lesbian. She brought home the most marvelous, strange girls. We lived in Berlin—in a big, beautiful house. My mother was the most gracious and interesting hostess, and everyone wanted to visit us. And there was Gisella with her exotic creatures, one after another, each more beautiful than the last. I think half of our visitors came just to look at her conquests. I was so jealous that I did not have an attraction to women. It seemed by far the more interesting way to be.
She laughed again, then I laughed, both of us giddy to find we were really related to each other. And I … My God, it was the first time in my life I felt I had come from somewhere, where I was normal, not an alien. Then it came to me … Then I realized … That world didn’t exist anymore. The world of artists and writers, architects and lesbians and marvelous strange girls—my ideal life—gone.
I think the feeling of a lost life came to Michal at the same moment. We sat and didn’t say anything for a long while. Again I was aware of the clock ticking, the children playing in the courtyard. Reality seemed to press on us. We were undeniably in Israel, a long way from her house in Berlin.
Finally she said: You cannot understand what happened to me, to you, unless you understand my life in Berlin. Oh! she said with a gasp. It pains me even to remember it, the wonder of it. Could such a life disappear from the face of the earth?
75.
Here’s where my recording starts, the patient said to Dr. Schussler.
There came clicks and whirring sounds, then a voice that penetrated the scratch and hiss of the tape.
And what a voice it was! Just as the patient had described it: low, resonant, a choir of sound. Now came a creamed-coffee alto, now a bourbon baritone, here and there a sprinkle of soprano laughter. The accent was too complex and blended for me to place. German, British English, Hebrew—but others seemed to play below the surface. Which? I did not know. Yet the accent was all the more alluring for the hidden identities of its components: a caravan of languages reflecting Michal Gershon’s sojourns through the world.
On the tape the patient and her mother are drinking tea—one could hear the occasional clicks of cups and spoons and saucers, the pauses as one or the other stops to drink. I imagined them in their armchairs, the tea set between them on a low table, the dim room surrounding them, the scrim of light that curtained the space.
Slowly I was able to strip Michal’s voice of its accent, of the age that had roughened the tone. And I was overcome by the recognition: It was the patient’s voice!
The patient was not an alien on this earth. She did indeed “look” like someone. Except it was not on the mere surface. She had inherited the more profound interior configuration of the body, the subtle crenellations of lung and diaphragm and sinuses, the delicate architecture of the airways; all of which combine to produce that aspect which is last noted but finally most determinant of one’s overall feelings about a person: that which produces a sense of pleasure or displeasure in her presence, an awareness of her graciousness or lack of it, a tug of intrigue or a drone of boredom; that which makes the plainest woman magnetic, the one most visually lovely an irritant: the voice.
Did the patient know this? Was she aware—when she described her mother’s voice as beautiful, low and resonant—that it was so similar to her own? Fixed as she was—as fixed as her adoptive mother had made her be—upon the surface features, the colors of eyes and hair, it was unlikely that the patient understood the quality of her own voice: its divinity. Had no one told her?
Our house had twelve bedrooms, her mother began, in the warm sound that was the ancestor to the patient’s voice. Eighteen fireplaces, a ballroom, Michal went on. Can you imagine this today? A very large room reserved for the rare social occasion called “a ball”? Four servants lived on the attic floor. Oh God! What a vanished world! Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and still hear the Berlin of my childhood.
She spoke of horses neighing, the ring of bicycle bells, the drone of organ-grinders. Trams rumbling down the boulevards. Cars racing in the streets, jamming the roads,