Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (28 page)

But I don’t seem to have the heart, or the appetite, or the courage, or whatever quality it would take, to complete this process of psychological auto-vivisection. It’s possible that I simply don’t possess the meme (though for professional reasons I hate to exempt myself from any human tendency, good or bad), and my half-formed theory of its physiological origin and consequent latent universality is fatally flawed. Or maybe it was just that those Brooklyn accents I heard earlier put me in mind of the other notorious remark made by the author of that “Zionist SS” poem: that the Brooklyn-born settlers “should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them…,” and I am just recoiling in nausea from the whole exercise.

The poet is very sure that he is not an anti-Semite. An anti-Zionist, yes, and an opponent of Israel’s right to exist, but not an anti-Semite. It seems to be important to him not to be thought of as anti-Semitic. People who have accused him of anti-Semitism are just playing the race card: “They use this card of anti-Semitism. They fill newspapers with hate letters. They are useless people.” Nasreen also was sure that she was not anti-Semitic. “I sound anti-semitic but I’m not,” she wrote in one email, and likewise it seemed important to her to discredit any accusation to the contrary.

Which raises the question of whether you can be an anti-Semite even if you categorically deny that you are one. Is it something you alone can decide that you are or aren’t, like being a vegetarian, or is there something more involuntary about it, like a sexual orientation, which no amount of deciding or wishing or denying can change, and which may be clearer to others than it is to yourself? If the latter, then the next question might be whether society is going to continue to reject it or gradually accept it; in other words, whether it is going to go the way of pedophilia or of gay pride. If the latter, then … then what? The thought peters out before I can get to the end of it. I don’t seem to be as interested in thinking about any of these questions as I had planned to be, now that I’m here.

And something is distracting me: an elderly man standing right up against the Wall, rocking on his heels and lost in what appears, from his half-turned face, to be a somewhat anguished state of prayer or supplication. He is wearing a plain gray yarmulke over his long, unkempt, not very clean-looking gray hair. His beard is matted and his coat is shabby in the extreme, brown and threadbare, with torn pockets. He is the first genuinely down-and-out-looking person I have seen in Jerusalem, and I can’t help wondering what his story could possibly be, and projecting all sorts of sentimental things onto him: Shapiro’s piety, some kind of old-world shtetl simplicity, the outcast raggedness of the Wandering Jew himself, until it occurs to me from a glimpse of rolling whiteness in his eyes as his head tips back (along with the very extreme nature of his swaying and moaning) that he is most likely just a bit cracked.

But what really interests me about him isn’t the bowing and praying at all, but the fact that he is also engaged in screwing a little piece of balled up paper into a chink between two stones. I realize I have been forgetting all about this aspect of the Wall, the thing that probably comes to mind before anything else for most people when they think about it: that it is a place where you come to post messages to the Almighty.

Moving all the way up to it, I see that little folded or balled up bits of paper have been crammed and jammed into every seam: not just the thin gaps between the stones but every crack and cranny in the stones themselves, and every pitted indentation on their surfaces. The accumulated scale and intensity of the little gesture is powerfully affecting; you feel the extreme urgency of the need to communicate awoken by this sanctified and monumental surface.

On our last walk in Provence we climbed into the Mercantour wilderness, to see the Bronze Age rock inscriptions in the high valleys under Mount Bego. Bego, it is conjectured, was a storm god and bull god, patron of the cattle-raising clans who lived there in the Bronze Age and covered the flat-faced boulders with their pictograms. A sign at the top of the trail points to the highest local concentration of the engravings, a sort of long, tilted wall of massive, glacier-polished stone tablets known as the Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way.

I think of them now, those great, flat, sky-facing pages of rock, and the mysteriously communicative images their surfaces summoned from the hands of the cattle herders with their new bronze tools. Horns turning into daggers, daggers into lightning bolts. Figures brandishing axes. A bull’s head tumbling. Storms drawn as thick stipplings in the orange-patinated schist. Meandering horns turning into rivers irrigating rectangular grids of pasture.

What are they all saying, those images, these balled-up texts here in the Western Wall? Nobody knows, but perhaps it isn’t so hard to imagine. Send rain. Send love. I do love you and am in love with you. I’m sorry if I got screwy on you. You don’t love me at all anymore. Would you like to see me in a veil, sir? Your silence is scary, sir. You lack depth. You lack compassion. Say something. Give me your fucking keys. You pose as an intellectual but you’re a corrupt thief. I am fond of you. I really am. Mr. Horned God, so tacky. Fine, stay silent. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. You need a garden full of me. Get a toupee. I’m sorry I’ve blamed you for so much. I want every cent. Old, shitty man! Two-faced psychotic. Give me everything you have. I’m still in love, so much in love. Can we have coffee?

And it’s hard to know whether to be struck more by the conviction and energy of the effort, or by the tenacity of the silence surrounding it. Somehow they seem the measure of each other.

Also by James Lasdun

Fiction

Delirium Eclipse and Other Stories

Three Evenings: Stories

Besieged: Selected Stories

The Horned Man: A Novel

Seven Lies: A Novel

It’s Beginning to Hurt: Stories

Poetry

A Jump Start

Woman Police Officer in Elevator

Landscape with Chainsaw

As Editor

After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
(with Michael Hofmann)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2013 by James Lasdun

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lasdun, James.

      
Give me everything you have: on being stalked / James Lasdun.—1st ed.

          
p.   cm.

      
ISBN 978-0-374-21907-9 (alk. paper)

      
1.  Stalking—United States—Case studies.   1.  Title.

  
HV6594.2 .L37 2013

  
362.88—dc23

2012018506

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eISBN 9780374708900

Author’s Note: This is a true story, but various names, places, and details have been changed.

As the reader will come to understand, the claims and allegations made by the woman I call Nasreen are presented purely as her assertions, and are most certainly not intended to reflect the actual truth about any person.