by Gail Hareven
“Because she’s too one-dimensional, too saintly, as if she isn’t a prostitute at all. It’s obvious that no such prostitute exists.”
“You mean that Dostoevsky failed with her from point of view of social realism?’ ”
“I mean that a prostitute can’t be a saint.”
“And you know this, that a prostitute can’t be saint,” he stated, without a question mark. I didn’t know what to say to him, and I simply repeated like a literature teacher that Sonia was “a one-dimensional character, much more one-dimensional that Raskolnikov.”
He pulled on a pair of pants and got up to make us tea. I remained naked. “If you have an exam tomorrow, you must sleep,” he said and pulled the sheet up to my chin.
How did I come by the illusion that I “understood him,” having only the vaguest notion of what he was talking about?
“Only someone with an individual voice of his own can describe what is impossible to describe,” he quoted to me once, I don’t know from where.
Alek turned off the reading lamp and went to his cubbyhole of a study, the little room where I am writing now. In the light coming from his room and the light of the street lamp coming from outside, I could still see things, and everything I saw gave rise in me to a feeling of wonder, as if something very wonderful and joyful were dancing and twinkling in all the objects in the world. As if something beyond comprehension and steeped in magic pervaded everything, and I had only just found out. An old wooden cupboard, a mirror in a wooden frame hanging on the wall, a picture of a pale green demon woman reflected in the mirror, the bamboo armchair with a white bedspread thrown onto it. And a chilly breeze sharpening the edges of my body, the touch of the sheet and the configuration of the cascading fabric on the armchair.
Wide awake, more wide awake than I had ever been in my life, I sensed everything with my gaze, and it seemed to me that my eyes could feel textures: the lingering touch of a fold of pale cloth; the dry touch of a pile of books; the hooked green touch of the she-devil’s fingernails; the cold green touch of her figure in the mirror and the curly cold green of her hair. Below her, four patterned floor tiles, patched into the yellowish floor, the tendrils of a vine gaily twining over them.
With this gaze came the sensation that I was filling my body, that I was inhabiting all of it, and that I had been given a form. This was me-my-body, and these were my edges, and beyond them was living air. I extracted my hands from under the sheet, I twiddled my fingers in front of my eyes like a baby, and laughed softly with their movements.
Hello, hello, this is me in space.
At some point I got up and went to Alek. I stood behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He didn’t turn around, just held one of my hands with his and went on writing with the other. On the desk the German book I had seen before in the kitchen lay open, together with a German-Russian dictionary.
“What are you doing?” A question that in the days to come I learned not to ask.
“If I’m already going to Heidelberg, I should learn German.”
“Tell me more.”
“More about what?”
“More about the army. You were in the army weren’t you?”
“Once a million years ago I studied medicine for half a year, so they made me medical orderly in the Golani Brigade. Logic of the Israeli Defense Forces.”
“So why shouldn’t a girl serve in the army?”
Alek sighed, turned round to face me, and sat me naked on his knees.
Woman (flirtatiously stubborn, arching her neck back and distancing her face from his kisses): No, explain to me.…
Man (kissing her neck, slipping his hand between her legs): Explain to you what? You know everything.
Woman: But still … explain.…
Man: What can I explain to you? What? A soldier is a slave (turning her face towards him and giving her a deep kiss), a soldier is a slave (another kiss with his eyes closed), and a woman in the army is … how do you say it? Slave of the slave.
Woman (with her eyes closed too): A bondmaid.
Man: Right.
ALEK’S FRIENDS
Alek wasn’t keen on presenting his biography in an orderly fashion: “It doesn’t matter now,” “that’s prehistory,” “it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.” So that it took me months to put the facts of his CV together, and a lot longer to begin to understand something about them. And indeed, what could I understand from a sentence like “My mother’s husband is Polish by origin, and because of that in ’58 they let us leave.” Because what did I know about it? I loved Dostoevsky and to a lesser degree also Tolstoy, they “spoke to me” and for some reason I assumed that I understood them. I liked the “Russian songs” we sang in the youth movement, until I saw that Alek detested them. And I was fascinated by the tales my father used to tell about the “Russian lunacies” of the early days on the kibbutz. My mother would purse her lips whenever he told these stories. She was born on the kibbutz and he wasn’t, so: “Not everything has to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.”
Apart from that, there were the almost daily articles about the “Jews of Silence” and a lot of arguments about the dropouts at the transit station in Austria, and one graffiti on Gaza Street next to the Prime Minister’s house: “The Russian Jews want to go home? Let them go home.” To put it plainly, I didn’t have what’s called a background, I didn’t know a thing, not about the country Alek called his “prehistoric motherland”—France he sometimes referred to as his “historic motherland”—and not even about a mother’s husbands. I didn’t know anyone who had a “mother’s husband.”
Alek wasn’t any keener on explaining the facts than he was on revealing them, and in this he was completely different not only from Amikam but in fact from anyone else I knew. Questions like “If you were already studying in Paris, why did you actually come to Israel?” would make him close up completely.
“I thought this was a country of Jews,” “The students there, in Paris, didn’t really understand. They didn’t have any clue about what their slogans meant. It was clear from the outset that the Communists would take over the whole thing, it couldn’t have happened any other way.” Sometimes he would produce sentences like this, but I didn’t know what to make of them, even though I tried to look as if I understood. Somehow I grasped that Alek’s politics too were different from those of the crowd that hung around in his house, but nothing in my education had prepared me to actually understand what he was saying.
More than twenty years later, in ’93, when I came to him in Moscow, he began to talk to me about Russians and Russia, and he continued to do so in the six further visits I paid him. Perhaps the changed times made it easier for him to explain, and perhaps he needed the years of our common history to trust me. Perhaps he was also influenced by the fact that in these meetings he was the host, and therefore the guide by force of circumstance. In any event, one of the many things I didn’t understand in ’72 was how much of an Israeli I was in his eyes. And that “Israeli” meant foreign. It was enough for me that his Hebrew was almost flawless, it was enough that he had spent six months on a kibbutz and then served in the Golani Brigade, to take it for granted that he understood everything as I did. And more than that, that he understood me as I did.
Close to my final exams in Bible studies—an exam in which Alek showed a surprising interest—I adopted the verb “to know” as it is used in the Book of Genesis as part of my inner language: What, for example, did Adam know about his wife Eve? He didn’t ask, investigate, clarify things to enable him to “know about” her, and nor did she, for her part, “know about” him. Adam knew Eve his wife, and Eve, so I decided, knew Adam. And this primordial knowledge, whatever its meaning, seemed to me the highest level of relationship. A kind of pristine knowledge, preceding words and names. An illumination that does not need biographical data, and is always felt as a miracle.
And even today, years later, I’m not sure that this subliminal knowledge was a t
otal illusion. That is to say, if I were asked my official, rational opinion, it would be that it is impossible to know someone whose language you don’t speak, whose memories you haven’t investigated, whose associations are all foreign to you. A man for whom sounds and smells, words and tastes and concepts are associated with images about which you haven’t got a clue. That’s my opinion, I have no argument to contradict it, and nevertheless, in spite of my irrefutable opinion, what is it that happens when he turns my face to him, when he looks into my face, when I look at him while we’re fucking? What else can I call it but pure knowledge? And a kind of recognition, as if we were predestined to know, and that nothing else is possible for me.
With the passing of the years, the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much bullshit is involved in this kind of “knowing.” “He looked into her eyes until he saw to the depths of her soul.” “And then, in a moment of grace, his soul was revealed to her.” “They were soul mates,” and all the rest of that romantic novelette rubbish. So he fucks me with his eyes open, so I look at him without fantasizing, so I come at the same time as him without taking my eyes off him, so—what does it mean?
I say: It’s sentimental crap, I think it’s crap, it’s clear to me that it’s crap, and nevertheless, against my better judgement, I still feel it as a miracle, and I am still full of the grace of that knowledge.
I say that I had and still have a deep sense of knowledge, but this subcutaneous knowledge did nothing to abate my curiosity. I wanted to know everything—no detail was too trivial for me—and every detail I accumulated immediately split up into lots of new details charged with magic that also split up at the edges into radiant new reflections of light. Alert as a stalker, I spent my days watching him, me, us, trying to learn things from every word and gesture. This was a new, focussed activity that demanded all of me and concentrated all of me, very far from the soft, dazed state usually associated with lovers. And even now, when I recall those memories, it still seems to me that there is yet something to be learned in this story.
In the evenings the house would often be full of people. Looking back it’s clear to me that he didn’t regard them as friends or even like them, but for some reason he simply put his place at their disposal. Sometimes he would make them coffee, sometimes he let somebody else wash glasses or grapes from the market and serve, for the most part he seemed to observe them and their arguments from the side.
In the living room behind me—though for some reason I feel as if their scenes took place somewhere else—they chewed over the third world and the cultural revolution, capitalist technocracy and the tyranny of tolerance, artistic fetishism and the right to violence, and suchlike subjects. Menachem Levy wanted to burn down all the museums. Menachem Becker agreed to burn down the lot—except for Van Gogh. And with sentences like these they would burn entire evenings. Becker was a Trotskyite and Levy was a Maoist, or maybe the opposite, in any case I didn’t know the difference, I just sat on the mattress and soaked up Marcuse and Sartre, the Red Brigades, the Rage Brigade, and urban guerrilla warfare.
Alek intervened only rarely, and when he did they listened to him. Once, I remember, it happened when they were arguing about Godard, what he was actually saying and exactly what kind of revolutionary he was. They appealed to Alek because Dalit had heard from somebody that he had met Godard and interviewed him for a student newspaper in Paris. And Alek, with demonstrative reluctance, said that Godard’s political opinions were of no interest to him, nor were Mao’s sayings in La Chinoise, nor what Godard thought about Mao’s sayings. He had interviewed Godard because he was asked to do so, it was a job, there were people who thought that this was the way to write in a newspaper and these were the questions that should be asked, but they were in a house now, not a newspaper. “Of course Godard is a revolutionary, from ideological point of view the worst kind possible, but Godard is nevertheless the Schoenberg of cinema, and the important thing is the revolution an artist makes with his camera, and all the rest is just rubbish for politicians.”
Sometimes when Alek finished speaking he would turn around and disappear into his little study or the kitchen. Sometimes in his absence they would go on arguing about what he said, but this was one of the occasions on which he silenced them. Not because they agreed with him, but because he had the halo of someone who had been a student in Paris and met Godard. I knew that Alek realized this, and that he despised them for it. And I also knew that they felt his contempt, and that the scorn only strengthened the spell he cast over them.
Now, looking back, they seem very young to me, forgivably young. “Abroad” was further away then than it is now, and certain abroads, like Paris, had a glamour then that it took years to dispel.
Most of the regular participants in the group were men, except for Dalit from “La Mama” who would always make a tempestuous entrance. He treated Dalit nicely, he never ignored her arrival, and it was the same with all the pretty faces with the plucked eyebrows who would turn up with someone or other, stick around for a week or two, and then be replaced. When they didn’t come with a guy, the pretty girls would come in pairs, and huddle together like goslings waiting for someone to stick a worm in their beaks. Alek would clear the records or the occupant off a chair, make sure that the pretty face was comfortably seated in her short mini, and he never failed to ask her name and if he could get her anything. Occasionally a female made of sterner stuff would turn up, like for instance Osnat law-and-order who actually succeeded in forcing her way into the discussion. I admired this woman. She had an exquisite jaw and black, unplucked eyebrows, she would turn a chair around and sit astride on it, leaning her arms on the backrest and harangue us: “So ask yourselves—whose law and order? Law and order that serve what? That serve whom?” Because she impressed me, I assumed that she impressed Alek too, until I looked at his face.
In the morning I threw a neutral remark into the air anyway, to check out his reaction, and Alek raised his eyes from his book and gave me a long, faintly amused look. “I’ve known too many woman of this type,” he said in the end and went back to his book, pinching his cigarette as usual between his thumb and two fingers.
Ten or maybe twelve years later, in the home of friends in Tel Aviv, I came across Osnat again. She taught in the history department at the university, published articles in the newspapers, she still turned her chair around, and she still smoked the same short Chinese pipe. Since she failed to recognize me and remember me from then, I felt free to touch the erogenous zone and remind her of “that crowd from Nachlaot.” “Oh yes, them, sure … they were fucking male chauvinists, too, just like everyone else in those days.” Beyond this sweeping generalization it appeared that the group had not remained in her memory, and we actually became quite good friends.
Opinions I heard on those evenings seeped into me gradually, and even though I lacked the intellectual background to understand them, I started trying on ideas like a young girl trying on a dress: not in order to see if it fits her, but to see who it turns her into and who she looks like when she puts it on. “What’s the difference between the actions of Black September against us and our bombing in Jordan?” I threw at my mother’s back one evening during the weeks when I was still going home. “They hurt civilians and we hurt civilians. They took our athletes hostage in Munich, and we treat Jordanian civilians as hostages; so tell me why what Israel does is called war and defense, and what Black September does is called terrorism?”
• • •
“It’s a good thing your father isn’t here to hear you talk like that,” my mother said grimly, draining the water from her steamed vegetables into the sink. “If you, Noa, don’t know the answer to that question yourself, it would be better if you kept quiet and didn’t shame yourself by such talk. We know very well who’s influencing you, who’s putting that nonsense into your head.” My mother, unlike me, has never felt the need to try on opinions, and in this she resembles my daughter far more than me. My mother is a dietet
ic nurse, my daughter is about to become a rabbi, and they both relate with the same degree of seriousness to what goes into the mouth and what comes out of it.
Looking back, even though I agree in general with Osnat’s verdict regarding the group’s male chauvinism, it’s clear to me that the seeds of my feminist views were planted during that period. At the time I didn’t take any notice of the way they behaved towards women, it wasn’t too different from the way my father or any other man I knew behaved, they certainly didn’t count women among oppressed population groups, and neither did it ever occur to me to do so. And nevertheless questions like: “Law and order—that serve whom?” registered in my mind and left an impression, and years later, when I constructed the character of Nira Woolf, I gave her some of Osnat’s gestures, and some of her views regarding the law.
(“When Nira Woolf gives the sex slave her pistol, in order for her to use it, she is actually killing them both with one bullet: the slave trafficker and the oppressed woman. So that after the shot we are left with the body of a man, a dead female slave, and a living woman. She who was previously a slave and who is now a liberated woman.” From my last interview about What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?)
Alek, as I said, didn’t talk much, but before I finish with the folklore of those days in Nachlaot, I’ll just mention one outburst of his. The discussion was not particularly lively—about the indifference of the Israeli student, the Sorbonne commune, the occupation, police brutality and the right to violence—and they were rehashing the subject of “the suppression of thought” again when Alek suddenly began to talk about the Prague Spring. I won’t try to recapitulate everything he said, because more than I remember the content, I remember the tone. He sat slightly bowed in his chair and spoke quietly, without looking at any of us, speaking as if he was telling a very personal story, and one sentence kept coming back like a lament: “It was beautiful, the Prague Spring, it was beautiful, and I like a fool actually began to believe that the world was going to let it happen.”