I felt like she was destroying me with support. It took everything in me not to just scream shut up. Ariane literally could not stop this kind of conversation once we’d started. She could never ever just leave things alone. She always had to be right. She even wanted to hug me. I did not want to hug her after talking like this.
But something about her rape comment stuck.
I thought, Ka-Tzetnik did experience rape as a war crime. Being in a concentration camp was like being raped. I thought, Ka-Tzetnik left Auschwitz primed to pervert. I thought, feminized, traumatized men want to pervert the whole world! I thought about Sabbatai Zevi, Barbra’s slippery Messiah. I thought, the salamander was a cold-blooded, slippery lizard. I thought, victims are perverts. God, I would never say that out loud. Ariane would’ve said I was brainwashed or racist. My father would’ve had me committed again.
But I knew that I would finish my thesis, school or no school. I would write this thought down: Perversion is just a fantastic action committed by a hurt person that taps the heart of the world.
‘You have to introduce Ka-Tzetnik’s pulp into the canon.’ Ariane kept talking, trying to smooth over whatever was going on between us. ‘Because most Jews seem to think they are exempt from being “bad.”’
I started laughing out loud. What did she think being ‘bad’ had to do with being Jewish? Was she back on the essentialist, exploiting, bad-white-man thing?
This was a question for Barbra, I thought. Barbra perverttapping.
‘Stop laughing at me,’ said Ariane.
I wanted to tap the whole world with my Beta Israel refusenik.
‘Israel bombs little kids. We’ve all seen the videos,’ Ariane said.
Feminized, traumatized men humped goats in my head.
‘Stop looking at me like that!’ cried Ariane. ‘I know that “Jew” does not equal Israel. I know that there’s dissent inside of Israel. I know it’s a steady war of propaganda between the master and Indigenous narratives.’
‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said.
I felt ready to split. I felt primed to pervert. I could not look at my girlfriend anymore in the eyes.
‘Wow, look here. White fragility, folks. Look here, it’s real.’
Why did Ariane always think she knew what was right, what was real?
‘Israel bombs little kids, babe. That’s a fact. I know you can hear me. Operation Cast Lead. There is no defence.’
I had no more defences. Barbra had re-entered my basement. She’d cut through my barbed wire, sliced into my real.
§
My father’s chest hairs formed the shape of a mushroom cloud. All the newspapers were open on the kitchen table.
‘Stop crying, I’m not mad. C’mon, kid. Get up.’
Barbra was kneeling on the ground in front of my father’s pyjamas. My dad touched her shaved head, glancing guiltily at me.
‘We should tell Abigail and your mother – looky-look who’s back.’
Barbra got up off the floor. She was crying. For him? Did she apologize to him like she’d apologized to me? Ariane somehow swooped in and linked arms with Barbra, leading her over to the stove.
My father displayed multiple, layered frown lines. ‘You know, now I feel like I want a cigarette.’
Barbra lobbed a pack of Israeli cigarettes on the table.
‘Regga, Barbra, regga. Oy, I mean, b’vakesha!’
Barbra giggled. What was happening? Was this comic relief? Where was the shyster? Plugging a bomb in the pipes? My dad fiddled with the package. He hadn’t smoked since he was a student. I thought of Joel for some reason, back here as a dick-ish director: Did your father fuck her, too, bro? Let’s work with something here where this hot Black girl from Israel is like the mail-order bride and she’s fucking both the father and the son with a hot Chinese lesbian lover on the side…
My father extracted the lighter from Barbra’s pack of cigarettes.
‘Oy! Slicha. Barbra. I’m sorry. I’m rusty. It’s been seven years.’