him before that day. This scenario has to be the world’s worst
rape nightmare outside the context of torture and mass
murder. It was so simple for him.
The point is that once the victim can identify the predator,
once she says his name and goes to court, there is no empathy
for her, not on the part of al the good, civic-minded citizens
on the jury, not from the media reporting on the case (if they
do), not from men and women socializing in bars. She’s got
the mark of Cain on her; he does not. Al the sympathy tilts
toward him, and he has an unchangeable kind of credibility
with which he was born. To ruin his life with a charge of rape
is heinous - more heinous than the rape. No mat er how
many rapists go free, the society does not change the way the
scales of justice are weighted; he’s got a pound of gold by
virtue of being a male, and she’s got a pound of feathers. It
couldn’t be more equal.
People deal with hideous events in different ways, and one
way is to forget them. A forgotten event is not always sexual or
abusive. I worked very hard for years as a writer and feminist.
One night I had dinner with a distant cousin. “I remember when
you used to play the piano, ” she said. I didn’t remember that
fact of my life at al and had not for decades. My life had
changed so much, I had so little use for the memory, perhaps,
that I had forgot en the years of piano lessons and recitals.
I sat stunned. She was bewildered. She insisted: “Don’t you
remember? ” I was blank until she gave me some details. Then
I began to remember. In fact, she had remembered my life
as a pianist over a period of decades during which I had
forgot en it.
With sexual abuse, people remember and people forget. The
process of remembering can be slow, tormenting, sometimes
impossible. Aharon Appelfeld thanks the Holocaust survivors
who insisted on remembering when al he wanted to do was
forget. There are at least two Holocaust memoirs about forgetting, and if one can forget a concentration camp one can forget a rape. If one can forget as an adult, a child can surely forget.
I read some years ago about a study in which a mother
chimpanzee was fit ed with a harness that had knives sticking
out; her babies were released into her presence; trying to
embrace her they were cut; the more cut they were the more
they tried to hold tight to her; the more they were hurt the
more they wanted their mother. The research itself is repugnant, but the terrifying story of what happened during it strikes me as an accurate parable of a child’s love, blind love, and
desperate need. Remembering and forget ing are aspects of
needing and loving, not rulers of what the heart does or does
not know. Those who say children are lying when they
remember as adults abuse they endured as children are foolish
- as are those who think children categorically do not know
