Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (20 page)

“Anyway,” he said, “I warned her if she contacted you or any of your colleagues ever again, we’d have her arrested for aggravated harassment.”

I thanked him. “Do you think she’ll stop now?”

“Well, I asked if she wanted to spend the rest of the summer locked up in a New York jail, and she said she definitely didn’t want to. So I’m guessing she’ll stop.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“I can talk to the DA, but like I said, I don’t think he’s going to extradite her from California on a misdemeanor.”

“So if she ignores your warning, there’s really nothing else anyone can do?”

I was pushing him, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be easy to get hold of the detective again after this conversation.

“We’ll have to see. Maybe we can have a squad car drop by where she lives and talk to her. That’s a possibility.”

“I should call you, then, if she sends any more emails?”

“Like I say, I think she’ll stop, but if she does continue, then sure, go ahead and fax me the emails, and we’ll see what else we can do. All right, Mr. Lasdun?”

I hung up, telling myself that on balance this was good news. But I was depressed, all the same. Among other things, Nasreen had made it clear (so it seemed to me) that she now had my connection to Princeton in her sights. Did that mean she had sent them an email denouncing me as a thief and sexual predator like the one she’d sent Frank? I realized, with a kind of weary dread, that I was going to have to call the head of the writing department there to find out. I did: she hadn’t sent anything, but if anything this made the conversation with my old colleague even weirder and more embarrassing than it would have been if she had. A lifetime of such conversations was what seemed to lie ahead of me if Detective Bauer’s warning should fail.

There was silence for a few days. I allowed myself to feel fractionally encouraged. Then a YouTube forwarding arrived: a PJ Harvey video with the heading: “
ever hear of email blocking? This is my farewell email. Bye!
” Aware of how precarious my own mental condition was, I tried to take this as a good sign; proof that Detective Bauer had made an impression on Nasreen and that, in her incomparably annoying way, she was disengaging. Twenty minutes later another PJ Harvey video arrived. There was no message but the title of the song, “Bitter Little Bird,” seemed significant. Again, I told myself it was encouraging: a little rueful acknowledgment that she had come to the end of the road. Then a song called “Rid of Me,” also by PJ Harvey, arrived, along with the message: “
last one … promise. tee hee
.” The taunting note was unmistakable, and the next couple of forwardings confirmed beyond doubt that any sense of defeat she may have initially felt after Detective Bauer’s call was giving way to mocking defiance. “
you are under arrest for sending pj harvey videos!
” read the first; the second: “
You’ll extradite me to ny for pj harvey videos. that’s sooooo nazi like
.” And by the end of the day she was back in full cackling cry. The video was Jay-Z’s “Breathe Easy,” the message: “
ha ha ha ha
.”

I had been afraid of what would happen to me, psychologically, if the time came when I could no longer convince myself I was going to be able to make the emails stop. Now that time appeared to have come. Not that Detective Bauer’s warning had had no effect at all: the emails did slow down after that initial deluge, and there were days, sometimes whole weeks, when I didn’t hear from Nasreen. And for a long period the emails themselves became more oblique, less often overtly threatening. But by this time it was neither the content nor the frequency of the emails that mattered to me, so much as the mere fact of their continued existence. In my hypersensitized state, all it took was the sight of Nasreen’s name or one of her many pseudonyms in my inbox to send me into a state of anxiety that could last all day. I was being given notice, it seemed to me, that there was nothing in my power that could bring an end to this torment. It was one thing to indulge in a kind of medicinal imagining of the worst, saturating myself in Patricia Highsmith while knowing that Detective Bauer was on the case, but now there was no longer any comforting frame of provisionality around the facts, and they were stark. The illness I had contracted was incurable. My adversary was stronger than I was. In abstract that sounds like a useful lesson for a man to learn, midway through life’s journey, but it is hard nevertheless, and one learns it only with great bitterness and pain.

I put off calling Detective Bauer for some time, mainly because I didn’t want to extinguish the last, faint, doubtless illusory flicker of hope that the thought of him still held out. I also disliked playing the role of the timid citizen who entrusts every aspect of his well-being to the forces of law and order, rather than defending them himself. But the logic of the situation seemed to have been steadily embedding the mask of that helpless figure into my own features ever since the drama began.

When I finally called the detective he was away, but he left a message a few days later, asking me to fax him the new emails. I did. Weeks passed with no word from him. I called again and was put through to his voice mail. The desk sergeants who answered the phone all knew my voice by now, and I felt I had become a laughingstock at the station: the poor persecuted professor. I hung up without leaving another message.

Winter arrived. In March 2009 I read an article in
The New York Times
about an identity theft case being prosecuted by the Manhattan DA, Robert Morgenthau, that bore some resemblance to my own. The setting was academe: an embattled biblical scholar whose overzealous son had assumed the identity of one of his father’s critics and begun posting online messages in that person’s name, “admitting” to plagiarism from the father’s work. “‘This exemplifies a growing trend in the area of identity theft,’” the article quoted an assistant DA as saying. The son had been charged with identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment, and faced up to four years in prison if convicted. I cut out the article and faxed it off to Detective Bauer, with a long letter explaining its relevance. He didn’t respond. I concluded, perhaps unfairly, that he had decided he had done all he could do in this strange affair.

I couldn’t altogether say that I blamed him.

Part IV

Mosaic

I am uneasy when confronted with my own work …

—Freud,
Moses and Monotheism

In the year 1700 a group of Polish Jews emigrated to Jerusalem. The journey was hard and by the time they arrived they were in ill health and penniless. Borrowing money from the Arab community, they built a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, not far from the Wailing Wall. But their leader died, and before long they defaulted on their debt and the creditors burned down the building. Ever since then, the site it stood on has been known as the “Hurva,” which is the Hebrew word for “ruin.”

For more than a century the ruin lay undisturbed, and then in 1864 a second synagogue was built on the same site, this time by Lithuanians, followers of the influential rabbi known as the Vilna Gaon: the “Genius of Vilnius.” Their version of the building, designed for them by the Turkish sultan’s own architect and modeled on the domed and arched mosques of Constantinople, dominated the skyline of the Jewish Quarter for almost a century and came to be regarded as the official synagogue of Old Jerusalem. Theodor Herzl spoke there. The first British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, paid a ceremonial visit in 1920. But in 1948, during the War of Independence, it too was destroyed, blown up by the Jordanian army as they took the Old City.

The Vilna Gaon, a revered figure in Orthodox Judaism, left behind a prophecy stating that three versions of the Hurva synagogue would be built, and that completion of the third would bring about the rebuilding of the Great Temple in Jerusalem. The rebuilding of the Temple is a dream cherished by all sorts of religious cults and associated, variously, with the arrival of the Jewish Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ, the Rapture, and the End of Days.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, the Israelis captured the Old City and set about reconstructing the Jewish Quarter, which had been largely flattened. The project was overseen by the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, a cultured, liberal figure, legendary for his expansive spirit and tireless energy. In time Kollek turned his attention to the rubble of the Hurva synagogue and proposed yet another incarnation: the fateful third.

His ambitions for this version were grandly international. It would be both a civic and an architectural statement; a showcase for his vision of a reunited, enlightened, globally minded new Jerusalem. The first architect he appointed was the American pioneer of modernism Louis Kahn, who worked on it until his death in 1974. His plans were admired but not, in the end, adopted, and the project went dormant. But in 1978 Kollek took it up again, appointing a new architect, to whom he spelled out his rather exalted vision of the building:

“I fully believe that we will witness the creation of a religious and spiritual focus for world Jewry.”

The new architect was my father. For several years he shuttled back and forth between London and Jerusalem, working almost exclusively on the project. He wasn’t especially religious (and though he always thought of himself as a Jew, and publicly identified as one, his Jewishness was complicated by the fact that he was also a baptized Christian). But he had a sort of agnostic regard for the possibility of higher mysteries, especially as embodied in the great churches and temples of antiquity. Ceremonial spaces fascinated him; he was responsive to the “numinous” (a favorite word of his) in both nature and architecture, and had always wanted to design a religious building. Like Kahn, he devoted considerable time and energy to resolving the question of what a Jewish cathedral (for it was to be essentially that) could possibly look like at this late date in the ancient city. Like Kahn, he produced an uncompromisingly modernist design. And like Kahn’s, it came to nothing.

Some time before the project fizzled out, he took me aside to show me a letter he had been sent at his office. He had published his design in
The Architectural Review
, and the letter consisted of a photocopy of the article with violent anti-Semitic abuse scrawled all over the pages. I had never seen anything like it in my life (I was in my early twenties). It was like a splinter from a block of some concentrated substance that I had only ever known by rumor or, at most, in the much diluted form it took in polite English society, where occasionally someone would use the word “Jewish” to mean tight with money. We stared at it together, and then my father put it away, asking me not to mention it to my mother.

I remembered this letter when Nasreen’s attacks began, and I thought of it many times as they continued. Overt anti-Semitism is rare today, and it seemed to me noteworthy that my father and I, neither of us exactly representative Jews, had both been at the receiving end of it.

And yet what did it mean, this coincidence? A part of me sensed that, objectively speaking, it didn’t mean anything at all. Certainly I didn’t want to interpret it as evidence that anti-Semitism exists everywhere, seething under veneers of strained civility. That way of thinking, always tempting to members of minority groups, is a dangerously easy way of blaming all one’s woes on other people, and strikes me as something one should resist, even when it seems justified.

But meanwhile another part of me remained fixated on this curious recurrence, and continued probing it as if it were some enigmatic legacy that might turn out to be valuable if I could only figure out what it was. When you are under acute stress, and when the source of your tribulation seems to lie beyond the reach of rational understanding, you start to attach great importance to any circumstance that resonates with your own. These things become your signs: the clues that, if you follow them correctly, will enable you (so you believe) to penetrate the mystery that stands before you.

In March 2010, an unexpected chain of events occurred that seemed, in conjunction with my father’s letter, to comprise precisely such a sign, linking my father’s very public field of action with my own largely private one, in ways that I found irresistibly fascinating.

It began with an announcement by the Israeli government of plans to build an extensive new settlement in East Jerusalem. Vice President Joseph Biden happened to be in Israel for peace talks at the time, and the announcement set off a major diplomatic row. I wasn’t following the story closely, but after a few days a subplot emerged that involved, of all things, the Hurva synagogue, and I found myself suddenly paying attention.

Teddy Kollek had died in 2007, having retired from politics years earlier, and I’d assumed the Hurva project had long been forgotten. But apparently it hadn’t. After all these years, the synagogue had finally been rebuilt: not as a modern building but as an exact copy, a “stone for stone” replica (so the papers were reporting) of its Ottoman predecessor. It was about to be officially reopened, and the news, which had immediately become entangled with the settlement announcement, was provoking furious reactions from Palestinians. Hamas had called for a “day of rage” to protest the rededication. Fatah accused the Israelis of “playing with fire.” The spokesmen for both organizations referred explicitly to the Vilna Gaon’s prophecy. In light of it, they claimed, the rebuilding of the synagogue amounted to a statement of intent to rebuild the ancient Temple, and was therefore to be regarded as a deliberate act of aggression toward the two sacred Muslim shrines that currently occupy the Temple Mount, or Haram Ash-Sharif (as Muslims call it): namely the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Arab Knesset members warned of a third intifada. Three thousand security personnel were put on alert for the opening ceremony.

The more I read, the more interested I became. In the thick gloom that had settled on me in the wake of Nasreen’s attacks, it appealed to me, perversely, to discover a family connection to so promisingly apocalyptic an affair.