Listen to My Voice (5 page)

Over the course of the next few weeks, I found myself cohabiting with a complete stranger. The extraterrestrials had disappeared, but their place had been taken by a persecution complex. Everything and everyone was conspiring against you.

It was a conspiracy made up of malevolent whispers, behind-the-back mockery, constant petty theft: your slippers and your dressing gown disappeared; your handbag and your overcoat vanished into thin air; your keys and your glasses slid into the void for ever. Someone stole the pot you wanted to cook in and the lunch you had just prepared. In the refrigerator, there was no trace of the things you’d bought at the store, and the soap was missing from the bathroom. Given that the UFOs and their occupants were no longer around, the person solely responsible for all this wanton pilfering was me, always and only me. I did it just to spite you, to turn your life into a torment of infernal little searches.

You bought a great many chains and padlocks from the hardware store and used them to bind and lock everything. In order to keep from losing the various keys, you strung them on a long red ribbon, which you wore around
your
neck. In my memory, the incessant jangling of your keys, coupled with the pitter-patter of your indefatigable footsteps, is the background sound of those months.

You accused me of the most incredible things, and I didn’t know how to defend myself. The words I tried to say were like an inflammable liquid – just a few drops were enough to make you explode. You’d burst into flames of rage, your jaw clenched, your eyes narrow, your thin hands scratching the air; you’d spend hours spouting unrepeatable curses. You opened and closed all the drawers, furtively carrying off various objects to new and even more secret places. You opened and closed the armoires, the refrigerator, the oven. You went up and down the stairs. You opened and closed the windows, suddenly sticking your head out in order to catch someone in the act of lying in wait for you. You did the same thing with the front door. You were sure you’d seen someone; presences hidden behind the jambs, scrutinising you with malevolent eyes. They had to be fought ruthlessly, implacably. They had to be beaten to the punch.

In an attempt to show some solidarity with you, I helped you organise your various defensive strategies. I bought a whistle and told you it was endowed with magical powers; it could keep malignant entities at a distance. You snatched it out of my hand, wide-eyed with amazement. ‘Really? It works?’ you kept saying, repeating the words with a sort of relieved gratitude.

Indeed, it
did
work for a certain period of time. A new household sound joined your footfalls and the jangling of your improvised key ring: the piercing shriek of that whistle, instantly accompanied by Buck’s howling – the high frequencies disturbed him. And there I was, roaming about like a ghost in the midst of this diabolical symphony. During the rare periods when you yielded to sleep, I stood beside your bed and studied you. You were coiled up in a defensive position, with clenched fists and tense lips; your facial muscles moved and twitched ceaselessly, and so did your eyes behind the thin veil of your eyelids.

Contemplating your features, I tried to see in them the person who had raised me. What had happened to her? Who was this old woman I was looking at? Where had she come from? How was it possible for a mild, gentle, matronly lady to turn into her opposite? Meanness, rage, suspicion, violence – what was all that? What had caused such an explosion of awfulness? Had it always lain smouldering inside her? Had she simply managed to control it for all those years, and now, having shed the inhibitions of mental health, was she revealing the person she’d always wanted to be? Or had she really been taken over by a dybbuk? Was there a possibility that this dybbuk would invade me, too?

Or do we, right from the start, like creatures in certain science-fiction movies, perhaps contain – hidden
between
the pia mater and the dura mater – a program coded for self-destruction? Who sets the timer? Who determines the length of the program?

I had never given much thought to whether or not the heavens were inhabited by Someone different from the UFOs and the extraterrestrials that flew in them, but during the course of those long autumn afternoons, pondering this question for the first time, I reached a conclusion: the heavens are empty, or if they’re not, the entity that inhabits them is thoroughly uninterested in what’s going on in the world below. This was a being, I thought, who must have been distracted frequently while creating his little toy. How else to explain the fact that a person could bear such deterioration? That a life full of dignity and intelligence could be brought so low in just a few months? That memory could disappear just like that, as though a sponge had been passed over it? What hypocrites they must be, the people who talked about our dear Heavenly Father! What father would ever want such a fate for his children?

Often, at night – trying to escape the constant clicking of your footsteps, the screech of your whistle, the squealing of unoiled hinges – I took refuge in the farthest corner of the yard.

Seen from outside, the house really did look like a
ghost
ship. First I’d hear the jangling keys, and then I’d see you appear and disappear like a shadow behind the lighted windows; and all the while, the roar of the heavy goods traffic on the highway mounted to my ears, echoing the lonesome barking of the dogs in the scattered country houses.

On windy nights, the black pines above my head creaked and groaned like the masts on a ship.

I crouched at their feet, and at last, I was able to cry – in anger more than sorrow. From weeping, I passed to kicking; I struck their trunks violently with my feet, and then I punched the bark until blood ran down my wrist. ‘Let me die!’ I screamed into the wind, raising my voice so that my words would be carried high and far. ‘Let her die! Carry her off, destroy her, pulverise her! If you don’t want her, then at least take me! Yes, if You exist, You up there, let me die!’ Then I threw myself on the ground and hugged Buck, who’d been standing terrified at my feet, wagging his tail.

One morning, on waking up from one of those alfresco nights, I was afraid my prayers had been heard. I’d slept later than usual, and when I went back into the house, an unusual stillness reigned. There was no sound of shuffling feet, no whistle, no jangling keys, no cursing. Nothing.

After a few minutes of incredulous waiting, I carefully cracked the door of your room, afraid that I would find your body there. The same fear tugged at me as I searched through every room in the house, but there was no trace of you.

Then, followed by Buck, I went out into the yard, but you weren’t among the geraniums, nor in the woodshed, nor even in the garage. You couldn’t have taken the car, because your keys had gone missing some time ago; therefore, if you’d left, you had to have done so on foot, although your coat was in its usual spot, and so was the handbag you were never without.

I was about to go to the police and report your disappearance when the telephone rang. It was the fruit vendor. He’d stopped you while you were crossing an intersection – barefoot and wearing only your slip – and taken you into his shop.

‘We’re in the tunnel,’ you kept saying. ‘Papa, Mamma, we’re in the tunnel. We made it!’

For some time, you’d been obsessed with shelling, and with Germans beating on the door. When you saw me, you turned hostile, but you gave no sign of recognition. ‘What do you want from me?’ you asked. Only when I whispered in your ear that I was the person in charge of air defence did you give me your hand and follow me back to the house, as docile as a weary child.

From that morning on, all our domestic emergencies
involved
your flights from the house and your heedless gestures. You washed your hands over the gas burner; if you felt like eating some marmalade, you didn’t open the jar, you broke it, and then you necessarily swallowed bits of glass, too; if you locked yourself in a room for protection, you shouted that we had to run to the shelter, because the alarm had already sounded; when Buck appeared at the door, you yelled, ‘The Gestapo are coming!’ – perhaps because of his extremely distant resemblance to an Alsatian – and then you’d run and hide, your face wet with tears.

As far as you were concerned, I stopped being a hostile person and became a complete stranger; you never knew who I was. During those months, in order to survive and to help you to survive, I turned myself (like one of your favourite characters, Aladdin’s genie) into a multitude of different people.

The game ended one windy December morning. Coming back from shopping, I found you on the ground in the yard, still wearing your nightgown. Your bare feet were covered with dirt, and Buck was whining by your side. Pursued by one of your ghosts, you’d run out of the house, probably tripped over some root, and struck your head against a tree. You were lying supine and smiling, one arm flung out over your head, as though
doing
the backstroke through the grass. A thin stream of blood marked your forehead, and beneath your eyelids, your eyes were finally at rest.

5

NOT THAT MORNING,
but three days later, you died in a ward of the hospital.

Before dawn, while I was tossing and turning on my bed at home, the angel of death, armed with his fiery sword, swooped down on you. Buck must have sensed his passage, because when I got up, he wasn’t waiting for me, as usual, by the back door. Since he often disappeared, I wasn’t all that alarmed, but then, in the afternoon, someone called and said he’d read the phone number on Buck’s collar. A car had run him down not far from the hospital. Maybe he was on his way there to visit you, or maybe he thought you two should depart for the next world together. They told me his body had already been taken to the incinerator.

Only about five people came to your burial, the neighbours and a couple of old friends, ancient ladies still capable of locomotion. The priest spoke like the owner of a car dealership, using conventional, slightly tired language to extol the excellence of his wares.

The year was a few days from its end; as we left the cemetery, we were greeted by a burst of fireworks.