by Gail Hareven
Alek is not a father to Hagar, and he is a bad father to Mark and Daniel, the sons of the woman whose children he wanted to sire from the moment he set eyes on her. If Hagar needed something big, for him to bring her the golden-hearted flower, to pluck the moon from the sky for her, I have no doubt that he would do everything in his power and beyond it, that he would turn the world upside down for her sake, and the same goes for his sons, but the daily business of fatherhood is something beyond his comprehension or his capacities. And in any case, it seems that his women and children get along very well without him.
Should I bear a grudge against him for what he deprived his children of? In my opinion I definitely should: men are responsible for their offspring, both parents bear equal responsibility, and so on and so forth, and nevertheless I don’t bear him a grudge.
When she was a little girl Hagar tried touchingly to attach me to Yoash. When he raised her to his shoulders she would kick and ask me to hold her from behind, and we would walk down the street like Siamese triplets; she would demand that I phone him now, why not now, and invite him over; she would ask why Yoash wasn’t married, say it would suit him to have a baby, and quiz me as to whether in my opinion he seemed “in love.”
When she grew older she became more explicit, and when she despaired of Yoash and his eccentricities, she began questioning me about others, especially Jeff. “How long has he been divorced already?”, “I think his daughters are really nice, it feels as if we’ve always known each other,” and finally: “If he’s such a good friend of yours, why can’t he be your boyfriend?” If Tami had asked me the same question I would have replied that I’d tried, “for my sins I’ve tried, and I really can’t recommend it, six out of ten on the Noa Weber scale,” but small daughters are not girlfriends, and therefore I replied: “It’s impossible and it will never happen because he’s my boss.” “So what if he’s your boss?”
“If you go to bed with your boss your children are born with a squint.” Hagar was not amused, to this day she tends to take everything literally and is offended when she discovers her mistake.
This year Alek became the father of a baby girl in Moscow. Dasha, or Dashka, is her name and I know nothing about her mother. Somehow I understood that the pregnancy was unplanned, by him at any rate, and that he sees her from time to time and also supports her financially, but Alek, always the gentleman, did not go into details. Was I upset? And how I was upset, mainly, in some strange way, because the baby was a girl. Ute is big, blonde and ample, I am small, short and relatively dark. Ute is German, European, and I am the Middle Eastern minx. The German woman has sons, and the Israeli minx gave birth to a daughter. Something in this division of roles helped me to separate between the worlds, to separate myself from the other woman, and to remove the sting of jealousy. Ute was one thing, I was another, and whatever there was between him and her did not touch me. And now he had a daughter, like Hagar, with twenty tiny nails, and another young woman who might be like me. How was she like me? And how was she with him? And how was he with her?
We were on the way from Sheremetyevo, on the Moscow Ring Road encircling the city. It was a quarter past eight in the morning, and outside the taxi window was a gray fog so thick that you could hardly see the white of the snow. It was my seventh visit, and when I stood in line for customs I noticed how the airport had changed since the first time I came to him, in 1993.
I was all aroused in anticipation of meeting Alek, but without the fear crawling under my skin that had diluted the arousal of the first visits. No shady character tried to take my bags from me, nobody offered the devil knows what services, and the airport employees no longer looked like gray corpses on leave. In another year or two maybe they would begin to smile and even to wish the passengers a “nice day.” What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? had already been sent to the printers, and it occurred to me that perhaps in my next book I should bring Nira here, in winter. I would dress her in a black fur like the one displayed in the shop window upstairs. The flat-faced passport controller knew no English, but she took my visa without making me wait nervously, and without fixing her long narrow eyes on me or the computer screen, she stamped it with a hammer blow. Over the loudspeaker system, too, there was not a word to be heard in English, and when I stood in the next line I suddenly felt goose bumps at the sound of the names: “Irkutsk … vosem tridzat. Habarovsk … vosem tridzat pyat. Tallinn … Samarkand … Vladivostok.…” Expanses of cold, imaginary forms of existence, all poured into the airport, and in this heart-rending vastness, present and tangible and standing patiently in line, there was nothing that it made sense to cling to except for the one waiting for me with a flower in his hand beyond the next set of doors.
“They say that at my age a child makes you younger, but what can I tell you, Noia, it’s not exactly like that.” The taxi driver had a slender neck, suddenly I wondered how the coarse wool of his sweater didn’t drive him crazy with its touch, and when he opened the window to move the stuck windshield wiper, he did it without gloves. I had gloves, but Alek didn’t, and when he wrapped my hands in both of his, hands no longer young, I was defeated again by the old rebellious helplessness; the helplessness that told me that in all the infinite expanses, in all the infinity confronting me, there was no point in anything, anything except for this. What could I say to him? “Congratulations”? “You’re a maniac”? What could I ask? “Is she like me? Does she love you in the same way?”
“Tell me about Borya,” I said. “What’s he up to? How is he?” Alek leaned back and took out cigarettes for both of us. “Nobody can talk to Borya any more he’s become such pravednik … kind of saint. And his new woman, complete svyatosha, with her it’s even worse. You know how she answers telephone? You don’t know, you can’t even guess. The handmaiden of God.” “Hello, this is the handmaiden of God?” “Exactly. Even my mother, who knew her mother when she was a baby, even she can’t stand it.” “So Borya doesn’t drink any more?” I asked, and I nestled in his arm, happy and relaxed. “Why not? He drinks all right, but drinking with saints, you know, isn’t such a pleasure.” And I laughed heartily and felt great love, for both of us.
ONCE I IMAGINED
Once I imagined telling everything to Miriam, to her and nobody else. Perhaps she would have pitied me: Look how he took advantage of your love, you wasted the best years of your life on him and what did you get out of it, tell me? Perhaps she would have said: I felt that there was something wrong in your life, but I didn’t want to poke my nose in. Only when Hagar changed her name did Miriam find out that I had been and still was an officially married woman, and my declared indifference to the formalities of the situation shocked her deeply. In her affection for me she had surmised that I had been done some injustice that I didn’t want to talk about, and while she was wrong, of course, regarding the injustice, she was right in assuming that I couldn’t possibly be truly indifferent to my legal position.
Miriam might have been angry with me: How could he lead you astray like that and how could you let him—she would certainly have been a little angry—but at least she would not have provided me with the telephone number of “an excellent psychologist.” For some reason it seems to me that Miriam, more than anyone else, is capable of thinking of love as one of the afflictions of fate.
There was relief in the fantasy of confession. The thought of baring the soul brings relief, but sometimes the price to be paid for that relief is the soul itself, whose life seems to demand darkness.
As opposed to Miriam, I never for a moment thought that Alek was taking advantage of me in any way whatsoever, and sometimes it even occurs to me that the one taking advantage is me.
Last February, when we were already in his apartment in Ordenka, after he had told me about Dasha and after he had made me rejoice from head to toe, I reminded him that on my previous visit he had promised to take me into the refurbished gilded white church three buildings away from us, but he was too lazy to get up. “I’ll put on some music for you
instead, all night prayers, I’ll find the disc in a minute … there you are, with your permission.” And then, after all those years, like on Usha Street, like from the record he played me on Usha Street, rose the low male voices—slowly gathering, parting, like walking slowly in the dark, not actually growing stronger or louder, simply bearing stubborn, undefeated, sonorous testimony.
The mattress was very soft, snow went on falling and falling outside the white lace curtain, and between us there was a kind of weariness that sets in after everything is over, like a kind of pity or pardon. When he made love to me, the repertoire of movements had not changed, but the violent demand had disappeared, as if we were becoming reconciled, becoming one. As if becoming one was our purpose on earth.
Alek, one hand under my head, the other on my breast, breathed slowly, perhaps he was sleeping, and I with my eyes open saw visions of white infinity measured step by step, white vales of despair extending without a sign. Then breathing under his hand, slowly and surely I took off, slow and low; as if gathered up in the mist, I glided over infinity. Even if I dived into the white I would be gathered up, even if I dived down I would rise again like mist, even if I fell I would not fear.
When I awoke from the vision I looked from the side at the sleeping cubist profile: a single gray hair bristling from the arc of the eyebrow, thick boyish lashes on a heavy drooping eyelid, and a soft wrinkle shaped like a crescent moon beneath it. I put my hand on his hand lying on my breast, and then I thought: perhaps this man is only a gateway through which to pass. Perhaps he is only matter through which to see beyond matter. Perhaps he is only a stair to another love which no longer needs anyone.
I cannot justify these thoughts, or explain a single word. Matter and beyond matter … love which needs no one … vales of despair.… The yellowish light of a Passover heat wave should be enough to dissolve these phrases. Just saying them out loud should be enough to annihilate them with laughter. Where did they come from? And where did I get the feeling that like a precognition they were always there inside me?
In Blood Money I gave the contractor’s repulsive brother a mystical turn of speech, like that of the messianic settlers’ movement, and all through the plot he breathes a fog of verbal vapors on the reader that covers up the suspect and the murder; in Compulsory Service there’s Sylvie, a particularly silly soldier who complicates the investigation when she consults spirits and energies. My better judgment cannot bear them and their talk, they truly and instinctively repel me; in the same way, I should be repelled and disgusted by myself, and nevertheless I am not disgusted. Not at the right time, and not to the required degree. Life in the underground lets you do this: fall foolishly in love without having to listen to yourself talking, and without paying the price of shame.
NIRA WOOLF
If I send her to Moscow she’ll learn Russian first, which I never did, apart from a few words I picked up from Alek.
Nira Woolf will learn the language in two or three months, perhaps dialects, too, and if I send her into the white and gold church, she will even understand the liturgy sung there in Old Slavonic. Perhaps I’ll give her a guide, an intellectual like Borya, who will also fall in love with her, but very soon she’ll learn everything there is to learn from this teacher, and from about the first third of the book she will no longer be dependent on him. Mastering the language will come easily to Nira, like the knowledge of immunology she acquired in The Stabbing, like the understanding of bank fraud in Birthright, like her five martial arts. And studying the map at home will suffice for her to navigate the complex city and to locate herself even when she emerges from the Metro station in the middle of the night at some remote suburb.
Nira Woolf is “more like a fairy tale,” as Miriam said, but why shouldn’t women have fairy tales of their own? Tales of women who never know panic in the street and the fear of footsteps following them in the dark; legends about heroines who do not fall in love with their teachers and officers, and who are never impressed by rich, strong, mature, famous, tall men.
“It’s important for us to have role models to identify with,” Hagar lectures me, “but it’s impossible to identify with such an unrealistic character.” “What about the role models men identify with?” I type indignantly in reply, “Does James Bond look realistic to you? Do Indiana Jones, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger look realistic to you? Half the men in the movies aren’t in the least realistic. Much more than half, almost all of them.”
This morning she called me unexpectedly from Boston, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her until she returned to New York. She had just finished reading What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? and she didn’t want to wait, she had to tell me that this time she had really, really liked it. “Even though you write books for entertainment, the message gets across.… I think it’s just wonderful how you managed to get in so much information.… You know what? In the last chapter, when Nira gives Svedka the revolver? Even I felt ready to shoot him, that swine, if he couldn’t be brought to trial, that is.” “She could have brought him to trial,” I corrected her slowly, “but the punishment didn’t seem harsh enough to her.” “That’s because the judges are men and the law is made by men, and even now that there are women judges, they learn to think like men.” I was glad to hear her voice, but after two whole days in which I hadn’t spoken to anyone, even at the grocer’s, dragging the words out was an effort. “Did I wake you up? Aren’t you on summer time?” Everyone who called me that Passover asked me if they had woken me up, but the truth is that when she rang I hadn’t gone to bed yet. “You’re not sick? … Are you sure you’re not sick? … Is the holiday hard? … Are you eating, Mommy? Are you taking care of yourself? Going out? … Are you meeting your friends, or have they all gone away? What about Tami? Is she back yet?” Where are all these worries coming from all of a sudden? I’m forty-seven and healthy, active up until recently, my planner is full of addresses and phone numbers, I am interviewed in the papers, my book is on display in shop windows, and even though Hagar is my only child and I am a single parent, a mother is a mother and a daughter is a daughter and the roles should not be reversed. “I’m fine, just busy writing.” “So soon? It used to take you longer to start a new book.”
“Just playing with ideas. Now tell me, how does it feel being without Peter for two weeks?”
In the winter of 1980 the fund ceased its activities for a period of three weeks, and everyone except for me flew to the United States to meet the donors and consult with a battery of experts on how to go on, if at all. I composed most of the first draft of Blood Money then, on a baby Hermes borrowed from the office.
Ute gave birth to Daniel in November, Hagar was invited to the brith—in view of the Viking appearance of the mother, it seemed strange to me that they were having a brith at all—and in the following three months Alek disappeared from our lives. From our overt lives, I mean, and as far as Hagar’s covert life is concerned I have no idea. She said that the baby was cute, that it was impossible to talk to Ute because she didn’t know any Hebrew, and when she was brushing her teeth before going to bed she suddenly asked with her mouth full of toothpaste if we could also have a baby like that, to which I replied “We’ll see,” even though I had made up my mind never to have any more children. In any case, Hagar with her healthy instincts appeared to have come to terms quite happily with reality.
Serious writers describe themselves as suffering when they write; I, who have no pretensions to seriousness, have never suffered in the course of the work itself, and my difficulties only arise at the stage of publication. Writing held me together when I felt I was coming apart, and solved the problem of time when it began to unravel at the edges. Constructing a plot, like reading, in fact, gives time a direction, and when Nira Woolf began to take action, I was animated by a happy feeling that I too was making progress.
The background data of the story didn’t present any problems, they were all taken from testimonies I heard at work before the decision to limit the activities
of the fund to this side of the Green Line: the bribes paid to the Military Government, the harassment and frequent arrests, the contractor seen riding in the company commander’s jeep, the medic’s suppressed evidence, the pen in which the young boys were confined, the scene of the nocturnal burial.… The scene of the boys behind the barbed wire and the picture of the night burial annoyed a lot of people.
Nira Woolf already existed in my head before Blood Money as an infantile fantasy. In 1974 she solved the murder of the soldier Rachel Heller; in ’75 I sent her to the Savoy Hotel as a resourceful hostage; in my night runs, when men bothered me with disgusting lip-smackings, Nira Woolf would fell them to the pavement with one graceful blow, without even stopping. She still does it, and to this day I still summon her to deal with male pests. The mere thought of her helps me to radiate something that sends them packing.
Once Nira Woolf put a man in a wheelchair after he raped an old woman in Ramat Gan and got off with community service; and once I sent her to the High Court of Justice to eloquently plead the case of the people evicted from their homes in Yemin Moshe, and she won. As I said: an infantile fantasy, a completely infantile gratification, but from the moment I sent her into action in a well-constructed plot, the fantasy became a little less shameful. My last doubts concerning Nira, strangely enough, were about her hair, and in the end, after dying it and shortening it and lengthening it, I gave her an Annie Lennox look that was before its time. For some reason I was bothered by this matter of her hair.… Now I don’t know anymore if her cropped head speaks of fragility or strength, but this was the look I decided on in the end, and this is how she has remained ever since. Forty-five years old, big breasts that won’t develop cancer, and a close-cropped, almost shaved, blonde head.