The Confessions of Noa Weber (22 page)
I could easily write the memory of their appearance at my door as a “shtick,” and to tell the truth I actually did so a number of times over the course of the years: little Talush, a scouting party of one little girl, is sent to knock on my door. My mother takes up her position as backup halfway down the stairs. My father sits in the getaway car without switching off the engine.
When it transpired that the “Russian nihilist,” as Grandma Dora called him, was gone, the family gathered round me, and in a matter of minutes, without any overt negotiations, formulated an agreed version of the state of affairs. Our Noa came under a bad influence, our Noa was kidnapped by the wicked wolf, and now that the wicked wolf is gone, the past is forgotten and we’re “looking ahead to the future.” My father, who apart from the embarrassments I’d caused resented the scene in the street,
found it a little difficult to accept this agreement, but from the moment the Weber team made it into the apartment, and from the moment it transpired that Noa Weber looked the way she looked—in other words, a mess—it was clear that Mother Batya would take command. Armed with my new cunning of the mad I was relieved at not having to answer any questions about “that man,” that I was not being required to pay with a confession, and weak as I was I surrendered myself to their efficient care. Because at that stage I really did feel sick. Sick and very frightened.
My mother was at her best, performing her role as a nurse, and although her experience with babies was not great, she applied herself fearlessly to the operations of bathing and diapering. Methods of suckling, pacifiers for and against, and ointments for diaper rash supplied us with sufficient subjects of conversation, and the rest of the time we dealt with my “recovery”—of my body, that is. I was a good patient, just as my mother was an excellent nurse. Lying between clean bedclothes, my shampooed hair on the raised pillow, my hands on the blanket, I did whatever I was told. When I was told to eat, I ate. When I was told to drink juice, I drank juice. When I was led to the bathroom, I washed myself. Days and nights ran into each other, and my memory from then is mainly of a sensation of dripping; drops of milk and blood and tears that didn’t stop flowing from the moment they started taking care of me. Dripping into the shower water. Dripping into the steam of the soup.
The tears were genuine, I didn’t have the strength to stop them, but at the fringes of consciousness I was also aware of the fact that crying helped me. The child is weak and traumatized. Leave the child alone. Don’t remind her, don’t ask any questions. Can’t you see that she’s suffering enough as it is?
Talush was sent to fetch and carry, my father dropped in every day
“to see how you’re getting on,” and my mother took leave from work and took over the house and reorganized it. I accepted everything with mute, grateful nods: when she converted Alek’s room into a nursery, when she brought the rest of my clothes from home and arranged them in the closet, when she ordered Yoash, who came to visit, to “give a hand” and move the table here and the closet there—she didn’t let him go even when he provoked her by asking her in the name of the principle of self-determination to call him Hamida. She called him Hamida, and still insisted that he help her move the closet. Even when she asked my permission to remove Klimt’s dead floating women from the kitchen wall—“that picture gives me the creeps”—I nodded.
My part in the new agreement was easy, I accepted it willingly: no more cheekiness with my parents, and no more ideological deviations. Our Noa has learned her lesson, and sadder but wiser she has come back to us. Sadder and wiser, and the roots of her hair hurt. Until then I never knew that the roots of your hair could hurt, but this is one of the strange things that I discovered. It hurt me even to cut my nails, and with every sip of soup I took I heard a wave breaking inside my ears.
Only once did I voice any opposition, and this was on the evening they first appeared, when my mother proposed taking me and Hagar home with them. I don’t know if my first burst of tears prevented a big argument, or if they weren’t so keen on putting the two of us up in the first place, but in any event, the result was that for two weeks or more my mother slept in Alek’s bed.
I didn’t explain the reasons for my objections; in days to come my mother noted that “that was a sign to me that you were recovering, and that it was important to you to stand on your own feet”—but the real reason was different, completely different, it was the feeling of the
gaping void around which I was crystallizing. The feeling was and still is completely physical. And under my swollen breasts I then felt the void all the time. As if an amputated internal organ was still hurting me. And in my heart I sobbed that Alek, Alek, Alek was hurting me.
The stronger this feeling grew, so too did the idea that as if by some law of nature the void had to be filled with what accorded with it, in the only manner that accorded with it; in other words, I began to believe that Alek would return. Of course I also formulated more reasonable and realistic reasons for this belief to myself, such as: “He has a daughter he will want to meet one day,” or “Alek may be angry with Israel, but he’s not indifferent to it”—they proved to be correct more quickly than I imagined—but at the basis of the belief was the feeling of a void, and Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t it?
Since I believed that Alek would return, I had to remain on Usha Street to wait for him, nothing could prevent me from waiting for him there.
I don’t know where I got this romantic nonsense from, as if I were the heroine of a black-and-white movie, waiting for my lover in the place where the war had parted us, but even if anyone had ridiculed me along these lines, or said that Alek was perfectly capable of opening a telephone directory and locating me, there were no words in the world with the power to move me from my stubborn refusal to budge. Alek would return here, and I had to be here when he came.
When this irrational certainty crystallized inside me, I buried it inside me and wrapped myself around it in the dark, drawing secret strength from my madness. When Alek came back he would find me worthy of him. I had to make myself worthy of him.
Much of what I am today stems in a crooked way from this wish to be worthy in his eyes, equal in power to his imaginary power. At the beginning this ambition related mainly to basic functioning: to start taking care of myself and of Hagar so that he wouldn’t despise me, to gradually limit my mother’s presence; and gradually more and more ambitions were added, until my will to prevail was extended also to the area of my mood, in which I also began to see a measure of my strength. Alek was doing his thing in Heidelberg, I was doing mine in Jerusalem. Alek was not suffering from “psychological depression,” therefore I too would hold my head up high.
At first, of course, I pretended: Get up. Stand up straight. Lift up your chin. Raise your eyes from the pavement. Take a deep breath. Straighten your shoulders. Stretch your neck. Look up. Go out to run, at least for a few blocks. Until the pretense took over, and with my chin up and my eyes on the horizon, I really did begin to feel better.
Most of my achievements over the years I measured under the imaginary gaze of Alek’s eyes, and to this day it remains fixed on me in both small and great events. I remember for example the gradual change that took place in my appearance in the first year as a law student, when I began to wear buttoned shirts and for the first time in my life went to a salon. The lightheaded feeling that came with my shoulder-length haircut and the touch of air on my nape like a new nudity were connected to his touch in my mind.
I remember my first staged court case, it was a damages case, the show I put on in order to impress precisely the person who wasn’t there, and the paradoxical way in which his imaginary gaze helped me to relax, as if the imaginary audience of one enabled me to ignore the real one. Alek’s imagined gaze steadied my voice and my arguments, and concentrating on it distanced the lecturer and class in front of me, turning them into the spectators of a play not really intended for them.
The whole episode of my legal studies was connected to the imagined eye of Alek, and my desire to impress him. Actually, Miriam too played a part here, a far from inconsiderable part, for from the start she urged me to study. My father offered to get me a job with one of his friends “until we see what’s happening with your life”—translation: “until you meet someone normal and marry in a normal way.” My mother said that a profession was definitely important for a woman, too, and “in my situation”—in other words, as a single parent—teaching could fit the bill, and only Miriam insisted that I had to “believe in myself,” and set up a meeting for me with the only lawyer she knew, the mother of a toddler who had attended her nursery school the year before, who she still sometimes babysat for in the afternoons.
In those days there were not yet television series about glamorous and neurotic female lawyers, but Miriam very much admired this lawyer, who was dealing with a protracted court case about building in the yard on her behalf, and she made up her mind that law was the profession for me and nothing else would do. For months she kept at me: “You’ve got a head on your shoulders,” and “You know how to talk,” and “You were lucky to go to high school, don’t waste your luck,” and for months
I kept at my parents to agree and for the assistance they were unwilling to provide—“A plan, Noaleh, must first of all be realistic”—until Aunt Greta arrived and contributed her share and compelled my father to contribute his. In all this time Miriam kept on at me, but what really decided the issue was the thought of Alek.
For almost a year I worked in a little soup restaurant that catered mainly to art students. It was relatively pleasant work, in a relatively pleasant place. The owner of the establishment, Tami, is a friend of mine to this day. And nevertheless when I served the customers, some of whom I recognized from Alek’s social evenings, and most of whom did not recognize me, I began to feel like Cinderella. As is usual with students, they worked at all kinds of odd jobs, but according to their definition and also their self-perception, they were something else: the future of Israeli academia, the future of the local avant-garde, activists in all kinds of left-wing and protest movements; even Tami was studying part time for a degree in economics. Only I was a real waitress. A mother, waitress, and a vegetable peeler. Sometimes I would imagine Alek coming into the restaurant and sitting down next to the window with some female intellectual, and then the humiliation was insufferable. So that after a few months of peeling carrots and wiping tables, I was determined to “make something” of myself, and when Miriam continued to insist that “something” meant lawyer, I decided to think so, too.
My idea of the profession was of course absurd: a combination of Robin Hood and Clarence Darrow, doing justice and solving all Miriam Marie’s problems with the municipality. Two days after the beginning of the academic year I realized how grotesque this image was. But without an alternative direction, I continued to study law.
Sometimes during interviews I feel a kamikazi urge to crash into the truth. The bit about Clarence Darrow and social justice sounds good, even charming, I’ve used it a number of times, but I take good care to censor all the rest.
Interviewer: So how did it happen that you went to study law?
Feminist writer: It was a coincidence. With women, you know, things happen by chance. There was a man I wanted to impress.
Interviewer: Did you want him to fall in love with you?
Feminist writer: I knew I didn’t have a hope.
Interviewer: But surely he must have been impressed.…
Writer: He didn’t even know I was studying. You see, he wasn’t in the country at all, there was no contact between us. I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.
Interviewer: And afterwards?
Writer: What afterwards? There is no afterwards. There is no earlier and later in love. When he felt like summoning me, I went to be his mistress. That’s the way it still is.
What’s missing in this confession is the benefit I derived from his imaginary gaze. Apart from the intense color of the world, apart from the sharpening of senses that comes with love, apart from the increased energy, there was also a specific benefit, a lot of specific benefits: what I described before as “holding my head high.” Under Alek’s imaginary gaze I couldn’t be a floor rag. And so in some strange way his gaze helped me push the baby carriage nobly up Tiberias Street when a heat wave had already pushed me out of the house, and helped me drag myself out of bed in the dark to light the kerosene stove in the kitchen and summarize “The Development of the Concept of Good Faith in German Law.”
The funny thing about it is that Alek, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t give a damn about the way I or any other woman looks when she pushes a baby carriage, and studiousness was never one of his qualities. And nevertheless I mobilized his gaze in order to brush my teeth, dress properly, get onto the bus, photocopy legal precedents and understand what exactly Reuben and Simeon had done to Levi.
In the winter when we were still living together I found a copy of
Eugene Onegin
in a second-hand book store, and on good days I amused Alek by learning whole stanzas off it by heart, to which he would respond by quoting from the poem in Russian. Pushkin in his eyes was the prince of princes; the “poet of the golden age” was beyond any criticism or irony, which gave the poem such magical status in my eyes that in his absence I would read passages from it to myself out loud. The symbolists he was working on had not been translated into Hebrew—or if they had I never succeeded in finding the translations—and Dostoevsky he hated, so I was left with Onegin, who I saw as a key. Another way of touching Alek.
From reading it so many times I absorbed the story into myself to such an extent that when I fantasized about the return of my man, I imagined the scene in the words of the poet. When he returned I would be someone impossible to ignore. When he returned, a new Noa Weber would be revealed to his eyes. “Not the plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden whom he’d known” but Noa Weber, a duchess who not only “never shivered, / paled, flushed, or lost composure’s grip—/ no, even her eyebrow never quivered, / she never even bit her lip.”