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"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
- MotherWhen They arrested Avram Blok for peeping, on 27th November 1967, the judge of the Jerusalem District Court, Justice Henrietta Ben-Horin, sent him to the Moses Klander Institute for twenty-eight days of psychiatric observation. Seven years later, to the day, Blok submitted himself voluntarily for treatment at Klander, presenting a unique complaint: he claimed to be living in an alternative historical epoch, in which Germany had been a wholly Communist state since 1923, Leon Trotsky had ruled Soviet Russia for forty-four years, and Adolf Hitler and colleagues had escaped to the United States, where Adolf eventually became a Senator for the State of Illinois and his son later ran for President on a third party ticket. In this fallacy the Second World War and the Holocaust had not taken place, Jews were living in their millions throughout Eastern Europe, and Palestine remained under shaky British control until 1973.
The creation of the State of Israel amid the Civil War of that year brought Blok partly back into line with Jerusalem reality, which is not, at the best of times, concomitant with the rest of the world. However, intercourse (purely verbal, at this stage) with his few remaining friends, showed him, so he said, that no one else seemed to share his hermetically deduced conviction. Doctor Flusser, re-checking Blok's file, and after a futile attempt to persuade him to abandon his childish pretence of insanity, finally allowed him in for the usual one month's observation. Blok, delighted, immediately sought out Nietzsche, Klander's Eminent Inhabitant, and before the afternoon was out they were both engaged in a marathon game of parchesi. Flusser sighed, gathering his notes on "Neuroses of Our Time: The Immorality of Inhibition". In the corridors of the asylum, the Forlorn gave voice, and, beneath their feet, the ground was deaf to the cries of those trapped in hidden depths. Outside, Jerusalem's brief evening scarletly faded, the call of the muezzin choked off by a power-cut caused by a terrorist sabotage.In 1967, when justice Ben-Horin committed Blok to the nuthouse for observation, she said (falsetto):
" The privacy of the individual is a hallowed right, not to be tampered with or profaned. People have the right to expect that Society and the Law should protect them against those for whom their private activities and conduct are an object of prurient and lewd curiosity. The fact that the subjects of the defendant's unwelcome attention are a devout, religiously observant couple, gives all the more cause for anxiety. The charge of indecent conduct is a serious one in a world unhappily beset by moral laxatives (sic), disrespect for the rights of others and incipient vice and depravity. The weakening of parental authority must especially be noted in this regard. However, in reviewing the case before us we must take into consideration that the defendant is a young man who has just completed three years of national service in the Israel Defence Forces, including service in the glorious Six Days' War which saved us all from Armageddon. His demobilization card, which we have before us, shows that his commanding officers regard him as a soldier who fulfilled his duties to the best of his abilities. Our national gratitude for the sacrifices and conduct of our soldiers in this great Victory dictates to us caution in saddling this young man with a criminal conviction which would weigh heavily upon him in his path through society. Blah, blah, blah. I am therefore committing you, Avram Blok, for twenty-eight days' observation at the Moses Klander Institute for Psychiatric Care, following which a report will be tendered by the probation officer attached to this court. I would like to make clear to you, Blok, that this leniency in no way signifies the court's indifference to your behaviour, which we hold in the utmost abhorrence, and that any subsequent offences may well meet with the full severity of the Law, including actual imprisonment. "Next case!"
Blok's defence, which neither the police nor justice Ben-Horin believed, was that, in gazing through the window of Cordovero Street, Number-, ground floor, he was not engaged in any voyeuristic, unlawful or prurient act whatsoever, so help me, but was solely and merely attempting to find out, ascertain and make sure that the ex-flame of his heart, Malka Halperin (her neck as the Tower of David, her breasts like two roes, which feed among the lilies ... ) was no longer domiciled there. Perceiving the name Friedman upon the jamb, he was about to retreat when the light in the open window made him step up just to see if the flat had indeed changed hands, a fact which would be indisputably proven by the presence of different furniture, curtains, wall-hangings, brie-a-brae such as lampfittings, flowerpots, paperweights, fruitbowls, etc., but, when he did arrive at the window he was riveted by sheer astonishment at the sight of Mr and Mrs Friedman, whom he did not know from Adam, was not in the least acquainted with and had no interest in, prurient or otherwise, making love, so he claimed incessantly, through a hole in the sheet. "It had been a living room, not a bedroom, before . . ." Blok explained, and continued, "I'd heard that the devout carry on in this way but had assumed these were old wives' tales ... I mean, why should I ... it's obvious . . ." He meant, it was not quite a sight for sore eyes: Mr Friedman, his sweaty black beard and the Mrs, with a face like a bunch of garlic cloves, patchy hair and a glass eye. Though they went at it hammer and tongs ... still, it was not a vision conducive to erotic emotion by any stretch of the imagination ... Another second and he would have run, Blok swore blind, putting as great a distance as possible between himself and this dire apparition but, before he could so much as turn, the heavy hand of Patrolman Abutbul, uniformed minion of the Law of Jerusalem City, descended on his shoulder, like the paw of a bear, his guttural voice booming:
" Caught, you vile stinking degenerate! Peeping, hah? We'll soon put a stop to that! Come with me, you pervert, I'll soon have your nuts for breakfast!"Blok's mother said:
" I knew this would happen. The boy's troubled, he's sunk into himself. He can't make up his mind what to do with his life. And is this surprising? What guidance does he get from his father? Answer me that, Baruch! A fine example you are to a young man, your only son, who must find his way through the trials and temptations of this rotten world. Just look at you! When the boy needs a firm hand where are you? Locked up in your study with your infantile stamp collection. A grown man playing with little coloured bits of paper! You ought to be ashamed ofyourself. You're more wrapped up with your crazy pen pals scattered to the four winds of the earth than you are in your own flesh and blood. Africa he writes to, getting messages from deep in the jungle! Tasmania, where blackamoors walk about without even a loincloth to cover their nakedness. Oh, the shame of it! A father who abandons his son to a world that has no elementary decency, no sense of a human being's worth! A people like all the goyim, that's what we've truly become! When there's no moral guidance from the father, what can you expect from the son? How do you expect him to know right from wrong? I've always known this is what lies at the end of a secular culture. Run away from God and what do you get? Everything twisted, people running about like chickens with their heads cut of All sorts of perversions become normal and the fabric of society rots away. Two thousand years of continuity flushed down the drain, lost completely in the mad rush to be like everyone else . . ."But Blok's father said:
" Asargelusha, Avremel, why couldn't you at least have peeked into the boudoir of some beauty queen instead of those two frum choleras? This is what really beats me. Why tangle with religious fanatics when we have one home-grown right here?
" Calm down, Shushu, it's not as if the lad has done any harm to anybody. It's just like you to take the word of some dumb police ox against your own son, just because it fits into your own gloomy Weltanschauung. There's nothing wrong with Avremel, and the suburb of Kiryat Moshe hasn't been struck down like Sodom and Gomorrah, goddamit! What really worries you is what the neighbours will think! What will Gaga the Bulgarian Bloodhound on the floor below have to say? and Mrs Saporta-Yecchs, and the Rebetsen TwilligerSyphilis-Face and all the other lunatics, perverts and religious maniacs who make this block the Number-One fruit-machine crazyhouse of the entire Holy City, May She Be Rebuilt in Our Time, amen, et cetera ... Well, I'll tell you what they can do: they can all come crawling upstairs, right into my backside, which is their Real and Destined Homeland. So help me. Now quit bawling and let me be. I am going to classify the Ruanda-Urundi Anniversary tete-a-beches if I have to do it with my last dying breath, and even if it takes me all night."Doctor Flusser, Director of the Klander Institute, would, in principle, have preferred not to be saddled with "patients" committed for observation by the courts. It imposed an intolerable burden on the voluntary doctor-patient relationship which he considered crucial. The "patient" often knew a diagnosis of "no case for treatment" could well lead to criminal sanctions. The doctor would often not know if he were wasting his time with someone who was "putting on a show". Denial of facilities, however, would mean all the court assignees would go to the State Hospital of T-t, where the arms of bureaucracy and electro-convulsion would grip them in a vice-like embrace. So Flusser took Avram Blok in and, after three personal interviews, found him articulate and intelligent, curious and concerned with his environment, though prone to serious bouts of depression and in many ways a disturbed young man.* But then, Flusser thought to himself, in our day and age, who isn't? (Disturbed, that is to say, not young ... ) Is it perfectly sane to be gay and happy when wars threaten to devour us, when mankind is poised on the brink of its own destruction? But Justice Ben-Horin, however, must be appeased. Flusser racked his brains and ruminated for some time about this question, a mere fragment of the great cosmic malady and scourge which threatens to destroy us all ...
* Blok's first responses to the Rorsach Inkblot Test:
Card 1: Three camels trying to pass through the eye of a needle.
Card 2: Bats doing push ups on a mirror.
Card 3: My grandmother being attacked by asparagus from outer space. (The tester, Psychologist Scholz, began to look a little worried.)
Card 4: Extreme low angle of headless SS man sitting on a fireplug.
Card 5: Count Dracula with antennae.
Card 6: Two bears climbing up a giant phallus. (Pychologist Schotz was relieved.)
Card 7: Rabbits caught out in a nuclear explosion. (Scholz, worried again.) Card 8: A Centaurian flying saucer with deformed testicles.
Card 9: Something very sexually profound and meaningful.
Card 10: A diseased psychoanalyst's doodies.
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