During this self-examination, my mother often discreetly reminded me that I was Jewish, despite nothing in our home or my upbringing attesting to it. I didn’t even know any other Jews, except for my relatives far away. The remains of the only synagogue had been turned into a cultural center that held occasional events such as classical concerts or drumming workshops. The town was known as “the first Jew-free city in Germany” and judging by the language, proud of it too. What lurked behind that fact remained closed off to me. There were no traces of Jewish presence left. The German Jew, as far as I could tell, had gone extinct, and my own existence suggested an anachronism, a glitch. And yet, to be Jewish had nothing to do with whether we kept Shabbat, had a rabbi or a functioning synagogue. It appeared to be a peerless and rewardless denomination received upon birth without explanation or choice, like a name. Even though Jewishness as a religious practice was not much discussed in our home, when asked if I believed in a Christian God in preparation for baptism, I could not bring myself to say yes. I opted out and instead participated in Confirmation through my best friend, who returned with lengthy reports about the social intimacies and corruptions occurring as part of the rite of passage.

  While she was off to her church initiation, I had managed to invite myself over to my neighbor’s sumptuously decked lunch table. A prosciutto plate was being passed back and forth. We sat below an orange marquee. My neighbor’s mother served and arranged, while her father presided stoically at the head of the table. Everyone else solemnly kept their eyes close to their plates. The garden hummed quietly. I felt sleepy from the lack of conversation. Coffee was served and then family members dispersed for their afternoon tasks. My neighbor and I finished our homework, her mother cleaned the kitchen, her father napped on the leather couch in the center of the house, and her sister played outside. The tranquility of this order made me want to curl up in a corner and pass into oblivion for a thousand years, recover from the intense occupations and inventions that my best friend and I had cultivated over the course of our battles. I wanted to forget the insurmountable messiness of my room, the lack of care for our garden, which was growing wildly toward the forest’s edges. Once homework was done, dinner had, everything would begin again in an automatic somnambular pace.

  My biology grade improved as I began to spend more time with my neighbor, and though the absence of order in our house continued to symbolize, to me at least, a larger dysfunction, I began to see the impact my day-to-day contact with my neighbor produced. The relationship to my still-best friend, on the other hand, deteriorated steadily. She usually demanded that I come to her place, where she could wield her power over me more easily. In her own home she could decide when and what we would eat, how long a certain game lasted, or who would play a certain character in a protracted story we had decided to enact. That was on good days. On bad days, her mood could swing from engaged to cruel, all the way up to sadist, and at times, genuinely psychopathic. Parts of me floated at the ceiling and through keyholes while bound and tethered to her government.

  My revenge was no less violent. In one instance, when I was still living in the apartment building closer to her house, we roller-skated down the building’s steep driveway. We started close to the bottom before steadily making our way up the gradient, taking turns, ascending the long steep driveway. It was exhilarating to roll down all the way from the top, and dangerous. There was no way to stop oneself, and only at the bottom a waist-high wall that we greeted with outstretched arms could. I watched my best friend speed down the driveway, her short hair flying enthusiastically across her face. She bent forward, as if to bow to her own race. My stomach was turning. When she hit the wall, she sank awkwardly to the ground with her arms limp and gelatinous, like a jellyfish, by her side. I could not tell whether she was screaming, crying, laughing, or everything at once, but I was hesitant in my response, slowly crisscrossing down the driveway and taking my time.

  Once I reached the wall, she yelled at me in exasperation, “I can’t move my arms, get your parents!” It was Sunday. My father was taking a nap, and we had been instructed to stay outside until at least five o’clock. I feared my friend’s wrath, though not as much as I feared my father’s, and I tried to convince her to wait. She looked at me in disbelief. I must be out of my mind. She was badly hurt, could I not see that? I offered to pull her up, but she squealed with pain. She lay helplessly on the ground, and her arms dangled from her shoulders. I suggested in a calm voice that she should just breathe for a few moments and the pain would most likely pass. I cited my own experiences with high degrees of pain in the past. The initial sensation of a bleeding wound from a fall, for example, usually dissipated once one was done with crying. It was the shock more than anything else. It did not reflect the actual seriousness of the injury. She looked at me with complete astonishment and then threatened that if I didn’t get my parents here immediately, she would scream for help. I nodded my head. I understood. I would do as I was told. What I did not say was that I would do it with the speed of a snail that had survived a stampede. I could feel her eyes burning through my back as I began to drag myself up the driveway with pronounced and carefully crafted movements, crossing the parking lot before taking off my roller skates and shaking out the sand and pebbles. I looked at the many names on the rectangular buttons next to the front door. Maybe I could ring someone else’s bell instead. Those minutes or hours must have been painful for her. I can’t remember how my father reacted to being woken, but my best friend was taken to a hospital and spent the remaining summer with two broken arms in plaster.

  Why does one maintain a relation based on cruelties, on never-ending revenge schemes and plots that render oneself murderous or murdered? My best friend called me daily. She also hung up on me several times during our conversations, only to call me again shortly after. I had begun to whisper during these phone calls so as not to alarm my mother, who usually overheard the insults, fuming in the kitchen. I did not want anyone to get upset. I was able to handle this myself. Most importantly, I did not want my mother to witness my shame and humiliation. The worthless self exposed. On the other hand, I too had learned to end a conversation abruptly or to drift to my neighbor’s house after lunch to avoid phone calls altogether.

  Once, I spontaneously made my way to my neighbor’s home, pressing my nose against the glass door to see up the staircase whether her father was still napping, in which case I would have to knock softly or wait until someone passed the door to draw attention. I saw the silhouette of a man with an open mouth resting in the chair and began to carefully move my knuckles against the glass. Nothing stirred. I knocked again, this time louder, with my nose still pressed against the perfectly see-through door. How deep can a man sleep in the center of a house? Why did everyone tiptoe if he was such a robust and convinced sleeper? I knocked once more with determination and watched his face, his open mouth caught as if a film image on pause. I noticed that his body was slightly slumped and could not detect the movement of breath or the flutter of his nostrils. No one seemed to be home, not even the dog. It occurred to me that he might be dead, maybe had been so for hours, and laid waiting in his armchair for his family to find him. He was old enough and, in my opinion, miserable enough to die. I started to feel uneasy about my position at the glass door. In a sense, I was the first witness but utterly unable to affect the situation. I considered ringing the doorbell, but I had to be careful, because if he was not dead and simply woken by one of his daughter’s squirmy friends, it could mean the end of my flourishing relationship to this family, its small privileges, and comforts. I went back home and decided to call. It would be less confrontational should he answer. My grandmother was visiting. I told her of the mystery. She rejected the idea that he was dead. People didn’t die in armchairs in broad daylight. I called my neighbor’s house three times with no response. How long could I wait? Would I be accused of some degree of murder; the way bystanders of accidents can be called to justice? I called one last time, and to my surprise, my neighbor answered the phone. Her father was not here, no, why? The man in the armchair? Oh, yes, her grandfather, deaf and ravaged by dementia, had slept in the living room while they were all out shopping for groceries (a family affair). Usually, the grandfather was a phantom only escorted out of the basement room for meals by my neighbor’s mother, his full-time caretaker. I was relieved and yet also startled by the grandfather’s sudden manifestation, his sly chancing upon the chair in the absence of the patriarch. The chair now resembled a throne, in which he had slept open mouthed and in full bliss. Perhaps his hope was to die in it on this afternoon, in plain sight and frightful freeze among the living.

  But he didn’t die. Transformation often walks in increments, slow breaths up the staircase. Pausing, turning back, standing still. And neither did we, my neighbor, best friend, and I, understand the irreversibility of our developments. We were no longer children. That much was clear. But we did not yet belong to the adult realms, or for that matter, the nether fields of adolescence. We were rootless. An amorphous mass without clear markings or voice. We ducked and bellowed into space, drew our little charts in waiting. And yet, we built and tested our strength, corroborated weaknesses toward an unknown and formidable task that was about to descend at any moment and in full force, or so we believed, into our lives. We began to learn and read signs, the human palette, its banality, vicissitude, and inconclusion. We lost at every turn. We made ourselves into little women, then little men. Sometimes dogs in between. We were the empty spaces among armchairs, dead hours of the afternoon, silent eyes from the corner of the room. And yet, our lack of visibility was deceptive; its lag and humiliation the perfect ground on which to launch our emergence.

  Though I was still drawing with chalk onto pavements and playing with rabbits, I also developed a distinct anger. Oddly, my neighbor did too, and we found ourselves on a class trip stuck in a room together with five other girls. One thing led to another, and I trashed the entire abode, while the girls all hid in their bunk beds crying. My neighbor did not cower and walked with a straight back across the room, kicking the door open and closing it with a loud bang. We did not talk for the rest of the trip. At home, I began to take walks in the forest, where I would release screams and break branches. My best friend was no longer around; otherwise, she would have offered me a fistfight. There were no computers, little screens in which to multiply. We had to birth ourselves from planters and overgrown ponds.

  Many decades later, when I ran into my former best friend in a tiny public restroom, she cracked a joke emerging from the cubicle, squeezing past me to wash her hands. Her laugh, exactly as I remembered it, a dry, high-pitched howl. She was the same except that she greeted me kindly. Where had she acquired this face mask? I had never encountered her politeness, her restraint, even though our official and final breakup had been coolheaded, almost diplomatic. We had designated a public space, exactly halfway between her house and mine, to return items and clothes. She made a remark about my cowardice. I was a typical mother’s girl, she said, who could not fend for herself but needed a parental savior in conflict. It was true. My mother had, one afternoon, in an impulsive move, ripped the telephone from my hands after witnessing a long series of insults to which I responded in silence, occasionally croaking incomprehensibly like a dying fish on land. My mother yelled at my best friend that she should find someone else to torture before hanging up on her. She did what I had wanted to do for months. Secretly, I was grateful for her poignant and headless gesture. Even though I was admitting my inability to stand up for myself, I was endlessly relieved. I was rid of her. Devastated, but rid of her. We exchanged our clothes. I think I had rehearsed a goodbye speech, which sounded more like a defense testimony to prevent any loopholes through which I might be swayed back into her hornet’s nest. It was not necessary. The sand in our hourglass had run its course, punctually with the onset of my first period. She sniggered. She was not interested in my reasoning. Evidently, I had lost the battle of the century. I was dead and she turned around quietly, almost demurely, descending her way back down the hill to her house, which I would never enter again. I could not relinquish the thought that our final judgment was somehow linked to the fact that my breasts had been growing faster than hers.

  Womanhood begins with a trespass, a simultaneous sense of guilt and glee at having claimed a piece of oneself, carrying between one’s jaw a small lump of pulsing life. Though it may not survive, it was, for now, secured. I buried my heart somewhere in the woods on my way back home, beyond the affluent neighborhood, the six identical row houses. It probably rained. I know I was completely alone.

  In the months that followed, I developed a natural curl in my hair and celebrated my birthday in the forest. I made out with two different birthday guests, mostly to witness the mysterious afterglow the next morning, which I had seen once previously on my face after kissing. My neighbor’s father died after a vehement but short illness. Her grandfather had passed away a few months prior, and suddenly, it was just the mother and two sisters left in a clean house. They traveled one last time to Sicily, as they had done every summer before, and my neighbor was taken on a horseback ride organized by a close friend of her father’s. A kind offer, intended to alleviate her grief and show her the beauty of the island’s countryside. While galloping along the coast, the family friend attempted to assault her. My neighbor’s hot-tempered fierceness, gradually cultivated through years of carefully ordering her handouts and eating quietly at the table, erupted with efficiency and speed, as if she had rehearsed this move for years. She pushed him off the horse and almost killed him immediately. The family departed shortly after. Her mother, meanwhile, on one of her many walks through the woods with the dog, had met a man and began seeing him regularly. The neighborhood speculated, with hands half covering their mouths, when this love affair had actually begun. It was clear to me that the dog, a stray, was a secret gift from some higher force that guided her into a new life. My neighbor hated the man passionately. I never found out whether this rejection was an attempt to, as she claimed, honor her dead father or a public demonstration of her dismay at the quick insertion of a new head at the table.

  While her hatred grew, I observed the dust on our shelves and mourned our rabbit’s infanticide. I listened to my parents’ arguments at night, staying on top of both scripts and positions. It was from this placement, in hiding, hovering below the stairs, that I could maneuver best. I could clarify what they had failed to communicate to each other the next day in a quiet moment. Or defend a specific argument in a less charged tone, with the hope that my rendition was more convincing. It was a lost cause. I took swimming lessons, played tennis. Those were the territories to be won by girl-women, little bald chests in the undergrowth.

  For my birthday, and probably to compensate for my losses foregoing Confirmation, my mother gifted me a book of stories from the Hebrew Bible. I had read about queens being beheaded, but I had not yet read about queens being crowned. Their sovereignty came with huge sacrifices, often in the form of another woman, sent away or killed off. At night, I wondered if porcupines died when on their backs, with their needles pushing inward.

  Many years later, in an alpine village thick with grasslands and helplessly peaceful, I was sleepless and thought of the doomed, triumphant, and murderous queens, their unfortunate depictions and baroque battles. Suddenly, I found myself back on the street with the six identical houses, named after the larks audible from the edges of the forest. I walked the familiar path, passing large fir trees from where I heard Debora Vogel sing a song in a language I did not know, a language accumulated and erased. In the distance, I saw an empress descending a narrow path, kneeling occasionally to pick up a piece of fruit. Above her head, a raven with many eyes. Farther away, I made out a figure I could only liken to a magician, faceless, with a large wheel between his hands. Behind their collective appearance, I felt the planets, states of truth. None of them seemed more persuasive or victorious over the other. Their relation bore a substance that could affect a turning, a prick in the fabric of what is known to exist. The empress had harvested many fruits, some were clearly rotten, others unripe. The raven dropped a feather. The magician called me toward his unfathomable face.

  The memory of my best friend, like an originary stain, draws a circle, but the lines do not return to each other. Forward, backward, around. No one with quite such an appetite for my soul ever appeared again.

  THE NAMELESS WOMAN LOOKS AT ME WITH REPROACH. The sleepless are spades, constantly burying one disaster only to find another covered in soil. It’s the hour of our dirge. A dog barks in the distance. She reminds me with her pretend fury that the reason we are both here, in bed and alone, began with a series of removals we conducted. She asks, how will you destroy your relations? Pride? Disinterest? Silence?

  I coax the nameless woman. Be the one everyone must love less, that is, truly the image of yourself as a child. Be truly such image in your mind at noon alone in the house. Set out to work in your average loveless condition, pick up the phone and reach no one. Attempt to leave the house and turn back. Be brave and put on a scarf. I want this scene played to the bitter end. I receive messages from the outside about eighty minutes before they reach me in “real” life. I never had charisma and that’s a problem when you age, especially as a woman. The word “vulnerability” means little to me. Or I do not know what it means. Does it matter whether something I say or do is vulnerable, is this a way to say I should earn your trust?

  Sometimes it appears that oppression does not come from sleeplessness but from the sleeping who assume sovereignty at night. Everyone must sleep! Violette Leduc was an insomniac. “I hate people who sleep,” she wrote.

 

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