The Confessions of Noa Weber (2 page)

LAA—Love Addicts Anonymous—holding hands on the web. Lovesick ladies from the East Coast to the West Coast, from Europe to Australia, entering the forum for therapeutic encounters. All of them fell in love suddenly, once and for all. And through winter, summer, autumn, and spring they cling to the one and only love that never lets them be.

Women who love too much, is how they define themselves. Women addicted to love. Women whose neurons have been screwed up by their unhealthy loves.

Since discovering the LAA forum, whenever my own neurons begin to go berserk, I enter the web site. I call myself Adele there, a private joke which I have never explained to my sister sufferers and which I never will. Adele, after Victor Hugo’s pathetic floor-rag of a daughter, who followed some nothing all the way to Marrakech and went so crazy because of him that they had to put her in the loony bin. The Adele H. of Israel. Very funny. But the women-who-love-too-much wouldn’t find it amusing, none of them would laugh.

Maybe women who love too much have no sense of humor and maybe they just have no idea about Israeli names and how unromantic they are. Take Sarit for example. Can anyone imagine Sarit throwing herself under a train? Or drowning herself in a river? Which river, exactly? In the shallow trickle of the Jordan? Or perhaps in the fish ponds of some kibbutz? No, the most Sarit could do is give a revealing interview to the mid-week supplement of one of the tabloids. Some names simply impose an anti-romantic discipline on their owners: Pazit. Sarit. Yossi. Amit. Try fitting them into an old love song by Alexander Penn, for instance, “My plain winter coat and the lamp on the bridge, / An autumn night and my face wet with rain. / That
was the first time you saw me, remember? / And it was as clear to me as two and two / That I was in love with Amit, and Amit was in love with Pazit, / Yes, it wasn’t any good, it was gloriously bad …”

Gloriously bad. I actually understand these words. And they are the ones that creep up from my tailbone to my collarbone, in complete contradiction to my logic which tells me that bad can’t be glorious. And that all this romantic bullshit is basically a conspiracy against the female sex.

I said that lovesick females from all over the world meet at night on the net, and that of course was an exaggeration characteristic of my state of mind. Africa is silent. China is silent. Japan is silent. India is silent. No Russian soul comes onto the screen to seek support from her sisters. But what do I know about love in Chinese? Or in Japanese? Or in the multitude of Indian languages? Nothing. I simply have no idea how women there love.

In Russia, on the other hand, I’m positive that there are a lot of broken hearts. Judging by their literature and our translations of it, every second heart there is gloriously badly broken. So why are they silent on the net? Even if we limit ourselves to English speakers capable of corresponding, taking into account the tens of millions of Russian women, some of them should definitely have found their way to the group. Hey, you over there, in Kiev, in Saint Petersburg, in Tobolsk, in Baku, in Tallinn, let’s hear from you. Haven’t you heard of the revolution? Haven’t you heard yet? Of course you have. So come on, girls. Stand up now and confess. What’s going on with you there? What’s the meaning of this silence? Isn’t there even one of you who’s sick of her bondage? Let’s hear one Russian soul at long last admit the
depressing folly of feeling. One Natasha who’ll come forward and type the ritual admission on her computer keyboard: “1. I am powerless over love, I am addicted to it and my life has become unmanageable.” “2. I have come to believe that only a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.” And, “3. Seeking recovery, I turn my life and will over to the group and to the care of God as I understand Him.”

Love like ours is a progressive disease, in the opinion of our nocturnal forum. In acknowledgement of this fact we are called upon to stop and make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. To admit to ourselves, to our sisters, and to God—“as we understand him”—the many wrongs we have done because of our addiction. To humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings. And then to make a list of all the people we have harmed in the lunacy of our love, apologize to them in detail and make amends to them all.

Sandy from Seattle abandoned four children and her husband for a certain clown, a real honest-to-goodness clown who put on a performance at her son’s seventh birthday party, and who now thinks he’s doing her a favor when he agrees to see her once every few months. Debra from Dallas got out of jail a year ago after making a childish attempt to poison her alcoholic’s wife. Terry from Toronto jams up the mailbox, the fax machine, and the telephones of her lying ex with endless hysterical messages, and he’s about to sue her for the damage she’s caused his business, but all the silly cow can think about is what it’ll be like to see him in court and how exactly he’ll look at her there.

Sandy from Seattle, Debra from Dallas, Betty from Boston, what imbecilic names they choose for themselves. As if they’ve entered a
contest for Miss World, and are about to be called onstage in their bathing suits. And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome dopey Debra from Dallas, senile Sandy from Seattle, and number fifteen on our list, brainless Betty from Boston. Here they are, our gorgeous girls, stepping up one after the other in the nakedness of their cute little souls.

Women who love too much are supposed to regret the fact that they were so dependent and so addicted, to regret it profoundly and to apologize profusely. As far as regret is concerned, I don’t know: but apologizing is another matter, and if anyone asked my opinion I would say that most of the group doesn’t need to apologize to anyone. Not as a matter of any urgency at any rate. Somebody screwed these screw-ups, most of them got beaten and betrayed, insulted and humiliated by the scum they fell in love with, and nevertheless they gave them their hearts and souls, and quite often their property too. So you can despise them for it, it’s definitely possible to despise them, but apologize? Let their lousy men apologize first. And let them change the whole system before anything else.

From what I’ve come to understand, a woman joins the group when in general terms the whole love-thing begins to seem unprofitable to her. She reaches this understanding a little late in the day, but in the last analysis that’s what it’s all about: the cost exceeds the gain, the balance of energy is upset, the psychic economy is on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s the way they talk on the site. So is it any wonder, girls, that most of our members come from the strongholds of capitalism? And is it any wonder that nearly all these Protestant ladies with hemorrhoids
in their souls talk about “investing in a relationship,” about “profit” and “waste” and “loss”? Okay, I don’t object. I think in these terms too, at least once a day.

When I enter the forum, I identify myself by my pseudonym, say hi to everyone, and then sit in my corner in Jerusalem. The women who love too much allow me to sit in silence while they give me the benefit of their experience, which is certainly very kind and gracious of them. The women in LAA permit me to watch the proceedings from my corner and grow in strength, until such time as I am able to move myself and my fingers and come forward with the whole sad story of my addiction. Debra from Dallas, Sandy from Seattle, Ursula from Utrecht, Terry from Toronto, Chelsea from Charleston, Beatrice from Bern, all the regulars sit patiently on their hemorrhoids and wait for me to admit at last that, yes, I too am suffering from the same progressive disease, and I too am powerless over love, and that only a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. But I have no intention of giving them this satisfaction and confessing on the Internet.

Because the fact is, dear friends, that there may be “brothers-in-arms” but there are no “sisters-in-love,” and my devotion to Alek doesn’t give rise in me to any consciousness of sisterly solidarity. Certainly not with dopey Debra or senile Sandy. Eternally sudden, self-absorbed, ardent, and grandiosely megalomaniac, the monster of love sees itself as unique and alone in the cosmos, and Noa Weber doesn’t have even a drop of empathy for the romantic folly of her fellows.

I remember that, when my daughter was still small and I had already begun to love her, I was overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of
solidarity with other mothers of small children, whoever they may be. Mothers in the park. Mothers at the nursery. Mothers everywhere. In nineteen seventy-five or -six, I would sit and gnaw at my fingernails in front of those black and white images televised from Vietnam, then in the dark go into the room where Hagar was sleeping on her stomach with her bum in the air and listen to her breathing, covering her head with the palm of my hand.

But maternal love is one thing and romantic love is another, and all I can say is that romantic love certainly doesn’t fan the flame of humanism in me.

A few times I almost confessed to the girls in LAA. “Forgive me, sisters, for I have sinned.”

“How have you sinned, sister?”

“I’ve distorted, I’ve lied, I’ve pretended to be someone I’m not. I’ve lived like a slave and an idolator in secret, while boasting of a freedom I didn’t possess. For almost thirty years one feeling has served me as a justification for a lack of feeling. I loved something I should have loathed, and I didn’t love what was worthy of being loved enough.”

Women who love too much aren’t very interested in metaphysical sins of this nature. Squandering their child’s college-savings fund, throwing acid at the legal wife, abandoning their bodies to violence, self-imprisonment, subsidizing their man’s drug habit by prostitution, catatonic depression, drunk driving, these are the kinds of practical sins
that preoccupy them, and in comparison to them my sins of thought and feeling turn white as snow. Well, maybe not quite white, but you could certainly say they pale in comparison.

It’s not the fact that I have no sensational sins that prevents me from confessing to the group. The problem is the language. They are all guilty of “co-dependency,” they all want to free themselves of “harmful relationships” and make themselves fit for “meaningful relationships.” They are all trying “to develop their spiritual aspect,” to “grow emotionally,” “to be in touch with their feelings”—whatever the hell that means—and all of them without exception believe in the liberating effect of archaeology. As a consequence of this belief they carry out energetic excavations in their family history, and on bad nights I definitely find their stories gripping. Senile Sandy from Seattle, for example, had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather, which in her opinion and that of the group explains the “co-dependency” she has with her clown. Brainless Betty from Boston has no history of alcoholism in the family, but she had a neglectful mother who to this day is still a compulsive overeater. And it’s certainly touching to read how little Betty used to hide the bread in hopes of saving something for her school sandwich from her mother’s nightly kitchen raids. Except that according to Betty’s and the rest of the group’s logic, a mother who loves food sentences her daughter to a lifetime of compulsive love, and at that point I stop being touched and begin to laugh.

On a number of occasions I was tempted to make the girls happy and join the party at last by cooking up some sort of terminal explanation for my case. An eloquent etiology of my disease. Ready? Yes, they’re all ready. So what happened to me, girls, is that my father
was hardly ever at home, my heroic father was in the army with men and other women, he was with other women a lot, and I never had a real home either, because the first eight years of my life I spent in the children’s house on a kibbutz. Allow me to confine myself for a moment to the story of the kibbutz.

Kibbutz, girls, do you have any idea of what a kibbutz is? No, of course you don’t, because the only people who know what a kibbutz is are those who grew up on one, like me. If there are any Jewish souls among you, if you grew up on the propaganda of the Jewish National Fund, kindly forget the fishermen spreading their nets, the female tractor driver and the suntanned women picking oranges and smiling photogenic smiles from the tops of their ladders. A kibbutz, my sisters, is not a poster, and even though the children’s house covered in ivy and bougainvillea looks like the Garden of Eden in the photographs, that’s what the island in
Lord of the Flies
looked like in the beginning, too.

The children’s house … let me tell you about the children’s house. In this house with the red-tiled roof, I was abandoned every day to the violence of my peer group, and every night to my loneliness. Eight years times three hundred and sixty-five days equals … You can work it out yourselves, but the sum is the number of nights that I was abandoned by my mother.

Eight times three hundred and sixty-five days of violence and ridicule, and eight times three hundred and sixty-five long nights of anxiety and fear, taught me to hide my neediness. When I ran away from the group to my parents’ room, my mother would lose no time in taking me back. When I complained, she pretended that she didn’t hear or told me to be strong and pull myself together. And I, it seems, was a good pupil, and gradually I stifled my tears until the weeping
was silenced inside me and turned into quiet despair. That’s how they taught me to associate love with abandonment, and that’s how they got me used to the idea that love is not a refuge.

Only now, my sisters, that I, Adele H. from Israel, sit here in our nocturnal group, do I suddenly have the insight that with so many abandonments behind me—I’ve already counted them for you: three hundred and sixty-five times eight—with so many abandonments, it’s clear why before I reached the age of eighteen I turned myself into a Natasha
(natash
being Hebrew for “abandon”), and why I have remained abandoned ever since.

This kind of description, which is definitely not complete fiction, but only partly false, this kind of description would immediately reward me with an international wave of empathy. The trouble is that what I need is contempt, not empathy, and certainly not the empathy of blockheads.