The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  From what I’ve come to understand, a woman joins the group when in general terms the whole love-thing begins to seem unprofitable to her. She reaches this understanding a little late in the day, but in the last analysis that’s what it’s all about: the cost exceeds the gain, the balance of energy is upset, the psychic economy is on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s the way they talk on the site. So is it any wonder, girls, that most of our members come from the strongholds of capitalism? And is it any wonder that nearly all these Protestant ladies with hemorrhoids in their souls talk about “investing in a relationship,” about “profit” and “waste” and “loss”? Okay, I don’t object. I think in these terms too, at least once a day.

  When I enter the forum, I identify myself by my pseudonym, say hi to everyone, and then sit in my corner in Jerusalem. The women who love too much allow me to sit in silence while they give me the benefit of their experience, which is certainly very kind and gracious of them. The women in LAA permit me to watch the proceedings from my corner and grow in strength, until such time as I am able to move myself and my fingers and come forward with the whole sad story of my addiction. Debra from Dallas, Sandy from Seattle, Ursula from Utrecht, Terry from Toronto, Chelsea from Charleston, Beatrice from Bern, all the regulars sit patiently on their hemorrhoids and wait for me to admit at last that, yes, I too am suffering from the same progressive disease, and I too am powerless over love, and that only a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. But I have no intention of giving them this satisfaction and confessing on the Internet.

  Because the fact is, dear friends, that there may be “brothers-in-arms” but there are no “sisters-in-love,” and my devotion to Alek doesn’t give rise in me to any consciousness of sisterly solidarity. Certainly not with dopey Debra or senile Sandy. Eternally sudden, self-absorbed, ardent, and grandiosely megalomaniac, the monster of love sees itself as unique and alone in the cosmos, and Noa Weber doesn’t have even a drop of empathy for the romantic folly of her fellows.

  I remember that, when my daughter was still small and I had already begun to love her, I was overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of solidarity with other mothers of small children, whoever they may be. Mothers in the park. Mothers at the nursery. Mothers everywhere. In nineteen seventy-five or -six, I would sit and gnaw at my fingernails in front of those black and white images televised from Vietnam, then in the dark go into the room where Hagar was sleeping on her stomach with her bum in the air and listen to her breathing, covering her head with the palm of my hand.

  But maternal love is one thing and romantic love is another, and all I can say is that romantic love certainly doesn’t fan the flame of humanism in me.

  CONFESSING

  A few times I almost confessed to the girls in LAA. “Forgive me, sisters, for I have sinned.”

  “How have you sinned, sister?”

  “I’ve distorted, I’ve lied, I’ve pretended to be someone I’m not. I’ve lived like a slave and an idolator in secret, while boasting of a freedom I didn’t possess. For almost thirty years one feeling has served me as a justification for a lack of feeling. I loved something I should have loathed, and I didn’t love what was worthy of being loved enough.”

  Women who love too much aren’t very interested in metaphysical sins of this nature. Squandering their child’s college-savings fund, throwing acid at the legal wife, abandoning their bodies to violence, self-imprisonment, subsidizing their man’s drug habit by prostitution, catatonic depression, drunk driving, these are the kinds of practical sins that preoccupy them, and in comparison to them my sins of thought and feeling turn white as snow. Well, maybe not quite white, but you could certainly say they pale in comparison.

  It’s not the fact that I have no sensational sins that prevents me from confessing to the group. The problem is the language. They are all guilty of “co-dependency,” they all want to free themselves of “harmful relationships” and make themselves fit for “meaningful relationships.” They are all trying “to develop their spiritual aspect,” to “grow emotionally,” “to be in touch with their feelings”—whatever the hell that means—and all of them without exception believe in the liberating effect of archaeology. As a consequence of this belief they carry out energetic excavations in their family history, and on bad nights I definitely find their stories gripping. Senile Sandy from Seattle, for example, had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather, which in her opinion and that of the group explains the “co-dependency” she has with her clown. Brainless Betty from Boston has no history of alcoholism in the family, but she had a neglectful mother who to this day is still a compulsive overeater. And it’s certainly touching to read how little Betty used to hide the bread in hopes of saving something for her school sandwich from her mother’s nightly kitchen raids. Except that according to Betty’s and the rest of the group’s logic, a mother who loves food sentences her daughter to a lifetime of compulsive love, and at that point I stop being touched and begin to laugh.

  On a number of occasions I was tempted to make the girls happy and join the party at last by cooking up some sort of terminal explanation for my case. An eloquent etiology of my disease. Ready? Yes, they’re all ready. So what happened to me, girls, is that my father was hardly ever at home, my heroic father was in the army with men and other women, he was with other women a lot, and I never had a real home either, because the first eight years of my life I spent in the children’s house on a kibbutz. Allow me to confine myself for a moment to the story of the kibbutz.

  Kibbutz, girls, do you have any idea of what a kibbutz is? No, of course you don’t, because the only people who know what a kibbutz is are those who grew up on one, like me. If there are any Jewish souls among you, if you grew up on the propaganda of the Jewish National Fund, kindly forget the fishermen spreading their nets, the female tractor driver and the suntanned women picking oranges and smiling photogenic smiles from the tops of their ladders. A kibbutz, my sisters, is not a poster, and even though the children’s house covered in ivy and bougainvillea looks like the Garden of Eden in the photographs, that’s what the island in Lord of the Flies looked like in the beginning, too.

  The children’s house … let me tell you about the children’s house. In this house with the red-tiled roof, I was abandoned every day to the violence of my peer group, and every night to my loneliness. Eight years times three hundred and sixty-five days equals … You can work it out yourselves, but the sum is the number of nights that I was abandoned by my mother.

  Eight times three hundred and sixty-five days of violence and ridicule, and eight times three hundred and sixty-five long nights of anxiety and fear, taught me to hide my neediness. When I ran away from the group to my parents’ room, my mother would lose no time in taking me back. When I complained, she pretended that she didn’t hear or told me to be strong and pull myself together. And I, it seems, was a good pupil, and gradually I stifled my tears until the weeping was silenced inside me and turned into quiet despair. That’s how they taught me to associate love with abandonment, and that’s how they got me used to the idea that love is not a refuge.

  Only now, my sisters, that I, Adele H. from Israel, sit here in our nocturnal group, do I suddenly have the insight that with so many abandonments behind me—I’ve already counted them for you: three hundred and sixty-five times eight—with so many abandonments, it’s clear why before I reached the age of eighteen I turned myself into a Natasha (natash being Hebrew for “abandon”), and why I have remained abandoned ever since.

  This kind of description, which is definitely not complete fiction, but only partly false, this kind of description would immediately reward me with an international wave of empathy. The trouble is that what I need is contempt, not empathy, and certainly not the empathy of blockheads.

  A parody of self-interpretation will not bring me the self-disgust I’m looking for.

  I say a parody of self-interpretation, partly because my childhood wasn’t as miserable as I described it
, but mainly because I, in contrast to my sisters-who-love-too-much, do not believe that my dybbuk has a “psychological background.” My father, my mother, and Yochie the kibbutz children’s caretaker, have no part in this story, and if not for the psychobabble they hear on the television or read in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to the love-addicts of LAA to shove their parents into the picture, either. Think of Romeo and Juliet, for instance: it’s true that Romeo and Juliet had parents, and logic demands that before the play begins they had some kind of childhood too, but nobody would seek the reason for Juliet’s love in Mrs. Capulet’s eating disorder, the love came of its own accord, the love seized hold of her, the love made her what she was. And in the face of such a lightning bolt only an idiot would insist on asking, “Why?”

  So even if I could easily offer a psychological explanation for my dybbuk, and not only just one but a few, in this matter you won’t get even a hint of a clue from me. Accept it, dear reader, or not; here I stand, and this is not a psychological novel.

  And if, like some stubborn interviewer, you go on nagging me about the “why,” I’m prepared to throw out the hypothesis that on the second of July, nineteen-hundred and seventy-two, somebody put a love potion into my coffee. It was black Turkish coffee, and I drank it from a thick glass purchased in the Machaneh Yehuda market in Jerusalem. The kind of love potion imbibed by Tristan and Isolde, who as far as I know had no psychological reasons for their love either.

  JULY THE SECOND NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

  Nineteen seventy-two was an eventful year. Richard Nixon defeated McGovern. Bobby Fischer defeated Spassky. The Pope visited China. Brezhnev was taken for a ride on Apollo 15. Terrorists poisoned the pandas in the Washington Zoo. I’m not being serious here. I could have done a bit of research to refresh my memory, but I don’t leave the house now, and what do I need research for? I’ve already warned you that there isn’t going to be any historical panorama here, only me, me and my life, that in the summer of ’72 received its present form.

  I can’t describe what I was like before the second of July, but if it’s really necessary, think of a formless entity of a girl. Naturally I did various things, like most of the people around me, and voiced opinions like them—more emphatically than most, as a matter of fact—but these deeds and words did not shape the entity I was into any particular form.

  Because what can you already say about a seventeen-year-old girl? That she’s a good student, but not a nerd? That she’s athletic? That she collects stamps? I didn’t collect stamps. That her relations with her parents are strained and her relations with her younger sister a little less so? Open any teen magazine and you’ll find hundreds of girls described in precisely the same terms.

  When I say formless, I mean mainly in the bodily sense. My measurements haven’t changed much since then, only my style of dressing has undergone changes; in the summer of ’72 I went about mainly in batik skirts and Arab kaftans, and my sense of my body underneath them was as loose and fluid as the garments. In hindsight, that body seems to me like a sea mollusk without edges, as if it hadn’t been properly packed into my smooth girlish skin.

  Of course I didn’t think of myself in those days as a formless mollusk. In April I began to fuck and in May I discovered how to come. The earth didn’t shake, even though I wanted very much to convince myself of a certain tremor, but in any case at the beginning of July, with the experience of about ten orgasms behind me, I saw myself as a model of decadent sensuousness, Liza Minelli playing Sally Bowles.

  I began to fuck, I say, but in those days in our school nobody “fucked,” not even the boys. “Going to bed with,” we called it politely, or “going all the way,” or best of all: “making love.” And since I had “made love,” or more precisely in order that I could at long last “make love,” I was naturally obliged to assume that I was “in love.” My boyfriend’s name was Amikam, and he too was officially in love.

  In order to “make love” we would go for hikes in the countryside on holidays and weekends. On ordinary weekdays, we would go to the Jerusalem forest, a place which should more properly be called the Jerusalem woods, and it was all as nice and delightful and enjoyable as it was supposed to be, except for an alarming weariness that sometimes overcame me on the way back. This weariness sometimes came over me without any connection to anything: a gray heaviness that poured in and overpowered me so that I had to sit down on the curb. My head like a hot sponge, my eyelids stuck together, hearing the cars go past, smelling asphalt and gasoline, and losing my limbs that refused to take messages from my brain. How many times did it happen? Five or six, I don’t remember, but I do remember Amikam’s hands massaging my shoulders, invading my bra and retreating with the noise and heat of another passing car, the hands of a boy trying to awaken Sleeping Beauty.

  Sex is supposed to wake you up, love is supposed to wake you up, but me, a healthy and athletic young girl—first in the thousand- and two thousand-meter races—it put to gray sleep. We surmised that it was because of the pill, and since we were both about to be drafted into the army, and didn’t expect to see much of each other after that, even though we would “still be a couple,” be faithful to each other and so on, we decided to forgo the contraceptive pills I had very responsibly started to swallow a month before we “went all the way.” Today it’s clear to me that getting rid of the pills was inter alia a promise that I would remain faithful to him, faithfulness being a subject on which we conducted lengthy and solemn seminars during this period. Should we give ourselves a chance to “experience relationships with other people”? Should we “free each other” before we began our army service? Did “a love like ours close us off from other experiences”?

  At the beginning of the summer we went together to see the movie Cabaret, and came to the common conclusion that it was about repulsive people in a sick society, and that it was no wonder that the Germans ended up doing what they did after such appalling decadence. We weren’t lying, this was our honest opinion about which we both agreed, but an hour after we left the cinema it happened that I came on to him with a new, provocative boldness, and while I was busy doing so I also fantasized that Amikam was Michael York and that I was lying between him and a decadent German baron who was embracing me closely from behind. What Amikam’s fantasies were I don’t know. Perhaps the suppleness of Sally Bowles, perhaps the firmness of the German baron, or perhaps he didn’t fantasize at all. Everything seems possible to the same extent. What do I know about him? In any case it was good that night, except for the attack of weakness afterwards, which is the only one that I can place in the context of a specific event.

  AMIKAM

  Was killed on the Golan Heights in the first week of the Yom Kippur War. He was my first boyfriend, with whom I “made love,” and that should be important. He was my boyfriend for two years. I can conjure up his appearance in words: very tall, shoulders sloping slightly forward, black hair on a chest that never got a deep tan, black hair on fingers strumming a guitar—“I’m just a poor boy …”—brows frowning in concentration like a little shelf jutting from his forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple. I can describe him in words, but I can’t really see him. He isn’t present, and although I feel guilty towards him, there isn’t enough substance in the memory to torture and chastise me. His ghost doesn’t haunt me at night and I have never had nightmares about him.

  What is there to say about a seventeen-year-old girl? What is there to say about someone who was nineteen years and three months old when he died? He was a good student. He was an outstanding soldier and an outstanding tank commander, or so I was told. Amikam read two newspapers every day, Amikam wrote a fine essay on Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, Amikam was a counselor in the Zionist Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, he liked Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, he couldn’t dance and he could fix things, and everything he did he did seriously and with concentration, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his black brows frowning. Once, when I tried to rememb
er his touch, I thought of a wooden board.

  I didn’t go to his funeral. When he died Hagar was already there, a baby of five months, and I was detached from my surroundings owing to my madness and my motherhood and because of the melodramatic pose I had adopted. I heard about his death weeks after he fell and it was too late to pay a condolence call to his parents. And anyway, how would I go? With the “accident” baby in my arms? I didn’t even fit the role of the ex-girlfriend, their son’s first sweetheart. And, in any case, they bore me a grudge.

  I don’t intend to dig up what happened with Amikam, the way I treated Amikam. Such things happen, when I did what I did I didn’t know that he was going to get killed, and, anyway, it isn’t him I’ve been carrying around for the past twenty-nine years. Amikam comes into this story only because one evening he took me to an apartment on Usha Street, in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, where I still live today.

  THE SECOND OF JULY

  Amikam related to politics with the same thoroughness and deliberation with which he prepared for his final exams, with which he mended a coil in the electric heater, with which he “went all the way” with me. When he was asked about his political views he was in the habit of replying that he “saw himself as part of the New Left,” and for months before his conscription he was engaged with the question of whether he should “go even further to the left,” in other words, left of his parents who were active in MAPAM, the Zionist-Socialist United Workers Party.