The Confessions of Noa Weber

A CALM DISTANCE, A PANORAMIC VIEW

The city of J lies at the top of the hills of J. That’s how I’d like to begin my story; at a calm distance, with a deep breath, in a panoramic shot focusing very slowly on a single street, and very slowly on a single house, “this is the house where I was born.” But you’d be making a fool of yourself if your J were Jerusalem, since every idiot knows about Jerusalem. And altogether it’s impossible to talk about Jerusalem any more. Impossible, that is to say, without “winding alleys” and “stone courtyards,” “caper bushes” and “Arab women in the market place.” And I have nothing to say about caper bushes and stone courtyards, nor do I have the faintest desire to flavor my story with the colorful patois of colorful Jerusalem characters, twirling their mustaches as they spin Oriental tales.

Nor do I intend to mention here the hills of J, in other words the Judean Hills. These hills always depressed me with their thick history and the thin trunks of their pine trees, and the picnic leftovers scattered over the dry pine needles. And anyone who didn’t spread out a picnic blanket and open a picnic basket surely trailed behind their scoutmasters there in the footsteps of Judah Maccabee and Uri Ben-Ari and the continuing saga of Jewish heroism, which I somehow managed to forget, however hard they drilled it into my head.

Of all the things that preoccupy my thoughts, not a single one happened to me between the thorny burnet and the arbutus tree, and so from now on I’ll do without the geographical features, the ancient human landscape, the black goat and the briar, with all those details that compose what is referred to as the panoramic view. And even if once upon a time, a great many years ago, I went for walks in the forests of J, it definitely isn’t worth the effort of distancing the camera for the sake of those ancient neckings. They’re about as riveting as the autumn crocuses. Or the spring. Or whatever you call them. The truth is that I wasn’t really born in Jerusalem, either. I was eight when my parents left the kibbutz — for seven years after that we lived in Tel Aviv — and if I began by saying, for example, “I was born in the Emek Hospital,” you’d come right back: “Ahaa, of course, my two sisters-in-law gave birth there too,” and immediately want to talk to me about “that amazing midwife, the one with the faint mustache, worth more than all the doctors put together, you don’t mean to say you’ve never heard of her?”

It isn’t my personal problem as a writer. It isn’t my personal problem that a person who was born here can’t open with the words “I was born”—because so what? So you were born, good for you, you were born, okay, and then what? Because after “I was born” has to come an adventure story that will take the first person far, far away from his birthplace, and how far can you really get from here? To the Far East on the beaten track of the ex-warriors from the Golani Brigade? To Uman with the nutcases of the Bratslav Hassids to their rabbi’s grave? And however far you went you’d end up meeting someone who knew your cousin’s cousin. Not interesting. Not interesting at all.

Not that I’m complaining, God forbid. The facts of my birth and upbringing have nothing to do with what follows here, and even if they did, you need calm and composure to distance the camera like that; calm and composure and a sense of historical perspective, and as far as my situation is concerned, I clearly suffer from a severe lack of both.

For the record I’ll simply mention here that I was favored by the luck of the draw. I grew up well fed and protected, and that’s another reason why where and how I “came into the world” is not a matter of public interest. People who’ve survived a holocaust, who were born into a world that no longer exists, they can begin their biographies with “I was born.” The heroes of nineteenth century novels begin with “I was born,” my heroic father can begin his story with “I was born.” Not me. My early history is too boring, it fails to provide any explanation for what happened to me in later years, and I have never felt the urge to examine it or whine about it. Nor do I now.

In any case, it’s no great loss, and if the right to say “I was born” has to be paid for in dire catastrophes, stepfathers, orphanages, and picking pockets in the marketplace, I say, “No thanks,” and choose to enter this story at the age of seventeen, where the real me begins:

Me and my love for Alek — which against my better judgment I experience as transcendence. Me with my dybbuk — which is the only thing that gives me a sense of space.

Forty-seven, that’s how old I am now; forty-eight in September.

FORTY-SEVEN

Forty-seven years old, and in my twenty-something years as a writer it’s never happened that I wrote a story in the first person. Not that I haven’t felt like sending the heroine of my books, that paragon of perfection Nira Woolf, to hell, and sometimes I’ve had the passing thought that maybe one day in the future, in some sober, even-breathed maturity, I would change my genre. I’ve had thoughts along those lines, but it’s never, ever occurred to me to push myself into the story, and what’s more, to puff and pant it in the first person.

I enjoyed writing my detective stories, I enjoyed the status they gave me — writing thrillers isn’t a bad profession, especially when they have a surplus value in the educational and political sense — and when I took care in various interviews to clarify that I had “no other literary pretensions,” it wasn’t a total lie. And it still isn’t a lie.

In one of the newspapers’ holiday supplements there was an interview I gave for the release of my latest book, What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? In this book Nira Woolf sets out on the trail of a network of pimp slave traffickers importing Russian sex slaves, “and the trail leads her from the suburbs of Moscow to the Israeli Ministry of Interior, up to the highest echelons of the Israeli police,” as the blurb says on the back cover. I came out of the interview okay: I managed to get in a few shocking statistics about the trafficking of women, and with my well-known sensitivity to sociopolitical issues — let the envious eat their hearts out — I spelled out enough of a sociopolitical agenda for a holiday supplement.

Since I know my own political agenda quite well, I have to admit that as soon as I opened the newspaper it was actually the picture that grabbed my attention. It was a cruel photograph, even though I don’t believe that the photographer or the editor meant me harm on purpose. I looked like a weird little girl turned into a wooden doll. Because of the angle of the shot, my feet were enormous, my seated body was hidden behind wooden calves gnarled with veins, and above my knees was a dark face surrounded by unkempt witch’s hair, with wide-open eyes popping out of their sockets. I can only blame my own stupidity; I shouldn’t have let them photograph me on the steps of my house in the spring light in running shorts and red sneakers without any makeup. Once, I could have gotten away with it, but not now, not at my age.

• • •

One of the pieces of nonsense they feed people is the idea of “times of life crises”—adolescent crisis, forties crisis, fifties crisis, end of the millennium syndrome crisis — book shops and newspapers are full of this shit, and there are people who actually live their lives from manual to manual as if age and time were explainable. Somehow I have never thought seriously about age, and now too, ever since that photograph, it’s not about the age of forty-seven that I think, but rather about the ages to come.

Let’s say Noa Weber is suddenly sixty-eight. A bony body full of the opinions of a militant old lady, climbing tip-tap up those same old stairs. An old body full of opinions entering its old house, and lying down on the same old bed to give its feet a rest. And when this Noa Weber finally lies down, what exactly runs through her brain’s worn-out connections? Does she polish up one of her correct opinions? Reflect compassionately about one of the victims in her books? Does she think about reforming society and justice for all? Definitely not. Just like now, Noa Weber thinks about him. She thinks about him, and wrinkles twitch around the dry mouth that still moans, and a hand blotched with liver spots moves down to her gray pubic hair. Sixty-eight years old, and still her heart goes out to he who is gone and to that which is gone, and still her body arches at the memory of his touch. Wretched, wretched, wretched Noa Weber, wretched her love that is beyond time and place, wretched her sparse pubic hair with the white skin showing through.

Noa Weber is old and moaning. Noa Weber is forty-seven and moaning. For years she’s been moaning, and there’s nothing new in her moans or her fantasies, and the self-disgust isn’t new either.

Sometimes you have to stick your finger down your throat and vomit up the disgusting insides of the self … sometimes you have to increase the nausea in order to get rid of the disgust.…

The light of the computer screen is the best disinfectant.

• • •

For years this itch has been coming and going in me, like a gravitation toward suicide, like a yearning for purification. Like a demon that whispers to me: Now, now, imagine them all … put them into a hall, row after row … Miriam, Talush, your parents, Hagar, Osnat, friends and fellow citizens, all your readers, and all the fucked-up activists and employees of the fund. Seat them in front of you one by one, and then snigger yourself to death before their eyes.

To confess to the finish … to confess till it finishes me off … to talk about him, to talk about myself, to talk so I won’t have to bear it any more. To talk until I can’t stand myself any longer. To talk, to talk, to talk myself to death — this is apparently why I’m standing here before you today.

Forty-seven years old. My daughter will turn twenty-nine this summer, and this story certainly isn’t meant for her. Children, I believe, don’t need to know the whole truth about their parents, and a gasping confession without any perspective won’t make her any the wiser. In any case she’s smarter than I am, or perhaps not smarter, but clearer and more sensible. Her mouth is always where her heart is. I need my daughter, the first row in my imaginary audience, while Hagar is clearly in no need at all of my imaginary striptease.

All my Nira Woolf novels have great beginnings that lead straight into the plot. I put a lot of thought into my opening sentences. The opening sentences and the closing sentences. That’s the kind of orderly plot in which I’d like to package myself and my love; to lead my madness along until it leaves me, to lead it and myself along like a story to the end.

A PANORAMIC PICTURE

I told you to forget about a panoramic view, but there’s one panorama at least that I can offer you. A panoramic picture of the disease I’ve been dragging around with me for almost thirty years. The picture that comes up on the computer screen after midnight is at its brightest between two and four in the morning, and fades gradually towards dawn, Israel time:

LAA — Love Addicts Anonymous — holding hands on the web. Lovesick ladies from the East Coast to the West Coast, from Europe to Australia, entering the forum for therapeutic encounters. All of them fell in love suddenly, once and for all. And through winter, summer, autumn, and spring they cling to the one and only love that never lets them be.

Women who love too much, is how they define themselves. Women addicted to love. Women whose neurons have been screwed up by their unhealthy loves.

Since discovering the LAA forum, whenever my own neurons begin to go berserk, I enter the web site. I call myself Adele there, a private joke which I have never explained to my sister sufferers and which I never will. Adele, after Victor Hugo’s pathetic floor-rag of a daughter, who followed some nothing all the way to Marrakech and went so crazy because of him that they had to put her in the loony bin. The Adele H. of Israel. Very funny. But the women-who-love-too-much wouldn’t find it amusing, none of them would laugh.

Maybe women who love too much have no sense of humor and maybe they just have no idea about Israeli names and how unromantic they are. Take Sarit for example. Can anyone imagine Sarit throwing herself under a train? Or drowning herself in a river? Which river, exactly? In the shallow trickle of the Jordan? Or perhaps in the fish ponds of some kibbutz? No, the most Sarit could do is give a revealing interview to the mid-week supplement of one of the tabloids. Some names simply impose an anti-romantic discipline on their owners: Pazit. Sarit. Yossi. Amit. Try fitting them into an old love song by Alexander Penn, for instance, “My plain winter coat and the lamp on the bridge, / An autumn night and my face wet with rain. / That was the first time you saw me, remember? / And it was as clear to me as two and two / That I was in love with Amit, and Amit was in love with Pazit, / Yes, it wasn’t any good, it was gloriously bad …”

Gloriously bad. I actually understand these words. And they are the ones that creep up from my tailbone to my collarbone, in complete contradiction to my logic which tells me that bad can’t be glorious. And that all this romantic bullshit is basically a conspiracy against the female sex.

I said that lovesick females from all over the world meet at night on the net, and that of course was an exaggeration characteristic of my state of mind. Africa is silent. China is silent. Japan is silent. India is silent. No Russian soul comes onto the screen to seek support from her sisters. But what do I know about love in Chinese? Or in Japanese? Or in the multitude of Indian languages? Nothing. I simply have no idea how women there love.

In Russia, on the other hand, I’m positive that there are a lot of broken hearts. Judging by their literature and our translations of it, every second heart there is gloriously badly broken. So why are they silent on the net? Even if we limit ourselves to English speakers capable of corresponding, taking into account the tens of millions of Russian women, some of them should definitely have found their way to the group. Hey, you over there, in Kiev, in Saint Petersburg, in Tobolsk, in Baku, in Tallinn, let’s hear from you. Haven’t you heard of the revolution? Haven’t you heard yet? Of course you have. So come on, girls. Stand up now and confess. What’s going on with you there? What’s the meaning of this silence? Isn’t there even one of you who’s sick of her bondage? Let’s hear one Russian soul at long last admit the depressing folly of feeling. One Natasha who’ll come forward and type the ritual admission on her computer keyboard: “1. I am powerless over love, I am addicted to it and my life has become unmanageable.” “2. I have come to believe that only a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.” And, “3. Seeking recovery, I turn my life and will over to the group and to the care of God as I understand Him.”

Love like ours is a progressive disease, in the opinion of our nocturnal forum. In acknowledgement of this fact we are called upon to stop and make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. To admit to ourselves, to our sisters, and to God—“as we understand him”—the many wrongs we have done because of our addiction. To humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings. And then to make a list of all the people we have harmed in the lunacy of our love, apologize to them in detail and make amends to them all.

Sandy from Seattle abandoned four children and her husband for a certain clown, a real honest-to-goodness clown who put on a performance at her son’s seventh birthday party, and who now thinks he’s doing her a favor when he agrees to see her once every few months. Debra from Dallas got out of jail a year ago after making a childish attempt to poison her alcoholic’s wife. Terry from Toronto jams up the mailbox, the fax machine, and the telephones of her lying ex with endless hysterical messages, and he’s about to sue her for the damage she’s caused his business, but all the silly cow can think about is what it’ll be like to see him in court and how exactly he’ll look at her there.

Sandy from Seattle, Debra from Dallas, Betty from Boston, what imbecilic names they choose for themselves. As if they’ve entered a contest for Miss World, and are about to be called onstage in their bathing suits. And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome dopey Debra from Dallas, senile Sandy from Seattle, and number fifteen on our list, brainless Betty from Boston. Here they are, our gorgeous girls, stepping up one after the other in the nakedness of their cute little souls.

Women who love too much are supposed to regret the fact that they were so dependent and so addicted, to regret it profoundly and to apologize profusely. As far as regret is concerned, I don’t know: but apologizing is another matter, and if anyone asked my opinion I would say that most of the group doesn’t need to apologize to anyone. Not as a matter of any urgency at any rate. Somebody screwed these screw-ups, most of them got beaten and betrayed, insulted and humiliated by the scum they fell in love with, and nevertheless they gave them their hearts and souls, and quite often their property too. So you can despise them for it, it’s definitely possible to despise them, but apologize? Let their lousy men apologize first. And let them change the whole system before anything else.

From what I’ve come to understand, a woman joins the group when in general terms the whole love-thing begins to seem unprofitable to her. She reaches this understanding a little late in the day, but in the last analysis that’s what it’s all about: the cost exceeds the gain, the balance of energy is upset, the psychic economy is on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s the way they talk on the site. So is it any wonder, girls, that most of our members come from the strongholds of capitalism? And is it any wonder that nearly all these Protestant ladies with hemorrhoids in their souls talk about “investing in a relationship,” about “profit” and “waste” and “loss”? Okay, I don’t object. I think in these terms too, at least once a day.

When I enter the forum, I identify myself by my pseudonym, say hi to everyone, and then sit in my corner in Jerusalem. The women who love too much allow me to sit in silence while they give me the benefit of their experience, which is certainly very kind and gracious of them. The women in LAA permit me to watch the proceedings from my corner and grow in strength, until such time as I am able to move myself and my fingers and come forward with the whole sad story of my addiction. Debra from Dallas, Sandy from Seattle, Ursula from Utrecht, Terry from Toronto, Chelsea from Charleston, Beatrice from Bern, all the regulars sit patiently on their hemorrhoids and wait for me to admit at last that, yes, I too am suffering from the same progressive disease, and I too am powerless over love, and that only a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. But I have no intention of giving them this satisfaction and confessing on the Internet.

Because the fact is, dear friends, that there may be “brothers-in-arms” but there are no “sisters-in-love,” and my devotion to Alek doesn’t give rise in me to any consciousness of sisterly solidarity. Certainly not with dopey Debra or senile Sandy. Eternally sudden, self-absorbed, ardent, and grandiosely megalomaniac, the monster of love sees itself as unique and alone in the cosmos, and Noa Weber doesn’t have even a drop of empathy for the romantic folly of her fellows.

I remember that, when my daughter was still small and I had already begun to love her, I was overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of solidarity with other mothers of small children, whoever they may be. Mothers in the park. Mothers at the nursery. Mothers everywhere. In nineteen seventy-five or — six, I would sit and gnaw at my fingernails in front of those black and white images televised from Vietnam, then in the dark go into the room where Hagar was sleeping on her stomach with her bum in the air and listen to her breathing, covering her head with the palm of my hand.

But maternal love is one thing and romantic love is another, and all I can say is that romantic love certainly doesn’t fan the flame of humanism in me.

CONFESSING

A few times I almost confessed to the girls in LAA. “Forgive me, sisters, for I have sinned.”

“How have you sinned, sister?”

“I’ve distorted, I’ve lied, I’ve pretended to be someone I’m not. I’ve lived like a slave and an idolator in secret, while boasting of a freedom I didn’t possess. For almost thirty years one feeling has served me as a justification for a lack of feeling. I loved something I should have loathed, and I didn’t love what was worthy of being loved enough.”

Women who love too much aren’t very interested in metaphysical sins of this nature. Squandering their child’s college-savings fund, throwing acid at the legal wife, abandoning their bodies to violence, self-imprisonment, subsidizing their man’s drug habit by prostitution, catatonic depression, drunk driving, these are the kinds of practical sins that preoccupy them, and in comparison to them my sins of thought and feeling turn white as snow. Well, maybe not quite white, but you could certainly say they pale in comparison.

It’s not the fact that I have no sensational sins that prevents me from confessing to the group. The problem is the language. They are all guilty of “co-dependency,” they all want to free themselves of “harmful relationships” and make themselves fit for “meaningful relationships.” They are all trying “to develop their spiritual aspect,” to “grow emotionally,” “to be in touch with their feelings”—whatever the hell that means — and all of them without exception believe in the liberating effect of archaeology. As a consequence of this belief they carry out energetic excavations in their family history, and on bad nights I definitely find their stories gripping. Senile Sandy from Seattle, for example, had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather, which in her opinion and that of the group explains the “co-dependency” she has with her clown. Brainless Betty from Boston has no history of alcoholism in the family, but she had a neglectful mother who to this day is still a compulsive overeater. And it’s certainly touching to read how little Betty used to hide the bread in hopes of saving something for her school sandwich from her mother’s nightly kitchen raids. Except that according to Betty’s and the rest of the group’s logic, a mother who loves food sentences her daughter to a lifetime of compulsive love, and at that point I stop being touched and begin to laugh.

On a number of occasions I was tempted to make the girls happy and join the party at last by cooking up some sort of terminal explanation for my case. An eloquent etiology of my disease. Ready? Yes, they’re all ready. So what happened to me, girls, is that my father was hardly ever at home, my heroic father was in the army with men and other women, he was with other women a lot, and I never had a real home either, because the first eight years of my life I spent in the children’s house on a kibbutz. Allow me to confine myself for a moment to the story of the kibbutz.

Kibbutz, girls, do you have any idea of what a kibbutz is? No, of course you don’t, because the only people who know what a kibbutz is are those who grew up on one, like me. If there are any Jewish souls among you, if you grew up on the propaganda of the Jewish National Fund, kindly forget the fishermen spreading their nets, the female tractor driver and the suntanned women picking oranges and smiling photogenic smiles from the tops of their ladders. A kibbutz, my sisters, is not a poster, and even though the children’s house covered in ivy and bougainvillea looks like the Garden of Eden in the photographs, that’s what the island in Lord of the Flies looked like in the beginning, too.

The children’s house … let me tell you about the children’s house. In this house with the red-tiled roof, I was abandoned every day to the violence of my peer group, and every night to my loneliness. Eight years times three hundred and sixty-five days equals … You can work it out yourselves, but the sum is the number of nights that I was abandoned by my mother.

Eight times three hundred and sixty-five days of violence and ridicule, and eight times three hundred and sixty-five long nights of anxiety and fear, taught me to hide my neediness. When I ran away from the group to my parents’ room, my mother would lose no time in taking me back. When I complained, she pretended that she didn’t hear or told me to be strong and pull myself together. And I, it seems, was a good pupil, and gradually I stifled my tears until the weeping was silenced inside me and turned into quiet despair. That’s how they taught me to associate love with abandonment, and that’s how they got me used to the idea that love is not a refuge.

Only now, my sisters, that I, Adele H. from Israel, sit here in our nocturnal group, do I suddenly have the insight that with so many abandonments behind me — I’ve already counted them for you: three hundred and sixty-five times eight — with so many abandonments, it’s clear why before I reached the age of eighteen I turned myself into a Natasha (natash being Hebrew for “abandon”), and why I have remained abandoned ever since.

This kind of description, which is definitely not complete fiction, but only partly false, this kind of description would immediately reward me with an international wave of empathy. The trouble is that what I need is contempt, not empathy, and certainly not the empathy of blockheads.

A parody of self-interpretation will not bring me the self-disgust I’m looking for.

I say a parody of self-interpretation, partly because my childhood wasn’t as miserable as I described it, but mainly because I, in contrast to my sisters-who-love-too-much, do not believe that my dybbuk has a “psychological background.” My father, my mother, and Yochie the kibbutz children’s caretaker, have no part in this story, and if not for the psychobabble they hear on the television or read in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to the love-addicts of LAA to shove their parents into the picture, either. Think of Romeo and Juliet, for instance: it’s true that Romeo and Juliet had parents, and logic demands that before the play begins they had some kind of childhood too, but nobody would seek the reason for Juliet’s love in Mrs. Capulet’s eating disorder, the love came of its own accord, the love seized hold of her, the love made her what she was. And in the face of such a lightning bolt only an idiot would insist on asking, “Why?”

So even if I could easily offer a psychological explanation for my dybbuk, and not only just one but a few, in this matter you won’t get even a hint of a clue from me. Accept it, dear reader, or not; here I stand, and this is not a psychological novel.

And if, like some stubborn interviewer, you go on nagging me about the “why,” I’m prepared to throw out the hypothesis that on the second of July, nineteen-hundred and seventy-two, somebody put a love potion into my coffee. It was black Turkish coffee, and I drank it from a thick glass purchased in the Machaneh Yehuda market in Jerusalem. The kind of love potion imbibed by Tristan and Isolde, who as far as I know had no psychological reasons for their love either.

JULY THE SECOND NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

Nineteen seventy-two was an eventful year. Richard Nixon defeated McGovern. Bobby Fischer defeated Spassky. The Pope visited China. Brezhnev was taken for a ride on Apollo 15. Terrorists poisoned the pandas in the Washington Zoo. I’m not being serious here. I could have done a bit of research to refresh my memory, but I don’t leave the house now, and what do I need research for? I’ve already warned you that there isn’t going to be any historical panorama here, only me, me and my life, that in the summer of ’72 received its present form.

I can’t describe what I was like before the second of July, but if it’s really necessary, think of a formless entity of a girl. Naturally I did various things, like most of the people around me, and voiced opinions like them — more emphatically than most, as a matter of fact — but these deeds and words did not shape the entity I was into any particular form.

Because what can you already say about a seventeen-year-old girl? That she’s a good student, but not a nerd? That she’s athletic? That she collects stamps? I didn’t collect stamps. That her relations with her parents are strained and her relations with her younger sister a little less so? Open any teen magazine and you’ll find hundreds of girls described in precisely the same terms.

When I say formless, I mean mainly in the bodily sense. My measurements haven’t changed much since then, only my style of dressing has undergone changes; in the summer of ’72 I went about mainly in batik skirts and Arab kaftans, and my sense of my body underneath them was as loose and fluid as the garments. In hindsight, that body seems to me like a sea mollusk without edges, as if it hadn’t been properly packed into my smooth girlish skin.

Of course I didn’t think of myself in those days as a formless mollusk. In April I began to fuck and in May I discovered how to come. The earth didn’t shake, even though I wanted very much to convince myself of a certain tremor, but in any case at the beginning of July, with the experience of about ten orgasms behind me, I saw myself as a model of decadent sensuousness, Liza Minelli playing Sally Bowles.

I began to fuck, I say, but in those days in our school nobody “fucked,” not even the boys. “Going to bed with,” we called it politely, or “going all the way,” or best of all: “making love.” And since I had “made love,” or more precisely in order that I could at long last “make love,” I was naturally obliged to assume that I was “in love.” My boyfriend’s name was Amikam, and he too was officially in love.

In order to “make love” we would go for hikes in the countryside on holidays and weekends. On ordinary weekdays, we would go to the Jerusalem forest, a place which should more properly be called the Jerusalem woods, and it was all as nice and delightful and enjoyable as it was supposed to be, except for an alarming weariness that sometimes overcame me on the way back. This weariness sometimes came over me without any connection to anything: a gray heaviness that poured in and overpowered me so that I had to sit down on the curb. My head like a hot sponge, my eyelids stuck together, hearing the cars go past, smelling asphalt and gasoline, and losing my limbs that refused to take messages from my brain. How many times did it happen? Five or six, I don’t remember, but I do remember Amikam’s hands massaging my shoulders, invading my bra and retreating with the noise and heat of another passing car, the hands of a boy trying to awaken Sleeping Beauty.

Sex is supposed to wake you up, love is supposed to wake you up, but me, a healthy and athletic young girl — first in the thousand- and two thousand-meter races — it put to gray sleep. We surmised that it was because of the pill, and since we were both about to be drafted into the army, and didn’t expect to see much of each other after that, even though we would “still be a couple,” be faithful to each other and so on, we decided to forgo the contraceptive pills I had very responsibly started to swallow a month before we “went all the way.” Today it’s clear to me that getting rid of the pills was inter alia a promise that I would remain faithful to him, faithfulness being a subject on which we conducted lengthy and solemn seminars during this period. Should we give ourselves a chance to “experience relationships with other people”? Should we “free each other” before we began our army service? Did “a love like ours close us off from other experiences”?

At the beginning of the summer we went together to see the movie Cabaret, and came to the common conclusion that it was about repulsive people in a sick society, and that it was no wonder that the Germans ended up doing what they did after such appalling decadence. We weren’t lying, this was our honest opinion about which we both agreed, but an hour after we left the cinema it happened that I came on to him with a new, provocative boldness, and while I was busy doing so I also fantasized that Amikam was Michael York and that I was lying between him and a decadent German baron who was embracing me closely from behind. What Amikam’s fantasies were I don’t know. Perhaps the suppleness of Sally Bowles, perhaps the firmness of the German baron, or perhaps he didn’t fantasize at all. Everything seems possible to the same extent. What do I know about him? In any case it was good that night, except for the attack of weakness afterwards, which is the only one that I can place in the context of a specific event.

AMIKAM

Was killed on the Golan Heights in the first week of the Yom Kippur War. He was my first boyfriend, with whom I “made love,” and that should be important. He was my boyfriend for two years. I can conjure up his appearance in words: very tall, shoulders sloping slightly forward, black hair on a chest that never got a deep tan, black hair on fingers strumming a guitar—“I’m just a poor boy …”—brows frowning in concentration like a little shelf jutting from his forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple. I can describe him in words, but I can’t really see him. He isn’t present, and although I feel guilty towards him, there isn’t enough substance in the memory to torture and chastise me. His ghost doesn’t haunt me at night and I have never had nightmares about him.

What is there to say about a seventeen-year-old girl? What is there to say about someone who was nineteen years and three months old when he died? He was a good student. He was an outstanding soldier and an outstanding tank commander, or so I was told. Amikam read two newspapers every day, Amikam wrote a fine essay on Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, Amikam was a counselor in the Zionist Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, he liked Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, he couldn’t dance and he could fix things, and everything he did he did seriously and with concentration, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his black brows frowning. Once, when I tried to remember his touch, I thought of a wooden board.

I didn’t go to his funeral. When he died Hagar was already there, a baby of five months, and I was detached from my surroundings owing to my madness and my motherhood and because of the melodramatic pose I had adopted. I heard about his death weeks after he fell and it was too late to pay a condolence call to his parents. And anyway, how would I go? With the “accident” baby in my arms? I didn’t even fit the role of the ex-girlfriend, their son’s first sweetheart. And, in any case, they bore me a grudge.

I don’t intend to dig up what happened with Amikam, the way I treated Amikam. Such things happen, when I did what I did I didn’t know that he was going to get killed, and, anyway, it isn’t him I’ve been carrying around for the past twenty-nine years. Amikam comes into this story only because one evening he took me to an apartment on Usha Street, in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, where I still live today.

THE SECOND OF JULY

Amikam related to politics with the same thoroughness and deliberation with which he prepared for his final exams, with which he mended a coil in the electric heater, with which he “went all the way” with me. When he was asked about his political views he was in the habit of replying that he “saw himself as part of the New Left,” and for months before his conscription he was engaged with the question of whether he should “go even further to the left,” in other words, left of his parents who were active in MAPAM, the Zionist-Socialist United Workers Party.

Amikam took me to Usha Street because a graduate of the youth movement who had “gone even further left” told him about an interesting group that met there in the evenings. History students. Activists from poor neighborhoods. Artists. Students at the Bezalel Academy of Art. And so on. I didn’t want to go. In arguments I couldn’t get out of I showed the proper degree of enthusiasm, but the truth is that politics interested me less than they did Amikam, and the thought of entering a strange house with a group of people older than myself embarrassed me. We lived mainly among our peers, and the world of the free spirits who had already completed their army service seemed to me like a vague and distant dream. A magical stage which would no doubt arrive, but which we were still too callow to be fit to enter. I knew that I would be ashamed of my very presence in their space, and I knew that I might very well, however unjustly, also be ashamed of Amikam. And nevertheless I went. I went because I was his girlfriend. And I went because the next day we were due to take our final exams in literature; and on the pretext that we were going to study late into the night, I received permission from my mother to sleep over at his house, in his sister’s room.

Thirty-six steps of an external stairway led to the apartment on the second floor. I didn’t count them then. Forget the prophecies of the heart: No premonition told me that for the next twenty-nine years I would go up and down them about seventy thousand times, a few hundred of them with a baby carriage; no tingling of my toes hinted that I would wound my exposed big toe four times on the rusty can holding the sick jasmine bush that refused to die; that in certain moods I would decide to change the soil and plant a new bush there, and in others I would plan to drag it to the dumpster, and that I would never do either; I had no inkling that I was to see the top of the shaky iron banister covered with a strip of snow, and that its unsteadiness would worry me from time to time, and that about this too, I would do nothing.

Entering the apartment was as embarrassing as I had imagined. The noise inside was so loud that the students/artists/neighborhood-activists did not hear us knocking, and when they finally opened the door it turned out that Amikam’s acquaintance “who had gone even further left” wasn’t there. The bearded man who opened the door identified himself as “Hamida,” and when we said together “What?” and “Sorry?” he barred our way and demanded to know whether or not we recognized the right to self-determination.

His real name was Yoash, and Yoash, as an expression of his right to self-determination, had gone to the Ministry of Interior and demanded to have his name changed to “Hamida.” The Ministry of Interior, for its part, had argued that “Hamida” was the name of an Arab woman, that a Jewish male could not call himself “Hamida” on the grounds of fraud and imposture, but Yoash insisted on his right to call himself whatever he liked, and his correspondence with the Ministry of Interior and with the lawyers he badgered to represent him for nothing, as a public service, filled a shiny orange folder which he took with him wherever he went. I learned these details later; at the threshold, the exchange was confined to Amikam’s declaration that we did indeed recognize the right to self-determination, a slogan which served as the “open sesame” that let us in to the apartment.

Amikam and I sat on a mattress while a passionate debate about the Organization of African Unity stormed above our heads. Anyone listening might have gained the impression that the question of whether Africa should unite would be determined on Usha Street, and if so, around what principles, for example whether the spread of Islam was a stage that could be skipped, or whether “we had to go through it.” Someone lectured with astonishing knowledge about colonialism and Liberia, colonialism and Cameroon, colonialism and Ethiopia, Somalia, the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and I remember thinking that I should know something about all these places; my father traveled a lot to those parts of the world, to make devil-knows-what connections and to negotiate all kinds of deals. The business he had entered a few years before was called the Agricultural Development Corporation, and from then on the hall table was covered with shiny brochures in English and French, with photographs of a black man driving a red tractor, and a black scientist holding up a test tube like a wine glass and flashing a white smile from ear to ear. During all his years on the kibbutz my father had never worked in agriculture, except for the seasonal mobilizations it was impossible to get out of, and his partners in the enterprise had retired from the army only a little while before he did so himself, but to this day he continues to insist that “although the company had expanded its interests from grain storage to heavy equipment and other areas of aid,” it had never sold anything shady to any shady regime. What do I know? What did I know then? Only that from the day he became a civilian the house filled up with all kinds of junk from Africa — families of carved elephants, masks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, stinking leather gourds — and nevertheless I couldn’t place Liberia on the map. But why am I dwelling on my father? And who cares about Liberia? And what do I care today about which theoretical organizations that group was debating then? I didn’t sit down to tell nostalgic tales about the Jerusalem folklore of student radicals in Nachlaot in the seventies — and here I am already dragging in “jasmine bushes” and “Bezalel” and “Yoash-Hamida”—and with this kind of decor, in a couple of pages I’ll have turned myself and my life into something affected and anecdotal. It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere,” which in any case I have no desire to remember.

It took some time before anyone paid us any attention. We sat down low and looked at the sandaled feet of the debaters taking the floor opposite us, and in the air was a strong scent the name of which was then unknown to me. Patchouli, I later learned.

Amikam looked as if he was concentrating hard, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, trying to focus on one of the discussions out of the several taking place simultaneously. Simultaneity wasn’t his strong point, but nevertheless he managed to turn to look at me and scowl when I lit one cigarette with another; despite the nausea induced by the unaccustomed amount of nicotine, I was chain-smoking. The person who addressed me in the end was a very fat girl, with a vast heaving bosom and agitated gestures, someone swaying above me and enthusing about her experiences at a “La Mama” workshop. She wanted to know what I did; I said I was in the middle of my final exams, I was being drafted in November, and of course I didn’t know yet what I was going to do in the army. It was one of those moments when for no evident reason an interval of silence suddenly comes into being in all the conversations being conducted in the same space at the same time, so that everyone heard me saying: “What I’d like most is to be an operations room clerk in a commando unit and the thing I most dread is being stuck in an office in Tel Aviv.” This was not the right thing to say to a girl just back from six months in New York in a “La Mama” workshop. And it wasn’t the right thing to say in that place. The owner of the heaving bosom puffed out her already swollen cheeks, holding back her laughter, and in the embarrassing silence a “tsss” of ridicule was heard from the direction of the kitchen.

“It’s important to me to contribute,” I added, in a panic, aware of the looks recognizing my panic. The only matches left in my matchbox were burnt.

“Contribute to whom? Contribute to what?” A boy in ostentatiously ugly thick black glasses looked both amused and irate. I tossed my bangs out of my eyes and, without any idea of what I was about to say, avoided the question in a defiant voice, with a statement that was completely new to me: “Obviously if I can’t really contribute, then I’d prefer not to serve at all.” Without looking at Amikam I felt him turning his head, and this was also the moment that I saw Alek.

“There’s nothing funny about what.…” He was standing directly opposite me, leaning on the kitchen door frame, the leaning hand holding a closed book, with one finger inside it marking his place.

“Noa.”

“What she says isn’t funny. Her voice doesn’t make me laugh.” His pronunciation was very clear, with almost no trace of a foreign accent, except for certain soft vowels; only his pronunciation was excessively clear, separating the words; and when he paused they waited for him to continue. “Noa is a woman,” he continued at his leisure, “you don’t laugh at what happens to a woman. An authentic person would understand what she’s saying … what it means … and what her voice is saying to him.… What is it saying?” he repeated the question obediently echoed back to him by one of the girls in his audience. “It’s saying that she needs to be freed. It’s saying that a man has to marry her, and all the other girls who are beginning to think like Noa. There have to be men to go with all of them to the Rabbinate and free them from the army by marrying them.”

AND THEN HE SAID TO ME AND THEN I SAID TO HIM

I reread the “he said and I said,” and “then he asked me, and then I answered him”—the description is accurate, but nevertheless I can’t find even the nucleus of an explanation of what happened afterwards in it. Perhaps I should have run the moments like a silent movie. A very young woman sits on a mattress on the floor, hugging her knees and smoking. The camera follows the woman’s look, a look from below, takes in bits of detail: dirty toes, thick ankles, cutoff jeans ragged at the edges, a heaving bosom, a jaw moving in speech, a jaw moving in mastication. An orchestra accompanies the pictures with a cacophony of sound and suddenly stops. The young Valentino, he was so young then, stands in a relaxed pose in the frame of an open door. He has black hair cropped as short as a convict’s, he is wearing a very white tee shirt, and is standing far enough away so that the woman’s look, still from below, can take him in at full length. The man speaks, without marked expressions, without gesticulations, a restrained foreign body, and when he stops talking the orchestra begins to play again, but now the music has one clear theme. The man lingers in the doorway and his look rests on the girl, who is fiddling with a packet of cigarettes. After a long moment he reaches out his hand and beckons her to him with two fingers. The girl gets up and goes to him, he lights her a cigarette, and they both disappear into the kitchen.

Love can be described as compulsive thinking. The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture. And in the days to come I would be stuck on two gestures from the opening scene:

The man signals “come here” with his finger, and the girl gets up and comes. It’s the kind of gesture with which you beckon a child. Or a servant. Or a waitress, if you haven’t got any manners. Is the girl not aware of this? And how she is. And nevertheless — oh, the shame of it — she gets up. Not “in spite of” the gesture but because of it. Let’s admit that the nonchalant movement of the finger turns her on, as if it’s moving between her legs.

The foreign man looks into her eyes, and with a foreign gesture he lights her cigarette. And afterwards too, in the kitchen, he keeps on watching her and offering her a light, instead of giving her the lighter so that she can light up herself.

Compulsive thinking latches on to details and dwells on them as if they hold enormous significance which cannot be grasped in a moment. It keeps returning to them again and again as if there is still something left to understand. The more I think about the meaning of these gestures the sicker I get of my thoughts and of myself for thinking them. Mulling over the subtleties of gestures and their erotic nuances like some idiotic character in a genteel English romance.

You won’t find any such absurd courting rituals in my Nira Woolf stories. No luuuve and no brooding thoughts. Not with Nira. Since she’s my character and I invented her, obviously I constructed her according to my taste: my heroine would never go in for such nonsense as “and then I said to him” and “and then he kept quiet and didn’t say anything.” And nobody would beckon my heroine with his finger—“come here.” Because if anyone ever uses that gesture in my books — and I don’t think anyone will — it will only be Nira herself. She’ll beckon and the man will come, and they’ll fuck on the carpet before anybody can say Jack Robinson. And she won’t spend too much time thinking about it afterwards either, because my James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about.

Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t conduct myself according to them, and although I can argue in my defense that at the age of seventeen I didn’t know what I believed yet, that argument lost its validity a long time ago.

I can imagine Nira Woolf listening to my “he looked at me” and “he went on looking at me,” stroking one of her monstrous cats under its chin, flexing a muscle in her arm and yawning with boredom. At some point she would cut me short and say: “Okay, okay, okay, I get the point, so what happened? Did you fuck on the carpet?”

Yes, I went to bed with Alek that night, not on the carpet but in his carved wooden bed that I still sleep in to this day.

I could have written that in the way my heroine would have approved of, in other words, wittily. I could have mocked him and the foolish girl I was until Nira Woolf split her sides laughing. But that’s not the reason why I sat down to write.

THE MARKETPLACE OF ANECDOTES

The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.

So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.

The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-à-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.

Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake, because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what’s important and what’s not. Fighting for the rights of dispossessed Arabs, defrauded patients, oppressed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system,” saving the innocent and stamping out evil — that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.

“Your heart aches because of some man?” she would say. “Nonsense, darling, just hypochondria, a little twinge you’ve decided to blow up out of all proportion. But never mind, sweetie, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, you go right ahead. And I hope you never know what real pain feels like.”

SO WHAT IF

So what if the soul stole its trembling from a body trembling with terror? And what if the aching of the heart was plundered for metaphorical purposes from those suffering the agonies of real pain? And if I say: there is no soul, there’s no such thing, the trembling soul is nothing but literary bullshit, will the trembling of that non-existent entity stop? Like hell it will.

Because what does it help me to know that the heart is a muscle, just a blood-pumping muscle, if my heart still goes out to him, and the bloody muscle still yearns and swells?

IN SHORT, WHAT HAPPENED

Noa: Where are you from?

Alek: You don’t want to know. Too many places.

Noa: What places?

Alek: It won’t mean much to you. I was born in Sverdlovsk, later we lived in Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and there were a few more on the way. A Jew’s story.

1) He made me coffee in a thick glass and served it on a saucer. Afterwards he opened the iron shutters and watered the pink geranium on the bars. In spite of all the glasses and plastic bottles piled up there during the evening, the kitchen looked clean.

2) When he filled the finjan with water to make coffee he put his book down on the marble counter. It was a German book. Alek said that when he finished everything he intended doing, next July, in one year exactly, he was going to fly from here to Heidelberg, and I, without any justification or logic, felt a little vacuum of surprise and insult opening inside me. “Heidelberg?” I asked, and Alek said: “Why not? All kinds of interesting things started from there. And anyway, I have a scholarship for Heidelberg.”

3) People who were in the kitchen before us gradually left, and those who came in after us took what they wanted and quickly went out again. Because of us.

4) I asked him what he meant when he talked about my voice, and Alek said: “It has to do with slavery and also inner freedom. People, as you know, speak in several voices, you can distinguish by the sound and the content.” When I said “an operations room clerk in a commando unit” he heard the foreign, banal voice, we all have foreign voices like that that speak from our mouths and they are what make us slaves. But when he heard me suddenly say that perhaps I didn’t want to serve in the army at all, something changed, and for a moment he thought that he was hearing my authentic voice. Like a clean note.

All these are distant memories, twenty-nine years is a long time, and I remember exactly only because in the days and hours that came afterwards I returned to them again and again and again, like learning a lesson by rote.

I remember that although I didn’t really understand what he said, it seemed to me that I understood, and in any case I had no desire to break the atmosphere of clandestine understanding in which we had wrapped ourselves. Because of this atmosphere of secret, self-evident understanding it seemed we were only talking for the sake of talking and that there was actually no need for words at all.

Perhaps because of our lengthening silences, perhaps because the others began to leave, perhaps because he had spoken before about voices — I suddenly became aware of the record which had apparently been playing for some time in the background. Not the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, and not Joni Mitchell. Not Judy Collins or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich. Something completely different was playing there. Something I’d never heard before, the angelic voices of women singing to God.

A MUSIC SEMINAR

The months to come were, among other things, a concentrated seminar on music, or to be more precise on Alek’s forty-something records. My musical experience up to then consisted of one year of recorder lessons on the kibbutz, shrieking community singing on bus trips, and Amikam’s not absolutely tuneless vocal accompaniment to his guitar strumming.

With my lack of any musical education I had no possibility of identifying the “irony” Alek found in Stravinsky, of relating to his “inner freedom” or his “playfulness,” nor to compare different performances on the music programs on the radio. But nevertheless I learned what I could as quickly as a dog, both because of the sensitized senses of love, and because I had no choice, a simple matter of conditioning. I very quickly learned that Schubert’s symphonies fulfilled the role of elevator music for him, something played in order to hear neither the music nor anything else. And with the Fifth or the Eighth Symphony in the background, pulled over his head like a helmet, it was better for me not to be seen or heard if I didn’t want to see a blank face or hear a formal voice, flat to the point of sarcasm, answering me.

One degree further than Schubert — I’m talking about degrees of torture here — were hours of Sibelius, with a couple of works by Dvorák thrown in. Because they were the sign that Alek had opened the sluice gate of despair, not reading, not working, just lying in bed and smoking. If anyone knocked at the front door, he wouldn’t answer. Would he be angry if I opened it? Would he be angry if I didn’t? Because if there was anyone at the door it wasn’t me they were coming to see. Nobody came to see me.

My musical conditioning was such that to this day it’s enough for me to overhear a couple of notes from a radio, or the window of a house, for my whole body to react immediately. Or sometimes it happens the other way around: first the body reaction and the images return, and only seconds later do I become aware of the sound stimulus in the background. One morning last summer when Hagar was visiting I woke up with an old joy, smelling a whiff of the Flex shampoo that I didn’t have in the house and hadn’t bought for years. A Debussy piano sonata was playing and announcing a morning of the good morning to you kind, a morning promising a day of cheerful well-being in our abode. Soon the winter sun would warm my shoulders in the kitchen. “Yesterday I bought us strawberries in the market,” and “Why don’t you slice some bread? Should I put cream and sugar on the strawberries?” And at those moments of waking my whole body was invaded with a sense of youthful joy, until a woman’s voice on the “Voice of Music” interrupted the fantasy and identified the stimulus.

Of the forty-something compositions constantly playing then in the background, I taped only one in the days to come, and it too I only play very rarely, in a kind of bitter surrender to sweetness. Gregorian Chants was written on the brown record sleeve.

The low pealing of a single great bell, low voices slowly gathering as if coming from a great distance, and the sense of infinite space opening up a window open to the rain opens to … and slanting rain wets the gas ring and nobody cares. Alek embraces me from behind and puts his hand on my rounding belly. I listen, closing my eyes and putting my hand on my flat stomach, and like then, with my head falling back, I slow time down on the waves of the slow singing over an infinite expanse. Like then, I slow time down, delaying and at the same time waiting for the return of a certain note and a certain moment. Because before he goes back to his room Alek turns me round to face him and his face is completely open. He turns me to him and looks at me as if he admits everything, and as if he is thankful for everything, and a great grace envelops us both.

For some mysterious psychological-biographical reason rooted in the distant past, in those days he associated church music with erotic feelings, as if religion permitted sex, and as if sex had no value unless it connected you to the wings of angels.

It’s difficult for me now to think of this religious eroticism in its raw, youthful, “consumer” incarnation; to think of how we “consumed” this music, to think of all the tours of churches we “consumed.” His favorite was the one in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the descent on foot from the Mount of Olives. He never touched me there, but when we stood there I knew how he would touch me later.

It’s strange to think of that particular music as a “substance” to be consumed, but that’s how I opened up to him then, by “using” this “substance.” That’s how I felt I was opening up. And the world actually opened up again and again, in this mystical pretension, as if the contact of body with body brought us into contact with something greater than we were. Bringing down Bach’s “Joy” on us, bringing down joy on all the world.

Because we were really into it, boy were we into it: with the heavenly sex, with sex and heaven, and the Kyrie eleison, oh God, have mercy on us, oh Agnus Dei, save us, yes, yes, just so, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus. Until we came together on this pretentious trip. On the third movement of Bach’s Mass, on the first night.

We came together, I say, but the truth is that the first time only Alek came, while I had the mental equivalent of an orgasm. Our movements weren’t yet sufficiently coordinated, the coordination came later, and somehow coming wasn’t in the least important. A faint orange light illuminated the room from outside. An orange light illuminated his face. And the sight of his slender face looking tortured in the light was important.

Something in me was no doubt screwed up before that, and Bach is not to blame for the fact that from the beginning I fucked Alek, from the beginning I cleaved to Alek, as if I was seeking salvation.

IF YOU ASKED ME TODAY

My daughter turned twenty-nine this spring, and she’s almost eleven years older than I was then. Sometime or other, when she was serving in Training Camp 12, I think, she began talking solemnly about something she called my “spiritual needs,” and whenever my daughter returns to the subject of her “spiritual needs,” we get into a fight. However hard I try to stop myself I can’t suppress the aggression this combination of words arouses in me. Once, six or seven years ago, she tried to explain to me something about the “spiritual need,” or maybe it was the “cultural need,” because of which she chose to study Judaism, and in response to this I remarked that “If we’re already talking about needs, haven’t you noticed that the toilet paper in the bathroom’s finished?” Afterwards, for a month, consistent as usual, Hagar ignored my attempts to butter her up and refused to speak to me, and when in the end she relented, I almost pushed her into a renewed silence when I remarked that “needs” sounded like the jargon of politicians or social workers.

Since in the end I satisfied her needs by financing her studies, we ended up with a fashionable agreement to disagree. “Tolerance,” they call it.

Today my daughter is studying in New York, for the rabbinate, God help us, and intends to take responsibility for the “spiritual, religious, and cultural needs” of others. From time to time she sends me papers, articles, or little sermons she has written, and in all of them God appears, with complete naturalness, in one form or another. “Redemption” and “the soul” are frequently featured too. Chaos neatly packaged and filed in a clear card-index with an enlightened message. Social justice, relationship, community, responsibility, love, and peace.

“Wasted on me,” I write to Hagar, “I was born deaf to God and the sublime, eternity, the soul and redemption, and I definitely regret it. If you want your mother ‘to accept you as you are’ you’ll have to accept me as I am, and stop looking for my nonexistent religious sentiments. I have no such latent sentiment, I have never had them, and, if you ask me, the world would look a lot better without eternity, redemption, and so on.” I refrain from adding that her god of social justice bores me, and that her “congregation” that comes to get a taste of “Jewish spirituality” before Saturday brunch makes me sick.

What would my daughter say about the sexual-religious sessions in the course of which she was created? I sometimes wonder if their shadow is sailing in her blood.

If you were to ask my opinion today, that is to say my official opinion, then fucking is for fun, fucking is for the simple joy of it, and all the rest, dear sisters, is pure and total bullshit. That’s what I think, that’s what I think I think, but if that’s what I think, how come certain sounds make my fingers breathe? And how come I revive the pain inside me as willingly as I revive the pleasure? And how come for years I haven’t found any fun for its own sake in fucking for its own sake?

I can mock Alek’s bands of angels until tomorrow, I can talk about the ostensibly illegitimate way he used church music in order to “create an atmosphere” conducive to getting me into bed. And in fact, perhaps not only me. So what? Others used protest songs against the war in Vietnam, or against the atom bomb, or against capital punishment, as a smooth slide into bed, and that’s not the point. A musical accompaniment is only an accompaniment, and it accompanies what exists without it too.

The point is that with Amikam I waited for the earth to shake, which is bad enough to begin with, and with Alek I expected even more, I went even further, from bad to worse. The earth wasn’t enough for me, suddenly there were the heavens above too. And with all my soul I longed for that heaven to open, and even though I don’t recognize the existence of that heaven, for a moment it seemed that it had opened and that lux, lux, lux perpetua was illuminating my soul, whose dubious existence I don’t admit to either.

I should have written to my daughter: At the age of eighteen you were much wiser than me. You knew how to identify your evil instinct, and to tame it like a cute puppy whose name is “need.”

“God,” my daughter repeatedly explains to me, trying to appease my anti-religious feminism and annoying me with the increasingly educational tone taking over her letters, “my God isn’t a man.” And she also writes: “If you would find the time to read at least a few chapters of the collection I sent you (from your last letter I understand that you haven’t read it yet) you would discover that in our culture God has a feminine aspect, too. And this feminine aspect can be stressed in study and developed in interpretation.”

My darling daughter, my sweet and kosher Hagar, first cuts off God’s prick, and then fakes a religious orgasm, and in English what’s more.

But my daughter with her castrated God — does she really believe in His existence? I’ve never been able to understand it — my daughter with her emasculated Sublime, divested of both His prick and His wrath, will never turn love into religion or confuse a man with God like her mother did.

THE WINK

When most of the guests had already left, Amikam came into the kitchen. “Are we going?” he asked me. When I try to remember his face, it’s the way it looked then that I remember: frowning, worried, slightly downcast, not looking me in the eye.

A devil got into me. Or I grabbed a devil by the tail and jumped onto its back. I swear, a minute before I opened my mouth I had no idea what I was going to say. “We’re not going, you’re going. You’re going and I’m staying.” He didn’t deserve such a slap in the face. He had never done anything to justify it. Or the cold smile that appeared on my face when he failed to react immediately. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alek leaning against the marble counter, hugging himself with one hand and smoking with the other.

And Amikam left. For some reason I turned to the window and watched him going down, down, down the steps. I didn’t know that he was going to die. How could I have known? Who was I to know? Even the head of military intelligence didn’t know that a war was going to break out. And in any case Amikam’s death has nothing to do with this scene, and the death does nothing to change the nature of the deed. But what exactly was the deed? What did I think I was doing? A cold, arrogant gaiety bubbled inside me like an unfamiliar drug, and my voice too was new in my ears.

Strange that I felt no guilt for that gratuitous cruelty, only shame, a cringing shame, especially for the gesture that came afterwards. Because when Amikam was already at the bottom of the stairs he turned his head and looked straight at the window, and when his eyes met mine, suddenly and for no reason, in a kind of clownish grimace, I winked at him. As if we were both party to some kind of practical joke, as if it was only a joke, and as if he had some part in this trick I was playing. A thousand years have passed since then, and to this day when I remember it that grimace distorts my face. An unformed seventeen-year-old putting on — what character exactly? One minute I was the reckless Sally Bowles, the next minute I was somebody else, and the next the devil knows who.

In those days, as far as I can remember, the phrase “no big deal” was not yet part of our vocabulary, but that’s what that clownish grimace of a wink was apparently meant to convey to Amikam. “Relax, I was only joking, it’s no big deal.” But it was a lie. It was a big deal, and I knew it even then.

Because it’s a fact that seconds afterwards I turned to Alek as if I’d proven something, and as if I was now worthy.

A lot’s happened since then, a whole history has happened since then, more important things than a stupid wink, than some whim of no significance whatsoever. Only my fixated brain would be capable of latching on like that to a momentary grimace, and I still have to cover my face with my hands and wait and wait, quietly, quietly, quietly, until the spasm passes.

A few words nevertheless about what happened afterwards. Love has its own cruel and banal laws, and in the wake of my scorpion bite, as if doomed by these laws, Amikam was truly poisoned. It was no longer a matter of feeling “the right thing” for a boy and a girl to go to bed together. And it was no longer a matter of a “healthy, normal feeling.” He haunted me, he felt haunted by me, in spite of and in opposition to his declared contempt for me. How predictable are these shameful moves — first he waited for me to come and explain and apologize, I could see the tense anticipation and the anxious awareness of my presence, I saw it in his posture, even when he engaged himself in conversations at the school gate before and after exams. And when he saw that I had no intention of approaching him, because what could I say, he came up to reproach me, and when I still had nothing to say except for I can’t help it, he haunted me.

For months he wrote me from the army, scornful and imploring letters, delving and searching for words that would change my heart, clinging to the hope that somewhere, in some nook or cranny the magic words existed, and all he had to do was search diligently to find them.

But there were no such words because no such words exist, and when his letters arrived I was already enmeshed in my misery and I read them and threw them away without being touched by them. In love, I think I have already said, there is no solidarity, and his clumsy, stilted style — and also, I have to confess to my shame, his spelling mistakes — embarrassed me; they embarrassed me as if they were a parody of myself and my own unique love. In any case, I thought, it isn’t me he loves, but the capricious, reckless character I was playing then. Like falling in love with a character in a movie.

On several occasions he lay in wait for me outside the house. And once he popped up in the rain and barred my way. “So this is what you want, so this is how you like it,” he hissed at me as he pushed me against the fence. His hair was wet, his face was wet, and his teeth were clenched over me. My pregnancy was already showing and my five-month belly was crushed against the trousers of his uniform. He had received a twenty-four-hour pass on the pretext of needing to have a wisdom tooth extracted, and after the tooth which didn’t need to be extracted at all had been extracted, straight from the dental clinic, with half his jaw still numb, he came to wait for me in the street. I learned all this later, from another letter he wrote me, and this too did not touch me.

I don’t want to think about him. He’s not my fault, and it’s not my fault that his expression looked ridiculous to me. As ridiculous as the way he grabbed my hands and held them behind my back, as if he was copying some manly gesture he’d seen in the movies, only the imitation was too transparent, like an actor in a bad audition. I shook him off without any difficulty. Without any difficulty because at this point I had nothing to offer in any case and nothing to give. Not to Amikam or to anyone else who wasn’t Alek.

FRAGMENTS

He asked: “Are you expected at home? Should I take you home now?” And I said: “There’s no need, I’m allowed to stay over, I’ve got my final exams in literature tomorrow.” He was amused by the literature exam. “What are you being examined on?” “Tons of stuff. The poets of medieval Spain, Tchernikhowsky, Bialik, Leah Goldberg, Amir Gilboa, five Agnon stories, Pere Goriot(??), Crime and Punishment, and that’s not all. I like Crime and Punishment best, in my opinion it’s the most profound, except for the character of Sonia which isn’t very convincing.” This amused him even more. I didn’t yet know that Alek was studying Comparative Literature. “Interesting … why don’t you find Sonia convincing?”

“Because she’s too one-dimensional, too saintly, as if she isn’t a prostitute at all. It’s obvious that no such prostitute exists.”

“You mean that Dostoevsky failed with her from point of view of social realism?’ ”

“I mean that a prostitute can’t be a saint.”

“And you know this, that a prostitute can’t be saint,” he stated, without a question mark. I didn’t know what to say to him, and I simply repeated like a literature teacher that Sonia was “a one-dimensional character, much more one-dimensional that Raskolnikov.”

He pulled on a pair of pants and got up to make us tea. I remained naked. “If you have an exam tomorrow, you must sleep,” he said and pulled the sheet up to my chin.

How did I come by the illusion that I “understood him,” having only the vaguest notion of what he was talking about?

“Only someone with an individual voice of his own can describe what is impossible to describe,” he quoted to me once, I don’t know from where.

Alek turned off the reading lamp and went to his cubbyhole of a study, the little room where I am writing now. In the light coming from his room and the light of the street lamp coming from outside, I could still see things, and everything I saw gave rise in me to a feeling of wonder, as if something very wonderful and joyful were dancing and twinkling in all the objects in the world. As if something beyond comprehension and steeped in magic pervaded everything, and I had only just found out. An old wooden cupboard, a mirror in a wooden frame hanging on the wall, a picture of a pale green demon woman reflected in the mirror, the bamboo armchair with a white bedspread thrown onto it. And a chilly breeze sharpening the edges of my body, the touch of the sheet and the configuration of the cascading fabric on the armchair.

Wide awake, more wide awake than I had ever been in my life, I sensed everything with my gaze, and it seemed to me that my eyes could feel textures: the lingering touch of a fold of pale cloth; the dry touch of a pile of books; the hooked green touch of the she-devil’s fingernails; the cold green touch of her figure in the mirror and the curly cold green of her hair. Below her, four patterned floor tiles, patched into the yellowish floor, the tendrils of a vine gaily twining over them.

With this gaze came the sensation that I was filling my body, that I was inhabiting all of it, and that I had been given a form. This was me-my-body, and these were my edges, and beyond them was living air. I extracted my hands from under the sheet, I twiddled my fingers in front of my eyes like a baby, and laughed softly with their movements.

Hello, hello, this is me in space.

At some point I got up and went to Alek. I stood behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He didn’t turn around, just held one of my hands with his and went on writing with the other. On the desk the German book I had seen before in the kitchen lay open, together with a German-Russian dictionary.

“What are you doing?” A question that in the days to come I learned not to ask.

“If I’m already going to Heidelberg, I should learn German.”

“Tell me more.”

“More about what?”

“More about the army. You were in the army weren’t you?”

“Once a million years ago I studied medicine for half a year, so they made me medical orderly in the Golani Brigade. Logic of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

“So why shouldn’t a girl serve in the army?”

Alek sighed, turned round to face me, and sat me naked on his knees.

Woman (flirtatiously stubborn, arching her neck back and distancing her face from his kisses): No, explain to me.…

Man (kissing her neck, slipping his hand between her legs): Explain to you what? You know everything.

Woman: But still … explain.…

Man: What can I explain to you? What? A soldier is a slave (turning her face towards him and giving her a deep kiss), a soldier is a slave (another kiss with his eyes closed), and a woman in the army is … how do you say it? Slave of the slave.

Woman (with her eyes closed too): A bondmaid.

Man: Right.

ALEK’S FRIENDS

Alek wasn’t keen on presenting his biography in an orderly fashion: “It doesn’t matter now,” “that’s prehistory,” “it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.” So that it took me months to put the facts of his CV together, and a lot longer to begin to understand something about them. And indeed, what could I understand from a sentence like “My mother’s husband is Polish by origin, and because of that in ’58 they let us leave.” Because what did I know about it? I loved Dostoevsky and to a lesser degree also Tolstoy, they “spoke to me” and for some reason I assumed that I understood them. I liked the “Russian songs” we sang in the youth movement, until I saw that Alek detested them. And I was fascinated by the tales my father used to tell about the “Russian lunacies” of the early days on the kibbutz. My mother would purse her lips whenever he told these stories. She was born on the kibbutz and he wasn’t, so: “Not everything has to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.”

Apart from that, there were the almost daily articles about the “Jews of Silence” and a lot of arguments about the dropouts at the transit station in Austria, and one graffiti on Gaza Street next to the Prime Minister’s house: “The Russian Jews want to go home? Let them go home.” To put it plainly, I didn’t have what’s called a background, I didn’t know a thing, not about the country Alek called his “prehistoric motherland”—France he sometimes referred to as his “historic motherland”—and not even about a mother’s husbands. I didn’t know anyone who had a “mother’s husband.”

Alek wasn’t any keener on explaining the facts than he was on revealing them, and in this he was completely different not only from Amikam but in fact from anyone else I knew. Questions like “If you were already studying in Paris, why did you actually come to Israel?” would make him close up completely.

“I thought this was a country of Jews,” “The students there, in Paris, didn’t really understand. They didn’t have any clue about what their slogans meant. It was clear from the outset that the Communists would take over the whole thing, it couldn’t have happened any other way.” Sometimes he would produce sentences like this, but I didn’t know what to make of them, even though I tried to look as if I understood. Somehow I grasped that Alek’s politics too were different from those of the crowd that hung around in his house, but nothing in my education had prepared me to actually understand what he was saying.

More than twenty years later, in ’93, when I came to him in Moscow, he began to talk to me about Russians and Russia, and he continued to do so in the six further visits I paid him. Perhaps the changed times made it easier for him to explain, and perhaps he needed the years of our common history to trust me. Perhaps he was also influenced by the fact that in these meetings he was the host, and therefore the guide by force of circumstance. In any event, one of the many things I didn’t understand in ’72 was how much of an Israeli I was in his eyes. And that “Israeli” meant foreign. It was enough for me that his Hebrew was almost flawless, it was enough that he had spent six months on a kibbutz and then served in the Golani Brigade, to take it for granted that he understood everything as I did. And more than that, that he understood me as I did.

Close to my final exams in Bible studies — an exam in which Alek showed a surprising interest — I adopted the verb “to know” as it is used in the Book of Genesis as part of my inner language: What, for example, did Adam know about his wife Eve? He didn’t ask, investigate, clarify things to enable him to “know about” her, and nor did she, for her part, “know about” him. Adam knew Eve his wife, and Eve, so I decided, knew Adam. And this primordial knowledge, whatever its meaning, seemed to me the highest level of relationship. A kind of pristine knowledge, preceding words and names. An illumination that does not need biographical data, and is always felt as a miracle.

And even today, years later, I’m not sure that this subliminal knowledge was a total illusion. That is to say, if I were asked my official, rational opinion, it would be that it is impossible to know someone whose language you don’t speak, whose memories you haven’t investigated, whose associations are all foreign to you. A man for whom sounds and smells, words and tastes and concepts are associated with images about which you haven’t got a clue. That’s my opinion, I have no argument to contradict it, and nevertheless, in spite of my irrefutable opinion, what is it that happens when he turns my face to him, when he looks into my face, when I look at him while we’re fucking? What else can I call it but pure knowledge? And a kind of recognition, as if we were predestined to know, and that nothing else is possible for me.

With the passing of the years, the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much bullshit is involved in this kind of “knowing.” “He looked into her eyes until he saw to the depths of her soul.” “And then, in a moment of grace, his soul was revealed to her.” “They were soul mates,” and all the rest of that romantic novelette rubbish. So he fucks me with his eyes open, so I look at him without fantasizing, so I come at the same time as him without taking my eyes off him, so — what does it mean?

I say: It’s sentimental crap, I think it’s crap, it’s clear to me that it’s crap, and nevertheless, against my better judgement, I still feel it as a miracle, and I am still full of the grace of that knowledge.

I say that I had and still have a deep sense of knowledge, but this subcutaneous knowledge did nothing to abate my curiosity. I wanted to know everything — no detail was too trivial for me — and every detail I accumulated immediately split up into lots of new details charged with magic that also split up at the edges into radiant new reflections of light. Alert as a stalker, I spent my days watching him, me, us, trying to learn things from every word and gesture. This was a new, focussed activity that demanded all of me and concentrated all of me, very far from the soft, dazed state usually associated with lovers. And even now, when I recall those memories, it still seems to me that there is yet something to be learned in this story.

In the evenings the house would often be full of people. Looking back it’s clear to me that he didn’t regard them as friends or even like them, but for some reason he simply put his place at their disposal. Sometimes he would make them coffee, sometimes he let somebody else wash glasses or grapes from the market and serve, for the most part he seemed to observe them and their arguments from the side.

In the living room behind me — though for some reason I feel as if their scenes took place somewhere else — they chewed over the third world and the cultural revolution, capitalist technocracy and the tyranny of tolerance, artistic fetishism and the right to violence, and suchlike subjects. Menachem Levy wanted to burn down all the museums. Menachem Becker agreed to burn down the lot — except for Van Gogh. And with sentences like these they would burn entire evenings. Becker was a Trotskyite and Levy was a Maoist, or maybe the opposite, in any case I didn’t know the difference, I just sat on the mattress and soaked up Marcuse and Sartre, the Red Brigades, the Rage Brigade, and urban guerrilla warfare.

Alek intervened only rarely, and when he did they listened to him. Once, I remember, it happened when they were arguing about Godard, what he was actually saying and exactly what kind of revolutionary he was. They appealed to Alek because Dalit had heard from somebody that he had met Godard and interviewed him for a student newspaper in Paris. And Alek, with demonstrative reluctance, said that Godard’s political opinions were of no interest to him, nor were Mao’s sayings in La Chinoise, nor what Godard thought about Mao’s sayings. He had interviewed Godard because he was asked to do so, it was a job, there were people who thought that this was the way to write in a newspaper and these were the questions that should be asked, but they were in a house now, not a newspaper. “Of course Godard is a revolutionary, from ideological point of view the worst kind possible, but Godard is nevertheless the Schoenberg of cinema, and the important thing is the revolution an artist makes with his camera, and all the rest is just rubbish for politicians.”

Sometimes when Alek finished speaking he would turn around and disappear into his little study or the kitchen. Sometimes in his absence they would go on arguing about what he said, but this was one of the occasions on which he silenced them. Not because they agreed with him, but because he had the halo of someone who had been a student in Paris and met Godard. I knew that Alek realized this, and that he despised them for it. And I also knew that they felt his contempt, and that the scorn only strengthened the spell he cast over them.

Now, looking back, they seem very young to me, forgivably young. “Abroad” was further away then than it is now, and certain abroads, like Paris, had a glamour then that it took years to dispel.

Most of the regular participants in the group were men, except for Dalit from “La Mama” who would always make a tempestuous entrance. He treated Dalit nicely, he never ignored her arrival, and it was the same with all the pretty faces with the plucked eyebrows who would turn up with someone or other, stick around for a week or two, and then be replaced. When they didn’t come with a guy, the pretty girls would come in pairs, and huddle together like goslings waiting for someone to stick a worm in their beaks. Alek would clear the records or the occupant off a chair, make sure that the pretty face was comfortably seated in her short mini, and he never failed to ask her name and if he could get her anything. Occasionally a female made of sterner stuff would turn up, like for instance Osnat law-and-order who actually succeeded in forcing her way into the discussion. I admired this woman. She had an exquisite jaw and black, unplucked eyebrows, she would turn a chair around and sit astride on it, leaning her arms on the backrest and harangue us: “So ask yourselves — whose law and order? Law and order that serve what? That serve whom?” Because she impressed me, I assumed that she impressed Alek too, until I looked at his face.

In the morning I threw a neutral remark into the air anyway, to check out his reaction, and Alek raised his eyes from his book and gave me a long, faintly amused look. “I’ve known too many woman of this type,” he said in the end and went back to his book, pinching his cigarette as usual between his thumb and two fingers.

Ten or maybe twelve years later, in the home of friends in Tel Aviv, I came across Osnat again. She taught in the history department at the university, published articles in the newspapers, she still turned her chair around, and she still smoked the same short Chinese pipe. Since she failed to recognize me and remember me from then, I felt free to touch the erogenous zone and remind her of “that crowd from Nachlaot.” “Oh yes, them, sure … they were fucking male chauvinists, too, just like everyone else in those days.” Beyond this sweeping generalization it appeared that the group had not remained in her memory, and we actually became quite good friends.

Opinions I heard on those evenings seeped into me gradually, and even though I lacked the intellectual background to understand them, I started trying on ideas like a young girl trying on a dress: not in order to see if it fits her, but to see who it turns her into and who she looks like when she puts it on. “What’s the difference between the actions of Black September against us and our bombing in Jordan?” I threw at my mother’s back one evening during the weeks when I was still going home. “They hurt civilians and we hurt civilians. They took our athletes hostage in Munich, and we treat Jordanian civilians as hostages; so tell me why what Israel does is called war and defense, and what Black September does is called terrorism?”

• • •

“It’s a good thing your father isn’t here to hear you talk like that,” my mother said grimly, draining the water from her steamed vegetables into the sink. “If you, Noa, don’t know the answer to that question yourself, it would be better if you kept quiet and didn’t shame yourself by such talk. We know very well who’s influencing you, who’s putting that nonsense into your head.” My mother, unlike me, has never felt the need to try on opinions, and in this she resembles my daughter far more than me. My mother is a dietetic nurse, my daughter is about to become a rabbi, and they both relate with the same degree of seriousness to what goes into the mouth and what comes out of it.

Looking back, even though I agree in general with Osnat’s verdict regarding the group’s male chauvinism, it’s clear to me that the seeds of my feminist views were planted during that period. At the time I didn’t take any notice of the way they behaved towards women, it wasn’t too different from the way my father or any other man I knew behaved, they certainly didn’t count women among oppressed population groups, and neither did it ever occur to me to do so. And nevertheless questions like: “Law and order — that serve whom?” registered in my mind and left an impression, and years later, when I constructed the character of Nira Woolf, I gave her some of Osnat’s gestures, and some of her views regarding the law.

(“When Nira Woolf gives the sex slave her pistol, in order for her to use it, she is actually killing them both with one bullet: the slave trafficker and the oppressed woman. So that after the shot we are left with the body of a man, a dead female slave, and a living woman. She who was previously a slave and who is now a liberated woman.” From my last interview about What Did Mrs. Neuman Know?)

Alek, as I said, didn’t talk much, but before I finish with the folklore of those days in Nachlaot, I’ll just mention one outburst of his. The discussion was not particularly lively — about the indifference of the Israeli student, the Sorbonne commune, the occupation, police brutality and the right to violence — and they were rehashing the subject of “the suppression of thought” again when Alek suddenly began to talk about the Prague Spring. I won’t try to recapitulate everything he said, because more than I remember the content, I remember the tone. He sat slightly bowed in his chair and spoke quietly, without looking at any of us, speaking as if he was telling a very personal story, and one sentence kept coming back like a lament: “It was beautiful, the Prague Spring, it was beautiful, and I like a fool actually began to believe that the world was going to let it happen.”

When the story was drawing close to its end, Alek raised his voice, glaring at us suddenly with a strange hostility: “Half a million Russian tanks crushed Czechoslovakia. They trampled the students, they trampled artists, they destroyed a hope that you’ll never understand. People like you, who talk about repression, have no idea of what kind of freedom people were fighting for there.” He stood up with a distorted face, close to tears or violence, and what happened afterwards was very much like flight.

In the space of ten minutes everyone had left the house, except for me and Hamida-Yoash, who took him to the kitchen and sat there with him until three in the morning emptying a bottle of vodka. The drink silenced Yoash and made Alek talkative and less sparing of gestures. “… It’s the talking … that’s the problem, I can’t stand the talking, not just Menachem’s, the two Menachems, with them it’s relatively easy, because they come right out and call themselves communists. I mean the others, all the others who haven’t got faintest idea of what they’re talking about,” he lashed out at both of us, or maybe only at Yoash. “Even you, who’re a friend and genuine human being, even you’re like a communist. You all know best, you all know what’s good for everyone, and you’re all ready to drag us by the hair into a bright future. Forgive me, I apologize, I’m not just drunk, I’m pathetic, but I can’t stand it physically, physically.”

And nevertheless he treated Yoash differently from the rest. Alek needed money, I don’t know if Yoash really needed his help in his work, but from time to time, at an evening’s notice, he would ask him to come and paint a house with him. House-painting days were always good days. The pickup honking its horn outside early in the morning, and at dusk the two of them returning cheerful and spattered with whitewash, unloading vast quantities of meat and vegetables, and taking over the kitchen to cook and drink. I wasn’t allowed to join in the cooking, it was a ritual with no room in it for a woman, and they sent me to “go for a little run outside.” But when the meal was ready, at the table, my presence was very desirable. I loved sitting there between the two of them, happy and hungry from the running, bathed and shampooed after it, like an honorary member of the male fraternity. They filled my plate, poured me water, sliced me bread. “Hamida is my true friend,” he would sometimes say, and examine me to see if I understood the meaning of the word. “I can see,” I would answer seriously. More than once it happened that while we were sitting at the table somebody knocked at the door, and Alek would put his finger to his lips and signal the two of us to be quiet, ignoring the record player that betrayed our presence in the house. But there were days when he didn’t even open the door for Yoash.

MARRYING NOA

I don’t remember who began the teasing, but it was Danny Hyman who turned it into a running joke. Hyman was a law student, a man with small limbs, stiff movements and the pronunciation of a radio announcer. I detested him instinctively, and he for his part never threw a word in my direction. From time to time when they talked about freedom, and they talked a lot about freedom, Hyman would tap an American cigarette on its packet and point out that, “The trouble is that all we do is talk and talk, and nobody’s prepared to do anything.” Then he would stick the cigarette in his small mouth and add: “Alek, for example, thinks that we should liberate girls from the army. So why doesn’t he marry Noa and free her from serving in the army?” After he had repeated this a few times, “Why doesn’t he marry Noa?” turned into “Why don’t we marry Noa?” or “Yeah, sure, and now let’s go and marry Noa,” a line that could be fallen back on by anyone wanting to put an end to any tedious debate, with the highly amusing conclusion that we were all impotent anyway.

I had no idea that Alek took this teasing seriously, until the afternoon after Yom Kippur.

The preceding twenty-four hours had not been easy. At this point I no longer needed excuses for not going home, but this week my father had flown in for a visit, and in order not to aggravate the tension that had started to accumulate, I presented myself for the meal preceding the fast, which in our case, needless to say, preceded nothing. When my mother set about polishing the sink, and my sister Talush’s friends called her to come out to skate in the empty streets, I said a hasty goodbye and left. I ran most of the way from Ramat Eshkol to Nachlaot.

Alek had given me a key the first week, but when I saw a light on in the house I didn’t use it, I knocked, and this was the first time that Alek opened the door and stood aside without touching, letting me in as if I was his roommate. “Is this not a good time for you?” “It’s fine. You can come whenever you like. That’s what the key is for.” And he retired to his little study as if he was dividing the rooms up between us.

To my astonishment, Alek fasted, shutting himself up for the evening and the day and drugging himself on Sibelius, played softly so as not to disturb the neighbors. I spent the time staring at the pages of a book, sleeping and daydreaming alternately, disturbed by the lack of the routine sounds that divided the day into clear units of time and notified the body of its functions. There are three synagogues near the house, and in the bedroom the sounds mingled, with one prayer rising and then another, and all the time the subterranean current of Sibelius, coming to the surface only in the hot, heavy silence of the afternoon break, and giving rise in me to a miserable little whimper that punctured my trance.

At the end of the day, when the music stopped, Alek still didn’t open his door and I fell asleep again, and when I woke up sweating in the middle of the night I discovered that he hadn’t come to bed, that he must have gone to sleep on the sofa in his room.

I saw him again only the next day at noon, when he came in with a few of the regulars. The academic year was about to begin, and they were angry about some survey courses they were obliged to take and some teacher whose contract hadn’t been renewed, for reasons which were only too clear: because of the way he talked about Dayan and because of that joke he told about Golda Meir. The heat wave had not yet broken, and they all looked worn out by the heat. Someone I didn’t know suggested going on strike or publishing a statement, and this time it was Dalit who said: “Yeah, sure. You’ll all go on strike, just like you’ll all marry Noa.” Alek was standing opposite her, clenching one fist in another in front of his chest, cracking pecan nuts which Yoash had brought from his parents’ farm. A silence must have fallen, because I heard the sound of the crack, and then his voice saying: “Marry Noa … okay … Noa, do you want to get married?”

ALEK ASKED

Alek asked: “Do you want to get married?” And he didn’t add, “to me.” But at the same time he said: “Do you want to get married?” and not “Do you want me to exempt you from serving in the army?” Which is perhaps a slightly different question.

Did I want to be exempt from army service? Until I met him it wouldn’t have occurred to me for a minute not to be drafted, and apart from one classmate who had polio, I didn’t know anybody who avoided army service, including those present in the room, including Alek himself.

The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. Girls from my year who had been drafted in August had already concluded their basic training and been sent to all kinds of bases to serve as clerks. And somehow it was clear to me that the new me couldn’t be sent anywhere to serve anyone. That I would simply get up and run away if they tried to squeeze me into some asbestos office. It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection — my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later — I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.

Jerusalem was charged with love for me. The map of the city was imprinted in me with illuminated areas where the air grew bright and the vibration of my inner waves intensified, the concentrated areas where we had wandered together, and the further I receded from them in my imagination, the grayer I grew inside, disappearing from myself into the gray, flat nothingness.

Alek was going to leave for Germany in July, I had no doubt that he would leave, but until July there was still more than nine months to go, a short time, a long time. I couldn’t consent to this time being taken away from me. Love had mobilized my entire being, love ruled me like a tyrant, and love would allow for no other master.

I reread the last couple of paragraphs and it’s all true: I couldn’t imagine myself leaving Jerusalem, I couldn’t part from Alek, I wanted to buy more time, true and true and true, but there’s one simple and shameful thing I haven’t yet said. I loved Alek, and therefore I wanted to marry him.

GOING TO THE RABBINATE

I didn’t look at him or at anyone else when I said: “Yes, I want to.” And the next thing he said was: “Okay, then let’s go and do it now, just tell me where to go.”

At that moment he was a king, he was their prince, they admired him more than ever, and some of that admiration was directed at me too, so that the doubts as to whether we were “really going to do it” were addressed to us in the plural. For a few minutes “you” meant both of us, and that “you”—the crazy, impulsive, glamorous, free-spirited you — was intoxicating. At the first words of doubt Alek threw the cracked pecans into the basket, and on the spot, accompanied by all of them, we set out for the Rabbinate on Havatzelet Street.

I recall the movement with which he aimed the pecans and hold it in my imagination, and Alek in his white tee shirt looks like a boy, slender and cropped. He was then twenty-eight, almost as old as Hagar today. But even today when the touch of his thinness sometimes feels like the touch of old age — and only rarely like the touch of a slender boy — he is still the same Alek who clenched fist over fist, and so he will apparently always remain, never mind the metamorphoses of his body.

Dalit, Hyman, and two others I barely knew, dropped out on the way on various pretexts. Perhaps things had gone further than they intended, perhaps they had been infected by some other embarrassment, but three of them, surrounding the pair of us like tipsy bodyguards, accompanied us into the Rabbinate building and testified that they had known us from early childhood, and that they knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Alexander Ginsberg and Noa Weber were single. And when the officials of the Holy One Blessed Be He began to inquire as to the exact date of Alek’s arrival in Israel, it turned out that one of our witnesses was also a Ginsberg, just like Alek, and this Ginsberg quickly improvised all kinds of fibs about the family connection, about uninterrupted correspondence and frequent visits in Paris. “Alexander Ginsberg,” babbled the ginger-haired Ginsberg, imitating the gossipy tone of the clerks, “Alek, as we call him in the family, is a confirmed bachelor. To such an extent that his mother began to worry that she wouldn’t have any grandchildren, and my mother told her, send him to Israel, and you’ll see that he’ll soon find himself a nice Jewish girl to marry.” And we all smothered hysterical giggles.

Alek was surprised to discover that we couldn’t finish what we had come to do on the spot. The men were sent outside, and I was sent to have a talk with the rabbi’s wife as a necessary preliminary to setting the date.

In the years to come I told the story of this interview countless times, it became part of my anecdotal stock-in-trade, which I polished up from time to time, perfecting the details of the scene, the asides and the timing. Now I’ll be brief and stick to the facts: A short woman with her hair covered in a brown snood greeted me from the other side of a scratched office desk and without any preliminaries began to explain to me what a mistake it would be to bake my husband a chocolate cake every day, even if he hinted that he wanted it and even if he demanded it, because you get tired of even the best cake if it’s served up every day. She reminded me of my mother with her nagging about the proper eating habits—“Chew, Noa, chew before you swallow.”—except that my mother is a thin woman, and this one had a double chin tucked in over a swelling bosom. In my innocence I replied that I didn’t know how to bake, and only when she sighed, and I, suddenly embarrassed without my male support group, stared at the bucket someone had left by the door, only then did I realize what the woman was talking about.

In the face of my surprising naiveté she abandoned the culinary metaphors and asked for details about my menstrual cycle. Was it regular? How long did it last? And when exactly was it due? I thought about the four who were presumably waiting for me outside, about Alek’s impatience, and about what I would have to tell them in a few minutes, and with this to inspire me, as soon as I realized where all these questions were leading, I whispered that there was a problem, you understand, we have a problem because I’m pregnant. That’s why we have to get married as quickly as possible, a quick, discreet wedding … perhaps right here in the Rabbinate? My face burned with a shame whose origins were different from what the rabbi’s wife supposed.

Overflowing with concern she waddled with me to the clerk, who set the date for ten days’ time, right after the holiday of Simchat Torah. “Light Sabbath candles,” she recommended in parting, “forget the past, and explain to your husband that this is the time to make a new beginning and fortify yourselves with tradition. It’s important to him too for his child to grow up like a Jew, why else did he come to Israel? … The mother is the foundation of the home, the wife is the foundation of the home, you’ll see how your husband will respect you when you make him a Jewish home. You’ll make him a Jewish home, and he’ll make you a queen.”

The really crazy joke in this story, the joke I never tell when I’m delivering the shtick, is that while I was inventing my urgent dilemma for the benefit of the rabbi’s wife, the first cells of Hagar were already dividing inside me. And that I didn’t have the faintest idea that I was pregnant.

I LOVED HIM

I loved him and I yearned to marry him. Even worse, I yearned for him to marry me, to take me to be his wedded wife, to sanctify me.

The rabbi’s wife’s double chin, the nagging tone of the clerks, the desks piled with cardboard files, the mop bucket — these details helped me to cover up my true desire for him to single me out to have and to hold, forever. The decor bespoke a seedy bureaucratic secularity, and I welcomed the ugliness. Since the marriage was not a true marriage, it was better this way, I thought, in all the ugliness of reality, in the harsh summer light, without any atmospherics to soften the facts, without any illusions. It was right, it was fitting, I was happy with it.

I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not …” And even when I read between the lines — lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content — I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reason, I knew that he didn’t love me.

In the nature of things, according to the rules of the game laid down from the start, I did not try to hold seminars with him about the nature of our feelings for each other, their origins and destination. I saw that I aroused his curiosity, I saw that the curiosity and the enjoyment bordered on amusement, and as far as I was able I tried to join in the style of provocative flirtatiousness stemming from these feelings. To behave as if we were brother and sister up to some naughtiness.

It took me years to understand that in Alek’s eyes I, Noa Weber, was the ultimate stranger, foremost because I was a woman. And for all his experience with the members of my sex, to this day he still tends to attribute a kind of alien mystery to us — as if we belonged to a completely different species, governed by incomprehensible inner laws, which a man, however hard he tried to penetrate the mystery, would never succeed in deciphering.

Beyond that — and this was something that was harder for me to understand — not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP.” Not just a WASP, but a descendent of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s side. Which in itself was a reason for curiosity and investigation.

But nevertheless, in spite of the strangeness, it was clear to me that the cloak of naughty flirtatiousness I wore and the ideological reasons I spouted, did not deceive him. Alek knew that I was possessed, he knew it very well, and he chose to marry me nevertheless. Why did he do it?

Twenty, no, nearly twenty-one years later, the first time I went to visit him in Moscow — Hagar had already completed her army service — it happened that I asked him. In January one of the European newspapers he worked for sent him to write a series of articles on the upheavals in Russia, and Alek invited me to join him, and we were there together for a whole week.

One night I was standing in the hotel opposite the wide window sill, drunk with sex, sleeplessness, and vodka, and looking down from the thirty-sixth floor at the configurations of the cracks in the ice on the river below. Alek had parted the heavy curtains for me, climbed up, and opened the upper section of one of the tall double windows, and the icy air cleared my breathing body.

From the moment I had landed, my sense of distance had gone haywire, and at that moment it seemed to me that I could have put out a finger and touched the cracks in the ice, or the white marble of the parliament building on the other side of the river and the six-lane road. Something opened inside me, something opened and spread and adapted itself to the vast dimensions of the place. Alek lay on the bed behind me and smoked. I was electrified, I had wings, I was too awake even to lie down beside him. The height stimulated me. And ghosts of previous guests in the Stalinist tower, people who were once alive and were now dead. The privileged of the regime. The dead man on holiday who hung his suit up in the closet, the dead man who sat writing opposite the mirror, the dead man who, like me, dried his wet stockings in the bathroom — who were they? What nightmares did they have here on this bed? What nightmare did they imagine in detail when they were awake?

I thought: If somebody pushed me out of the window now I wouldn’t fall. Weightless, I would glide over the city like a bird.

There is a pose that may well only exist in old movies: a man and a woman exchange important declarations while standing not face to face, but face to elegant back. If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the dialogue in Casablanca takes place this way, and I apparently had a romantic echo of that kind in my head when I asked Alek: “October ’72 … I didn’t ask you then, but why did you propose marriage to me?” I imprisoned the cold air inside me until he answered me, and when he answered I could hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe I wanted to see how far you would go with it.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking about my politics. “Did you have any doubts?” I asked.

“Yes, I think I did.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it all seems very small to me.”

“It all seems small to you … if you say so. I remember things differently.”

“What do you remember?” Alek sighed and didn’t reply. “What? Tell me,” I turned around to face him. “What do you remember?”

“I think it was hard for you.”

“So what if it was hard? Maybe it wasn’t hard for me at all. Maybe that was exactly how I wanted it.”

“Really?” He examined me with narrowed eyes.

“Yes, really. Why are you laughing?” I asked, laughter in my voice too, and I sat down on the windowsill with my profile to him.

“You’re beautiful.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Actually I do believe. That’s beautiful too.”

“What? What? What’s beautiful?” The click of a lighter, and no answer. I put my hand on the window pane, tilted my head slightly, and with three fingers blocked the river. “You’re wrong. It was never hard for me, not really,” I said and examined the new window picture, “and on Wednesday too, when we say goodbye and I get on the plane, it won’t be hard for me.”

“If it isn’t hard for you, good. I’m glad.”

I freed the river and hid the road. “Have you noticed that someone could shoot straight into the President’s residence from here?”

“There’s already been a shooting here. But in the opposite direction. During the August putsch a photographer was shot in the window here. What are you doing there?”

“Looking at things,” I answered like an intoxicated child. “You know what I think? I think I have a lot of strength. You know how much strength I have?”

“Enough to stop a bolting horse and enter a burning house.”

“You’re making fun again.”

“I’m not making fun. Nekrasov wrote it. He wrote it seriously.”

“Try me.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want me to try your strength? That’s what you want?”

“Yes.”

The next movement looked like a response to my “Yes,” it was impossible to think anything else. It was close to three o’clock in the morning, and Alek got up and got dressed, and as he put the key to the room in his pocket he said, “I’ll be back. Don’t let anyone in.”

HOW FAR ARE YOU GOING WITH IT

The Moscow Alek was the same person, but nevertheless different. When he met me at the airport, at first glance he looked tired, and only afterwards, in the taxi, I realized that the eyelids which were beginning to droop a little gave him a new look of weariness or sad resignation, but that this deceptive expression was contradicted again and again by a lively smile, because Alek, at least during my visit, was as intoxicatingly alert as I was. Not only did he play the gentleman more attentively than ever — I already knew exactly what these gestures were worth — but from the moment he picked me up at the airport he made it clear in many little ways that, more than acting as my tour guide, he intended to be my bodyguard here. In the street he was careful to take my arm so that I wouldn’t slip on the ice. He tied the strings of my fur hat under my chin, carried my handbag, chose for both of us the moment to leap into traffic and cross the road. In addition to all this, he insisted, to my surprise, that I accompany him to all his meetings at the Journalists’ House, and to apartments steeped in the smell of smoke and wet old clothes, all of them either too cold or overheated. “I’m an egoist,” he said one night as we descended stairs stinking of cooking and urine in the dark, “maybe I shouldn’t have told you to come.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows what could happen here.”

“I like not knowing,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You’re like a little girl,” he said and pressed me against the wall, laughing and strangely excited. And when he removed his lips from my neck he lifted his head, looked up as if he was searching for something, and added: “This smell, I didn’t think I could get used to it again. We had a whole life in stairwells like these.”

“So what did they say could happen here?” I asked as he led me downstairs. He translated very little for my benefit during the interviews. “What could happen?” He replied: “History could repeat itself, or not repeat itself, and both possibilities are frightening. Moscow is paradise compared to what’s happening in other places. Already people have no gas, no food, no salaries, no pensions, no nothing.”

I was completely dependent on him, dependent on him physically as I had never been anywhere else. I needed him in order to ask for another cup of lousy coffee at the hotel, in order to open the window I was unable to budge, to cross the street safely, even to understand the dialing instructions and call Hagar in Israel and go on lying to her — when he summoned me to him, I lied to Hagar and told her that I had been invited to Moscow to lecture on behalf of the Jewish Agency, and I stuck to this story on my subsequent visits too. I have to admit that I enjoyed the helplessness, the total dependence on Alek, and for some perverse reason I even enjoyed the fear. In February of 1993 normal people didn’t go to Moscow as tourists, and it didn’t even occur to Alek to take me to any of the tourist sites. Under the splendour of the snow there were filthy tenements and palaces, patched with dark squares of boarded-up windows. Passive lines of people stood in the clouds of steam at the entrances to the Metro; bookshelves, clothes hangers, shoe closets, kitchen cabinets, glass-fronted sideboards were emptied for sale. In all of Alek’s meetings the warnings were repeated: don’t go there, don’t let her go, don’t do this, that, or the other thing. Despite his Russian and his connections, they lumped us together as naive foreigners who needed to have the dangers pointed out to them.

At night I had the recurrent fantasy that the airport was closed, that the television screen was blacked out, that the silence meant the telephones were disconnected and tanks were blocking the roads. Alek: “The screen won’t go black. You’ll know that it’s happening when the television starts giving us Swan Lake.”

What would I do if he was torn away from me? If he went out to get something or clear something up and didn’t come back, if he was thrown bleeding onto a street corner, if he lay with his body broken in a hospital or a jail, if he was sent to the infinite expanses of the East? I doubted I would survive. Or perhaps I would survive but I would never return to the world. I would be tossed by the tidal wave of history into some other mutation. I would wander the Metro platforms, a demented beggar, mumbling my pleas in broken Russian.

Alek didn’t leave me alone for a minute, until “You want me to try your strength?” when he got up and went out.

I think about the dramatic “Try me” that came out of my mouth and I fill with self-loathing. What feeling was I dramatizing there? And what response was I longing for? For him to say to me, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee”? For him to test my love with some sadistic trick? To make me wait and wait for his return, until I sang over the domes of Moscow, “If crying is forbidden I will not cry”? Now it occurs to me that I identified cruelty with testing, and confused being tested with being chosen. He would choose me in order to try me. He would try me and then I would be the chosen one. Look at me, winged and electrified, I can do anything. I’m stupid Noa Weber, a chosen people of one woman.

Alek came back after fifteen minutes. “Aren’t you cold yet?” and he carried me to bed and lay me down and stroked me until my whole body arched, but he didn’t get undressed. Twenty more minutes passed, maybe half an hour, until there was a knock at the door.

The night before, it happened that we talked about the prostitutes. They hung around in the lobby at all hours of the day and night, standing on stiletto heels next to the telephones, or sitting on leather armchairs under the fresco of a sturdy peasant woman, gigantic as a goddesses, carrying sheaves of wheat. And I in my stupidity didn’t realize that the women in brief mini skirts and fur coats were whores. How could I have known? I didn’t know the first thing about prostitutes, except the ones in the movies, and in any case the way that some of the Russian women we met were dressed and made up seemed whorish to me. Amused by my lack of perception, Alek said that next time one of them called our room to find out if it was occupied by a single man, perhaps he should invite her to come on up, so that I could satisfy my curiosity without staring in the lift, like I did. “You can use it in your book,” said the man who had never read even one of my books.

When he got up to answer the knock at the door it occurred to me that when he went out he had invited one of the whores in the lobby to come up to our room. In order to test me — how? Doing — what? Interviewing her? Making love to her before his eyes for his enjoyment? Watching him fuck her? Watching her give him a blow job? From the moment he got up until he closed the door maybe sixty seconds passed, but during those sixty seconds I imagined with utter clarity all three latter possibilities, and in my imagination I did not rebel or protest against any of them.

Even in my glittering mood, even in my self-intoxicated, hallucinatory state, I knew that it was only a fantasy, and that nothing was going to happen. Whose fantasy? Not mine and not Alek’s, but a kind of morbid symptom of an implanted virus, the pornographic mental product of a pornographic industry. The product of the male sex industry. While I only added the words “a pornographic mental product of the sex industry” later on, I definitely remember that in real time, too, in some corner of my mind, I thought to myself: “This is an alien fantasy.”

But in real time this self-criticism was not in the least effective, and the fact is that in the following seconds I froze like a rabbit in the bed, riveted by the horror of the loathsome trial about to come through the door. And even when I heard it was a man’s voice, my thoughts went on turning round and round in the same area: I’m naked and Alek’s dressed, I asked to be tested and now the test is at the door, waiting to come into the room. And I’m not getting dressed or doing anything to stop it.

HOW DID I GET HERE

But how did I get here, and what am I doing in the Ukraine Hotel? I was about to report on my wedding day, that is what I intended on doing, but now that I’m already in Moscow, I may as well stay there a moment longer, until the end of this particular story.

Alek closed the door and came back inside with a bottle of vodka in his hand. He put it down between the double windows, to cool it, and then he got undressed and climbed into bed. Aroused as I was, I couldn’t fly again. Carefully I touched the little wrinkles around his eyes, I covered his heavy eyelids with my hand, it was the first time in our history that I left my body to lie with him, and distanced my soul for fear that he would read my thoughts.

Another few lines on this subject, before I return to the matter of our marriage. I said that the test of the prostitute was only the mental product of the pornography industry, which is of course an easy and convenient solution. Too easy and convenient. Because what am I saying by it? I’m saying that it wasn’t me hallucinating, it wasn’t me fantasizing, but some wicked corrupt people who came and put these fantasies in my head.

Sexual fantasies, I think, are a rather banal subject, because when you come right down to it, how many of them are there? We are all fed by the same junk, and however many junk fantasies there are, there’s no problem cataloguing them. They’re catalogued in the video libraries. They’re catalogued on the sex sites on the Internet. They’re catalogued in the tabloids and in the brothels.

I don’t use pornography, I have never been tempted to enter one of those sites, and nevertheless it’s clear to me that I’m polluted too — it simply can’t be otherwise. The pictures, the images, and the symbolic gestures are everywhere.

I have no idea how people thought about sex before cinema and television. It’s clear that most people didn’t read the Marquis de Sade or Moll Flanders or anything of the kind, so that if pre-cinema man had fantasies about sex they were evidently his own personal fantasies, taken from his private memories and personal experience, and not some polluting germ male industrialists shoved into his brain.

Today nobody has a chance of developing a virgin fantasy any more. Even if they’ve never opened a Penthouse or watched Nine 1/2 Weeks, however hard people try to protect themselves they get infected by perversion anyway, because the system insinuates it even via the most ostensibly innocent places. Including family favorites. Take for example the women in the movies of the forties and fifties, the way they hit the man on his chest or back, hitting and hitting hysterically, until their hands gradually come to rest and the blows turn to caresses. Look at Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O’Hara upstairs to the rape she’s asking for, listen to her singing happily afterwards, and tell me what to call it if not pornography. Look at the way Howard Keel spanks the shrewish Kathryn Grayson in Kiss Me Kate; remember how Clark Gable tames Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night; remember how the spineless Adele H. sends a whore to her officer to make him happy, and how that revolting pervert in Breaking the Waves sends his wife to fuck.…

And that’s quite enough, there’s no need to look-remember-and-see, not now, because without in any way belittling the importance of the foregoing lecture, I didn’t undertake to lecture here on sexuality and the cinema, on the cinema and patriarchy, on patriarchy and capitalism. Because this isn’t a public debate, and that’s not why I sat down to write.

The crux of my problem is that it’s clear to me that this whole lecture is one big excuse. Because even if the masochistic virus was implanted in my mind, it’s still my mind, mine and nobody else’s, made up of a combination of transplants just like anybody else’s. So that even if I babble on here for hours about the influence of the media, it will not negate the knowledge of the polluted self or blur the sickening awareness that of the entire catalogue of fantasies, my sick mind chose to replay the one I regard as the most humiliating of all: a man amusing himself, a woman victim, and a whore.

WE MARRIED IN OCTOBER

In October I married Alek, and there was no way I could avoid telling my parents. My mother, to be precise, because that week my father was out of the country again. In childish embarrassment I put it off until almost the last moment, two days before the wedding, so that in the end I did it in the worst possible way. Years later, and for quite a long time, I regretted my rudeness towards her, but it didn’t happen at once, far from it.

Supper at the Webers’. Batya Weber, my mother, cuts up a cucumber, a tomato and a hard-boiled egg on her plate, smears a slice of bread with low-fat white cheese, and arranges everything in bite-sized pieces before she begins to chew. My sister Talush studies the shape of the egg as she rolls it around and around her plate. The transistor radio is on in anticipation of the seven o’clock news.

“I have news,” and in the same breath, “the day after tomorrow I’m getting married.” An atavistic maternal glow spreads over my mother’s face before she takes in the words “the day after tomorrow.” Mazal tov, Batya, mazal tov, Benjy, what’s this we hear? Your daughter’s getting married? A little young, isn’t she? So, where’s it going to be? On the kibbutz? In a reception hall? Tell us everything. And who’s the groom?

On the stock exchange of Usha Street it was a story worth its weight in gold, not just another anecdote, but a full blown production, and in days to come I capitalized on it shamelessly, blunting the embarrassment and guilt with a mockery that improved with practice. Think of this woman, that is to say my mother, Batya, with her socialist upbringing in the children’s house on the kibbutz. Her parents turned their backs on their bourgeois families, Grandpa left the shtetl, Grandma ran away from the family home in Kraków, they cleared away rocks, sweated in the fields, burned with malarial fevers, and all for what? For the revolution, right? To create a new man for us here who would live in a new, just society. There was an article about it in the paper only last week, I don’t know if you saw it. A new man, a new family, a new form of relationship — that’s what they wanted and that’s what they talked about. And what did we get instead? Fiddler on the Roof, back to the shtetl with violins, mazal tov, comrades, mazal tov, our little girl’s getting married and grandchildren come next.

“Don’t start jumping for joy. It’s only a fictitious marriage,” I said quickly.

“Fictitious?” the knife was still in her hand. “But what does that mean, fictitious?”

“It means that I’m getting married at the Rabbinate the day after tomorrow, and later on I’ll get divorced. Not that marriage means anything to me in the first place, it’s just a primitive custom, but in any case this marriage isn’t for real.”

“Really? Is that so? One of the boys from the kibbutz married an illegal immigrant from Europe in a fictitious marriage, and afterwards they got divorced. But since then, as far as I know, we managed to chase the British out of the country.”

“I don’t intend to go to the army.”

At some point she asked me if “he”—she never called Alek by his name — if “he” was “giving me drugs.” At another point she bemoaned “what would people say” and how she was going to tell my father. And when, on the verge of a childish hysteria I hadn’t planned for at all, I denounced her, my father, Zionism, the army of occupation, and the oppression of the Palestinians — she ordered Talush to leave the room so that I wouldn’t “influence” her. “We know very well who’s influencing you,” she said.

With the Beatles’s “She’s Leaving Home” in the background, with frames from Five Easy Pieces and refrains from the Israeli version of Hair in my head, the two of us played our roles in this little historical melodrama with facility and total identification. Only I wasn’t leaving home to go to San Francisco with a flower in my hair, but because I wanted to get married. To get married to a man I would rather have died than told my mother how much I loved him.

The truth is that it wasn’t at all clear to me that I was leaving home, until my mother finally came out with the inevitable lines: “If that’s what you think of us, if that’s what your espresso generation is like, then perhaps there really isn’t anything for you and your generation to look for here. And if you’re old enough to get married, then perhaps you’re old enough to earn your living as well,” at which point I went up to my room, threw a few clothes into my rucksack, threw a nasty “I’m sorry for you,” at the alarmed Talush, and left the house.

How much sincerity was there in this stormy scene? I don’t know. It’s possible to play a part with feelings of absolute sincerity, and when I arrived at Alek’s with tears pouring down my face I had no sense of theatrical exaggeration. In other words, I was sure that the rift with my family was final and absolute.

“What happened?” he asked at the door, and immediately took me into his arms, which immediately brought on a fresh bout of weeping. “What happened?”

“I can’t do it,” I groaned when he closed the door behind us.

“What can’t you do?”

“Get out of the army. My mother, my parents, if I don’t go to the army they’ll throw me out of the house, and at the moment I’ll simply have nowhere else to go.” We were still standing in the hallway, and Alek stroked my head with concentrated gentleness. “All my girlfriends are going to the army and I don’t want to go to my Granny Dora on the kibbutz.”

“Noichka, Noichka … yes …”

I buried my head in his shirt, and with my head under his chin I felt the smile suddenly spreading over his face. A slow Alek smile with closed lips. “You don’t want to be in army?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, then you won’t,” and he raised my face to his. “Your mother and father … those are rules of the genre, you know,” he said holding my cheeks and pulling them into a smile, “that’s the way it is, Noichka, everything conforms to the rules of the genre.” And when he took his hands away the smile remained on my face. When he wanted to he could always effect this change in me, from total identification with my feelings, to a kind of light-hearted, mischievous observation of myself.

“You don’t want to be drafted?” he asked again.

“No,” I answered, this time out loud.

“And you want me to marry you?” My face was completely exposed. I knew what he could see in it, I knew what he was asking, I could deceive the whole world, but not him, and I didn’t want to deceive him anyway.

“Yes, I want you to do it.”

“Good, if that’s what you want, then that’s what I’ll do. I gave you a key, have you got the key? I want you to use it always. Will you use it? I’m leaving the country in July, and then too … you can stay here as long as you need to.”

How easily female tears turn into sexual arousal, not only of the male comforter but also of the weeping woman. The woman’s panties were already pulled down, one melting was turning into another, and Ravel’s Bolero was beginning to swell in the background when the man said: “And you’ll manage, and you’ll be all right, because that’s how it is in your story. Everything according to rules of the genre, right?”

ON THE MORNING OF MY WEDDING

On the morning of my wedding I went to the Old City and bought a white dress. I didn’t think that I was buying a wedding dress, but suddenly, as if for no reason, I just coveted a white galabiyeh flapping on a hanger in an alleyway, and it was only afterwards that it occurred to me to wear it to the Rabbinate.

“They expect a white dress,” I said meekly to Alek who examined me in silence before we left the house. “If they don’t like the way we’re dressed they might throw us out, and we’ll have wasted our time for nothing.”

With the dress in my hand I strolled in the direction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, simply because this was one of the places I went with Alek.

I’ve already mentioned that he loved churches, they acted on his soul, and when I stood in the church at his side, I understood that his admiration wasn’t only aesthetic. “That’s a nice picture,” I let slip once in one of the alcoves opposite the sooty face of the Virgin Mary. “I like it.”

“It’s horrible icon,” he replied impatiently from the side, “most of the paintings here are horrible.”

“You think so?”

“It’s not a question of what I think. They’re simply horrible, but it really doesn’t matter. Church isn’t a museum. And from religious point of view maybe bad art is preferable.”

Sometimes he would hurry through the halls — in Gethsemane, in the Dormition, in the Holy Sepulchre, there were two Saturdays when we walked as far as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem — and then, “That’s it, let’s go get some coffee.” Other times he would linger in one of the corners, standing erect and somehow obedient, his hands folded in front of him on the zipper of his jeans, not focused on any of the objects around him, and nevertheless somehow very focused indeed. It seemed as if he were capable of standing there for hours without moving a muscle, as if he had been trained to wait in silence, and the sight made my heart contract. I tried to impose a similar stillness on my own body, I tried not to shift my weight from foot to foot, to relax my shoulders, to relax my hands, as if by succeeding in doing so, I would know what was happening inside him. It seemed to me that if only I emptied my mind and cleaned out my body, Alek’s thoughts would seep by some magical osmosis into the void formed inside me, where they would take shape as the picture, the memory, the ancient experience that he was seeking. Because for some reason it seemed to me that he was searching for something inside him, not actively but the opposite; that he was stilling his thoughts and making room for something to rise up inside him, as if he were trying to call it up and waiting for it to come.

As always, I had to piece bits of information together. “My mother lives in this,” he said to me one night as we descended the Mount of Olives in the direction of the onion-domed church. “Lives in it?” “In Jesus.”

“Is your mother a Christian?”

“She’s a Jew. She’s a Jew in her own eyes, and everyone who sees her sees a Jew.”

“Sometimes when we walk here I try to imagine what it would be like to believe that—”

“You can’t.”

“Just to imagine, what it’s like to really believe that Jesus—”

“Impossible. People like my mother, and all her friends from the sixties, they don’t believe ‘that Jesus,’ they believe in him, which is completely different. They believe in Jesus, and ‘believing that Jesus’ only comes — or doesn’t come — afterwards.”

“But you would like to.”

“What?”

“Know how it feels? To believe?”

“No, certainly not.” He lied, and after a few steps he added, “You and I, we don’t come to these questions from the same place. It’s not a question of what a person wants at all. You don’t choose the direction of the movement of your soul. I don’t choose the direction of mine. There’s nothing you can do about it. So the most a person with intellect can do is to curse all the way, to yell at his soul: Why did you take me here? And why did you take me there? It’s normal, it just doesn’t really help, all that yelling.”

The moon whitened the stone walls lining the path and cast long shadows behind us. From a distance the city returned to its primeval sounds. A dog barking and a dog replying. The voice of a woman calling over rhythmic metallic blows. Far-near sounds as if we were walking in a country village. I wanted to linger longer, not to go down into the field of vision of the new city. But Alek took hold of my elbow, hastened his steps and said dryly, “Such talk … the direction of the movement of the soul … don’t trust a man who invites you to come up to his apartment to listen to Vivaldi, and don’t believe a man who talks to you about God.”

So on the morning of my wedding I bought a white dress, and with the dress rolled up in my shoulder bag, without really thinking, I arrived at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Straight from the autumn heat into the cool halls below and the dim little room with the single icon hanging in it, the one that Alek loved and belittled.

To this day I have no explanation for what happened there. I was very tired and very alert. I was high on the smell of the incense. Dazed by the transition from glaring light to gloom. I really don’t know, but I remember how the flickering candlelight lent a strange life to the young Madonna’s face, and I remember how quietly and gradually the longer I looked at her the more present she became to me, until she was more real than the tourists moving overhead. She was a timeless Mary, the one who received the annunciation and the one who gave birth, the one at the foot of the cross and the one ascending to heaven to be the bride of God. All the paintings I had seen with Alek combined in her, just as if she was a familiar personality and the object of private memories beyond time. So present to me was she in her infinite serenity, that it came about that I smiled, not to myself, but at her.

What is there to say about this scene? I was eighteen, in other words still an adolescent, and stretched to my limits. And even at those moments I didn’t think of “revelation”—in other words I knew all the time that the flickering figure was only a mirage — but I had a terrible need, and the need radiated out of me, and projected the figure out of the picture, where it twinkled and shone at me until it came about that I addressed it. “Make it be true,” I begged, and by true I meant me and Alek.

All kinds of alien words, alien wishes, whispered in me then. It embarrasses me to remember them now. I wished, with all my heart and soul, I wished for it to be “true” and “pure.” I asked to be “cleansed.” I asked to fall asleep and wake up bathed and washed in light, free of the dross of speech and of buffoonery and of lies. I was ready to endure pain, to be scoured by it, and I begged for grace. The devil knows where I got all this from, but the yearning was so physical and absolute, and the tenderness flowed and ebbed and flowed from her so powerfully that I relaxed my knee and started to kneel. Yes, that’s exactly how it happened, that’s what I did: I relaxed one knee, sent the other one backwards, and I was on the point of kneeling in front of the icon when something grabbed me in the middle of the movement, sent a shiver of disgust through me, and made me stand up straight.

For a minute longer I stood there, concentrating on purpose on the grotesque artistic clumsiness of the gesture of kneeling, and I let the self-loathing pour through me and fill me completely. For one more minute I examined the rather blackened face of the Madonna, with its expression of autistic sweetness, and only then I turned to go. “Comedian,” my Grandma Dora’s word came back to me, “comedian, comedian, comedian,” and to the hammering of this word, “comedian,” I made my way through the crowd of tourists and pilgrims to the door of the church.

URGES AND IMPULSES

When she completes her studies Hagar will be a rabbi, and when she finds herself a congregation she will also marry people. In the framework of her tireless efforts to educate me, she recently sent me a collection of articles about the importance of “rites of passage” and the enlightened alternative ways of celebrating them. I read my lucid daughter’s lucid contribution, and paged disinterestedly through the rest of the collection, and the next morning I sat down to compose a careful maternal response. I praised the quality of the production and the editing, thanked her for the illuminating analysis of the components of the marriage ceremony and especially the interesting interpretation of the apparel of the bride, expressed my not completely sincere wish that the numbers of religious people like her fellow students would grow in Israel, too, and only at the bottom of the page made the barbed comment: “… I still have my doubts as to whether anthropologists can serve as priests.”

“Understanding the meanings of the rites we perform doesn’t turn us into anthropologists,” my daughter answered in a hasty e-mail, “our awareness doesn’t contradict our faith, and as far as I’m concerned it only strengthens it.”

If I had told Hagar the story of the morning I got married — which I have no intention of doing — she would have seen it as conclusive proof both of my need for ritual, and of my repressed religious feeling. And she would also have said that if I had been married in a Jewish ceremony that was “progressive” and “meaningful,” rather than in the Rabbinate, my feet would not have led me to a church. But that’s not the point, it’s something else entirely, which I can’t explain to her: I’m not denying the existence of the religious impulse, who am I to deny it, I’m only denying the existence of a godhead to which this impulse is directed. And I’m certainly not convinced that my intelligent daughter really believes in God.

She certainly possesses an urge to believe. It’s not clear to me where it comes from or why, but it’s there — maybe this desire is genetic, maybe she inherited it from her parents. But the desire to believe is not the same as belief itself, and my daughter’s garrulous religiosity is in my eyes only a self-indulgent courting of a bad impulse. An act of buffoonery, exactly like my almost kneeling in front of a badly painted icon of the Virgin Mary.

I didn’t understand much at the ages of seventeen and eighteen. Since then I’ve come to understand a little more, and when I recall things that Alek said, and even more so the way he stood there in the church, it seems to me that the religious impulse was aroused in him then to a degree or in a manner that he still needed to fight, and it was only for the sake of this war that he went to church. Liberating the experience in order to overcome it and emerge as someone who had triumphed over himself.

And what was I doing there? The Christian God was Alek’s God, the specific god that Alek didn’t believe in. But a god you don’t believe in is still a god, and so it happened that when I was pining for Alek’s love, I went and prostrated myself to his gods.

I have already made it clear, I think, that I find no touching charm or beauty in this — though this is not absolutely the truth. However much I despise myself for my attacks of religious epilepsy, I despise my daughter, without any justification, more. Despise not only her convenient, dietetic, easy to digest religion, but she herself, for the small, civilized instinct that she cultivates by will. Hagar is of course not deserving of this contempt, and who am I to despise my honest daughter, immeasurably more honest than I.

Since Hagar’s new Jewishness isn’t only an aspect of her life, but something that determines it more and more, the diplomatic dishonesty in our relationship will no doubt grow greater over the years. With her grandmothers, astonishingly enough, Hagar has found a common language, and her preoccupation with religion has only increased the love that they both feel for her anyway. My mother is capable of spending hours nodding in admiration as my daughter lectures her on Jewish culture/Jewish renewal/new ways of interpreting Jewish traditions, etc. Meekly she agrees that a great injustice had been done her by her parents who robbed her of “her roots,” “her culture” and “her Jewish bookshelf,” and glowing with pride she occasionally accompanies her granddaughter to Saturday morning services at her progressive synagogue.

As for Grandmother Marina, Alek’s mother, it seems to me that she is happy that her granddaughter is showing an interest in “spirituality,” even though she has no idea of the nature of this “spirituality,” and although no serious discussion is possible between them, both because they have no common language, and because of the vast cultural gap between them.

When her father invited her to visit him in Paris, after she was discharged from the army and after my first visit to Moscow, Hagar was still at the beginning of her “Judaization” process, full of conceptual doubts and willing to sit up until the wee hours of morning debating such questions as “What is Jewish identity?” and “Is Judaism a religion/nationality or a culture?” In her debating style she sometimes reminds me more of Amikam than of her father. In the ten days she spent with her grandmother in Paris the child did not find an answer to the vexing question of whether Grandmother Marina, who had secretly converted to Christianity while still in Russia, could be considered a Jew.

I understood that all kinds of relations who were strangers to her and also strangers who weren’t related to her at all, enveloped her in warmth and love there, fed her as if she were a baby, accompanied her everywhere she went so that she wouldn’t get lost in the big city, and that no serious clarifications took place, either with Alek or with Marina. Alek waited for her outside when she went into Notre Dame Cathedral, and at the same opportunity remarked, by the way, that in recent years his mother’s church attendance had fallen off. A couple of times Marina said grace in Russian when they sat down to eat; over her and her husband’s double bed hung a triangle of beautiful icons — what the husband, Jenia’s, position was on these matters I do not know, for some reason he was seldom mentioned, as if he didn’t count — and when they parted at the airport Marina covertly made the sign of the cross over her granddaughter’s head. These were all the clues that Hagar received, and she had no idea what to make of them, but for a while it seemed that her tendency to set the world in order in the same way as she tidied her room had been swallowed up in a torrent of sense impressions: the smell of cheese and roasting chestnuts, the taste of new foods, the giddiness of the wine to which she was not accustomed, an exhibition of paintings, a statue, the view of a street framed in a café window.

Hagar talked without stopping, and a little rodent inside me devoured it all to the last crumb, while I kept my eyes and hands busy sorting the washing, folding the washing, cutting up the salad, so that she wouldn’t see and wouldn’t guess at the depths of my abject longing to feel the touch of the air around her father.

In my imagination I followed them to the Louvre “to see the Impressionists,” and only after she piled on the details and digressed in various directions did I discover that she went to the Louvre not with Alek but with “a terribly interesting friend of Grandma Marina’s, an artist who’s actually an American, but she’s been living in Paris for years.” And I felt a similar secret shame at the description of the “amazing picnic in the Bois de Boulogne,” which I only discovered later had not been attended by Alek.

To my complete and utter surprise it seemed to me that Grandma Marina had captured Hagar’s imagination and thoughts more than her father — or perhaps she had enabled her to avoid thinking about her father and her relationship with him. “You know that at Granny Marina’s, people phone up at one o’clock in the morning as if it’s the middle of the day.” “The most amazing thing is that Granny’s gorgeous, you should see her, she’s got legs that look as if they reach all the way to her neck, much better than mine.” Or: “I don’t understand how come Grandma Marina, with her gift for languages, never took the trouble to learn English.” The stream of her chatter flowed on and on, and I drank it in thirstily, until she gradually returned to her old boring ways, with questions like: “So in your opinion, can Brother Daniel, a Christian priest who claims to be Jewish, be considered a Jew just because he was born one?”

I HAD REACHED THE MORNING OF MY WEDDING

I had reached the morning of my wedding, in the month of October, in the year 1972, and as far as possible I shall try to stick with this chronology, without getting ahead of myself or digressing at every thought that pops into my head. But if I’m going to talk about my wedding, there is an impression I must correct first: when I mentioned the consolation fuck Alek gave me after my leaving-home scene I didn’t say that it was our only fuck since the day we presented ourselves at the Rabbinate.

It is clear to me, and it was clear to me then too, that Alek, to the best of his nonverbal ability, was trying to clarify himself to me: don’t mistake me and don’t deceive yourself, we’re talking about a fictitious marriage here, and you don’t fuck a woman you’re married to fictitiously in every corner of the house, and you certainly don’t stroke her hair and look into her eyes before, after, and during the act.

Alek, being Alek, was incapable of not offering me his home after I was “thrown out by my parents who demanded that I go to the army,” but the fact that I was living with him only complicated the situation. If I hadn’t been living there, maybe he wouldn’t have abstained from me entirely, but living together was too much like proper married life and he was therefore obliged to draw the line.

“Obliged to draw the line”—I am presenting his abstinence as if it stemmed from an explicit decision. I would like to believe that it came from some deliberate decision, on principle, which was the only reason he kept away from me even though he still desired me greatly. It would be nice to believe this face-saving explanation, very nice, but I know very well, and I knew very well, that it isn’t so. I haven’t got a clue whether Alek “decided” to abstain from me, maybe he “decided” and maybe he didn’t, but in any event it is clear to me that most of the time he didn’t need any “decision” to depend on or remind himself of. The simple truth is that the farce of the marriage, the political act of the marriage — whatever we call it — produced a sense of complication and turned Noa Weber into an oppressive presence on the ground. It didn’t happen in a minute, it didn’t happen in a day, and in the terrible months of chilliness there were still moments of warmth, but the process was very rapid.

So what could Noa Weber do? What could I do? I could have picked up my peacock’s tail and returned to my parents’ home, married or single, they would have taken me back. I could have gone to Grandma Dora on the kibbutz. I could have gone to the recruiting center and volunteered to serve in the army even after I was married. I could have “confronted Alek and discussed the situation openly,” as the wise advisors in the agony columns in the newspapers always say, or, in the same spirit, I could have taken myself to a psychologist who would “help me to untie the knot.” I could have and could have and could have, but the problem of course is that I couldn’t. That is to say that from the chemical point of view there was simply no possibility of my detaching myself from him. Just as there was no possibility for me to change my soul, or to cut myself into pieces. I loved him. In other words, he had infiltrated my very depths and then spread through all my cells, and changed my being until I was no longer mistress of my love. It wasn’t “my” love. It didn’t belong to me, I belonged to it and was ruled by it. Or perhaps I belonged to him and was ruled by him. I don’t know.

I’m not denying all responsibility, but I feel I can definitely claim diminished responsibility; and so in the end I did the only thing I could do, which was to efface myself so that my presence wouldn’t be oppressive. Light as the wind, playful as the wind, that is what I tried to be. Soft, pure air, a perfect cirrus cloud floating in the kitchen sky.

It’s easier to describe on the practical level. Alek was and remains a tidy man. I am still untidier than he is, but from the minute he cleared three shelves in the closet for me, I adapted myself to his standards of order and even more so: not a crumb on the chopping board, not a hair in the bathroom sink. Shrewdly I avoided playing the role of the housewife Alek was certainly not interested in, but I did my best to behave like the perfect roommate. When I polished off the cheese I was quick to replace it, when a bulb burned out in the bathroom I refrained from calling him to change it, and I never used up all the hot water, things like that, and looking back I can see that it was all nonsense. I can’t imagine Alek resenting having to change a light bulb, or complaining about the cheese, but nevertheless I was careful.

Beyond all this was the perpetual question of the choreography of our parallel lives. Alek settled into the study, I without a word was given the bedroom, and when Alek closed his door, I closed mine too — so far it was clear. But what am I supposed to do when he’s sitting in the kitchen? Is it a let’s-peel-Noa-an-orange morning, let’s tell her the name of the quartet playing on the radio, improve her mind with a little “Nietzsche, Ivanov, and the Dionysian principle,” and chat to her about romantic triangles in Russian literature? Or is it the beginning of another day when we don’t raise our head from the bed or the book even when the door bell rings? Does he want me frivolous now, passing airy remarks? Is my silent presence acceptable to him now? And at this moment — what? And what about the moment after it? Will it drive him crazy if I move? Open the tap? Chew? Breathe in his den?

Alek was and is a man of expansive gestures, but the gesture with which he opened his home to me was too expansive even for him.

WEDDING

Three people accompanied us from the house: Yoash-Hamida, the ginger-haired Ginsberg, and the revolting Hyman, and at the entrance to the Rabbinate we were joined by the acne-scarred Maoist with another guy I didn’t know, whom Alek apparently didn’t know either.

Until they were ready to marry us, we were all asked to wait in the corridor. Alek, a pale prince, graceful, disdainful, leaned on the doorpost, while Hyman took over one of the offices and conducted all kinds of debates. I remember couples sitting on a bench like patients in a queue at the free clinic, the screaming of a woman outside, all kinds of people passing between us with rapid steps carrying cardboard files, all of them staring at the woman in the white dress: what’s she doing here? Staring at the woman pacing to and fro in a white dress, in other words, me. One man — he sticks in my mind — walked past with floral slippers on his feet.

Money passed from Yoash’s wallet into the drawer of one of the clerks, a note was written, and then we were sent to an empty hall upstairs, to wait for them to prepare the marriage contract and collect ten men for a prayer quorum. Everything registered in my mind in partial pictures, like quick peeks through the blindfold in a game of blindman’s bluff: stacked towers of orange plastic chairs, a glimpse of a blue nylon scroll, which was the rolled-up wedding canopy, the sight of a shoe crushing a cigarette end on yellowing floor tiles. Three people gathered opposite the rabbi next to a table in the corner, crowded, sullen voices asking and answering in the corner, feet receding from the table, a stir spreads through the room, and then a pair of hands take hold of the pole of the canopy as if it were a flag. And all this time I kept my eyes lowered and I didn’t look at Alek, but even without looking at him I knew his location and his movements. A concentrated prince, captive among the hand-wavers.

Two women approached me, neither of them the rabbi’s wife I had met on the day we came to register, two other women. They asked me my name, they asked me pityingly about my family, if I was expecting anyone else to come, and when the rabbi came up to demand the note from the mikveh, they gave him my name in Yiddish, and it was only from their gestures that I understood what they were saying, that the poor girl was pregnant. The arrogance of our group abated, or perhaps it did not penetrate to these kindly, pious women, because their fingers kept touching my shoulders and my hair, as if I were in need. They straightened the neckline of my dress, they smoothed and stretched its folds, they brushed a lock of hair off my forehead, and then with increasing boldness they affectionately kneaded my arms. If we had met in the street the next day, I would not have recognized them, but together they arranged a gauze kerchief on my head, so I would have a wedding veil, they called me “the beautiful bride” and wished — it sounded like a promise — that all would be well.

When the canopy was spread a command was given, and the two women took a firm, final grip on my arms and began to lead me round and round the groom in what felt like a kind of slow torture. “This is so you’ll forget all the others,” one of them breathed warmly into my ear.

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.

FETISHISM

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

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.”

TELLING ALEK THE NEWS

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.

And thus, like an Ayn Rand heroine, I came out to him at my leisure, washed and combed, with the gestalt mantra tasting of peppermint toothpaste repeating itself in my throat: I do my thing and you do yours, because you’re you and I’m me. As far as I remember, this nonsense of I’m me and you’re you was a big hit in those days, people repeated it all the time, and always as if it were an amazing, original discovery flung at their interlocutors in order to open their eyes to a vital truth. But in those moments in the bathroom this piece of nonsense gave me strength. And I mean strength. I was an independent personality capable of anything, and I went out to him like a resolute goddess of free will.

Afterwards we sat in the kitchen. “It has nothing to do with you,” repeated the independent, all-powerful personality, “you’re leaving for Heidelberg in July and I … I’ll do whatever I like.” I couldn’t even pronounce the sentence “I’m going to have the baby,” it sounded so embarrassing to me.

“You have to be realistic,” he said and made me lemon tea without being asked. “Normal human beings should be realistic, and you’re not being realistic now.” “Realistic?” I sneered, suddenly sure of my strength. “Since when, exactly, Alek Ginsberg, have you been a realist?” I was great, no doubt about it, I didn’t only impress myself, I impressed him, too, because he flashed me a smile and seemed to reassess me. “So you still love me?” he asked quietly. “I love you.” He looked at his fingers which for a moment touched my face, and on his face there was a new and strange expression of humility. “I can’t be anybody’s father,” he said.

“I know that.”

“You know that,” he repeated.

“Yes, I know, and I also know that you’re leaving, and I don’t want anything from you.”

“You don’t want anything or you’re not asking for anything?” He always had the shocking ability to put his finger right on the spot.

Was it the madness of love that led me to think that although he was afraid of being bothered, he was somehow also fascinated and even delighted by the whole thing? I’m still sure that it was Alek himself, not the illusions of love, who secretly made me think so. By his expression. By the fluctuations in his voice. By the movements of his fingers. As if he were conducting two conversations with me at once. In one language he says to me, with that lip-narrowing disgust, which looks to me like self-disgust, again: “If you want … to end it, Gido — remember him? — the redheaded guy who was with us at the Rabbinate … he’s doing his residency at Hadassah, he could tell us where go to.” And in the other language he applauds the madness, the holy and actually rather surprising madness of Noa Weber.

“Forgive me,” he says in the end in a gentle voice, “I shouldn’t have spoken like that. A man has no right to tell a woman what to do about her pregnancy.”

BEING REALISTIC

I, to the best of my knowledge, am a realist, but how realistic I was at the age of eighteen it’s hard to say. If one of Hagar’s girlfriends from high school had come to me, if Hagar herself had come to me, and said: (a) I’m pregnant, and I’m not going to have an abortion; (b) I’m in love; (c) he doesn’t love me; and (d) he’s leaving the country in nine months time — I would have made her see reason right then and there. First I would have knocked the nonsense out of her and then I would have accompanied what remained of her to a reputable gynecologist to have an abortion.

Yes, and just how do you think you’ll manage with a child? Have you got any idea of what it means to be a single parent? What makes you think that you’ll be able to study and work at the same time? And where exactly will the money come from? And the strength to get up at night? And when the child suddenly gets sick, which happens quite often, and you’re all alone, and there’s nobody else to take care of him but you … or if you get sick, or heaven forbid if you break your arm, and that happens too, have you any idea of the stress, the anxiety, of being without any safety net at all? Now explain to me exactly what you have in mind. That your parents will bring him up? That your parents will support you both until you grow up and stand on your own feet? Aha, very good, you say you want to be independent. So tell me, exactly how much money have you earned in your life up to now? A hundred shekel as a babysitter? And apart from babysitting, my dear, have you ever taken care of a baby in your life?

Since no friend of Hagar’s ever came to ask my advice about an unwanted, in-these-circumstances pregnancy, I never had a chance to test the effectiveness of this rebuke. On me, in any case, it didn’t work. And I could no more consider getting rid of the fetus than Mary could have sat on a rock in the hills of Nazareth to consider getting rid of Jesus. Which isn’t to say that I thought I was pregnant with the Messiah or any such psychotic delusion, but that the pregnancy itself was sacred to me. Sacred not because I decided that it was, I didn’t decide anything, it was simply self-evident to me.

The word “sacred” is difficult for me, it’s difficult for me to use it without mockery, without being witty at my own expense, but I don’t have any other word, and even today and even now, I can still relive the feeling of hard grace that came with my love and was embodied in the developing fetus.

Since I was young but not entirely stupid, or not entirely detached from reality, I was scared stiff, and the fear naturally increased the closer the due date approached. And although I may not have had a serious grasp of what it meant to be a single mother at eighteen — I couldn’t possibly have known — I can testify that I certainly tried to guess. In other words, at first I just wondered vaguely, and later on I imagined, and then I imagined more, until towards the end I spent most of the day and night agonizing over completely realistic worries, which, especially after darkness fell, appeared insolvable. It would be reasonable to assume that the worry would banish the grace, but this did not happen, and throughout that winter I existed as if on two planes: one of fearful thoughts going round in circles — birth, hospital, pain, baby; money, profession, baby, money; birth, pain, pain, profession, loneliness, parents, baby — and another plane, on which I had as if been chosen to be blessed. Blessed I say now, and blessed I thought then too, but there was nothing saccharine-sweet in this consciousness. No bliss-azure-skies-plump-cherubs. It was more like a mission or a sign that marked me out, like a burn on my skin, which could not be denied even in great fear. What I’m trying to say is that grace does not banish the fear, but on the contrary, grace can be terrifying.

I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT MONEY

I have to talk about money, a few words at least. Because if I’m boasting about the courage with which I accepted the pregnancy — which in a sense is what I’m doing — it must be remembered that the courage demanded of me wasn’t so very great. And in order to deflate my heroism a little, I must give an account of the economic circumstances, as they say, in which I cultivated my love.

“Cultivated my love,” I say, “cultivated my love.” To the best of my knowledge I never “cultivated” it. And I only said so in order to needle myself and be sarcastic at my own expense. It would be much more accurate to say: the economic circumstances in which I loved.

When I left my parents’ home in an adolescent tempest, all I had was a small savings account at the postal bank. A little money I received for my bat mitzvah, money I saved from babysitting and counseling at summer camps, and the symbolic dollars my Aunt Greta sent on my birthdays. Since I deluded myself that the rift with my parents was final, and since I had been brought up to work, that same week I applied to the labor bureau, which sent me to an old bed and breakfast in the suburb of Talpiot. Until the end of the month of February, when I could no longer hide my pregnancy and I was fired, I worked there from quarter to seven in the morning to quarter to four in the afternoon. Two Arab women from East Jerusalem cleaned and tidied the upstairs rooms, and I, looking more presentable to the proprietors, laid the tables, cut up vegetables, fried omelets, poured drinks, served meals, and in general provided the guests with “homey service.” At eleven o’clock, when breakfast was over, I mopped the floors in the dining room, the lobby and the stairs, and all I had to do after that was to sit and answer the phone. The work was relatively easy, the owners, an elderly couple, were quite friendly until they fired me — at that period I did not yet have a clue about “legal rights”—and there isn’t the slightest justification to see me as the pregnant-servant-heroine. I certainly am not trying to present myself as such. And even if it happened that I was overcome by weakness or nausea while frying the omelets, these attacks were not severe and passed quickly.

My difficulty with the work was different. I have to admit that the smell of the frying in my hair and of the detergent in my clothes, and all the “go, do, bring,” were quite damaging to my self-image. It’s true that I was brought up to work. I was taught that all forms of work were deserving of respect, but even on a kibbutz scale this was close to the bottom of the ladder. Service work. Not productive labor that a person could be proud of, definitely not something that brought credit to the kibbutz. And let’s not forget that while I was busy not bringing credit to the kibbutz, Alek was plowing through Nietzsche with the help of a Russian-German dictionary, poring over his mysterious Soloviev and his symbolist poets, or catching the eye of his teacher, the poet Leah Goldberg, in class. I know that he tried to attract her attention in class, she interested him, I guessed that he interested her, too, and this too did nothing to add to my sense of worth.

What Alek’s financial situation was I did not know, and it never occurred to me to ask. That is to say, I knew that sometimes he had money, because then he took taxis and threw money around at Fink’s Bar, and that shortages of cash would last until he got fed up and he would go to work with Yoash. Further details I learned only later, after he left, and after the repulsive Hyman came to inform me of my legal husband’s intentions and of my rights: As of this moment, Alek, even if he so desired, is unable to pay child support, you have to understand this, and since he is abroad in any case, my advice to you is not to enter into a fight because you won’t get anything out of it. At the time, as you probably remember, I advised you to talk to him in order to secure your position, but there’s no point in crying over spilt milk now. Under the circumstances, and if we’re already talking, have you got some arrangement for the child already? They’re looking for an extra girl to work in our office in the mornings, and if you’re interested I’ll be happy to recommend you. Just take into account that you’ll have to learn to type, because presumably they didn’t teach you to type at school, ha ha ha.

I didn’t understand if Hyman had been sent by Alek or if he had appointed himself to the task, if he was trying to represent me or my husband, and the truth is that I wasn’t interested, either. At the end of all the talk he informed me that Alek had paid a deposit for the apartment in which I was living, and that I could go on living there as long as I wished. Hyman also tried to hint that it would be a good idea to “regularize the situation” and draw up a written agreement, but neither then nor in the future did I have the faintest desire for any kind of “written agreement.” Perhaps simply because there was no need for it, perhaps because a contractual procedure of this kind didn’t fit in with my lofty standards and exalted love.

Over the years, partly through Hagar, I discovered that Alek was not a complete beggar, at least not in terms of his home. From bits of stories I pieced together it transpired that Jenia, Marina’s husband, evidently a capable man, had had a hand in some textile business in Poland, and he had not only made a profit but also succeeded in getting the money out of the country, and afterwards, in France, he had made more. I don’t know if Alek took money from him, perhaps he had managed to save something during the period when he was a student with a job in Paris, perhaps he received money from the state as a new immigrant to Israel. The important thing from my point of view is that even before he enlisted in the army he acquired the apartment on Usha Street and renovated it, and it was in the course of the renovations, by the way, that he met Yoash. The quarter of Nachlaot had not yet become fashionable then, prices were relatively cheap, and as a result of all of the above it came about that I and my daughter had, and still have, a home. This fact was not yet known to me when I decided to have the baby, but even without it, I can’t deny that I made my leap of faith with a safety net spread out beneath me. A safety net consisting of parents, I mean, and with parents like mine there was no real possibility that I would turn into an abandoned-pregnant-maidservant-heroine. Even in my mental state of adolescent melodrama, I think that I knew this.

A few words about my parents’ situation. After leaving the kibbutz we lived austerely for a while, without property or savings, on the salaries of a nurse and an officer in the standing army. The change came two years later, when my father left the army and started to exploit the connections he had made on various sales and acquisitions missions in order to broker private arms deals.

Connections are Benjy’s strong point. Connections and a kind of greedy lust for life, expressed among other things in overpowering energy and dynamic industriousness. My father, Benjamin Weber, is a man whose sense of responsibility borders on megalomania, who slaps everyone on the back and looks after everyone. “Everyone” came to Talush’s bat mitzvah and he went to “everyone’s” celebrations, flashing them, me, all of us, the cheerful, bright blue looks of a tanned, wrinkled little boy. After the Yom Kippur War, and again after the Labor Party lost the elections, and after his heart attack, and when Bibi Netanyahu rose to power — he seemed to have emptied out, with his shirt empty at the shoulders, to have turned into a nostalgic whiner who had lost his back-slapping cheerfulness and his natural ability to fix things with a couple of phone calls. But whenever we thought that old age had finally caught up with him, he pulled himself together, jumped back into the saddle and returned to his hail-fellow-well-met ways.