The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  I didn’t understand this speech fully, or why he was so angry—he was only a guest here after all—I didn’t know where his anger came from, but I did know that Alek was leaving soon, and even though he was already dressed I still hadn’t put a foot out of the sheet. Suddenly, I remember, I detested them all equally: Peres and Begin, Aridor and Meridor, Kiryat Shmoneh and the kibbutzim and the atomic reactor, Shulamit Aloni whose book Women as People had opened my eyes, my sociopolitical insulted parents, and that Menachem and this one—all the Menachems in the world, together with all their friends and enemies: everyone who forced me over and over again to stand up and be counted, to take a stand; everyone who made him close his face to me.

  In the state of Israel you have to take a stand, in this world you have to take a stand, in this world you are your stand, only sometimes, what can I do, I get sick and tired of all these stands, they turn my stomach and make it hard for me to breathe. Alek never expected me to take a stand, not in that way, and it was I who usually introduced the outside noise, in order to test what? Who?

  He looked down at me and then he lay down next to me again. He allowed me to crease his shirt in silence a little longer, but he didn’t let me off completely. “Your friend, Miriam, who moved to Ma’ale Adumim, why don’t you ask her what she thinks of Begin? Or do you also prefer for the people to keep quiet?” I didn’t have to ask Miriam because I already knew. “Miriam isn’t an example, in many senses she’s even more left-wing than I am, but she has her own personal story, her own private score to settle for what happened to her when she arrived in the country.” “And the left doesn’t have, right? They don’t have private scores to settle, and that’s why they’re the only ones who know how to understand history and how to make progress. What a pity that there are people like your friend Miriam who get in the way of historical progress.”

  ON THE BRINK

  This is the phrase that comes to mind because that’s how it felt then, as if I was teetering on the brink, and sometimes I stumbled. With three or four hours of sleep at night, giddy and aroused to the point of being unable to concentrate, there were moments when objects seemed to lose their solidity, and then I would stumble, and bruised toes and cut fingers were quite a common occurrence then. I would linger with Hagar for a long time on the curb before crossing the street, afraid that I wasn’t assessing distance and speed correctly.

  Strange how you get accustomed to walking on shifting ground, too. Absorbed in mapping my own inner swamps, I was careful not to arouse suspicion, I adapted my movements to my loosening grip on reality, and the only attention I provoked was of the “you look tired” variety. In a certain sense everything became easier, because nothing seemed completely real except for the hours I spent with Alek—closing the door with a backwards kick, trapping my eyes as I stepped back, not letting them go as he came closer, and when I expected his quick, hard movement, touching me rather with a slow, long one.

  When everything becomes a little abstract, the concrete stops resisting you, and movements grow lighter, like those of an astronaut in space. During the weeks when he disappeared I would make up for lost sleep, and somehow or other I must have been born lucky, because even when the phenylethylamine rioted through my brain, my memory went on functioning like a separate disk.

  As the end of my last year in the law faculty approached, it was clear that I wasn’t a candidate for internship, that no legal firm I knew would take on a single mother as an intern—in those days I don’t think the term “single mother” was yet in use—and even if someone would have accepted me, I wouldn’t have been able to organize myself to cope with twelve- and fourteen-hour workdays. A few of the women graduates applied to be prosecutors for similar reasons, but I looked for a way out. Armed with a self-confidence that was paradoxically nourished by my new sexual exploits and the dramatic externalization of my sexual vulnerability, and under Alek’s imaginary eyes, which turned every test into a trifle and at the same time also challenged me to win, I went to be interviewed for a job with a human rights foundation. They weren’t necessarily looking for a lawyer, but legal articulateness and articulateness in general was seen as an advantage, and in the end I impressed them to such an extent that they agreed to keep the job for me and wait for almost two months until I graduated. I worked for the fund for over sixteen years, from the days when a staff of five were crowded in a noisy little office on Aza Street, until 1996 when it had grown into an empire, with a magnificent house in Talbiyeh and professional departments. According to the mandate defined by our donors we were supposed to assist in the development of local organizations dealing with the rights of … only such organizations barely existed then. I have had a number of occasions to say that most of the upheavals undergone by Israeli society from the end of the seventies to today can be described by the growth of such bodies, but what is relevant here is that the work consumed me to an extent that I never imagined, and that everything I learned during its course about the reality underneath the reality became a part of my being.

  In the beginning I made all the mistakes usually made by beginners. All of us except for Jeff were new at the job, and Jeffrey’s American experience didn’t suit the situation in Israel. We wasted months enthusiastically and inefficiently monitoring the activities of the so-called “Green Patrol” in their harassment of the Bedouins. At the height of these futile endeavours I found myself driving round the Negev with Yossi Lenk in the vain attempt to identify a stolen herd, as well as conducting furious and no less futile telephone conversations with my father’s friends, who naturally denied all knowledge of what I was telling them.

  Months were wasted in vain attempts to organize the residents of what was once the picturesque slum of Yemin Moshe, all with the aim of obtaining legal representation for these people who had been evicted from their homes when it was decided to gentrify the neighborhood and turn it into a tourist attraction. During the razing of the Shama’a Quarter to make room for the Cinematheque we compiled a thick dossier, which we didn’t know what to do with, and our initial contacts with a few doctors in the Gaza Strip were abruptly broken off, for reasons we were unable to understand. We also had no firm policy at that stage as to whether the occupied territories were part of our mandate or not.

  In internal seminars held by the fund I am sometimes called upon to tell anecdotes from those pioneering days: before the era of directors and research assistants, of nonprofit associations and volunteers and organizational consultants, of project descriptions and project funding and spreadsheets, when goals were not yet printed on recycled paper and human suffering was not yet parceled out among us in groups. As greenhorns we let the experiences swallow us up, let them make demands on our time without consideration of working hours, and this was exactly what I needed. I met people, I spoke to people, I traveled to places, the phone began to ring a lot, I made a lot of phone calls myself, and for a change I was doing something that seemed important to me.

  The year that I left the fund, when I held down two-thirds of a full-time job and was in charge of a number of well-formulated projects, it happened that I removed a young woman from dealing with damaged children. We were in the car on our way back from Haifa, after visiting one of the hostels whose financing the fund was then investigating, and this young woman, whose name was also Noa, told us how after previous visits to similar institutions she had woken at up night with horrible nightmares and gone to sleep with her daughter. “The strangest thing,” she said, “is that after not being able to tear myself away from her all night, after lying next to her and praying to God that nothing terrible happens to her, as soon as she wakes up I haven’t got any patience for her. She’s a little slow in the morning, she always dawdles in the morning, it’s nothing new, but precisely on this morning, I don’t know why, I lost my temper and behaved like a monster.”

  “If that’s the situation, it’s a sign that the job isn’t for you,” I pronounced from the front seat. “It doesn’t help you and it doesn
’t help the work for you to get into trouble at home.” And the next day, in spite of her objections, she was transferred to working with groups assisting foreign workers.

  I was never in danger of over-identification. Suffering, wickedness, stupidity, injustice, cruelty—I learned things about reality that I could never have imagined, but the main feeling simmering inside me was anger, which didn’t always explode in the right place, and not always in a helpful way. My father was often an object of my anger, especially in the first years, as if he, as a representative of the “oligarchy,” was responsible for Israeli reality and could be called on to account for it.

  “Good material for the KGB …,” Alek said once, when he picked up one of the illustrated publications of the Agricultural Development Company lying next to my bed. Hagar had scribbled a red beard and mustache on the face of the scientist in the photograph and made red flowers bloom from his test tube. “You want to pass it on to them?” I asked. “What? To whom?” he said, in alarm or revulsion. As far as I was concerned he could have been a spy, I didn’t care whom for. I was ready to be his agent, his field worker, taking his questions and presenting them to my father—Alek wouldn’t fuck me until I brought him the answers—I was ready to mingle with my parents’ friends, to question them and get the required information out of them, to blow the whole rotten system up from the inside.

  But Alek said: “It isn’t funny. KGB and its informers, Noia, it isn’t funny.” “Informer” was apparently the worst word in his lexicon, and once we had a nasty argument about it, when in the wake of ideas we were tossing around in the fund I mentioned to him a proposal for a sweeping law making it mandatory to report the abuse of minors, women, and the elderly. “Someone who does something like that, who abuses defenseless people, has no rights and should be shot. I would shoot him myself. But to inform, and even to make this law, that is something else.” “You’re an anarchist,” I said, as if a minute before I hadn’t had fantasies of blowing the system up from inside. “I am not an anarchist. You know what? Okay, I am. Better to be an anarchist and to shoot, than for neighbors to start informing on each other.”

  But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about now. I was living with injustice, cruelty, stupidity, and sadism, with this cocktail of the social system, and with the fact that my heart was hardly ever crushed like the other Noa’s. The anger got through to me, and I was good and angry with whomever and whatever I needed to be, but I couldn’t feel the pain of the victims.

  For a considerable part of the time however I did succeed in attaining one thing, and I sought it more and more: the awareness that in this world I and my entire range of feelings were not of the slightest importance, because touching heaven didn’t change anything in the real world.

  I went on meeting Alek whenever it suited him, he still pushed me to the edge and he still unraveled my heart and sharpened my edges, but in another separate part of my brain I grew indifferent. Not to him, no, never to him, but to myself and to what was happening to me.

  One minute I was with him with the blinds closed, with take me, take me already, ready to fall to his feet as long as he took me, and half an hour later with the Association of the Victims of.… Or the Committee for the War against.… Switching off my face and saying: “Let’s hear how you define your aims,” saying: “We’ll take it up with the board of directors,” saying: “But the most important thing is for you to start showing independence.” Sometimes I would lay my hand on my skirt, under the table, press a fingerprint left on my thigh to see if I could produce a pain, try to deepen the mark; the desire didn’t diminish, but gradually it began to seem worthless.

  The heavens could open to me, divinities could manifest themselves to me, my soul could fly out of my abandoned illuminated body, and all this would not change anything in the intermittently disembodied but nevertheless villainous world in which I moved.

  HAGAR

  I said that the work didn’t get to me like it did to others, but in the end I think it may have had an effect on Hagar. I don’t mean only that it took up all my time, and that I kept on sending her at the last minute to my mother, to Miriam, to girlfriends; I mean mainly that all the great injustices we dealt with at the fund somehow dwarfed her childhood, which suffered from an excessive sense of proportion. When her mother is going to visit a shelter for battered women or to meet the representatives of an organization for the disabled, a wise daughter—and Hagar was always wise—will not complain about the fact that it is her grandmother who accompanies her to the end-of-the-year party. As compensation, I would talk to her a lot about my work, tell her where I had been, who I had met and what I had done, and she was always interested. Sometimes more than in what was happening at school or in the youth movement.

  During school vacations she spent quite a lot of time in the office, where she always asked for explanations about what we were doing, and there was always someone who offered to explain. At the age of nine she inhaled tear gas at the demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s house in the wake of the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon. At the age of sixteen she was spat upon on Paris Square at the Women in Black vigil against the occupation.

  If today my daughter sometimes looks to me as if she is made entirely out of ideas and principles, I have only myself to blame.

  If I hadn’t met my soul, if not for Alek, perhaps I would have been just like her.

  Me: Hello, darling, how are you? What was it like with your father?

  Hagar: All right.

  Me (carefully, as if absentmindedly, looking for something in my blazer pocket): All right—how?

  Hagar: Just all right. But I don’t like date ice cream any more, and anyway it’s not healthy to eat ice cream in winter.

  Me: Why don’t you tell him?

  Hagar: Next time he comes it may be summer already, and maybe I’ll like the taste again.

  In the spring of ’88 Alek arrived for a short, bad, two-week visit, accompanying a television crew which was preparing a film about women in the Intifada, and he took a room apart from the crew in the Hotel Petra next to the Jaffa Gate. “I’ve wanted for a long time to wake up in the morning in the Old City.” Hagar, who was almost fifteen and very active, accepted his invitation to meet him at the YMCA, and came back to me with the angry conclusion that, “That man is a right-winger, a male chauvinist, and a racist.”

  “Now that I’ve met him,” she said to Tami who was in a huddle with me in the kitchen, “now I’m really beginning to understand why my mother can’t stand men.”

  Alek to the best of my judgment is not right-wing, chauvinistic, or racist, but there is no doubt that he succeeded in infuriating her with the question: “Is it permitted to tell a feminist girl how pretty she is?” with his tasteless remark about “shots of a Palestinian yingeleh,” and who knows what else. My little feminist, by the way, was not exactly pretty at that period in her life. Adolescence made her clumsy, her body looked embarrassed, and it was only in the summer before going to the army that she recovered her grace. In any event, I imagine that he was trying in his way to flatter her. I couldn’t tell her that her father, too, thought that we were waging a war of Goliath against David, that personal liberty was more important to him than anything else, far more important than national liberation—either ours or the Palestinians’—and that he detested propaganda of any sort; in doing so, I would be giving myself away. And in any case it was clear that the two of them rubbed each other the wrong way: she made inflated declarations, and he deflated them. He could have, should have, restrained himself, but in the end perhaps it was for the best, and when she went to visit him in Paris both of them were already careful to avoid provoking arguments.