The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  I admit that I was really turned on by this sad ballad then, even though I already had some idea that it was stupid and sick.

  In my imagination, I think, I saw myself as the descendent of all these lovelorn literary women, their sister in an order of unrequited love. Armed with my limitless love, armed with my passivity, possessed of great strength in my way, and “Not all is vanity, my dear / not all is vain,” and “Strength has no end, my dear, / only the body that breaks like clay.”

  Clearly I was trying to glorify my wretchedness, obviously I was trying to glorify my wretchedness, what else? But this glorification held me to a certain standard of dignified behavior, and it may have saved me from an even worse wretchedness, and from actually crawling like a worm. I mean that “If you tell me to go I shall go, / If you tell me to stay away I shall stay away,” is preferable, after all, to “please don’t go, no, don’t go, I can’t stand it, I can’t take it, no, Alek, please, please don’t.…”

  So it’s true that I painted the banal bad as “gloriously bad” to myself, but it’s also true that the “gloriously bad” helped me to get through another miserable hour and another miserable morning. And therefore, however ridiculous I find this romantic pose today, and for all my crushing feminist critique of those poems, I remember how at a certain point in my life they simply helped me to cope. And how in the end, after I gave birth and Alek left, what saved me from total collapse was precisely the romantic pose.

  IF YOU TELL ME TO GO

  Among all the marvelous qualities I bestowed on my heroine Nira Woolf I also gave her a musical gift and an exquisite contralto. For the most part she only plays to herself at night, improvising jazz both in order to relax and in order to think about her current case, but once I let her sing a completely different song. This happens in the last scene of Dead Woman’s Voice, the sixth book in the series, whose grim plot centers on the attempt to cover up a case of incest. The raped daughter of the senior officer in the security services kills herself before the book begins. The senior prosecuting attorney, the rapist father’s mistress, who is completely subjugated to his will, kills herself in chapter sixteen, after he thrusts a revolver into her hand. And in the last scene, the intern who was trying to blackmail the father lies bleeding on the steps to Nira’s house, while the chief villain himself lies bound at her feet.

  Throughout the book my Nira is mainly interested in the servile behavior of the mistress-lawyer, and at the end, after the mystery is solved and the police are already on their way, she sits down at the piano and sings to the villain lying on the floor with his hands and feet tied painfully together behind his back, in the so-called “banana knot,” Alterman’s “Song of Three Answers”: “Everything you ask and wish / I shall be happy to do / I shall never lack the strength / To do as you wish me to.” Nira Woolf’s back is turned to the cruel villain who tried to trap her, too—first to seduce her with his charms and then to murder her—her warm contralto grows louder from line to line against a background of sirens, and only when the police are already in the room does she turn around, without even looking at him. A private joke of my own, I would say, but what kind of a joke is it in fact?

  My darling Hagar, who is not a great admirer of my books—she considers them “shallow”—actually praised this scene, although she remarked that “for her taste” it was “too far-fetched.” My daughter, who from time to time sends me articles about “The image of the woman in …”—all her articles seem to me the regurgitation of the same slogans—my daughter appears to have been born with an innate immunity to the germ of romanticism and to have subsequently enlisted in the medical corps dedicated in deadly earnest to its extermination. Not for her own personal benefit, since she does not seem to be in need of it, but for the good of the population at large.

  Hagar’s preoccupation with “the image of the woman” began in high school, at the same high school I attended myself, with the same literature teacher and regarding the very same works that I myself studied.

  “To say to a woman ‘be to me a god and an angel,’ ” she once wrote in one of her more successful compositions, “is like telling her that she isn’t a human being!!! Bialik has no right to dictate to a woman what she should be!!!” On behalf of these well-put sentiments, with all their angry exclamation marks, and others like them, my darling often quarreled with her literature teacher. Thanks to her congenital immunity she seems to be completely deaf to certain notes, so that they simply fail to have any effect on her at all, or else they activate only her sense of justice and social anger. A justified anger, I have to say, an absolutely and completely justified social anger.

  But for the second of July 1972, but for Alek, perhaps I would be as pure and innocent as she is today.

  “In my opinion Sonia is a superficial one-dimensional character,” wrote my darling vehemently when they studied Crime and Punishment, and she added arguments far more compelling than any I had to offer at her age. All kinds of explanations about the connection between the kedosha, the saintly woman, and the kedeisha, the temple whore, and how “the patriarchal culture produced them both.”

  In my day the combination “patriarchal culture” did not yet exist.

  When I read the essay she left lying on the kitchen table, with the usual mark of 100 written on top of the page, it suddenly seemed to me that this red-inked hundred referred to my age, so infirm of mind did I feel. Muddling memories, he stood there like that and I lay there when he said and then I said.… My arteries so clogged with memories that I didn’t have a drop of strength to speak, and in any case there was too much, much too much, and it was too late to explain anything.

  When she praised the last scene of Dead Woman’s Voice my daughter told me—she was twenty-five then—that I had done well to “expose the falsity of that text” and that it was “important to educate the public to understand how chauvinistic that song is.”

  My good darling is right, we have to educate, we have no choice, and I educated her, I had no choice, and she with her marvelous purity is the perfect creation of my educational endeavors.

  Even if I were given the chance to bring her up all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

  I DO MY THING AND YOU DO YOURS

  The first time I saw Tamara was on the eve of Purim, when all kinds of people dropped in on us on their way to the big party at the Bezalel Academy of Art, and already in that half hour I knew that something had happened or was going to happen between her and Alek. It’s hard to say exactly how such things are grasped, but I think that I knew not because of the way they looked at each other, but just the opposite, because of the way they avoided looking. He didn’t make room for her to sit down. He didn’t pour her a drink. None of his usual chivalrous gestures towards the pretty faces who would show up at the house.

  Tamara—not Tamar but Tamara—was as affected in my eyes as her name. She had dressed up for the party in a gold sari, and if she had removed her steel-rimmed glasses, with her long black hair and dark, slightly asymmetrical face, she would have looked like one of Gauguin’s women. A thin Gauguin. Although she was as Israeli as I was, a Jerusalemite from the well-heeled suburb of Rehavia, she surrounded herself with a kind of aura of foreignness. She was studying comparative literature with Alek, and she talked through her nose in a would-be European accent, although it was impossible to say which Europe exactly.

  On that first evening she showed up with a friend draped in a sheet supposed to be a toga, who came back on the following days, but the minute I set eyes on his pampered mouth and receding chin, and took in the pair of them together, I knew that I couldn’t expect any protection from him.

  The pregnant Cinderella was not going to the party, even though a number of people asked me if I wanted a ticket. With my big belly and scratchy tights under my galabiyeh, and my feeling of vulnerability, I had no intention of exposing myself to the particular torment of Purim. I waited for everyone to leave with their costumes and rattles, so that I could go to b
ed at last and be by myself. But when I was alone I was subject to another torment, no less intrusive than the noise of the merry-making, and from which I could not hide in bed, because it was even more savage lying down.

  From the beginning, the beginning of our relationship, that is, I knew that this torment would come. In other words, I had no reason to assume that Alek would abstain from other women, and in spite of my own limited experience, I was certainly able to recognize his. I knew on my skin how every movement of his with me, every kiss and caress, bore the memory of previous contacts, and I knew it so precisely, that it sometimes seemed to me that the memory of these previous sexual encounters had entered into me by osmosis, and I could actually see the images. I was seventeen and eighteen in our first year, and he was twenty-eight. And to this day I have this feeling, as if I can guess via the sex what kind of woman he was with before. As if our love-making made all the others present.

  Today I don’t care any more, I think I don’t care, but that lofty indifference was acquired with effort and passed through all kinds of stages on the way, the one being the stage of the gestalt mantra: I’m me and you’re you, I do my thing and you do yours. Now I think that this slogan serves as a theoretical rationalization for abuse, but for some strange reason I used this rationalization then to justify my own mute suffering: this is what I chose, this is what he chose, that’s how he is, that’s how I am, and if I don’t get up and leave, I have to bear it. And with dignity.

  As far as Alek is concerned, by the way, I don’t think he ever had any desire to abuse me or any other woman. In all our years together he was discreet about his other women, perfectly discreet, but never secretive in a manner that spoke of guilt.

  With me and also presumably with them, he behaved as if polygamy was the most natural thing in the world. And with the passing of time, without anything being said, he succeeded quite well in making me internalize the notion that the demand for sexual fidelity was tantamount to emasculation.

  So I would never put my Nira Woolf, for example, into any kind of exclusive relationship, let alone a total commitment. And if the curtain comes down in Suitable Service with a passionate sex scene with the decent military advocate, at the opening of Daggers Drawn she already has another man in tow.

  Looking back, the hardest thing was waiting for the inevitable to happen, for another woman to appear, and so perhaps, however perverse it may sound, when Tamara came into the picture it was a kind of relief.

  Jealousy craves knowledge, as if knowledge of the details has it in its power to liberate the obsessive preoccupation, and at a certain point, two weeks or more after the party, I needed to know so badly that I went up to talk to her. It was in our kitchen, and she was making tea for the owner of the pampered mouth and a few others.

  Me (leaning against the marble counter next to her): I wanted to tell you something.

  Tamara (obviously alarmed): Yes, of course …

  Me: About you and Alek.

  Tamara: What? Oh … what about it? (A quick glance in my direction, and then lowering her head as she pours the tea into the mugs on the tray.)

  Me: I just wanted you to know … and for Alek to know, too, that this is his house. And that nobody tells him what to do in his house.

  Tamara (More alarmed than ever. The lenses of her glasses are covered with steam): I don’t understand.

  Me (Pulling the cardigan more tightly around my body. My hands folded above my high stomach.): I don’t know what you’ve been told about us, but you should know that Alek and I are only married fictitiously, because I didn’t want to go to the army.

  Tamara: Oh, but you’re mistaken. It isn’t like that. You’re completely mistaken. There’s nothing between me and Alek. Rani (or Dani) is my boyfriend.

  Me: What I wanted to say is that you don’t have to behave like a couple of thieves, because that’s what’s unfair to me. And if you really want to know what hurts me, then that’s what hurts me. It insults me that you try to hide it.

  In the course of this dialogue I suddenly realized what it means to be crazy: I attached myself to her like some crazy beggar woman seizing the sleeve of a passerby in the street, and I clearly sensed how she instinctively recoiled in fear. Instinctively she wanted to pick up her heels and run away from me, not because I had “caught her out” and “discovered her secret,” but because of what I was, which could be dangerous. And nevertheless I could not stop. As if only the explicit confirmation that it had happened and was happening would bring me relief. The devil knows what kind of relief, because I didn’t have even the vaguest notion of what I would do when I knew. When I knew for certain. When I knew what for certain? That he was fucking her? How he was fucking her? Slowly and looking at her to see? What her little breasts looked like when he rolled her on top of him; how he wound her long hair around his hand and smiled at her; if he kissed her eyes and stroked her back too when she fell asleep on his shoulder?

  Above all, I think, I wanted it to be different with me. To know that something different happened to him with me. Because it was impossible that it could be the same with me and this phony Gauguin fake.

  It sounds funny, but what aroused my jealousy most, even more than the imagined sex, was the fact that Tamara knew French and was studying Russian. That she sat next to him during classes and afterwards, gossiping about Leah Goldberg and reading Verlaine and Baudelaire, and Bely, and Blok, and Ivanov, all the poets he could only tell me about. That he talked to her about “Schopenhauer’s perception of music” and what exactly an important thinker called Eduard von Hartmann thought, and what exactly someone else, I can’t remember who, said. For some reason it was clear to me—a crumb of consolation—that he talked to her, while all she contributed to the conversation was her affected cultured expression. I brooded a lot about how he made her laugh with all kinds of misquotations and never had to interrupt with “that I really can’t translate.”

  Of course I never found the certainty I sought. And after Purim, when Alek’s trance of sociability calmed down a bit, he simply started to stay away from home more and more. Once when I came back from work the two of them were sitting in his room with the door open, and he had his arm around her shoulder. “Noichka … come and join us. Tamara’s tried to translate something we read in class here, and with my Hebrew I can’t even tell her how it sounds.” He said this quite naturally, without removing his arm from her shoulder that had turned to stone. And then, too, what hurt most of all in this scene was the apparently trivial fact that he called me “Noichka,” a name that up to then had been reserved for only the most intimate moments between us.

  TWENTY-NINE YEARS LATER

  Twenty-nine years later, the jealousy was no longer alive. It died down after the shock of the birth, and after he left and came back and left again, and I went to visit him abroad. Perhaps I grew accustomed to being one of a number of Alek’s women. And perhaps the distance and the longings dulled the other pain. From the outset I should never have allowed myself to be jealous, for what right did I have to be jealous of him? And for lack of any alternative, what I wanted above all was only to believe that I was in some way special to him. That something not given to others was given only to me.

  With more than twenty-nine years behind us, I am entitled to believe that I am, indeed, special to him. That my perseverance has borne fruit, and there is a place reserved exclusively for me in his heart. But at what price?

  Now too I do not think that I fell in love with a man unworthy of me, and that if only I woke up from a twenty-nine-year-old dream I would to my horror see a donkey’s head. Alek turned fifty-seven in December, and still, with his angular thinness and his graying hair, he is more worthy in my eyes than any other man, and so I know he will always remain. The problem isn’t that he’s unworthy, but that perhaps it isn’t worthy to love anyone the way I love him.

  I said that the birth and everything that followed it dulled my jealousy. But it happened a few times that it bit me again, and I di
dn’t succeed in loosening its teeth immediately.

  My Hagar (aged six): What do you think, that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?

  Me: You know better than me. You went for a walk with him.

  And thus from my worried daughter I learned that Ute was about to give her a baby brother. This was in ’79, after Alek had returned to Israel as a correspondent for Radio Luxembourg and a couple of European newspapers, and I was already leading the life of a mistress. Waiting for him to phone me. Not phoning him. Deserting my job on all kinds of pretexts to keep appointments with him. Looking for babysitters for Hagar, simply in order to accompany him when he went to cover a demonstration. Arranging for another mother to pick Hagar up from kindergarten and waiting for him bathed and ready at home, afraid that the phone would ring and it would be him, to say that he was sorry but he couldn’t come. Maybe next week? I’ll call you.… The whole humiliating package.