criminals. It had always been political to articulate a crime
that had happened to one and name the criminal, but that had
been on a small scale: the family, the village, the local legal
system. Sometimes one remembered but made no accusation.
This was true with pogroms as well as rapes.
There have been Holocaust survivors who refused to
remember, and there is at least one known Holocaust survivor
who is a Holocaust denier.
It has been hard to get crimes against women recognized as
such. Rape was a crime against the father or husband, not the
victim herself. Incest was a privately protected right hidden
under the imperial robe of the patriarch. Prostitution was a
crime in which the prostitute was the criminal no mat er who
forced her, who hurt her, or how young she was in those first
days of rape without complicity. A woman’s memory was so
inconsequential that her word under oath meant nothing.
Now we have a kind of half-memory; one can remember
being raped, but remembering the name and face of the
rapist, saying the name aloud, pointing to the face, actually
compromises the victim’s claim. People are willing to cluck
empathetically over the horror of rape as long as they are not
made responsible for punishing the rapist.
Proust’s madeleine signifies the kind of memory one may
have. That memory may be baroque. A regular woman who
has been coerced had bet er have a very simple story to tell
and a rapist dripping with gold lame guilt instead of sweat.
A worker in a rape crisis center told me this story. It
happened down the street from where I live. A woman moved
into a new apartment on the parlor level, slightly elevated
from the street but not by much. She needed to have someone
come into her new apartment to install new windows. The
worker did most of the work but said that he needed a particular tool in order to finish. He said that he would be willing to come back that evening to finish the job. The woman was
grateful; after al , there is nothing quite as dangerously insecure
as an urban apartment near the ground floor with unlocked
windows. He came back; he beat and raped her. At the trial
his defense was that he had been her boyfriend, she had had
sex with him many times, she liked it rough, and as with the
other times this was not rape. She, of course, did not know
him at al .
The jury believed him, which is to say that they had reasonable doubt about her testimony. After al , she could not prove that he had not been her boyfriend, that she had never met
