The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  This wasn’t the first time I had heard his voice calling me: “Noia.…” It had already happened a number of times. He never called urgently, he never called sorrowfully, he only said my name, and then I woke.

  If I doubt that I really heard him, I will have to doubt the Japanese knife in the dream as well, and also the unshaven border guard who tomorrow evening, actually this evening, will be able to buy himself pita bread.

  TEN YEARS

  Alek left Israel in the spring of 1982, without guessing that Sharon was about to invade Lebanon and invent a new Middle East for us. So that apart from our two meetings when he was staying in the Petra Hotel, I didn’t hear from him or see him for ten years. What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.

  Perhaps this is how we continue to love the dead, but Alek wasn’t dead, and the living Alek gave me strength.

  I did not lack for enthusiasms in those years, but all these sometimes even feverish enthusiasms were accompanied by an awareness of transience. As if they were flare-ups that had to be experienced until … until what? I don’t know. Until the flammable matter was consumed. Until matter was consumed.

  I said to myself that a table was a table was a table, that a wolf moon was only a moon … that if there was a purpose at all its name was justice, and that the taste of heaven was my daughter laughing in the sea.

  For weeks or months I succeeded in turning ordinary everyday existence into a manifesto and a creed: I believe in one single reality and no other. I believe in doing good: now I have to solve problems in the office, to locate Jeff, to buy meat at the butcher’s on the way home, to check if Tami has invited Miriam, too, to remember to say I’m sorry to Hagar. That is the good. But then there was a shift in the weather, a different air blew in, a ray of light vanished, a thin, mean moon hung in the sky, and all of a sudden I filled with that oceanic yearning that absolute justice cannot satisfy.

  I missed Alek, his voice, his accent, his concentrated body, the touch of his hand on my face, the way he leaned against the marble counter in the kitchen, today too I fold in half when a concrete memory and a no less concrete absence clutch at my diaphragm, only now I can sometimes rise on a wave and ride with it, and from the height of the wave it seems that my longing for him is only a gateway to some other yearning, to which this yearning happened to attached itself.

  What did I want? For what was I yearning? What do I wish for now? I have already said: for some crack in the sky, nothing less. For some crack which will open up to me for eternity. When the absolute will be revealed and everything will be filled with the absolute and the streaming and the sealed light which will rise out of matter. Increasingly I see acts as a way, increasingly I see the body as a vessel … sometimes for hours I can feel the light imprisoned inside it, waiting for the light from above which will never disappear again. In this light sometimes for hours I see stones giving birth to stones and trees giving birth to trees.

  In Moscow about which I know nothing, in Moscow where I am wordless as a baby and helpless as a baby, I keep seeing this vision of objects without a name and without a background, and there and with him I too with the harsh light inside me give birth to myself as a being without a background.

  “Yearning,” however “oceanic,” is not evidence of the existence of something to yearn for, and the body is not a vessel.… I haven’t got the strength any more to say everything that should be said, like a reflexive apology after an epileptic fit, and nevertheless here I have said it again.

  Like a dog running around in circles after its own tail and biting it, I try to get rid of the delusion that I experience as my soul.

  I could have resigned myself to the “oceanic yearning,” and in the end no doubt I will resign myself.

  I could have resigned myself to the sickness of my secret love.

  But what I will never resign myself to, and the reason why I keep tearing at myself and my flesh, is the fact that in my visions there is a guard at the gates of heaven. That a man stands between me and what cannot be described in words.

  Even if I stood myself up against the wall, I would not be able to give any comparative description of him, but I can put it like this: if at the age of seventeen, eighteen, I saw him as the wisest of men, Alek of the year ’72 seems to me now touchingly young and confused, perhaps like I seemed to him then. Since then I have met wiser men, and especially women, handsomer men and so on and so forth, and none of it matters a damn, because only he in all his appearances splits open the spine of words in me, and only he makes trees burst forth from trees and stones burst forth from stones for me.

  If these words have any meaning … the spine of words … what lies beyond … I want to see the stone and the tree and myself bursting forth without him. I have to learn to see them without him.

  On the second of January 1991, when the world crossed off days from the American ultimatum, Alek phoned and his voice sounded so close that for the first moment I thought that he was in Jerusalem. He said that what was happening in the gulf didn’t look good to him, that Saddam Hussein was totally insane, the West apparently didn’t know how insane, it was hard to understand when somebody was totally insane. And perhaps he was worrying for nothing, but maybe I should come with Hagar to Paris? …

  Where would he put us up? At his mother’s? With friends? Had he talked to Ute about it? I didn’t ask. Hagar was in the Negev on a year’s national service, I was in bed with bronchitis which may have infected my lungs. I told him that it was impossible for us to come, but it would be all right, perhaps Saddam Hussein was insane but we at least were quite sane in our way. Only after he had repeated his invitation and I had declined it again, he asked if I thought it would interest Hagar to meet her grandfather, and since my feverish head was stuck in Paris, I thought that he was talking about Marina’s husband Genia, and that it was to them that he was suggesting we come.

  But Alek wasn’t talking about Genia but about his father Abram Ginsberg, who had immigrated, it transpired, to Israel at the end of that summer. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much trouble? He’s living with friends now in Kiryat Menachem.” “Yes … of course,” I said still confused, “I’m sure Hagar would be happy to go and see him, it would interest her, I’m sure she’d be happy, but how exactly will she talk to him? Do those friends of his know a bit of Hebrew?” His friends, said Alek, were old and didn’t know a word of Hebrew, and apparently they wouldn’t learn any now, but Abram might remember something. “Where did he learn Hebrew?” I asked, and then he told me his father’s story, or at least the outline that he knew, and it was the most fluent story I had ever heard Alek tell.

  Abram Ginsberg was a student at gymnasium, not yet sixteen and already wild and rebellious, when he forged some papers and ran away from Vilna to the Land of Israel. For two years he worked and knocked around here, in the Galilee apparently, before he decided that nothing serious would come of the Zionist experiment and went to join the real revolution in Russia. Others who did the same thing were liquidated or died slowly or quickly in camps and resettlement plans, but Abram survived, it wasn’t clear how, “I didn’t ask questions, and when I did ask I never got answer, I know that for some time he worked as a truck driver, transporting timber in the North, in the taiga, the devil knows.… Up to the war and after he was on the move most of the time.”

  Alek was born “in the war, during an evacuation, almost in a railway station,” and when his father returned as an “official hero” he joined his wife, her mother, and their son, and “registered in Sverdlovsk. My mother was studying at university, he studied a little at the Agricultural Institute, but then he left again, after the war he had friends in all kinds of places, and my mother met Genia, who h
ad a room in Moscow.” Alek was five when they moved to Moscow, and he remembered his father mainly from photographs. “He looked like a real Russian, not like me, completely different from me. You can’t tell he’s Jewish.”

  Ten o’clock at night, for over two and a half years I hadn’t heard from him, and Alek was giving me the outline of a five-hundred-page novel over the phone, strewn with allusions I couldn’t interpret and full of gaps I had no idea of how to fill in. Dazed by fever and pills, under the threat of chemical missiles which Alek’s concern made me take more seriously—this time I didn’t feel young, healthy, white-toothed, rudely constructive and far from any comprehension of the tragic, as I sometimes felt with him. The history that had devastated other places was coming closer, gathering force as it advanced, and threatening to reach my home.

  I told him that I was sick and that when I was better I would go to visit his father. “Sick? What’s wrong with you?” He sounded alarmed. “Nothing serious, just bronchitis and a fever.” “You’re sure it’s not serious?” And when I said yes he said: “In that case, I wish I could feel your fever.” On the other end of the line I heard him light a cigarette, and in the moment of silence that followed, both of our breathing. “Who are the people he’s staying with?” I asked and pulled the telephone under the blanket. “Friends, Yacov Rudin, also a veteran, and his wife Fanny. Perhaps it’s hard for you to write down the number now?” “Tell me what it is, I’ll remember it. Do you know if they’re organized? Have they got gasmasks, plastic sheets for the windows, masking tape? Should we take them something?” “There’s no need, really. These people you don’t have to worry about, believe me. I just thought it might be interesting.” “And how interesting it is.…” I said, dizzy with over sixty years of history, “I’d be interested to hear what your father thinks about the Zionist experiment now.”

  More than two and a half years had passed since we last met, and I still saw his smile as clearly as I heard it in his voice. “Warn the little idealist that she’s not going to meet a Zionist activist. I spoke to him on the phone, the most he is prepared to say is that the whole world is in a mess now, and if he already has to die, then better to die in a Jewish mess.” “To die in the Holy Land? Is that the idea?” “What Holy Land? For my mother, yes, even though she’ll never come to Israel, but for him there’s no such concept as a ‘Holy Land,’ why don’t you wait and hear for yourself?”

  In the winter of ’89 Alek was eager to go to Berlin, he was very interested in Berlin then, but both the newspapers he was writing for then had their own correspondents there, and in the end, after “we didn’t stop nagging them,” they sent him to Russia, to cover the elections to the Duma and report on what was happening there in general. In the winter of ’89—to his mother Marina’s horror—he went there for the first time, and then twice more, and on his third trip he found his father, which on the face of things should have been difficult in a country without telephone directories, but in fact “wasn’t difficult at all. For years we heard that he was in Sverdlovsk.” Immigrants, it appears, have information channels of their own.

  Alek arrived in Sverdlovsk a few months before the city took back its old name, and found that his father had already applied for an exit visa and was “sitting on his suitcases.” Abram Ginsberg landed in Israel on the night after Yom Kippur.

  I didn’t ask: “So what was it like meeting him?” or “So what did you talk about?” or “How did you feel?” You don’t ask Alek questions like these, but I promised to talk to Hagar and to go with her to visit him when she came home. For the first time in the history of our long-distance relations Alek gave me a phone number where I could get hold of him in Paris, and said that he would phone again during the week.

  Since I had to talk to Hagar, the story wasn’t confidential, and I repeated it to everyone who came to pay me a sick visit and to everyone who phoned, with a strange enjoyment and without boring myself.

  A friend of mine who writes for a local paper said that it was “a great story, only it wouldn’t interest anyone, especially not now.”

  Tami said: “Be careful, it would be typical of that maniac to dump his father on you to look after.”

  My father said on the phone: “Go know who this man is at all and who he served. If Grandma Dora were alive today, maybe she could have told us … a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve suddenly remembered to sign on as Zionists at this stage of the game.” My mother intervened on the other phone and said: “Excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anybody can remember whenever he likes.” And Talush who was sitting on the armchair next to my bed concluded with: “As long as you don’t end up stuck with that old man in a sealed room.”

  Hagar was the only one who was truly excited, and she phoned every day from her group in the Negev while I was still sick in bed to ask how I was and if I had succeeded in making contact with Abram yet. A few months before, towards the end of summer, she had changed her name to “Weber,” and the hostility her last meeting with her father had aroused in her seemed to have subsided as a result. Perhaps the act of changing her name calmed her down, perhaps it was only the symbolic conclusion of an ongoing process, I really don’t know. Among the many subjects that we talk about all the time, Hagar keeps her thoughts about Alek mainly to herself, but even so I knew that she was hungry for information about her father, collecting scraps discreetly so as not to alarm me, my parents, and Yoash, and in any case she was already obsessed with “roots” and “identity,” and I know that she shared this obsession with all her friends.

  In a certain sense it was a story of missed opportunity, a series of missed opportunities in fact. I phoned the number Alek had given me four or five times, and every time a woman answered in excited Russian, which grew more excited every time I repeated, “Alek Ginsberg … Abram?” With all her heart she wanted to cooperate, but she couldn’t, all she could do was repeat in varying nuances of interrogation and emphasis the two words: “bolnitza” and “bolnoi.” My fever went down but I was still too weak to get into the car and drive to Kiryat Menachem.

  A few days before the beginning of the American attack Alek called again and said that his father had been hospitalized at Hadassah, he apparently needed surgery, but Fanny and Yasha couldn’t understand a word the doctors said and Marina was worried. And how are you? Have you recovered by now?

  I arrived at the hospital when they were sending everyone they could home to free beds for an emergency. Outside the ER, soldiers were busy building terrifying showers, and a row of gurneys blocked the pavement. From Information they sent me to Surgery 2, at Surgery 2 they told me that the patient in question wasn’t with them, maybe he was in Surgery 1, or maybe he was at Hadassah Mount Scopus, I had better check it out. In the elevator were a group of tense reservists who looked as if they were getting ready to jump out and run the minute the elevator hit the ground floor. In the end I found a young doctor who had read a few of my books and recognized me, and then it turned out that they had registered him under the wrong name.

  “A rotten leg” certainly doesn’t sound like a medical term, but those were the words she used as we stood next to the nurses station. Abram Ginsberg—for some reason they had registered him as “Zaltsburg”—had arrived with “an old wound and a completely rotten leg, which nobody here could understand how he had trodden on all those years, how a person could walk around in such pain … some people are made of iron.…” They had rushed him to the operating room for an amputation, but, she explained, we had to be prepared for the worst, they may have been too late, because we were talking about an aggressive germ that had spread from the wound. At the moment the patient was in intensive care, unconscious, and the prognosis, to be honest, wasn’t brilliant, but with these old guys you can never tell, they’re made of different stuff.

  I didn’t go to see Abram Ginsberg in the Intensive Care Unit. Perhaps they wouldn’t have let me in, perhaps they would have.… When my father was
there they let one visitor in at a time at certain hours. I was still not free of germs, I was still taking antibiotics, I drove home and told myself that I would go back another day.

  Abram Ginsberg died on the first night of the missiles, without regaining consciousness; early in the morning they phoned me from the hospital and I phoned Hagar, and Alek again, who already knew. He was in Marina’s apartment—it was her number he had given me—waiting with her to hear the news. During the night of the missiles itself, after listening to my breathing in the gasmask and to the pounding of my heart, which was beating faster from fear at the sound of my breathing, I spoke to them both. I spoke to everyone I knew that night, whenever the line was freed, but to Alek I went on talking all night long, so that I hadn’t had more than a few minutes sleep when the call from the hospital woke me up.

  We buried him at one o’clock in the afternoon. Hagar, brave and stubborn, ignored the police recommendations and the general panic and came by bus from the Negev, but by the time she arrived the funeral had already set out for the cemetery, so we drove straight there.

  It had rained heavily in the early hours of the morning, the first serious rain of the year, and the roads were washed and deserted as if it were a winter Yom Kippur. I remember: nervous clouds moved low over the hilltops, pierced by long rays of light, and I drove fast between the tatters of gray and the light. The day before, when it seemed that the Americans were going to eliminate Saddam Hussein with a quick, strong, elegant strike, Hagar and her friends had gone to a Hilula, a celebration held under the auspices of the popular religious leader Baba Baruch, in his home town of Netivot, and she started to tell me about it and suddenly interrupted herself: “It seems so absurd now, the Hilula. Like a minute before the end of the world.” “The world’s not going to end,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “Are you sure?” “As far as I possibly can be. But still it would be better if you stayed in Jerusalem. If you’re worried what your friends will think, you can tell them you’re sitting shivah for your grandfather.”