The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  Those were bad days, the days before Passover, days of Schubert symphonies, when nobody talked to Noa; Hagar lay high and pressed on my diaphragm, I only dragged myself out of bed when the little girls knocked on the door, and nevertheless in my capacity as the bohemian big sister I put on a Gershwin record for them, drew them out with amused superiority—what’s new at school and what’s new in the youth movement—and threw out anarchistic remarks about this and that. In the course of putting on this act of a free-spirited woman of mystery my mood somewhat improved, but Talush somehow saw through me, or maybe not, but in any case, for whatever reason, she turned up again the next day on her own behalf, and took out of her jeans bag two papayas and a giant pineapple that our father had brought back from Africa, and a few bars of chocolate from the airport, all of which she had swiped from our parents’ kitchen. “You probably have to eat a lot if you’re pregnant,” she said, and her face was bright pink, and her nostrils and upper lip trembled, as they do to this day when she’s excited.

  On the third evening after my return from the hospital, I think it was the third evening, the downstairs neighbor Miriam Marie, who now that she no longer lives downstairs is regarded by Hagar and myself as a member of the family, and who up to then hardly impinged on the fringes of my consciousness, knocked on the door. She realized that a baby had been born, and came with a plate of cookies to congratulate me, and after seeing me she went downstairs again and came back with a little pot of chicken and rice which without asking she put on the stove to heat up.

  Before this I had hardly exchanged more than a couple of sentences with her, in my eyes she was just one of the extras cast to play a bit part on the margins of my drama, but it quite soon became apparent to me that Miriam had taken in more than a little of the drama, and that her understanding of what was happening with me was closer to reality than anyone else’s. So close to reality that in the future, whenever Alek showed up, I was afraid that she would see him and despise me. So that when she moved to Maaleh Adumim on the outskirts of Jerusalem to be close to the grandchildren on the way, I felt relieved. And even though I missed, and still miss, the warmth of her closeness, I was relieved to be rid of her look.

  Miriam Marie. If I was a real writer and a proper human being, I would have written her story and not mine, because whichever way you look at it she’s the true heroine and I’m the phony. When she came up the first time she was forty-four, only a little younger than my mother, but she looked years older. She hasn’t changed much since then, as if her appearance had been fixed at a certain age, before old age and after the stage at which femininity, consciously or unconsciously, is directed towards men. Today, too, when she dyes her hair with raven black henna, wears three-piece outfits of cheap gaudy velvet and “artistic” brooches pinned to her bosom, she gives the impression that she is only dressing up to broadcast her feeling of well-being to the world.

  When I met her she had one son, called Avi, who was already studying for his master’s degree in education. When the boy was seven she had been abandoned by the husband—“the engineer” she sometimes calls him scornfully, though he really was an engineer—who ran away to France with a relation of hers. A little girl of sixteen from the immigrants transit camp in Talpiot. The main outlines of her story she told me that first evening, I think, holding Hagar securely while she bustled about the kitchen. “If I ever tell you the story of my life …,” she said. Or perhaps she didn’t tell me everything then, as I sat with her weak and dizzy in the kitchen, and my memory is filling in the details from later installments. How he abandoned her to her fate as an aguna, a woman whose husband’s whereabouts are unknown. How the rabbis over there searched for him, how it took them nine years to find him. And how she, with very little Hebrew, went to work, first as a cleaning lady, then taking a course to qualify as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant, which didn’t pay enough to care for the child, so that even with the steady kindergarten job she always took on extra work. Over the years I heard these stories again and again: how she managed to put food on the table, how she made sure that Avi went to school, and how in the end she moved to the center of town just so he would get into a good high school. “All his reports were ten out of ten, ten out of ten for everything. One day I’ll show you, you’ll see what they write about him there. But the principal didn’t want to let him into the gymnasium, just because he was from Nachlaot. Every day I went to the municipality and sat there to make them look me in the face, and in the end what do you think? They took him, they didn’t want to, but they did. Just because of my character, that I don’t give in.” What I remember clearly is that at some moment of that monologue I suddenly wanted a cigarette badly. I hadn’t smoked since the birth, and suddenly for some reason I was dying for a cigarette, so that although I knew I wouldn’t find one, I got up and began opening all the empty drawers in the house, one after the other. When I had despaired of the closet, with my hands still fumbling inside it, Miriam came and stood behind me, my daughter folded in her arms. “You shouldn’t be left alone,” she said. “It’s not normal. There are women that get a psychological depression from it. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.” Then she put her hand in her pocket and offered me a packet of Europa cigarettes. “Promise me you won’t smoke next to the baby.”

  In time I began to respond to this woman with the admiration she demanded and richly deserved, but on that first evening I didn’t have the strength to utter a word, as if the road from their origins somewhere inside me to my mouth was too long for me to lead them along it. Nevertheless I was grateful that somebody was talking to me.

  When she came to me she already knew that Alek had left—“that one of yours with the eyelashes” she called him—and when she placed the plate whose steam made my face damp before me I somehow understood that she was offering me her biography on a steaming plate as well. That she was laying her past before me not only as “a personal example of willpower and character,” but mainly in order to make this spoiled young girl open her mouth at last and give her a clue as to her situation.

  When Miriam’s husband went off with his teenage mistress and with Miriam’s gold bracelets, she had nobody to lean on: her father was already sick when they arrived in the country, her mother had three more young children at home, and in comparison to these facts I know that my unhappiness was like a pampered parody of distress.

  A pampered parody of distress—that’s what I was then, and that in many ways is what I still am today. And then, too, when she asked me straight out over a cup of tea where my family was—Wasn’t that your father who hooted for you downstairs then, driving the whole street mad?—I knew how ridiculous I was in the comparison between us: she a penniless immigrant, and I the daughter of parents who may not have been rich, but who were getting richer all the time, and who had never lacked for connections or the sense that the country belonged to them.

  I have no idea whether Miriam loved her man before he ran away, or how she loved him, I never dared to ask. History as she tells it begins on the day he deserted her, and from the beginning of this history he is referred to in derogatory terms. Perhaps she called him different names once, and perhaps not, but in any case it was clear that she would not be sympathetic to the kind of reckless madness that led “that poor girl” to run away with her husband.

  “You could make a movie out of my life,” she sometimes says, with absolute justice. If I had to choose a heroine, I would definitely choose her, myself I don’t even see as a candidate, but if that’s what I think, and I really do think so, then how is it that to this day I still feel that I have a certain advantage over her? Not because I am better educated, not because I know more words, but only because in my folly love makes me superior in my own eyes. As if it has exalted me to some lofty pinnacle, as if I have been branded by a hallucinatory fire, and as if I have been privileged to touch what she and others have not touched.

  Miriam Marie loves her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren, tw
o of her brothers and most of her nephews and nieces. She loves most of the toddlers in her nursery school, and some of their mothers. And to my good fortune, I don’t know why, she loves me too and she loves Hagar. When Miriam says that someone loves, she almost always adds proofs to her statement; practical proofs, not cliches about feelings: “You should see how he helps her,” “the way he looked after her,” “he would do anything for her.” “His heart goes out to her,” or “her heart goes out to him” are phrases which do not appear in her lexicon, and certainly not “soul mates combining into one androgynous creature.” In all the years that we have known each other, I have never heard any such highfalutin drivel from her.

  Miriam is occupied with real people: the asthmatic Itamar, Dror who is about to be drafted, Yaron and Liron who are building a house; whereas I am occupied with the fictions of my books, and with my ever-present absentee. And from this point of view as well I believe that she is superior to me.

  But what do I really know about her fantasies and her nights? I know nothing, and I have no right to patronize her in this way.

  After I had given her a few mumbled details about my situation, she pronounced that I had to “forget everything that had happened” and turn to my parents, because “what do quarrels mean now? This sweet little baby is their granddaughter, wait and see what they say after they see her.” I promised her that I would think about it, and I realized that she wouldn’t leave me be, and she didn’t, even after my parents showed up.

  PARENTS

  My parents showed up the next day. Without thinking about it I had given my name as Weber in the hospital, and one of the nurses who knew my mother made the connection and got in touch with her. I have already said that my parents know everybody and everybody knows them, and it was only to be expected that they would hear the news, sooner rather than later. I think that they had prepared themselves for it, for as they told me afterwards with a reasonable degree of resentment, when the nurse phoned my mother was able to hide her ignorance of the fact that she was a grandmother from her. She didn’t repeat the text to me word for word, but I can imagine it: “Our Noa … she’s so stubborn … got it into her head that she didn’t want any visitors … you know how it is, it’s so important to them to be independent … she feels fine … everything’s fine … the difficulties are behind us … we’re looking to the future.”

  I could easily write the memory of their appearance at my door as a “shtick,” and to tell the truth I actually did so a number of times over the course of the years: little Talush, a scouting party of one little girl, is sent to knock on my door. My mother takes up her position as backup halfway down the stairs. My father sits in the getaway car without switching off the engine.

  When it transpired that the “Russian nihilist,” as Grandma Dora called him, was gone, the family gathered round me, and in a matter of minutes, without any overt negotiations, formulated an agreed version of the state of affairs. Our Noa came under a bad influence, our Noa was kidnapped by the wicked wolf, and now that the wicked wolf is gone, the past is forgotten and we’re “looking ahead to the future.” My father, who apart from the embarrassments I’d caused resented the scene in the street, found it a little difficult to accept this agreement, but from the moment the Weber team made it into the apartment, and from the moment it transpired that Noa Weber looked the way she looked—in other words, a mess—it was clear that Mother Batya would take command. Armed with my new cunning of the mad I was relieved at not having to answer any questions about “that man,” that I was not being required to pay with a confession, and weak as I was I surrendered myself to their efficient care. Because at that stage I really did feel sick. Sick and very frightened.

  My mother was at her best, performing her role as a nurse, and although her experience with babies was not great, she applied herself fearlessly to the operations of bathing and diapering. Methods of suckling, pacifiers for and against, and ointments for diaper rash supplied us with sufficient subjects of conversation, and the rest of the time we dealt with my “recovery”—of my body, that is. I was a good patient, just as my mother was an excellent nurse. Lying between clean bedclothes, my shampooed hair on the raised pillow, my hands on the blanket, I did whatever I was told. When I was told to eat, I ate. When I was told to drink juice, I drank juice. When I was led to the bathroom, I washed myself. Days and nights ran into each other, and my memory from then is mainly of a sensation of dripping; drops of milk and blood and tears that didn’t stop flowing from the moment they started taking care of me. Dripping into the shower water. Dripping into the steam of the soup.

  The tears were genuine, I didn’t have the strength to stop them, but at the fringes of consciousness I was also aware of the fact that crying helped me. The child is weak and traumatized. Leave the child alone. Don’t remind her, don’t ask any questions. Can’t you see that she’s suffering enough as it is?

  Talush was sent to fetch and carry, my father dropped in every day “to see how you’re getting on,” and my mother took leave from work and took over the house and reorganized it. I accepted everything with mute, grateful nods: when she converted Alek’s room into a nursery, when she brought the rest of my clothes from home and arranged them in the closet, when she ordered Yoash, who came to visit, to “give a hand” and move the table here and the closet there—she didn’t let him go even when he provoked her by asking her in the name of the principle of self-determination to call him Hamida. She called him Hamida, and still insisted that he help her move the closet. Even when she asked my permission to remove Klimt’s dead floating women from the kitchen wall—“that picture gives me the creeps”—I nodded.

  My part in the new agreement was easy, I accepted it willingly: no more cheekiness with my parents, and no more ideological deviations. Our Noa has learned her lesson, and sadder but wiser she has come back to us. Sadder and wiser, and the roots of her hair hurt. Until then I never knew that the roots of your hair could hurt, but this is one of the strange things that I discovered. It hurt me even to cut my nails, and with every sip of soup I took I heard a wave breaking inside my ears.

  Only once did I voice any opposition, and this was on the evening they first appeared, when my mother proposed taking me and Hagar home with them. I don’t know if my first burst of tears prevented a big argument, or if they weren’t so keen on putting the two of us up in the first place, but in any event, the result was that for two weeks or more my mother slept in Alek’s bed.

  I didn’t explain the reasons for my objections; in days to come my mother noted that “that was a sign to me that you were recovering, and that it was important to you to stand on your own feet”—but the real reason was different, completely different, it was the feeling of the gaping void around which I was crystallizing. The feeling was and still is completely physical. And under my swollen breasts I then felt the void all the time. As if an amputated internal organ was still hurting me. And in my heart I sobbed that Alek, Alek, Alek was hurting me.

  The stronger this feeling grew, so too did the idea that as if by some law of nature the void had to be filled with what accorded with it, in the only manner that accorded with it; in other words, I began to believe that Alek would return. Of course I also formulated more reasonable and realistic reasons for this belief to myself, such as: “He has a daughter he will want to meet one day,” or “Alek may be angry with Israel, but he’s not indifferent to it”—they proved to be correct more quickly than I imagined—but at the basis of the belief was the feeling of a void, and Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t it?

  Since I believed that Alek would return, I had to remain on Usha Street to wait for him, nothing could prevent me from waiting for him there.

  I don’t know where I got this romantic nonsense from, as if I were the heroine of a black-and-white movie, waiting for my lover in the place where the war had parted us, but even if anyone had ridiculed me along these lines, or said that Alek was perfectly capable of opening a telephone directory
and locating me, there were no words in the world with the power to move me from my stubborn refusal to budge. Alek would return here, and I had to be here when he came.

  When this irrational certainty crystallized inside me, I buried it inside me and wrapped myself around it in the dark, drawing secret strength from my madness. When Alek came back he would find me worthy of him. I had to make myself worthy of him.

  IN A CROOKED WAY

  Much of what I am today stems in a crooked way from this wish to be worthy in his eyes, equal in power to his imaginary power. At the beginning this ambition related mainly to basic functioning: to start taking care of myself and of Hagar so that he wouldn’t despise me, to gradually limit my mother’s presence; and gradually more and more ambitions were added, until my will to prevail was extended also to the area of my mood, in which I also began to see a measure of my strength. Alek was doing his thing in Heidelberg, I was doing mine in Jerusalem. Alek was not suffering from “psychological depression,” therefore I too would hold my head up high.

  At first, of course, I pretended: Get up. Stand up straight. Lift up your chin. Raise your eyes from the pavement. Take a deep breath. Straighten your shoulders. Stretch your neck. Look up. Go out to run, at least for a few blocks. Until the pretense took over, and with my chin up and my eyes on the horizon, I really did begin to feel better.

  Most of my achievements over the years I measured under the imaginary gaze of Alek’s eyes, and to this day it remains fixed on me in both small and great events. I remember for example the gradual change that took place in my appearance in the first year as a law student, when I began to wear buttoned shirts and for the first time in my life went to a salon. The lightheaded feeling that came with my shoulder-length haircut and the touch of air on my nape like a new nudity were connected to his touch in my mind.