but without participating. As the discussion heated up, the faint wolf grin gradually spread on your lips. You stealthily kept the glasses topped up, and went back to concentrating on filling your pipe. When the discussion was at its height and they were all tearing one another limb from limb, shouting and red in the face, you would choose your moment with the precision of a ballet dancer, and interject softly: “Hold on. I’m sorry. I don’t follow that.” The hubbub would die down at once and all eyes would fix on you. Lazily drawing out the syllables, you would say: “You’re all moving a little too fast for me. I’ve got a really elementary question.” And then you would shut up. You would concentrate on your pipe for a moment as though you were alone in the room, and then, out of the thick cloud, you would deliver a short Katyusha salvo at your guests. Demanding definitions of the terms they had been using carelessly. Laying bare with an icy chisel certain latent contradictions. Drawing in a few sentences some clever logical lines, as though tracing geometrical shapes. Directing a devastating rejoinder to one of the lions in the room, and surprising all of us by backing the opinion of the weakest intellect present. Setting up a compact argument and fortifying it with a preventive bombardment against any possible rejoinder. And concluding, to the general stupefaction, by indicating a possible weak point in your own argument, which no doubt had escaped everyone’s notice. In the ensuing silence you would turn to me and command: “Lady, these good people are too shy to tell you that they want some coffee.” Then you would start fiddling with your pipe again, as if to say that the break was over and it was time to resume the really serious business. I was enthralled by the frost of your polite ruthlessness. The moment the door closed behind the last departing couple I would wrench your neatly pressed best shirt out of your corduroy trousers and thrust my fingers into your back, into the hair on your chest. Only the following morning would I clear up and wash the dishes.

Sometimes you got in at one o’clock in the morning from maneuvers, from a brigade-level field exercise, from a night vigil of taming some new tank (what were you getting in those days? British Centurions? American Pattons?), with eyes red from the desert dust, powdered bristles on your face, gritty sand in your hair and the soles of your shoes, your salt sweat stiffening the shirt on your back, and yet as brisk and lively as a burglar inside a safe. You would wake me up, demand some supper, take a shower without closing the door and emerge dripping wet because you hated drying yourself. You would sit down in an undershirt and tennis shorts at the kitchen table and devour the bread and salad and the double omelette that I had prepared for you in the meantime. Far from sleep you would put some Vivaldi or Albinoni on the record player. You would pour yourself some cognac or a whisky-on-the-rocks, sit me down in my nightie in an armchair and sink into the chair opposite, put your bare feet up on the coffee table, and start lecturing me with a kind of repressed, derisive rage: denouncing the idiocy of your commanding officers; tearing to pieces the “mentality of the Palmach mob”; sketching the appearance of the theater of war toward the end of the century; thinking aloud about “the universal common denominator” of armed conflicts as such. And suddenly you would change the subject and tell me about some little woman soldier who had tried to seduce you earlier that evening. Interested to know if I was jealous. Asking jokingly what I would say if you had allowed yourself to be seduced into “opening a quick packet of field rations.” Interrogating me offhandedly about the men I had had before you. Demanding that I grade them “on a scale from one to ten.” Curious to learn if it happened that some stranger occasionally caught my fancy. Asking me to give a “stimulation rating” to your superior officers and comrades, our Friday evening guests, the plumber and the greengrocer and the postman. Eventually, at three o’clock in the morning, we would clamber into bed or collapse onto the rug, emitting sparks, my hand on your lips to prevent the neighbors from hearing your roars, your hand on my mouth to muffle my shrieks.

Limp, drowned in pleasure, aching, dizzy with exhaustion, I would sleep next day till one or two in the afternoon. In my sleep I could hear your alarm clock going off at six-thirty. You would get up, shave, take another shower—this time in cold water. Even in the winter. You would get into a clean uniform that I had starched and pressed for you. Swallow some bread and sardines. Gulp down some coffee without even sitting down. And then: the slamming of the door. Your leaping down the steps two by two. The sound of the jeep starting. That’s how the game began. The shadow of a third person in our bed. We would conjure up some man who happened to have caught my fancy. And you impersonated him. Sometimes you impersonated both of you, yourself and the stranger. My role was to give myself to you both alternately or simultaneously. The presence of the strange shadows pierced us both with a searing jungle thrill that wrenched from my belly and your chest screams, oaths, pleas, spasms the like of which I have never encountered elsewhere except in childbirth. Or in death.

By the time Boaz was two our hellfire was already burning with a black flame. Our love had filled with hate. Which consumed everything yet continued to masquerade as love. When you discovered that snowy January evening, coming back from the university library with a raging fever, that lighter on the bathroom stool, you were overwhelmed by a lunatic glee. You roared with laughter, like hiccoughs; you punched me until by a battering cross-examination you dragged out of me every detail, every jot and shudder, and without undressing me you fucked me standing up as though knifing me, and during and after you didn’t stop interrogating me more and more and again you mounted me on the kitchen table and your teeth dug into my shoulder and you slapped me with the back of your hand, like punishing an unruly horse. So our life began to flicker with the glimmer of a will-o’-the-wisp. Your demented fury, whether I was obedient or not, whether I seemed to you sick with desire or whether I seemed indifferent, whether I described what had been done to me or stayed stubbornly silent. You would disappear from home for days and nights on end, shut yourself up in that hole in the wall you rented near the Russian Compound, conquering your doctorate as though taking enemy fortifications by storm, and without warning you used to descend on me at eight o’clock in the morning or three in the afternoon, lock Boaz in his room, extract a detailed confession from me, and exhaust in me the torrent of your lust. Then began the suicides, with tablets and with gas. And your alliance with Zakheim and your savage war against your father and the accursed house in Yefe Nof. Our tropical hell. A parade of dirty towels. Stinking socks of grinning belching men. The reek of garlic and radishes and shish kebab. Hiccoughs from Coca-Cola or beer. Choking on cheap cigarettes. Sourness of sticky lustful male sweat. Their trousers lowered to their ankles, not troubling to take off their shirts; some were even too slovenly to remove their shoes. Their dribble on my shoulders. In my hair. Spunk stains on my sheets. Murmured obscenities and hoarse lascivious whispers. Their lecherous, meaningless endearments. And afterward, the ludicrous search for their underwear, lost in the bedding. The jocular arrogance that descended upon them once their desire was satisfied. The absent-minded yawns. The invariable glance at their watches. Crushing me as though in me they were vanquishing the whole female sex. Like avengers. Or as though they were scoring points on some masculine league table. Or clocking engine hours. Only very rarely there came a stranger who tried to listen to my body and produce a tune. Or a youth who managed to make me feel a fleeting compassion beyond my lasting disgust. And you with your tide of desperate hatred. Until I became repugnant to myself and to you and you divorced me. At the bottom of my make-up drawer I keep a note in your handwriting. Zakheim handed it to me the day of our decree, when the court declared that henceforth we have no claims on each other. You had written down four lines for me from a poem by Alterman: “You are the sadness of my balding head, / The melancholy of my aging claws: / You’ll hear me in the plaster of your walls, / And in the nightly creaking of your floors.”