Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (26 page)

I remember another scene in the Singer novel. Changing planes in Rome, Shapiro notices the man in Orthodox garb he’d seen earlier on the flight from New York, this time with a group of young Yeshiva students in tow, all dressed like him. He stares at them as they wait for their connection to Tel Aviv. “How did they become what they are?” he wonders, noting their indifference to the mocking glances of passersby, the look of passion in their eyes, the air of eagerness to serve God, “to carry out all His commandments and to assume even more rigors and restrictions…” He remembers a line from the Torah, the commandment to be other, different,
un
like: “‘After the doings of the land of Egypt shall ye not do.’” As Egypt changes its fads and fashions, he asserts, “so must the true Jew constantly assume new rigors and restraints…” What Freud attributes to neurotically escalating Oedipal guilt at the murder of Moses, Shapiro explains as an arms race between worldliness and piety, one driving the other into ever more elaborate expressions of itself. His image of the soldier comes to me—
A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform
—and I see these figures precisely as soldiers, though the volatile instability in my own point of view at once causes them to vacillate between that and Freud’s counter-image of the descendants of a people wracked by an unassuageable guilt that “made them render their religious precepts ever and ever more strict, more exacting, but also more petty,” and that pitiless observation of his: “It bears the characteristic of being never concluded and never able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reaction-formations of obsessional neurosis…”

Near the top of the steps leading down to the Western Wall Plaza, a vast, glass-encased golden menorah stands ready to be installed in the Third Temple when its hour comes round. “May it be rebuilt speedily and in our days,” goes the legend on the sign below. It was created by the Temple Institute and paid for by one of the Hurva donors, the Ukrainian businessman with alleged links to organized crime. It used to be farther away from the Wall, in the Cardo, but it was recently moved forward, closer.

You can see the plaza from here; already milling with people, the density of the crowd increasing toward the bastion of the Wall itself. A man stands with his back to the steps, unwinding the tefillin from his left arm. His movements are exact, quietly ceremonious. There are elaborate rules covering every aspect of the manufacture and use of these objects, from the dyeing and stitching of the leather boxes to the tone of voice in which to recite the blessings while wearing them. The boxes contain verses from the Torah. They are worn, or “laid,” as a sign of remembrance—of God’s hand leading the Jews out of Egypt—and they have also acquired the significance of a protective charm or amulet (the Greek “
phylakter
” means “guard”). They are not worn during the twenty-four hours of Shabbat because the period, being holy, is a sign and guard in itself. To wear them would be a blasphemy, a superfluous measure of self-protection that would imply doubt rather than faith.

Having duly removed them, the pious man proceeds on down the steps to present himself to the Almighty. Someone sounds a blast on a ram’s horn shofar, summoning in the New Year, which is also the Day of Judgment, and a volley of answering blasts goes off all around, echoing off the gray-gold cliff of the Western Wall.

I follow after him, passing through the security booth into the crowded esplanade. Closer to the Wall is a partition dividing the men’s side from the much smaller women’s area, but here at the back men and women, tourists and worshippers, mingle together. There is a carnival atmosphere, with the bleaty trumpeting of the shofars, and people calling out
shana tova
, the New Year’s greeting. Small groups merge into larger groups who hold hands in a ring and then splinter off haphazardly into singles again. Individuals tent a fringed shawl, a tallith, over their heads and conduct a private prayer service under it, each his own priest. There are teenagers, businessmen, tour groups, IDF soldiers in military fatigues, and Shapiro/Freud’s soldier-neurotics in their own regalia. They pray, chat, read, chant, stare entranced. In one corner of the plaza about eighty young men in white shirts, Yeshiva students, dance in a circle singing loudly, hands on one another’s shoulders. Among them is an older, gray-bearded man with a large, handsome head tilted back in a way that makes the smile fixed on his powerful features seem superbly self-assured. There is something more concerted about this group than any of the others, a consciousness of their impact on the crowd around them.

I press on toward the Wall. Inside the men’s section the nodding and chanting and davening are more concentrated. The crowd is thicker. Some men in fur
shtreimels
and silk stockings gather in front of me, talking in Brooklyn accents. Up close, the heavy masses of glistening fur have a dense materiality that for a moment blots out all thought of their religious or historical meaning, and I catch myself falling into my old, ignorant misprision of preening self-delight. Across the plaza the linked students uncouple and regroup in several short rows, one behind the other. Arms around one another’s shoulders, they come toward the men’s section in a half-marching, half-dancing shuffle. The gray-bearded man is at the center of the front row, his smiling head thrown back as he leads his acolytes toward the Wall. All of them are smiling, in fact; their joy is palpable, and I am struck by the fact that this too, this dancing phalanx advancing on the Wall, is one of those images that can resonate with contradictory meanings depending on where you begin the story in which they appear. You could call it just a ceremonial crossing of empty space to a holy site. Or you could start earlier, when the plaza wasn’t empty but comprised the old Moroccan Quarter with its houses crowding almost all the way up to the Wall, in which case you would have to describe how the Israelis tore down the houses immediately after the Six-Day War, which would charge this empty space with meanings that might or might not trouble you but would certainly affect how you saw it and how you interpreted the dancing and marching impulses it seems to inspire. Or you could go back further, to the War of Independence, the final retreat of Jewish forces from the Old City following the destruction of the Hurva, which they were using as a stronghold, and the Jordanian commander’s strange boast that “for the first time in a thousand years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible,” which would endow both space and dancing with yet another complexion. And so on.

*   *   *

A knock comes at the door. You let in the stranger, accept the challenge, venture forth, and a year later find yourself baring your own neck for the death blow of a freshly sharpened ax. The ax stalls in mid-air once, twice, but the third time it comes all the way down. To your astonished relief it does no more than very lightly nick your neck, spilling a little blood on the snowy ground.

New Year’s Day—not the Jewish but the Christian New Year—is also the day of the climactic scene in
Gawain
, where the young knight finally reencounters his nemesis. He wakes early and puts on his armor: the surcoat with its pentangle symbol of purity, but also the magic girdle, his not-so-pure charm against death, wrapping it twice around his waist. A man from the castle brings him as far as a tall cliff, where a path leads on to the Green Chapel, and leaves him there, afraid to go any closer. Alone, Gawain follows the path into a ravine under the cliff. There is nothing anywhere that looks like a chapel, only a smooth green mound off to the side. He rides over and sees that it is hollow; a grave mound or barrow, but empty, with entrances on four sides.
This
, he realizes, is the Green Chapel, this stark hatchway between the worlds of the living and the dead. Suddenly he hears the sound of a blade being sharpened in the air above him: “Quat! Hit clatered in the clyff…” The Green Knight is up there somewhere, hidden in the cliff like the
Shechina
, the Divine Presence, here in the Western Wall. But after a moment he emerges into plain sight, striding down toward Gawain, head squarely back on his shoulders.

He is Sir Bertilak, of course, and he carries the gigantic ax in his hand, ready to behead Gawain and finish the game he began a year earlier.

The two withheld blows are for the two evenings Gawain played true in the exchange of spoils, passing on the lady’s kisses. As for the third, well, “here yow lakked a lyttel, sir…” But it was just a token blow all the same: a little “tappe,” Sir Bertilak calls it, acknowledging that the girdle had been withheld from him, not for purposes of lecherous intrigue but out of a natural attachment to existence: “Bot for ye lufed your lyfe…”

All this Sir Bertilak explains in great good humor under the cliff, laughing genially as he praises Gawain’s generally commendable performance in the game, pressing him to keep the girdle as a souvenir of his adventure and assuring him that he is now fully absolved of all wrongdoing. He even invites him back to the castle to make up with the lady and meet the witch Morgan le Faye, Arthur’s half sister and Gawain’s aunt. It was she, Sir Bertilak continues, thoroughly amused by it all, who dreamed up this whole beheading business in the first place, sending me to Camelot out of pure idle malice, to drive you out of your senses, “your wyttes to reve.” But that’s all water under the bridge as far as this indomitably jolly man is concerned, and there is no reason to dwell on any of it. Come back and say hello to your aunt, he entreats Gawain, as if after all nothing of any great consequence has occurred. “Make myry in my hous…”

But Gawain isn’t in the mood for making merry. Exposed in his little deceit, he is no longer able to ignore the gap between his impossibly pure image of himself and the flawed reality that has just been thrust in his face. Shame floods him, bitter and unassuageable. Fear taught me to forsake my nature: the largesse and loyalty that belongs to knights. Now am I faulty and false. There is no question of going back to the castle. As for the magic girdle (or not so magic, since he would apparently have been safer if he hadn’t worn it), he will keep it, but only as the sign of his own guilt. Winding it carefully around his neck and shoulder, he laces it under his left arm, the knot against his heart, and sets off for Camelot, a newly minted soldier-neurotic from the dark ages, riding home to his fortress.

Laughter here too; jubilation at his safe return, but again he is unable to join in. Some terminal disenchantment has fallen over him. Like a time traveler from science fiction, he has journeyed too far and grown middle-aged in the space of a year. Haggard and brooding, he confesses everything to his old companions: displays the scar on his neck, shows them the girdle, his “token of untrawthe,” and declares his intention to wear it till his dying day. They listen but they don’t understand what this self-flagellating gloom is about, and he can’t seem to explain it to them. It’s over, you’re alive, any possible wrong you may have done you’ve more than atoned for; who cares about anything else? Irrepressible laughter surges back through the court. The king himself tries to cheer up Gawain. Someone has the merry idea that they should all lace a green girdle around themselves, and that henceforth it will be the Round Table’s special symbol of honor and renown. And whatever pang of helpless exasperation or anguish this idea provokes in Gawain can only be imagined, because with that final image of a man forgiven everything by everyone but himself, indeed assured that there is nothing
to
forgive, the story ends.

*   *   *

Speaking for myself, though, nothing has ended and not much has changed, at least on the face of it. Nasreen’s emails continue. I block the sender addresses, but new ones spring up in their place. Sometimes there are long periods of silence, sometimes the old rapid-fire bursts start up again. For a year or so the messages were more oblique, less overtly threatening, sometimes not even especially malicious at all. A while ago there was a link to a long, frankly confessional piece titled “To Sir, With Love”: “I called him Sir because his father was knighted Sir by the English royal family as a carrot for the esteemed architecture the monarchy despised behind his back … Sir had lovely teeth, full lips, curly Jew-hair, a sexy amount of which peeked out of the collar of shirts that never were ironed. He looked disheveled, un-professorial and uber-professorial, all at the same time. I loved calling him Sir.” (Not that it matters, but a more objective eye would never have been able to discern much in the way of “curly Jew-hair” on either my head or my chest.) “My stalking of Sir began only a few days after I’d blindly sent out an unfinished manuscript of my novel-in-progress … Sir’s former mistress, Elaine, made me fall in love with Sir. I fell in love with the way Sir saw me or the way Sir saw the female muse behind his writing, which Elaine made me believe is me and I wanted to believe is me (it is me!)…”

In May 2011 I went to Los Angeles to give a reading. It was advertised in the L.A. listings and Nasreen, who had been quiet for some time, went into a fresh frenzy of emailing. I knew she lived somewhere near L.A., and as the day approached and her demands to know where I was staying started coming in, along with renewed protestations of love and hate and all the rest of it (including a mildly obscene photo of herself), I began to wonder if she was going to show up at the reading and stage some kind of incident.

The day before I was due to fly in happened to be the day Osama Bin Laden was killed. Given Nasreen’s identification with the spirit of terrorism (not to mention her assertion that I myself was “the reason for terrorism”), I couldn’t help feeling that this was a peculiarly fateful piece of timing, and at a certain point I realized I was going to have to warn the organizers of the reading about her. I called them up: “Er, there’s something I need to tell you…” I felt like the Ancient Mariner: doomed to tell his mad tale to every new stranger he encounters as he wanders the earth. I gave my reading under guard, with a security detail in the auditorium and the LAPD patrolling outside.