Denial (6 page)

“I'm not sure I even saw the guns,” he says, as if thinking of this for the first time.

“Then how did you know that they had guns?” I ask.

“I always thought whenever the Nazis showed up, they had guns with them,” he says.

“Do you think you saw the guns and then forgot them?”

“No, I don't think so.” My father cannot imagine that he would forget something like this. I know that he could.

“I believe my mother told me afterward. I knew they had drawn guns, but I'm not sure how I knew.”

“So the door opens. What happened after that?”

“I don't recall,” he says.

“Did she come over and hug you?” I ask.

“I don't recall. I think she might have come out, and we hugged each other. She would have picked us up.

“I'm surmising,” he explains.

“Where was your father?” I whisper.

“Apparently my father was in the fields at the time of the attack, when the brownshirts marched into our house. My mother
was deathly afraid that my father would return with a scythe in his arms,” he says.

Why was my grandmother afraid that her husband would go after the Nazis with a scythe? Could the Nazis have raped my grandmother?

Is my father telling me that he understands what happened to me, that he understands why I knew it was not sensible to be hysterical under the rapist's gun? Is he warning me that after this brief interlude he will go back behind the wall that shuts out the recognition of terror, the terrors of his past and the terrors of mine?

For now, in this very moment, we are allies, my father and I, in the war against terror and rape. In this very moment, we are together.

Now my father switches to the present.

“Except for the beating of the boys, I never suffered anything comparable to what you went through,” he says, shocking me with a bolt of empathy. He seems to be considering my past experience in a new light. And with this return to the present, I sense new rules—he seems to be giving both of us permission to feel for the other, at least for the moment. We are no longer in an empathy-free zone.

“The beatings didn't bother me very much because in my family children were physically punished if they were bad. It wasn't as bad as it would be for a child today, for Evan, who has never been beaten,” he says, referring to my son.

I am thinking now of when Evan was a toddler. Like many toddlers, when Evan got too excited, he would sometimes try to bite me. My father offered to cure him by biting Evan back.

“I prefer to be spanked than to be yelled at or made to feel guilty. It was less painful. I felt warm in my bottom and that was it,” my father says.

“I was afraid at night, afraid during the day,” he continues, without prompting from me.

There is a noticeable lessening of tension in the room.

“Did you have trouble sleeping?” I ask.

“But I didn't know I was terrorized,” my father says, as if he hasn't heard my question. So he didn't feel his terror in the moment, either.

“When did you realize?” I ask.

“I still remember the feeling,” he says. “As soon as the U.S. ship started pulling away from the dock in Hamburg, I felt a huge upwelling. Then I realized that my fear was leaving me—the ship was American, and American law applied there, although there were some Nazis on the ship. The USS
Washington
…a passenger liner…March of 1938…so I was almost ten.

“I got very sick. I couldn't hold anything down. I'm not sure, maybe I got food poisoned. As soon as I recovered, I was voraciously hungry. And everyone else was sick, and I was getting to run around the ship. And getting to eat four or five meals a day. We didn't have much to eat in Germany—we had fake flour. I got to eat real food. I was small and thin for my age at the time.”

It is hard for me to imagine this muscled man emaciated and starving.

“But I still had German habits,” he says, by which he means, the habits of a German Jew, petrified of the Nazis. “If I saw Boy Scouts, I would go way out of my way to avoid them because they reminded me of Hitlerjugend. I was very passive and did everything I was told in school—I imbued any authorities with German power. I was afraid of them. Of the principal. That was with me until I got to be thirteen or fourteen….. Even then I deferred to authority.”

I hear again my father's words: “I didn't know I was terrorized.” I wonder now, was he terrorized by the police in Concord, Massachusetts? So determined to get them off the case that he
told them we had forgotten about the crime four months after it occurred?

“So only some of your fear left when you left Germany?”

“My anxiety left. But those other fears were bred into me…. It took a long time to realize they weren't founded on anything. Another fear is that I didn't ever want to stand out, so I feared for a long time huge visible success—I didn't know that I was smart. I didn't try to get prizes or anything like that because I was afraid I'd be exposed. In college. And even professionally for a while. It did have a lasting effect, living through that terror.”

Is this why my father never praised us when we did well in school? I wonder now.

“This quality that you write about”—he changes the subject—“of not feeling afraid during a crisis. I know exactly what you mean. In a frightening situation I become very clearheaded. I assess the situation and try to maneuver within the constraints of the situation.

“When we had the car accident, I lost control of the car,” he says, referring to a serious accident he and my stepmother suffered in 1994. “The car did not respond to the steering wheel, but I wasn't frightened. I tried to create a trajectory to cause the least damage. I didn't just throw my hands up.

“Same thing when I'm mountain climbing. If I get into trouble, I suppress everything that I'm concerned about…. I'm not afraid. It's gone.”

“How does it feel to go into that state?” I ask.

I've only recently realized that there is something unusual about this capacity to slip into an altered state that makes me more efficient, even smarter. I am not sure how to feel about my father's admission that he can do the same thing.

“It doesn't feel good or bad. I feel competent. I feel I'm in control,” he says.

“Afterward, do you feel burned out?” I ask.

“Physically exhausted,” he says. “I feel tired and emotionally low.”

“Did you ever ask yourself why you could do that?” I ask.

“No,” he answers, simply, honestly.

We will return to this subject later.

O
nce I read the complete file, I had to learn about the man who raped me. I needed to do this to tame him—but also to tame a wild, nameless feeling inside myself.

I have always been a spy. Whenever I sense pain that I don't understand, my own or others', I feel compelled to research the source. I become a detective.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I am insatiably curious about the half-known truths that motivate people's lives, often in ways they do not realize. If I met you today and sensed you have a secret—especially a secret you keep from yourself, especially a secret that might hurt someone—I would start trying to find the key from the moment I laid eyes on you. I might not even know that I was doing this. I might not want to do it, but I can't stop myself.

I have been spying on violent men for much of my life. Not
just men who have hurt me, but also men who have hurt others. I have traveled all over the world to talk to terrorists. I am compelled to understand men who hurt people, as if by understanding what motivates them, I can tame them; as if by taming them, I can make my world safe. But, perhaps for the first time, I am aware that my curiosity could make me sick. Sara tells me that she assumed, after the rape, that the next crime against us would be murder. She wasn't sure whether the rapist would come back to kill us, or a new perpetrator. But it seemed logical, she felt, that we would be killed. Is murder what I fear?

This time, however, I have help. I am spying together with the police. They want to find the rapist, too, for their own reasons. They want to get him off the street. Today we understand that violent pedophiles cannot be cured. They can be treated with medication, but even then, they must be kept away from children.

Paul Macone, my partner in espionage, wants to talk to me. He wants to give me some redacted files. There is more than one case that he thinks is similar to mine. Remarkably similar-sounding perp, he says. Very similar MO. Same grayish black gun with white grips. He asks me to come out to the station. He would like my help, he says.

Although Lt. Macone and I overlapped in school, I cannot connect with him in a personal way. He is good, in a way that I fear that I am not. Unspoiled. He knows things about me that I normally don't reveal. He knows about how the shadow of a long-ago terror debilitates me. I worry that he can sense an unhealthy obsession in me, and I feel shy in his presence.

I go to Concord regularly. It's not just that I grew up there. My father and his wife still live there, and my son visits them every week. I have driven past the police station hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I have a vague recollection that I've even been inside the building, but I don't remember anything. Was I ever arrested? I'm certain I was not. But shame shimmers at the edge
of my consciousness, like a mirage I can't quite see. I discover that I cannot remember precisely where the station is.

I drive past the Louisa May Alcott house, which I visited several times as a child. I know the station is near here, but I seem to have gone too far. I drive back toward the center of town. I am terribly sleepy. There is the Scout House, a large eighteenth-century barn where I attended Girl Scout meetings, where I had to take dancing lessons. An image of white gloves floats into my mind. Did we really wear white gloves? I cannot recall; my brain is turned to mush.

After this bewildering incident, I don't even try to drive back there. Lt. Macone keeps me apprised of his progress by e-mail.

In October 2006 I open this e-mail.

I do not respond. Several days later he writes again. I open his message immediately, anxious to hear what he has to say.

It takes me weeks to respond. I'm busy, I guess. And I also get sleepy. I want Lt. Macone to find my rapist because I want to interview him myself, but I am not able to provide much help. I am not aware of feeling afraid. But I don't feel like dwelling on the topic. I put the thought of my rapist and of Paul's continuing investigation aside. I will wait until the rapist is found, I tell myself, and think about it then.

It's not that I'm afraid of my rapist. It happened long ago, I tell myself. I'm grown up now. But I am afraid of the police station, which, for me, is a repository of shame. I prefer to stay away.

Once we find the rapist, I plan to talk to him. I plan to look him straight in the eye. That is as far as my planning goes.

I do not write out a series of questions, as I have often done in preparing to interview terrorists. I do not think about whether I will need to have a rifle, or perhaps a sword, or perhaps a posse. I always went unarmed to my interviews with terrorists. I always thought my very vulnerability was my best protection. But somehow, though I don't really think about it, I have an idea that this is different.

I do not plan that the interview will take place in a restaurant. I do not plan that it will be at Friendly's, an obvious choice. I do not think about how I will skewer him, not with a Friendly's butter knife, but by looking him straight in the eye.

If I make him see that I am not just his object, but also a sub
ject, there will be an explosion in his brain. An electric signal will cascade: he will realize that he wronged the universe, and his brain will explode. Also his penis will fall off. I will leave him there, his brain on his plate. He will remain sitting upright, but the waitresses will realize that he's dead because the top of his head will have flopped neatly off and there will be wires sticking out. Broken phone wires, thick and tangled but cut through all the way, looking as though they'd been cut with shears rather than the power of thought. I will avoid stepping on his shriveled penis as I walk out the door. I will leave it there for the rats. I will not apologize to Friendly's for the mess: I cannot help it that electricity comes out of your body when you really look at someone. I may be a victim, but I'm a world-class perpetrator, too.

These not-plans, which I am describing to you now, take place in another dimension, a place I prefer not to dwell.

Although I am curious about what Lt. Macone is finding out, I don't drive out to the police station in Concord, the town where I was raped, the town where my parents still live, a twenty-minute drive from where my son and I live now. There is no point: I know I will get lost.

I e-mail Lt. Macone to tell him that I saw in the file that we had informed the police that I had received an obscene phone call shortly after the rape. But I don't remember the call, or much else that occurred during that period. Soon, however, Lt. Macone has more news.

He will work around my schedule. He's gotten the message, apparently, that I am busy. It's not as if this investigation is my whole life.

 

Because I work on terrorism, I have good contacts in the FBI. After September 11, a number of agents who had worked on “ordinary” crime were recruited to work on counterterrorism cases, and a series of them have come to visit me over the years for what amounts to terrorism lessons.

I've never taken a fee for this work, although I've devoted many hours to it. The most intense period was in January–February 2002, when
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted by terrorists in Pakistan. I didn't mean to, but I all but ceased doing my own work during this period. I became obsessed with helping to save Daniel Pearl, as absurd as that might sound. I called all my contacts in Pakistan. It seemed to me very important to be in touch with the terrorists themselves, not just with Pakistani government officials or the Oxbridge-educated elite that Americans typically talk to in Pakistan. I had done the same sort of “stupid” things Pearl had done—meeting alone with terrorists, and admitting, when asked, that I was a Jew. But I had been lucky. My last trip to Pakistan to talk to members of bin Laden's International Islamic Front was in August 2001, and I survived, despite sharing Pearl's naïveté, as the media described it at the time. Pearl did his work after September 11, when the attitude toward Americans had shifted dramatically.

I identified with Pearl, of course. But there was more than that: I understand now that I was feeling, for the first time, the
fear that I had not perceived when I had met with the same terrorist groups that Pearl met with. At the time of Pearl's abduction it didn't feel like fear, exactly. It felt like a premonition of evil.

Nine days after he was abducted, Daniel Pearl's captors slit his throat and beheaded him. I can almost feel that knife. A month later a film was released, showing the terrorists' horrific crime. The film was disseminated widely to recruit others to the terrorist cause. Despite the ultimate failure of our efforts to discover the captors in time to save Pearl's life, I received a letter of commendation from the director of the FBI for the futile help I provided during those weeks.

Like most people who have served in government, I have acquired a number of letters like this one, commemorating my service. I put these letters, and the other mementos I received, in a box. Then the box disappeared. I think it is somewhere in the basement of the house I once shared with my ex-husband.

But I have kept this letter from the FBI director. I never worked for the FBI, so that makes it more valuable. More like a stamp of approval from a higher power. More like a stamp telling me, “You're okay” that this mysterious shame I feel, especially in the police station, is unwarranted, at least in the eyes of the FBI, at least for now.

One day it came into my head to ask one of the agents I knew to talk to Lt. Macone. It took some weeks for me to broach the topic. It was as if there were two persons living in my body—one, a tough, seemingly fearless person who traveled around the world talking to terrorists and whose knowledge turned out to be of interest to people fighting crime; and the other, a shame-filled victim. I had more or less left that victim and her unattractive, girlie feelings behind. I didn't think about her.

Victims—I somehow “knew” this to be a fact—are ineffectual, weak, and dishonest persons who drag society, or anyway their families, or anyway their fathers, down. I understood that ter
ror and despair were contagious emotions, and that to indulge oneself in the feeling of terror was antisocial and possibly even immoral. I found a way to slice off the side of my self that felt endangered, and endangering, by the shameful feelings I could not stop myself from experiencing.

After the rape, according to a police officer's notes taken down on the back of his crime report, I reported that I had a “skill” in becoming “stern and hard” as a response to terror. I don't recall saying this to the police. But I do know that I understood, long before the rape, that to become stern and hard was a more “manly” approach to fear and despair, that it demonstrated a kind of good breeding, a kind of moral fiber. I wonder now why the officer took note of my words. Was he surprised to hear a terrorized fifteen-year-old girl speaking this way? And yet he does not seem to have asked me how I acquired this skill, or to what end.

Becoming stern and hard is so inbred in me that a more natural, “girlie” reaction to pain or fear takes an act of will. My sister, who was petrified to be alone for many years after the rape, was deeply ashamed of her fear. She, too, had taken in the notion that feeling afraid was somehow unseemly in our family. She explained to me later how she tried to finagle visits or phone calls with friends at times when she might otherwise be alone with the silence of an empty house. But she took great pains to disguise these efforts.

Talking to my contacts in the FBI about my rape—especially now that I was no longer able to speak about the crime as if it had happened to someone I didn't know—would bring back to life a shameful side of myself that I had tried to deaden, that I had pronounced not me. I'm not just talking about the different roles one plays in life—parent, spouse, professional—and the way different parts of one's character emerge in these different roles. I am talking about a part of the self that is almost wholly other, a
victimized and now despised Siamese twin that survived despite my effort to extrude it.

Finding a way to be both persons was a terrifying prospect. It took all the willpower I could summon. It was worse than jumping into the sea. I might be overwhelmed by sensation with a million little jellyfish gluing to my skin. I might drown, or drown others, out of fear.