The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  In a thousand years I will never understand why they sell us this stuff: as if emotional epilepsy is something charming and lightning strikes are good for the environment.

  The worst damage done by romantic love is the coldheartedness that it creates. Because when love seizes you, however much you struggle and kick, you are no longer capable of truly thinking about anyone else, because nobody else is truly real to you any more.

  In 1981 my father had a heart attack, and my mother and Talush and I took turns sitting in the corridor outside the Intensive Care Unit. The day after the heart attack was a Wednesday, and I remember that it was a Wednesday because on Friday I was supposed to go on a trip to the north of the country with Alek, and the main thought in my mind was how I was going to get away now, because as things stood I didn’t have an alibi for disappearing for a couple of days, and I had no one to look after Hagar. Ute had gone to visit her parents in Germany with baby Daniel, she was due back the coming Tuesday—you see, I remember everything—and I, with the ice of love surrounding my heart, walked around with a styrofoam cup from the coffee machine in my hand, biting the rim of the cup and thinking, among other things, that if my father died, and they sat shiva on the kibbutz, I wouldn’t be able to spend any time with Alek.

  If there was any logic in the world, the radio would bleep every time the word “love” was mentioned. The censors would blacken the television screen and warn that the material in question is not suitable for children, that it is subversive, dangerous. That anyone who seriously succumbs to this madness is definitely not friendly to the environment. But nobody apart from me seems to see things this way.

  MY HAGAR, FOR EXAMPLE

  My Hagar, for example, tends to chew on the word “love” interminably, and in recent years she has also developed the irritating habit of remarking “I love you” at the end of every conversation with me, casting the two of us in some American television drama.

  This is the recurrent pattern: first she provokes some argument with me on e-mail, and then she calls to say, “Mommy, I just want you to know that I love you.”

  “Yes.… Same here,” I echo in embarrassment. And only once I said: “Look, surely we can have an argument without pinning this tail to it. It wouldn’t kill us.”

  “And it won’t kill you to hear that I love you. Why is it so hard for you to hear me say it? When I have children, I’ll tell them that I love them ten times a day.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “And I want to make it clear to you that I know that you love me.”

  “I very much hope that you know.”

  When she was here over the summer I almost vomited at the conversations she conducted with her boyfriend on the phone: I love you. I miss you so much. I know you care for your brother. I know it hurts. I wish I could share it with you. More than once she stood opposite me in the kitchen with the cordless phone, she didn’t even take the trouble to go to her room, and against the background of the synthetic music of these phrases I cut the cucumbers and tomatoes on the chopping board into tiny pieces so that my daughter would have a proper Israeli salad after a winter in New York.

  Hagar sincerely believes that “love is communication,” and that “love is above all friendship and shared values,” and that “love is growing together”; she recites these theses to me without a hint of irony, and since “Peter’s aggressive-depressive silences sabotage their love” she doesn’t think she’ll marry him, even though for the time being they’re not breaking up, either. Peter hurts her feelings, and you don’t marry someone who hurts your feelings, right? No, my clear darling, says her mother, on no account should you marry someone who hurts your feelings, even if those feelings sound to your mother like commercially packaged nothing.

  ALEK

  Alek came on the night of the twentieth of November. At half past ten on the night after the war.

  How can I convince myself that love is an insane delusion, when Alek appears at my door in the dark as in a vision?

  His face is white as that of a tense clown, and he is wearing something white under his army coat. “May I?” he asks, standing so passively in the doorway. You don’t ask “May I?” about something that belongs to you anyway, I thought afterwards, when I drew back to get my breath between heartbeats. My heart had gone completely haywire, it had expanded to alarming dimensions leaving no room for my lungs. Alek let me go for a minute and put his Kalashnikov down on the marble counter. “What are you doing here?” I asked when he pulled me back into his embrace. “What am I doing?” he mumbled to my forehead, and without seeing or hearing—perhaps only from the touch of his lips—I made out the words, “What am I doing here? Apparently trying to be Hemingway.”

  “No,” he added immediately and tightened his grip, “no. That’s not it. I was a soldier here, and there’s you and the child and Yoash and a few others. It wouldn’t be normal not to come.” And later on, at dawn, he said too that “as soon as the war began I couldn’t stand the anti-Semites. Understand, I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semites and they just hate Israel.” Only then, at dawn, I discovered that he hadn’t gone to Heidelberg at all, and had flown straight to Paris when he left in June.

  Heidelberg: One of the most beautiful cities in Germany. Known for its famous university, which was founded in the Middle Ages. Tchernikhovsky and Klausner studied there. I know, I looked it up in Grandma Dora’s encyclopedia one Saturday when I traveled to the kibbutz with Hagar to show ourselves and stand the test of gossiping tongues. For five months I had imagined Heidelberg at the foot of the Odenwald mountain range, until I could walk down the cobbled streets in my imagination and make my way to the river. I sometimes went into travel agencies simply in order to see the name of the city on a poster. Before I went to sleep I would look at the atlas and measure the distance in days of walking. And whenever they said “West Germany” on the radio, I would turn up the volume. And all that time he had been in Paris.

  Alek didn’t ask about Hagar sleeping in her room that was once his room. Not right away. First he led me to bed and sank himself in my body, and gave me back my body that had as if been taken from me after the birth. Gave me back my body so that I would lose it under him and above him and this way and that, and then I would fill it up again until the tips of my fingers and toes dripped happiness.

  “We weren’t Jewish heroes,” he mumbled when I rested on his arm, and his fingers dripped with milk from my breasts.

  “We weren’t?”

  “No. My father is a Jewish hero. Official hero. Two years he fought at Leningrad, you know: blocked the canon with his body. He himself breached the blockade.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the same place, apparently. In Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg, where they killed the Czar.”

  “And you, where have you come from now?”

  Years later, too, when he became a full-time journalist, he wasn’t in the habit of volunteering information in answer to questions of the who-what-when-where kind. “In the area of the enclave. The Golan Heights,” he answered reluctantly.

  “Was it hard?”

  “For those who were there at the beginning it was hard. This week they finally brought coats for everyone.”

  As always happens with him, to this day, Alek opened up time for me and stripped the moment of all its specific attributes. Amikam was dead, that I already knew. The IDF was positioned forty kilometers from Damascus, Golda was conducting talks with Kissinger, Tami’s brother was in Tel Hashomer Hospital, Yoash was still serving in the reserves, and in Alek’s arms, in the clean smell of his body, I was far away, in a place consisting only of the absolute raw materials. Man, woman, war, baby.

  Even when I saw his white face in the doorway I knew that he would not stay with us, but I was like a person whose faith has found confirmation: nature abhors a vacuum
, and the vacuum is filled with what fits it. Alek had not left me, and he would never really leave me.

  At some point or other Hagar began to whimper and Alek didn’t get up with me, he waited; I went to her and waited, dense sweet heart-trembling moments, until he came and stood silently next to the wall over us. I didn’t switch on the light, and I didn’t need to. I saw everything like a cat in the dark. My vision has never been clearer. Alek was dressed—perhaps he was cold, perhaps he felt it wasn’t fitting to enter this scene naked. I think that’s what he felt. He stood hugging himself in that so familiar position, and from the armchair I could see his fingers gripping his ribs. Something happened to time, which slowed down and spread out between the beats: Hagar’s sucking. My breathing. My heartbeats. His breathing presence in the dark. As if infinity could enter between the beats. I don’t have the right words to describe it, but I know for certain that in those moments I wanted nothing, I hoped for nothing, my thoughts stayed still. I was all gathered in, all wrapped up, and it was enough for me to know that the moment indeed existed, and since it existed, it would never ever be denied.

  Only when I put Hagar back to bed did Alek come up and stand next to me and reach out to put one finger on her hand, which immediately clenched around it. I didn’t dare look at his face, I didn’t look until he whispered something and I turned my head to read his lips. “Fingernails,” he whispered, “I didn’t think of this. Of this I didn’t think. I didn’t think she had fingernails.”

  During all the years to come I made sure that Hagar never saw the two of us together, except for the unavoidable moments when she went out to him, on the rare occasions when he came to get her at the house. Does she have some unconscious memory in which this picture is stored? Her mother with an open flannel pyjama top, her father in white, standing together over her crib.

  My feet were frozen, and when we got back into bed Alek put them on his chest to warm them. And then he asked me about Yoash. He had a gentlemanly order of priorities. First me, his full attention, then Hagar, and then Yoash. When had I heard from him last? I hadn’t heard anything from Yoash, Alek was much better informed than I was. Before he booked a flight to Israel he managed to get him on the phone, and Yoash who was already in uniform left him a key in the regular place under the flowerpot. And the first chance he got to make a call, Alek called Yoash’s mother on the farm. Yoash was in Africa, on the other side of the canal, with Brigade 421, they hoped to see him safe and sound next week.

  ALEK

  Alek stayed in the country for nearly three more weeks before returning to Paris, and from the first morning we established a routine which had never existed before and which was never repeated afterwards. The procedure came into being as if of its own accord on the first day, when Alek went to get his discharge from the army. I took Hagar to her daycare, and from there I went to meet him at Yoash’s apartment, where he had settled in the night before, before coming to me. I spent the afternoon with Hagar, and at night when she was already asleep he came to me, knocking on the door and staying for a few hours. But after Yoash returned, it sometimes happened that he came with him and left with him.

  When Hagar woke up, he would sometimes come with me and touch her with renewed wonder, but he never picked her up. Even on the one night she spent in my arms with the two men in the kitchen, when she was suffering from a prickly rash. Because of this, when I had to go to the toilet, without giving it any thought I handed her to Yoash, who took her naturally, put her on his shoulder, and was in no hurry to give her back to me when I returned.

  Without saying anything, Alek made it clear that he was a guest in our house, and nevertheless he tried to spend as much time as he could with me. With me and with Yoash.

  One Saturday I took Hagar to my parents for lunch, and we all made a big effort to create an atmosphere of normality, but nothing was normal. The newspapers were black with mourning notices, the telephone kept ringing with news of friends’ sons, and rumors of what had really happened and what had definitely happened, and my father looked as if he had shrunk. He never picked up the phone himself, he just stood there with his eyes fixed on the instrument until my mother handed it to him, and to us he hardly spoke at all. It was his friends who were responsible for the fiasco, and he realized the full extent of the catastrophe more than any of us.

  Talush, in a childish track suit already too small for her that for some reason she insisted on wearing, withdrew with Hagar to the sofa, ignoring the three of us, and from the look in my mother’s eyes she seemed not to see us at all. On the first day of the war she had closed the diet clinic and gone back to working as a nurse in the wards.

  And in the midst of this sorrow, of all this sorrow, Noa Weber sat at the table reeking of sex, silent in idiotic satisfaction, and nobody thought for a moment of attributing her silence to compulsive sexual gratification. On the contrary, they thought that I was with them, depressed to the point of speechlessness by the torrent of bad news, and in fact I seemed so depressed to them that at one point my mother put her hands on my shoulders from behind and said: “Cheer up a bit, Noa. It doesn’t help to be depressed. In the end, we won a great victory.”

  For a moment I was tempted to tell them that Alek was in Israel and that he was really a good guy, one of the best of our boys, doing the right thing by rushing to the defense of the motherland, but I immediately rejected the thought. Alek was not a good guy, not in their sense, and I was already deep in an emotional underground, too deep to be able to conduct a public relations campaign on Alek’s behalf.

  Two days before, on Thursday afternoon, I had gone with him and Yoash to drink coffee in the Old City. When we came out of the cafe it began to pour, the merchants retreated into their empty shops, but we ran through the water cascading from the awnings, embracing, skipping crazily up the wet steps, eliciting peals of laughter from the spectators, who also seemed to forget the time and events for a moment.

  Something was happening between the three of us, and when I thought about it—and I thought about it most of the time—I felt a kind of conspiratorial warmth spreading through me.

  In the days preceding Yoash’s release from the army I understood the intensity with which Alek related to him. He called up to find out what had happened to all kinds of friends and acquaintances, but as far as Yoash was concerned it was evident that he was really worried, a worry that never left him. “I love him,” he said. The best of our boys didn’t say such things then.

  About the events of his own war Alek was unwilling to talk, and it was only gradually that I gathered information. On the first day of the war he tried to get onto a plane, but reservists from Golani were not a high priority, so it was only on the fourth day that he reached brigade headquarters. For some reason they kept him at Acre for three days, and from there they sent him to Rosh Pina, it’s not clear why. In the end he went up to the Golan Heights to escort a convoy of supplies to the enclave, but by that time the worst of the fighting was already over. I have no idea what he saw and what he did, perhaps he talked about it to Yoash, but with me he just shrugged his shoulders. “We weren’t Jewish heroes.”

  When Yoash came back Alek was the first to notice that there was something wrong, it took me time, and all I saw at the beginning was that Yoash was in high gear, and it was nothing new for Yoash to have attacks of speedy hyperactivity. He talked a lot, he talked without stopping, rapid strings of words, and Alek sat next to him and listened. The words were the same words that everybody was repeating then: Golda, the Chief of Staff, they came in from here, they attacked us from there, the bridgehead, the breakthrough, General Gonen.… I didn’t pay attention to the exact content and the details of the complaints which were endlessly, monotonously repeated, but after Alek pointed it out to me I began to notice that there really was something wrong with Yoash. He hardly slept, none of us slept much in those days. Alek my insomniac prince never needed much sleep, I made up a little sleep in the mornings, but Yoash was different, he looked like
a clockwork mouse which had been wound up and couldn’t stop. He would get up in the middle of a sentence and say that he had to go here or there, volunteer unnecessarily to go to the corner store and buy us butter or salt. The Hamida file had been replaced by petitions and manifestos that he had to fetch and return and duplicate in the middle of the night. As if at every moment there was something else that had to be done. Even before, he used to jiggle his foot nervously when he sat, but now it seemed that the agitation had taken over his whole body.

  “Yoash had a bad war,” Alek said to me, “and Yoash, never mind how he fought and how much of a hero he was, is still exactly like a child. From this point of view, he’s a typical Israeli.” Infinitely patient, he did not argue with Yoash, but one morning when the two of us were alone in his apartment on Yarkon Street, he said a few things to me, and his mouth, I remember, twisted in a terrifying, or perhaps terrified, anger. “Oversight … I can’t bear the sound of that word any more. They found themselves a word … oversight.”

  “But there was an oversight, in spades,” I objected. Motherhood, the weeks that had gone by without him, the fact of his return, had given me a new self-confidence, and I no longer hesitated to confront him, I even enjoyed it.