by Gail Hareven
Over the course of the years, as Hagar grew up, I began to tell, especially to my girlfriends, a slightly different version: My period was never regular, blah-blah-blah, when I found out it was already too late, blah-blah-blah, Alek actually wanted me to have an abortion, an abortion would have suited his convenience—but why should a woman do something just because it’s convenient for a man? It was my pregnancy, my body, my reproductive system. Understand me, girls, in the end I wanted the baby, and as far as I’m concerned the father had nothing to do with it.
Girls: What, you really didn’t think of letting him share in the decision?
Me (so arrogant, so heroic): No, I didn’t. From the outset I didn’t think it was any of his business, and I gave him to understand as much.
Girls: And you weren’t afraid? To be a single mother at that age?
Me: Of course I was afraid, obviously I was afraid, what am I, an idiot? But I decided that if that was what I wanted to do, that’s what I was going to do.
A girl (suspicious): And you really had no feeling for him?
Me (in an amused voice): No feeling? Look, of course I had a certain feeling. That is to say, we were quite close, and all kinds of things happened between us, obviously they did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. But the pregnancy was much more important to me than the being-in-love bit, and the being-in-love bit was over anyway.
The bottom line of all these conversations, and later on in my life of a number of newspaper interviews:
A woman needs a husband like a fish needs a bicycle! “Okay … maybe there are some fish who need bicycles, I’m not judging them, I only hope that this is a problem that evolution will solve …” Me, in one of those interviews. Sometimes I sound exactly like my Nira Woolf.
Long live the eternal, true, pure, and meaningful tie between a mother and her offspring, to which no other love can compare.
Telling Hagar the story of her conception and birth was the most complicated. Because what could I say to the child? My daughter, my marriage to your father was only fictitious? What’s fictitious, Mommy? My daughter, I never loved your father? So how did I get born to you, Mommy? You should know, my daughter, that your father didn’t love me and that he didn’t want you either.
You may say that I could have told her the truth, that the truth is best, and the truth is actually an excellent story to tell a child. You want the truth? Here it is. The truth, my child, is that I loved your father, that I still love him, I loved him so madly that I never imagined for a moment, I couldn’t have imagined, getting rid of his child. The truth, my darling daughter, is that at first you were only a fetish to me, the object most charged with Alek, something that would remain after he disappeared into wicked Germany.
You should know, my little one, that if I had become pregnant by somebody else, Amikam for instance, this story would have ended completely differently, in the gynecologist’s trash can. That’s what you would have done to me, Mommy? Killed me and thrown me into the trash? Go confuse a little one of three, four, or five with philosophical arguments along the lines of: If you had a different father you wouldn’t be you and you wouldn’t exist at all, so that your claim that you could have ended up in the trash is meaningless. You go and put a three-year-old to bed with arguments like those.
Apart from which, even though when she was small I was not yet a fully-fledged feminist, a declared feminist I mean, I was instinctively averse to raising a little girl on the basis of the drugged love of a man. I think that what was at work here was a protective maternal instinct to distance her from my addiction, joined by the simple motive of pride. I didn’t want her to know that her mother was a downtrodden doormat. A worm eaten up by longings for a man who was her father. I didn’t want her ever to see her mother eating the leftover scraps of affections from his table. I wanted her to have respect for me, and I had no intention of passing on my weakness to the younger generation.
Over the years, therefore, my version for Hagar was composed as follows: Your mother and father were very young when they met, and even when people love one another, it’s not a good idea to marry so young. So Daddy loved you? Yes. And you loved him? Yes, but not like I love you; you, pumpkin, I love always and forever, because that’s the way mothers love their children. And fathers? Fathers what? Fathers don’t love their children? Fathers do love their children, but sometimes somebody has a child when that somebody isn’t ready to be a father yet. When that somebody is still a bit of a child himself.
The idea of her father’s immaturity sank into Hagar’s mind, so that when she was five or six years old, during the period when Alek was living in Israel again, she once asked me: “What do you think, do you think that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?”
“And what do you think?” I evaded her question with a question.
“I didn’t ask you what I think,” my logical daughter replied, “I asked you what you think. I know what I think.”
“You know better than I do. You went for a walk with him, not me.”
TELLING ALEK THE NEWS
By the end of October I more or less knew that I was pregnant, and in November, right after my birthday, I went to be examined. I didn’t tell Alek about the test and I didn’t have to tell him about the results either. A few days after my visit to the gynecologist, and after I had already obtained the results from the lab, he found out for himself. It wasn’t the first time I threw up, and I always tried to do it quietly. I knelt down and bowed my head over the toilet bowl, but early on this particular morning when I emerged from the toilet with my mouth full of nausea, Alek was standing opposite me in the passage.
A similar scene takes place in a lot of movies and television series. A woman tells her lover that she’s pregnant, a pregnancy which all the circumstances known to the audience lead them to believe is unwanted, and at these moments we always see the woman in close-up: the camera lingers on her facial expressions, on the nervous movements of her hands, and then draws it out to keep us in suspense. What’s going to happen, what’s going to happen now? Will the lover’s face light up in joyful pride when his paternal instincts are unexpectedly aroused? Will he reject the woman rudely? Will he meanly cast doubt on his paternity of the child she is bearing in her womb? Offer her money for an abortion?
In my case there were no lingering moments of suspense. And before either of us uttered a word, questions and answers passed between our eyes. As still happens to this day, it seemed that everything was conveyed before it was spoken. And nevertheless he asked, and nevertheless I answered. “I’m pregnant,” and immediately added, “but it doesn’t concern you.” I had prepared the position, the words, in advance, I had worked on them for hours, but saying them out loud for the first time, standing weakly in the toilet door, they sounded quite pathetic.
“How doesn’t it concern me?” He spoke almost without moving his lips, in a dry, disgusted tone. This gave me a second chance to speak my piece.
“It doesn’t concern you, because I definitely don’t want anything from you,” I replied and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. This time I had been more successful, the words “I don’t want anything from you” had come out without any female hysteria.
Strange how small sounds and movements can have an effect: from the moment I pronounced these calm, uplifting words, from the moment I closed the door behind me, the fact that I had said the words and closed the door, and the knowledge that Alek was waiting outside—these little things filled me with a feeling of power. I remember, I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror, I brushed my hair thoroughly, wet air came in through the window and banished the last of my nausea. All that remained was the rather pleasant, disembodied feeling that comes after vomiting. I inspected my face in the gray light and I liked what I saw: absolute detachment and calm. As if I had been enveloped in a chilly halo, as if a cool blue halo had enveloped my heart. I love you, I thought, I love you infinitely, and you, my love, relax, relax, because n
one of this has got anything to do with you.
And thus, like an Ayn Rand heroine, I came out to him at my leisure, washed and combed, with the gestalt mantra tasting of peppermint toothpaste repeating itself in my throat: I do my thing and you do yours, because you’re you and I’m me. As far as I remember, this nonsense of I’m me and you’re you was a big hit in those days, people repeated it all the time, and always as if it were an amazing, original discovery flung at their interlocutors in order to open their eyes to a vital truth. But in those moments in the bathroom this piece of nonsense gave me strength. And I mean strength. I was an independent personality capable of anything, and I went out to him like a resolute goddess of free will.
Afterwards we sat in the kitchen. “It has nothing to do with you,” repeated the independent, all-powerful personality, “you’re leaving for Heidelberg in July and I … I’ll do whatever I like.” I couldn’t even pronounce the sentence “I’m going to have the baby,” it sounded so embarrassing to me.
“You have to be realistic,” he said and made me lemon tea without being asked. “Normal human beings should be realistic, and you’re not being realistic now.” “Realistic?” I sneered, suddenly sure of my strength. “Since when, exactly, Alek Ginsberg, have you been a realist?” I was great, no doubt about it, I didn’t only impress myself, I impressed him, too, because he flashed me a smile and seemed to reassess me. “So you still love me?” he asked quietly. “I love you.” He looked at his fingers which for a moment touched my face, and on his face there was a new and strange expression of humility. “I can’t be anybody’s father,” he said.
“I know that.”
“You know that,” he repeated.
“Yes, I know, and I also know that you’re leaving, and I don’t want anything from you.”
“You don’t want anything or you’re not asking for anything?” He always had the shocking ability to put his finger right on the spot.
Was it the madness of love that led me to think that although he was afraid of being bothered, he was somehow also fascinated and even delighted by the whole thing? I’m still sure that it was Alek himself, not the illusions of love, who secretly made me think so. By his expression. By the fluctuations in his voice. By the movements of his fingers. As if he were conducting two conversations with me at once. In one language he says to me, with that lip-narrowing disgust, which looks to me like self-disgust, again: “If you want … to end it, Gido—remember him?—the redheaded guy who was with us at the Rabbinate … he’s doing his residency at Hadassah, he could tell us where go to.” And in the other language he applauds the madness, the holy and actually rather surprising madness of Noa Weber.
“Forgive me,” he says in the end in a gentle voice, “I shouldn’t have spoken like that. A man has no right to tell a woman what to do about her pregnancy.”
BEING REALISTIC
I, to the best of my knowledge, am a realist, but how realistic I was at the age of eighteen it’s hard to say. If one of Hagar’s girlfriends from high school had come to me, if Hagar herself had come to me, and said: (a) I’m pregnant, and I’m not going to have an abortion; (b) I’m in love; (c) he doesn’t love me; and (d) he’s leaving the country in nine months time—I would have made her see reason right then and there. First I would have knocked the nonsense out of her and then I would have accompanied what remained of her to a reputable gynecologist to have an abortion.
Yes, and just how do you think you’ll manage with a child? Have you got any idea of what it means to be a single parent? What makes you think that you’ll be able to study and work at the same time? And where exactly will the money come from? And the strength to get up at night? And when the child suddenly gets sick, which happens quite often, and you’re all alone, and there’s nobody else to take care of him but you … or if you get sick, or heaven forbid if you break your arm, and that happens too, have you any idea of the stress, the anxiety, of being without any safety net at all? Now explain to me exactly what you have in mind. That your parents will bring him up? That your parents will support you both until you grow up and stand on your own feet? Aha, very good, you say you want to be independent. So tell me, exactly how much money have you earned in your life up to now? A hundred shekel as a babysitter? And apart from babysitting, my dear, have you ever taken care of a baby in your life?
Since no friend of Hagar’s ever came to ask my advice about an unwanted, in-these-circumstances pregnancy, I never had a chance to test the effectiveness of this rebuke. On me, in any case, it didn’t work. And I could no more consider getting rid of the fetus than Mary could have sat on a rock in the hills of Nazareth to consider getting rid of Jesus. Which isn’t to say that I thought I was pregnant with the Messiah or any such psychotic delusion, but that the pregnancy itself was sacred to me. Sacred not because I decided that it was, I didn’t decide anything, it was simply self-evident to me.
The word “sacred” is difficult for me, it’s difficult for me to use it without mockery, without being witty at my own expense, but I don’t have any other word, and even today and even now, I can still relive the feeling of hard grace that came with my love and was embodied in the developing fetus.
Since I was young but not entirely stupid, or not entirely detached from reality, I was scared stiff, and the fear naturally increased the closer the due date approached. And although I may not have had a serious grasp of what it meant to be a single mother at eighteen—I couldn’t possibly have known—I can testify that I certainly tried to guess. In other words, at first I just wondered vaguely, and later on I imagined, and then I imagined more, until towards the end I spent most of the day and night agonizing over completely realistic worries, which, especially after darkness fell, appeared insolvable. It would be reasonable to assume that the worry would banish the grace, but this did not happen, and throughout that winter I existed as if on two planes: one of fearful thoughts going round in circles—birth, hospital, pain, baby; money, profession, baby, money; birth, pain, pain, profession, loneliness, parents, baby—and another plane, on which I had as if been chosen to be blessed. Blessed I say now, and blessed I thought then too, but there was nothing saccharine-sweet in this consciousness. No bliss-azure-skies-plump-cherubs. It was more like a mission or a sign that marked me out, like a burn on my skin, which could not be denied even in great fear. What I’m trying to say is that grace does not banish the fear, but on the contrary, grace can be terrifying.
I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT MONEY
I have to talk about money, a few words at least. Because if I’m boasting about the courage with which I accepted the pregnancy—which in a sense is what I’m doing—it must be remembered that the courage demanded of me wasn’t so very great. And in order to deflate my heroism a little, I must give an account of the economic circumstances, as they say, in which I cultivated my love.
“Cultivated my love,” I say, “cultivated my love.” To the best of my knowledge I never “cultivated” it. And I only said so in order to needle myself and be sarcastic at my own expense. It would be much more accurate to say: the economic circumstances in which I loved.
When I left my parents’ home in an adolescent tempest, all I had was a small savings account at the postal bank. A little money I received for my bat mitzvah, money I saved from babysitting and counseling at summer camps, and the symbolic dollars my Aunt Greta sent on my birthdays. Since I deluded myself that the rift with my parents was final, and since I had been brought up to work, that same week I applied to the labor bureau, which sent me to an old bed and breakfast in the suburb of Talpiot. Until the end of the month of February, when I could no longer hide my pregnancy and I was fired, I worked there from quarter to seven in the morning to quarter to four in the afternoon. Two Arab women from East Jerusalem cleaned and tidied the upstairs rooms, and I, looking more presentable to the proprietors, laid the tables, cut up vegetables, fried omelets, poured drinks, served meals, and in general provided the guests with “homey service.” At eleven o’clock
, when breakfast was over, I mopped the floors in the dining room, the lobby and the stairs, and all I had to do after that was to sit and answer the phone. The work was relatively easy, the owners, an elderly couple, were quite friendly until they fired me—at that period I did not yet have a clue about “legal rights”—and there isn’t the slightest justification to see me as the pregnant-servant-heroine. I certainly am not trying to present myself as such. And even if it happened that I was overcome by weakness or nausea while frying the omelets, these attacks were not severe and passed quickly.
My difficulty with the work was different. I have to admit that the smell of the frying in my hair and of the detergent in my clothes, and all the “go, do, bring,” were quite damaging to my self-image. It’s true that I was brought up to work. I was taught that all forms of work were deserving of respect, but even on a kibbutz scale this was close to the bottom of the ladder. Service work. Not productive labor that a person could be proud of, definitely not something that brought credit to the kibbutz. And let’s not forget that while I was busy not bringing credit to the kibbutz, Alek was plowing through Nietzsche with the help of a Russian-German dictionary, poring over his mysterious Soloviev and his symbolist poets, or catching the eye of his teacher, the poet Leah Goldberg, in class. I know that he tried to attract her attention in class, she interested him, I guessed that he interested her, too, and this too did nothing to add to my sense of worth.
What Alek’s financial situation was I did not know, and it never occurred to me to ask. That is to say, I knew that sometimes he had money, because then he took taxis and threw money around at Fink’s Bar, and that shortages of cash would last until he got fed up and he would go to work with Yoash. Further details I learned only later, after he left, and after the repulsive Hyman came to inform me of my legal husband’s intentions and of my rights: As of this moment, Alek, even if he so desired, is unable to pay child support, you have to understand this, and since he is abroad in any case, my advice to you is not to enter into a fight because you won’t get anything out of it. At the time, as you probably remember, I advised you to talk to him in order to secure your position, but there’s no point in crying over spilt milk now. Under the circumstances, and if we’re already talking, have you got some arrangement for the child already? They’re looking for an extra girl to work in our office in the mornings, and if you’re interested I’ll be happy to recommend you. Just take into account that you’ll have to learn to type, because presumably they didn’t teach you to type at school, ha ha ha.