by Gail Hareven
THERE’S A KIND OF LIE
There’s a kind of lie in this linear writing which does not encompass all the details. I remember how on the way back I sat withdrawn in the window seat of the plane, how I waited for the takeoff so that I could withdraw into myself and let my thoughts glide, among other things, over this last conversation with Alek. The flight’s four hours were not enough. I have already said: love does not need much to feed it. And what of this abundance of small things can be described at all, when I enlarge some picture and it goes on and on subdividing into more and more pictures ad infinitum? Should I focus on his hands holding the tin kettle? I love his hands, I love to watch them when they do something apart from caressing me. When they touch ordinary objects. When he hugs himself. Holds a cigarette between thumb, index, and middle finger. But what can be said about this that isn’t totally dumb?
Easier to talk about the mental alertness, the scurrying thoughts, and actually this too is difficult when every thought involving him splits into so many strands that it is impossible to follow them all. I didn’t fall in love with the Russian soul, I cleaved to Alek as to the missing half of my own soul, as if it were ordained by the very nature of my being and the very nature of his being, and as if this cleaving was an attribute of matter.
Sometimes at the height of illusion a hallucinatory thought about the last incarnation crosses my mind, as if I have known him in other bodies, men’s bodies.… Perhaps I was like Yoash or Borya to him, and it was impossible to become whole and complete the cycle then, and only now is it possible, and this is therefore an opportunity for the final incarnation.
For some reason it is easier for me to imagine myself metamorphosing into a man than to imagine him metamorphosing into a woman, and in any case it’s only a metaphor. The belief in the transmigration of souls is nonsense.
“There is something about this place that cannot be grasped by normal thought,” I said to him then when we walked under the Kremlin. A plane taking off from Saint Petersburg had exploded in the air that morning, and Alek like others had suspicions about it, none of which would be investigated, and he, too, as a journalist, would not investigate them. A local paper reported that Lenin’s mummy was putting on weight, and a hysterical, consumptive medium appeared on television that night with a daughter with braids like rats’ tails, who was also a medium. Trotsky spoke from the mother’s throat, and Zorge the Spy from the throat of her daughter.
Alek laughed and said that I was quoting again. “Quoting who?” I asked. “Lermontov. It’s impossible to understand Russia with the intellect. Another sentence quoted by the wrong people at the wrong time. You can say that the Empire of Evil is something the intellect cannot comprehend, and the Israeli intellect never comprehended, but from your mouth it sounds completely different.”
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. And perhaps it is not him whom my soul loves that I am seeking, but simply my soul.
With the years, I think, I have been purified. Facing him, or on his behalf, for him or because of him, in one way or another, I have been purified. At night, on many nights, I am able to let the longings go, to touch them, and then to dispel them inside me. Able to touch the absence as if it were a presence. Jealousy was never cruel as the grave for me, and for some reason I hardly tasted bitterness. Perhaps it was only for this that he was given to me.
Sometime close to the meeting in the Hotel Petra I stopped sleeping around, which is another way of saying that in all the many years since then I have abstained from other men. I don’t know why, or why precisely then, it wasn’t a decision because I didn’t decide, the need to go the way of all flesh simply disappeared. Not owing to disgust, because I wasn’t disgusted, I simply lost the taste for it; if it had disgusted me perhaps I would have carried on.
The urge itself didn’t go away, perhaps it didn’t even diminish, but like a nun I choose to resolve it, or to rid myself of it, with my own hands. From time to time I still find myself turned on by the idea of a little fling, but everything needed to get there, and in fact also the imaginary act itself, seems like a ridiculous hassle: the smell of a strange scalp, crackling curls, strange breath, wet lips, the wetness of strange lips on my breast, the wrong touch and bodyweight thrusting into me—what is it all for? The body will do what bodies do—but for what?
In my wild decade I gained such a reputation that nobody noticed when I stopped having sex; and of the possibility of finding me a life partner all my friends had despaired long ago. That “Noa needs a man in her life like a fish needs a bicycle” could be a statement of praise or of resignation, but the absence of sexual need and renunciation of the spasms of pleasure is for some reason unforgivable. Did I say unforgivable? So let them not forgive me, and I won’t forgive myself either, because what does it really matter? I, if I haven’t noticed, am increasingly evading the eyes even of those I invited to hear my confession. Escaping the impediment of words. And it is not their peace that I seek, but a different peace, a peace of my own.
OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEARS
Over the course of the years I kicked out in all kinds of directions in an attempt to “liberate myself from dependency,” and what I did definitely succeed in liberating myself from was the concrete dependency. I don’t need him to support me. I don’t need him to protect me. And I don’t turn to him for advice and encouragement, not even in my imagination. Sometime around Daniel’s birth I brought up the subject of the divorce again, I even went to the Rabbinate, where they opened a file and set a date for a hearing. And when the date arrived Hagar was sick and I couldn’t find a babysitter, and after that we didn’t bother to set a new date. If he had asked me, if he had shown any interest in the subject, we would have been officially divorced, he would have married his common law wife officially, and that too would not have made any difference. Today it’s clear to me that it wouldn’t have made any difference, and perhaps I knew it then too.
The paradox of love is that it enslaves you to one person, and by so doing liberates you from other things. It liberates you to the point of indifference, which increasingly seems to me to be true liberty.
I did not adopt Alek’s views, his instinctive detestation of sociopolitical ideology, I still believe in “equality,” in “rights,” in “social responsibility,” and in “justice,” only justice is too obvious to arouse my curiosity, and the idea of a “healthy, decent society” doesn’t make heaven and earth breathe and animate the world for me. In the end all that remains is the utterly unthrilling work required to get there. Official forms in five copies on recycled paper.
Anger still comes to me more easily than human compassion, and anger still makes reality forcefully present to me, but over the course of the years the anger too has increasingly become an automatic response; and perhaps in this too I have been influenced by Alek, who is never astonished like me by human wickedness.
It would have been reasonable to assume that the dulling of my senses in this respect would undermine Nira Woolf’s pursuit of justice, but the truth is that it had no effect on my writing. I have already said that I am not a real writer.
As with the writing so too with the work at the fund, the emotional unresponsiveness only improved the quality of my work, so that if previously I had wallowed in self-accusation for what I called my coldheartedness, I did so for no good reason and without justice.
The problem in leading a double life has nothing to do with justice—with the proper allocation of emotional resources, with the right investments and fair trade in feeling. Very little feeling can suffice to behave decently and be of use.
The problem with leading a double life is that the everyday part of that life seems to you—not less real, I was always realistic—but somehow less true. As if lacking inner light and seeking a crack through which the light from outside can stream in and rise.…
I should have said now: Light … what light are you talking about? Neon light? The blinding summer sunlight at noon today? The orange
light of the street lamp?
I should have said: A kettle is a kettle and a table is a table, and neither of them needs a light and certainly not a crack.
I should have said it and now I’ve said it, so what? I’m tired of these wisecracks. Which of course aren’t wisecracks but wisdom. But I’m tired of this wisdom, too.
When I resigned from the fund in January of ’96, I had the feeling again that I needed to clean myself and my life out a little. This was how I thought of it then, in terms of cleanliness, even though I had no idea of what this cleanliness I was seeking might be. Mainly, I remember, I wanted to talk less. Before this there were days when I had seven meetings in my planner, days when I met dozens of people, and the outside world had begun to make me ill. More and more I felt sickened by so many contacts and so much talk, sick of myself and my talking, and tainted, until I sometimes felt as if a moldy lump was sitting in my throat and incorporating more and more particles of pollution with every additional sentence I uttered.
In the months before I left, Nira Woolf took up most of my leisure hours, but the plot of The Stabbing unfolded reluctantly, as if I was serving one more tour of duty in the reserves. In a fit of spite I destroyed one of her monstrous cats, and laid its carcass at the entrance to her apartment. In another fit of spite I decided to leave her at the end waiting for the results of an AIDS test, without telling her that she hadn’t been infected. If I said before that the world doesn’t need my feelings, The Stabbing is one of my proofs, because when the book came out none of the readers noticed the change.
For the second time the movie rights to Compulsory Service were acquired by the same producer, and this time too I assumed that nothing would come of it, but in the meantime a handsome sum was about to be transferred to my bank account. The manuscript of The Stabbing was handed to the editor. For almost seventeen years I had been putting money into a pension fund. I have an apartment that I can’t be thrown out of, my needs are modest, and I could afford to stop working. Hagar, who was planning to go to America and had already applied for a grant which she would no doubt get, expressed reservations: “But what will you do all day?” And I reassured her by saying that now I would have time to research and write in the mornings, which was what I had wanted for a long time—to write in the mornings. Perhaps I would register for a course at the university, I would find a new field of interest, and who knows, maybe I would come to bother her with a prolonged visit to New York, because I had never been there.
When Hagar, not reassured, finally left, I flew for the third time to Moscow, and when I returned I spent two or three months cleaning out and reorganizing the apartment. It was only in the middle of this fit of activity that I realized what I was doing, that I was returning the house to how it had been in 1972. My daughter’s room, Alek’s room, was turned into my study, and according to the logic imposed by the room itself, my new desk with the computer now stood in the place where his desk had once stood. Hagar’s things were boxed and stored in the space under the roof. The picture of the greenish woman was brought down and hung in the newly painted bedroom, and Klimt’s watery dead women were taken to Yoash to be reframed and returned to the kitchen. I brought them back on the day that bus number eighteen blew up, the day that bus number eighteen blew up for the second time, and the explosion shook the windows of the house, but I walked down Agrippas Street to Yoash to fetch the picture and continued about my business. I realized what I was doing, but its purpose escaped me, and as I packed and unpacked, moved furniture, took pictures down and hung them up, I enjoyed waiting for the understanding to come. Waiting for something that I felt would come later.
At the age of forty-two and a bit I started life as a semi-retiree. Reading in the morning paper about how we were settling accounts in Lebanon. Reading books in the morning. Going nowhere in particular without a shopping bag or a purse. I didn’t disappear from the world or shut myself up in my lair: from time to time I took freelance jobs, which I still do, and wrote applications for support from various funds on behalf of various organizations. I sat on the board of a public committee, and I do a little volunteer work for two non-profit justice-seeking organizations. Family and friends come to visit and I visit them, Talush comes to lie in my bed and get some rest from her twins. On Friday afternoons people often drop by, their children run up and down the stairs, shaking the rail and threatening to fall with it.
My financial situation is stable and my health is excellent. At least four times a week I go out to run, and with time my route has grown longer, so that it reaches the Israel Museum, passes the Knesset, and returns via the Supreme Court. It was on such a night run with my walkman that I heard the news of Rabin’s assassination—Hagar was there in the square, I had let myself off going to the demonstration—and when I got home and switched on the television, under the rush of adrenaline surging through me and the flood of phone calls to me and to her, I was still waiting to hear from him.
After the murder, when everyone jumped up to make declarations and beat their chests and point their fingers, and at the fund, too, when people asked themselves where we had gone wrong and what more we could have done, all I wanted to do was retire. Young people, my daughter among them, lit candles in the square and fell on each others’ necks in an orgy of shocked and weepy self-indulgence; at the fund people talked a lot of nonsense then about “the youth,” they seemed to believe that singing sentimental songs, waving candles, and holding “dialogues” would really bring about a new reality here, and I no longer knew what was true and what was false, everything seemed false to me—or at moments that were far worse, like a kind of banal and uninteresting truth. I would switch on the television then and without turning down the volume I would stop hearing the words. Faces on the screen were distorted as if by crooked mirrors, until for seconds at a time I was overcome by panic at not being able to recognize them. I thought that if I screamed the picture would come right and I would see human faces again, and human beings would start talking a human language that I could hear again—why were they talking to me like this?—but in the end the picture straightened out without my screaming, or I switched it off, and only the lump in my throat remained.
I retired from my job, and at the age of forty-two, for the first time in my adult life, I had all the time I wanted in which to think. But grace did not visit my thoughts. Grace did not come from my thoughts.
ONE NIGHT
One night this week I woke up when I heard him calling me from outside my dream. I had fallen asleep late, at about four in the morning, and apparently soon after falling asleep I dreamt that some woman was chasing me, I was being chased by a woman, and I was hurrying down a winding street behind the Natural History Museum. In the dream I didn’t see my pursuer, I didn’t know where she would appear from, but I knew that she was chasing me or lying in wait for me, and so I was walking quickly. I walked quickly, but the street kept growing longer and longer, as if it would never end, even though it was still the very same street behind the Natural History Museum, which I knew well and which you could walk down in a minute. In the way you know things in a dream, I knew what she wanted, too. When she caught up with me, the woman would bend down and with two movements she would cut my ankles.
At some stage of my lengthening flight from her I heard him call my name, not in the dream but from outside it, from the room, as if he wanted to tell me something or ask me something, some everyday thing, and that was why he was standing in the doorway and calling me, and when I opened my eyes to answer, I could on no account convince myself that his voice, too, was part of the dream. If his voice belonged to the dream then I was no longer able to distinguish between dream and reality. I couldn’t fall asleep again and so I got up and got dressed and went outside to walk around the streets in the direction of the open market.
Before dawn the black of night changed to a deep blue darker than the darkness, though the streetlights were already switched off. There were a few trucks parked on the oily wet aspha
lt of Agrippas Street, and two men were loading empty crates onto one of them, with a kitten wailing like death beneath it. Next to the roadblock outside the market two border guards stopped me with, “Hey, lady, you looking for us? You lose something? …” and one of them held out a floral scarf. For a moment I imagined for some reason that they had pulled it from my neck when I walked past them, but when I left the house I wasn’t wearing a scarf, and anyway this scarf wasn’t mine and it didn’t look like any scarf of mine. I summoned Nira Woolf to my aid, I grew six feet tall and asked for a cigarette, which I smoked in their company. They asked me if I had a problem, and I said that no, I lived nearby in the neighborhood, I wrote at night. A reporter? No, a writer. The taller one said that he had a story, one day perhaps he would write it himself, and the short one said that the market at Passover without pita bread wasn’t the same market. The air was warm, with a faint smell of jasmine blossoms and rotting fruit. Stripes of gold-blue were painted above the city when I left them.