The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  My daughter appears like me as Weber. At the daycare I registered her as Weber, friends and neighbors have known her as Weber since the day she was born, and the questions began only when she entered the education system, where she appeared under the name registered at the Ministry of Interior. In ’91, when she turned eighteen, she asked to be registered under the name of Weber on her ID card, and to both of our surprise, her request was granted after filling in a single standard form.

  “I belong to you more than to Alek. I even belong to Granny and Grandpa more than to him,” she kept on explaining, as if anyone needed an explanation. During that period she was preoccupied by thoughts of Mark and Daniel, the half-brothers she didn’t know, once every few years she would begin to brood about them, and it seemed to me that adopting my name was an act intended to put an end to this futile preoccupation. “I even belong to Granny and Grandpa more than him.…” But I belong in secret to Alek. And in the secret of the bureaucratic joke I am still called by his name.

  • • •

  Alek, as I said, is spending Passover or Easter with Ute and the children in Germany, and in my inner language I call such times my “white days.” White days because of their clarity, uncolored by any expectation. As if the mind has retired and is free to take up all kinds of hobbies.

  At times like these not only the suspense of concrete expectation declines—for there were long periods, years, during which I had no expectations of any concrete contact—but it is as if Alek has removed his withdrawn gaze from me, and for days or weeks I hardly see myself through his eyes.

  A great silence reigns over this Passover, as if the street has emptied of its inhabitants. In recent years quite a lot of well-off people have moved into the neighborhood and they have apparently all gone away on vacation. Once, it was different here on religious holidays.

  My parents are in London, Talush is with the children on the kibbutz, my women friends—who almost all have young children—have been swallowed up by family affairs, Hagar is spending the holiday with a girlfriend in Boston. On the eve of Passover she called to wish me a happy holiday, and until she returns to New York I don’t expect even an e-mail. I haven’t annoyed her enough for her to write to me from Boston.

  In the mornings the air is still clear, a uniform blue sky without a scrap of clouds is painted strongly over the clean white and green of the street, and only towards midday, when it begins to grow hazy, a kind of sensuousness invades the air, presaging the heat wave.

  What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? is already in the shop windows, and until the more or less anticipated reviews appear, thoughts of “the next book” remain unfocused. I sleep a little, wake up early, and go early to the grocery, even though there is nothing I need, or need early in the morning, on the half-empty shelves. The short morning walk does not banish the gloom of awakening, and the transparency of the air and the view only ferments my self-loathing. Yesterday on the way home the outside stairs of the houses looked to me like tongues sticking out.

  “White days” I said … but this time around my mind refuses to divert itself with hobbies, and when I wake up I feel depression covering me like a heavy blanket that I push off, but after an hour or two it returns, and drives me back to bed.

  For two weeks I haven’t gone out to run, writing has become the backbone of my day, as if it has taken the place of running, or any other activity keeping me upright, but it is only after dark that I can summon up the energy to sit down in front of the computer and poison myself with an unreasonable amount of cigarettes.

  What am I doing? What do I want? What have I taken it on myself to want?

  Forty-seven years old, Alek turned fifty-seven this year, and never again will I see how he has changed, and how to me he is unchanged, to me he is never changed as he comes towards me at the airport.

  Timelessness is an illusion. Timelessness is a derivative of love, a derivative of faith, a concrete derivative of a state of mind which I no longer have any idea what to call. Alek, according to his age, could already be a grandfather, Hagar at her age could turn me into a grandmother, and eternity is nothing but an illusion. There is nothing timeless in me or in him or in us or in anyone.

  What am I doing? Telling. For there to be a beginning and an end. For there to be an end.

  What did I take upon myself to want?

  He will never look into my eyes and bring to my lips that familiar smile which acknowledges everything and wipes out everything.

  I’ll never try on a new dress and think: I’ll wear it when I walk with him, if I walk with him in summer in the street.

  There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself.

  Love will never expand me.

  The one right body will never come to me.

  GOING HOME

  I promised to parcel myself out in the proper order, even though I have no idea what I will do with this parceled self when I bring it to the end of the story.

  In the meantime: Hadassah Hospital, maternity ward. Deborah the social worker has gone, and I collect myself around a new wish, to go home, home to Alek; fortified by my mad cunning, I go to the newborns room, ask the nurses to show me how to give the baby a bath. “I’m so sorry I missed the demonstration, I didn’t feel well.” Prattle any nonsense that comes into my head, with them and the other women in my room and their afternoon visitors; picking sentences out of the air of the room, fermenting them in my mouth, and bubbling over in an exaggerated gush: “Show him to me … show her to me … show me how you … what a cutie … oh, what a sweetheart … what a little darling!” Broadcasting youthful maternal energy and joy.

  After supper I lurked in the corridor until the nurse with the mean face left the nurses station, and then I asked the one with the nice face to let me use their telephone. “I’m not supposed to, so do it quickly.” With Yoash on the phone I was brisk and cool, and suddenly he was the one gushing and hardly letting me get a word in edgeways: “Wonderful news … I never got a chance.… I had that renovation, and you know what it’s like with the year-end audits … so Baruch says to me … I’ll tell you … how Baruch … yes, sure … I’ll come tomorrow … sure thing … in the morning, with pleasure.” I didn’t ask him about Alek, somehow it was clear to me that he didn’t want to be asked, but in any case, I thought, I would know tomorrow, and what could Yoash really tell me? What did he know? He would think that I was taking advantage; but the way I arrived at the hospital, without telephone tokens or money in my purse, I needed him. I simply couldn’t think of anyone else.

  Yoash showed up at ten o’clock in the morning, appearing in the corridor in his eternal overalls, with his ungainly walk, and without the Hamida file under his arm. But then, when we were already on our way to the infants a new obstacle popped up: in my stupidity it hadn’t occurred to me that without something to wear, they wouldn’t release Hagar from the hospital. Dear Yoash looked as if he was delighted with the situation—to this day, I think, nothing pleases him more than the prospect of “driving the authorities crazy.”

  “Idiot that I am,” he said to the nurse and hit himself on the forehead, “idiot, idiot, idiot … forgive me, Noa, I’m an idiot. How you got such an idiot for a brother I don’t know, but I forgot the whole parcel at home.” He went off for an hour, I waited on a bench in the shade at the entrance, and when he came back he was carrying a few swollen bags, whose contents he spread out with a conjurer’s pride before the astonished eyes of the nurse. A pile of tiny white garments, a pile of diapers, a tube of ointment for the baby’s bottom, a cloth clown with bells on its head, a yellow rattle, a parcel of paper bibs. One by one he whipped them out and showed them, and in the end, with a triumphant flourish, he fished out three pacifiers and hung them around his f
ingers. “In case she loses one. My sisters were always throwing their pacifiers out. You know what it’s like with pacifiers. They’re always vanishing and you can’t find them and it’s a big mystery, one of the greatest mysteries in the universe.”

  All the way out he didn’t stop chattering. Like some dopey spy he boasted of how he had cut all the price tags off the garments, “so they wouldn’t suspect me of only just buying them.” And only after he brought the pickup round from the parking lot, and only after he helped me climb in with Hagar, and only after he got in himself and inserted the key, only then did he lean back and ask without looking at me: “So where am I taking you?”

  “Home,” I replied, but it was a question more than an answer, because I already knew that there was bad news in the offing.

  “Home … Alek said you’d want to, that’s to say, that you can if you want to. Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. Alek … brought forward his trip. What I mean to say is that he’s leaving today.” Since I was silent Yoash went on talking, and his voice—I remember his voice—grew rude and abrupt, almost hostile: “In any case, you know, he had to be there in August, and if you ask me, with all due respect to you both, all of this is a bit too much for him. Seeing the baby, I mean. Seeing her—it’s too much for him.” And when I remained silent he went on: “Alek thought that perhaps you might want to get in touch with your mother in spite of everything.”

  “I want to go home,” I said. “I want you to take me home.” And we drove to the empty house.

  I don’t remember feeling anything, I don’t remember thinking anything, I was like a hollow body propelled into motion by a push from an invisible hand. When we entered the house—I held Hagar, and Yoash opened the door—I was surprised to see everything in its place, but this too was at a remove, like a kind of curiosity outside myself. At the fringes of my mind I was apparently expecting to see empty rooms and bare walls, and in these same margins I noted to myself that everything was the same as before. Only later on, whenever Hagar fell asleep, I examined and re-examined every inch of the house. The record player was standing in its place, the records—I discovered afterwards—he had given to Yoash. The bookshelves in his room were empty and striped with dust. I found some of the books later in boxes in the storage space under the roof. His shelves in the closet were bare. His desk was cleared. In the drawers there were only a few pins and a pen without a refill. No crumpled note in the wastepaper basket. And no note anywhere. He didn’t take anything from the kitchen, there was a big sack of potatoes stuffed into the wicker basket, and a few packets of sausages and cheese and seven bags of milk in the fridge. Perhaps he thought that this was what babies drank. Perhaps he thought that this was what a nursing mother needed.

  Yoash: I really have to go now. Are you sure you’re okay?

  Me: It’s okay.

  Yoash: Are you sure you don’t want to get in touch with your parents? I can get in touch for you, if you like.

  Me: It’s okay.

  (And then, when he was already standing at the door, it seemed to me that I read something in his slightly averted face, or perhaps in his raised shoulders, or perhaps in the way he twisted his feet.)

  Me: Yoash? You said Alek was leaving today? What time is his flight?

  Yoash: What time is his flight … is it important? What difference does it make to you, in fact? Okay. Okay. Don’t look at me like that, just don’t look at me like that. His flight’s at 4:20, which means that at half past one, in another … forty-five minutes I have to pick him up and take him to the airport. From my place.

  FROM A DISTANCE

  From a distance of twenty-nine years I don’t feel a drop of pity for that girl. Not because “she got herself into it”—people “get themselves” into all kinds of trouble and they still deserve to be pitied—I don’t feel any pity for her because of the blank expression on her face, rejecting the hand reaching out to her even from the distance of these years.

  Blankly she moves about the rooms, barely glancing at her baby daughter lying on the big double bed. Nothing moves in her even when she finds the envelope he left on the kitchen table. There are six hundred and fifty shekels. He cleaned out his bank account, put the money into the envelope, licked it, closed it, and put it under the salt shaker, without even writing her name on it.

  Now she sits down in the wicker armchair in the living room, looks at her watch and tries to trap the movement of the minute hand, hypnotizing herself not to blink and miss the second that it moves. The baby is sleeping, if she wakes and cries maybe she won’t hear, and if she does hear maybe she won’t react. The time is thirty-three minutes past one, thirty-four minutes past one. They have already loaded his luggage onto the pickup. Gone back to get the shoulder bag and sunglasses. Locked the door. Detached from feeling she senses his departure from the city like a change taking place in the nature of matter. He’s leaving, he’s getting further away, already he’s at the turn in the road descending from the city, still close, in another two and a quarter hours he’ll be on the plane. She notes the change in matter with every breath she takes, as if the touch of the air is different and objects are less present. She follows his departure as if she has been made responsible for studying the effect of his departure on matter, which is fading and becoming thinner as the minutes go by.

  I don’t pity her, because she is wrapped up in her belief, and she still believes that she has no salvation outside his love.

  And if I try to leap into the picture, to reach out to her and break the tension, she’ll bite my hand to stop me from disturbing her hypnotized concentration.

  She’s suffering, true, and in the hours to come when her sorrow runs riot, she will suffer more, but for the time being there is no sign that she wants to keep the sorrow at bay. I want to make the sorrow go away. And she, the mad girl, receives it into her. She won’t let me rob her of it.

  The days that followed, until the rescue team arrived, are difficult to reconstruct in an orderly way, and in fact also the weeks after them. Somewhere before I mentioned the kibbutz education that I refuse to see as the seedbed of my sickness, and the fact that I functioned then I attribute precisely to that despised education. “Pull yourself together, control yourself,” was the message of my childhood, and I did my best to conform to it. I was always taught that in all circumstances it was important to function, and perhaps thanks to this I functioned, a strange, partial functioning, but functioning nevertheless.

  Hagar was what in days to come I learned to define as an easy baby; contact with the world did not dismay her, it did not invade her or disturb her, she slept for hours on end and cried only when she was hungry. I did not concentrate on her, I did not smell her head, I did not wait for the seconds when she opened her eyes in order to inspect their color, but when she cried I put her to my breast exactly as I had been told to, and somehow or other I also changed her diapers, although I didn’t clean her properly. Most of the time, I remember, I sat next to her on the double bed where I had placed her in the beginning; I sat—because of the fear that if I lay down a last barrier inside me would be breached, and I would drown in what burst out. I don’t remember day and night, but I do remember that I piled up the pillows at the top of the bed and propped up against them like a sick person I dozed and woke without distinguishing clearly between one state of consciousness and another. Only once in the dark I know that I got up, took a pail and cloth and for some reason began to wash the floor. It would have been better to wash myself and Hagar, because we were both no doubt in need of bathing by then, but that’s what happened and that’s what I did. And in the meantime the soiled diapers accumulated in a bag, without my giving a thought to what I was going to do when the clean ones ran out.

  My sleeping and waking states were visited by all kinds of sensations and hallucinations, some of which still come back today. The pain cutting through my diaphragm, because of which I can’t lie down. The grayness crawling over my body and threatening to cover me comple
tely if I lie down. Fragments of myself floating in the cavities of my body like lumps of broken ice.

  Looking back it is clear to me that I put my daughter into a situation that could have been dangerous, and I don’t take any credit for the fact that we emerged unscathed.

  HANDS OF MERCIFUL WOMEN

  Hands of Merciful Women is the name of a painting I once saw in an art book; the painting itself did not remain in my memory, but the name stuck in my mind. Most of the actual good in my life came to me at the hands of women, and if I could choose whom to love with all my soul, I would choose a woman and not a man. With the passage of the years I have learned to love my mother and my daughter, and I love my girlfriends, but in my opinion I should love them differently, because even if I can’t do without the folly of “he-makes-me-come-alive” and “I-can’t-live-without-him,” the feeling of love should be directed towards those I can’t live without in reality. And in reality the man isn’t there, and the hands of merciful woman always appeared in time.

  When I was still pregnant, towards Passover, it was my sister who appeared like an angel on a bicycle, accompanied by a tiny little friend who turned out to be her classmate. Perhaps she had been sent by my mother to put out feelers, I didn’t ask, but in any case Alek wasn’t home, and I seated the pair of them in the living room and put on a show for them. They sat close together on the mattress, like two little birds, looking around with birdlike curiosity at everything, and when I went into the kitchen to make them tea—there were no cookies in the house—I heard the tiny friend whisper: “If she only got married to get out of going to the army, how come she’s pregnant?” And my sister answering with a pride that brought sudden tears to my eyes: “That’s how it is when you’ve got a bohemian sister.”