The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  The dwellings of the dead on the cemetery slopes were deserted, as if the last corpse had already been buried here, it took some time until we found the plot, and we found it not by signs but by the distant figures who looked as if they didn’t belong there or anywhere else, either. Four black silhouettes, of the undertakers from the Burial Society, and another three people standing next to them, all with boxed gasmasks hanging from their shoulders and protruding from their hips like strange alien growths under their coats. When we approached they had already finished piling earth on the pit and on the one-legged old man made of iron and also perhaps on his amputated leg that had been thrown in for good measure, and a thin man from the Burial Society read in a high, rapid voice El Malei Rahamim. O Lord, who art full of compassion … shelter him for evermore under the cover of thy wings, and let his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.… The Lord is his inheritance, may he rest in peace. Big drops of rain fell intermittently on the loose soil. A mist advancing from the east covered Jerusalem. Yacov Rudin opened an umbrella over his wife and the young woman with them, and only Hagar said Amen with the grave diggers, but when the man from the Burial Society laid a little stone on the grave, we all approached and bent down after him. We ask your pardon if we have not acted in accordance with your dignity … go in peace … and meet your fate at the end of days.

  When the service appeared to have come to an end, Hagar roused herself, went up to the Rudins and the young woman accompanying them, and explained to them with her hands that we wanted them to stay there with us. The undertakers left, in the silence that descended we heard their van driving away, even though it was parked quite far from us, and my daughter who was then at the beginning of her Jewish development took a Bible out of her rucksack and in a strained hoarse voice began to conduct a little ritual of her own. “A golden psalm of David. Preserve me O God; for in thee do I put my trust,” she read, “… I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest without fear.” The rain grew heavier, Jerusalem disappeared, the surrounding hills disappeared, and in the mud between the tombstones above the muddy earth of the fresh grave we stood, three strangers in heavy coats and I, listening to a girl’s brave voice trembling slightly at the edges as she read: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.…”

  “All according to the rules of the genre,” Alek would have said, but what was the genre we were in? The war had not yet turned into a farce, our flesh was not resting without fear, hell seemed like a real possibility, and Abram Ginsberg had died not of biological warfare but simply of an ordinary aggressive germ.

  We returned the Rudins and the woman with them to their depressing apartment block in Kiryat Menachem—later I would see similar housing projects but on a much larger scale in Russia—and I dropped Hagar the good soldier off at the Central Bus Station after in a sudden gesture of good will she had presented the embarrassed Rudins with her Bible. She refused to stay over even one night or even to have lunch with me—“I have kids I’m responsible for, their counselors can’t just go off to Jerusalem”—and I went back to bed and the telephone and Alek.

  We talked a lot in those first three days of the war, before Tami came up with her two boys from Tel Aviv—Avner hadn’t been born yet—and they took over the house. In the nature of things our conversations were bogged down by “events” but nevertheless they were like a magical continuation, and somehow also completely relaxed.

  When Hagar was small, she would sometimes crawl into bed with me; and when she grew up, too, when she came home from hikes, or from the army, or evening classes at the university, she would sometimes lie down next to me to tell me something, and fall asleep in the middle. I liked her physical closeness, I liked her smell and sleeping next to her felt good, and my daughter was an excellent excuse not to let a man sleep in my bed. In all my years I’ve only fallen asleep next to one man, and sometimes his voice leads me into sleep. “Are you already dreaming?” “Perhaps.” “Are your eyes closed?” “Yes.” “If they’re closed, then you’re already dreaming.” And so he followed me into my dreams.

  After the first night of the missiles I hardly felt any fear. Alek sounded as if he had a cold, he laughed and said he’d caught it from me. And once Marina cut into our conversation, and Alek explained that she was asking how her granddaughter was, and then I heard-saw him answering her rather impatiently, after which she left the room.

  His voice wrapped the events in his presence and turned everything that was “inconceivable” into a part of the general disorder of the world. The world according to Alek … where in the midst of chaos and helplessness, you can sometimes find a different security and a different consolation.

  THE SPINE OF WORDS

  Miriam Marie went to Cairo in the spring of ’82, and returned looking blooming and astonishingly youthful with a pile of photographs. “This woman was my best friend … and this is her granddaughter … this is where we went to the synagogue … and here, this is the Corniche, you can’t see it properly in the picture, this is where we ran away when two boys were following us.” Miriam wouldn’t have dreamed of returning to live in Cairo, she would have laughed at me if I’d brought up the idea, but the very possibility of “smelling the air again,” and the knowledge that the places where she had once walked were still more or less there, took about twenty years off her age.

  Aunt Greta came to Israel not in order to make her peace with us, and returned to New York.

  Abram Ginsberg came to Israel after he had “crossed too many names off his address book,” as his son put it, and Alek himself lost interest in Israel and was living alternately in Paris and Moscow, without making either of these places his.

  Around what spine of words can these stories be organized? The victory of Zionism? The failure of Zionism? Post-Zionism? Jewish psychology? A new national reality at the end of the millenium? Hagar tries to organize them for herself in precisely these terms, while I succumb to an attack of nervous boredom whenever anyone opens his mouth and talks to me in sociopolitologish, which has been happening more and more frequently over the years. Government ministers, professors, rabbis, and writers, the man in the street in his capacity as “the man in the street” and the taxi driver in his capacity as “the taxi driver”—all of them chew over reality in sociopolitologish: they talk about “strata,” “ethnic groups,” “elites,” they speak of “cultures,” “immigrations,” and “populations” which suffer from “complexes” and “traumas.” I myself speak in sociopolitologish, and not only to others but also to myself. But there has to be, I know there has to be, another language.

  This illusion that people’s private destinies can be explained at all; what makes them go and what makes them stay.…

  What makes them go and what makes them stay? The beating of a butterfly’s wings in Korea. An old taste suddenly coming into the mouth. Unrequited love. Hidden rage. Sensitivity to some invisible molecule that was in the air at a particular moment in time. Sometimes a great wind blows up, an evil wind which sweeps people away, and then too there is no point in words, which cannot really capture the victims.

  No evil wind swept us away in the Gulf War, which from day to day degenerated into a kind of sticky, hysterical farce, but what happened from my point of view was that in a strange and completely unexpected way I entered a new incarnation with Alek. We became friends. And then I went to visit him in Moscow.

  PASSOVER

  The last day of Passover ended tonight, with a din of cars hooting for pita bread and falafel. The most vulgar and crowded secular seder of all. With the smells of family and cooking ingredients and scouring kettles. All the smells of the Jewish incense that keep the danger of spring at bay.

  Long ago, at the beginning of the holiday, when I had just begun to write, I thought of purifying myself until I concluded with a great hymn of praise to everyday secular reality. To a reality without illusi
ons, to the empty yellowish summer sky, to the Zionism of the soul planting itself in history with the morning paper. When I finish my confession, I imagined to myself, I’ll begin to quietly praise. I’ll bow my sinful head and sing a modest hymn to the only reality there is: a ray of sunlight creeping over the table … a child’s hug … a loaf of bread … the tired eyes of my friends … the tired laughter of mothers … a pot wrapped in a kitchen towel … the voice of the newscaster.… Thus, stitch by stitch, I would embroider the fullness and the richness.

  Tomorrow they’ll be holding the traditional “Maimouna” celebrations at the Saker Garden, two streets below my house. Am I supposed to praise and extol this mass cookout, too, the carcasses of beef, the fullness of the chewing mouths, the melting ice cream and the screeching loudspeakers?

  If this is the good, then the good is urgently in need of redemption.

  On second thought, it’s clear to me that I’ll never take Nira to Moscow, not in a fur coat and not in a summer dress. If I took her there it would only be to kill her off, to push her under the midnight train to Saint Petersburg, a development my editor would on no account be willing to accept.

  In 1999, when we wandered ’round at night among the fantastically illuminated, newly painted aristocratic mansions, Alek explained that it was the Mafia that had cleaned the streets of the small time gangsters. “Thanks to the big crooks we can walk here in safety.” What would Nira Woolf, Lady Justice-for-All, do in this chaotic free-for-all, where even seven martial arts would not help her? And what would I do with Lady Justice-for-All and her martial arts?

  In order to get rid of Nira there was no need to drag her all the way to Moscow, it was enough for me to want it, to make a decision, and then I could finish her off right here, in my house.

  I enjoyed writing Voice of a Dead Woman and What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? more than The Stabbing. I went to visit Alek, I returned from visiting Alek, we held long and short telephone conversations, I was so aroused that my plots, too, raced ahead on light-footed, quick-tempered sentences. Now I think that with the use I made of incest, slavery, and rape I really did scrape the bottom of the barrel, because what other systematic rage could I provoke within myself? And for Nira and me systematic rage against the “system” is essential; rage with a theory, not simply rage focused on a person.

  I didn’t stop hating evildoers and detesting evil—Alek: “The easiest thing is to hate the villains”—outbursts of focused anger still make reality vividly present to me, but Nira from her inception aspired to more, and the elimination of the oppressors in her exploits always signifies the possibility of eliminating oppression itself.

  Russia put an end to that for me, Alek put an end to it for me, it’s hard to say exactly how and exactly what changed in me.… It’s not that I stopped deriving infantile satisfaction from destroying scoundrels, but that everything seems infantile to me now.

  Systematic rage needs a sense of direction: with justice behind you and evil confronting you, forward to progress and down with the system! Down with Western imperialism, death to the patriarchal oligarchy, out with oppressive capitalism, let the ground burn, let a social earthquake topple the class pyramid, let the mighty and terrible heroic God fall from His throne, bring on the Great Mother who nourishes and sustains all living creatures in His place. “Spiritual nourishment,” too, as my only beloved daughter says. I don’t care, I don’t care—more than that, I’ll even rejoice. From the bathtub I’ll join in singing the anthem. I’ll stick my head out of the window and sing as prettily as a tame canary. Second voice, millionth voice, I’ll sing in harmony with them if they wish.

  But the despair, that other despair, that can’t be removed from the skin by the whitest teeth, what will eradicate it? And when the soul, the backward soul, begs for redemption, what will I say to it? Shut your mouth, you’re just a fiction? Or will I shut it up with social redemption, because that’s all there is?

  Even when evil has been defeated and the good has triumphed—when foreign workers are not cheated, and women are not beaten, and the poor are not oppressed—then, too, when justice has been done, man will still be in need of mercy.

  MOSCOW

  Once upon a time I talked about a short-winded confession without perspective, and about Russia in my ignorance I have no perspective at all. I neither loved Moscow nor hated it. I did not understand this city, where I kept on losing my sense of direction, and whenever it seemed to me that the river was behind us, I suddenly saw it in front of us. I didn’t love Moscow, I love Alek, and I loved him there.

  We became friends, but that was only “an added layer,” as they say, I still loved my master, like a willing slave, and every time he said to me: “It’s not normal … you should be here now, why don’t you come?” I bought a plane ticket, packed a bag and lied to all my friends and relations. I lived from conversation to conversation and from trip to trip, as if on cold oxygen that I stored up in my lungs, and the thought of the next breath, the next call, was intoxicating.

  I have seven trips behind me, and I can’t say that I’ve seen much of Moscow. We took walks here and there, sometimes for hours. We ate at little restaurants where they served caviar sandwiches on formica tables, where they were generous with the vodka and stingy with the coarse paper napkins. On a number of occasions, without embarrassment or the need for explanations, he took me to meet his friends; but most of the time he wanted to stay at home and refrained from treating me like a tourist. He says that Moscow can tire you to death. That “anyone who didn’t grow up here all his life, his body can’t take it,” and that without going back to Paris he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

  It sometimes happens that when he starts talking he addresses me in French and immediately interrupts himself with ‘ “I don’t know already which language I’m talking.” Sometimes he loses a word in Hebrew and clenches his fist impatiently, until I find the missing word and offer it to him. From visit to visit the soft “sh” and wet “r” which hardly appeared in his Hebrew once become more pronounced. On one of my visits he was about to fly to Paris to his family a few hours after my departure, his suitcase lay open on the sofa.

  In spite of his complaints about the city, Alek stayed there for longer periods from year to year. He installed new locks in the apartment on Yakimanka Street, which he had initially rented for only a few months, exchanged his laptop for a regular computer, collected books in amounts that were impossible to transport—“at that price impossible not to buy.”

  I was full of energy, and nevertheless I too felt no great need to go anywhere, his view was enough for me. A filthy inner courtyard visible from the kitchen window. Rows of windows in the building opposite, some of them curtained in white lace. One ugly wooden chest. A wall covered in old wallpaper with a pattern of leaves with a single picture hanging on it: a fake icon that Borya had given him, a proper forgery, not a reproduction; a tortured Jesus, golden and big-eyed in the style of Rublev, only Rublev hadn’t painted it.

  Moscow left me naked. However much Alek tried to explain—and he doesn’t tend to explain a lot—and however much I read, I was left without a language and without an opinion, without the usual ability to discuss and make judgements. I have heard about similar sensations from people visiting the Far East, but Russia isn’t India, we learned something about it in high school, most of the veteran members of the kibbutz came from there, the language sounds familiar, and so I had a kind of presumption that I was supposed to understand, and this presumption was almost always refuted. The strange thing is that I enjoyed this failure, the alarming difficulty in organizing reality, and the inability to make judgements in general or at all. Helpless and with my mind empty of opinions, very concentrated, it seemed to me that I was stretched by a kind of vibration which was existence itself—the devil knows what “existence itself” means, maybe it doesn’t mean anything—but it held intense despair and renunciation and a wild and fearful joy, which expanded inside me, pulsing and stretching my ribs
, until I could scarcely contain it.

  Moscow left me naked, and I was naked anyway, in a nakedness so terrifying that sometimes I would close my eyes in the childish illusion that for a moment he would not see me. But it was for the sake of this nakedness with him that I kept on coming. Because of the gaze that turns all of me into soul and fills my body with soul, so that I never, ever want to escape from it or perch on the ceiling. Never to be in a place where his gaze can’t reach me and give my body life.

  Once it happened that we were sitting in the kitchen, and when he looked at me I thought that it was a good thing he didn’t love me, because even so it was almost impossible to bear.

  It’s impossible to exist like this for any length of time. My longest stay was in 1995, eleven days, part of which we were with Borya, and when I returned to the city of J in the hills of J I was like a madwoman gathering her cunning to hide what she sees and hears. Alek spent that summer with his family somewhere outside of Paris, for over four months we didn’t speak to each other, in Oslo talks were taking place with the Palestinians, settlers were demonstrating and blocking the roads.… Hagar wanted to know what I thought about the “right-wing” Russian immigration—how it would affect politics in Israel, and how the Jewish Agency was influencing the immigrants, and how I explained the fact that a fighter for human rights like Natan Sharansky displayed contemptuous indifference to human rights in the territories? So who do you think will influence him in the end?—and I to the best of my ability talked and discussed and debated, and felt myself growing scabs of words until my skin was as dry as a lizard’s, which was the only way I could go out in the sun that was obliterating the city the further we advanced into summer. Jerusalem bleached in the light looked as insubstantial as a ghost town, and the air was so heavy that on my night runs I found it hard to breathe. And precisely for this reason I ran longer, but I obtained no relief even after the effort. I needed the darkness in which I could breathe. And then I began to think, too, of giving up my job at the fund.