Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (27 page)

There have been tender words: “i’m still in love. so much in love…”; an invitation to join her on a yoga retreat in Australia; some haunting cell phone photographs of little street scenes caught on the fly (sent to me as if I’d been temporarily recategorized from eternal enemy to dependably approving friend or mentor); even, in the spirit of Sir Bertilak inviting Gawain back to the castle as if nothing has happened, a social invitation: “can we have coffee?”

But the old crazed hatred still persists. Recriminations about the unfinished novel: “
I want the full JEW treatment
 … polish it … pretty it up you fucking animals”; demands for recompense for the “theft” of her work: “Pay me for it or I’ll continue the music”; more Holocaust taunting: “I wish Hitler had seen it through”; a link to Kate Bush singing “James and the Cold Gun,” with the lyrics helpfully typed out: “You’re a coward, James! You’re running away from humanity…”

Since my visit to L.A. these
odi et amo
vacillations have grown increasingly elemental: “James. I need you” one day; “I want you banished from this earth” the next. She alludes to a new affair that seems to have gone wrong—“he too is a rapist…” Her own family join the cast of villains: “my brother, my father, my mother, my uncle and most of my siblings are SHIT.” Her self-presentation as the ultimate victim becomes ever more acidly emphatic: “I’m just a dirty darky muslim girl…” while her inflated image of my standing in the world grows correspondingly surreal: “Oh, but you love charity and to do super-star celebrity charity…”

Meanwhile the stain of defamation continues to spread. In the summer of 2011 Nasreen launched a Facebook campaign, trying to “friend” people connected to me, and posting the full smoldering litany of accusations against me on various walls. Google entries under my name began to list links to these accusations, which now included having her drugged and raped at the national magazine where she’d worked. From Facebook she proceeded to
The Guardian
, where, in the online comments section under a book review I’d written, she posted:

Coming from James Lasdun, a mediocre writer himself, whose last book is sexually sophomoric, I find this review to be funny. At least the writer doesn’t steal his students’ work and give it to others of the same ethnicity. And, Mr. Lasdun, your own personal life is a bad porn film and I’m sorry I didn’t sleep with you and so you had me raped and gave my work to AIPAC babies for $. I see you’re well connected at the Guardian. American women would like you to move to England. —Nasreen, a former student.

Other comments in the same vein followed. Unlike, say, my Wikipedia entry,
Guardian
articles and comments are seen by large numbers of people. “Don’t even try to repair your rep.,” she had written a couple of months earlier (I assume she meant “reputation”), and at this point it did seem as if that tattered article was beyond repair. I hit the “report” button, and the comments were quickly taken down, but I was badly shaken (in fact I was literally shaking). How long had they been up? How many others had been posted and taken down? What was to stop her from posting more? I write regularly for
The Guardian
: Was I going to have to monitor my online pages around the clock? Or would I simply have to accept that this was now going to be a part of my life; that my public self, such as it is, was going to manifest this strange disfigurement wherever it appeared? If so, was there perhaps some different attitude I could acquire, some way of not minding about being publicly accused of rape and theft? Is such a thing humanly possible?

Abandoning her former caution, Nasreen now began making overt threats. Demands that I “fix the fucking book” mingle with what appear to be dire warnings about what will happen if I don’t: “You are to blame for innocent deaths…”

She also began targeting my daughter, attempting to friend her on Facebook, warning me, “your daughter is fucked,” and proclaiming, “I do voodoo. You’ll see. She’s going to go through fucking HELL for what you did to me…” When she informed me point-blank that “your family’s going to get it if you do not right your wrongs,” I realized the time had come to call the police again. “
go call the cops…”
she wrote, ever clairvoyant, “… you get me in trouble and you’re fucked. give me everything you have and go kill yourself…” I called the Albany FBI again (I had seen a notice on their website soliciting calls about Internet crimes) and was listened to politely, only to be instructed to contact a local field office instead, where an answering machine repeatedly informed me: “This mailbox is full and not currently taking messages. Please try again later.” I left several urgent messages with Detective Bauer, but never heard back from him. Through Janice, however, I heard that he still didn’t think the DA would extradite Nasreen, even for the more explicit threats she was now making. I had to wonder what it would take to stir that mighty personage into action. In desperation I called my local village police department, which I’d assumed wouldn’t be able to do much about the situation. But they sprang into action, calling Nasreen immediately and warning her she would be arrested if she continued harassing me. I can’t say I’m hopeful of any kind of long-term result (she has already broken her promise that she wouldn’t contact me again), but it was reassuring just to be taken seriously.

It was Detective Bauer who had told me not to stop reading the emails in case they became violent enough to qualify as a felony. But if the bar for a felony was as impossibly high as it appeared to be, then what was the point of subjecting myself to the excruciating pain of reading the damn things? I began blocking them again, intermittently; allowing myself the luxury of a few weeks’ silence, before misgivings of one kind or another would get the better of me (might I have missed an allusion to some critically damaging Web posting or, worse, some crucial warning of impending violence?) and I reopened the channel.

On it goes, then; on and on and on. Supplications and imprecations flaring up and dying away like fevers of a recurrent illness. Threats, pranks with misappropriated email addresses (I opened one the other day from the British Council, hoping to find an invitation to some literary junket, only to read, under the official letterhead: “your family is dead you ugly JEW”). Phone calls too, lately, with long obscene messages demanding money, promising to go on harassing me until I pay, telling my wife I slept with all my female students (except for Nasreen herself), all in a bizarre, unrecognizable, sing-song voice, full of wearily sarcastic allusions to the things Jews do (“I
know
it’s in the
Tor
ah, I know it’s in the
Tal
mud, that you’re supposed to rape
gen
tiles, steal from them…”).

I try not to pay any more attention than I do to the midnight voices in my own head, which at times it closely resembles. Occasionally I lapse back into my old Inca torture agony, writhing prostrate on a sofa. More often, now that the saga has entered its fifth year and I have given up waiting for it to stop, I find myself simply wanting to make sense of it. Why is this happening? What does it mean? I want to understand this tormentor of mine who knows the workings of my mind so intricately and uses them so cleverly to make me suffer. I want, as St. Augustine said, “to comprehend my comprehender.” I want to know what she thinks she is doing. She must be aware, at some level, that I haven’t stolen her work or sold it through some network of nefarious Jews to her literary rivals (she has never made any attempt to describe what it is she thinks these writers have stolen from her), that I didn’t have her drugged and raped at the magazine where she worked. Why, then, is she devoting so much time and energy to making and pressing and elaborating these accusations? What happened—between us, or to her alone—to make my unremarkable existence matter so much to her?

A large part of understanding something is finding analogies for it. What is it like? What other situation does it resemble? For me, being who I am, the analogies that come to mind are most often from things I’ve read.
Gawain
,
Macbeth
, the Highsmith and Singer novels, Emily Dickinson’s letters: all have seemed to shed some light. Lately I have also been looking at Sylvia Plath’s poems, especially “Lady Lazarus,” that little tour de force of chortling malediction. It’s a poem in the form of a piece of hate mail, after all (or so it seems to me now), complete with Nazified recipient:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
 … “O my enemy. / Do I terrify?” Lady Lazarus asks this unlucky figure, and at once I hear Nasreen’s mocking, menacing grandiosity. “I am your opus,” Lady Lazarus declares (she seems to be on the point of accusing her addressee of plagiarism); “I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby…” And she too, in her search for ever more extreme terms to evoke her pain and fury, reaches for the Holocaust: her skin “Bright as a Nazi lampshade,” her face like “Jew linen.”

What do I learn from these resemblances? Among other things, they force me to consider (given Plath’s fate) the extremities of despair entailed in Nasreen’s gleefully uninhibited aggression: its likely proximity to some unendurable pain. And this in turn, occasionally, causes me to feel compassion for her.

Or again: there is a recurrent gesture in classical mythology that might be termed the gesture of the offended woman. This consists of the splashing of water or some other liquid into the face of the offender, to drastic effect. Ceres, jeered at by a boy for drinking from her cup with unladylike gusto, spatters the boy with the brew, causing him to shrivel into a little wriggling-tailed lizard. When the hunter Actaeon stumbles on Diana bathing naked in a pool, the angry goddess splashes water at him, turning him into a stag (his dogs tear him to pieces). Proserpina flings water from the underworld river into the face of Ascalaphus when he reveals that she has violated the terms of her release from hell. The water turns him into a screech owl.

In my (crudely Freudian) reading of these stories, the liquid represents the state of female desire, aroused by attraction and then immediately weaponized by wounded pride; the men’s crimes consisting, essentially, of an affront to sexual self-esteem, whether by mockery, clumsiness, or betrayal.

In pagan terms, rejection of a woman’s offer of love is a sin against nature, whose sole imperative is procreation, and it is always punished. There are stories that explicitly address that act of sexual rejection, and these have no need of the symbolic splashing (though you can feel how the symbol might have evolved from them: for instance, when the bashful youth Hermaphroditus rejects the advances of the nymph Salmacis in her pool, she deluges his naked limbs with her own in a watery embrace that merges their two bodies into one, creating the original hermaphrodite). I like the splash, though; the image it offers of elementally unbridled self-expression, the explosive manifestation of the goddess’s inner core. For me this has connotations of extreme creativity as well as destructiveness. Both aspects seemed to me present in Nasreen’s “splash,” the electronic tsunami she unleashed in response to what she saw as my offense. There was the pure destructiveness of the self-styled “verbal terrorist.” But there was also something manifestly creative in her unstoppable productivity, a vitality I couldn’t help envying.

Behind my constant sense of being up against the narrow limit of my own abilities is a vaguer, more intermittent sense of having possessed, at some point in the real or imaginary past, precisely an
abundance
of powers (I suspect many writers feel this). I began to think about that countervailing sense now. Was it just wishful thinking or did it have some basis in reality? If the latter, then how were such powers lost? Could they be destroyed by misuse? Forfeited because of something one had done or failed to do? Was there anything one could do to regain them? Dimly, certain ingrained habits of mine—decisions I had made, consciously or unconsciously; positions I had taken regarding this or that aspect of life or work—began to emerge out of memory and cluster around these questions, as if summoned for reappraisal.

What I am trying to express is that without being entirely aware of it, I had enlisted Nasreen as a guide to help me through the very crisis she herself had precipitated. Or at least my image of Nasreen, the real Nasreen bearing, I realized, no more resemblance to Diana or Ceres or Proserpina (or for that matter Lady Lazarus or Emily Dickinson or the Three Witches) than I myself do to Actaeon or Sir Gawain or Joseph Shapiro. But one way or another this shape-shifting, quasi-phantasmal being, veiled in her skeins of rage and madness, had become a part of my private navigational system; a
Fluchthelfer
, to use that word again, through what she had once, presciently (and in her own idiosyncratic fashion), referred to as my “mid-life.” You could say I had stumbled on a way of deploying my own preferred form of resistance: weakness as strength; absorption of the blow rather than opposition to it. It didn’t make the situation any better in practical terms, but it made it fractionally more bearable. It was certainly the only kind of resistance that did me any good.

*   *   *

And so here I am at the Wall. And naturally, having built it up in my mind as some kind of grand revelation-in-waiting, I am feeling suddenly a bit blank. The stones are impressive. The ones on the lower courses have framelike indentations around them. They date from the time of Herod, when they formed the retaining wall under the Second Temple, destroyed in
A.D.
70, after which the Jews went into exile. The ones above are plainer but equally massive. Weeds hang down here and there from the crevices, green and whiskery. I wonder idly if it would be in poor taste to describe them in my article as rabbinical-looking; if I could perhaps even bring in Gawain somehow, make a joke, Sir Gawain and the Green Rabbi … The truth is, I am not sure what I was expecting to find or feel or learn here.

Or no, that isn’t quite the truth. I had actually planned to make this moment the climax of my amateur private investigation into the origins of anti-Semitism. With all due discomfort of self-exposure I was going to, as it were, lift the lid off my own brain here among these worshippers and find the little evil meme lurking there, the last unharried “insult to mankind that exists in oneself” and make it, as Fanon said one must, “explicit.”