by Gail Hareven
In the midst of all the joking and laughter, I envied the funny redhead, who appeared to me the embodiment of female mental health.
The story of my own delivery I kept to myself, of course, even after Talush threw out “In comparison to Noa our stories are jokes for children. My sister gave birth in the Middle Ages.”
Perhaps people have a kind of reflex that makes them try to endow pain with significance, but how could I explain to this group of women hilarious with anarchic mirth—laughing at their husbands, joking about the hospital, bad-mouthing their mothers, giggling at themselves and their newfound motherhood—how could I explain to them the perverse meaning which I had given to pain? This meaning belonged to another world, very far from the living room heated for my sister’s offspring, and though I was sitting there in that living room, it was also far from me. What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered myself to pain for his sake. And to my sorrow I must point out that this warped idea was quite detached from the knowledge that at the end of the process I would have a baby. In other words, I didn’t think that I was suffering for the sake of the child, the way that women in labor are at least supposed to think, but found a point in the pain itself, a point which was somehow connected to Alek. And thus with every contraction that racked my body, I imagined that I was taking the pain and offering it up, dedicating it, I have no idea to whom, all I know is that this dedication was connected to some absolute of love. As if all I had to do was take it upon myself, and I would be rewarded in the end by absolute love, which was not simply Alek-will-love-me, but something more tremendous. Something infinite.
At some point, I think it was already afternoon, the midwife came in and after examining me—“Good girl. Not yet, but we’re coming along nicely”—she asked me if I wanted them to “give me something.” Of course I wanted them to give me “something,” but I didn’t know what this “something” was, I only understood from her voice that it would lessen the pain. In my defense I have to say that even in my warped mental state I didn’t wish myself still more pain, and I was very frightened of the pain to come.
Looking back I suppose they must have given me Pethidine, and that while it dulled the pain it somehow increased the hallucinations, because at that point I really went completely off the tracks.
Although the curtains in the room were closed, light still came in, and in addition they had left a light on over my head, on which my hallucinations became fixed. At first I imagined that the light was growing stronger, and at the same time that the shape of the lamp was changing and becoming limitless and unfocussed like the sun. The spreading sun/lamp warmed me and banished the cold shivers, and gradually it came to seem that it was this that was banishing the pain from my back and stomach. As if a sweet warm light were seeping into me until my whole being was full of light, from top to toe, and still it went on welling up and filling me. Gratefully, I let go of Alek’s shirt, and silently thanked the lamp, that is to say the sun, that is to say the face which had begun to appear inside it and which I really cannot describe, except that it was surrounded by a halo like a figure in an icon or that it was itself the aura of something else hidden in its light, which was far more radiant and present than a figure in an icon. The face was very clear, like that of a very familiar personality, clearer and more vivid than any familiar personality … and nevertheless like a familiar personality, and nevertheless, for some reason, impossible to describe. All I know is that this figure revealed itself to me like love, and that with its appearance I felt completely loved, as if I had been made one with my love and now it was inside me, and I dwelt safely within it forever, or something to that effect.… And it was still somehow connected to Alek. As if I had prostrated myself before it like a supplicant, and been promised that my yearnings would be fulfilled. And as if the light was the happiness filling me to overflowing.
It was with the sensation of this superabundance of light, I think, that the change started, and the same thing that was pouring and pouring into me began to arouse my fear. It seemed as if the light was converted inside me into some other substance, and although it was still light, this dense light was crystallizing inside me into something hard and blazing. The light grew stronger, the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the face of the figure turned into a burning presence. And the heat increased even further, until I felt the burning light on my skin, in a minute it would be inside me, melting my bones, boiling my blood, turning the fluid in my eyes to steam. Glued to the bed I pleaded with the figure to withdraw its light, whether it was an expression of wrath, or simply the annihilating effect of its powerful presence, which was growing more powerful all the time.
Like a frightened child I covered my face with the shirt and folded my hands on top of it, but even thus, with my eyes closed, the harsh light and heat increased to terrifying proportions. And only when it seemed that I could bear it no longer, the light and the fear gradually began to grow dimmer.
Three times this experience returned. A benevolent light converted into a burning one, dying down into sweetness, sweetening my blood, pouring into me with infinite gentleness, and then intensifying and hardening inside me and above me with blind indifference.
In days to come, when Talush was getting ready to give birth, I read in one of her manuals about the existence of a defined stage, before the appearance of the major contractions, when it sometimes happens that for a few minutes a woman enters something like a psychotic state. Since in the middle of this hallucination I was rapidly wheeled into the delivery room, I imagine that this is the stage I was in, and that the “stage” and the Pethidine produced their effects on me. But neither the “stage” nor the Pethidine can explain the specific content of my hallucination, and the way in which it was related to Alek and the obsessive thoughts of love that accompanied me throughout.
After the birth I did not give the experience much thought. The baby’s presence and Alek’s absence were more compelling, and it was only half a year later, on one of our invasions of Yoash’s apartment, that I told Alek. Not what preceded the hallucination or followed it, but only the visionary delusion, with his presence expurgated. Alek, his hands clasped behind his neck, listened as if what I was telling him was the most natural thing in the world, and although it was interesting, even very interesting, there was nothing strange or surprising about it. “It happens that a person dreams a dream that seems not to belong to him,” he said quietly, as if stating a fact, and reached under the blanket for the packet of cigarettes. There was no mystical mumbo-jumbo or gush in his reaction, and this made it easier for me to talk. “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said, “although it wasn’t exactly a dream … but that’s what it felt like, as if I dreamt somebody else’s dream.” “Except that now it’s your dream, too,” he replied with a smile, and pulled me onto his chest.
As I lay resting on him like this, I thought that there really was nothing to be done with this alien vision, which was like a strange object bequeathed me as a legacy by some primeval mother. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t ask for it, it simply fell on me as if from another world, and now it was mine. Like this love.
It was morning, a pale winter sun shone into the shutterless room. The portable electric heater didn’t work very well, only one of the coils was working. But Alek got up and piled all the blankets he found in the closet on top of us, and between the hot and the cold we were content.
NIRA WOOLF
Nira Woolf is forty-five, this is her age in my first book, Blood Money, and at this excellent age she remains in the books that follow. The setting in which she operates changes from book to book—Israel at the beginning of the eighties is not the Israel of today, even as the arena of a detective story—but my fighting lawyer doesn’t change, only the causes she fights for change in accordance with the period. In Blood Money, which was about the plunder of Palestinian land, through patients’ rights in The Shattered Man, thr
ough children’s rights in The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Ask, through sexual harassment in the army in Compulsory Service, through the shocking corruption in Birthright, through the fear of AIDS in The Stabbing, up to the militant feminism of the last four years: Dead Woman’s Voice, which as I may have already mentioned turns on a case of incest, and What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?, in which my feminist lawyer does battle with a ring of traffickers in women.
When I started writing about Nira I was twenty-six years old, and when I started to imagine her I was even younger, and forty-five seemed to me a venerable and dignified age. An age at which nobody calls you a “girl” any more. Although the way I constructed Nira, nobody would have dared to call her a “girl” at the age of twenty-six either.
From the outset it was clear to me that my combative lawyer was single, that she had no children and no longings for children, or needless to say for a husband, either. The mother of children is not free to jump into her car and fly to the murder scene when a phone call wakes her up in the middle of the night, nor can she rush around with a revolver ready to fire. And in general, children bring up a lot of questions I had no desire to deal with on the page or the computer screen. For instance: Who looks after them when their mother is running around with a revolver? A nanny? And who takes them to school at quarter to eight in the morning? And what happens when the disappearing client, the one who’s suspected of murder, suddenly turns up at the house? And on what Afghan carpet can my Nira have a spontaneous fuck when the plot approaches its suspenseful climax? The one with the toys strewn over it?
When I wrote Blood Money I didn’t know that it was the first in a series, and I wasn’t even sure that it was a book at all. But in the following books, too, I was not tempted to give her a child, because how would this child suddenly arrive on the scene? Could I allow her to get mixed up with gangsters when she was eight months pregnant? From a feminist point of view it might actually be amusing to send a woman with a bad attack of heartburn to the Supreme Court on a case, and make her whip out her gun on the way to the hospital to give birth. The critics would scream their heads off. Especially those who always attack me on the grounds that “Nira Woolf isn’t a feminist heroine, but a macho man disguised as a woman.” But even assuming that I made her pregnant just to annoy the critics, what then? Nira Woolf lies helplessly in the delivery room and waits for the dilation to grow big enough for them to give her a shot at last? The midwife raises and parts Nira’s legs? The midwife bends down between our heroine’s legs to make the cut?
In a general outline of the next book I thought of giving Nira a ward or an adopted child. I even knew who the little girl was. The daughter of Anna, a foreign worker who substituted for Mrs. Neuman’s regular nurse for a week, and who was the sole beneficiary of the surprising new will dictated by Neuman to Woolf. “Sasha” I would call the child orphaned in What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?, and in the exposition describing the background to her adoption I would briefly relate how the kind-hearted lawyer traveled to Kharkov to find the nine-year-old who had become the beneficiary herself (after Anna’s body was discovered on Palmahim Beach in the previous book), and how it came about that my heroine returned to Israel with the little orphan in tow.
The trouble with this idea, which I liked in itself, was with the limitations it would impose on me in the continuation of the series, assuming I wanted to go on with it. Nira Woolf could remain forty-five forever, it was the age she was meant to be and I had no problem with it, but the little girl could on no account go on being nine years old in book after book, because that would be ridiculous. I couldn’t possibly send her to the fourth grade every year, make her mourn her mother in every new book, and let her be stuck with difficulties in Hebrew forever.
The trouble with children is that they have to grow up, and I have no idea how to deal with the literary problems presented by this fact. So that in the end it appears that Anna’s orphan will have to be left to grow up by herself in Ukraine, nameless and outside the plot of this book.
THE DAY AFTER GIVING BIRTH
The day after giving birth I felt fine. Stupidly happy in a way that makes me cringe with embarrassment to this day.
In the afternoon, a couple of hours after they transferred me to the maternity ward, they brought me the baby. A nurse put her into my arms, and I—forgive me, whoever’s job it is to forgive—looked at my daughter for the first time and the first thought that crossed my mind was: so small and so perfect, he won’t be able to help loving her.
Her head was covered with a lot of black hair, and I rejoiced in this downy hair, and in the wrinkled little face, and the tiny hands imprisoned in their sleeves, only because I felt that Alek would have to surrender to this tiny softness. And when I put her to my breast in the first clumsy attempt to feed her, I silently rejoiced in fantasies of how he would fall in love with her. But it wasn’t the loving father she would gain that I was thinking of, it was the crumbs of this inevitable paternal love that would no doubt fall into my own lap. After all, it was from me that this sweetness came, and it was impossible for it not to project itself onto me. The baby slept, she didn’t want to wake up and suck, I still hadn’t seen the color of her eyes, and I arranged my hair becomingly on the pink pillowcase, and thought how charming the two of us looked, Madonna and child.
If I had given Nira Woolf a child, I wouldn’t have let her have it by a man she loved. A sperm donation might have fit the bill, except for the repelling nature of the procedure, and if she had wanted a child she would have been more likely to choose a man for a one-night stand according to the probable quality of his genes. What would have suited her best, I think now, would have been a virgin birth, and I would have given her one without any qualms: the possibility of replicating herself by herself without the assistance of a man. Except that a miraculous event of that nature belongs to a different genre than the one I write in. And even though my thrillers are far from being realistic, they are not amenable to this kind of supernatural event.
A newborn baby is a wonder, and children should be rejoiced in for themselves from the moment they are born. They should be loved simply for what they are, and not thanks to another love. And I did not love Hagar in this way. With time I did begin to love her, of course; the heavy-headed, well-tempered infant, the logical child suddenly fired up over questions of justice and injustice, the young girl sprawling on the floor to paint bad slogans for demonstrations and asking me to put her hair up in a ponytail because her hands were full of paint. I loved her as she deserved to be loved, but from the outset the feeling was tainted.
Don’t get me wrong, if I had been faced with the kind of dilemma people like to pose in youth movements—you and Hagar and Alek are cast away in the desert with only one water canteen; or, if you could only rescue one person from a fire—I have no doubt what my answer would be, and it would be sincere. I wouldn’t hesitate for a second, and that is not the point. The point is the despicable way I sometimes looked at her, and still sometimes look at her, through Alek’s imagined eyes. Like the way, for instance, when she was six months old and her face was covered with a red rash, I was afraid of his reaction, as if he might be repelled by her appearance, and this repulsion might somehow be projected onto me. And the way when she was five years old, and he would sometimes take her for walk, I would wash her little jeans and dry them on the stove so that she would look cute for him. The way I inspected my teenaged daughter with a cold eye before she flew to Paris. And the way I tried to guess from her stories upon her return if he was charmed, and to what extent, and by what precisely, so that I could learn the secret. I knew very well how loathsome these thoughts were, and nevertheless before she set off to visit her father and grandmother in Paris, like a pimp I bought her a bottle of his favorite White Shoulders perfume, in the hope that in some unconscious way she might remind him of me. If only she would have hated it, but she didn’t hate it, my daughter was delighted with her mother’s gift, without having a clue about what I was up to,
because the overt message I gave her was the opposite of my true wishes: “You’re allowed to decide that you don’t like him”; “You shouldn’t have any great expectations of him or his mother. Think of it simply as a trip to Paris without any strings attached”; “I’m sure they’ll welcome you with open arms, and you don’t have to make an impression on anyone there,” and so on and so forth until Hagar said: “Stop it, Mommy, relax, I’m not five years old, and this time I have no intention of letting him upset me. My main feeling is one of curiosity … to meet my roots.”
Luckily for us Hagar does not resemble me or Alek, and if she resembles anyone, it’s my father: in her clear, unshadowed, round-eyed regard, the way she purses her mouth, and the stubborn cleft in her chin. Whether she bears any resemblance to Alek’s parents I have no idea.
ALEK DIDN’T COME
At the visiting hour on the first day Alek didn’t come, and I put off my expectations to the second day. Perhaps he was sitting for an exam at the university, perhaps he had promised to work with Yoash and he couldn’t get out of it, perhaps he had fallen asleep after a sleepless night and when he arrived at the hospital they wouldn’t let him in. For some reason I didn’t think of Tamara, perhaps because the events of the night had made her pale into insignificance in his eyes, or so I believed, and therefore also in mine.
Without any logical reason I fell asleep in a kind of daze of happiness, and in the certain knowledge that he would come tomorrow. At the beginning of August he was supposed to present himself in Heidelberg, I did not imagine for a moment that he would cancel his trip, but the weeks before us, like the parting itself, were indelibly stamped by the covenant of the night of the birth.