The Confessions of Noa Weber (9 page)

“Why?”

“Nobody knows what could happen here.”

“I like not knowing,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You’re like a little girl,” he said and pressed me against the wall, laughing and strangely excited. And when he removed his lips from my neck he lifted his head, looked up as if he was searching for something, and added: “This smell, I didn’t think I could get used to it again. We had a whole life in stairwells like these.”

“So what did they say could happen here?” I asked as he led me downstairs. He translated very little for my benefit during the interviews. “What could happen?” He replied: “History could repeat itself, or not repeat itself, and both possibilities are frightening. Moscow is paradise compared to what’s happening in other places. Already people have no gas, no food, no salaries, no pensions, no nothing.”

I was completely dependent on him, dependent on him physically as I had never been anywhere else. I needed him in order to ask for another cup of lousy coffee at the hotel, in order to open the window I was unable to budge, to cross the street safely, even to understand the dialing instructions and call Hagar in Israel and go on lying to her—when he summoned me to him, I lied to Hagar and told her that I had been invited to Moscow to lecture on behalf of the Jewish Agency, and I stuck to this story on my subsequent visits too. I have to admit that I enjoyed the helplessness, the total dependence on Alek, and for some perverse reason I even enjoyed the fear. In February of 1993 normal people didn’t go to Moscow as tourists, and it didn’t even occur to Alek to take me to any of the tourist sites. Under the splendour
of the snow there were filthy tenements and palaces, patched with dark squares of boarded-up windows. Passive lines of people stood in the clouds of steam at the entrances to the Metro; bookshelves, clothes hangers, shoe closets, kitchen cabinets, glass-fronted sideboards were emptied for sale. In all of Alek’s meetings the warnings were repeated: don’t go there, don’t let her go, don’t do this, that, or the other thing. Despite his Russian and his connections, they lumped us together as naive foreigners who needed to have the dangers pointed out to them.

At night I had the recurrent fantasy that the airport was closed, that the television screen was blacked out, that the silence meant the telephones were disconnected and tanks were blocking the roads. Alek: “The screen won’t go black. You’ll know that it’s happening when the television starts giving us
Swan Lake.”

What would I do if he was torn away from me? If he went out to get something or clear something up and didn’t come back, if he was thrown bleeding onto a street corner, if he lay with his body broken in a hospital or a jail, if he was sent to the infinite expanses of the East? I doubted I would survive. Or perhaps I would survive but I would never return to the world. I would be tossed by the tidal wave of history into some other mutation. I would wander the Metro platforms, a demented beggar, mumbling my pleas in broken Russian.

Alek didn’t leave me alone for a minute, until “You want me to try your strength?” when he got up and went out.

I think about the dramatic “Try me” that came out of my mouth and I fill with self-loathing. What feeling was I dramatizing there? And what response was I longing for? For him to say to me, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a
land that I will show thee”? For him to test my love with some sadistic trick? To make me wait and wait for his return, until I sang over the domes of Moscow, “If crying is forbidden I will not cry”? Now it occurs to me that I identified cruelty with testing, and confused being tested with being chosen. He would choose me in order to try me. He would try me and then I would be the chosen one. Look at me, winged and electrified, I can do anything. I’m stupid Noa Weber, a chosen people of one woman.

Alek came back after fifteen minutes. “Aren’t you cold yet?” and he carried me to bed and lay me down and stroked me until my whole body arched, but he didn’t get undressed. Twenty more minutes passed, maybe half an hour, until there was a knock at the door.

The night before, it happened that we talked about the prostitutes. They hung around in the lobby at all hours of the day and night, standing on stiletto heels next to the telephones, or sitting on leather armchairs under the fresco of a sturdy peasant woman, gigantic as a goddesses, carrying sheaves of wheat. And I in my stupidity didn’t realize that the women in brief mini skirts and fur coats were whores. How could I have known? I didn’t know the first thing about prostitutes, except the ones in the movies, and in any case the way that some of the Russian women we met were dressed and made up seemed whorish to me. Amused by my lack of perception, Alek said that next time one of them called our room to find out if it was occupied by a single man, perhaps he should invite her to come on up, so that I could satisfy my curiosity without staring in the lift, like I did. “You can use it in your book,” said the man who had never read even one of my books.

When he got up to answer the knock at the door it occurred to me that when he went out he had invited one of the whores in the lobby to come up to our room. In order to test me—how? Doing—what? Interviewing her? Making love to her before his eyes for his enjoyment? Watching him fuck her? Watching her give him a blow job? From the moment he got up until he closed the door maybe sixty seconds passed, but during those sixty seconds I imagined with utter clarity all three latter possibilities, and in my imagination I did not rebel or protest against any of them.

Even in my glittering mood, even in my self-intoxicated, hallucinatory state, I knew that it was only a fantasy, and that nothing was going to happen. Whose fantasy? Not mine and not Alek’s, but a kind of morbid symptom of an implanted virus, the pornographic mental product of a pornographic industry. The product of the male sex industry. While I only added the words “a pornographic mental product of the sex industry” later on, I definitely remember that in real time, too, in some corner of my mind, I thought to myself: “This is an alien fantasy.”

But in real time this self-criticism was not in the least effective, and the fact is that in the following seconds I froze like a rabbit in the bed, riveted by the horror of the loathsome trial about to come through the door. And even when I heard it was a man’s voice, my thoughts went on turning round and round in the same area: I’m naked and Alek’s dressed, I asked to be tested and now the test is at the door, waiting to come into the room. And I’m not getting dressed or doing anything to stop it.

But how did I get here, and what am I doing in the Ukraine Hotel? I was about to report on my wedding day, that is what I intended on doing, but now that I’m already in Moscow, I may as well stay there a moment longer, until the end of this particular story.

Alek closed the door and came back inside with a bottle of vodka in his hand. He put it down between the double windows, to cool it, and then he got undressed and climbed into bed. Aroused as I was, I couldn’t fly again. Carefully I touched the little wrinkles around his eyes, I covered his heavy eyelids with my hand, it was the first time in our history that I left my body to lie with him, and distanced my soul for fear that he would read my thoughts.

Another few lines on this subject, before I return to the matter of our marriage. I said that the test of the prostitute was only the mental product of the pornography industry, which is of course an easy and convenient solution. Too easy and convenient. Because what am I saying by it? I’m saying that it wasn’t me hallucinating, it wasn’t me fantasizing, but some wicked corrupt people who came and put these fantasies in my head.

Sexual fantasies, I think, are a rather banal subject, because when you come right down to it, how many of them are there? We are all fed by the same junk, and however many junk fantasies there are, there’s no problem cataloguing them. They’re catalogued in the video libraries. They’re catalogued on the sex sites on the Internet. They’re catalogued in the tabloids and in the brothels.

I don’t use pornography, I have never been tempted to enter one of those sites, and nevertheless it’s clear to me that I’m polluted too—it simply can’t be otherwise. The pictures, the images, and the symbolic gestures are everywhere.

I have no idea how people thought about sex before cinema and television. It’s clear that most people didn’t read the Marquis de Sade or
Moll Flanders
or anything of the kind, so that if pre-cinema man had fantasies about sex they were evidently his own personal fantasies, taken from his private memories and personal experience, and not some polluting germ male industrialists shoved into his brain.

Today nobody has a chance of developing a virgin fantasy any more. Even if they’ve never opened a
Penthouse
or watched
Nine 1/2 Weeks
, however hard people try to protect themselves they get infected by perversion anyway, because the system insinuates it even via the most ostensibly innocent places. Including family favorites. Take for example the women in the movies of the forties and fifties, the way they hit the man on his chest or back, hitting and hitting hysterically, until their hands gradually come to rest and the blows turn to caresses. Look at Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O’Hara upstairs to the rape she’s asking for, listen to her singing happily afterwards, and tell me what to call it if not pornography. Look at the way Howard Keel spanks the shrewish Kathryn Grayson in
Kiss Me Kate;
remember how Clark Gable tames Claudette Colbert in
It Happened One Night;
remember how the spineless Adele H. sends a whore to her officer to make him happy, and how that revolting pervert in
Breaking the Waves
sends his wife to fuck.…

And that’s quite enough, there’s no need to look-remember-and-see, not now, because without in any way belittling the importance of
the foregoing lecture, I didn’t undertake to lecture here on sexuality and the cinema, on the cinema and patriarchy, on patriarchy and capitalism. Because this isn’t a public debate, and that’s not why I sat down to write.

The crux of my problem is that it’s clear to me that this whole lecture is one big excuse. Because even if the masochistic virus was implanted in my mind, it’s still my mind, mine and nobody else’s, made up of a combination of transplants just like anybody else’s. So that even if I babble on here for hours about the influence of the media, it will not negate the knowledge of the polluted self or blur the sickening awareness that of the entire catalogue of fantasies, my sick mind chose to replay the one I regard as the most humiliating of all: a man amusing himself, a woman victim, and a whore.

In October I married Alek, and there was no way I could avoid telling my parents. My mother, to be precise, because that week my father was out of the country again. In childish embarrassment I put it off until almost the last moment, two days before the wedding, so that in the end I did it in the worst possible way. Years later, and for quite a long time, I regretted my rudeness towards her, but it didn’t happen at once, far from it.

Supper at the Webers’. Batya Weber, my mother, cuts up a cucumber, a tomato and a hard-boiled egg on her plate, smears a slice of bread with low-fat white cheese, and arranges everything in bite-sized pieces
before she begins to chew. My sister Talush studies the shape of the egg as she rolls it around and around her plate. The transistor radio is on in anticipation of the seven o’clock news.

“I have news,” and in the same breath, “the day after tomorrow I’m getting married.” An atavistic maternal glow spreads over my mother’s face before she takes in the words “the day after tomorrow.” Mazal tov, Batya, mazal tov, Benjy, what’s this we hear? Your daughter’s getting married? A little young, isn’t she? So, where’s it going to be? On the kibbutz? In a reception hall? Tell us everything. And who’s the groom?

On the stock exchange of Usha Street it was a story worth its weight in gold, not just another anecdote, but a full blown production, and in days to come I capitalized on it shamelessly, blunting the embarrassment and guilt with a mockery that improved with practice. Think of this woman, that is to say my mother, Batya, with her socialist upbringing in the children’s house on the kibbutz. Her parents turned their backs on their bourgeois families, Grandpa left the shtetl, Grandma ran away from the family home in Kraków, they cleared away rocks, sweated in the fields, burned with malarial fevers, and all for what? For the revolution, right? To create a new man for us here who would live in a new, just society. There was an article about it in the paper only last week, I don’t know if you saw it. A new man, a new family, a new form of relationship—that’s what they wanted and that’s what they talked about. And what did we get instead?
Fiddler on the Roof
, back to the shtetl with violins, mazal tov, comrades, mazal tov, our little girl’s getting married and grandchildren come next.

“Don’t start jumping for joy. It’s only a fictitious marriage,” I said quickly.

“Fictitious?” the knife was still in her hand. “But what does that mean, fictitious?”

“It means that I’m getting married at the Rabbinate the day after tomorrow, and later on I’ll get divorced. Not that marriage means anything to me in the first place, it’s just a primitive custom, but in any case this marriage isn’t for real.”

“Really? Is that so? One of the boys from the kibbutz married an illegal immigrant from Europe in a fictitious marriage, and afterwards they got divorced. But since then, as far as I know, we managed to chase the British out of the country.”

“I don’t intend to go to the army.”

At some point she asked me if “he”—she never called Alek by his name—if “he” was “giving me drugs.” At another point she bemoaned “what would people say” and how she was going to tell my father. And when, on the verge of a childish hysteria I hadn’t planned for at all, I denounced her, my father, Zionism, the army of occupation, and the oppression of the Palestinians—she ordered Talush to leave the room so that I wouldn’t “influence” her. “We know very well who’s influencing you,” she said.