The Confessions of Noa Weber (32 page)

The mattress was very soft, snow went on falling and falling outside the white lace curtain, and between us there was a kind of weariness that sets in after everything is over, like a kind of pity or pardon. When he made love to me, the repertoire of movements had not changed, but the violent demand had disappeared, as if we were becoming reconciled, becoming one. As if becoming one was our purpose on earth.

Alek, one hand under my head, the other on my breast, breathed slowly, perhaps he was sleeping, and I with my eyes open saw visions of white infinity measured step by step, white vales of despair extending without a sign. Then breathing under his hand, slowly and surely I took off, slow and low; as if gathered up in the mist, I glided over infinity. Even if I dived into the white I would be gathered up, even if I dived down I would rise again like mist, even if I fell I would not fear.

When I awoke from the vision I looked from the side at the sleeping cubist profile: a single gray hair bristling from the arc of the eyebrow, thick boyish lashes on a heavy drooping eyelid, and a soft wrinkle shaped like a crescent moon beneath it. I put my hand on his hand lying on my breast, and then I thought: perhaps this man is only a gateway through which to pass. Perhaps he is only matter through which to see beyond matter. Perhaps he is only a stair to another love which no longer needs anyone.

I cannot justify these thoughts, or explain a single word. Matter and beyond matter … love which needs no one … vales of despair.… The yellowish light of a Passover heat wave should be enough to dissolve these phrases. Just saying them out loud should be enough to annihilate them with laughter. Where did they come from? And where did I get the feeling that like a precognition they were always there inside me?

In
Blood Money
I gave the contractor’s repulsive brother a mystical turn of speech, like that of the messianic settlers’ movement, and all through the plot he breathes a fog of verbal vapors on the reader that covers up the suspect and the murder; in
Compulsory Service
there’s Sylvie, a particularly silly soldier who complicates the investigation when she consults spirits and energies. My better judgment cannot bear them and their talk, they truly and instinctively repel me; in the same way, I should be repelled and disgusted by myself, and nevertheless I am not disgusted. Not at the right time, and not to the required degree. Life in the underground lets you do this: fall foolishly in love without having to listen to yourself talking, and without paying the price of shame.

If I send her to Moscow she’ll learn Russian first, which I never did, apart from a few words I picked up from Alek.

Nira Woolf will learn the language in two or three months, perhaps dialects, too, and if I send her into the white and gold church, she will even understand the liturgy sung there in Old Slavonic. Perhaps I’ll give her a guide, an intellectual like Borya, who will also fall in love with her, but very soon she’ll learn everything there is to learn from this teacher, and from about the first third of the book she will no longer be dependent on him. Mastering the language will come easily to Nira, like the knowledge of immunology she acquired in
The Stabbing
, like the understanding of bank fraud in
Birthright
, like her five martial arts. And studying the map at home will suffice for her to navigate the complex city and to locate herself even when she emerges from the Metro station in the middle of the night at some remote suburb.

Nira Woolf is “more like a fairy tale,” as Miriam said, but why shouldn’t women have fairy tales of their own? Tales of women who never know panic in the street and the fear of footsteps following them in the dark; legends about heroines who do not fall in love with their teachers and officers, and who are never impressed by rich, strong, mature, famous, tall men.

“It’s important for us to have role models to identify with,” Hagar lectures me, “but it’s impossible to identify with such an unrealistic character.” “What about the role models men identify with?” I type
indignantly in reply, “Does James Bond look realistic to you? Do Indiana Jones, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger look realistic to you? Half the men in the movies aren’t in the least realistic. Much more than half, almost all of them.”

This morning she called me unexpectedly from Boston, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her until she returned to New York. She had just finished reading
What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?
and she didn’t want to wait, she had to tell me that this time she had really, really liked it. “Even though you write books for entertainment, the message gets across.… I think it’s just wonderful how you managed to get in so much information.… You know what? In the last chapter, when Nira gives Svedka the revolver? Even I felt ready to shoot him, that swine, if he couldn’t be brought to trial, that is.” “She could have brought him to trial,” I corrected her slowly, “but the punishment didn’t seem harsh enough to her.” “That’s because the judges are men and the law is made by men, and even now that there are women judges, they learn to think like men.” I was glad to hear her voice, but after two whole days in which I hadn’t spoken to anyone, even at the grocer’s, dragging the words out was an effort. “Did I wake you up? Aren’t you on summer time?” Everyone who called me that Passover asked me if they had woken me up, but the truth is that when she rang I hadn’t gone to bed yet. “You’re not sick? … Are you sure you’re not sick? … Is the holiday hard? … Are you eating, Mommy? Are you taking care of yourself? Going out? … Are you meeting your friends, or have they all gone away? What about Tami? Is she back yet?” Where are all these worries coming from all of a sudden? I’m forty-seven and healthy, active up until recently, my planner is full of addresses and phone numbers, I am interviewed in the papers, my book is on display in shop windows, and
even though Hagar is my only child and I am a single parent, a mother is a mother and a daughter is a daughter and the roles should not be reversed. “I’m fine, just busy writing.” “So soon? It used to take you longer to start a new book.”

“Just playing with ideas. Now tell me, how does it feel being without Peter for two weeks?”

In the winter of 1980 the fund ceased its activities for a period of three weeks, and everyone except for me flew to the United States to meet the donors and consult with a battery of experts on how to go on, if at all. I composed most of the first draft of
Blood Money
then, on a baby Hermes borrowed from the office.

Ute gave birth to Daniel in November, Hagar was invited to the
brith
—in view of the Viking appearance of the mother, it seemed strange to me that they were having a
brith
at all—and in the following three months Alek disappeared from our lives. From our overt lives, I mean, and as far as Hagar’s covert life is concerned I have no idea. She said that the baby was cute, that it was impossible to talk to Ute because she didn’t know any Hebrew, and when she was brushing her teeth before going to bed she suddenly asked with her mouth full of toothpaste if we could also have a baby like that, to which I replied “We’ll see,” even though I had made up my mind never to have any more children. In any case, Hagar with her healthy instincts appeared to have come to terms quite happily with reality.

Serious writers describe themselves as suffering when they write; I, who have no pretensions to seriousness, have never suffered in the course of the work itself, and my difficulties only arise at the stage of publication. Writing held me together when I felt I was coming apart,
and solved the problem of time when it began to unravel at the edges. Constructing a plot, like reading, in fact, gives time a direction, and when Nira Woolf began to take action, I was animated by a happy feeling that I too was making progress.

The background data of the story didn’t present any problems, they were all taken from testimonies I heard at work before the decision to limit the activities of the fund to this side of the Green Line: the bribes paid to the Military Government, the harassment and frequent arrests, the contractor seen riding in the company commander’s jeep, the medic’s suppressed evidence, the pen in which the young boys were confined, the scene of the nocturnal burial.… The scene of the boys behind the barbed wire and the picture of the night burial annoyed a lot of people.

Nira Woolf already existed in my head before
Blood Money
as an infantile fantasy. In 1974 she solved the murder of the soldier Rachel Heller; in ’75 I sent her to the Savoy Hotel as a resourceful hostage; in my night runs, when men bothered me with disgusting lip-smackings, Nira Woolf would fell them to the pavement with one graceful blow, without even stopping. She still does it, and to this day I still summon her to deal with male pests. The mere thought of her helps me to radiate something that sends them packing.

Once Nira Woolf put a man in a wheelchair after he raped an old woman in Ramat Gan and got off with community service; and once I sent her to the High Court of Justice to eloquently plead the case of the people evicted from their homes in Yemin Moshe, and she won. As I said: an infantile fantasy, a completely infantile gratification, but from the moment I sent her into action in a well-constructed plot, the fantasy became a little less shameful. My last doubts concerning Nira, strangely
enough, were about her hair, and in the end, after dying it and shortening it and lengthening it, I gave her an Annie Lennox look that was before its time. For some reason I was bothered by this matter of her hair.… Now I don’t know anymore if her cropped head speaks of fragility or strength, but this was the look I decided on in the end, and this is how she has remained ever since. Forty-five years old, big breasts that won’t develop cancer, and a close-cropped, almost shaved, blonde head.

Two publishers rejected the book in letters of one and a half lines. I was prepared for this, what I wasn’t prepared for was the extent of the response after the publication, and the way in which people began to identify me with Nira. At fund meetings my colleagues began to make remarks in my presence such as: “Maybe we should get Nira Woolf on the case,” or: “Let’s not be carried away into adopting Nira Woolf solutions,” and on a number of occasions Jeff warned me that, “What we need here is quiet, in-depth work,” and, “Forgive me for saying so, but this is a matter that demands exploration and negotiation, not a militant style.” As if I had ever given him any reason to doubt my “in-depth work.” All of a sudden I needed to prove that I was “serious,” that I was “realistic,” that I wasn’t trying to cut corners and shorten procedures with a kick, and at the same time, to my embarrassment, they seemed to imagine that I actually could take advantage of all the publicity to get things done without going through the proper channels, which was far from being the case. It didn’t help for me to repeat that I wasn’t Nira and Nira wasn’t me, people simply refused to listen; Nira was a symbol, I was seen as a standard-bearer, and for want of an alternative I decided to enjoy playing the role and put it to use wherever possible.

I’m not trying to say, God forbid, that Nira Woolf’s opinions were far from my own, and since Nira Woolf acted more than she
voiced opinions, I was obliged to formulate the views that justified her actions—which, in the last analysis, certainly did me no harm. Suddenly I was asked for my opinion on oppression in general and in particular, on the state and the individual, on the state and Zionism, on Zionism and women, on women and the patriarchal structure, on women’s literature and the representation of women in literature, and so on and so forth—and it seemed that even those close to me attributed a new importance to my words, as if they “represented something.”

Nira Woolf improved my financial situation, Nira made me “opinionated”—as people began later on to call any woman who had an opinion—Nira Woolf prompted me to read and think; so that in the final analysis it could be said that I, at least, was empowered by her character. She was born from the voice of an infantile fantasy, but from the moment she began to make her way in the world, she made me into what people today call a “voice.”

My editor, who is more literary than I am, once quoted me something that Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye.…

With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze. With the years and the additional books I sometimes regretted writing so fast, so that the truce never lasted long enough.

Alek left for Paris in 1982, before the IDF invaded Lebanon, and from my point of view before the publication of
Blood Money
, so that he missed my transformation into a “public figure,” and he also didn’t read the book. It was only when they sent me the contract—the first, bad one—that I told him I’d written a book, and he was glad for me and congratulated me and came round with a bottle of fine wine. After he had refilled my glass until I was too drunk to return to the office, he asked me to tell him something about the book I had written—even today, with all my experience, I find it difficult to answer this question—and then, when the embarrassment was still new to me, I said something like: ‘Well, look … it’s not actually literature … it’s more like a thriller … with a strong heroine, a lawyer, not exactly a lawyer, not only … but a woman with power. My editor says that on the jacket blurb they’re going to call it a feminist thriller.”

“Feminist thriller is good,” he said and smiled and leaned over me and took a cigarette, “thriller is good, and feminist thriller is even better. It’s a pity I can’t read it.” And inserting his hand under my neck he added: “You know what they say … in time of revolution the relation of literature to life is a relation of incest.”

“What revolution?” I asked, drunk and vague.

“Today this is your revolution, the women’s revolution.”

A thousand times since then I’ve used this phrase, “the feminist revolution,” and since I was asked, I’ve learned all kinds of illuminating things about its relation to literature and literature’s relation to it. Sometimes now, in an intimate rather than a public setting, when I’m listening to Hagar, it occurs to me that this worn out word, “revolution,” explains something in relation to her. In my relation to her, I mean. My darling Hagar is to a great extent the product of this revolution: good,
clear-minded, and emotionally focused; and I am a daughter of the generation of the wilderness, not like her.… I got stuck in the middle and only half of me has made it. The good half, I say. I look at her in the same way as the hairy Neanderthal no doubt looked at
Homo sapiens
, lurching at a four-legged crouch, and however hard he tried to stand up straight and speak like a human being, he went on blurting out ancient, unintelligible grunts.