The Confessions of Noa Weber (14 page)

What is important here is that in the winter of ’72 my parents were already “doing well,” as they say, that afterwards they did even better, and that even if this were not the case, they would never have abandoned their firstborn daughter to the streets or the social services. Would I have persisted in my madness and my pregnancy without this safety net? Not having been put to the test, I don’t know, but the bottom line is: I believe that I would have.

Once I’m already talking about my parents, I may as well mention two shameful events connected to them which took place during my pregnancy. When I was in my fourth month, it was in December, I dropped into my mother’s clinic, she worked then in the old Sha’arei Tzedek Hospital, and informed her of my situation—Hello, mother, how are you? I got married in a fictitious marriage and now I’m pregnant.

To the best of my recollection I didn’t plan this visit in advance, I didn’t plan it and I didn’t decide on it, but on my way home from work, I simply went up to see her as if on a whim. From the heights of my maturity today I can admit that I was miserable and frightened and I needed a mother, but then I didn’t admit this even to myself, and armored myself instead in a kind of conceited, annoying calm. My mother, in spite of all the advice she read in women’s magazines, my mother, a veteran nurse, with a table of the principal nutrients on the wall over her head, and a table of calories under the glass on her desk, my mother couldn’t find a word to say. She simply sat there
speechless, and I can’t say that I blame her. I blew in out of nowhere, impermeable and intoxicated with myself, albeit in need, desperately in need, but not of her and her touch—of him, who made any other contact impossible.

That same evening, in the street below, someone put his hand on the horn of his car and kept it there. And when our neighbour Miriam poked her head out to complain, and Alek emerged from his room, I saw my father’s white Alfa Romeo from the kitchen window.

“It’s my father,” I said quietly, “I suppose he wants me to go down.” Chivalrous by education and principle, Alek offered to go down with or without me. Judging by his tone it sounded as if there was nothing out of the ordinary in the street scene taking place below, or in the one that was about to take place. As if this was the way of the world and the way of fathers and everybody knew it. “Put on a coat at least,” he said, mildly amused, “here, take mine,” and he draped it round my shoulders.

Wrapped in Alek’s coat, while its owner took up a position at the window, I went down to my father. When I opened the gate for a moment his eyes were at the level of my stomach, and he immediately jumped out of the car. “Get in,” he shot at me, “we’re going home, first thing tomorrow morning your mother’s taking you to Zvi’s clinic.”

“It’s too late.”

“Don’t you tell me that it’s too late.”

“It is too late, one; and two, I’m not going with you anywhere.”

My father kicked the tire and let out a curse in English aimed at Alek. “Why are you cursing him? What’s there to curse about? What do you want him to do? To marry me? He’s already married me. I’m a married woman.” I could have made do with these lines, they were
quite good, but I couldn’t resist going on: “And, all together, what right have you got to talk? You didn’t marry Yifat, and ‘that man,’ as you call him, did marry me.” When we were still living on the kibbutz, one of my father’s volunteer activities was to prepare the twelfth-graders for the army, and Yifat from the Swallow Group, some of the kibbutz members said also Dalia from the Dawn Group, apparently received his personal attention. At home nobody ever mentioned these stories, or even hinted at them, as if it might God forbid hurt my father’s feelings, but in my group there was a girl whose sister worked in the kibbutz clinic, and according to her my dear father arranged for a friend of his at the Tel Hashomer Hospital to perform abortions on both of them.

All this happened shortly before we left the kibbutz and invites the construction of some bombastic theory about my subconscious hostility towards my father, which is of course nothing but love in disguise. About the incestuous jealousy I felt for the girls he had fucked, an incestuous jealousy which was the sole reason … except that this interpretation doesn’t hold water, and is completely beside the point. I love Alek. Full stop. I loved Alek, full stop. I was impregnated by Alek, full stop. And my father’s activities have nothing to do with it. As a child his behaviour embarrassed me. And later on it angered me. As an adult I accumulated fluent reasons to explain to anyone ready to listen why it was abhorrent, and I went on condemning and denouncing until I reached a height of maturity where my feelings were joined by a kind of compassionate affection as well.

But all these emotional and ideological developments with regard to my father, all this textbook psychological growth, had absolutely nothing to do with my relationship with Alek.

My love watches me from the window. My father looks at me through his superfluous sunglasses, and his mouth is suddenly slack and drooping. My love and my father, my father and my love. Reality brought them together this one time, in this one scene. My mind, however, never made any connection between them, and the same goes for my subconscious mind. I’m sure of it, you have my word for it, and it’s my word that counts.

“And I already fixed up a job for you in the army as a company clerk,” said my father, and no doubt wanted to drive away with screeching brakes, but the Alfa refused to start. He almost exhausted the battery before it moved. But still he let the window down to have the last word: “Just tell him, in my name, that I’m going to find out everything about him,” and then he stepped on the gas.

That was my last big scene, and the further we advanced into winter the lower I sank, without being able to raise myself or my spirits. I couldn’t even go out to run, and running had always been a part of my life. It seems to me that I discovered jogging naturally, long before it became fashionable, and I kept it up after it went out of fashion too. Until recently, running has helped me keep to my daily ration of five cigarettes, as well, and it’s only rarely, like this Passover, that I let myself exceed it. I liked, and I still like, the effort, the stretching of myself beyond the point where you think you’ve reached your limit. And still,
to this day, I go on pushing myself past the stabbing pain in my ribs and the pain in my legs, for the sake of the miracle that takes place when you don’t break, when the pain vanishes, and you grow light to yourself and you feel as if you can carry on gliding through the air forever. But already at the beginning of the pregnancy I found that I was short of breath, I was too tired after work, in the evening I felt sleepy, and I stopped running.

Beginning with the fifth month I could no longer hide my condition, not even under the
galabiyehs
I wore, and my swelling stomach and undisguised wretchedness embarrassed everyone who came to the house. And they came in droves, flocks of guests who dropped in almost every evening and sometimes stayed until the wee hours of the night. Alek entered into a kind of sociable trance, and in that freezing February-March there were weeks that looked like a never-ending party.
Rhapsody in Blue
playing on the record player, stacks of dishes piled in the sink, used tea bags on the marble counter, cigarette ends in empty bottles of brandy, vodka, and Sprite. People sprawled in every corner of the house, including his room. Someone squatting on the stairs, wrapped in a red banner bearing a picture of Che Guevara, filling the stove with kerosene while the wind made the banner billow around him. Someone dead to the world on my bed, his muddy shoes dirtying the corner of the mattress. A smell of kerosene, and rain and smoke and orange peels on top of the stove, never grass, because even at the height of his sociability Alek would send the joint-rollers outside, with the apology that he couldn’t stand the smell.

There was a certain Shmulik who turned up with a guitar and the entire repertoire of the youth movement and the kibbutz, and
suddenly this too didn’t bother Alek, who up to then hadn’t been able to stand “those Soviet songs.” Or maybe it did bother him, because a murderous, demented expression spread over his face as he joined in and sang as if to spite himself, sang with them, to them, in Russian.

I said before that I was a source of embarrassment. In practice most of the guests ignored me, they didn’t even know that I lived there, and the ones that knew me didn’t know what to say. I stuck out like a sore thumb, like a kind of walking hump, a hump that was liable, God forbid, to attach itself to their own backs. Sometimes Dalit from La Mama would ask in a confidential-compassionate voice: “Should I make you a cup of tea?” Or: “Are you sure we’re not stopping you from sleeping?” And in my misery I was glad even of these little pats.

Once, on a gray early evening, outside, I remember, a niggardly snow was falling, Hyman sat down next to me on the mattress, and when he put his arm around me in a comradely manner, as if we were sitting round the campfire, and slipped his fingers into my bra, I didn’t even protest. I was chain-smoking then, one cigarette after the other whenever I wasn’t feeling nauseated, and that gray evening, with Hyman’s arm around me, Alek suddenly bent down and removed the cigarette from between my lips. “That’s enough. You’re smoking too much.” By such crumbs of attention I was nourished then, and with them I sustained my love. Love does not need very much to sustain it.

Another time he came home in the morning, it was already after I had been fired from my job, and I was just sitting in the kitchen. And I was hurting so badly then that I couldn’t even raise my head. But Alek came up and stood behind me, and stroked my nape, the sensation of that particular touch is imprinted in me to this day, as if my nape remembers, and then he pulled me to my feet and went on hugging
me gently from behind. “It’s hard for you.” “It is,” I admitted in a low voice. “Yes …” he whispered to me, “yes, Noichka, it’s hard.” As if a common destiny had been imposed on both of us. A common destiny … even today, when I no longer believe in that kind of predestination as I did then, sometimes against my better judgement, I still sense its existence.

When he turned away and went to his room, I, moved to the point of tears, thought of a poem by David Vogel we had studied for finals. “How can I see you, love, / Standing alone / Amid storms of grief / Without feeling my heart shake?” I returned again and again in those days to that poem, which continued: “Come, / My hand will clasp your dreaming / Hand, / And I shall lead you between the nights.” But I was only his fictitious wife, married to him only by law and by the law of my love, and most of the time I stood “alone amid storms of grief” and his heart did not shake. And his hand did not clasp my hand to lead me between the nights.

Only one single time, one single night in that winter, when my stomach was not yet very big, he got into bed with me. He didn’t fuck me, he didn’t even take off his pants, he only undressed me naked and worked on me until I came in tears. And he held me a little longer against his chest, until perhaps he thought I had fallen asleep, and then he got up and went away.

I didn’t want to come like that. I did want to come, the fact is that I did come, it’s only in pornographic movies that a woman shudders and comes against her will, and he finished me off completely with that unselfish sex, I finished myself in that beggarly sex, under the generosity of his mouth and hands, trembling, rising and falling, not holding my head above water, swallowing black water, sinking in waves
of humiliation. And in all that time I knew that he was really trying to do me and my body good. And in the days to come, too, like a dog I would fawn on the accidental touch of his hand, and arch at the memory of a caress.

You could say that in that winter I lost my self-respect, you could say so—but that wasn’t the way I felt, at least most of the time. And with the feeling of humiliation, with my wretchedness and pink, running nose, in my madness I invented a new kind of respect for myself. Like a private code of chivalry. Like setting myself a martyr’s test, at the conclusion of which I would present myself to receive a medal from the Order of Faithful Lovers. No nagging. No clinging. No whining. No expectations and no demands. This was the motto inscribed on my shield. And with all my strength I tried to comply with these commands. Because if I was sentenced to being a beggar, then at least I would be a beggar with an ethical code.

Vogel’s weren’t the only lines of poetry in my head, there were all kinds of others, too, and without any other books at hand—Alek’s were in Russian, French and German—I absorbed myself in the material from my high school literature courses to such an extent that I still know some of it by heart. For hours I held myself spellbound with the poems of Alterman’s
The Joy of the Poor
, with the eternal absentee coming to the woman “to join her behind the glass,” with the stranger coming to the city to “stand in the gate, and guard your sleep,” with his hidden voice demanding: “And you, now swear by God that you / will draw strength from your miseries.” With his voice promising “like fire and spear I shall give you / comfort, I shall fill you with inhuman / strength,” until “before all is lost I shall / brace you for the time / I the remem- / berer, I the witness.”

I knew that Alek didn’t love me, I’ve already said so, and with a surprising maturity I did not delude myself with thoughts of lightning suddenly striking him. Somehow it was clear to me that people don’t suddenly fall in love with someone who in any case is getting under their feet all day. And nevertheless I wanted something, I longed for something. To be significant in his eyes. To be important to him. To be woven into his heart in a way that could never be unraveled.

Of all the poems I read then the most perverse was an old English ballad we studied in the first year of high school, called “Childe Waters.” In this ballad, which I don’t remember by heart, even though I’ve read it many times, the pregnant heroine cuts off her hair, puts on a page’s costume and accompanies her lover when he sets out to find himself a bride. Childe Waters rides and rides on his horse, the lovelorn girl walks and walks barefoot at his side, and after many verses in which he rides and rides and the damsel walks and walks through thorn fields and rivers, they arrive at a golden palace in a great city. When they are already inside the palace the cruel Childe Waters sends the fair Ellen to bring him a whore from the street, and to add to her humiliation he also commands her to carry the whore in her arms so that she won’t dirty her feet. Ellen does as the knight commands, and while he rolls around in bed with the whore she has brought him, the chivalrous pregnant woman goes to sleep in the stable.