Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (21 page)

*   *   *

By this time I had already begun to consider writing something about Nasreen. My motive, initially, was purely defensive, and there was one particular incident that triggered it. I had been invited to apply for a teaching job at another college near where I live, and was updating my résumé when an email arrived from Nasreen. In it was a link to a website where she had posted a long article about the traumas she’d endured at the hands of her “puffed-up former writing professor,” who had “won expensive prizes for ‘writing’ stories based on my deteriorating state”; et cetera, et cetera.

Arriving at just this moment, the message had seemed to confirm my worst forebodings: that if I was offered this or any other job, it would only be a matter of time before Nasreen contacted the college and I would have to relive the mortifying scenes I’d been through with my other employers.

I was about to give up on the application when it occurred to me that if I had a website of my own, I could post the story of Nasreen, complete with sample emails, and refer people to it when the need arose. It wouldn’t protect me against the taint that clings to one merely by being accused of certain crimes, but at least it would spare me some of the unpleasantness of having to explain the situation over and over.

I did create a website,
jameslasdun.com
(it seemed a miracle that Nasreen hadn’t already appropriated the domain name), but somehow I couldn’t get the tone right for the story. Just as I’d found when I’d talked to the FBI, the harder I tried to be neutral and objective, the crazier I sounded. Even the material I did post, some basic author information, comes off as a little obsessional, I realize now. “This is the official website of the writer James Lasdun,” it begins, “and the only reliably accurate source of information about his work…” I have left it up: a memorial to my brush with paranoia.

But in the process of trying to create this posting, I began to sense that if I cared to examine certain aspects of the story in greater depth than I was aiming for in that purely forensic account, then it had the potential to release the kind of large energies that could fuel a book—a book that would interest me, both as writer and as reader: wide-ranging, unpredictable, but unified by a single, elemental conflict.

It would be a risky enterprise: that was clear from the start. On top of the usual problems associated with writing any book, there would be some less routine matters to address. The necessity of using private emails in a story about accusations of plagiarism and violations of privacy was an irony I was going to have to come to terms with. I would also, needless to say, have to have the full consent of my wife and family before proceeding. I wouldn’t have survived this ordeal without K——’s steadfast support, and I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize this by publishing a book against her wishes (she agreed to it without hesitation). Then too, there would be legal considerations that would have to be very thoroughly looked into (and resolved) with the cooperation of any potential publisher. Even if I settled all these matters for myself, there were bound to be readers—honest ones as well as the professionally offended—who would object to the very notion of such a book, and this was something I knew I would have to accept in advance. And finally, as one of the lawyers I consulted pointed out, there would be the question of how Nasreen herself might retaliate. Might I be making things worse for myself? “She’ll do everything she can to discredit you,” the lawyer warned. But hadn’t she already? Certainly it was hard to imagine anything more damaging than the allegations she had already made. And since those allegations—of plagiarism, of “daytrading” her work with my Jewish cabal, of “setting up” her rape at the magazine where she worked before I taught her at Morgan College, and all the rest of it—were pure fabrication, wouldn’t the daylight of publication be the best way of turning them to dust?

I hadn’t kept copies of all my emails to her during the early phase of our correspondence, but she had (or so she claimed), and these would certainly prove that I’d liked her and had been warmly supportive of her work. But there was nothing in them that embarrassed me to remember (certainly nothing more embarrassing than the ones I did keep and have already quoted). Still, I had to assume, knowing her, that she would try to think of some way of using them against me, and I realized I would have to resign myself to this too.

Despite all these obvious hurdles, the more I thought about the project the more compelling it became. Nasreen’s uncanny ability to get under my skin—all the little neuroses and insecurities of mine that she had so cleverly intuited and exploited—made her, potentially, an extremely illuminating subject as far as my interest in these murky aspects of myself was concerned. There would be the armature of the case itself, but beyond it, if I could get it right, would be a larger story woven from memories, journeys, portraits, observations—all the stray psychic material that had been drawn into orbit around the drama that had monopolized my consciousness for more than three years now. I saw a place in it for my family, my father, our Provence trip, my train ride across the country, my interest in questions of moral culpability, honor and reputation, desire and repression; for various figures out of history, legend, and fiction, for an analysis of what it feels like to be a middle-aged white male writer of impeccable (by his own reckoning) liberal convictions, publicly accused of the tawdriest kinds of misconduct, and for an account of what happens when an unbelieving, not even entirely kosher Jew finds himself subjected to a firestorm of unrelenting anti-Semitism.

All of which, I am willing to concede, may have been merely the false excitement of desperation: the knowledge that I had to do
something
if I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge, that writing was what I knew how to do best, and that at this point the only subject I was capable of writing about was Nasreen.

Even before the Hurva story appeared in the papers, I had begun to feel I should go to Jerusalem before writing this book. My idea was to situate myself at the geographic and spiritual heart of Judaism so that I could reexamine what I had experienced, from the viewpoint of maximum possible intimacy with the condition (so abstract to me) of being Jewish.

Specifically, I had an image of myself at the Western Wall (formerly the Wailing Wall), the stones of which were held by true believers to contain the Divine Presence, the
Shechina
; its earthly refuge pending the rebuilding of the Great Temple itself. I would stand at the Wall at sundown on Shabbat, wrapped in the force field of sacred observance distilled there down through the ages, and think about my long and strange ordeal.

But I am not in a position to “situate myself” in some distant city just because I believe it might be useful for a book. Even if I had been, I would still have had to overcome my by-now leaden state of inertia, not to mention my private taboo against projects driven by acts of will rather than forces of necessity. So I mulled it over, vaguely wishing I could be teleported to Jerusalem but doing nothing about it.

Then out of the blue a magazine editor emailed to ask if I had any ideas for an article. This kind of invitation comes my way only rarely (in fact the last journalistic assignment I’d had was the one I’d taken the train to L.A. to write, several years earlier), so it was inevitable that this too should strike me as more than merely fortuitous: vindication, in fact, of my principle of passive acquiescence; the outer world knocking at my door just when I needed it, and for just the right reason. (This feverish, dubiously founded enthusiasm was increasingly my state of mind in those months.) I wrote back proposing an article on the Hurva synagogue. It would be a story of politics, history, and architecture, I told the editor; part memoir, part essay, part travelogue. I would need to go to London first, to look at the Hurva papers in my father’s archive, and then of course I would have to go to Jerusalem … It seemed politic to mention that I had other reasons, besides this article, for wanting to go there, and I told the editor about Nasreen (I was also concerned that she would send the magazine something unpleasant about me after the article came out, and I wanted to preempt that). He was interested; we even discussed bringing her into the piece. In the end I decided not to, but it helped to know that my motives were all, so to speak, out in the open. I have become pedantically scrupulous about such things.

A few weeks later I was on a plane.

*   *   *

In London I spent a day looking at my father’s archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum. (A strange hilarity rises in me as I write those words: “my father’s archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum”—the way that faintly delirious note of grandeur seems to attach itself to every aspect of my father’s life … In himself he was a stormy, passionate, embattled person, often laid low with depression. But around this volatile core radiated a paradoxical air of almost imperious serenity. There was the vulnerable human being, lying flat out in darkness on the living-room sofa, nursing his wounds after some attack in the press, but there was also this figure for whom a kind of imperturbable kingliness was somehow a given, the element in which his essential self existed. I lived in England until my late twenties, and it seemed wherever I went one of his buildings was always nearby. They were part of the geographic, almost the geological, foundation of my own existence. When I worked in Bloomsbury I would pass the School of Oriental and African Studies or another of his University of London buildings on my way to lunch. When I lived in Highgate my journey to my girlfriend in South London would take me past the Royal College of Physicians in Regent’s Park, Hallfield School in Paddington, then the National Theatre and IBM headquarters on the South Bank. When I visited friends in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College or Christ’s would loom over us on and off all day as we wandered around. The vast scale and austere surfaces of these buildings, not to mention the fact that they were mostly “controversial,” which meant that my filial pride was always in danger of being affronted by someone saying something extremely rude about them, made their presence in my mind all the more charged and gigantic, while their frequently pyramidal form gave them, and by extension their maker, an inescapably Pharaonic aspect. Looking back, I realize how unusual it is for anyone, even a successful architect, to permeate the physical fabric of his world to quite this extent. But my father somehow conveyed, without any arrogance or posturing, that it was entirely in the natural course of things for him to have done this, and for a very long time this was how I saw it too. He and his buildings were natural phenomena to me, like mountains and plains. Even now, knowing how very remarkable and
un
natural it all was, how hard he had to fight for everything he accomplished, how much uncertainty and self-doubt he lived with, I can’t quite shake off the traces of that other, regally entitled aura he projected. So it is impossible for me to speak casually of his “archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum” without smiling at my involuntary compliance in the illusion, as if it really is normal and unremarkable and altogether to be expected to have one’s papers taken in by the V&A after one’s death.)

The archivist had set out the Hurva material—five black box-files—in the architectural collection’s study room. The files were full of notes, minutes, scribbles, and correspondence covering everything from payment schedules to the comparative architectural traditions of Judaism and Christianity. There was plenty of dramatic material for my article: clashes and reconciliations by telex between my father and Teddy Kollek; minutes from meetings with Israeli diplomats in London and government officials in Jerusalem; press cuttings charting the progress of the job from the cornerstone-laying ceremony conducted with the president of Israel to its final fading away as it became clear that the prime minister, Menachem Begin, wanted a replica rather than a modern building (eighteen years after his death, the will of this deeply conservative leader appears to have prevailed).

And the letter was there, the hate letter my father had shown me in 1982. It was in a large white envelope. A swastika was drawn on the outside, so my father must have had a pretty good idea of what he was going to find inside. Gingerly, I took out the photocopied article it had been written on. Every single line of the article had been individually blacked out (I had forgotten this detail). “AL QUDS. NOT THIS” was written at the top (“Al Quds” is the Arab name for Jerusalem). Next to it was a name, presumably the sender’s, also in large, emphatic letters: “JAWEED KARIM.” Scrawled over the pictures of my father’s plans and models were phrases such as “DANGER JEWS ABOUT” and weird punning insults: “HOMOSEXUALS USE SINAGOG,” and so on. There were drawings of swastikas equaling Stars of David, such as you see on protest banners today, and there was an outright threat: “IF YOU DESIGN THIS YOU WILL DIE PREMATURE DEATH.” There was also the peculiar conflation of the roles of victim and oppressor that seems to distinguish anti-Semitism from other forms of racism, and that was such a pronounced feature of Nasreen’s emails: “HITLER WAS RIGHT TO GAS JEWS,” on the one hand, and on the other: “THIS IS JEW ECONOMY DIRTY PEOPLE ONLY KNOW HOW TO MASSACRE PEOPLE.”

*   *   *

From London I flew to Israel, arriving in Jerusalem at dusk. Ramadan was in its last week, and the city was quiet. My hotel, a former private villa, was in East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city. It had been recommended as a place to meet interesting people: NGO workers, journalists, political operatives with connections on both sides of the conflict. The idea of subjecting my tribal allegiances to a slight geographic torsion was also a part of the appeal.

I was tempted to stay in for the evening, unwind in the candlelit garden bar, but I made myself go out. The concierge gave me directions to the Old City, a fifteen-minute walk. The streets were dark, almost empty. Two days earlier a settler’s car had been ambushed, all four passengers shot dead, and although it had happened in the West Bank, several miles from Jerusalem, it was different thinking about it here on Nablus Road than it had been reading about it in my mother’s kitchen in London. I walked quickly.