Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (25 page)

*   *   *

But speaking of psychoanalysis, a comment that the archivist made at the V&A has been nagging at me.

I had put my father’s hate letter in a pile of documents I was setting aside to copy. When the archivist saw it she gave a sort of sigh. “Ah, that letter,” she said. “Whoever wrote it was mentally ill. That’s my opinion.”

At the time I’d thought nothing of it, but now I feel as if I was being gently reproved for digging up something sensationalistic for my article, some shameful relic that should have been left to decompose in peace.

My impulse is to jump to my own defense and assert that the writer of the letter was aware of what he was doing and that it was therefore perfectly appropriate to exhume it. But thinking back to the shouting capitals and thickly scrawled defacements, the hundreds of painstakingly inked-out lines of print, I become less certain. And I return to a question that has arisen periodically in my mind since Nasreen first began emailing me; namely, was Nasreen herself simply “mentally ill,” and if so is there any point, after all, in trying to write about her? Has her behavior all along been just the chaotic by-product of chemical imbalances and misfiring synapses—to be regretted and pitied, surely, but in itself essentially meaningless?

I have mentioned the “borderline” aspects, as they seemed to me, of Nasreen’s personality. But I could probably have made the case that she was communicating from a place well and truly across the border. She herself seemed to want to convey that impression. Her emails contained dozens of references to her “insanity,” “psychosis,” “nervous breakdowns,” “craziness,” and so on, of which I have quoted only a fraction. There were those paranoid comments about mysterious forces tampering with her computer. And there was quite a bit of talk about doing drugs. Arguably, in other words, the whole saga could be explained purely and simply as some kind of “mental illness,” possibly worsened by drug abuse.

But I can’t quite accept this. For one thing, “mental illness” carries an implication that the sufferer isn’t aware of the possible consequences of his or her actions and therefore shouldn’t be held accountable for them. That seems reasonable in cases of real insanity, but however afflicted Nasreen may have been, she was obviously, calculatingly, tauntingly aware of the possible consequences of her actions, and by her own admission dead set on bringing at least some of them about (“I will ruin him”). For another, the very proclamations of her own “insanity” seem precisely evidence that she was
not
insane, but rather that she was using the idea of insanity as leverage for manipulation.

Even as I write this, though, I am aware of the possibility of mixed motives in what I myself am doing. I have a strong vested interest, after all, in claiming that Nasreen was fundamentally sane. I want to hold her responsible for her behavior. I tell myself that this is simply because I believe it to be the case, which I do. But I also have to admit that if I didn’t, I would probably feel uncomfortable writing about her. Uncomfortable not only from a personal point of view but also from a literary one. As soon as you reduce human behavior to a pathology—label it “psychotic” or “sociopathic,” or attribute it to some kind of personality disorder—it becomes, for literary purposes, less interesting (at least to me). She’s clinically this or that; she has X Syndrome, Y Disorder: well, maybe, but in that case there is no morally engaging antagonist and therefore, for me, no drama. Iago’s “motiveless malignancy,” in Coleridge’s famous phrase, brings the audience up against the mystery of evil with a force that would be seriously weakened if a psychiatrist were to appear in the play and explain his behavior as the result of an excess of monoamine oxidase in his posterior cerebellum.

So I have reasons that may not be entirely objective for resisting a purely medical diagnosis of Nasreen’s actions. But even as I acknowledge this, it occurs to me (and you could say this proves nothing except the urgency of my need to justify myself) that even if these outbursts—Nasreen’s and that of my father’s attacker—
are
instances of “mental illness,” they are perhaps not quite as special-case and narrowly applicable as I have been thinking. Might they not, on the contrary, be evidence of some naturally occurring feature in the human mind, one that by definition requires the presence of “madness” in order to become observable, since, under present social conditions, nobody in their right mind would allow it to disclose itself?

The spasmlike, explosive nature of anti-Semitism, when you do witness it today, seems relevant to the conjecture. Often the outburst appears to be as startling to its perpetrator as anyone else, as if some constriction or inhibition had been unexpectedly lifted, some area of the psyche had come suddenly uncoupled from the social self with its diligent observance of proprieties and taboos. The look on the White House correspondent’s face in the news footage after she has said that Jews should go back to Germany and Poland, for instance; a grimace of astonished horror, as if toads have just hopped out of her mouth. The extreme drunkenness involved in recent outbursts of anti-Semitism from fashion and movie celebrities. Even in its cooler, steelier form it seems to arise almost involuntarily in its perpetrators, insinuating itself into other impulses before its unmistakable fin surfaces. Moral outrage, for example, is the proper response to a news story of Israeli soldiers killing a Palestinian child, but when a poet writes of a Palestinian boy “gunned down by the Zionist SS” you feel that something other than moral outrage has entered the picture: an opportunistic malice riding in on the wake of the legitimate disgust, itself having no particular interest in the child or the soldiers, but only the desire to seize a rare chance to call Jews Nazis. The tainted word “Zionist” is the poet’s alibi (“It’s not Jews I’m against, only Zionists”), but his use of “SS” as the slur of choice gives him away (imagine calling an African American soldier who killed a child a “slave-trader” or a “Klansman”). The urge to condemn people in their capacity as wrongdoers gives way mid-expression, mid-breath almost, to the apparently stronger urge to bait them in their capacity as Jews. The propensity for Judaism to keep drawing this kind of archaic lightning out of educated people even after the Holocaust seems an intrinsic part of its curious time-dissolving effect. Or put it this way: there is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

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In the early days of Israel, strictly orthodox Jews were opposed to the Zionists. They rejected Zionism because of the Midrashic injunction not to hasten the will of God in creating a home for the Jewish people. The gap was narrowed somewhat by the teachings of the country’s first chief rabbi, Avraham Kook, who held that the Zionists could be regarded as unconscious agents of God’s will; their actions, whether they knew it or not, part of the divine plan to reestablish the House of David in Israel.

After Rabbi Avraham Kook died, his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, refined his father’s theology, steadily aligning it with the politics of the young state. Some Orthodox groups continued to oppose the notion of a man-made state of Israel (some still do), but for Kook and his followers the earthly and the divine increasingly appeared to be on the same track. The final convergence came with the Six-Day War. What more stunning evidence could there be of God’s will than those lightning victories? To a religious mind, alert for signs in even the most mundane of occurrences, these seemingly miraculous events were proof of God’s favorable disposition toward the Zionist project. “The Almighty has his own political agenda according to which politics down here are conducted,” Kook jubilantly proclaimed. “… No earthly politics can supersede it.” Henceforth settlement of the Land of Israel was to be regarded as a divine commandment, a mitzvah. The Religious Settler movement was born.

Another member of the Kook family, Simcha HaCohen Kook, was appointed rabbi of the new Hurva synagogue a few months before my visit. The appointment was controversial, even within the Jewish Quarter. The head of the civic agency that oversaw the project (the Jewish Quarter Development Company) refused to attend the rabbi’s investiture. I have been trying to arrange an interview with the rabbi for several days. The JQDC, who manage the synagogue, offered to put me in touch with him, but nothing has come of it so far. A few hours ago I walked down here to Hurva Square, where I am sitting now, to try my luck in person. A polite young man with a pistol took my number and told me someone would call soon, but I’m still waiting. It is Friday; soon Shabbat will have begun and Rabbi Kook won’t be able to use a phone.

I am debating whether to pursue a line of thought in my article, concerning the philosophical implications of replicas. If you replicate the appearance of something, do you also replicate its meaning? Is this building in any meaningful way the “same” as the Ottoman structure it replicates? If not, why not? At some point, if I were to go in this direction, I would bring in the Borges story about the writer who re-creates
Don Quixote
word for word, not by copying it, but by immersing himself in the context of its original creation so thoroughly that he is able, as it were, to give birth to it a second time. Is it the same book, or do the same words magically mean something entirely different? From here my idea would be to move on to politics, specifically the topic of apartheid. If the outward features of South African apartheid evolve in another society, but do so by a different process and for different reasons than they did in South Africa, do they nevertheless mean the same thing and deserve to be called by the same name? Is the same visceral shunning reflex appropriate, or should criticism take account of the different underlying causes? Is it the case that while brutality and humiliation are what they are, regardless of underlying causes, there is nevertheless a difference between saying “T his is wrong” and “T his is apartheid”? That one is a legitimate moral reaction, while the other is a smear?

A gated lodge guards one main entrance of the synagogue and a locked stairway bars the other. Security is of course a serious matter in this city, but I have noticed that you can wander freely into the restored Sephardic synagogues down the road, whereas here visitors seem to be actively discouraged.

Perhaps it’s just a literary prejudice of mine, but I seem to be developing a certain animosity toward this smooth, pale, architectural doppelgänger. Its gates and railings oppress the spirit. The sight of young men in black hats and business suits coming and going through side doors that are opened from the inside only after a knock, and then closed immediately behind them, adds an air of secretiveness to the overall effect. It doesn’t help to learn, as I did this morning online, that one of the two donors who paid for the construction, a Ukrainian businessman, was reported by the FBI to have links with organized crime. (But perhaps that isn’t true; perhaps he has his own Nasreen, smearing him on the Internet.)

The afternoon deepens and the streets begin to fill. Tourists and groups of Yeshiva students head toward the Western Wall. Locals are bustling about on last-minute errands before Shabbat begins. It also happens to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so I imagine Rabbi Kook will be busy all weekend. And after that I return to the States.

I realize I left it rather late to start trying to get hold of him, and I’m wondering if this is because I don’t really want to talk to him, and if so, whether this is because I am afraid that his views will resemble those of his illustrious relative Zvi Yehuda Kook, thereby necessitating a yet more uncomfortably treacherous-feeling attitude of hostility toward the synagogue than I already have, or the reverse: that he will be so moderate and sensible that my forebodings about the building, the vague sense I’ve been forming of it as some sort of cyclopic creature gazing broodingly at the Temple Mount with the unblinking eye of its dome, will prove frivolous and sensationalistic.

An hour passes. It doesn’t look like I am going to hear from the rabbi. I get up from my bench and join the slow tide of figures moving toward the Western Wall. I was busy the previous Friday, and so today is also my last opportunity to do what I had planned to do: place myself at the Wall at sundown on Shabbat, and reflect.

There are families on their way to prayers now, the large families of the ultra-Orthodox, with six, eight, ten children—the fastest-growing religious group on the planet. What you notice about them as an outside observer is always their sheer extremity of self-differentiation, their physical unlikeness to any other group on earth.

Most traditional dress has a relationship to natural conditions that one grasps intuitively, even if one can’t account in detail for specific features. But intuition alone will merely register the appearance of the Haredim as strange, and therefore at some level of consciousness estranging. Even to make the most basic sense of it you have to have educated yourself in some rather esoteric matters. The
shtreimel
, for instance, a wide cylindrical hat made of sable or of gray fox tails, the size and shape of an enormous cake, and very popular among the Jerusalem Ashkenazi, is a magnificent and yet unfathomably singular piece of Shabbat headgear, bearing no obvious kinship to any other hat. The fact that it is always worn over another head covering, the close-fitting yarmulke, further compounds the cryptic effect. If you know nothing of the traditions concerning its origin and symbolism—the decree forcing Jews to wear a tail on their heads, the conversion of an object of humiliation into one of dignity, the gematrial or numerological significance of the number of tails used and the relation of this to the tetragrammaton (the name of God), the special spiritual merit of wearing two head coverings, the allusion to the
shaatnez
rules from the Torah prohibiting certain uses of wool, the clockwise spiral wrapping of the fur to emulate and invoke the radiance of the Divine Presence, the overall intention to glorify not the wearer but the holiness of Shabbat—if you are ignorant of all this, you are likely to see the hat just as something at once disquietingly weird and unaccountably sumptuous, and find yourself wondering by what quirk of eccentric and extravagant self-regard a man would find it necessary to crown himself in this fashion. What it replaces, the tefillin, or phylacteries, worn on non-Shabbat days, is even more enigmatic. What is the uninformed eye to make of a black leather box strapped to the center of a man’s forehead like a miner’s lamp shedding invisible light, another attached to his arm, facing inward to the heart, the leather straps wound and tied in precise arrangements unmistakably charged with meaning yet indecipherable by any process of natural deduction? Likewise with every other aspect of outward appearance: without a knowledge of the complex interplay of history and scripture, tsarist decree and Talmudic injunction, everything—the wigs and hairnets, the prevalence of silk, the mid-body
gartel
dividing the heart and mind from the sex organs, the uncut sidelocks, the right-over-left buttoning, the laceless Shabbat shoes, the satin
bekeshe
, or surcoat, that looks so lavish but is in fact intended to convey modesty, the knee breeches to avoid contact of clothing with the unclean ground, the fringed garments, and on, and on—everything is going to appear almost intentionally alien, uncanny,
unheimlich
. But even
with
this knowledge there remains, to the irreligious outsider, something unassimilable to one’s instincts about human attire, a stubborn residue of mystery.