The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  When Aunt Greta landed at the Hilton and summoned me into her presence, the plot advanced as expected, but in a style which was, from my point of view at least, surprising. Aunt Greta did not display even polite affection towards the baby I brought with me, then eleven months old, togged out in a party dress, with a single tooth showing cutely when she smiled.

  After ordering tea and cake for both of us, without first asking what I wanted, and even before the waiter wheeled the room service trolley out of the room, she opened a thorough, no-nonsense investigation, without any sentiment. Only when in reply to her question I said in careful English that I was “not in contact with Hagar’s father,” she sighed from the depths of her tough old breast, turned her faded blue gaze towards the view of Nachlaot, and remarked that she didn’t know what was happening to men nowadays. “Haim,” she said, “had his dreams, but at least he was a man. A real Jewish man. Not like the floor rags you bump into everywhere today who don’t know the meaning of responsibility. I can tell you, child, that I personally don’t rent apartments to hippies or psychologists.” “Hippies I understand, but why psychologists?” I asked, feeling for some reason that I could come to like her. “If I rent to psychologists, men will come to see them,” whispered my Aunt Greta in a mysterious husky voice. “Men will come, and you know what will happen then? Those men will begin to whine and wail, and that I cannot tolerate and I will not permit, not in any apartment of mine.” She too was quite an accomplished actress. A woman who lives alone for many years, I think, is compelled to adopt a few eccentric behaviors, even if only in self-defense.

  When to my surprise Aunt Greta put out her cigarette on the Black Forest cake—perhaps as an expression of contempt for the margarine—all that remained was to sum up, which she did precisely and succinctly. “It’s obvious that law isn’t for you, and that you, Noa Weber, will never be a lawyer, but as far as it depends on me I will try to help you. And don’t ask me why.” And so she did. Aunt Greta would pay my tuition, my parents would help with other expenses, and I would find pupils for private coaching, because a combination of a day job and studying law—forget about it, you can understand that it just isn’t realistic.

  After she returned to New York I never saw her again, “she flew away on her broomstick and disappeared,” as Alek said. Aunt Greta died at Mount Sinai Hospital in the autumn of 1983, on the day that Menachem Begin resigned, after Alek had already left Israel with his family. In her will she left Talush a few pieces of old jewelry, and to me she left her Encyclopedia Britannica together with its bookcase. The rest of her property went to Jewish charities. But even when I stood in line to pay the custom duties on this superfluous encyclopedic legacy, and when I went crazy trying to arrange for its transportation to Jerusalem, I remembered her with affection.

  IF I REPEATED

  If I repeated this little story about Aunt Greta it’s only because it is so pervaded by Alek’s spirit that it seems he could have composed it himself. He rejoiced in the concluding scene with the Britannica, and laughed like a child when I described my great-aunt’s rental boycott policy: “All according to the rules of the genre.” As far as the psychologists were concerned, and their male clients in particular, he and Aunt Greta were of one mind.

  Hagar, for example, tells this story quite differently. In the eyes of my daughter, Aunt Greta is “an independent woman who existed before her time and paid the price for it” (how does Hagar know?), and was “one of the many tragedies of Zionism that nobody talks about.” One of the first things that my Hagar did in New York was to locate Aunt Greta’s grave and recite the mourner’s prayer over it (I wonder how the old lady would have reacted to a woman reciting Kaddish, but what does that matter?). In her lectures my daughter sometimes quotes Aunt Greta’s story as an example and symbol of the Jewish fate, which is apparently the kind of story that Americans like. I, like Alek, prefer a different story.

  IN THE LAA FORUM

  Tonight I entered the LAA forum again to check and see if there was anything new. Sandy, Sally, Sara, and Susan were all singing the same old tune. But for the benefit of the girls someone had gone to the trouble of sending in a whole lecture on biochemistry, “to help us become better acquainted with our bodies and understand what’s happening to us.”

  So, everything had begun on the second of July 1972, with a little molecule called phenylethylamine. My brain, which was and is “about the size of a grapefruit,” had become addicted to this cunning molecule which stimulates the nerves, and in my case, as with other addicts, common dependency had turned into an addiction because of a “structural deficiency” in the “monoamine oxidase inhibitors.”

  I understand, girls. Now I understand everything. And nevertheless I didn’t understand. Was Alek’s melting smile engraved on my phenylethylamine molecules? Had it been engraved there in advance? From the moment I was conceived in my mother’s womb? And the touch of his hand, and the smell of his neck, and the smell of his apartment and the smell of snowbound Moscow—are they imprinted on my monoamine oxidase?

  If we’re talking about a typhoon raging in my neurons, why doesn’t the storm subside when the storm god disappears for years at a time? And how can you explain the fact that only one person, present or absent, sets this storm in motion, if indeed it is not the person whom my body craves, but only the storm?

  On the second of July I drank of the love potion of Tristan and Isolde. On the second of July I drank bitter coffee mixed with phenylethylamine.

  But how does that explain me, me and Alek? And the touch of heaven on the skin, how does it explain that?

  Among all the babble of Sandy and Sally and Sara and Susan, among all the drivel of the dope from Detroit, there’s one thing I can’t find, pardon me, there’s one thing missing, and that is the soul. Because in my case, my stupid sisters, it is the soul that begs for a fuck, yes, precisely the soul. Believe it or not, this is my fantastic perversion: it’s not my body I want him to fuck but my brain. And it’s not the “reptilian brain” that I howl to the wicked moon for him to fuck, but the cortex of the brain.

  “Most mammals pet while courting,” they write there. But this primate would forgo the petting to her last day, if in exchange she could receive her one and only into her soul.

  “To her master, or rather her father; to her husband, or rather her brother; his handmaid, or rather his daughter; his wife, or rather his sister.…” In these words Eloise’s penylethylamine addresses the castrated Abelard; in words like these the sick molecules inside me cry out when the soul, the soul, the screwed up soul and nothing else addresses the absent one. For then the body and even the emotions are only an instrument and a means to reach what lies beyond them.

  I’m sick, forgive me, sick and tired to death. Even my only one would laugh at me.

  It was last February, in the apartment in Ordenka, we didn’t go out anywhere, we stayed in bed, Alek read a book full of old marks and quoted: “The drive to love is the drive to death,” and shrugged his white shoulders and added: “Another one of Soloviev’s exaggerations. You asked about him once. He talks about sex if it isn’t clear. Anyone who has sex like animal will die like animal, also. I completely forgot those formulations of his.” “What other exaggerations was he guilty of?” “You want me to translate for you? I won’t translate … he speaks about striving for perfection … love is from God, is perfection and most close to God, but in order for love to unite with God … for that, the whole world order must first be changed … the way we understand things.” He sat leaning against the headboard, leafing through the pages, and as he spoke his voice and face took on the weary, familiar expression of friendly, consoling self-irony. “Understand … I don’t know if you can understand, or what it could mean to you … we’re in year ten, and this man in year ten is saying that in his opinion we should construct the world, our biography, and above all, love.”

  “Which has no connection to sex.”

  “Not necessarily. He isn’t against sex.
But this is already related to the subject of androgyny, the missing half of every one, and also to the question of how ready is the soul. How high soul can lift … no, not lift, raise.…”

  “Rise?”

  He smiled. “Something like that.”

  I took the book out of his hands. “In that case,” I said, “come and raise me up.” And he raised me, and how, or lifted me, whatever you like, and I definitely rose. Even my only one would laugh at me, I said, but Alek saw and knew and he never laughed.

  ALEK RETURNED

  Alek returned to Israel in the spring of ’77, this time as a journalist, an official observer from the side. He had a job with Radio Luxembourg, he freelanced for a number of European newspapers, and nevertheless you couldn’t say that he was “sent” here, because Alek wasn’t the kind of person that anybody “sent.” In recent years the interest he had once had in Israel is dwindling, and he no longer asks questions and gets angry as he did then, but when he left after the war in ’73, it was clear that there was something unresolved in his relations with the country that wouldn’t let him be, and it had to be this which prompted his return.

  Alek came with Ute. First they lived on Palmach Street, a fifteen-minute walk from me, and then they moved to Musrara, about the same distance in the opposite direction, and I sensed nothing and guessed nothing. It took him nearly two months to get in touch.

  When he returned I was already in my third year of legal studies, and ostensibly three and a half years more mature. I am referring to all the behaviors I had acquired by observing the women in the law faculty and imitating them. There weren’t many women in the faculty then, and with the exception of one girl in the ROTC, they were all older than I was, and most of them were good girls with fathers who were lawyers or judges. I imitated the way they dressed—clothes from the Old City were out—I imitated the way they spoke in seminars—intelligent and restrained—I imitated their expressions—intelligent and attentive—and I imitated their attitude to politics—that it was for students from other departments, who had time. Once in a while I would run into someone from my other, former life—Dalit from La Mama lived nearby and dropped in to see the baby once, the slimy Hyman would pop up occasionally on Ben Yehuda Street—but except for Yoash, they all seemed as if they belonged to another incarnation. Emotionally anesthetized, with a new, careful persona, I advanced steadily, on automatic pilot, towards goals I did not really desire. I had longings, of course. But the longing was no longer a threat. It could be lived with, the way one lives with a chronic disease; morning and evening you tether it under your ribs, and morning and evening you make all kinds of deals with it. Leave me alone now, and I’ll devote myself to you later. Let me be now, and I’ll let you loose later. If you just leave off now, I’ll unleash you when night comes. I had no doubt that Alek would return, so that in the end it was simply a question of how to pass the time, and I, with my Tatyana fantasy—“not the plain, timorous, lovelorn maiden whom he’d known.…”—and my kibbutz education, I simply tried to do it with dignity.

  Longings. What is there to say about longings that hasn’t already been said? Perhaps only that in spite of all the negotiations and the postponement deals that I made with them, I wouldn’t really give them up. The void was Alek’s void, the absence wore Alek’s form, and therefore the absence was also a kind of presence with which I made love. The touch of his absence. Its clutch.

  After he left—I know how ridiculous it sounds—I developed a foolish sensitivity to airplanes, I mean that I couldn’t resist looking up to follow their flight. “Airplane, Hagar … over there, above the tower, look, an airplane.…” But even when she wasn’t there I looked.

  “And now the international weather forecast. Rome fifteen degrees, fine to partly cloudy. Paris nine degrees, fine and cold.…” Perhaps the Boeing was coming from that fine cold weather. In our part of the world it was the eve of the festival of first fruits, my mother had taken Hagar to the kibbutz, and I had forgotten to close the window, and by the time I came home the table would be covered with desert dust.

  In the year 1977 I already had a telephone, a gift ordered by my parents which arrived in time for my twenty-second birthday and Hagar’s third. As far as I can remember people didn’t phone each other much in those days, and the conversations were shorter and more functional than they are today. And perhaps precisely for this reason I was already in the mindset of someone waiting for the phone to ring. For the phone to ring rather than for a knock at the door. From the mailbox, on the other hand, I didn’t expect anything; Alek who was fluent in Russian and French, and who read German and English, often said that he was unable to read and write in our language, that it was too frustrating, and it was clear that he wouldn’t try.

  He said “Shalom” without identifying himself, and I said, “Where are you?” “Where am I? In phone booth on Zion Square, that’s where I’m standing now.” “What are you doing in Zion Square?” I asked, infected by the smile on the other end of the line. From the tone of his voice it seemed as if we had met yesterday and the day before, as if we hadn’t stopped talking, and this was exactly the confirmation I needed.

  “It’s long story, I’ll tell you everything.… How are you?” His voice sounded very far away, intermittently drowned out in the noise from the street. “Where have you been?” “Where have I … nowhere. I’m here.” “It sounds as if you were running from somewhere.” “Most of the time I’m running.” “What did you say? It’s hard to hear.…” “I asked how you are.” “Fine.… All kinds of changes happened … plans … I have a woman I live with now … she’s here … we rented an apartment in Musrara, I signed a lease this week. When can I see you? It’s too long since I saw you.” “I’m studying law,” I said suddenly as if without any connection into the wind, for that was how it seemed to me, as if the two of us were snatching sentences from a roaring wind. “I’m studying law. In the end I succeeded in getting in. I have one more year to graduate.” “Law is good. It’s good … be so kind to tell me, please, when can we meet?”

  All the time I knew that he had other women in Paris, women in long black raincoats, women in aromatic cafes smoking Gauloise, women who lived in attics with pigeons flying from the pediment when Alex went to shut the window. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it, I simply took it for granted, and only when I averted my face from another man’s kiss the images would sometimes arise. But somehow, in my foolishness, “I have a woman I live with” had never entered my head.

  I told him that I would meet him at lunchtime the next day at Fink’s Bar. “You want Fink’s? Okay, if you want Fink’s, let it be Fink’s. I’ll wait for you there.”

  Outside it was a heavy summer dusk, I was wearing a long tee shirt with only panties underneath it … one remembers such trifles. And when I replaced the receiver I felt a sudden panic at the silence in Hagar’s room, and I rushed to her. As if a catastrophe could have happened during this conversation, due to this conversation.… But my daughter was sitting on the rug surrounded by her stuffed animals and feeding them with a teaspoon.

  In the four years that they lived in Israel I saw Ute twice. The first time, it was the first summer, they were standing together at the entrance to the Jerusalem Theatre, waiting in line for a Friday matinee film show. And a year or two later, also in summer, she came up Ben Yehuda Street and walked past me in the opposite direction. I was with Hagar.

  A big, blonde woman, a little taller than I was, yellow hair piled on top of a head held high. A graceful walk, a long neck gracefully bearing her head over her Viking breast. I knew that she would be beautiful, it was inconceivable that she wouldn’t be, and in some perverse way I took comfort both in her beauty and in her complete difference from me. She was one thing, I was another. She was one story, I was a completely different one. However strange it may sound, I hardly ever thought about her, and I still don’t. A German by birth. Worked here in the Rockefeller Museum. Had two sons with him. Her father, I know, owned a
chain of retirement homes in Switzerland, and at a certain stage he offered Alek a job working for him. “Of all things in world, can you imagine me calling some laundry to find out when they’re returning those Nazis’ sheets?”

  Even when Alek began meeting Hagar, and avoided taking her to their home, I wasn’t angry, even though I guessed that it wasn’t his idea not to take her there. I was one thing, and Ute was a different world, and just as I had no wish to know about her, it seemed natural to me that she wouldn’t want to be reminded of my existence.

  All these thoughts, all this blocking out, actually came later, in the course of many days to come. But then he said, “I have a woman I live with now,” and so I said “At Fink’s.…”

  I detest all those twitters of “he said,” “and so then I said,” all those little female pecks in words. I detest them when it comes to me and Alek, and in spite of that and just because of that I’ll repeat it again.…

  He said “I have a woman I live with now,” to which I replied, “At Fink’s,” but the words had no connection to the transparent radiance flooding me under my skin. Or the tender liveliness of his voice.