by Gail Hareven
I understood that all kinds of relations who were strangers to her and also strangers who weren’t related to her at all, enveloped her in warmth and love there, fed her as if she were a baby, accompanied her everywhere she went so that she wouldn’t get lost in the big city, and that no serious clarifications took place, either with Alek or with Marina. Alek waited for her outside when she went into Notre Dame Cathedral, and at the same opportunity remarked, by the way, that in recent years his mother’s church attendance had fallen off. A couple of times Marina said grace in Russian when they sat down to eat; over her and her husband’s double bed hung a triangle of beautiful icons—what the husband, Jenia’s, position was on these matters I do not know, for some reason he was seldom mentioned, as if he didn’t count—and when they parted at the airport Marina covertly made the sign of the cross over her granddaughter’s head. These were all the clues that Hagar received, and she had no idea what to make of them, but for a while it seemed that her tendency to set the world in order in the same way as she tidied her room had been swallowed up in a torrent of sense impressions: the smell of cheese and roasting chestnuts, the taste of new foods, the giddiness of the wine to which she was not accustomed, an exhibition of paintings, a statue, the view of a street framed in a café window.
Hagar talked without stopping, and a little rodent inside me devoured it all to the last crumb, while I kept my eyes and hands busy sorting the washing, folding the washing, cutting up the salad, so that she wouldn’t see and wouldn’t guess at the depths of my abject longing to feel the touch of the air around her father.
In my imagination I followed them to the Louvre “to see the Impressionists,” and only after she piled on the details and digressed in various directions did I discover that she went to the Louvre not with Alek but with “a terribly interesting friend of Grandma Marina’s, an artist who’s actually an American, but she’s been living in Paris for years.” And I felt a similar secret shame at the description of the “amazing picnic in the Bois de Boulogne,” which I only discovered later had not been attended by Alek.
To my complete and utter surprise it seemed to me that Grandma Marina had captured Hagar’s imagination and thoughts more than her father—or perhaps she had enabled her to avoid thinking about her father and her relationship with him. “You know that at Granny Marina’s, people phone up at one o’clock in the morning as if it’s the middle of the day.” “The most amazing thing is that Granny’s gorgeous, you should see her, she’s got legs that look as if they reach all the way to her neck, much better than mine.” Or: “I don’t understand how come Grandma Marina, with her gift for languages, never took the trouble to learn English.” The stream of her chatter flowed on and on, and I drank it in thirstily, until she gradually returned to her old boring ways, with questions like: “So in your opinion, can Brother Daniel, a Christian priest who claims to be Jewish, be considered a Jew just because he was born one?”
I HAD REACHED THE MORNING OF MY WEDDING
I had reached the morning of my wedding, in the month of October, in the year 1972, and as far as possible I shall try to stick with this chronology, without getting ahead of myself or digressing at every thought that pops into my head. But if I’m going to talk about my wedding, there is an impression I must correct first: when I mentioned the consolation fuck Alek gave me after my leaving-home scene I didn’t say that it was our only fuck since the day we presented ourselves at the Rabbinate.
It is clear to me, and it was clear to me then too, that Alek, to the best of his nonverbal ability, was trying to clarify himself to me: don’t mistake me and don’t deceive yourself, we’re talking about a fictitious marriage here, and you don’t fuck a woman you’re married to fictitiously in every corner of the house, and you certainly don’t stroke her hair and look into her eyes before, after, and during the act.
Alek, being Alek, was incapable of not offering me his home after I was “thrown out by my parents who demanded that I go to the army,” but the fact that I was living with him only complicated the situation. If I hadn’t been living there, maybe he wouldn’t have abstained from me entirely, but living together was too much like proper married life and he was therefore obliged to draw the line.
“Obliged to draw the line”—I am presenting his abstinence as if it stemmed from an explicit decision. I would like to believe that it came from some deliberate decision, on principle, which was the only reason he kept away from me even though he still desired me greatly. It would be nice to believe this face-saving explanation, very nice, but I know very well, and I knew very well, that it isn’t so. I haven’t got a clue whether Alek “decided” to abstain from me, maybe he “decided” and maybe he didn’t, but in any event it is clear to me that most of the time he didn’t need any “decision” to depend on or remind himself of. The simple truth is that the farce of the marriage, the political act of the marriage—whatever we call it—produced a sense of complication and turned Noa Weber into an oppressive presence on the ground. It didn’t happen in a minute, it didn’t happen in a day, and in the terrible months of chilliness there were still moments of warmth, but the process was very rapid.
So what could Noa Weber do? What could I do? I could have picked up my peacock’s tail and returned to my parents’ home, married or single, they would have taken me back. I could have gone to Grandma Dora on the kibbutz. I could have gone to the recruiting center and volunteered to serve in the army even after I was married. I could have “confronted Alek and discussed the situation openly,” as the wise advisors in the agony columns in the newspapers always say, or, in the same spirit, I could have taken myself to a psychologist who would “help me to untie the knot.” I could have and could have and could have, but the problem of course is that I couldn’t. That is to say that from the chemical point of view there was simply no possibility of my detaching myself from him. Just as there was no possibility for me to change my soul, or to cut myself into pieces. I loved him. In other words, he had infiltrated my very depths and then spread through all my cells, and changed my being until I was no longer mistress of my love. It wasn’t “my” love. It didn’t belong to me, I belonged to it and was ruled by it. Or perhaps I belonged to him and was ruled by him. I don’t know.
I’m not denying all responsibility, but I feel I can definitely claim diminished responsibility; and so in the end I did the only thing I could do, which was to efface myself so that my presence wouldn’t be oppressive. Light as the wind, playful as the wind, that is what I tried to be. Soft, pure air, a perfect cirrus cloud floating in the kitchen sky.
It’s easier to describe on the practical level. Alek was and remains a tidy man. I am still untidier than he is, but from the minute he cleared three shelves in the closet for me, I adapted myself to his standards of order and even more so: not a crumb on the chopping board, not a hair in the bathroom sink. Shrewdly I avoided playing the role of the housewife Alek was certainly not interested in, but I did my best to behave like the perfect roommate. When I polished off the cheese I was quick to replace it, when a bulb burned out in the bathroom I refrained from calling him to change it, and I never used up all the hot water, things like that, and looking back I can see that it was all nonsense. I can’t imagine Alek resenting having to change a light bulb, or complaining about the cheese, but nevertheless I was careful.
Beyond all this was the perpetual question of the choreography of our parallel lives. Alek settled into the study, I without a word was given the bedroom, and when Alek closed his door, I closed mine too—so far it was clear. But what am I supposed to do when he’s sitting in the kitchen? Is it a let’s-peel-Noa-an-orange morning, let’s tell her the name of the quartet playing on the radio, improve her mind with a little “Nietzsche, Ivanov, and the Dionysian principle,” and chat to her about romantic triangles in Russian literature? Or is it the beginning of another day when we don’t raise our head from the bed or the book even when the door bell rings? Does he want me frivolous now, passing airy remar
ks? Is my silent presence acceptable to him now? And at this moment—what? And what about the moment after it? Will it drive him crazy if I move? Open the tap? Chew? Breathe in his den?
Alek was and is a man of expansive gestures, but the gesture with which he opened his home to me was too expansive even for him.
WEDDING
Three people accompanied us from the house: Yoash-Hamida, the ginger-haired Ginsberg, and the revolting Hyman, and at the entrance to the Rabbinate we were joined by the acne-scarred Maoist with another guy I didn’t know, whom Alek apparently didn’t know either.
Until they were ready to marry us, we were all asked to wait in the corridor. Alek, a pale prince, graceful, disdainful, leaned on the doorpost, while Hyman took over one of the offices and conducted all kinds of debates. I remember couples sitting on a bench like patients in a queue at the free clinic, the screaming of a woman outside, all kinds of people passing between us with rapid steps carrying cardboard files, all of them staring at the woman in the white dress: what’s she doing here? Staring at the woman pacing to and fro in a white dress, in other words, me. One man—he sticks in my mind—walked past with floral slippers on his feet.
Money passed from Yoash’s wallet into the drawer of one of the clerks, a note was written, and then we were sent to an empty hall upstairs, to wait for them to prepare the marriage contract and collect ten men for a prayer quorum. Everything registered in my mind in partial pictures, like quick peeks through the blindfold in a game of blindman’s bluff: stacked towers of orange plastic chairs, a glimpse of a blue nylon scroll, which was the rolled-up wedding canopy, the sight of a shoe crushing a cigarette end on yellowing floor tiles. Three people gathered opposite the rabbi next to a table in the corner, crowded, sullen voices asking and answering in the corner, feet receding from the table, a stir spreads through the room, and then a pair of hands take hold of the pole of the canopy as if it were a flag. And all this time I kept my eyes lowered and I didn’t look at Alek, but even without looking at him I knew his location and his movements. A concentrated prince, captive among the hand-wavers.
Two women approached me, neither of them the rabbi’s wife I had met on the day we came to register, two other women. They asked me my name, they asked me pityingly about my family, if I was expecting anyone else to come, and when the rabbi came up to demand the note from the mikveh, they gave him my name in Yiddish, and it was only from their gestures that I understood what they were saying, that the poor girl was pregnant. The arrogance of our group abated, or perhaps it did not penetrate to these kindly, pious women, because their fingers kept touching my shoulders and my hair, as if I were in need. They straightened the neckline of my dress, they smoothed and stretched its folds, they brushed a lock of hair off my forehead, and then with increasing boldness they affectionately kneaded my arms. If we had met in the street the next day, I would not have recognized them, but together they arranged a gauze kerchief on my head, so I would have a wedding veil, they called me “the beautiful bride” and wished—it sounded like a promise—that all would be well.
When the canopy was spread a command was given, and the two women took a firm, final grip on my arms and began to lead me round and round the groom in what felt like a kind of slow torture. “This is so you’ll forget all the others,” one of them breathed warmly into my ear.
Although I’m not tall, they were shorter than I was, actual dwarves, and with every step I was conscious, to the point of gut-twisting revulsion, of the grotesqueness of this circular movement in threesome, of how I disappeared for a few steps, and immediately reappeared in Alek’s view, with no possibility of escape. Straight-backed as a novice model, pulled by the arms, one shoulder drooping and the other raised, unable to even them out, my face distorted, unable to relax my expression. On the next round, here it comes, on the next round I’ll slip past him with nonchalant, jaunty grace, I’ll smile ironically, and again I am under his all-seeing eyes, and everything is even more crooked than before.
In all my life up to then I had attended four or five weddings, no more; the children of my parents’ friends, married on a platform on the lawn opposite the kibbutz dining hall, or in a hotel. For Alek this was his first Jewish wedding, but somehow he succeeded in deciphering the Yiddish-accented “Behold thou art sanctified unto me with this ring” and to repeat the words, and when he repeated them, for a moment I didn’t recognize his voice, and it seemed to me that somebody else was repeating them so that he would understand. One of the strangers present in the room.
Is it possible, as my daughter claims, that a person has a kind of genetic memory in which the ancient texts are imprinted? I don’t have a genetic memory, I don’t believe in it, it’s nonsense, and nevertheless there was a moment, when he put the ring on my finger, there was a moment when all the pains of self-consciousness vanished and shame disappeared. For a few moments I was absolutely innocent, sanctified, sanctified, sanctified, blushing, raising my eyes at last from the white of his shirt to his naked face, with my hand held in his, and all of me loose and unraveled as if we were alone together. Let my right hand forget its cunning, Alek, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget. No joy, no gladness, no rejoicing, no jubilation, and nevertheless, my beloved husband, I will not forget.
As soon as we got home I removed the thin band from my finger, left it in full sight on the window sill in the kitchen, and there it remained until after Alek left. Before he put it on my finger, the ring had warmed up in the repulsive Hyman’s shirt pocket, through the blur of my kerchief-veil I saw it being removed from there. I imagined that he had reminded Alek it needed to be bought, or that he had been asked to buy it, and in any case even if it had not been purchased with Hyman’s money, I could not wear it. I was only married to him fictitiously, but the fact that Hyman had bought the ring prevented me from developing any kind of fetishistic relation to it. And that too is perhaps for the best.
FETISHISM
The truth is that I had no need of the ring as a fetish. First of all because I was surrounded by everything of Alek’s, I was living in his house after all. And even after he left and took his clothes and most of his books with him, even after he removed the black comb from the bathroom shelf and the shaving brush from the sink, even after he gave all the records to Yoash, I was still surrounded by things related to him: the curtain he had hung in the bedroom, the blanket with which we had covered ourselves, shelves he had put up, a bed and another bed and empty drawers. The house was charged with his movements and his touch, and recharged with them on each of his visits, and even though with the passing years—before I restored everything to its former state—I’d changed many things, and so did Hagar (carpets, television, a new closet, an air-conditioner)—all these did not banish his spirit.
In romantic movies and novels it was once the fashion to make a big fuss about a single object: “my mother’s cameo ring,” “the packet of his letters,” “her fan,” “his baseball bat,” her picture, his picture, his underpants. In our day, I think, people are rather ashamed of this fetishism, but I can actually understand how one can become attached to a single object, and if I failed to do so it is only because so much was haunted by Alek in any case.
Sometimes I think, it’s the weather that does it for me. It’s the smell of the rain. It’s the warm wind. It’s the sight of the softened light refracted from the stone, like it was then. It’s the taste of the air that’s exactly like it was then when I went out in the evening for a run. With them and because of them come the longings, and the sense of his absence which makes him desperately present. Because there is nothing that makes someone more present than absence. And with moderate fluctuations in intensity, he is still absent-present to me most of the time.
But what did I just say? The warm wind and the softened light refracted from the stone give rise to my longings? In the last analysis that’s romantic bullshit too. Setting the feeling in “the softened light refracted from the stone” to make it more photo
genic. I loved Alek under the ugly neon of the hospital too, and in all kinds of other lights that can’t be poeticized.
Warm wind, cold wind, drafty wind, wind with a whiff of diesel oil, and no wind at all, they can all do it to me, and my love stirs within me with every change in the light and every movement in the air. Occasionally, I have to admit, it feels like grace, his presence suffused in everything. My awakened senses. The objects quickened into life. The touch of everything he touched. Alek’s spirit in inanimate objects.
WHEN YOU GIVE BIRTH AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN
When you give birth at the age of eighteen, you have no choice but to explain yourself: So tell me, didn’t anybody teach you about contraceptives? An intelligent girl like you, didn’t you realize that you were pregnant? So how come you didn’t have an abortion? Weren’t you afraid that you were going to ruin your life? What on earth were you thinking?
I began to invent excuses while I was still pregnant, clearly aware that I was lying, and when I didn’t have anyone to tell them to, I told them to myself: Look, my period was never regular. Listen, in October I bled (true, a little spot of blood which I didn’t really think was a period). Understand, we did use contraceptives, but nothing is a hundred percent effective, by the time I realized what was happening it was already too late to have an abortion. These were my first rationalizations, and they were all intended to explain to the world that I wasn’t an utter fool, that I was a rational person, that I had worthy goals in life and that I had no intention of losing control of my life. Because this, of course, is what teenage pregnancy means to the public: irresponsible stupidity and losing control over your life. And if you don’t want to be seen as a stupid fool who has lost control over her life, you have to inform people what happened in your underpants when.