The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  All these are distant memories, twenty-nine years is a long time, and I remember exactly only because in the days and hours that came afterwards I returned to them again and again and again, like learning a lesson by rote.

  I remember that although I didn’t really understand what he said, it seemed to me that I understood, and in any case I had no desire to break the atmosphere of clandestine understanding in which we had wrapped ourselves. Because of this atmosphere of secret, self-evident understanding it seemed we were only talking for the sake of talking and that there was actually no need for words at all.

  Perhaps because of our lengthening silences, perhaps because the others began to leave, perhaps because he had spoken before about voices—I suddenly became aware of the record which had apparently been playing for some time in the background. Not the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, and not Joni Mitchell. Not Judy Collins or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich. Something completely different was playing there. Something I’d never heard before, the angelic voices of women singing to God.

  A MUSIC SEMINAR

  The months to come were, among other things, a concentrated seminar on music, or to be more precise on Alek’s forty-something records. My musical experience up to then consisted of one year of recorder lessons on the kibbutz, shrieking community singing on bus trips, and Amikam’s not absolutely tuneless vocal accompaniment to his guitar strumming.

  With my lack of any musical education I had no possibility of identifying the “irony” Alek found in Stravinsky, of relating to his “inner freedom” or his “playfulness,” nor to compare different performances on the music programs on the radio. But nevertheless I learned what I could as quickly as a dog, both because of the sensitized senses of love, and because I had no choice, a simple matter of conditioning. I very quickly learned that Schubert’s symphonies fulfilled the role of elevator music for him, something played in order to hear neither the music nor anything else. And with the Fifth or the Eighth Symphony in the background, pulled over his head like a helmet, it was better for me not to be seen or heard if I didn’t want to see a blank face or hear a formal voice, flat to the point of sarcasm, answering me.

  One degree further than Schubert—I’m talking about degrees of torture here—were hours of Sibelius, with a couple of works by Dvorák thrown in. Because they were the sign that Alek had opened the sluice gate of despair, not reading, not working, just lying in bed and smoking. If anyone knocked at the front door, he wouldn’t answer. Would he be angry if I opened it? Would he be angry if I didn’t? Because if there was anyone at the door it wasn’t me they were coming to see. Nobody came to see me.

  My musical conditioning was such that to this day it’s enough for me to overhear a couple of notes from a radio, or the window of a house, for my whole body to react immediately. Or sometimes it happens the other way around: first the body reaction and the images return, and only seconds later do I become aware of the sound stimulus in the background. One morning last summer when Hagar was visiting I woke up with an old joy, smelling a whiff of the Flex shampoo that I didn’t have in the house and hadn’t bought for years. A Debussy piano sonata was playing and announcing a morning of the good morning to you kind, a morning promising a day of cheerful well-being in our abode. Soon the winter sun would warm my shoulders in the kitchen. “Yesterday I bought us strawberries in the market,” and “Why don’t you slice some bread? Should I put cream and sugar on the strawberries?” And at those moments of waking my whole body was invaded with a sense of youthful joy, until a woman’s voice on the “Voice of Music” interrupted the fantasy and identified the stimulus.

  Of the forty-something compositions constantly playing then in the background, I taped only one in the days to come, and it too I only play very rarely, in a kind of bitter surrender to sweetness. Gregorian Chants was written on the brown record sleeve.

  The low pealing of a single great bell, low voices slowly gathering as if coming from a great distance, and the sense of infinite space opening up a window open to the rain opens to … and slanting rain wets the gas ring and nobody cares. Alek embraces me from behind and puts his hand on my rounding belly. I listen, closing my eyes and putting my hand on my flat stomach, and like then, with my head falling back, I slow time down on the waves of the slow singing over an infinite expanse. Like then, I slow time down, delaying and at the same time waiting for the return of a certain note and a certain moment. Because before he goes back to his room Alek turns me round to face him and his face is completely open. He turns me to him and looks at me as if he admits everything, and as if he is thankful for everything, and a great grace envelops us both.

  For some mysterious psychological-biographical reason rooted in the distant past, in those days he associated church music with erotic feelings, as if religion permitted sex, and as if sex had no value unless it connected you to the wings of angels.

  It’s difficult for me now to think of this religious eroticism in its raw, youthful, “consumer” incarnation; to think of how we “consumed” this music, to think of all the tours of churches we “consumed.” His favorite was the one in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the descent on foot from the Mount of Olives. He never touched me there, but when we stood there I knew how he would touch me later.

  It’s strange to think of that particular music as a “substance” to be consumed, but that’s how I opened up to him then, by “using” this “substance.” That’s how I felt I was opening up. And the world actually opened up again and again, in this mystical pretension, as if the contact of body with body brought us into contact with something greater than we were. Bringing down Bach’s “Joy” on us, bringing down joy on all the world.

  Because we were really into it, boy were we into it: with the heavenly sex, with sex and heaven, and the Kyrie eleison, oh God, have mercy on us, oh Agnus Dei, save us, yes, yes, just so, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus. Until we came together on this pretentious trip. On the third movement of Bach’s Mass, on the first night.

  We came together, I say, but the truth is that the first time only Alek came, while I had the mental equivalent of an orgasm. Our movements weren’t yet sufficiently coordinated, the coordination came later, and somehow coming wasn’t in the least important. A faint orange light illuminated the room from outside. An orange light illuminated his face. And the sight of his slender face looking tortured in the light was important.

  Something in me was no doubt screwed up before that, and Bach is not to blame for the fact that from the beginning I fucked Alek, from the beginning I cleaved to Alek, as if I was seeking salvation.

  IF YOU ASKED ME TODAY

  My daughter turned twenty-nine this spring, and she’s almost eleven years older than I was then. Sometime or other, when she was serving in Training Camp 12, I think, she began talking solemnly about something she called my “spiritual needs,” and whenever my daughter returns to the subject of her “spiritual needs,” we get into a fight. However hard I try to stop myself I can’t suppress the aggression this combination of words arouses in me. Once, six or seven years ago, she tried to explain to me something about the “spiritual need,” or maybe it was the “cultural need,” because of which she chose to study Judaism, and in response to this I remarked that “If we’re already talking about needs, haven’t you noticed that the toilet paper in the bathroom’s finished?” Afterwards, for a month, consistent as usual, Hagar ignored my attempts to butter her up and refused to speak to me, and when in the end she relented, I almost pushed her into a renewed silence when I remarked that “needs” sounded like the jargon of politicians or social workers.

  Since in the end I satisfied her needs by financing her studies, we ended up with a fashionable agreement to disagree. “Tolerance,” they call it.

  Today my daughter is studying in New York, for the rabbinate, God help us, and intends to take responsibility for the “spiritual, religious, and cultural needs” of others. From time to time she sends me papers, articles, or
little sermons she has written, and in all of them God appears, with complete naturalness, in one form or another. “Redemption” and “the soul” are frequently featured too. Chaos neatly packaged and filed in a clear card-index with an enlightened message. Social justice, relationship, community, responsibility, love, and peace.

  “Wasted on me,” I write to Hagar, “I was born deaf to God and the sublime, eternity, the soul and redemption, and I definitely regret it. If you want your mother ‘to accept you as you are’ you’ll have to accept me as I am, and stop looking for my nonexistent religious sentiments. I have no such latent sentiment, I have never had them, and, if you ask me, the world would look a lot better without eternity, redemption, and so on.” I refrain from adding that her god of social justice bores me, and that her “congregation” that comes to get a taste of “Jewish spirituality” before Saturday brunch makes me sick.

  What would my daughter say about the sexual-religious sessions in the course of which she was created? I sometimes wonder if their shadow is sailing in her blood.

  If you were to ask my opinion today, that is to say my official opinion, then fucking is for fun, fucking is for the simple joy of it, and all the rest, dear sisters, is pure and total bullshit. That’s what I think, that’s what I think I think, but if that’s what I think, how come certain sounds make my fingers breathe? And how come I revive the pain inside me as willingly as I revive the pleasure? And how come for years I haven’t found any fun for its own sake in fucking for its own sake?

  I can mock Alek’s bands of angels until tomorrow, I can talk about the ostensibly illegitimate way he used church music in order to “create an atmosphere” conducive to getting me into bed. And in fact, perhaps not only me. So what? Others used protest songs against the war in Vietnam, or against the atom bomb, or against capital punishment, as a smooth slide into bed, and that’s not the point. A musical accompaniment is only an accompaniment, and it accompanies what exists without it too.

  The point is that with Amikam I waited for the earth to shake, which is bad enough to begin with, and with Alek I expected even more, I went even further, from bad to worse. The earth wasn’t enough for me, suddenly there were the heavens above too. And with all my soul I longed for that heaven to open, and even though I don’t recognize the existence of that heaven, for a moment it seemed that it had opened and that lux, lux, lux perpetua was illuminating my soul, whose dubious existence I don’t admit to either.

  I should have written to my daughter: At the age of eighteen you were much wiser than me. You knew how to identify your evil instinct, and to tame it like a cute puppy whose name is “need.”

  “God,” my daughter repeatedly explains to me, trying to appease my anti-religious feminism and annoying me with the increasingly educational tone taking over her letters, “my God isn’t a man.” And she also writes: “If you would find the time to read at least a few chapters of the collection I sent you (from your last letter I understand that you haven’t read it yet) you would discover that in our culture God has a feminine aspect, too. And this feminine aspect can be stressed in study and developed in interpretation.”

  My darling daughter, my sweet and kosher Hagar, first cuts off God’s prick, and then fakes a religious orgasm, and in English what’s more.

  But my daughter with her castrated God—does she really believe in His existence? I’ve never been able to understand it—my daughter with her emasculated Sublime, divested of both His prick and His wrath, will never turn love into religion or confuse a man with God like her mother did.

  THE WINK

  When most of the guests had already left, Amikam came into the kitchen. “Are we going?” he asked me. When I try to remember his face, it’s the way it looked then that I remember: frowning, worried, slightly downcast, not looking me in the eye.

  A devil got into me. Or I grabbed a devil by the tail and jumped onto its back. I swear, a minute before I opened my mouth I had no idea what I was going to say. “We’re not going, you’re going. You’re going and I’m staying.” He didn’t deserve such a slap in the face. He had never done anything to justify it. Or the cold smile that appeared on my face when he failed to react immediately. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alek leaning against the marble counter, hugging himself with one hand and smoking with the other.

  And Amikam left. For some reason I turned to the window and watched him going down, down, down the steps. I didn’t know that he was going to die. How could I have known? Who was I to know? Even the head of military intelligence didn’t know that a war was going to break out. And in any case Amikam’s death has nothing to do with this scene, and the death does nothing to change the nature of the deed. But what exactly was the deed? What did I think I was doing? A cold, arrogant gaiety bubbled inside me like an unfamiliar drug, and my voice too was new in my ears.

  Strange that I felt no guilt for that gratuitous cruelty, only shame, a cringing shame, especially for the gesture that came afterwards. Because when Amikam was already at the bottom of the stairs he turned his head and looked straight at the window, and when his eyes met mine, suddenly and for no reason, in a kind of clownish grimace, I winked at him. As if we were both party to some kind of practical joke, as if it was only a joke, and as if he had some part in this trick I was playing. A thousand years have passed since then, and to this day when I remember it that grimace distorts my face. An unformed seventeen-year-old putting on—what character exactly? One minute I was the reckless Sally Bowles, the next minute I was somebody else, and the next the devil knows who.

  In those days, as far as I can remember, the phrase “no big deal” was not yet part of our vocabulary, but that’s what that clownish grimace of a wink was apparently meant to convey to Amikam. “Relax, I was only joking, it’s no big deal.” But it was a lie. It was a big deal, and I knew it even then.

  Because it’s a fact that seconds afterwards I turned to Alek as if I’d proven something, and as if I was now worthy.

  A lot’s happened since then, a whole history has happened since then, more important things than a stupid wink, than some whim of no significance whatsoever. Only my fixated brain would be capable of latching on like that to a momentary grimace, and I still have to cover my face with my hands and wait and wait, quietly, quietly, quietly, until the spasm passes.

  A few words nevertheless about what happened afterwards. Love has its own cruel and banal laws, and in the wake of my scorpion bite, as if doomed by these laws, Amikam was truly poisoned. It was no longer a matter of feeling “the right thing” for a boy and a girl to go to bed together. And it was no longer a matter of a “healthy, normal feeling.” He haunted me, he felt haunted by me, in spite of and in opposition to his declared contempt for me. How predictable are these shameful moves—first he waited for me to come and explain and apologize, I could see the tense anticipation and the anxious awareness of my presence, I saw it in his posture, even when he engaged himself in conversations at the school gate before and after exams. And when he saw that I had no intention of approaching him, because what could I say, he came up to reproach me, and when I still had nothing to say except for I can’t help it, he haunted me.

  For months he wrote me from the army, scornful and imploring letters, delving and searching for words that would change my heart, clinging to the hope that somewhere, in some nook or cranny the magic words existed, and all he had to do was search diligently to find them.

  But there were no such words because no such words exist, and when his letters arrived I was already enmeshed in my misery and I read them and threw them away without being touched by them. In love, I think I have already said, there is no solidarity, and his clumsy, stilted style—and also, I have to confess to my shame, his spelling mistakes—embarrassed me; they embarrassed me as if they were a parody of myself and my own unique love. In any case, I thought, it isn’t me he loves, but the capricious, reckless character I was playing then. Like falling in love with a character in a movie.

  O
n several occasions he lay in wait for me outside the house. And once he popped up in the rain and barred my way. “So this is what you want, so this is how you like it,” he hissed at me as he pushed me against the fence. His hair was wet, his face was wet, and his teeth were clenched over me. My pregnancy was already showing and my five-month belly was crushed against the trousers of his uniform. He had received a twenty-four-hour pass on the pretext of needing to have a wisdom tooth extracted, and after the tooth which didn’t need to be extracted at all had been extracted, straight from the dental clinic, with half his jaw still numb, he came to wait for me in the street. I learned all this later, from another letter he wrote me, and this too did not touch me.

  I don’t want to think about him. He’s not my fault, and it’s not my fault that his expression looked ridiculous to me. As ridiculous as the way he grabbed my hands and held them behind my back, as if he was copying some manly gesture he’d seen in the movies, only the imitation was too transparent, like an actor in a bad audition. I shook him off without any difficulty. Without any difficulty because at this point I had nothing to offer in any case and nothing to give. Not to Amikam or to anyone else who wasn’t Alek.

  FRAGMENTS

  He asked: “Are you expected at home? Should I take you home now?” And I said: “There’s no need, I’m allowed to stay over, I’ve got my final exams in literature tomorrow.” He was amused by the literature exam. “What are you being examined on?” “Tons of stuff. The poets of medieval Spain, Tchernikhowsky, Bialik, Leah Goldberg, Amir Gilboa, five Agnon stories, Pere Goriot(??), Crime and Punishment, and that’s not all. I like Crime and Punishment best, in my opinion it’s the most profound, except for the character of Sonia which isn’t very convincing.” This amused him even more. I didn’t yet know that Alek was studying Comparative Literature. “Interesting … why don’t you find Sonia convincing?”