The Confessions of Noa Weber

by Gail Hareven

  ONCE

  Once we came out into deep snow from an old monastery whose name I have forgotten—maybe he never told me its name—he took me there to “see a real Rublev.” There were a few cars on the side road, none of the drivers was interested in moonlighting as a taxi, and then he took me to one of those little windowless restaurants which on my own I would never have identified as a restaurant.

  “Our Yesus Yosifovich is apparently a blessing the world can’t cope with,” he said as I tried to re-establish my connection to my frozen toes, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Jesus Christ,” he said with a smile. “Yeshua in your language.”

  “What about him?”

  “What about him? What indeed? What do you do with a blessing people can’t cope with?” I know when to keep quiet, so I kept quiet, and Alek went on and penetrated my thoughts without foreplay, or after the foreplay of years. “God, as I understand it, can never accept human beings or really understand them, and this led to the mistake of Yeshua.… World, as I understand, was created to be different from God, the complete opposite of him, and for this reason there are laws of nature and of morality. But with Jesus what happens is that God entered this world to take part in it, as if he got tired of talking to people about their behavior from distance. As if not only the world needs God for its salvation, but also God needs human beings … he needs a place in their souls for his development, which is a blasphemous thing to say … but God made a mistake.…” I succeeded in moving my toes in my shoes, while Alek ordered vodka for himself and tea for me—I had had too much to drink the night before. “You said that God made a mistake,” I said quietly, suddenly aware of the men at the table behind us and the foreign sound of the Hebrew. “Yes. He made a mistake. Because he is God and because of his love for human beings. Love of God is a hard thing. Hard when it enters between people, and Jesus in spite of sacrifice and forgiveness is hardest love of all.”

  “So was God only mistaken in the timing, or was it a fundamental mistake?”

  “Now you asked the big question.” Alek drank his vodka in one gulp, and then in an uncharacteristic pose he planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands.

  “I asked the big question, what’s the answer?”

  “What is the answer? That there is no answer. Maybe there can’t be one. Maybe for God there is no such thing as ‘timing.’ ‘Timing’ is connected to time, and God and time have a problem in meeting. This is another problem with Jesus, and about this a lot has already been written. And people, too, I think … people can be ready in their own time, so there is no one timing right for everybody.”

  I didn’t ask him if he “really believed” in Jesus, because what did it matter? And what did “really” mean?

  If I asked him perhaps he would answer dryly that we had gone to Bethlehem together and that he wasn’t inspired by a pink doll in a manger. If I asked him perhaps he would say that Jesus was a “symbol,” but I already know how close and present and personified a “symbol” can be. “Symbols” sometimes take on flesh in reality.

  “What are you doing with me here?” I asked him later, when we were back in bed in the apartment. “What am I doing?” he repeated and pulled me on top of him. “Yes,” I said and looked down at his face, and then he smiled and clasped his hands behind his head. “Maybe I have a role. In your life.”

  “Yes,” I said deliberately, “yes, you have. But one day, one day I won’t need you any more for … all this. I know.”

  “And then you’ll fire me from this role,” he said quietly and went on smiling.

  “And then I’ll fire you from your role,” and I smiled, too.

  I never asked him why he returned to Moscow. Presumably he had questions that required him to go back to the point of departure, like I needed to return the apartment to how it was in 1972. Only it’s impossible to actually go back because in the meantime the continent has shifted.

  THE PRIVATE THEATER

  I have mentioned my resignation from the fund a number of times, and now I think that in this move too there was a certain dramatization, as if I wanted to impress myself. I felt worn out and grubby, I felt like a stinking old sack of words, Hagar was about to leave home, for years I had hardly had any time for myself.… All this is true, but apparently not the complete truth, because there was also the matter of the inner theater, my private theater in which the heroine said to herself: “Get thee to a nunnery,” and picked up the hem of her skirts and retired, which is of course ridiculous.

  I did not seclude myself in a cave, I did not take a vow of silence, and I did not sustain myself on bits of carobs. I simply started living like a semi-retiree with time to meet for coffee in the mornings. I didn’t even stop reading the papers or watching soccer on television.

  When the phone rings, I can allow myself not to answer; my parents are well and have gone on a trip—my mother had a cataract removed just before they left, but if they haven’t been in touch up to now it means that all is well. Hagar and my friends are all fine, nobody needs me, and I, so it seems to me, no longer need anybody.

  And this too in a certain sense is a foolish illusion. I pay taxes, the municipality provides me with water, the IDF guards my borders, and the finger of the Galilee is still perched like a pointed hat atop my pensioner’s head. So what have I done, and what have I actually achieved?

  With my first trips, coming back was still bearable. Like a mole, like a spy under deep cover recharging his batteries through meetings with his controller, I derived strength from being with him over there, and then I converted that secret fuel into a different energy. At about the third time back the transition began to jar me, each time more and more, and from then on I have found it harder to return to my pensioner’s freedom, and after every landing days pass before I am able to see people or be seen by them. This time, for days I let the answering machine pick up my calls, and like the old Alek, I didn’t get up when people knocked at the door. Let them think what they will of me. But after that, too, after I have already been out and seen and been seen, reality refuses to return to what it was, and like a famished dervish I am still whirling around his absence. A skin separates me from my shadow, and I am desperate to remove it. I tear and tear in desire for some other place where it will be possible to merge with the shadow. Only at night does it become easier, for then I can abandon myself to the dark; in recent years I have begun to live more and more at night. When I started writing this I thought that I would retrieve the day. Perhaps I was wrong to start.

  It happened on the trip before last, the plane was half-empty, but both seats next to me were occupied. I left my seat, and a flight attendant who recognized me from television—that week I had taken part in some argument on prime time—allowed me to infiltrate the business class. She even brought me wine. We were flying low, I think, in the moisture of the clouds, and with the faint vibrating hum of the floor under my feet, cradled in the reclining chair, I was visited by a vision that told me that the plane was not really necessary, and that the metal body was intended only to provide those of little faith with something to cling to, so that they would not be alarmed by the actual possibility, or shocked by it. Floating slowly, the speed hardly perceptible, gliding towards him.… How easy it was to glide slowly through the air, how easy, the metal body encompassing me wasn’t really necessary, it was only a matter of convention. It suddenly made me want to laugh, this metal body which was only there for the sake of propriety, like a polite gesture, it really amused me and I smiled. This was a convention of travel, and I was availing myself of it, but there was another possibility, too: if the window cracked, if the door was torn off and I was sucked out, I would go on floating just as I was now, I would still float towards him. Because it was only for the sake of appearances that I was coming to him in a metal body.… I could have come in the light and the wind, I could have come as vapor and smoke and cloud, changing shape as the fancy took me.

 
There is nowhere in the world where I can wrap myself in my shadow, there is no such place, and the body is not simply a polite convention … but even so, even so, I will not praise what I have no wish to praise, and I do not wish to praise and I will not praise, I will not praise the metal body.

  Even if it’s impossible in a cloud, even if it’s impossible in smoke, even if it’s impossible to walk on water, I will not praise the body.

  Alek was waiting passively for me at the airport, a body wrapped in a gray coat, the cigarette in his hand had gone out, and I can swear that he touched me with all of himself as soon as he saw me, as soon as I began to be sucked towards him, when there were still a few steps left, none but a few steps left, only a few steps left.

  EPILOGUE, SUMMARY

  She won’t go anywhere; not to a more monastic monastery, nor to him to be taken to oblivion, because there is nowhere to go.

  She won’t kill herself in a foolish attempt to float from the window, and she won’t crush her Nira Woolf under the engine of a train. Already in the weeks to come Weber will make Woolf dance like a graceful bear in the squares of the city of J and the coastal plain. And she herself will applaud her, clap her hands.

  Already in the coming months she will find herself some new job that will take her out of the house on a regular basis, because living like this without any order isn’t good for her.

  • • •

  Something else will happen, something else will happen one night, when a voice calls her from outside her dream. It will happen when a mean, mad orange moon hangs in the sky, and absence calls her name from the threshold. Perhaps her hair will stand on end, perhaps she will want to howl to him like a she-wolf, surely she will howl like the last she-wolf, surely she will arch herself to him when he comes. With eyes of darkness I will be able to see him coming closer, with eyes of darkness I will see his face taking on substance, and the body of shadow becoming tangible like a last need.

  Something else will happen one night, when a voice calls, and a crouching body hides the mean orange moon and the sky in the window. Then with eyes of shadow I will gaze at his flesh, and I will rise and hold out arms of shadow to touch him. Like a last need I will shed my body before him, and as from a last need my soul will flee from him. Alone I will pass through the gate.

  Outside the sky streams onto the city. Outside the night glimmers and clears. My vision clears of itself. But there is no face between myself and the streaming. And there is no longer a face between myself and the night.

  A man will remain behind in my house, in his house, and I will not look back at the gate. It is not him I seek, it is not him I sought, not a man. Wrapped in the streaming I shall go, consoled by the abundance, by the awakening night, in the light of the moon I shall see by myself how the city bursts forth.

  Now even if they come to seek my soul, they will not be able to take it.