three – two – one

Some things can only be said in a group of two. I mean, of course you can say them also in a group of three, but only in a group of two do you know for sure, that what was said, was meant solely for you and if what you heard was disturbing, you can’t pretend it was meant for the other guy.

A few days ago I attended an important meeting. I can’t give away exactly where and whom with, but I can say it was in a prominent Israeli organization here in Berlin and that the purpose of the meeting was to see, whether the two women I was meeting with could help me publish a manuscript in Germany.

One of them, we’ll call her Lisa, I had known from a previous engagement. In fact, she was the one who suggested to hook me up with the other woman; this one was precisely that – a “hook”. I think Casandra would be a suitable name for her.

I was sitting (or was I seated?) opposite Casandra, Lisa watching us from aside, not intervening, but in a position to come to my rescue if I was to swallow Casandra’s hook. She introduced herself as the oldest woman working in the building and went on and on about all the writers she knew: “David Grossmann? – I read him even before he was so Gross…he was a shy public-speaker at the beginning, but we brought it out of him, didn’t we?; Golan? – she’s a ‘cradle-snatcher’… it means she sleeps with younger men”, she explained in light of our silence. Not a very polite thing to say, I thought, but still, quite poetic, wasn’t it? “Am I young enough to fit the description?”, I asked, but received no answer. Worse as that – her silence approved that I wasn’t. And then she went on about another ‘favorite’ female-writer of hers: “Her?! she’s a Cholera!” (I could try and translate this word, but do I really need to? let it slip through your mouth a couple of times; what does it taste like?). Eventually, Lisa said she had to leave us, and then – it was whispered in the air – there were two.

“Are you an admirer of men or women?”, asked Casandra, again with the poetics. “Women”, I said. “Good, now you listen to me: everyone who has attempted to bury themselves in the Holocaust archives, doing the kind of research you do, has gone mad. Go get yourself a nice Israeli girl FROM ISRAEL, with both feet planted in the ground – OUR ground – and then come back and continue with your research”.

Now what was I supposed to say to that? Even with Casandra’s frantic (mis)demeanor, her squeaky voice and all those moments when you weren’t even sure if she realizes you’re sitting there in front of her – I still really liked her. It was exactly this uncertainty which I liked. But now I was wishing I knew for certain if she was being serious or not. I couldn’t help but feeling like the protagonist in a Polanski film, who has just been warned about his inevitable fate – rendering the warning irrelevant. “Anyway, I think I can help you with your manuscript”, she said and left the room.

This was a strange thing to do. In the kind of place I was having the meeting, it was customary to escort the guest all the way to the exit. But there I was, alone in the room, a party of one. Maybe she left me alone so I could think about what she had just said; maybe it was her way of letting me know that this wasn’t another poetic joke. Or maybe, it was simply a countdown to the inevitable: three-two-one.