The Confessions of Noa Weber (25 page)

“Yoash had a bad war,” Alek said to me, “and Yoash, never mind how he fought and how much of a hero he was, is still exactly like a
child. From this point of view, he’s a typical Israeli.” Infinitely patient, he did not argue with Yoash, but one morning when the two of us were alone in his apartment on Yarkon Street, he said a few things to me, and his mouth, I remember, twisted in a terrifying, or perhaps terrified, anger. “Oversight … I can’t bear the sound of that word any more. They found themselves a word … oversight.”

“But there was an oversight, in spades,” I objected. Motherhood, the weeks that had gone by without him, the fact of his return, had given me a new self-confidence, and I no longer hesitated to confront him, I even enjoyed it.

“Of course there was an oversight, nobody’s denying this, it’s obvious. Daddy promised that there wouldn’t be war. Daddy told me that war would only begin in the afternoon.… They said we’d be attacked at four o’clock.… How old are they, tell me, all these people who are writing and talking?”

“So are you telling me that Golda and Dayan shouldn’t resign?”

“Of course they should resign, immediately. They’re responsible for the ‘oversight.’ That’s not what I’m talking about at all.” In the background a festive concerto by Schubert was playing, one of the records he had left behind, and for a moment I felt the old inner surrender setting in. “Unbelievable that these people are Jews,” he said. “As if they’ve learned nothing, and once again Daddy promised, and once again authorities said. It’s not normal.” And almost instantly a gentler tone returned. “This is Yoash’s problem, too, that he has a daddy who makes promises, and that he is naive like most of the Israelis.” I identified the area of warmth and approached it: “So what will become of Yoash?” “Yoash isn’t right. Maybe he’ll become right,
but now it’s not good. You are good for him, I am too, but a woman is something else. With you he’s calm. With you and Hagar. And with me, however hard I try, it’s not the same.”

These were the most explicit words he said to me, I don’t know how explicit he was to himself. In any case, Alek spoke in other ways, too, and in fact all three of us did. I remember that he was standing in the kitchen and peeling potatoes and chopping dill on a plate when Yoash started on one of his tirades. It went on and on, until Alek asked him to take over the peeling and chopping and handed him the knife, and when they changed places he hugged him hard and pulled me too into the embrace. His fingers rested on my cheek, and rubbing up against the smell of the dill I thought, as if in an attempt to reassure: It’s all right, I know what you’re doing now, what you’re trying to do, all three of us know, it’s all right.

During all that time, throughout that period, Alek kept close to my face: touching my cheeks, holding them when he kissed me, holding my head and turning it to him in bed. And with the same concentration he looked at Yoash, too, and Yoash looked at me. All three of us, I mean to say, looked at each other far, far too much.

I know what might be said about this. I know what Nira Woolf would say, the same thing that Talush and Tami and all my friends would have said: He found himself a convenient arrangement, that Alek, landing you with his crazy friend and taking the heat off himself. I know that this is the obvious thing to think, I understand it, but it isn’t true, it isn’t true at all, and anyone who thinks so doesn’t understand the intensity. How the three of us were really and truly more important to each other than the whole world.

Even today nobody could persuade me that Alek wanted to pair me off with Yoash, although if anything like that had happened, it would have seemed perfectly natural to him, “the most natural and beautiful thing in the world,” in his words.
Inter alia
because the whole notion of sexual fidelity was completely alien to him. I’m not talking about some sixties ideology of free love, Alek has no ideology, certainly not about sex. I mean that the very idea of sexual fidelity seems weird and incomprehensible to him. Not only in relation to himself, but also in relation to me and everybody else. I remember how one of those days I told him about my father and his affairs with the girls in the kibbutz high school—in general we talked a lot more then than before—and I brought this story out as if I was revealing some traumatic family secret. But in spite of my breaking voice Alek missed the traumatic point, and when I reached the bit about leaving the kibbutz—I said that I didn’t know to what extent, if at all, our leaving was connected to those affairs—he shook his head dismissively and said: “What kind of people.…” And with regard to my father all he said was that he didn’t understand men who were attracted to young girls.

“And what about me?” I asked.

“What—what about you?”

“Aren’t I a young girl?” “No, you’re not. Perhaps according to your age you are, but your age is accidental.”

A million years later I remembered this conversation. I had come home from the television studios in Herzliya, where I had heard all kinds of sanctimonious statements about the Lewinsky affair, with the emphasis on the regrettable way in which Hillary had humiliated herself, and late at night, when I was about to remove the make-up and take a shower, Alek called from Moscow. “Lucky my mother goes
to bed early, she wouldn’t have enjoyed listening to a few of the things I had to say,” I said. Alek was silent. He was silent long enough to take the wind of righteous public indignation out of my sails, long enough for shame to begin gnawing at me: who was I to talk, where did I get my nerve from?

Alek was silent and then he said with painful dryness: “I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about.”

“What don’t you understand?” I held my ground against him or against myself and wiped a layer of makeup off my face. “Don’t you understand that the role of the forgiving wife is humiliating?” “I understand that too many people are interfering in something that is none of their business, and in my opinion it is this which is humiliating and hard to forgive. Apart from which, have you considered possibility that the iron lady doesn’t care that much what her husband does? This lady rules the world, and also, they say, her husband, so maybe things of interest to other women don’t interest her so much.… Once, aristocracy knew how to deal with such matters, and nobody made a scandal, but on the other hand, Clinton is certainly not an aristocrat, maybe this is what you are really saying.” That is not what I was saying, of course, but neither did it occur to me to come up with a slogan like “the personal is political” or “the President’s wife is not only a private person, she is a role model,” although these are precisely the kind of things I had said an hour and a half earlier. As was happening more and more in the course of time, I didn’t agree with him, I didn’t agree with myself, and above all I felt flawed and distorted. As if I had been caught in some falseness or stupid boasting. Everything that formulated itself in my head at those moments had a phony ring. Was this my voice? Was it an alien voice? Which of all the voices I uttered was my own?

“So what’s happening in Moscow?”

“Moscow? Like Moscow. A crazy province. It’s not clear why God decided to put it at the forefront of the world. And Jerusalem?”

“The same thing exactly.” I could hear his smile through the receiver. Sometimes he has the smile of a child throwing off his school satchel, and never mind what had happened a moment before, his smile spreads to my face, too.

Alek loved Yoash, he loves him still, and passing between them was like crossing a densely packed energy field. A kind of palpable energy that reorganizes all the particles in your body. Sometimes I would fantasize that I was fucking both of them together. Sometimes when I went up to Alek, and Yoash was there, it seemed to me that it was beginning now, here in the kitchen. In all my fantasies Alek was the initiator, he made all the initial moves and as if offered me to Yoash. And in all of them he went on looking straight at me throughout the act, with the same look.

In May 1995, a million years later, I felt the same vibration of intensity passing between him and Borya. Boris Chazin, a doctor by profession, playwright, journalist, recovered drug addict, occasional trafficker in mementos from the Stalinist era, and election campaigner for Luzkov, is a friend of Alek’s, meaning that Alek lived in his apartment for unlimited periods of time, and to this apartment in Yakimanka he brought me as well. Alek doesn’t need to explain anything to Borya, and what seemed to me at first socially embarrassing—my appearance in Moscow as a mistress—seemed to him the most natural thing in the
world. For a few days he removed himself from the apartment, went to sleep in another friend’s apartment, and when he returned and joined us he treated me like a long lost sister. A sister and a visiting Czarina. Out of pride or shyness he refused to speak broken English to me, but somehow it didn’t matter. On the sideboard stood pictures of the blonde Ute and little Mark and Daniel in ski suits, and this too did not get in the way of Borya’s stammering welcome. Without asking or requesting, the two of them shared everything between them: money, connections, food and drink, Borya’s bed while the owner went to sleep on the sofa, Alek’s jacket which Borya wore, Borya’s cashmere scarf which was wound around my throat, the slippers of who knows which lady placed on my feet with much ado after a little splinter penetrated my toe.

One evening our taxi lost its way in a maze of little streets until Borya located the iron door that hid a fashionable nightclub designed as a communal apartment. Alek in the taxi: “He says it’s an amazing place and you have to see it … no, he’s never been there either.” Borya had gathered together a party of twelve people, and at three in the morning, after he had finished ordering us the entire menu—“Pablik Morozov pancakes,” “Komsomol girl’s ribs,” “Pilot amputee,” jokes behind which were dishes unlike anything ever tasted in a communal apartment—at three o’clock in the morning we were still reveling there among the blinking lights, to the strains of Eurovision pop songs in Russian.

Alek doesn’t dance and Borya didn’t dance then, they remained seated at the table, and in the vase standing between them a spray of white lilac changed color with the changes in the lighting. Their faces changed color from white to spectral green to blue, and drunk as I
was, even from behind the shoulder of someone introduced to me as a Tartar poet, I didn’t lose eye contact with them. They raised white-green-blue glasses in my honor, and in theirs I allowed the Tartar poet to press his pelvis against me.

Borya, Alek explained to me, had sold some French collector a genuine oil portrait of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and the money he received for the group portrait—how it survived the devil only knows—he quickly showered on all of us, as if it were burning a hole in his pocket. In the shopping arcade next to the apartment, he bought me a fur hat of the expensive kind, a heavy little iron horse which is now standing on my desk, a Bukharan dressing gown, “our ice cream that she has to taste,” and a little bunch of white flowers with a sweet, subtle smell. At other times the money was Alek’s, or there was no money at all, but nobody ever kept accounts.

In my last three days there the weather suddenly turned hot and stifling, at night too, the pavements were covered with a seasonal shedding of blossoms, and the dusty down gave Borya an allergy attack. With a checkered handkerchief pressed to his fleshy nose he led us to Red Square, to the Tretyakov Gallery and to the graves of saints and sinners in Novodevichy, and during this whole tour of tourist “musts” which Alek had refused to take me on previously, he showered me with jokes about the “New Russia” and funny-horrific stories that “nobody could imagine” and whose truth Alek was called upon again and again to verify.

On the endless escalator going down to the Metro platform it was Borya who held my elbow, and along the avenues the three of us walked arm in arm, with me in the middle. Nikolskaya Street, Kirovskaya Street, Tverskaya Street, Komsomolsky Prospect. In exactly the same
way I had walked with Alek and Yoash on one distant Friday night in Nachlaot, and Borya was as tall as Yoash, his gait as ungainly, and his gestures as broad.

In the greasy little kitchen in Yakimanka, rubbing up against each other in the passage to the stove, I furrowed into the heat produced by the contact between them, and at night when Alek lifted me above him with a strong movement, I thought: Now he’s going to tell me to go to Borya.

If he’d told me to, I would have gone. And if I had been asked to, I would have remained there with both of them. Hello, Hagar, I just wanted to tell you that I’m not coming home. The time has come for your mother to come out of the closet, and I’m sure that you will accept it in the spirit of American tolerance and understanding. I have a lover in Moscow. I have two lovers in Moscow. One of them is your father, my husband in law and Ute’s husband in practice. The second is an occasional drunk and an ex-junkie, and your mother, my dear, is crazy about both of them.

I really did fantasize about staying there with them. With time I would no doubt have found some cleaning agent capable of removing the filth of generations from the lavatory and the bathtub.

The perversity of course lies in the fact that all this time I knew that I wasn’t really attracted to Borya; not to Borya himself and not to his shadowed life and his wet face and the hair plastered to his forehead, but Borya just like Yoash was a part of Alek, and therefore to this day I fuck both of them in my imagination.

I know what the above description seems to imply. I can understand how people might come to conclusions like: So, your Alek is actually a homosexual, he only really loves men. I understand where this apparently logical idea comes from, but it is completely mistaken. Alek is neither a practicing homosexual nor a latent one. There’s nothing latent about Alek’s sexuality. Nothing repressed or dormant. I know. And precisely for this reason I sometimes dream of turning into a man, so that I could be like Borya and Yoash for him, so I could be with him like Borya and Yoash.

Nothing happened with Borya, nothing could possibly have happened with Borya, but I did go to bed with Yoash in the end. Not on the night that he drove Alek to the airport and Alek sent him back with a bunch of flowers for me, but a few nights later. We did it, and it was definitely nothing to write home about. At first he couldn’t even get it up. We were already friends by then, perhaps that worked against us, too, but the main problem was that Yoash was no more attracted to me than I was to him, he simply saw me as part and parcel of Alek.