The Confessions of Noa Weber (37 page)

Long ago, at the beginning of the holiday, when I had just begun to write, I thought of purifying myself until I concluded with a great hymn of praise to everyday secular reality. To a reality without illusions, to the empty yellowish summer sky, to the Zionism of the soul planting itself in history with the morning paper. When I finish my confession, I imagined to myself, I’ll begin to quietly praise. I’ll bow my sinful head and sing a modest hymn to the only reality there is: a ray of sunlight creeping over the table … a child’s hug … a loaf of bread … the tired
eyes of my friends … the tired laughter of mothers … a pot wrapped in a kitchen towel … the voice of the newscaster.… Thus, stitch by stitch, I would embroider the fullness and the richness.

Tomorrow they’ll be holding the traditional “Maimouna” celebrations at the Saker Garden, two streets below my house. Am I supposed to praise and extol this mass cookout, too, the carcasses of beef, the fullness of the chewing mouths, the melting ice cream and the screeching loudspeakers?

If this is the good, then the good is urgently in need of redemption.

On second thought, it’s clear to me that I’ll never take Nira to Moscow, not in a fur coat and not in a summer dress. If I took her there it would only be to kill her off, to push her under the midnight train to Saint Petersburg, a development my editor would on no account be willing to accept.

In 1999, when we wandered ’round at night among the fantastically illuminated, newly painted aristocratic mansions, Alek explained that it was the Mafia that had cleaned the streets of the small time gangsters. “Thanks to the big crooks we can walk here in safety.” What would Nira Woolf, Lady Justice-for-All, do in this chaotic free-for-all, where even seven martial arts would not help her? And what would I do with Lady Justice-for-All and her martial arts?

In order to get rid of Nira there was no need to drag her all the way to Moscow, it was enough for me to want it, to make a decision, and then I could finish her off right here, in my house.

I enjoyed writing
Voice of a Dead Woman
and
What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?
more than
The Stabbing
. I went to visit Alek, I returned from
visiting Alek, we held long and short telephone conversations, I was so aroused that my plots, too, raced ahead on light-footed, quick-tempered sentences. Now I think that with the use I made of incest, slavery, and rape I really did scrape the bottom of the barrel, because what other systematic rage could I provoke within myself? And for Nira and me systematic rage against the “system” is essential; rage with a theory, not simply rage focused on a person.

I didn’t stop hating evildoers and detesting evil—Alek: “The easiest thing is to hate the villains”—outbursts of focused anger still make reality vividly present to me, but Nira from her inception aspired to more, and the elimination of the oppressors in her exploits always signifies the possibility of eliminating oppression itself.

Russia put an end to that for me, Alek put an end to it for me, it’s hard to say exactly how and exactly what changed in me.… It’s not that I stopped deriving infantile satisfaction from destroying scoundrels, but that everything seems infantile to me now.

Systematic rage needs a sense of direction: with justice behind you and evil confronting you, forward to progress and down with the system! Down with Western imperialism, death to the patriarchal oligarchy, out with oppressive capitalism, let the ground burn, let a social earthquake topple the class pyramid, let the mighty and terrible heroic God fall from His throne, bring on the Great Mother who nourishes and sustains all living creatures in His place. “Spiritual nourishment,” too, as my only beloved daughter says. I don’t care, I don’t care—more than that, I’ll even rejoice. From the bathtub I’ll join in singing the anthem. I’ll stick my head out of the window and sing as prettily as a tame canary. Second voice, millionth voice, I’ll sing in harmony with them if they wish.

But the despair, that other despair, that can’t be removed from the
skin by the whitest teeth, what will eradicate it? And when the soul, the backward soul, begs for redemption, what will I say to it? Shut your mouth, you’re just a fiction? Or will I shut it up with social redemption, because that’s all there is?

Even when evil has been defeated and the good has triumphed—when foreign workers are not cheated, and women are not beaten, and the poor are not oppressed—then, too, when justice has been done, man will still be in need of mercy.

Once upon a time I talked about a short-winded confession without perspective, and about Russia in my ignorance I have no perspective at all. I neither loved Moscow nor hated it. I did not understand this city, where I kept on losing my sense of direction, and whenever it seemed to me that the river was behind us, I suddenly saw it in front of us. I didn’t love Moscow, I love Alek, and I loved him there.

We became friends, but that was only “an added layer,” as they say, I still loved my master, like a willing slave, and every time he said to me: “It’s not normal … you should be here now, why don’t you come?” I bought a plane ticket, packed a bag and lied to all my friends and relations. I lived from conversation to conversation and from trip to trip, as if on cold oxygen that I stored up in my lungs, and the thought of the next breath, the next call, was intoxicating.

I have seven trips behind me, and I can’t say that I’ve seen much of Moscow. We took walks here and there, sometimes for hours. We ate at little restaurants where they served caviar sandwiches on formica tables,
where they were generous with the vodka and stingy with the coarse paper napkins. On a number of occasions, without embarrassment or the need for explanations, he took me to meet his friends; but most of the time he wanted to stay at home and refrained from treating me like a tourist. He says that Moscow can tire you to death. That “anyone who didn’t grow up here all his life, his body can’t take it,” and that without going back to Paris he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

It sometimes happens that when he starts talking he addresses me in French and immediately interrupts himself with ‘ “I don’t know already which language I’m talking.” Sometimes he loses a word in Hebrew and clenches his fist impatiently, until I find the missing word and offer it to him. From visit to visit the soft “sh” and wet “r” which hardly appeared in his Hebrew once become more pronounced. On one of my visits he was about to fly to Paris to his family a few hours after my departure, his suitcase lay open on the sofa.

In spite of his complaints about the city, Alek stayed there for longer periods from year to year. He installed new locks in the apartment on Yakimanka Street, which he had initially rented for only a few months, exchanged his laptop for a regular computer, collected books in amounts that were impossible to transport—“at that price impossible not to buy.”

I was full of energy, and nevertheless I too felt no great need to go anywhere, his view was enough for me. A filthy inner courtyard visible from the kitchen window. Rows of windows in the building opposite, some of them curtained in white lace. One ugly wooden chest. A wall covered in old wallpaper with a pattern of leaves with a single picture hanging on it: a fake icon that Borya had given him, a proper forgery, not a reproduction; a tortured Jesus, golden and big-eyed in the style of Rublev, only Rublev hadn’t painted it.

Moscow left me naked. However much Alek tried to explain—and he doesn’t tend to explain a lot—and however much I read, I was left without a language and without an opinion, without the usual ability to discuss and make judgements. I have heard about similar sensations from people visiting the Far East, but Russia isn’t India, we learned something about it in high school, most of the veteran members of the kibbutz came from there, the language sounds familiar, and so I had a kind of presumption that I was supposed to understand, and this presumption was almost always refuted. The strange thing is that I enjoyed this failure, the alarming difficulty in organizing reality, and the inability to make judgements in general or at all. Helpless and with my mind empty of opinions, very concentrated, it seemed to me that I was stretched by a kind of vibration which was existence itself—the devil knows what “existence itself” means, maybe it doesn’t mean anything—but it held intense despair and renunciation and a wild and fearful joy, which expanded inside me, pulsing and stretching my ribs, until I could scarcely contain it.

Moscow left me naked, and I was naked anyway, in a nakedness so terrifying that sometimes I would close my eyes in the childish illusion that for a moment he would not see me. But it was for the sake of this nakedness with him that I kept on coming. Because of the gaze that turns all of me into soul and fills my body with soul, so that I never, ever want to escape from it or perch on the ceiling. Never to be in a place where his gaze can’t reach me and give my body life.

Once it happened that we were sitting in the kitchen, and when he looked at me I thought that it was a good thing he didn’t love me, because even so it was almost impossible to bear.

It’s impossible to exist like this for any length of time. My longest stay was in 1995, eleven days, part of which we were with Borya, and when I returned to the city of J in the hills of J I was like a madwoman gathering her cunning to hide what she sees and hears. Alek spent that summer with his family somewhere outside of Paris, for over four months we didn’t speak to each other, in Oslo talks were taking place with the Palestinians, settlers were demonstrating and blocking the roads.… Hagar wanted to know what I thought about the “right-wing” Russian immigration—how it would affect politics in Israel, and how the Jewish Agency was influencing the immigrants, and how I explained the fact that a fighter for human rights like Natan Sharansky displayed contemptuous indifference to human rights in the territories? So who do you think will influence him in the end?—and I to the best of my ability talked and discussed and debated, and felt myself growing scabs of words until my skin was as dry as a lizard’s, which was the only way I could go out in the sun that was obliterating the city the further we advanced into summer. Jerusalem bleached in the light looked as insubstantial as a ghost town, and the air was so heavy that on my night runs I found it hard to breathe. And precisely for this reason I ran longer, but I obtained no relief even after the effort. I needed the darkness in which I could breathe. And then I began to think, too, of giving up my job at the fund.

Once we came out into deep snow from an old monastery whose name
I have forgotten—maybe he never told me its name—he took me there to “see a real Rublev.” There were a few cars on the side road, none of the drivers was interested in moonlighting as a taxi, and then he took me to one of those little windowless restaurants which on my own I would never have identified as a restaurant.

“Our Yesus Yosifovich is apparently a blessing the world can’t cope with,” he said as I tried to re-establish my connection to my frozen toes, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Jesus Christ,” he said with a smile. “Yeshua in your language.”

“What about him?”

“What about him? What indeed? What do you do with a blessing people can’t cope with?” I know when to keep quiet, so I kept quiet, and Alek went on and penetrated my thoughts without foreplay, or after the foreplay of years. “God, as I understand it, can never accept human beings or really understand them, and this led to the mistake of Yeshua.… World, as I understand, was created to be different from God, the complete opposite of him, and for this reason there are laws of nature and of morality. But with Jesus what happens is that God entered this world to take part in it, as if he got tired of talking to people about their behavior from distance. As if not only the world needs God for its salvation, but also God needs human beings … he needs a place in their souls for his development, which is a blasphemous thing to say … but God made a mistake.…” I succeeded in moving my toes in my shoes, while Alek ordered vodka for himself and tea for me—I had had too much to drink the night before. “You said that God made a mistake,” I said quietly, suddenly aware of the men at the table behind us and the foreign sound of the Hebrew. “Yes. He made a
mistake. Because he is God and because of his love for human beings. Love of God is a hard thing. Hard when it enters between people, and Jesus in spite of sacrifice and forgiveness is hardest love of all.”

“So was God only mistaken in the timing, or was it a fundamental mistake?”

“Now you asked the big question.” Alek drank his vodka in one gulp, and then in an uncharacteristic pose he planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands.

“I asked the big question, what’s the answer?”

“What is the answer? That there is no answer. Maybe there can’t be one. Maybe for God there is no such thing as ‘timing.’ ‘Timing’ is connected to time, and God and time have a problem in meeting. This is another problem with Jesus, and about this a lot has already been written. And people, too, I think … people can be ready in their own time, so there is no one timing right for everybody.”

I didn’t ask him if he “really believed” in Jesus, because what did it matter? And what did “really” mean?

If I asked him perhaps he would answer dryly that we had gone to Bethlehem together and that he wasn’t inspired by a pink doll in a manger. If I asked him perhaps he would say that Jesus was a “symbol,” but I already know how close and present and personified a “symbol” can be. “Symbols” sometimes take on flesh in reality.

“What are you doing with me here?” I asked him later, when we were back in bed in the apartment. “What am I doing?” he repeated and pulled me on top of him. “Yes,” I said and looked down at his face, and then he smiled and clasped his hands behind his head. “Maybe I have a role. In your life.”

“Yes,” I said deliberately, “yes, you have. But one day, one day I won’t need you any more for … all this. I know.”

“And then you’ll fire me from this role,” he said quietly and went on smiling.