The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  My Swedish sexpot, as Hagar calls her—“But why does she have to have such big breasts?” “What do you want me to do? Send her to a plastic surgeon to have them made smaller?”—my Swedish sexpot has a happy, adventurous sex life, and even though I have never actually described a fuck in any of my books, what happens between one chapter and the next is quite clear to everyone.

  “The best sex is on the second date,” my Diva says to the gloomy pathologist, “it’s a law of nature,” but in the end she agrees to a third date, as well. Part of the sensation caused by the first books was due to Nira’s sexuality. In American literature women were already fucking for pleasure then, consciously or unconsciously, but in Hebrew, a woman who fucked for the sake of it was somehow seen as an innovation.

  Never mind all that now, because the point I want to make here is only that I bestowed all this sexual freedom on Nira at a time when I wasn’t having any sex at all. A contemporary woman is not supposed to admit to such a disgrace. A contemporary woman is supposed to take care of her sex life in the same way that she takes care of brushing her teeth. And if you don’t go to bed with anyone for four years, and you don’t even feel the urge to do so, it means that something about you is simply not normal and you should see a psychologist. In the present state of the market, admitting to the lack of a sex life lowers the value of your shares and leads to a heavy loss of prestige. Even between girlfriends who tell each other everything.

  Four years of abstinence I had after the miserable fuck with Yoash—that is, if we don’t count masturbation as actual sex—and the reason for my abstinence was absolutely clear to me: not the fact that I was tired most of the time, not the technical difficulty posed by being a single mother—even though a few nonentities in the law faculty lived with their parents, some of them at least had apartments or pigsties of their own—and certainly not a “fear of relationships” or any other psychobabble of that kind. I abstained because from my point of view there was only one right body and one right touch and smell: one unique model that had been imprinted in all my cells, engraved in my bones, which made every other contact wrong. On several occasions I had in fact tried to go the way of all flesh, for the sake of my self-respect and release, petting that had failed to ignite any joy in me and had succeeded only in making me feel very remote from my body. As if I were perching on the branch of a nearby pine tree, on the roof of the car outside, on the lampshade, on one of the fat clouds in the sky, and observing myself from there as in a movie. The hands weren’t right. The height wasn’t right. And the contour of the hips. The mouth tastes of wine, sweet and revolting. Bob Marley doesn’t do it for me. And the wrong things are said in the wrong tone. I, unlike my Nira, escaped not after the second fuck, but after the first one.

  Even without these attempts my body seemed rubbed out. And not only my body, but also my soul. As if I had retired from myself and I was now operating mainly on automatic pilot, obeying the instructions of some higher authority. Now go to the photocopying machine. Now you have an hour in the library, concentrate. Now go to the bus stop to pick up Hagar on time, and don’t forget to pop in at the grocery store on the way home.

  My memory is a trash can, I stuff it with whatever rubbish I like, and the studies which did not demand much thought came easily to me—when I was told to read verdicts I read them, I didn’t look for someone with a cheat-sheet, and when I was told to regurgitate the material, I did so. In the human landscape of the law faculty I was an outsider and I felt like an outsider. Female, younger than everyone else, the mother of an infant who woke up at night with an earache, and who had to be provided with dried fruits to celebrate Arbor Day in nursery school. Somehow I managed, and in fact, not “somehow” but mainly thanks to the help of my mother and to Miriam who came to the rescue, but now, from a distance, those years are covered in fog with scarcely a landmark, as if I had walked through them in my sleep.

  Two or three times a day, I remember, I would close my eyes, and as a reward for the functioning of the previous hours, I would conjure up Alek. In the library. For a moment or two while Hagar was playing quietly. And it was as if I were retrieving my soul. Even when I was overwhelmed with sorrow.

  TAMI

  Tami called in the morning, waking me up after I had gone back to bed. She was on vacation in Eilat with her husband and her three young ogres, the four lunatics had gone to the beach again, her back was burned to a frazzle, the ogres had insisted on going to flay themselves some more, thank God, she herself had stayed behind in the air-conditioned room, and she was in dire need of hearing a human voice actually talking instead of grunting at her in bass. “Are you all right? Were you sleeping?”

  “No, of course not. What’s the time?”

  “Eleven o’clock. Why do you sound so strange?”

  “That’s what a human voice sounds like, you must have forgotten. That’s what happens to a girl who spends too much time with boys.”

  “Go on, laugh at me. Not everyone gives birth when they’re minors, and not everyone has daughters. I saw you in the paper. It was a good interview. How’s the book doing? Is it selling?”

  “I very much hope so.”

  “What do you mean ‘you hope’? It’s a great book. Write us another one. Exactly like this one. I finally realized what you got out of all those trips to Moscow. Dalya and I were already sure that you had a lover in the Jewish Agency, but after this book we decided that it’s a lover in the Russian Mafia.”

  “Benya Krik.”

  “What?”

  “Benya Krik, that’s the name of my lover. Benya is a king. The king of the Mafia.”

  “Benya Krik is the name of someone from the Jewish Agency and not the Mafia. Benya Krik isn’t the name of someone you fuck. Benya is the name of an old man from Bat Shlomo.… You don’t know how I’m dying to get back to work. You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have to worry about holidays any more.”

  “You just like complaining. Kisses to the boys, or regards.”

  “Kisses, I’ll pass them on. And you’re right, on the whole it’s fun here. They’re coming to clean the room in a minute, you won’t believe what a mess the boys have left, at least I don’t have to clean it up.”

  “Look after yourself, have a good rest.”

  “You too, and write me another book, you hear? So the girls will have something to read when the next holiday comes round.”

  HAGAR AND MY MOTHER, TAMI, AND MIRIAM

  Children are stuck with their parents and as a last resort they don’t have any alternative to bonding with them, but Tami and Miriam and my mother—I shall never understand all the goodness they showered on me when I had so little to return. My mother set Hagar in the center of her world, and she remains just about there to this day. And in spite of all her efforts to treat us all equally, she doesn’t relate to Talush’s twins in the same way, with the same pride and surprising tenderness.

  It was only at the beginning of the nineties, when I met a few Russian families, that I realized what a joke Alek had played on us, that indirectly and without any intention on his part he had maneuvered the Weber family into a Russian pattern: the wife works, the wife studies, the wife has important business, and the grandmother suspends her no less important affairs, and takes care of the grandchild. My mother continued working at her clinic, but two or three times a week she finished early to pick Hagar up from her daycare, and in later years from school. My old room at home was turned into a second room for my daughter, with toys “for there” and books “for there,” and to this day it remains hers and she keeps things there.

  Very late in the day, only after Hagar had left home, it occurred to me that a situation of double motherhood invites all kinds of conflicts, is a recipe for the development of tensions, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t remember any tension between my mother and myself. Perhaps I was too drained to be angry or jealous, and whatever she told me about my daughter I accepted. For the most part.

  Se
lf-condemnation can turn very easily into a kind of boasting in reverse—look at me, look at me, see what an incredible monster I was—and therefore I have to say that there wasn’t a drop of anything monstrous in my treatment of Hagar. I dressed her, I put her shoes on, I listened, I reacted, I thought about … I remembered to.… When she was small I braided her hair, and when she was in high school I picked her up at the youth movement center when she came back from hikes.

  With time I also began to breathe in the smell of her hair, to delight in the warmth of her little body in her pajamas and to admire her sayings. She was a sturdy child, with penetrating logic, and when she learned to talk—she began to speak fluently at an early age—I enjoyed talking to her. You could say that I enjoy it to this day.

  One winter Saturday, when Hagar was nearly two, I took her in her stroller to the Old City, and went into the church of the Holy Sepulchre with her. In the hall where the picture of my Madonna hung in one of the niches, a large group of tourists was gathered, and a guide was standing with his back to the picture and speaking to them in German. I let Hagar, who had just woken up, out of her stroller, and despite the Germans I approached the painting, wanting to confirm or refute something, hoping perhaps that something would return to encompass both of us together, but nothing of the sort occurred. Hagar turned her head right and left on my shoulder, the tourists’ cameras flashed, and the same place was completely different. Whatever it was that I wanted to check, I wasn’t disappointed. There was an athletic, middle aged German woman standing next to me, with pale freckles on her arms and a red-checkered keffiyeh covering her shoulders. Hagar weighed heavily on my arms, and when I tried to put her down she arched her back and refused to stand. The guide in his silly hat kept repeating the same word, the only one I recognized. Jews, he said. Juden. He had a stick in his hand, it too was crowned with a hat.

  It was a long way back, almost all uphill, I had to get Hagar something to drink, and whatever I had been looking for, if at all, had nothing to do with her and would never have anything to do with her. Because for some reason which I would never be able to explain, Hagar did not belong to Alek, and from the time she was a few days old it was already clear that she didn’t belong to him. So obvious was this to me that the relation between them sometimes struck me with a shock of surprise.

  Tami: When will you be done in the library? Should we meet in the cafeteria? No, I have a better idea. I’ll be in the restaurant this afternoon. Are you picking Hagar up today? Bring her here. Does she still eat soup? We’ll find her something without carrots. You look as if you could do with a good bowl of soup, too.

  Miriam: The skinny man with the sideburns was here again this afternoon, asking about you, if I know when you’ll be back. Now listen to me and believe me when I tell you: study, work, study, work, day in day out, it’s no good. A person isn’t a machine, and a woman especially has to find the middle way.

  Noa: It’s not my fault that I haven’t got any time.

  Miriam: I’ll tell you what, you leave the little one with me, all night long, and go to a movie. And don’t hurry back. A gift from me.

  Noa: With you it’s work, work all day long, and you don’t go to the movies either.… How’s Avi? Is he still with that nice girl I met?

  Miriam: Don’t talk to me about her, I don’t want to say anything bad. She’s not nice at all, she just wants to butter me up.

  Noa: The man with the sideburns isn’t nice at all either.

  It took a few weeks, but during Hanukah, when Miriam’s nursery school was closed and Hagar’s daycare was open, we went to the cinema together to see a matinee of The Godfather. Both of us groaned in chorus at the sight of the severed horse’s head, we both relaxed together in our chairs when Michael finally put two bullets into the police captain—something, not in his appearance but in his body tension, reminded me of Alek—and only when we walked down the street and peeled the paper off the chocolate bar we had forgotten to eat inside the movie theater did I realize that Miriam Marie had understood the movie completely differently from me. She said that it was very sad how Michael had been dragged into a life of crime just because of his family, and how come his mother as the mother of the family didn’t have a word to say about the ways of her menfolk?

  “Didn’t you enjoy watching Sonny beating up Connie’s husband?” I knew she’d enjoyed it, I was sitting next to her, but I wanted to hear her say it. “I enjoyed it, of course I enjoyed it,” she admitted. “And don’t you think it was just?” “Just?” she exclaimed with majestic disdain, “Just? Believe me, if there was any justice in this world, half the men would be in wheelchairs. Including my engineer and including that one of yours, who doesn’t pay a penny for his daughter. But what good will it do us to say so?” Suddenly, I remember, I had a tremendous urge to hug her, but hugs weren’t part of our repertoire, so I just broke a piece off the bar of chocolate she was holding in her hand and put it in my mouth.

  Miriam would read all my books, nobly pass over the passages that embarrassed her, and generously forgive my and Nira’s lust for revenge and justice. My books would stand in a neat row behind the glass doors of her display cabinet, and she would enjoy showing people the dedications, but nevertheless I was destined to hear the most accurate criticism of them from her. She would ask about the sales, I would mention that most of the people who bought the books were women, and then she would say consolingly: “It’s the same thing in the nursery school when we tell the children fairy stories. You can see how it grabs the girls, and the boys start squirming and making noise right from the beginning. Boys are more into reality. And your books are more naive, like fairy tales.”

  STUDYING LAW

  Alek didn’t pay child support, and even if he’d had the wherewithal he wouldn’t have paid it, he would simply have given us as much as we needed without keeping accounts. I know it. But the way things turned out, when I needed money Alek didn’t have any either, and when Alek’s situation improved I was no longer in need.

  Before he returned to Paris I said something about thinking of studying law, and that without help from my parents there was no way I would be able to do it, not in the next few years at least. I didn’t mean to hint, but for a moment an expression appeared on his face which somehow reminded me of the way he looked standing in the door on the night my labor started. I understood that he was condemning himself for not being able to help and I was sorry for the misunderstanding.

  He helped me in another way, however, by his reaction to the story about Aunt Greta. Aunt Greta had announced that she was coming on a visit to Israel to check out her donation to Hadassah, and up to Alek’s departure it was not yet clear whether she intended summoning all or only some of us to her presence, and the discussions and conjectures about this question, and about Aunt Greta in general, injected a little of the old vitality into the family. The fact of the donation to Hadassah was unprecedented in itself, because up to now she had totally rejected the state that had robbed her of my father. Not that she denied its right to exist, she simply ignored its existence completely. Perhaps the war had provided her with the pretext for a reconciliation she had desired even beforehand, there was no way of knowing.

  To my surprise Alek showed a keen interest in this story, he liked family mythologies, and so it happened that I told him the whole legend in detail.

  Aunt Greta was my grandmother’s sister, and when my father was a small child they packed him up and sent him by ship from Hamburg to New York to stay with her. His mother, Grandma Hannah, had died, apparently of a complication of influenza, and in a certain, terrible sense it could be said that this was his good fortune, since but for Grandma Hannah’s fatal attack of influenza, it is doubtful if my father would have survived and I would have been born.

  Aunt Greta’s husband, Uncle Haim who was a socialist, “went and killed himself,” in his wife’s words, as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and he wasn’t even killed by a bullet, but died there two weeks after his arriva
l from dysentery. Uncle Haim’s death, and perhaps also the manner of his death, gave rise in Aunt Greta to an impatient skepticism with regard to volunteers in general, as well as the general foolishness of the world, and armed with this angry skepticism she sold her late husband’s laundry and devoted herself to bringing up her nephew and to the real estate business. Buying apartments, dividing them up, and renting them out. In 1948, when my father announced that he was going to fight the Arabs, Aunt Greta reacted with disapproval, to put it mildly, and when he met my mother and informed her that he was getting married and remaining in Israel—perhaps one day she too might consider joining him there?—she broke off relations with him. My father went on writing to her from time to time anyway: greeting cards for the New Year, announcements of the birth of his daughters, photographs, drawings made by Talush and me, and various items of family news, to which she eventually began to reply, albeit coldly. Towards my mother, on the other hand, there was no attempt at politeness, only obdurate, unrelenting hostility, and the letters my mother wrote in her broken English were returned unopened. The question now on the family agenda was whether Aunt Greta was about to effect a reconciliation only with the state or also with the wife, or whether perhaps she had no intention of reconciling with anybody, and the visit and the donation to Hadassah were intended only to provoke us.

  Alek was evidently fascinated by this story. He said that my Aunt Greta sounded like “someone worth knowing, not at all like an American person,” and added that “every family needs one rich Aunt Greta to make life interesting.” His lighthearted, literary attitude to something I saw as a complicated family dynamic inspired me after he left to write to Aunt Greta and tell her about myself, about baby Hagar, about my keen desire to study law and about my parents’ opposition to this project. Shamelessly, I even hinted that the main obstacle was my mother. This wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair, but I simply couldn’t see myself working at Soupçon until I managed to save up enough money to finance my studies, and I couldn’t think of any other way out. When I wrote my manipulative letter to Aunt Greta, I imagined myself reading it aloud to Alek. I knew that he would find it entertaining and appropriate to the story and character of the rich, tight-fisted aunt, who every family should possess.