And that’s quite enough, there’s no need to look-remember-and-see, not now, because without in any way belittling the importance of the foregoing lecture, I didn’t undertake to lecture here on sexuality and the cinema, on the cinema and patriarchy, on patriarchy and capitalism. Because this isn’t a public debate, and that’s not why I sat down to write.
The crux of my problem is that it’s clear to me that this whole lecture is one big excuse. Because even if the masochistic virus was implanted in my mind, it’s still my mind, mine and nobody else’s, made up of a combination of transplants just like anybody else’s. So that even if I babble on here for hours about the influence of the media, it will not negate the knowledge of the polluted self or blur the sickening awareness that of the entire catalogue of fantasies, my sick mind chose to replay the one I regard as the most humiliating of alclass="underline" a man amusing himself, a woman victim, and a whore.
WE MARRIED IN OCTOBER
In October I married Alek, and there was no way I could avoid telling my parents. My mother, to be precise, because that week my father was out of the country again. In childish embarrassment I put it off until almost the last moment, two days before the wedding, so that in the end I did it in the worst possible way. Years later, and for quite a long time, I regretted my rudeness towards her, but it didn’t happen at once, far from it.
Supper at the Webers’. Batya Weber, my mother, cuts up a cucumber, a tomato and a hard-boiled egg on her plate, smears a slice of bread with low-fat white cheese, and arranges everything in bite-sized pieces before she begins to chew. My sister Talush studies the shape of the egg as she rolls it around and around her plate. The transistor radio is on in anticipation of the seven o’clock news.
“I have news,” and in the same breath, “the day after tomorrow I’m getting married.” An atavistic maternal glow spreads over my mother’s face before she takes in the words “the day after tomorrow.” Mazal tov, Batya, mazal tov, Benjy, what’s this we hear? Your daughter’s getting married? A little young, isn’t she? So, where’s it going to be? On the kibbutz? In a reception hall? Tell us everything. And who’s the groom?
On the stock exchange of Usha Street it was a story worth its weight in gold, not just another anecdote, but a full blown production, and in days to come I capitalized on it shamelessly, blunting the embarrassment and guilt with a mockery that improved with practice. Think of this woman, that is to say my mother, Batya, with her socialist upbringing in the children’s house on the kibbutz. Her parents turned their backs on their bourgeois families, Grandpa left the shtetl, Grandma ran away from the family home in Kraków, they cleared away rocks, sweated in the fields, burned with malarial fevers, and all for what? For the revolution, right? To create a new man for us here who would live in a new, just society. There was an article about it in the paper only last week, I don’t know if you saw it. A new man, a new family, a new form of relationship — that’s what they wanted and that’s what they talked about. And what did we get instead? Fiddler on the Roof, back to the shtetl with violins, mazal tov, comrades, mazal tov, our little girl’s getting married and grandchildren come next.
“Don’t start jumping for joy. It’s only a fictitious marriage,” I said quickly.
“Fictitious?” the knife was still in her hand. “But what does that mean, fictitious?”
“It means that I’m getting married at the Rabbinate the day after tomorrow, and later on I’ll get divorced. Not that marriage means anything to me in the first place, it’s just a primitive custom, but in any case this marriage isn’t for real.”
“Really? Is that so? One of the boys from the kibbutz married an illegal immigrant from Europe in a fictitious marriage, and afterwards they got divorced. But since then, as far as I know, we managed to chase the British out of the country.”
“I don’t intend to go to the army.”
At some point she asked me if “he”—she never called Alek by his name — if “he” was “giving me drugs.” At another point she bemoaned “what would people say” and how she was going to tell my father. And when, on the verge of a childish hysteria I hadn’t planned for at all, I denounced her, my father, Zionism, the army of occupation, and the oppression of the Palestinians — she ordered Talush to leave the room so that I wouldn’t “influence” her. “We know very well who’s influencing you,” she said.
With the Beatles’s “She’s Leaving Home” in the background, with frames from Five Easy Pieces and refrains from the Israeli version of Hair in my head, the two of us played our roles in this little historical melodrama with facility and total identification. Only I wasn’t leaving home to go to San Francisco with a flower in my hair, but because I wanted to get married. To get married to a man I would rather have died than told my mother how much I loved him.
The truth is that it wasn’t at all clear to me that I was leaving home, until my mother finally came out with the inevitable lines: “If that’s what you think of us, if that’s what your espresso generation is like, then perhaps there really isn’t anything for you and your generation to look for here. And if you’re old enough to get married, then perhaps you’re old enough to earn your living as well,” at which point I went up to my room, threw a few clothes into my rucksack, threw a nasty “I’m sorry for you,” at the alarmed Talush, and left the house.
How much sincerity was there in this stormy scene? I don’t know. It’s possible to play a part with feelings of absolute sincerity, and when I arrived at Alek’s with tears pouring down my face I had no sense of theatrical exaggeration. In other words, I was sure that the rift with my family was final and absolute.
“What happened?” he asked at the door, and immediately took me into his arms, which immediately brought on a fresh bout of weeping. “What happened?”
“I can’t do it,” I groaned when he closed the door behind us.
“What can’t you do?”
“Get out of the army. My mother, my parents, if I don’t go to the army they’ll throw me out of the house, and at the moment I’ll simply have nowhere else to go.” We were still standing in the hallway, and Alek stroked my head with concentrated gentleness. “All my girlfriends are going to the army and I don’t want to go to my Granny Dora on the kibbutz.”
“Noichka, Noichka … yes …”
I buried my head in his shirt, and with my head under his chin I felt the smile suddenly spreading over his face. A slow Alek smile with closed lips. “You don’t want to be in army?”
I shook my head.
“Okay, then you won’t,” and he raised my face to his. “Your mother and father … those are rules of the genre, you know,” he said holding my cheeks and pulling them into a smile, “that’s the way it is, Noichka, everything conforms to the rules of the genre.” And when he took his hands away the smile remained on my face. When he wanted to he could always effect this change in me, from total identification with my feelings, to a kind of light-hearted, mischievous observation of myself.