The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  Two publishers rejected the book in letters of one and a half lines. I was prepared for this, what I wasn’t prepared for was the extent of the response after the publication, and the way in which people began to identify me with Nira. At fund meetings my colleagues began to make remarks in my presence such as: “Maybe we should get Nira Woolf on the case,” or: “Let’s not be carried away into adopting Nira Woolf solutions,” and on a number of occasions Jeff warned me that, “What we need here is quiet, in-depth work,” and, “Forgive me for saying so, but this is a matter that demands exploration and negotiation, not a militant style.” As if I had ever given him any reason to doubt my “in-depth work.” All of a sudden I needed to prove that I was “serious,” that I was “realistic,” that I wasn’t trying to cut corners and shorten procedures with a kick, and at the same time, to my embarrassment, they seemed to imagine that I actually could take advantage of all the publicity to get things done without going through the proper channels, which was far from being the case. It didn’t help for me to repeat that I wasn’t Nira and Nira wasn’t me, people simply refused to listen; Nira was a symbol, I was seen as a standard-bearer, and for want of an alternative I decided to enjoy playing the role and put it to use wherever possible.

  I’m not trying to say, God forbid, that Nira Woolf’s opinions were far from my own, and since Nira Woolf acted more than she voiced opinions, I was obliged to formulate the views that justified her actions—which, in the last analysis, certainly did me no harm. Suddenly I was asked for my opinion on oppression in general and in particular, on the state and the individual, on the state and Zionism, on Zionism and women, on women and the patriarchal structure, on women’s literature and the representation of women in literature, and so on and so forth—and it seemed that even those close to me attributed a new importance to my words, as if they “represented something.”

  Nira Woolf improved my financial situation, Nira made me “opinionated”—as people began later on to call any woman who had an opinion—Nira Woolf prompted me to read and think; so that in the final analysis it could be said that I, at least, was empowered by her character. She was born from the voice of an infantile fantasy, but from the moment she began to make her way in the world, she made me into what people today call a “voice.”

  LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION

  My editor, who is more literary than I am, once quoted me something that Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye.…

  With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze. With the years and the additional books I sometimes regretted writing so fast, so that the truce never lasted long enough.

  Alek left for Paris in 1982, before the IDF invaded Lebanon, and from my point of view before the publication of Blood Money, so that he missed my transformation into a “public figure,” and he also didn’t read the book. It was only when they sent me the contract—the first, bad one—that I told him I’d written a book, and he was glad for me and congratulated me and came round with a bottle of fine wine. After he had refilled my glass until I was too drunk to return to the office, he asked me to tell him something about the book I had written—even today, with all my experience, I find it difficult to answer this question—and then, when the embarrassment was still new to me, I said something like: ‘Well, look … it’s not actually literature … it’s more like a thriller … with a strong heroine, a lawyer, not exactly a lawyer, not only … but a woman with power. My editor says that on the jacket blurb they’re going to call it a feminist thriller.”

  “Feminist thriller is good,” he said and smiled and leaned over me and took a cigarette, “thriller is good, and feminist thriller is even better. It’s a pity I can’t read it.” And inserting his hand under my neck he added: “You know what they say … in time of revolution the relation of literature to life is a relation of incest.”

  “What revolution?” I asked, drunk and vague.

  “Today this is your revolution, the women’s revolution.”

  A thousand times since then I’ve used this phrase, “the feminist revolution,” and since I was asked, I’ve learned all kinds of illuminating things about its relation to literature and literature’s relation to it. Sometimes now, in an intimate rather than a public setting, when I’m listening to Hagar, it occurs to me that this worn out word, “revolution,” explains something in relation to her. In my relation to her, I mean. My darling Hagar is to a great extent the product of this revolution: good, clear-minded, and emotionally focused; and I am a daughter of the generation of the wilderness, not like her.… I got stuck in the middle and only half of me has made it. The good half, I say. I look at her in the same way as the hairy Neanderthal no doubt looked at Homo sapiens, lurching at a four-legged crouch, and however hard he tried to stand up straight and speak like a human being, he went on blurting out ancient, unintelligible grunts.

  Hagar will never ferment underground and poison herself underground, and everything that bubbles inside her rises to the surface and is clarified in the light of day. I should have missed my transparent, enlightened daughter more.

  But why “should” I? Who says I “should have”? When she left home for the first time with her boyfriend to do a year of national service in Ofakim, I wasn’t sorry. They were like two clumsy, happy cubs, they romped around the house, they talked without stopping, they conducted long ideological seminars in the kitchen. I admit that I needed quiet, that I was tired of clarifying and explaining and answering so many questions at home as well. Afterwards I sometimes missed her. Actually, what do I know about the Homo sapiens I brought up? Perhaps she too.…

  When she was here last summer she fell asleep one night on my bed, and when she was sleeping deeply and breathing quietly, I looked at the curve of her cheek, and for some reason I touched her temple. I needed to feel her pulse, I laid three fingers on her temple, and with the delicate pulse beating on my fingers came a feeling of wonder, both sad and tranquil. What did I know about her? What could I possibly know? But then she turned over and went to sleep on her back.

  Another time, I remember, when she was in the army, I came home one afternoon, I didn’t know that she was there and she didn’t hear the door opening, and when I came in I saw her lying in her room, on her bed, in the place where her father’s couch once stood, her wet hair spread over the pillow. The Walkman was lying on her stomach, she was wearing earphones, and on her face packed between them was a strange expression, flickering, illuminated … as if she were lit up from within. My daughter lay straight, uncovered, her hands folded on her chest and her eyes closed—seeing what? And suddenly, still and full of light, she looked like him. And then too, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, she was like a miracle.

  TALKING ABOUT THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION

  Talking about the feminist revolution, Alek good-humoredly called it “your revolution,” but at other times, when we weren’t celebrating a book, he pronounced it quite differently. Dryly and sarcastically. On the subject of feminism, as on a number of others, he had, and still has, completely reactionary opinions—“How do you know what’s good for other women? Why impose the liberation of feminists on all of them? Are women cripples, that you have to fight for their rights?”—but somehow or other we often agreed on specific cases, and if he had been required to beat up some chauvinist bastard, I think that he would have done it without too much hesitation. The absurdity of all this is that in a certain sense Alek liberated me, from dependency on a man, I mean, and when I said that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” it wasn’t a complete lie. I needed only the one, and since this one was not there but was nevertheless present, I was freed from getting involved with others. There were times when I wanted to be free of him too, but never in order to free myself for someone els
e, never in order to make myself available for the “healthy” and “meaningful” relationships so dear to the hearts of the members of LAA.

  “Meaningful relationships,” “support,” and “equality” I had with my women friends, and with Talush who grew even sweeter as she grew up, and for these things I did not need—and I still do not need—a man.

  Some time at the beginning of my years of active mistresshood I began to turn into a tramp. Not in the heavyweight league, my way of life didn’t permit it, but I definitely turned myself into a serial slut, and I did so quite quickly.

  “A nun and a tramp are two sides of the same coin produced by the patriarchal culture,” my Hagar would have said sagely if she had known, but what the hell am I supposed to do with these words of wisdom? To lament and confess and grovel and beg for help in reforming my nature? Throw myself out of the window and smash myself up? I won’t grovel for help and I won’t throw myself out of the window, either.

  At the beginning of my years of active mistresshood I started to work at the fund. The fund was a respectable place, but all the meetings and the debates with the groups and the initiatives and the sociopolitical fervor led so easily to sex that it sometimes seemed as if that was their main reason for existence. Later on, when people began confusing me with Nira Woolf, an additional element came into play, with all kinds of idiots seeing me as a challenge; they were eager to prove something to me, they were eager to prove something to themselves. One of them, a community worker I remember particularly—I had tutored him for his final exams a few years before—stood up after the event with a smug smile, proud as a peacock, as if he had just been decorated with a medal for gallantry. Since they were so dumb, these idiots did not always know that it was this they were looking for, but I always knew. It didn’t bother me particularly, in a certain sense it was more convenient with them: they wanted Nira Woolf, they got Nira Woolf, and just like Nira I refused to meet them a second or third time—a fair deal, in my eyes at least. And from the sweet, innocent guys I usually, not always, kept my distance.

  It was quite a dirty business, all this. It was dirty from the start and it got dirtier. I became a seductress. I became capricious and deliberately impossible. I discovered that men, like dogs, smell each other on your skin and the smell arouses them. Even Alek is not exempt from this doggishness, and part of the ritual violence of the sex then was related to this, too. He never questioned me about other men, he never demanded sexual ownership of me. I have already said, repeatedly—Alek didn’t love me, Alek doesn’t love me—but just as I can guess the presence of others in his touch, he could guess them on me, too, and the guess spurred him on. To touch me so that no other hands would erase his hands. To kiss me so that no other lips would erase his lips.

  As far as sexual morality is concerned, Alek doesn’t have double standards, it doesn’t even occur to him to connect “sex” with “morality,” and anything I or any other woman might do in this area seems okay to him, not because he has convinced himself of our rights, but because this is how he really feels. This is how he feels, and nevertheless, without ever putting it into words, he would come to take back his own. To take back my body and exorcise other bodies from it. When I realized this, I was delighted by the discovery, and I really began to use the others, to fornicate mainly for effect. How much would he sense? How much would I feel? Perhaps it was possible not to feel at all. At the height of this activity it was no longer completely clear to me what I was trying to do: to chase him out of me. To bring him into me. To wallow in others as in a smell in order to make him stick to me or in order to drive him away.

  Alek had Ute and I’m sure he had other women, too; in ’79 Daniel was born, and I had Hagar and there were others to even the score between us. The more I bled strength between his appearances, the more I needed it. And after he came I needed it in order to regain my balance. Like a drug to counter a drug, it only made me more addicted, and perhaps this is what I really wanted. As if I were performing rites in his honor. For him or against him. I really don’t know.

  The sex was sex, sometimes better sometimes worse. But sex in itself is nonsense. By the age of close to thirty, with a reasonably attractive man a woman is supposed to know how to enjoy herself, and coming is trivial, so that what distinguished one time from another was only the proximity of despair. Pleasure touches quickly on despair, removes its muzzle and sends it racing towards you, especially when you have sent your soul to perch on the ceiling while you abandon your flesh to its pleasures.

  I wasn’t trying to disgust myself, I usually chose well; sometimes I emerged into the street afterwards with a light step, which is what I wanted, to walk down the street with a light step.… I really wasn’t trying to do myself any harm, and nevertheless it seems that I did. The gaze of another was stamped on my soul, nothing was closer to me than this gaze, and only it, in its absence and its presence, was capable of redeeming the sex.

  Was Alek the best of them all? My girlfriends sometimes make these cheerful comparisons, and perhaps I should have made myself grade him, too. Alek made my soul manifest to me, he gave me back my soul, he filled my body with my soul without taking his eyes off me, until he made me lose my body. Not always, but often. So what is there for me to grade?

  HOMO SAPIENS

  I was cheating a bit when I glorified my Homo sapiens. Something is lacking in my daughter, something is being taken away from her, but what it is has no name.… My better judgement tells me that what my enlightened daughter lacks is only the slavish curvature of the spine, and the Neanderthal superstitions, and in spite of myself I sense a lack in her, and without any justice I see her as not a whole woman.… Strange that the more Hagar persists in her enlightened and verbose religiosity, the more she prattles on about “soul,” “spirituality,” “God,” and “love,” the more sterile she seems to me. As if she has sterilized the words by removing some secret from them, and in so doing also sterilized herself.

  Secret, God, and soul—words that befuddle thought, words that it would be better not to say … or perhaps the opposite, perhaps they should be used as frequently as Hagar uses them, until they cause an inflationary spiral, and lead to bankruptcy, used precisely in order to sterilize. Sunlight is the best disinfectant for mystery and nonsense.

  Alek, I remember, once spoke about the “mystery of the Russian soul.” With ridicule and his lips almost closed he spoke. “Chaadaev, there was once such a man, an adjutant of Czar Alexander, who invented the mystery of the Russian soul, and ever since people who don’t really think repeat this endlessly, mainly Frenchmen but not only … and with them there is no longer evil plain and simple or chaos for its own sake, because just to be evil isn’t nice, but mystery of the Russian soul, this is something else.” It was in the spring of 1988, during the bad visit when Alek came and took a room in the Petra Hotel, as if they weren’t throwing stones from the Old City walls, and as if there were no merchants’ strike, and no slogans painted on the walls and rubbed out and repainted in the alley below, and no white signs on the doors of the shops. He stayed in the Petra Hotel because that was where he wanted to wake up in the morning, and he even bought himself a hookah, I saw it when I came there. He remained in Israel for two weeks, most of which he spent driving around the territories with the television crew he was accompanying, and collecting impressions of his own for his reports for a number of French newspapers. I was busy at the fund, involved in research for Birthright, and under the overly observant eyes of an adolescent daughter who knew that her father was in the country. I didn’t want her to see or hear when I spoke to him on the phone, so that even the telephone became a problem. When we finally met, after he had already met Hagar, it was cold and bad. A handsome stranger in a thin black turtleneck sweater received me politely, a stranger in a black sweater saw me out of the Jaffa Gate towards evening. That year he let his hair grow, afterwards he cut it short again, but that spring I was met by a curly-haired Alek.

  If this is how he
wants it, so be it, I thought as we parted, and I imagined a stone thrown at us and me crouching down and making a dash, like Nira Woolf, for the wall and flattening myself against it like a cat. Only after taking a few steps along the outer wall, my knees suddenly gave way beneath me, and I turned back into his embrace in the gateway and with his arm around me back into his bed again.

  Before this, with small almost malicious smiles on our faces, we talked about politics, I remember how I protested when he said something about the “Arab mentality,” and he retorted with the Israeli mentality and the Russian mentality and from there to the “mystery of the soul.” With a politeness intended to hurt we competed to push each other away, and so it seemed to me that it was not the “mystery of the Russian soul” that he was mocking, but Noa Weber, only I, no longer “the plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden whom he’d known,” imagined that I was stroking a big cat, one of Nira’s monsters, fastened one of my jacket buttons, and with affected calm replied: “As far as that’s concerned I agree with you completely. You know, when you make a big deal out of the soul it leads people to ignore their actual living conditions.”

  “You mean … like religion is the opium of the masses?” he asked and stretched his tight-lipped smile a little further. “I mean that the assessment of the depths of the soul is greatly exaggerated,” I said and adopted Nira’s voice, too, the three-hundred-dollars-an-hour voice. “People exaggerate the depths, and the darkness, and the uniqueness of what is to be found inside it. Because tell me, what can there really be in the depths of the soul? Take a hundred people who live in the same society, and you’ll find more or less the same garbage in all of them. The same crap stuffed into our brains by the people with the power to stuff things into our brains.”

  Last February, during my last visit, the same subject of the “Russian soul” came up again. We had returned from a walk along the Kremlin walls and again we didn’t go into the church on Alek’s street, it had already become a joke between us, not to go into the church again, and when he made me tea I asked him about Borya and his Anna, his new woman, God’s handmaiden. “It seems that you’re falling in love with the Slavic soul,” he said disapprovingly, “and you’re not the first. It happens to people who don’t understand much about this country.” And this time it seemed to me that he was actually saying something about the two of us. No, I didn’t fall in love with the Slavic soul, don’t worry. I love Alek. I loved him ages before he brought me to the violent, heart-rending, merciless expanses of the country he does not call his. It’s his soul I love, and the dark, famished, howling element in mine.