The Confessions of Noa Weber (18 page)

As I lay resting on him like this, I thought that there really was nothing to be done with this alien vision, which was like a strange object bequeathed me as a legacy by some primeval mother. I didn’t choose it, I didn’t ask for it, it simply fell on me as if from another world, and now it was mine. Like this love.

It was morning, a pale winter sun shone into the shutterless room. The portable electric heater didn’t work very well, only one of the coils was working. But Alek got up and piled all the blankets he found in the closet on top of us, and between the hot and the cold we were content.

Nira Woolf is forty-five, this is her age in my first book,
Blood Money
, and at this excellent age she remains in the books that follow. The setting in
which she operates changes from book to book—Israel at the beginning of the eighties is not the Israel of today, even as the arena of a detective story—but my fighting lawyer doesn’t change, only the causes she fights for change in accordance with the period. In
Blood Money
, which was about the plunder of Palestinian land, through patients’ rights in
The Shattered Man
, through children’s rights in
The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Ask
, through sexual harassment in the army in
Compulsory Service
, through the shocking corruption in
Birthright
, through the fear of AIDS in
The Stabbing
, up to the militant feminism of the last four years:
Dead Woman’s Voice
, which as I may have already mentioned turns on a case of incest, and
What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?
, in which my feminist lawyer does battle with a ring of traffickers in women.

When I started writing about Nira I was twenty-six years old, and when I started to imagine her I was even younger, and forty-five seemed to me a venerable and dignified age. An age at which nobody calls you a “girl” any more. Although the way I constructed Nira, nobody would have dared to call her a “girl” at the age of twenty-six either.

From the outset it was clear to me that my combative lawyer was single, that she had no children and no longings for children, or needless to say for a husband, either. The mother of children is not free to jump into her car and fly to the murder scene when a phone call wakes her up in the middle of the night, nor can she rush around with a revolver ready to fire. And in general, children bring up a lot of questions I had no desire to deal with on the page or the computer screen. For instance: Who looks after them when their mother is running around with a revolver? A nanny? And who takes them to school at quarter to eight in the morning? And what happens when the disappearing client, the
one who’s suspected of murder, suddenly turns up at the house? And on what Afghan carpet can my Nira have a spontaneous fuck when the plot approaches its suspenseful climax? The one with the toys strewn over it?

When I wrote
Blood Money
I didn’t know that it was the first in a series, and I wasn’t even sure that it was a book at all. But in the following books, too, I was not tempted to give her a child, because how would this child suddenly arrive on the scene? Could I allow her to get mixed up with gangsters when she was eight months pregnant? From a feminist point of view it might actually be amusing to send a woman with a bad attack of heartburn to the Supreme Court on a case, and make her whip out her gun on the way to the hospital to give birth. The critics would scream their heads off. Especially those who always attack me on the grounds that “Nira Woolf isn’t a feminist heroine, but a macho man disguised as a woman.” But even assuming that I made her pregnant just to annoy the critics, what then? Nira Woolf lies helplessly in the delivery room and waits for the dilation to grow big enough for them to give her a shot at last? The midwife raises and parts Nira’s legs? The midwife bends down between our heroine’s legs to make the cut?

In a general outline of the next book I thought of giving Nira a ward or an adopted child. I even knew who the little girl was. The daughter of Anna, a foreign worker who substituted for Mrs. Neuman’s regular nurse for a week, and who was the sole beneficiary of the surprising new will dictated by Neuman to Woolf. “Sasha” I would call the child orphaned in
What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?
, and in the exposition describing the background to her adoption I would briefly relate how the kind-hearted lawyer traveled to Kharkov to find the nine-year-old who had become
the beneficiary herself (after Anna’s body was discovered on Palmahim Beach in the previous book), and how it came about that my heroine returned to Israel with the little orphan in tow.

The trouble with this idea, which I liked in itself, was with the limitations it would impose on me in the continuation of the series, assuming I wanted to go on with it. Nira Woolf could remain forty-five forever, it was the age she was meant to be and I had no problem with it, but the little girl could on no account go on being nine years old in book after book, because that would be ridiculous. I couldn’t possibly send her to the fourth grade every year, make her mourn her mother in every new book, and let her be stuck with difficulties in Hebrew forever.

The trouble with children is that they have to grow up, and I have no idea how to deal with the literary problems presented by this fact. So that in the end it appears that Anna’s orphan will have to be left to grow up by herself in Ukraine, nameless and outside the plot of this book.

The day after giving birth I felt fine. Stupidly happy in a way that makes me cringe with embarrassment to this day.

In the afternoon, a couple of hours after they transferred me to the maternity ward, they brought me the baby. A nurse put her into my arms, and I—forgive me, whoever’s job it is to forgive—looked at my daughter for the first time and the first thought that crossed my mind was: so small and so perfect, he won’t be able to help loving her.

Her head was covered with a lot of black hair, and I rejoiced in this
downy hair, and in the wrinkled little face, and the tiny hands imprisoned in their sleeves, only because I felt that Alek would have to surrender to this tiny softness. And when I put her to my breast in the first clumsy attempt to feed her, I silently rejoiced in fantasies of how he would fall in love with her. But it wasn’t the loving father she would gain that I was thinking of, it was the crumbs of this inevitable paternal love that would no doubt fall into my own lap. After all, it was from me that this sweetness came, and it was impossible for it not to project itself onto me. The baby slept, she didn’t want to wake up and suck, I still hadn’t seen the color of her eyes, and I arranged my hair becomingly on the pink pillowcase, and thought how charming the two of us looked, Madonna and child.

If I had given Nira Woolf a child, I wouldn’t have let her have it by a man she loved. A sperm donation might have fit the bill, except for the repelling nature of the procedure, and if she had wanted a child she would have been more likely to choose a man for a one-night stand according to the probable quality of his genes. What would have suited her best, I think now, would have been a virgin birth, and I would have given her one without any qualms: the possibility of replicating herself by herself without the assistance of a man. Except that a miraculous event of that nature belongs to a different genre than the one I write in. And even though my thrillers are far from being realistic, they are not amenable to this kind of supernatural event.

A newborn baby is a wonder, and children should be rejoiced in for themselves from the moment they are born. They should be loved simply for what they are, and not thanks to another love. And I did not love Hagar in this way. With time I did begin to love her, of course; the
heavy-headed, well-tempered infant, the logical child suddenly fired up over questions of justice and injustice, the young girl sprawling on the floor to paint bad slogans for demonstrations and asking me to put her hair up in a ponytail because her hands were full of paint. I loved her as she deserved to be loved, but from the outset the feeling was tainted.

Don’t get me wrong, if I had been faced with the kind of dilemma people like to pose in youth movements—you and Hagar and Alek are cast away in the desert with only one water canteen; or, if you could only rescue one person from a fire—I have no doubt what my answer would be, and it would be sincere. I wouldn’t hesitate for a second, and that is not the point. The point is the despicable way I sometimes looked at her, and still sometimes look at her, through Alek’s imagined eyes. Like the way, for instance, when she was six months old and her face was covered with a red rash, I was afraid of his reaction, as if he might be repelled by her appearance, and this repulsion might somehow be projected onto me. And the way when she was five years old, and he would sometimes take her for walk, I would wash her little jeans and dry them on the stove so that she would look cute for him. The way I inspected my teenaged daughter with a cold eye before she flew to Paris. And the way I tried to guess from her stories upon her return if he was charmed, and to what extent, and by what precisely, so that I could learn the secret. I knew very well how loathsome these thoughts were, and nevertheless before she set off to visit her father and grandmother in Paris, like a pimp I bought her a bottle of his favorite White Shoulders perfume, in the hope that in some unconscious way she might remind him of me. If only she would have hated it, but she didn’t hate it, my daughter was delighted with her mother’s gift, without having a clue about what I was up to, because the overt message I
gave her was the opposite of my true wishes: “You’re allowed to decide that you don’t like him”; “You shouldn’t have any great expectations of him or his mother. Think of it simply as a trip to Paris without any strings attached”; “I’m sure they’ll welcome you with open arms, and you don’t have to make an impression on anyone there,” and so on and so forth until Hagar said: “Stop it, Mommy, relax, I’m not five years old, and this time I have no intention of letting him upset me. My main feeling is one of curiosity … to meet my roots.”

Luckily for us Hagar does not resemble me or Alek, and if she resembles anyone, it’s my father: in her clear, unshadowed, round-eyed regard, the way she purses her mouth, and the stubborn cleft in her chin. Whether she bears any resemblance to Alek’s parents I have no idea.

At the visiting hour on the first day Alek didn’t come, and I put off my expectations to the second day. Perhaps he was sitting for an exam at the university, perhaps he had promised to work with Yoash and he couldn’t get out of it, perhaps he had fallen asleep after a sleepless night and when he arrived at the hospital they wouldn’t let him in. For some reason I didn’t think of Tamara, perhaps because the events of the night had made her pale into insignificance in his eyes, or so I believed, and therefore also in mine.

Without any logical reason I fell asleep in a kind of daze of happiness, and in the certain knowledge that he would come tomorrow. At the beginning of August he was supposed to present himself in
Heidelberg, I did not imagine for a moment that he would cancel his trip, but the weeks before us, like the parting itself, were indelibly stamped by the covenant of the night of the birth.

The next day legions of visitors passed through the room, bearing flowers, bags, magazines and plastic bottles. My bed was the middle one of three, and even when I drew the curtain around it, I couldn’t shut out the voices coming from all directions. Improvised vases overturned and spilled water on the floor, the two chairs in the room were dragged to and fro. “Excuse me, is this so-and-so’s room? … Mazal tov … what time was the birth? … Mazal tov … it’s so cute.… How are you feeling? … Is this so-and-so’s room? … You’re still a little pale.… How much does she weigh? What can we bring you? Should we call the nurse?” Twice a man opened the curtain and immediately apologized, and once a toddler snuck in and hid and was immediately removed with a gentle rebuke.

My solitariness did not bother me, not at this stage. It set me apart, it enabled me to concentrate on the one person whose presence I desired, and all the comers and goers seemed to me like extras in a movie, an accompaniment to the main plot that was mine. Only mine. To my right and my left lay women who had just given birth just like me, women who had lives just like me, perhaps more interesting than mine, but I was barely aware of their existence. And when the babies were brought in for us to feed, I did not respond to any conversational feelers. A kind of game developed between me and the nurses: they opened the curtains around my bed and I closed them, they opened them again, and I closed them again, hiding behind them and putting on a Madonna face, as if the stitches didn’t sting like hell whenever I went to pee.

Five visiting hours went by in a waiting that was like a concentrated doing, until my strength ran out. I yearned for him to come so intensely, I imagined him so vividly, that I felt as if the yearning itself would bring him to me. Like a beamed message, a call that could not be ignored. Because he had to hear it.

Waiting, like concealed internal bleeding, gradually brings about a kind of anemia, a completely tangible loss of strength. And in the hospital I felt for the first time how this concentration—here he comes, in a minute he’ll come, in a minute he’ll be standing in the door—slides me slowly into a tearful impotence. I should have hated the person who made me feel like this, not because he was to blame, but simply because of the feeling itself and because of survival instinct. But my survival instinct didn’t work, not in the hospital and not later on. And the secret expectation became a part of my being. Like a chronic pain that awakens with changes in the weather. I have no idea what failing causes it, but for the most part I think that this failing is not in me and my mind, but in the nature of love.

I remember a picture from my last visit to Moscow, it was in February of this year and we were standing in the street next to the Patriarch’s Ponds waiting for a friend of Alek’s to pick us up for a late lunch. When we left the house in the morning the temperature was minus ten, and towards midday it dropped even further. The sky turned gray, low and damp, and from the moment that we stood still the snow lost its glamour, and I felt very cold, especially my feet. Twice Alek went to the little booth next to the ice rink and bought me a ghastly cup of hot coffee, but even with the styrofoam cup in my hand I couldn’t stop
moving back and forth. “If you’re already moving, then lift your leg like this,” he said and demonstrated a few high swings of the thigh, “it will warm you more.” But Alek himself did not shake a limb. For an hour and a half we waited there, his friend was caught in a traffic jam, and for most of the time he stood there without a hat, in infinite patience, his shoulders slightly stooped, as if he had been trained all his life to wait. At some point a little old lady in a black flowered headkerchief stopped next to us. She raised a wrinkled fairytale face to us, with bright blue, benevolent fairytale eyes, and rattled off a couple of sentences that brought an affectionate smile to Alek’s face. “She says it’s obvious you’re not used to the weather,” he said when she walked away, “she says I must take you home and give you black bread and drippings. Black bread. She says it must be a black and not white.” “I’d eat anything now, never mind what, I’m dying of hunger.” “Dima will come soon, and then we’ll eat properly. Unless Anushka spilled the oil, of course.…”