The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  “Don’t start jumping for joy. It’s only a fictitious marriage,” I said quickly.

  “Fictitious?” the knife was still in her hand. “But what does that mean, fictitious?”

  “It means that I’m getting married at the Rabbinate the day after tomorrow, and later on I’ll get divorced. Not that marriage means anything to me in the first place, it’s just a primitive custom, but in any case this marriage isn’t for real.”

  “Really? Is that so? One of the boys from the kibbutz married an illegal immigrant from Europe in a fictitious marriage, and afterwards they got divorced. But since then, as far as I know, we managed to chase the British out of the country.”

  “I don’t intend to go to the army.”

  At some point she asked me if “he”—she never called Alek by his name—if “he” was “giving me drugs.” At another point she bemoaned “what would people say” and how she was going to tell my father. And when, on the verge of a childish hysteria I hadn’t planned for at all, I denounced her, my father, Zionism, the army of occupation, and the oppression of the Palestinians—she ordered Talush to leave the room so that I wouldn’t “influence” her. “We know very well who’s influencing you,” she said.

  With the Beatles’s “She’s Leaving Home” in the background, with frames from Five Easy Pieces and refrains from the Israeli version of Hair in my head, the two of us played our roles in this little historical melodrama with facility and total identification. Only I wasn’t leaving home to go to San Francisco with a flower in my hair, but because I wanted to get married. To get married to a man I would rather have died than told my mother how much I loved him.

  The truth is that it wasn’t at all clear to me that I was leaving home, until my mother finally came out with the inevitable lines: “If that’s what you think of us, if that’s what your espresso generation is like, then perhaps there really isn’t anything for you and your generation to look for here. And if you’re old enough to get married, then perhaps you’re old enough to earn your living as well,” at which point I went up to my room, threw a few clothes into my rucksack, threw a nasty “I’m sorry for you,” at the alarmed Talush, and left the house.

  How much sincerity was there in this stormy scene? I don’t know. It’s possible to play a part with feelings of absolute sincerity, and when I arrived at Alek’s with tears pouring down my face I had no sense of theatrical exaggeration. In other words, I was sure that the rift with my family was final and absolute.

  “What happened?” he asked at the door, and immediately took me into his arms, which immediately brought on a fresh bout of weeping. “What happened?”

  “I can’t do it,” I groaned when he closed the door behind us.

  “What can’t you do?”

  “Get out of the army. My mother, my parents, if I don’t go to the army they’ll throw me out of the house, and at the moment I’ll simply have nowhere else to go.” We were still standing in the hallway, and Alek stroked my head with concentrated gentleness. “All my girlfriends are going to the army and I don’t want to go to my Granny Dora on the kibbutz.”

  “Noichka, Noichka … yes …”

  I buried my head in his shirt, and with my head under his chin I felt the smile suddenly spreading over his face. A slow Alek smile with closed lips. “You don’t want to be in army?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay, then you won’t,” and he raised my face to his. “Your mother and father … those are rules of the genre, you know,” he said holding my cheeks and pulling them into a smile, “that’s the way it is, Noichka, everything conforms to the rules of the genre.” And when he took his hands away the smile remained on my face. When he wanted to he could always effect this change in me, from total identification with my feelings, to a kind of light-hearted, mischievous observation of myself.

  “You don’t want to be drafted?” he asked again.

  “No,” I answered, this time out loud.

  “And you want me to marry you?” My face was completely exposed. I knew what he could see in it, I knew what he was asking, I could deceive the whole world, but not him, and I didn’t want to deceive him anyway.

  “Yes, I want you to do it.”

  “Good, if that’s what you want, then that’s what I’ll do. I gave you a key, have you got the key? I want you to use it always. Will you use it? I’m leaving the country in July, and then too … you can stay here as long as you need to.”

  How easily female tears turn into sexual arousal, not only of the male comforter but also of the weeping woman. The woman’s panties were already pulled down, one melting was turning into another, and Ravel’s Bolero was beginning to swell in the background when the man said: “And you’ll manage, and you’ll be all right, because that’s how it is in your story. Everything according to rules of the genre, right?”

  ON THE MORNING OF MY WEDDING

  On the morning of my wedding I went to the Old City and bought a white dress. I didn’t think that I was buying a wedding dress, but suddenly, as if for no reason, I just coveted a white galabiyeh flapping on a hanger in an alleyway, and it was only afterwards that it occurred to me to wear it to the Rabbinate.

  “They expect a white dress,” I said meekly to Alek who examined me in silence before we left the house. “If they don’t like the way we’re dressed they might throw us out, and we’ll have wasted our time for nothing.”

  With the dress in my hand I strolled in the direction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, simply because this was one of the places I went with Alek.

  I’ve already mentioned that he loved churches, they acted on his soul, and when I stood in the church at his side, I understood that his admiration wasn’t only aesthetic. “That’s a nice picture,” I let slip once in one of the alcoves opposite the sooty face of the Virgin Mary. “I like it.”

  “It’s horrible icon,” he replied impatiently from the side, “most of the paintings here are horrible.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s not a question of what I think. They’re simply horrible, but it really doesn’t matter. Church isn’t a museum. And from religious point of view maybe bad art is preferable.”

  Sometimes he would hurry through the halls—in Gethsemane, in the Dormition, in the Holy Sepulchre, there were two Saturdays when we walked as far as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem—and then, “That’s it, let’s go get some coffee.” Other times he would linger in one of the corners, standing erect and somehow obedient, his hands folded in front of him on the zipper of his jeans, not focused on any of the objects around him, and nevertheless somehow very focused indeed. It seemed as if he were capable of standing there for hours without moving a muscle, as if he had been trained to wait in silence, and the sight made my heart contract. I tried to impose a similar stillness on my own body, I tried not to shift my weight from foot to foot, to relax my shoulders, to relax my hands, as if by succeeding in doing so, I would know what was happening inside him. It seemed to me that if only I emptied my mind and cleaned out my body, Alek’s thoughts would seep by some magical osmosis into the void formed inside me, where they would take shape as the picture, the memory, the ancient experience that he was seeking. Because for some reason it seemed to me that he was searching for something inside him, not actively but the opposite; that he was stilling his thoughts and making room for something to rise up inside him, as if he were trying to call it up and waiting for it to come.

  As always, I had to piece bits of information together. “My mother lives in this,” he said to me one night as we descended the Mount of Olives in the direction of the onion-domed church. “Lives in it?” “In Jesus.”

  “Is your mother a Christian?”

  “She’s a Jew. She’s a Jew in her own eyes, and everyone who sees her sees a Jew.”

  “Sometimes when we walk here I try to imagine what it would be like to believe that—”

  “You can’t.”

  “Just to imagine, what it’s like
to really believe that Jesus—”

  “Impossible. People like my mother, and all her friends from the sixties, they don’t believe ‘that Jesus,’ they believe in him, which is completely different. They believe in Jesus, and ‘believing that Jesus’ only comes—or doesn’t come—afterwards.”

  “But you would like to.”

  “What?”

  “Know how it feels? To believe?”

  “No, certainly not.” He lied, and after a few steps he added, “You and I, we don’t come to these questions from the same place. It’s not a question of what a person wants at all. You don’t choose the direction of the movement of your soul. I don’t choose the direction of mine. There’s nothing you can do about it. So the most a person with intellect can do is to curse all the way, to yell at his soul: Why did you take me here? And why did you take me there? It’s normal, it just doesn’t really help, all that yelling.”

  The moon whitened the stone walls lining the path and cast long shadows behind us. From a distance the city returned to its primeval sounds. A dog barking and a dog replying. The voice of a woman calling over rhythmic metallic blows. Far-near sounds as if we were walking in a country village. I wanted to linger longer, not to go down into the field of vision of the new city. But Alek took hold of my elbow, hastened his steps and said dryly, “Such talk … the direction of the movement of the soul … don’t trust a man who invites you to come up to his apartment to listen to Vivaldi, and don’t believe a man who talks to you about God.”

  So on the morning of my wedding I bought a white dress, and with the dress rolled up in my shoulder bag, without really thinking, I arrived at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Straight from the autumn heat into the cool halls below and the dim little room with the single icon hanging in it, the one that Alek loved and belittled.

  To this day I have no explanation for what happened there. I was very tired and very alert. I was high on the smell of the incense. Dazed by the transition from glaring light to gloom. I really don’t know, but I remember how the flickering candlelight lent a strange life to the young Madonna’s face, and I remember how quietly and gradually the longer I looked at her the more present she became to me, until she was more real than the tourists moving overhead. She was a timeless Mary, the one who received the annunciation and the one who gave birth, the one at the foot of the cross and the one ascending to heaven to be the bride of God. All the paintings I had seen with Alek combined in her, just as if she was a familiar personality and the object of private memories beyond time. So present to me was she in her infinite serenity, that it came about that I smiled, not to myself, but at her.

  What is there to say about this scene? I was eighteen, in other words still an adolescent, and stretched to my limits. And even at those moments I didn’t think of “revelation”—in other words I knew all the time that the flickering figure was only a mirage—but I had a terrible need, and the need radiated out of me, and projected the figure out of the picture, where it twinkled and shone at me until it came about that I addressed it. “Make it be true,” I begged, and by true I meant me and Alek.

  All kinds of alien words, alien wishes, whispered in me then. It embarrasses me to remember them now. I wished, with all my heart and soul, I wished for it to be “true” and “pure.” I asked to be “cleansed.” I asked to fall asleep and wake up bathed and washed in light, free of the dross of speech and of buffoonery and of lies. I was ready to endure pain, to be scoured by it, and I begged for grace. The devil knows where I got all this from, but the yearning was so physical and absolute, and the tenderness flowed and ebbed and flowed from her so powerfully that I relaxed my knee and started to kneel. Yes, that’s exactly how it happened, that’s what I did: I relaxed one knee, sent the other one backwards, and I was on the point of kneeling in front of the icon when something grabbed me in the middle of the movement, sent a shiver of disgust through me, and made me stand up straight.

  For a minute longer I stood there, concentrating on purpose on the grotesque artistic clumsiness of the gesture of kneeling, and I let the self-loathing pour through me and fill me completely. For one more minute I examined the rather blackened face of the Madonna, with its expression of autistic sweetness, and only then I turned to go. “Comedian,” my Grandma Dora’s word came back to me, “comedian, comedian, comedian,” and to the hammering of this word, “comedian,” I made my way through the crowd of tourists and pilgrims to the door of the church.

  URGES AND IMPULSES

  When she completes her studies Hagar will be a rabbi, and when she finds herself a congregation she will also marry people. In the framework of her tireless efforts to educate me, she recently sent me a collection of articles about the importance of “rites of passage” and the enlightened alternative ways of celebrating them. I read my lucid daughter’s lucid contribution, and paged disinterestedly through the rest of the collection, and the next morning I sat down to compose a careful maternal response. I praised the quality of the production and the editing, thanked her for the illuminating analysis of the components of the marriage ceremony and especially the interesting interpretation of the apparel of the bride, expressed my not completely sincere wish that the numbers of religious people like her fellow students would grow in Israel, too, and only at the bottom of the page made the barbed comment: “… I still have my doubts as to whether anthropologists can serve as priests.”

  “Understanding the meanings of the rites we perform doesn’t turn us into anthropologists,” my daughter answered in a hasty e-mail, “our awareness doesn’t contradict our faith, and as far as I’m concerned it only strengthens it.”

  If I had told Hagar the story of the morning I got married—which I have no intention of doing—she would have seen it as conclusive proof both of my need for ritual, and of my repressed religious feeling. And she would also have said that if I had been married in a Jewish ceremony that was “progressive” and “meaningful,” rather than in the Rabbinate, my feet would not have led me to a church. But that’s not the point, it’s something else entirely, which I can’t explain to her: I’m not denying the existence of the religious impulse, who am I to deny it, I’m only denying the existence of a godhead to which this impulse is directed. And I’m certainly not convinced that my intelligent daughter really believes in God.

  She certainly possesses an urge to believe. It’s not clear to me where it comes from or why, but it’s there—maybe this desire is genetic, maybe she inherited it from her parents. But the desire to believe is not the same as belief itself, and my daughter’s garrulous religiosity is in my eyes only a self-indulgent courting of a bad impulse. An act of buffoonery, exactly like my almost kneeling in front of a badly painted icon of the Virgin Mary.

  I didn’t understand much at the ages of seventeen and eighteen. Since then I’ve come to understand a little more, and when I recall things that Alek said, and even more so the way he stood there in the church, it seems to me that the religious impulse was aroused in him then to a degree or in a manner that he still needed to fight, and it was only for the sake of this war that he went to church. Liberating the experience in order to overcome it and emerge as someone who had triumphed over himself.

  And what was I doing there? The Christian God was Alek’s God, the specific god that Alek didn’t believe in. But a god you don’t believe in is still a god, and so it happened that when I was pining for Alek’s love, I went and prostrated myself to his gods.

  I have already made it clear, I think, that I find no touching charm or beauty in this—though this is not absolutely the truth. However much I despise myself for my attacks of religious epilepsy, I despise my daughter, without any justification, more. Despise not only her convenient, dietetic, easy to digest religion, but she herself, for the small, civilized instinct that she cultivates by will. Hagar is of course not deserving of this contempt, and who am I to despise my honest daughter, immeasurably more honest than I.

  Since Hagar’s new Jewishness isn’t only
an aspect of her life, but something that determines it more and more, the diplomatic dishonesty in our relationship will no doubt grow greater over the years. With her grandmothers, astonishingly enough, Hagar has found a common language, and her preoccupation with religion has only increased the love that they both feel for her anyway. My mother is capable of spending hours nodding in admiration as my daughter lectures her on Jewish culture/Jewish renewal/new ways of interpreting Jewish traditions, etc. Meekly she agrees that a great injustice had been done her by her parents who robbed her of “her roots,” “her culture” and “her Jewish bookshelf,” and glowing with pride she occasionally accompanies her granddaughter to Saturday morning services at her progressive synagogue.

  As for Grandmother Marina, Alek’s mother, it seems to me that she is happy that her granddaughter is showing an interest in “spirituality,” even though she has no idea of the nature of this “spirituality,” and although no serious discussion is possible between them, both because they have no common language, and because of the vast cultural gap between them.

  When her father invited her to visit him in Paris, after she was discharged from the army and after my first visit to Moscow, Hagar was still at the beginning of her “Judaization” process, full of conceptual doubts and willing to sit up until the wee hours of morning debating such questions as “What is Jewish identity?” and “Is Judaism a religion/nationality or a culture?” In her debating style she sometimes reminds me more of Amikam than of her father. In the ten days she spent with her grandmother in Paris the child did not find an answer to the vexing question of whether Grandmother Marina, who had secretly converted to Christianity while still in Russia, could be considered a Jew.