by Gail Hareven
Amikam took me to Usha Street because a graduate of the youth movement who had “gone even further left” told him about an interesting group that met there in the evenings. History students. Activists from poor neighborhoods. Artists. Students at the Bezalel Academy of Art. And so on. I didn’t want to go. In arguments I couldn’t get out of I showed the proper degree of enthusiasm, but the truth is that politics interested me less than they did Amikam, and the thought of entering a strange house with a group of people older than myself embarrassed me. We lived mainly among our peers, and the world of the free spirits who had already completed their army service seemed to me like a vague and distant dream. A magical stage which would no doubt arrive, but which we were still too callow to be fit to enter. I knew that I would be ashamed of my very presence in their space, and I knew that I might very well, however unjustly, also be ashamed of Amikam. And nevertheless I went. I went because I was his girlfriend. And I went because the next day we were due to take our final exams in literature; and on the pretext that we were going to study late into the night, I received permission from my mother to sleep over at his house, in his sister’s room.
Thirty-six steps of an external stairway led to the apartment on the second floor. I didn’t count them then. Forget the prophecies of the heart: No premonition told me that for the next twenty-nine years I would go up and down them about seventy thousand times, a few hundred of them with a baby carriage; no tingling of my toes hinted that I would wound my exposed big toe four times on the rusty can holding the sick jasmine bush that refused to die; that in certain moods I would decide to change the soil and plant a new bush there, and in others I would plan to drag it to the dumpster, and that I would never do either; I had no inkling that I was to see the top of the shaky iron banister covered with a strip of snow, and that its unsteadiness would worry me from time to time, and that about this too, I would do nothing.
Entering the apartment was as embarrassing as I had imagined. The noise inside was so loud that the students/artists/neighborhood-activists did not hear us knocking, and when they finally opened the door it turned out that Amikam’s acquaintance “who had gone even further left” wasn’t there. The bearded man who opened the door identified himself as “Hamida,” and when we said together “What?” and “Sorry?” he barred our way and demanded to know whether or not we recognized the right to self-determination.
His real name was Yoash, and Yoash, as an expression of his right to self-determination, had gone to the Ministry of Interior and demanded to have his name changed to “Hamida.” The Ministry of Interior, for its part, had argued that “Hamida” was the name of an Arab woman, that a Jewish male could not call himself “Hamida” on the grounds of fraud and imposture, but Yoash insisted on his right to call himself whatever he liked, and his correspondence with the Ministry of Interior and with the lawyers he badgered to represent him for nothing, as a public service, filled a shiny orange folder which he took with him wherever he went. I learned these details later; at the threshold, the exchange was confined to Amikam’s declaration that we did indeed recognize the right to self-determination, a slogan which served as the “open sesame” that let us in to the apartment.
Amikam and I sat on a mattress while a passionate debate about the Organization of African Unity stormed above our heads. Anyone listening might have gained the impression that the question of whether Africa should unite would be determined on Usha Street, and if so, around what principles, for example whether the spread of Islam was a stage that could be skipped, or whether “we had to go through it.” Someone lectured with astonishing knowledge about colonialism and Liberia, colonialism and Cameroon, colonialism and Ethiopia, Somalia, the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and I remember thinking that I should know something about all these places; my father traveled a lot to those parts of the world, to make devil-knows-what connections and to negotiate all kinds of deals. The business he had entered a few years before was called the Agricultural Development Corporation, and from then on the hall table was covered with shiny brochures in English and French, with photographs of a black man driving a red tractor, and a black scientist holding up a test tube like a wine glass and flashing a white smile from ear to ear. During all his years on the kibbutz my father had never worked in agriculture, except for the seasonal mobilizations it was impossible to get out of, and his partners in the enterprise had retired from the army only a little while before he did so himself, but to this day he continues to insist that “although the company had expanded its interests from grain storage to heavy equipment and other areas of aid,” it had never sold anything shady to any shady regime. What do I know? What did I know then? Only that from the day he became a civilian the house filled up with all kinds of junk from Africa—families of carved elephants, masks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, stinking leather gourds—and nevertheless I couldn’t place Liberia on the map. But why am I dwelling on my father? And who cares about Liberia? And what do I care today about which theoretical organizations that group was debating then? I didn’t sit down to tell nostalgic tales about the Jerusalem folklore of student radicals in Nachlaot in the seventies—and here I am already dragging in “jasmine bushes” and “Bezalel” and “Yoash-Hamida”—and with this kind of decor, in a couple of pages I’ll have turned myself and my life into something affected and anecdotal. It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere,” which in any case I have no desire to remember.
It took some time before anyone paid us any attention. We sat down low and looked at the sandaled feet of the debaters taking the floor opposite us, and in the air was a strong scent the name of which was then unknown to me. Patchouli, I later learned.
Amikam looked as if he was concentrating hard, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, trying to focus on one of the discussions out of the several taking place simultaneously. Simultaneity wasn’t his strong point, but nevertheless he managed to turn to look at me and scowl when I lit one cigarette with another; despite the nausea induced by the unaccustomed amount of nicotine, I was chain-smoking. The person who addressed me in the end was a very fat girl, with a vast heaving bosom and agitated gestures, someone swaying above me and enthusing about her experiences at a “La Mama” workshop. She wanted to know what I did; I said I was in the middle of my final exams, I was being drafted in November, and of course I didn’t know yet what I was going to do in the army. It was one of those moments when for no evident reason an interval of silence suddenly comes into being in all the conversations being conducted in the same space at the same time, so that everyone heard me saying: “What I’d like most is to be an operations room clerk in a commando unit and the thing I most dread is being stuck in an office in Tel Aviv.” This was not the right thing to say to a girl just back from six months in New York in a “La Mama” workshop. And it wasn’t the right thing to say in that place. The owner of the heaving bosom puffed out her already swollen cheeks, holding back her laughter, and in the embarrassing silence a “tsss” of ridicule was heard from the direction of the kitchen.
“It’s important to me to contribute,” I added, in a panic, aware of the looks recognizing my panic. The only matches left in my matchbox were burnt.
“Contribute to whom? Contribute to what?” A boy in ostentatiously ugly thick black glasses looked both amused and irate. I tossed my bangs out of my eyes and, without any idea of what I was about to say, avoided the question in a defiant voice, with a statement that was completely new to me: “Obviously if I can’t really contribute, then I’d prefer not to serve at all.” Without looking at Amikam I felt him turning his head, and this was also the moment that I saw Alek.
“There’s nothing funny about what.…” He was standing directly opposite me, leaning on the kitchen door frame, the leaning hand holding a closed book, with one finger inside it marking his place.
; “Noa.”
“What she says isn’t funny. Her voice doesn’t make me laugh.” His pronunciation was very clear, with almost no trace of a foreign accent, except for certain soft vowels; only his pronunciation was excessively clear, separating the words; and when he paused they waited for him to continue. “Noa is a woman,” he continued at his leisure, “you don’t laugh at what happens to a woman. An authentic person would understand what she’s saying … what it means … and what her voice is saying to him.… What is it saying?” he repeated the question obediently echoed back to him by one of the girls in his audience. “It’s saying that she needs to be freed. It’s saying that a man has to marry her, and all the other girls who are beginning to think like Noa. There have to be men to go with all of them to the Rabbinate and free them from the army by marrying them.”
AND THEN HE SAID TO ME AND THEN I SAID TO HIM
I reread the “he said and I said,” and “then he asked me, and then I answered him”—the description is accurate, but nevertheless I can’t find even the nucleus of an explanation of what happened afterwards in it. Perhaps I should have run the moments like a silent movie. A very young woman sits on a mattress on the floor, hugging her knees and smoking. The camera follows the woman’s look, a look from below, takes in bits of detail: dirty toes, thick ankles, cutoff jeans ragged at the edges, a heaving bosom, a jaw moving in speech, a jaw moving in mastication. An orchestra accompanies the pictures with a cacophony of sound and suddenly stops. The young Valentino, he was so young then, stands in a relaxed pose in the frame of an open door. He has black hair cropped as short as a convict’s, he is wearing a very white tee shirt, and is standing far enough away so that the woman’s look, still from below, can take him in at full length. The man speaks, without marked expressions, without gesticulations, a restrained foreign body, and when he stops talking the orchestra begins to play again, but now the music has one clear theme. The man lingers in the doorway and his look rests on the girl, who is fiddling with a packet of cigarettes. After a long moment he reaches out his hand and beckons her to him with two fingers. The girl gets up and goes to him, he lights her a cigarette, and they both disappear into the kitchen.
Love can be described as compulsive thinking. The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture. And in the days to come I would be stuck on two gestures from the opening scene:
The man signals “come here” with his finger, and the girl gets up and comes. It’s the kind of gesture with which you beckon a child. Or a servant. Or a waitress, if you haven’t got any manners. Is the girl not aware of this? And how she is. And nevertheless—oh, the shame of it—she gets up. Not “in spite of” the gesture but because of it. Let’s admit that the nonchalant movement of the finger turns her on, as if it’s moving between her legs.
The foreign man looks into her eyes, and with a foreign gesture he lights her cigarette. And afterwards too, in the kitchen, he keeps on watching her and offering her a light, instead of giving her the lighter so that she can light up herself.
Compulsive thinking latches on to details and dwells on them as if they hold enormous significance which cannot be grasped in a moment. It keeps returning to them again and again as if there is still something left to understand. The more I think about the meaning of these gestures the sicker I get of my thoughts and of myself for thinking them. Mulling over the subtleties of gestures and their erotic nuances like some idiotic character in a genteel English romance.
You won’t find any such absurd courting rituals in my Nira Woolf stories. No luuuve and no brooding thoughts. Not with Nira. Since she’s my character and I invented her, obviously I constructed her according to my taste: my heroine would never go in for such nonsense as “and then I said to him” and “and then he kept quiet and didn’t say anything.” And nobody would beckon my heroine with his finger—“come here.” Because if anyone ever uses that gesture in my books—and I don’t think anyone will—it will only be Nira herself. She’ll beckon and the man will come, and they’ll fuck on the carpet before anybody can say Jack Robinson. And she won’t spend too much time thinking about it afterwards either, because my James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about.
Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t conduct myself according to them, and although I can argue in my defense that at the age of seventeen I didn’t know what I believed yet, that argument lost its validity a long time ago.
I can imagine Nira Woolf listening to my “he looked at me” and “he went on looking at me,” stroking one of her monstrous cats under its chin, flexing a muscle in her arm and yawning with boredom. At some point she would cut me short and say: “Okay, okay, okay, I get the point, so what happened? Did you fuck on the carpet?”
Yes, I went to bed with Alek that night, not on the carpet but in his carved wooden bed that I still sleep in to this day.
I could have written that in the way my heroine would have approved of, in other words, wittily. I could have mocked him and the foolish girl I was until Nira Woolf split her sides laughing. But that’s not the reason why I sat down to write.
THE MARKETPLACE OF ANECDOTES
The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.
So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.
The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-à-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.
Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake, because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what’s important and what’s not. Fighting for the rights of dispossessed Arabs, defrauded patients, oppressed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system,” saving the innocent and stamping out evil—that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.
“Your heart aches because of some man?” she would say. “Nonsense, darling, just hypochondria, a little twinge you’ve decided to blow up out of all proportion. But never mind, sweetie, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, you go right ahead. And I hope you never know what real pain feels like.”
SO WHAT IF
So what if the soul stole its trembling from a body trembling with terror? And what if the aching of the heart was plundered for metaphorical purposes from those suffering the agonies of real pain? And if I say: there is no soul, there’s no such thing, the trembling soul is nothing but literary bullshit, will the trembling of that non-existent entity stop? Like hell it will.
Because what does it help me to know that the heart is a muscle, just a blood-pumping muscle, if my heart st
ill goes out to him, and the bloody muscle still yearns and swells?
IN SHORT, WHAT HAPPENED
Noa: Where are you from?
Alek: You don’t want to know. Too many places.
Noa: What places?
Alek: It won’t mean much to you. I was born in Sverdlovsk, later we lived in Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and there were a few more on the way. A Jew’s story.
1) He made me coffee in a thick glass and served it on a saucer. Afterwards he opened the iron shutters and watered the pink geranium on the bars. In spite of all the glasses and plastic bottles piled up there during the evening, the kitchen looked clean.
2) When he filled the finjan with water to make coffee he put his book down on the marble counter. It was a German book. Alek said that when he finished everything he intended doing, next July, in one year exactly, he was going to fly from here to Heidelberg, and I, without any justification or logic, felt a little vacuum of surprise and insult opening inside me. “Heidelberg?” I asked, and Alek said: “Why not? All kinds of interesting things started from there. And anyway, I have a scholarship for Heidelberg.”
3) People who were in the kitchen before us gradually left, and those who came in after us took what they wanted and quickly went out again. Because of us.
4) I asked him what he meant when he talked about my voice, and Alek said: “It has to do with slavery and also inner freedom. People, as you know, speak in several voices, you can distinguish by the sound and the content.” When I said “an operations room clerk in a commando unit” he heard the foreign, banal voice, we all have foreign voices like that that speak from our mouths and they are what make us slaves. But when he heard me suddenly say that perhaps I didn’t want to serve in the army at all, something changed, and for a moment he thought that he was hearing my authentic voice. Like a clean note.