The Confessions of Noa Weber (12 page)

Although I’m not tall, they were shorter than I was, actual dwarves, and with every step I was conscious, to the point of gut-twisting revulsion, of the grotesqueness of this circular movement in threesome, of how I disappeared for a few steps, and immediately reappeared in Alek’s view, with no possibility of escape. Straight-backed
as a novice model, pulled by the arms, one shoulder drooping and the other raised, unable to even them out, my face distorted, unable to relax my expression. On the next round, here it comes, on the next round I’ll slip past him with nonchalant, jaunty grace, I’ll smile ironically, and again I am under his all-seeing eyes, and everything is even more crooked than before.

In all my life up to then I had attended four or five weddings, no more; the children of my parents’ friends, married on a platform on the lawn opposite the kibbutz dining hall, or in a hotel. For Alek this was his first Jewish wedding, but somehow he succeeded in deciphering the Yiddish-accented “Behold thou art sanctified unto me with this ring” and to repeat the words, and when he repeated them, for a moment I didn’t recognize his voice, and it seemed to me that somebody else was repeating them so that he would understand. One of the strangers present in the room.

Is it possible, as my daughter claims, that a person has a kind of genetic memory in which the ancient texts are imprinted? I don’t have a genetic memory, I don’t believe in it, it’s nonsense, and nevertheless there was a moment, when he put the ring on my finger, there was a moment when all the pains of self-consciousness vanished and shame disappeared. For a few moments I was absolutely innocent, sanctified, sanctified, sanctified, blushing, raising my eyes at last from the white of his shirt to his naked face, with my hand held in his, and all of me loose and unraveled as if we were alone together. Let my right hand forget its cunning, Alek, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget. No joy, no gladness, no rejoicing, no jubilation, and nevertheless, my beloved husband, I will not forget.

As soon as we got home I removed the thin band from my finger, left it in full sight on the window sill in the kitchen, and there it remained until after Alek left. Before he put it on my finger, the ring had warmed up in the repulsive Hyman’s shirt pocket, through the blur of my kerchief-veil I saw it being removed from there. I imagined that he had reminded Alek it needed to be bought, or that he had been asked to buy it, and in any case even if it had not been purchased with Hyman’s money, I could not wear it. I was only married to him fictitiously, but the fact that Hyman had bought the ring prevented me from developing any kind of fetishistic relation to it. And that too is perhaps for the best.

The truth is that I had no need of the ring as a fetish. First of all because I was surrounded by everything of Alek’s, I was living in his house after all. And even after he left and took his clothes and most of his books with him, even after he removed the black comb from the bathroom shelf and the shaving brush from the sink, even after he gave all the records to Yoash, I was still surrounded by things related to him: the curtain he had hung in the bedroom, the blanket with which we had covered ourselves, shelves he had put up, a bed and another bed and empty drawers. The house was charged with his movements and his touch, and recharged with them on each of his visits, and even though with the passing years—before I restored everything to its former state—I’d changed many things, and so did Hagar (carpets, television, a new closet, an air-conditioner)—all these did not banish his spirit.

In romantic movies and novels it was once the fashion to make a big fuss about a single object: “my mother’s cameo ring,” “the packet of his letters,” “her fan,” “his baseball bat,” her picture, his picture, his underpants. In our day, I think, people are rather ashamed of this fetishism, but I can actually understand how one can become attached to a single object, and if I failed to do so it is only because so much was haunted by Alek in any case.

Sometimes I think, it’s the weather that does it for me. It’s the smell of the rain. It’s the warm wind. It’s the sight of the softened light refracted from the stone, like it was then. It’s the taste of the air that’s exactly like it was then when I went out in the evening for a run. With them and because of them come the longings, and the sense of his absence which makes him desperately present. Because there is nothing that makes someone more present than absence. And with moderate fluctuations in intensity, he is still absent-present to me most of the time.

But what did I just say? The warm wind and the softened light refracted from the stone give rise to my longings? In the last analysis that’s romantic bullshit too. Setting the feeling in “the softened light refracted from the stone” to make it more photogenic. I loved Alek under the ugly neon of the hospital too, and in all kinds of other lights that can’t be poeticized.

Warm wind, cold wind, drafty wind, wind with a whiff of diesel oil, and no wind at all, they can all do it to me, and my love stirs within me with every change in the light and every movement in the air. Occasionally, I have to admit, it feels like grace, his presence suffused in everything. My awakened senses. The objects quickened into life. The touch of everything he touched. Alek’s spirit in inanimate objects.

When you give birth at the age of eighteen, you have no choice but to explain yourself: So tell me, didn’t anybody teach you about contraceptives? An intelligent girl like you, didn’t you realize that you were pregnant? So how come you didn’t have an abortion? Weren’t you afraid that you were going to ruin your life? What on earth were you thinking?

I began to invent excuses while I was still pregnant, clearly aware that I was lying, and when I didn’t have anyone to tell them to, I told them to myself: Look, my period was never regular. Listen, in October I bled (true, a little spot of blood which I didn’t really think was a period). Understand, we did use contraceptives, but nothing is a hundred percent effective, by the time I realized what was happening it was already too late to have an abortion. These were my first rationalizations, and they were all intended to explain to the world that I wasn’t an utter fool, that I was a rational person, that I had worthy goals in life and that I had no intention of losing control of my life. Because this, of course, is what teenage pregnancy means to the public: irresponsible stupidity and losing control over your life. And if you don’t want to be seen as a stupid fool who has lost control over her life, you have to inform people what happened in your underpants when.

Over the course of the years, as Hagar grew up, I began to tell, especially to my girlfriends, a slightly different version: My period was never regular, blah-blah-blah, when I found out it was already too late, blah-blah-blah, Alek actually wanted me to have an abortion, an abortion would have suited his convenience—but why should a woman do something just because it’s convenient for a man? It was my
pregnancy, my body, my reproductive system. Understand me, girls, in the end I wanted the baby, and as far as I’m concerned the father had nothing to do with it.

Girls: What, you really didn’t think of letting him share in the decision?

Me (so arrogant, so heroic): No, I didn’t. From the outset I didn’t think it was any of his business, and I gave him to understand as much.

Girls: And you weren’t afraid? To be a single mother at that age?

Me: Of course I was afraid, obviously I was afraid, what am I, an idiot? But I decided that if that was what I wanted to do, that’s what I was going to do.

A girl (suspicious): And you really had no feeling for him?

Me (in an amused voice): No feeling? Look, of course I had a certain feeling. That is to say, we were quite close, and all kinds of things happened between us, obviously they did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. But the pregnancy was much more important to me than the being-in-love bit, and the being-in-love bit was over anyway.

The bottom line of all these conversations, and later on in my life of a number of newspaper interviews:

A woman needs a husband like a fish needs a bicycle! “Okay … maybe there are some fish who need bicycles, I’m not judging them, I only hope that this is a problem that evolution will solve …” Me, in one of those interviews. Sometimes I sound exactly like my Nira Woolf.

Long live the eternal, true, pure, and meaningful tie between a mother and her offspring, to which no other love can compare.

Telling Hagar the story of her conception and birth was the most complicated. Because what could I say to the child? My daughter, my
marriage to your father was only fictitious? What’s fictitious, Mommy? My daughter, I never loved your father? So how did I get born to you, Mommy? You should know, my daughter, that your father didn’t love me and that he didn’t want you either.

You may say that I could have told her the truth, that the truth is best, and the truth is actually an excellent story to tell a child. You want the truth? Here it is. The truth, my child, is that I loved your father, that I still love him, I loved him so madly that I never imagined for a moment, I couldn’t have imagined, getting rid of his child. The truth, my darling daughter, is that at first you were only a fetish to me, the object most charged with Alek, something that would remain after he disappeared into wicked Germany.

You should know, my little one, that if I had become pregnant by somebody else, Amikam for instance, this story would have ended completely differently, in the gynecologist’s trash can. That’s what you would have done to me, Mommy? Killed me and thrown me into the trash? Go confuse a little one of three, four, or five with philosophical arguments along the lines of: If you had a different father you wouldn’t be you and you wouldn’t exist at all, so that your claim that you could have ended up in the trash is meaningless. You go and put a three-year-old to bed with arguments like those.

Apart from which, even though when she was small I was not yet a fully-fledged feminist, a declared feminist I mean, I was instinctively averse to raising a little girl on the basis of the drugged love of a man. I think that what was at work here was a protective maternal instinct to distance her from my addiction, joined by the simple motive of pride. I didn’t want her to know that her mother was a downtrodden doormat. A worm eaten up by longings for a man who was her father.
I didn’t want her ever to see her mother eating the leftover scraps of affections from his table. I wanted her to have respect for me, and I had no intention of passing on my weakness to the younger generation.

Over the years, therefore, my version for Hagar was composed as follows: Your mother and father were very young when they met, and even when people love one another, it’s not a good idea to marry so young. So Daddy loved you? Yes. And you loved him? Yes, but not like I love you; you, pumpkin, I love always and forever, because that’s the way mothers love their children. And fathers? Fathers what? Fathers don’t love their children? Fathers do love their children, but sometimes somebody has a child when that somebody isn’t ready to be a father yet. When that somebody is still a bit of a child himself.

The idea of her father’s immaturity sank into Hagar’s mind, so that when she was five or six years old, during the period when Alek was living in Israel again, she once asked me: “What do you think, do you think that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?”

“And what do you think?” I evaded her question with a question.

“I didn’t ask you what I think,” my logical daughter replied, “I asked you what you think. I know what I think.”

“You know better than I do. You went for a walk with him, not me.”

By the end of October I more or less knew that I was pregnant, and in November, right after my birthday, I went to be examined. I didn’t tell
Alek about the test and I didn’t have to tell him about the results either. A few days after my visit to the gynecologist, and after I had already obtained the results from the lab, he found out for himself. It wasn’t the first time I threw up, and I always tried to do it quietly. I knelt down and bowed my head over the toilet bowl, but early on this particular morning when I emerged from the toilet with my mouth full of nausea, Alek was standing opposite me in the passage.

A similar scene takes place in a lot of movies and television series. A woman tells her lover that she’s pregnant, a pregnancy which all the circumstances known to the audience lead them to believe is unwanted, and at these moments we always see the woman in close-up: the camera lingers on her facial expressions, on the nervous movements of her hands, and then draws it out to keep us in suspense. What’s going to happen, what’s going to happen now? Will the lover’s face light up in joyful pride when his paternal instincts are unexpectedly aroused? Will he reject the woman rudely? Will he meanly cast doubt on his paternity of the child she is bearing in her womb? Offer her money for an abortion?

In my case there were no lingering moments of suspense. And before either of us uttered a word, questions and answers passed between our eyes. As still happens to this day, it seemed that everything was conveyed before it was spoken. And nevertheless he asked, and nevertheless I answered. “I’m pregnant,” and immediately added, “but it doesn’t concern you.” I had prepared the position, the words, in advance, I had worked on them for hours, but saying them out loud for the first time, standing weakly in the toilet door, they sounded quite pathetic.

“How doesn’t it concern me?” He spoke almost without moving his lips, in a dry, disgusted tone. This gave me a second chance to speak my piece.

“It doesn’t concern you, because I definitely don’t want anything from you,” I replied and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. This time I had been more successful, the words “I don’t want anything from you” had come out without any female hysteria.

Strange how small sounds and movements can have an effect: from the moment I pronounced these calm, uplifting words, from the moment I closed the door behind me, the fact that I had said the words and closed the door, and the knowledge that Alek was waiting outside—these little things filled me with a feeling of power. I remember, I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror, I brushed my hair thoroughly, wet air came in through the window and banished the last of my nausea. All that remained was the rather pleasant, disembodied feeling that comes after vomiting. I inspected my face in the gray light and I liked what I saw: absolute detachment and calm. As if I had been enveloped in a chilly halo, as if a cool blue halo had enveloped my heart. I love you, I thought, I love you infinitely, and you, my love, relax, relax, because none of this has got anything to do with you.