by Gail Hareven
When the story was drawing close to its end, Alek raised his voice, glaring at us suddenly with a strange hostility: “Half a million Russian tanks crushed Czechoslovakia. They trampled the students, they trampled artists, they destroyed a hope that you’ll never understand. People like you, who talk about repression, have no idea of what kind of freedom people were fighting for there.” He stood up with a distorted face, close to tears or violence, and what happened afterwards was very much like flight.
In the space of ten minutes everyone had left the house, except for me and Hamida-Yoash, who took him to the kitchen and sat there with him until three in the morning emptying a bottle of vodka. The drink silenced Yoash and made Alek talkative and less sparing of gestures. “… It’s the talking … that’s the problem, I can’t stand the talking, not just Menachem’s, the two Menachems, with them it’s relatively easy, because they come right out and call themselves communists. I mean the others, all the others who haven’t got faintest idea of what they’re talking about,” he lashed out at both of us, or maybe only at Yoash. “Even you, who’re a friend and genuine human being, even you’re like a communist. You all know best, you all know what’s good for everyone, and you’re all ready to drag us by the hair into a bright future. Forgive me, I apologize, I’m not just drunk, I’m pathetic, but I can’t stand it physically, physically.”
And nevertheless he treated Yoash differently from the rest. Alek needed money, I don’t know if Yoash really needed his help in his work, but from time to time, at an evening’s notice, he would ask him to come and paint a house with him. House-painting days were always good days. The pickup honking its horn outside early in the morning, and at dusk the two of them returning cheerful and spattered with whitewash, unloading vast quantities of meat and vegetables, and taking over the kitchen to cook and drink. I wasn’t allowed to join in the cooking, it was a ritual with no room in it for a woman, and they sent me to “go for a little run outside.” But when the meal was ready, at the table, my presence was very desirable. I loved sitting there between the two of them, happy and hungry from the running, bathed and shampooed after it, like an honorary member of the male fraternity. They filled my plate, poured me water, sliced me bread. “Hamida is my true friend,” he would sometimes say, and examine me to see if I understood the meaning of the word. “I can see,” I would answer seriously. More than once it happened that while we were sitting at the table somebody knocked at the door, and Alek would put his finger to his lips and signal the two of us to be quiet, ignoring the record player that betrayed our presence in the house. But there were days when he didn’t even open the door for Yoash.
MARRYING NOA
I don’t remember who began the teasing, but it was Danny Hyman who turned it into a running joke. Hyman was a law student, a man with small limbs, stiff movements and the pronunciation of a radio announcer. I detested him instinctively, and he for his part never threw a word in my direction. From time to time when they talked about freedom, and they talked a lot about freedom, Hyman would tap an American cigarette on its packet and point out that, “The trouble is that all we do is talk and talk, and nobody’s prepared to do anything.” Then he would stick the cigarette in his small mouth and add: “Alek, for example, thinks that we should liberate girls from the army. So why doesn’t he marry Noa and free her from serving in the army?” After he had repeated this a few times, “Why doesn’t he marry Noa?” turned into “Why don’t we marry Noa?” or “Yeah, sure, and now let’s go and marry Noa,” a line that could be fallen back on by anyone wanting to put an end to any tedious debate, with the highly amusing conclusion that we were all impotent anyway.
I had no idea that Alek took this teasing seriously, until the afternoon after Yom Kippur.
The preceding twenty-four hours had not been easy. At this point I no longer needed excuses for not going home, but this week my father had flown in for a visit, and in order not to aggravate the tension that had started to accumulate, I presented myself for the meal preceding the fast, which in our case, needless to say, preceded nothing. When my mother set about polishing the sink, and my sister Talush’s friends called her to come out to skate in the empty streets, I said a hasty goodbye and left. I ran most of the way from Ramat Eshkol to Nachlaot.
Alek had given me a key the first week, but when I saw a light on in the house I didn’t use it, I knocked, and this was the first time that Alek opened the door and stood aside without touching, letting me in as if I was his roommate. “Is this not a good time for you?” “It’s fine. You can come whenever you like. That’s what the key is for.” And he retired to his little study as if he was dividing the rooms up between us.
To my astonishment, Alek fasted, shutting himself up for the evening and the day and drugging himself on Sibelius, played softly so as not to disturb the neighbors. I spent the time staring at the pages of a book, sleeping and daydreaming alternately, disturbed by the lack of the routine sounds that divided the day into clear units of time and notified the body of its functions. There are three synagogues near the house, and in the bedroom the sounds mingled, with one prayer rising and then another, and all the time the subterranean current of Sibelius, coming to the surface only in the hot, heavy silence of the afternoon break, and giving rise in me to a miserable little whimper that punctured my trance.
At the end of the day, when the music stopped, Alek still didn’t open his door and I fell asleep again, and when I woke up sweating in the middle of the night I discovered that he hadn’t come to bed, that he must have gone to sleep on the sofa in his room.
I saw him again only the next day at noon, when he came in with a few of the regulars. The academic year was about to begin, and they were angry about some survey courses they were obliged to take and some teacher whose contract hadn’t been renewed, for reasons which were only too clear: because of the way he talked about Dayan and because of that joke he told about Golda Meir. The heat wave had not yet broken, and they all looked worn out by the heat. Someone I didn’t know suggested going on strike or publishing a statement, and this time it was Dalit who said: “Yeah, sure. You’ll all go on strike, just like you’ll all marry Noa.” Alek was standing opposite her, clenching one fist in another in front of his chest, cracking pecan nuts which Yoash had brought from his parents’ farm. A silence must have fallen, because I heard the sound of the crack, and then his voice saying: “Marry Noa … okay … Noa, do you want to get married?”
ALEK ASKED
Alek asked: “Do you want to get married?” And he didn’t add, “to me.” But at the same time he said: “Do you want to get married?” and not “Do you want me to exempt you from serving in the army?” Which is perhaps a slightly different question.
Did I want to be exempt from army service? Until I met him it wouldn’t have occurred to me for a minute not to be drafted, and apart from one classmate who had polio, I didn’t know anybody who avoided army service, including those present in the room, including Alek himself.
The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. Girls from my year who had been drafted in August had already concluded their basic training and been sent to all kinds of bases to serve as clerks. And somehow it was clear to me that the new me couldn’t be sent anywhere to serve anyone. That I would simply get up and run away if they tried to squeeze me into some asbestos office. It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection—my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later—I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.
Jerusalem was charged with love for me. The map of the city was imprinted in me with illuminated areas where the air grew bright and the vibration of my inner waves intensified,
the concentrated areas where we had wandered together, and the further I receded from them in my imagination, the grayer I grew inside, disappearing from myself into the gray, flat nothingness.
Alek was going to leave for Germany in July, I had no doubt that he would leave, but until July there was still more than nine months to go, a short time, a long time. I couldn’t consent to this time being taken away from me. Love had mobilized my entire being, love ruled me like a tyrant, and love would allow for no other master.
I reread the last couple of paragraphs and it’s all true: I couldn’t imagine myself leaving Jerusalem, I couldn’t part from Alek, I wanted to buy more time, true and true and true, but there’s one simple and shameful thing I haven’t yet said. I loved Alek, and therefore I wanted to marry him.
GOING TO THE RABBINATE
I didn’t look at him or at anyone else when I said: “Yes, I want to.” And the next thing he said was: “Okay, then let’s go and do it now, just tell me where to go.”
At that moment he was a king, he was their prince, they admired him more than ever, and some of that admiration was directed at me too, so that the doubts as to whether we were “really going to do it” were addressed to us in the plural. For a few minutes “you” meant both of us, and that “you”—the crazy, impulsive, glamorous, free-spirited you—was intoxicating. At the first words of doubt Alek threw the cracked pecans into the basket, and on the spot, accompanied by all of them, we set out for the Rabbinate on Havatzelet Street.
I recall the movement with which he aimed the pecans and hold it in my imagination, and Alek in his white tee shirt looks like a boy, slender and cropped. He was then twenty-eight, almost as old as Hagar today. But even today when the touch of his thinness sometimes feels like the touch of old age—and only rarely like the touch of a slender boy—he is still the same Alek who clenched fist over fist, and so he will apparently always remain, never mind the metamorphoses of his body.
Dalit, Hyman, and two others I barely knew, dropped out on the way on various pretexts. Perhaps things had gone further than they intended, perhaps they had been infected by some other embarrassment, but three of them, surrounding the pair of us like tipsy bodyguards, accompanied us into the Rabbinate building and testified that they had known us from early childhood, and that they knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Alexander Ginsberg and Noa Weber were single. And when the officials of the Holy One Blessed Be He began to inquire as to the exact date of Alek’s arrival in Israel, it turned out that one of our witnesses was also a Ginsberg, just like Alek, and this Ginsberg quickly improvised all kinds of fibs about the family connection, about uninterrupted correspondence and frequent visits in Paris. “Alexander Ginsberg,” babbled the ginger-haired Ginsberg, imitating the gossipy tone of the clerks, “Alek, as we call him in the family, is a confirmed bachelor. To such an extent that his mother began to worry that she wouldn’t have any grandchildren, and my mother told her, send him to Israel, and you’ll see that he’ll soon find himself a nice Jewish girl to marry.” And we all smothered hysterical giggles.
Alek was surprised to discover that we couldn’t finish what we had come to do on the spot. The men were sent outside, and I was sent to have a talk with the rabbi’s wife as a necessary preliminary to setting the date.
In the years to come I told the story of this interview countless times, it became part of my anecdotal stock-in-trade, which I polished up from time to time, perfecting the details of the scene, the asides and the timing. Now I’ll be brief and stick to the facts: A short woman with her hair covered in a brown snood greeted me from the other side of a scratched office desk and without any preliminaries began to explain to me what a mistake it would be to bake my husband a chocolate cake every day, even if he hinted that he wanted it and even if he demanded it, because you get tired of even the best cake if it’s served up every day. She reminded me of my mother with her nagging about the proper eating habits—“Chew, Noa, chew before you swallow.”—except that my mother is a thin woman, and this one had a double chin tucked in over a swelling bosom. In my innocence I replied that I didn’t know how to bake, and only when she sighed, and I, suddenly embarrassed without my male support group, stared at the bucket someone had left by the door, only then did I realize what the woman was talking about.
In the face of my surprising naiveté she abandoned the culinary metaphors and asked for details about my menstrual cycle. Was it regular? How long did it last? And when exactly was it due? I thought about the four who were presumably waiting for me outside, about Alek’s impatience, and about what I would have to tell them in a few minutes, and with this to inspire me, as soon as I realized where all these questions were leading, I whispered that there was a problem, you understand, we have a problem because I’m pregnant. That’s why we have to get married as quickly as possible, a quick, discreet wedding … perhaps right here in the Rabbinate? My face burned with a shame whose origins were different from what the rabbi’s wife supposed.
Overflowing with concern she waddled with me to the clerk, who set the date for ten days’ time, right after the holiday of Simchat Torah. “Light Sabbath candles,” she recommended in parting, “forget the past, and explain to your husband that this is the time to make a new beginning and fortify yourselves with tradition. It’s important to him too for his child to grow up like a Jew, why else did he come to Israel? … The mother is the foundation of the home, the wife is the foundation of the home, you’ll see how your husband will respect you when you make him a Jewish home. You’ll make him a Jewish home, and he’ll make you a queen.”
The really crazy joke in this story, the joke I never tell when I’m delivering the shtick, is that while I was inventing my urgent dilemma for the benefit of the rabbi’s wife, the first cells of Hagar were already dividing inside me. And that I didn’t have the faintest idea that I was pregnant.
I LOVED HIM
I loved him and I yearned to marry him. Even worse, I yearned for him to marry me, to take me to be his wedded wife, to sanctify me.
The rabbi’s wife’s double chin, the nagging tone of the clerks, the desks piled with cardboard files, the mop bucket—these details helped me to cover up my true desire for him to single me out to have and to hold, forever. The decor bespoke a seedy bureaucratic secularity, and I welcomed the ugliness. Since the marriage was not a true marriage, it was better this way, I thought, in all the ugliness of reality, in the harsh summer light, without any atmospherics to soften the facts, without any illusions. It was right, it was fitting, I was happy with it.
I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not …” And even when I read between the lines—lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content—I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reason, I knew that he didn’t love me.
In the nature of things, according to the rules of the game laid down from the start, I did not try to hold seminars with him about the nature of our feelings for each other, their origins and destination. I saw that I aroused his curiosity, I saw that the curiosity and the enjoyment bordered on amusement, and as far as I was able I tried to join in the style of provocative flirtatiousness stemming from these feelings. To behave as if we were brother and sister up to some naughtiness.
It took me years to understand that in Alek’s eyes I, Noa Weber, was the ultimate stranger, foremost because I was a woman. And for all his experience with the members of my sex, to this day he still tends to attribute a kind of alien mystery to us—as if we belonged to a completely different species, governed by incomprehensible inner laws, which a man, however hard he tried to penetrate the mystery, would never succeed in deciphering.
Beyond that—and this was
something that was harder for me to understand—not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP.” Not just a WASP, but a descendent of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s side. Which in itself was a reason for curiosity and investigation.
But nevertheless, in spite of the strangeness, it was clear to me that the cloak of naughty flirtatiousness I wore and the ideological reasons I spouted, did not deceive him. Alek knew that I was possessed, he knew it very well, and he chose to marry me nevertheless. Why did he do it?
Twenty, no, nearly twenty-one years later, the first time I went to visit him in Moscow—Hagar had already completed her army service—it happened that I asked him. In January one of the European newspapers he worked for sent him to write a series of articles on the upheavals in Russia, and Alek invited me to join him, and we were there together for a whole week.
One night I was standing in the hotel opposite the wide window sill, drunk with sex, sleeplessness, and vodka, and looking down from the thirty-sixth floor at the configurations of the cracks in the ice on the river below. Alek had parted the heavy curtains for me, climbed up, and opened the upper section of one of the tall double windows, and the icy air cleared my breathing body.