The Confessions of Noa Weber

What is important here is that in the winter of ’72 my parents were already “doing well,” as they say, that afterwards they did even better, and that even if this were not the case, they would never have abandoned their firstborn daughter to the streets or the social services. Would I have persisted in my madness and my pregnancy without this safety net? Not having been put to the test, I don’t know, but the bottom line is: I believe that I would have.

ONCE I’M TALKING ABOUT MY PARENTS

Once I’m already talking about my parents, I may as well mention two shameful events connected to them which took place during my pregnancy. When I was in my fourth month, it was in December, I dropped into my mother’s clinic, she worked then in the old Sha’arei Tzedek Hospital, and informed her of my situation — Hello, mother, how are you? I got married in a fictitious marriage and now I’m pregnant.

To the best of my recollection I didn’t plan this visit in advance, I didn’t plan it and I didn’t decide on it, but on my way home from work, I simply went up to see her as if on a whim. From the heights of my maturity today I can admit that I was miserable and frightened and I needed a mother, but then I didn’t admit this even to myself, and armored myself instead in a kind of conceited, annoying calm. My mother, in spite of all the advice she read in women’s magazines, my mother, a veteran nurse, with a table of the principal nutrients on the wall over her head, and a table of calories under the glass on her desk, my mother couldn’t find a word to say. She simply sat there speechless, and I can’t say that I blame her. I blew in out of nowhere, impermeable and intoxicated with myself, albeit in need, desperately in need, but not of her and her touch — of him, who made any other contact impossible.

That same evening, in the street below, someone put his hand on the horn of his car and kept it there. And when our neighbour Miriam poked her head out to complain, and Alek emerged from his room, I saw my father’s white Alfa Romeo from the kitchen window.

“It’s my father,” I said quietly, “I suppose he wants me to go down.” Chivalrous by education and principle, Alek offered to go down with or without me. Judging by his tone it sounded as if there was nothing out of the ordinary in the street scene taking place below, or in the one that was about to take place. As if this was the way of the world and the way of fathers and everybody knew it. “Put on a coat at least,” he said, mildly amused, “here, take mine,” and he draped it round my shoulders.

Wrapped in Alek’s coat, while its owner took up a position at the window, I went down to my father. When I opened the gate for a moment his eyes were at the level of my stomach, and he immediately jumped out of the car. “Get in,” he shot at me, “we’re going home, first thing tomorrow morning your mother’s taking you to Zvi’s clinic.”

“It’s too late.”

“Don’t you tell me that it’s too late.”

“It is too late, one; and two, I’m not going with you anywhere.”

My father kicked the tire and let out a curse in English aimed at Alek. “Why are you cursing him? What’s there to curse about? What do you want him to do? To marry me? He’s already married me. I’m a married woman.” I could have made do with these lines, they were quite good, but I couldn’t resist going on: “And, all together, what right have you got to talk? You didn’t marry Yifat, and ‘that man,’ as you call him, did marry me.” When we were still living on the kibbutz, one of my father’s volunteer activities was to prepare the twelfth-graders for the army, and Yifat from the Swallow Group, some of the kibbutz members said also Dalia from the Dawn Group, apparently received his personal attention. At home nobody ever mentioned these stories, or even hinted at them, as if it might God forbid hurt my father’s feelings, but in my group there was a girl whose sister worked in the kibbutz clinic, and according to her my dear father arranged for a friend of his at the Tel Hashomer Hospital to perform abortions on both of them.

All this happened shortly before we left the kibbutz and invites the construction of some bombastic theory about my subconscious hostility towards my father, which is of course nothing but love in disguise. About the incestuous jealousy I felt for the girls he had fucked, an incestuous jealousy which was the sole reason … except that this interpretation doesn’t hold water, and is completely beside the point. I love Alek. Full stop. I loved Alek, full stop. I was impregnated by Alek, full stop. And my father’s activities have nothing to do with it. As a child his behaviour embarrassed me. And later on it angered me. As an adult I accumulated fluent reasons to explain to anyone ready to listen why it was abhorrent, and I went on condemning and denouncing until I reached a height of maturity where my feelings were joined by a kind of compassionate affection as well.

But all these emotional and ideological developments with regard to my father, all this textbook psychological growth, had absolutely nothing to do with my relationship with Alek.

My love watches me from the window. My father looks at me through his superfluous sunglasses, and his mouth is suddenly slack and drooping. My love and my father, my father and my love. Reality brought them together this one time, in this one scene. My mind, however, never made any connection between them, and the same goes for my subconscious mind. I’m sure of it, you have my word for it, and it’s my word that counts.

“And I already fixed up a job for you in the army as a company clerk,” said my father, and no doubt wanted to drive away with screeching brakes, but the Alfa refused to start. He almost exhausted the battery before it moved. But still he let the window down to have the last word: “Just tell him, in my name, that I’m going to find out everything about him,” and then he stepped on the gas.

WRETCHEDNESS

That was my last big scene, and the further we advanced into winter the lower I sank, without being able to raise myself or my spirits. I couldn’t even go out to run, and running had always been a part of my life. It seems to me that I discovered jogging naturally, long before it became fashionable, and I kept it up after it went out of fashion too. Until recently, running has helped me keep to my daily ration of five cigarettes, as well, and it’s only rarely, like this Passover, that I let myself exceed it. I liked, and I still like, the effort, the stretching of myself beyond the point where you think you’ve reached your limit. And still, to this day, I go on pushing myself past the stabbing pain in my ribs and the pain in my legs, for the sake of the miracle that takes place when you don’t break, when the pain vanishes, and you grow light to yourself and you feel as if you can carry on gliding through the air forever. But already at the beginning of the pregnancy I found that I was short of breath, I was too tired after work, in the evening I felt sleepy, and I stopped running.

Beginning with the fifth month I could no longer hide my condition, not even under the galabiyehs I wore, and my swelling stomach and undisguised wretchedness embarrassed everyone who came to the house. And they came in droves, flocks of guests who dropped in almost every evening and sometimes stayed until the wee hours of the night. Alek entered into a kind of sociable trance, and in that freezing February-March there were weeks that looked like a never-ending party. Rhapsody in Blue playing on the record player, stacks of dishes piled in the sink, used tea bags on the marble counter, cigarette ends in empty bottles of brandy, vodka, and Sprite. People sprawled in every corner of the house, including his room. Someone squatting on the stairs, wrapped in a red banner bearing a picture of Che Guevara, filling the stove with kerosene while the wind made the banner billow around him. Someone dead to the world on my bed, his muddy shoes dirtying the corner of the mattress. A smell of kerosene, and rain and smoke and orange peels on top of the stove, never grass, because even at the height of his sociability Alek would send the joint-rollers outside, with the apology that he couldn’t stand the smell.

There was a certain Shmulik who turned up with a guitar and the entire repertoire of the youth movement and the kibbutz, and suddenly this too didn’t bother Alek, who up to then hadn’t been able to stand “those Soviet songs.” Or maybe it did bother him, because a murderous, demented expression spread over his face as he joined in and sang as if to spite himself, sang with them, to them, in Russian.

I said before that I was a source of embarrassment. In practice most of the guests ignored me, they didn’t even know that I lived there, and the ones that knew me didn’t know what to say. I stuck out like a sore thumb, like a kind of walking hump, a hump that was liable, God forbid, to attach itself to their own backs. Sometimes Dalit from La Mama would ask in a confidential-compassionate voice: “Should I make you a cup of tea?” Or: “Are you sure we’re not stopping you from sleeping?” And in my misery I was glad even of these little pats.

Once, on a gray early evening, outside, I remember, a niggardly snow was falling, Hyman sat down next to me on the mattress, and when he put his arm around me in a comradely manner, as if we were sitting round the campfire, and slipped his fingers into my bra, I didn’t even protest. I was chain-smoking then, one cigarette after the other whenever I wasn’t feeling nauseated, and that gray evening, with Hyman’s arm around me, Alek suddenly bent down and removed the cigarette from between my lips. “That’s enough. You’re smoking too much.” By such crumbs of attention I was nourished then, and with them I sustained my love. Love does not need very much to sustain it.

Another time he came home in the morning, it was already after I had been fired from my job, and I was just sitting in the kitchen. And I was hurting so badly then that I couldn’t even raise my head. But Alek came up and stood behind me, and stroked my nape, the sensation of that particular touch is imprinted in me to this day, as if my nape remembers, and then he pulled me to my feet and went on hugging me gently from behind. “It’s hard for you.” “It is,” I admitted in a low voice. “Yes …” he whispered to me, “yes, Noichka, it’s hard.” As if a common destiny had been imposed on both of us. A common destiny … even today, when I no longer believe in that kind of predestination as I did then, sometimes against my better judgement, I still sense its existence.

When he turned away and went to his room, I, moved to the point of tears, thought of a poem by David Vogel we had studied for finals. “How can I see you, love, / Standing alone / Amid storms of grief / Without feeling my heart shake?” I returned again and again in those days to that poem, which continued: “Come, / My hand will clasp your dreaming / Hand, / And I shall lead you between the nights.” But I was only his fictitious wife, married to him only by law and by the law of my love, and most of the time I stood “alone amid storms of grief” and his heart did not shake. And his hand did not clasp my hand to lead me between the nights.

Only one single time, one single night in that winter, when my stomach was not yet very big, he got into bed with me. He didn’t fuck me, he didn’t even take off his pants, he only undressed me naked and worked on me until I came in tears. And he held me a little longer against his chest, until perhaps he thought I had fallen asleep, and then he got up and went away.

I didn’t want to come like that. I did want to come, the fact is that I did come, it’s only in pornographic movies that a woman shudders and comes against her will, and he finished me off completely with that unselfish sex, I finished myself in that beggarly sex, under the generosity of his mouth and hands, trembling, rising and falling, not holding my head above water, swallowing black water, sinking in waves of humiliation. And in all that time I knew that he was really trying to do me and my body good. And in the days to come, too, like a dog I would fawn on the accidental touch of his hand, and arch at the memory of a caress.

You could say that in that winter I lost my self-respect, you could say so — but that wasn’t the way I felt, at least most of the time. And with the feeling of humiliation, with my wretchedness and pink, running nose, in my madness I invented a new kind of respect for myself. Like a private code of chivalry. Like setting myself a martyr’s test, at the conclusion of which I would present myself to receive a medal from the Order of Faithful Lovers. No nagging. No clinging. No whining. No expectations and no demands. This was the motto inscribed on my shield. And with all my strength I tried to comply with these commands. Because if I was sentenced to being a beggar, then at least I would be a beggar with an ethical code.

Vogel’s weren’t the only lines of poetry in my head, there were all kinds of others, too, and without any other books at hand — Alek’s were in Russian, French and German — I absorbed myself in the material from my high school literature courses to such an extent that I still know some of it by heart. For hours I held myself spellbound with the poems of Alterman’s The Joy of the Poor, with the eternal absentee coming to the woman “to join her behind the glass,” with the stranger coming to the city to “stand in the gate, and guard your sleep,” with his hidden voice demanding: “And you, now swear by God that you / will draw strength from your miseries.” With his voice promising “like fire and spear I shall give you / comfort, I shall fill you with inhuman / strength,” until “before all is lost I shall / brace you for the time / I the remem- / berer, I the witness.”

I knew that Alek didn’t love me, I’ve already said so, and with a surprising maturity I did not delude myself with thoughts of lightning suddenly striking him. Somehow it was clear to me that people don’t suddenly fall in love with someone who in any case is getting under their feet all day. And nevertheless I wanted something, I longed for something. To be significant in his eyes. To be important to him. To be woven into his heart in a way that could never be unraveled.

Of all the poems I read then the most perverse was an old English ballad we studied in the first year of high school, called “Childe Waters.” In this ballad, which I don’t remember by heart, even though I’ve read it many times, the pregnant heroine cuts off her hair, puts on a page’s costume and accompanies her lover when he sets out to find himself a bride. Childe Waters rides and rides on his horse, the lovelorn girl walks and walks barefoot at his side, and after many verses in which he rides and rides and the damsel walks and walks through thorn fields and rivers, they arrive at a golden palace in a great city. When they are already inside the palace the cruel Childe Waters sends the fair Ellen to bring him a whore from the street, and to add to her humiliation he also commands her to carry the whore in her arms so that she won’t dirty her feet. Ellen does as the knight commands, and while he rolls around in bed with the whore she has brought him, the chivalrous pregnant woman goes to sleep in the stable.

I admit that I was really turned on by this sad ballad then, even though I already had some idea that it was stupid and sick.

In my imagination, I think, I saw myself as the descendent of all these lovelorn literary women, their sister in an order of unrequited love. Armed with my limitless love, armed with my passivity, possessed of great strength in my way, and “Not all is vanity, my dear / not all is vain,” and “Strength has no end, my dear, / only the body that breaks like clay.”

Clearly I was trying to glorify my wretchedness, obviously I was trying to glorify my wretchedness, what else? But this glorification held me to a certain standard of dignified behavior, and it may have saved me from an even worse wretchedness, and from actually crawling like a worm. I mean that “If you tell me to go I shall go, / If you tell me to stay away I shall stay away,” is preferable, after all, to “please don’t go, no, don’t go, I can’t stand it, I can’t take it, no, Alek, please, please don’t.…”

So it’s true that I painted the banal bad as “gloriously bad” to myself, but it’s also true that the “gloriously bad” helped me to get through another miserable hour and another miserable morning. And therefore, however ridiculous I find this romantic pose today, and for all my crushing feminist critique of those poems, I remember how at a certain point in my life they simply helped me to cope. And how in the end, after I gave birth and Alek left, what saved me from total collapse was precisely the romantic pose.

IF YOU TELL ME TO GO

Among all the marvelous qualities I bestowed on my heroine Nira Woolf I also gave her a musical gift and an exquisite contralto. For the most part she only plays to herself at night, improvising jazz both in order to relax and in order to think about her current case, but once I let her sing a completely different song. This happens in the last scene of Dead Woman’s Voice, the sixth book in the series, whose grim plot centers on the attempt to cover up a case of incest. The raped daughter of the senior officer in the security services kills herself before the book begins. The senior prosecuting attorney, the rapist father’s mistress, who is completely subjugated to his will, kills herself in chapter sixteen, after he thrusts a revolver into her hand. And in the last scene, the intern who was trying to blackmail the father lies bleeding on the steps to Nira’s house, while the chief villain himself lies bound at her feet.

Throughout the book my Nira is mainly interested in the servile behavior of the mistress-lawyer, and at the end, after the mystery is solved and the police are already on their way, she sits down at the piano and sings to the villain lying on the floor with his hands and feet tied painfully together behind his back, in the so-called “banana knot,” Alterman’s “Song of Three Answers”: “Everything you ask and wish / I shall be happy to do / I shall never lack the strength / To do as you wish me to.” Nira Woolf’s back is turned to the cruel villain who tried to trap her, too — first to seduce her with his charms and then to murder her — her warm contralto grows louder from line to line against a background of sirens, and only when the police are already in the room does she turn around, without even looking at him. A private joke of my own, I would say, but what kind of a joke is it in fact?

My darling Hagar, who is not a great admirer of my books — she considers them “shallow”—actually praised this scene, although she remarked that “for her taste” it was “too far-fetched.” My daughter, who from time to time sends me articles about “The image of the woman in …”—all her articles seem to me the regurgitation of the same slogans — my daughter appears to have been born with an innate immunity to the germ of romanticism and to have subsequently enlisted in the medical corps dedicated in deadly earnest to its extermination. Not for her own personal benefit, since she does not seem to be in need of it, but for the good of the population at large.

Hagar’s preoccupation with “the image of the woman” began in high school, at the same high school I attended myself, with the same literature teacher and regarding the very same works that I myself studied.

“To say to a woman ‘be to me a god and an angel,’ ” she once wrote in one of her more successful compositions, “is like telling her that she isn’t a human being!!! Bialik has no right to dictate to a woman what she should be!!!” On behalf of these well-put sentiments, with all their angry exclamation marks, and others like them, my darling often quarreled with her literature teacher. Thanks to her congenital immunity she seems to be completely deaf to certain notes, so that they simply fail to have any effect on her at all, or else they activate only her sense of justice and social anger. A justified anger, I have to say, an absolutely and completely justified social anger.

But for the second of July 1972, but for Alek, perhaps I would be as pure and innocent as she is today.

“In my opinion Sonia is a superficial one-dimensional character,” wrote my darling vehemently when they studied Crime and Punishment, and she added arguments far more compelling than any I had to offer at her age. All kinds of explanations about the connection between the kedosha, the saintly woman, and the kedeisha, the temple whore, and how “the patriarchal culture produced them both.”

In my day the combination “patriarchal culture” did not yet exist.

When I read the essay she left lying on the kitchen table, with the usual mark of 100 written on top of the page, it suddenly seemed to me that this red-inked hundred referred to my age, so infirm of mind did I feel. Muddling memories, he stood there like that and I lay there when he said and then I said.… My arteries so clogged with memories that I didn’t have a drop of strength to speak, and in any case there was too much, much too much, and it was too late to explain anything.

When she praised the last scene of Dead Woman’s Voice my daughter told me — she was twenty-five then — that I had done well to “expose the falsity of that text” and that it was “important to educate the public to understand how chauvinistic that song is.”

My good darling is right, we have to educate, we have no choice, and I educated her, I had no choice, and she with her marvelous purity is the perfect creation of my educational endeavors.

Even if I were given the chance to bring her up all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I DO MY THING AND YOU DO YOURS

The first time I saw Tamara was on the eve of Purim, when all kinds of people dropped in on us on their way to the big party at the Bezalel Academy of Art, and already in that half hour I knew that something had happened or was going to happen between her and Alek. It’s hard to say exactly how such things are grasped, but I think that I knew not because of the way they looked at each other, but just the opposite, because of the way they avoided looking. He didn’t make room for her to sit down. He didn’t pour her a drink. None of his usual chivalrous gestures towards the pretty faces who would show up at the house.

Tamara — not Tamar but Tamara — was as affected in my eyes as her name. She had dressed up for the party in a gold sari, and if she had removed her steel-rimmed glasses, with her long black hair and dark, slightly asymmetrical face, she would have looked like one of Gauguin’s women. A thin Gauguin. Although she was as Israeli as I was, a Jerusalemite from the well-heeled suburb of Rehavia, she surrounded herself with a kind of aura of foreignness. She was studying comparative literature with Alek, and she talked through her nose in a would-be European accent, although it was impossible to say which Europe exactly.

On that first evening she showed up with a friend draped in a sheet supposed to be a toga, who came back on the following days, but the minute I set eyes on his pampered mouth and receding chin, and took in the pair of them together, I knew that I couldn’t expect any protection from him.

The pregnant Cinderella was not going to the party, even though a number of people asked me if I wanted a ticket. With my big belly and scratchy tights under my galabiyeh, and my feeling of vulnerability, I had no intention of exposing myself to the particular torment of Purim. I waited for everyone to leave with their costumes and rattles, so that I could go to bed at last and be by myself. But when I was alone I was subject to another torment, no less intrusive than the noise of the merry-making, and from which I could not hide in bed, because it was even more savage lying down.

From the beginning, the beginning of our relationship, that is, I knew that this torment would come. In other words, I had no reason to assume that Alek would abstain from other women, and in spite of my own limited experience, I was certainly able to recognize his. I knew on my skin how every movement of his with me, every kiss and caress, bore the memory of previous contacts, and I knew it so precisely, that it sometimes seemed to me that the memory of these previous sexual encounters had entered into me by osmosis, and I could actually see the images. I was seventeen and eighteen in our first year, and he was twenty-eight. And to this day I have this feeling, as if I can guess via the sex what kind of woman he was with before. As if our love-making made all the others present.

Today I don’t care any more, I think I don’t care, but that lofty indifference was acquired with effort and passed through all kinds of stages on the way, the one being the stage of the gestalt mantra: I’m me and you’re you, I do my thing and you do yours. Now I think that this slogan serves as a theoretical rationalization for abuse, but for some strange reason I used this rationalization then to justify my own mute suffering: this is what I chose, this is what he chose, that’s how he is, that’s how I am, and if I don’t get up and leave, I have to bear it. And with dignity.

As far as Alek is concerned, by the way, I don’t think he ever had any desire to abuse me or any other woman. In all our years together he was discreet about his other women, perfectly discreet, but never secretive in a manner that spoke of guilt.

With me and also presumably with them, he behaved as if polygamy was the most natural thing in the world. And with the passing of time, without anything being said, he succeeded quite well in making me internalize the notion that the demand for sexual fidelity was tantamount to emasculation.

So I would never put my Nira Woolf, for example, into any kind of exclusive relationship, let alone a total commitment. And if the curtain comes down in Suitable Service with a passionate sex scene with the decent military advocate, at the opening of Daggers Drawn she already has another man in tow.

Looking back, the hardest thing was waiting for the inevitable to happen, for another woman to appear, and so perhaps, however perverse it may sound, when Tamara came into the picture it was a kind of relief.

Jealousy craves knowledge, as if knowledge of the details has it in its power to liberate the obsessive preoccupation, and at a certain point, two weeks or more after the party, I needed to know so badly that I went up to talk to her. It was in our kitchen, and she was making tea for the owner of the pampered mouth and a few others.

Me (leaning against the marble counter next to her): I wanted to tell you something.

Tamara (obviously alarmed): Yes, of course …

Me: About you and Alek.

Tamara: What? Oh … what about it? (A quick glance in my direction, and then lowering her head as she pours the tea into the mugs on the tray.)

Me: I just wanted you to know … and for Alek to know, too, that this is his house. And that nobody tells him what to do in his house.

Tamara (More alarmed than ever. The lenses of her glasses are covered with steam): I don’t understand.

Me (Pulling the cardigan more tightly around my body. My hands folded above my high stomach.): I don’t know what you’ve been told about us, but you should know that Alek and I are only married fictitiously, because I didn’t want to go to the army.

Tamara: Oh, but you’re mistaken. It isn’t like that. You’re completely mistaken. There’s nothing between me and Alek. Rani (or Dani) is my boyfriend.

Me: What I wanted to say is that you don’t have to behave like a couple of thieves, because that’s what’s unfair to me. And if you really want to know what hurts me, then that’s what hurts me. It insults me that you try to hide it.

In the course of this dialogue I suddenly realized what it means to be crazy: I attached myself to her like some crazy beggar woman seizing the sleeve of a passerby in the street, and I clearly sensed how she instinctively recoiled in fear. Instinctively she wanted to pick up her heels and run away from me, not because I had “caught her out” and “discovered her secret,” but because of what I was, which could be dangerous. And nevertheless I could not stop. As if only the explicit confirmation that it had happened and was happening would bring me relief. The devil knows what kind of relief, because I didn’t have even the vaguest notion of what I would do when I knew. When I knew for certain. When I knew what for certain? That he was fucking her? How he was fucking her? Slowly and looking at her to see? What her little breasts looked like when he rolled her on top of him; how he wound her long hair around his hand and smiled at her; if he kissed her eyes and stroked her back too when she fell asleep on his shoulder?

Above all, I think, I wanted it to be different with me. To know that something different happened to him with me. Because it was impossible that it could be the same with me and this phony Gauguin fake.

It sounds funny, but what aroused my jealousy most, even more than the imagined sex, was the fact that Tamara knew French and was studying Russian. That she sat next to him during classes and afterwards, gossiping about Leah Goldberg and reading Verlaine and Baudelaire, and Bely, and Blok, and Ivanov, all the poets he could only tell me about. That he talked to her about “Schopenhauer’s perception of music” and what exactly an important thinker called Eduard von Hartmann thought, and what exactly someone else, I can’t remember who, said. For some reason it was clear to me — a crumb of consolation — that he talked to her, while all she contributed to the conversation was her affected cultured expression. I brooded a lot about how he made her laugh with all kinds of misquotations and never had to interrupt with “that I really can’t translate.”

Of course I never found the certainty I sought. And after Purim, when Alek’s trance of sociability calmed down a bit, he simply started to stay away from home more and more. Once when I came back from work the two of them were sitting in his room with the door open, and he had his arm around her shoulder. “Noichka … come and join us. Tamara’s tried to translate something we read in class here, and with my Hebrew I can’t even tell her how it sounds.” He said this quite naturally, without removing his arm from her shoulder that had turned to stone. And then, too, what hurt most of all in this scene was the apparently trivial fact that he called me “Noichka,” a name that up to then had been reserved for only the most intimate moments between us.

TWENTY-NINE YEARS LATER

Twenty-nine years later, the jealousy was no longer alive. It died down after the shock of the birth, and after he left and came back and left again, and I went to visit him abroad. Perhaps I grew accustomed to being one of a number of Alek’s women. And perhaps the distance and the longings dulled the other pain. From the outset I should never have allowed myself to be jealous, for what right did I have to be jealous of him? And for lack of any alternative, what I wanted above all was only to believe that I was in some way special to him. That something not given to others was given only to me.

With more than twenty-nine years behind us, I am entitled to believe that I am, indeed, special to him. That my perseverance has borne fruit, and there is a place reserved exclusively for me in his heart. But at what price?

Now too I do not think that I fell in love with a man unworthy of me, and that if only I woke up from a twenty-nine-year-old dream I would to my horror see a donkey’s head. Alek turned fifty-seven in December, and still, with his angular thinness and his graying hair, he is more worthy in my eyes than any other man, and so I know he will always remain. The problem isn’t that he’s unworthy, but that perhaps it isn’t worthy to love anyone the way I love him.

I said that the birth and everything that followed it dulled my jealousy. But it happened a few times that it bit me again, and I didn’t succeed in loosening its teeth immediately.

My Hagar (aged six): What do you think, that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?

Me: You know better than me. You went for a walk with him.

And thus from my worried daughter I learned that Ute was about to give her a baby brother. This was in ’79, after Alek had returned to Israel as a correspondent for Radio Luxembourg and a couple of European newspapers, and I was already leading the life of a mistress. Waiting for him to phone me. Not phoning him. Deserting my job on all kinds of pretexts to keep appointments with him. Looking for babysitters for Hagar, simply in order to accompany him when he went to cover a demonstration. Arranging for another mother to pick Hagar up from kindergarten and waiting for him bathed and ready at home, afraid that the phone would ring and it would be him, to say that he was sorry but he couldn’t come. Maybe next week? I’ll call you.… The whole humiliating package.

Soon after Alek’s return, I had dropped in for coffee at Yoash’s picture-frame shop on Agrippas Street, and he said to me: “She’s a restorer, he met her in Paris. Her name’s Ute.” I already knew this, but Yoash, bending over his work table, went on, more slowly than usual and surprisingly hostile: “The way Alek tells it, she came to the newspaper office to pick up a parcel her cousin had left there for her, and a second after she entered the room he already knew that he wanted to have children with this woman. Do you believe that? Or is he just rewriting history?”

Alek and Yoash didn’t see a lot of each other at this time. Perhaps the political atmosphere strained relations between them: the rise of the right to power that appalled Yoash and pleased Alek the foreign correspondent—“Changing the government is always a good thing”—and perhaps there was some other reason. I didn’t see a lot of Yoash, either. But that Friday morning, for no particular reason, I dropped into his shop for a cup of coffee on my way to the market. Or perhaps the reason for my visit was that I had already met Alek since his return, and I wanted to hear what Yoash knew, and to feel I was touching him again through someone who might have met him too.

“He wanted to have children with this woman.” The sentence cut right through my stomach to the sound of the cardboard splitting in two as Yoash slowly and intently sliced through it with his box-cutter knife. I already knew about Ute, but I didn’t know this, and suddenly I understood that in my foolishness I had seen my pregnancy with Hagar and the night of her birth as a kind of covenant between us.

BIRTH

On the night of the tenth of June I woke up with wet panties, a strong feeling of nausea, and a pain no worse than the pain that had been coming and going intermittently during the previous days. As soon as I woke up I knew that it had begun, and I was completely unready.

When my sister Talush was born I was not yet six, and all I remembered of the event was that my mother went away to Afula and returned five days later with the baby, and how for some time my father would take me to the children’s house to put me to bed, because my mother had gone to feed the baby. All my girlfriends today gave birth in their thirties, and from their prenatal courses, and from the stories they told and retold afterwards, I learned things I had no idea of even after I had already given birth myself. Contraction length, dog pants, dilation, epidural, Pitocin, head presentation, breech presentation, vacuum, forceps — an entire vocabulary of combat experience that could certainly have been useful. Only once, when I was already in my ninth month, I paged through some manual in Stein’s Bookshop, and the black-and-white photographs disgusted or alarmed me to such an extent that I closed it immediately. And so I came to give birth in a state of total ignorance, with only the vaguest notion of what was happening to me.

They say that women forget the pain of giving birth, which is absolute nonsense and I don’t know why people keep repeating it. Because what does it mean to remember pain? You remember pain in exactly the same way as you remember pleasure, which is also not exactly re-experienced with the memory, and nevertheless is implanted firmly in your body.

It was dark in the room and I was feeling too nauseated to get up and look for clean panties in the closet, so I simply took off the wet ones and went on lying half naked on the bed under the piqué blanket. Alek’s door was shut, he had returned after I had already fallen asleep, and for some stupid, stubborn reason I got it into my head that whatever happened, I was on no account to wake him up. Maybe he had come home late from Tamara. Maybe he was with Tamara now. He had never hidden behind the door with Tamara, and the couch in his room wasn’t big enough for two, but nevertheless this piece of idiocy stuck in my head, that the two of them might be there together now, and that nothing on earth would make me call him or knock on the door.

You could argue that my stubbornness was actually an expression of anger. That instead of punishing him I punished myself, and that what I was really doing was trying to make him feel as guilty as I could: “Look how much I love you, and look what you’re doing to me.” Maybe. I don’t know. I only know that together with the thought that he was in the room with Tamara, I was afraid of the possibility that he wasn’t home at all, that his door was still closed from the day before, and that I was mistaken in thinking that it had been open when I went to bed. Apart from which I have already said that I was unprepared, and waking Alek meant admitting that this was it, it was beginning. So even though I really knew it was beginning, at the same time it seemed to me that if I didn’t wake him up, perhaps I would fall asleep again and somehow or other I would wake up in the morning as if nothing had happened.

I don’t know how much time passed in this way until, at a certain point, I tried to reach the bathroom to vomit, and in the darkness I threw up on the passage floor. When I squatted down with my bare bottom to clean up the mess, a whine like a dog’s suddenly escaped me and took me by surprise. This whine seems to have breached the dike, because after it, and when I returned to sit on the bed, I gave myself up entirely to self-pity and tears. I wailed and rocked, rocked and wailed, even though the contractions were not yet of an order that could not be borne in silence.

Through closed lids I saw the light go on, and even before I opened my eyes I located him standing in the doorway.

“Noichka … has it started?” For some reason I shook my head, but Alek took no notice of my denial. “What a swine I am,” he exclaimed and punched the doorpost with his fist. And even before I recoiled from the violence of the gesture he was already at my side, tucking the blanket around me, embracing me tightly, brushing a sticky lock of hair off my face, whispering tender words to me in Russian: “Shhh … shhh … shhh … devuchka … harosheya maya … shhh, child, don’t cry.”

Nothing will help me, because even today this memory is dear to my heart, and all I have to do is remember Alek, concentrating intently, holding me between his hands, one hand on my breast, the other between my shoulder blades, imprisoning the sobbing inside me — all I have to do is remember it and I melt. As if the importance of those moments is far greater than everything else. Very slowly, as if we had all the time in the world, he helped me to steady my breath and pull myself together, and then he gathered me to him gently and rocked me slowly. “It’s all right … vsyo harasho … it’s all right, don’t be afraid.” Nothing will help me — because even now, when I think of complete and utter consolation, it is personified for me in that cradling in his arms and his voice whispering “don’t be afraid.” Because with that touch and that movement I felt that I was being lapped by a wondrous oceanic sensation, being filled with a sweet oceanic sensation, which was utterly and completely consoling. To this day, whenever I feel the need of consolation, I try to conjure up that sensation, and mostly I only succeed in touching its edges.

The sheet was wet with the amniotic fluid. I was sticky and stinking of vomit, I hadn’t even brushed my teeth, and nevertheless he gathered me up and held me in his arms.

ALEK WASN’T DISGUSTED

Alek wasn’t disgusted by me. On the contrary, he was completely absorbed in me. Not as if he were rushing to the aid of some “emergency” but as if he was intensely moved, and yet he was able to perform all the necessary operations without fear, without being paralyzed by this intensity of emotion.

I can’t say why I love Alek. My love is not a function of any one of his attributes, not of those that I admire, and certainly not of those that are not to my liking. And nevertheless, when I think of my sexual addiction to him, I attribute it at least to a certain extent to his attitude towards the body. I say his attitude towards “the body” and not “my body,” because it is perfectly clear to me that this attitude, which is an essential part of Alek’s nature and being, is not reserved for me alone, and that he treats other women in the same way.

In the four years that he was in Israel with Ute, and I played the part of the classic mistress, I fucked not a few other men. In order to keep my balance, I think, and to even the score. But in all these experiences, and all the experiences that came later, I never met another man like him. I’m not talking about the fact that fucking someone you love is a completely different experience, and I’m not talking about his repertoire of sexual stunts, either. I’ve met a few sexual athletes in my life, the kind who’ve read all the manuals and wear your orgasms on their chests like medals, and without denying the pleasure I had with them, with Alek it was different.

The thing is that Alek really loves the body, he loves the body as if he’s never seen a movie in his life, or a TV commercial; he is free of the external eye and aesthetic perception. It’s difficult to explain properly, because Alek actually likes looking, but it seems as if the sights penetrate him and are beautiful in his eyes and gladden his heart not in the conventional way, not because of “what they look like.” Somehow, almost always when sexual moves are initiated, he seems to undergo a transformation; he fills then with a kind of wonder, and seems to be intent only on guessing and serving — not because it swells his ego, even though in some way of course it swells his ego, of course it does — but the main thing is that he is entranced. Entranced — perhaps this is the right word, as if we are the first people in the world to perform the act, sinking deeper and deeper into it, and the spell is so potent that my external eye too closes until I am all body and until the body vanishes.

Sometimes I think that it is this transformation that drives me crazy. Sometimes I like to look at him in public. To look at his restrained public movements, and then to remember their opposite.

On a number of occasions I have heard Alek describing an old woman as “beautiful,” or an official beauty as “not interesting,” and altogether it seemed that most of the conventional ways of judging women had passed him by. For example, he likes women’s perfumes, and knows how to distinguish between them, too, his favorite is “White Shoulders,” on my neck at least, but in our first month together, when we once emerged from the shower together, he took the deodorant out of my hand, put it back on the shelf, and said: “Not yet, with your permission, we haven’t finished yet,” and it wasn’t an empty gesture. Over the course of time I really became convinced that this clean man really loved the odors of my body, and in our day and age maybe this is enough to win a woman’s heart.

I remember how on my fourth visit to him in Moscow, it was summer then, we were already in his apartment in Ordenka, and I had forgotten my razor blades at home. And since we’re talking about Moscow here, there was no way I could just walk into a shop and buy one. In the end I found a packet of razor blades in a bookshop, in a locked display case next to Ajax cleaning fluid, but before I did so, the stubble that had sprouted on my legs during the course of the week did not stop Alek from rubbing his face on them and smiling to himself as if he was innocently delighting in the new touch.

Thanks to running or genetics, or perhaps to the fire of my madness, my body is what is referred to as “well preserved,” but it is very far from being the body of a seventeen-year-old girl. Before every trip to visit him there is a certain moment in front of the mirror when I take note of the changes, but Alek without words somehow manages to persuade me that they only make me more interesting, and to the signs of aging that appear on my skin from one visit to the next he relates the way a woman is supposed to relate to a man’s scars of honor.

In recent years, ever since my first visit to Russia, I began to attribute this identification with the body to the landscapes of his motherland, perhaps because it was very pronounced over there. He always enjoyed feeding me, but in Moscow it seemed that the simplest act of eating gave him immense pleasure, as when he raised a forkful of food to my mouth and said: “Taste this, see how you like it,” and never took his eyes off me as I bit and chewed, and kissed me without being ashamed of the taste of food in his mouth.

“In Israel the food is tasteless, in Paris they know how to cook the best, but food only has a real taste here.” Perhaps because I saw Moscow through his eyes, and through the rest of his senses, I too began to sense the “real taste of food.” Like the taste and the smell of the sex, which were sharper there than anything I had known before. I had never lived my body as I did there, and it had never dissolved and evaporated as it did there.

All this is true, the truth as far as I am capable of formulating it, and still it revolts, it disgusts me, it utterly disgusts me to have to put the sex with him and my body with him into words. “The sights penetrate him,” “he undergoes a transformation,” “he is intent on guessing and serving.” Why do I do it? Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.

BIRTH

When he thought I had calmed down he said: “I’ll go down and call Yoash now to come with the pickup,” and I clung to him and said: “No, don’t go. I don’t want to. I don’t want to drive,” and then he stroked me a little more and raised my chin and gave me a look that brought a reluctant smile to my lips. “Five minutes,” he said, “five minutes and I’ll be back with you again.”

By the time he returned I was already dressed and I had also cleaned myself up a bit. I still felt nauseated, but I was already able to think of the drive without wanting to throw up. On the way out to the pickup he draped his brown corduroy shirt over my shoulders, and, wrapped in his shirt with his arm around me all the way, I rode between the two men to the hospital to give birth to Hagar.

The drive to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem took maybe twenty minutes, and when he put me in the nurses’ hands my mood was already greatly improved, as if I had been infected by Alek’s festivity, and had risen to the importance of the occasion. And nevertheless he lingered a little longer, gazing at me in admiration, as if at the ultimate mystery, and then he kissed me gravely on the forehead, as if he were sending me on some important mission. “Ti molodetz,” he said to me before he left.

Months later I asked him: “What’s molodetz?” “Say it again … ah, molodetz. Where did you hear that word?” he was suddenly curious.

“Someone said it to me.”

“Molodetz is … hero, person who overcomes. You say this of a man, but it may also be said of a woman. It could be said about you, that you are molodetz. The someone who said it to you, he said it about you?” I didn’t answer. It was a few weeks after Yom Kippur, the two of us had invaded Yoash’s apartment in Yarkon Street, and instead of answering I asked him if he had heard anything more about Yoash, who was still in the agricultural buffer zone on the other side of the Suez Canal.

A birth is a birth, millions of women all over the world give birth every day in worse conditions than I did, and I really have no intention of turning my delivery into something heroic. After being handed over to the nurses the usual procedure began, what was then the “usual procedure.” I know from my girlfriends that a few things have changed since then. They gave me a nightgown, shaved me, gave me an enema, lay me on a bed in the labor room, stuck an IV into my arm, and attached me to a monitor to wait. On the other side of the screen was an empty bed, and beyond that empty bed a woman with a middle-aged voice was wailing fearsomely. At a certain point, when I had already lost my sense of time — they had taken away my watch — they wheeled her out, and after that there were other voices belonging to other women. From time to time a relation came in to visit one of them, and every few minutes the midwife came to see “how we’re coming along.” Two or three times she accompanied me, tottering and hanging on to the IV stand, to the toilet.

In years to come, when my friends began comparing the tales of their deliveries, I understood that I had apparently made good progress, i.e. at a normal pace, for a first birth. What I especially remember is the fear of how much worse the pain could get that came with every wave of contractions, and the graph on the monitor representing the climb from contraction to contraction, like an abstract threat of torture. How much more could I take? The same pain, presumably, was experienced by all the women beyond the screen, and by every woman in the world who has ever given birth, and it is of no particular interest, at least in the context of the story that I am telling here.

What is pertinent to the story is my perverse feeling that I was somehow handing myself over as a willing sacrifice for the sake of something of surpassing importance, which was not only the baby about to be born. Suffering pain and nausea and shivering with cold — for some reason I felt cold all the time — my mind filled with confused, hallucinatory images of ancient rituals, in my folly I saw the daughter of Jephthah and the daughter of Montezuma, and somehow it all connected to Alek and his kiss on my forehead, as if he had sent me to the sacrifice.

Pain is pain is pain, what else can be said of it? But I hadn’t resolved to “bear it with honor” for nothing, my gritted teeth and clamped jaw were connected to the thought that Alek was somehow watching me, and this is what he expected to see. To see me “bearing it with honor.” As the hours passed I gradually lost all control over logic, until at a certain point it seemed to me that Alek himself had inflicted this agony on me, and since he had inflicted it I accepted it, breathing quietly, barely sighing, and hugging his corduroy shirt.

Ten years ago, after my sister gave birth to her twins, a few of her girlfriends were visiting her at home, and, as was usual on these occasions, reminisced like war veterans about battles waged in the delivery room. One of them, orange-haired and ample-bosomed, was burping Noam on her shoulder, and at the same time making us all laugh with reports of how she had made her husband suffer during her labor, and how she had screamed at the top of her voice. “I had a ball, believe me, I really went to town, people must have heard me screaming miles away.”

“Didn’t they give you an epidural?” “You bet they did. Right at the beginning I screamed so loudly that they didn’t have a choice, they came running to give it to me. What am I, a wounded soldier, to lie there and suffer in silence? How many opportunities do I have in my life to scream? So the minute I get the chance I do it with all my heart.”

In the midst of all the joking and laughter, I envied the funny redhead, who appeared to me the embodiment of female mental health.

The story of my own delivery I kept to myself, of course, even after Talush threw out “In comparison to Noa our stories are jokes for children. My sister gave birth in the Middle Ages.”

Perhaps people have a kind of reflex that makes them try to endow pain with significance, but how could I explain to this group of women hilarious with anarchic mirth — laughing at their husbands, joking about the hospital, bad-mouthing their mothers, giggling at themselves and their newfound motherhood — how could I explain to them the perverse meaning which I had given to pain? This meaning belonged to another world, very far from the living room heated for my sister’s offspring, and though I was sitting there in that living room, it was also far from me. What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered myself to pain for his sake. And to my sorrow I must point out that this warped idea was quite detached from the knowledge that at the end of the process I would have a baby. In other words, I didn’t think that I was suffering for the sake of the child, the way that women in labor are at least supposed to think, but found a point in the pain itself, a point which was somehow connected to Alek. And thus with every contraction that racked my body, I imagined that I was taking the pain and offering it up, dedicating it, I have no idea to whom, all I know is that this dedication was connected to some absolute of love. As if all I had to do was take it upon myself, and I would be rewarded in the end by absolute love, which was not simply Alek-will-love-me, but something more tremendous. Something infinite.

At some point, I think it was already afternoon, the midwife came in and after examining me—“Good girl. Not yet, but we’re coming along nicely”—she asked me if I wanted them to “give me something.” Of course I wanted them to give me “something,” but I didn’t know what this “something” was, I only understood from her voice that it would lessen the pain. In my defense I have to say that even in my warped mental state I didn’t wish myself still more pain, and I was very frightened of the pain to come.

Looking back I suppose they must have given me Pethidine, and that while it dulled the pain it somehow increased the hallucinations, because at that point I really went completely off the tracks.

Although the curtains in the room were closed, light still came in, and in addition they had left a light on over my head, on which my hallucinations became fixed. At first I imagined that the light was growing stronger, and at the same time that the shape of the lamp was changing and becoming limitless and unfocussed like the sun. The spreading sun/lamp warmed me and banished the cold shivers, and gradually it came to seem that it was this that was banishing the pain from my back and stomach. As if a sweet warm light were seeping into me until my whole being was full of light, from top to toe, and still it went on welling up and filling me. Gratefully, I let go of Alek’s shirt, and silently thanked the lamp, that is to say the sun, that is to say the face which had begun to appear inside it and which I really cannot describe, except that it was surrounded by a halo like a figure in an icon or that it was itself the aura of something else hidden in its light, which was far more radiant and present than a figure in an icon. The face was very clear, like that of a very familiar personality, clearer and more vivid than any familiar personality … and nevertheless like a familiar personality, and nevertheless, for some reason, impossible to describe. All I know is that this figure revealed itself to me like love, and that with its appearance I felt completely loved, as if I had been made one with my love and now it was inside me, and I dwelt safely within it forever, or something to that effect.… And it was still somehow connected to Alek. As if I had prostrated myself before it like a supplicant, and been promised that my yearnings would be fulfilled. And as if the light was the happiness filling me to overflowing.

It was with the sensation of this superabundance of light, I think, that the change started, and the same thing that was pouring and pouring into me began to arouse my fear. It seemed as if the light was converted inside me into some other substance, and although it was still light, this dense light was crystallizing inside me into something hard and blazing. The light grew stronger, the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the face of the figure turned into a burning presence. And the heat increased even further, until I felt the burning light on my skin, in a minute it would be inside me, melting my bones, boiling my blood, turning the fluid in my eyes to steam. Glued to the bed I pleaded with the figure to withdraw its light, whether it was an expression of wrath, or simply the annihilating effect of its powerful presence, which was growing more powerful all the time.

Like a frightened child I covered my face with the shirt and folded my hands on top of it, but even thus, with my eyes closed, the harsh light and heat increased to terrifying proportions. And only when it seemed that I could bear it no longer, the light and the fear gradually began to grow dimmer.

Three times this experience returned. A benevolent light converted into a burning one, dying down into sweetness, sweetening my blood, pouring into me with infinite gentleness, and then intensifying and hardening inside me and above me with blind indifference.

In days to come, when Talush was getting ready to give birth, I read in one of her manuals about the existence of a defined stage, before the appearance of the major contractions, when it sometimes happens that for a few minutes a woman enters something like a psychotic state. Since in the middle of this hallucination I was rapidly wheeled into the delivery room, I imagine that this is the stage I was in, and that the “stage” and the Pethidine produced their effects on me. But neither the “stage” nor the Pethidine can explain the specific content of my hallucination, and the way in which it was related to Alek and the obsessive thoughts of love that accompanied me throughout.

After the birth I did not give the experience much thought. The baby’s presence and Alek’s absence were more compelling, and it was only half a year later, on one of our invasions of Yoash’s apartment, that I told Alek. Not what preceded the hallucination or followed it, but only the visionary delusion, with his presence expurgated. Alek, his hands clasped behind his neck, listened as if what I was telling him was the most natural thing in the world, and although it was interesting, even very interesting, there was nothing strange or surprising about it. “It happens that a person dreams a dream that seems not to belong to him,” he said quietly, as if stating a fact, and reached under the blanket for the packet of cigarettes. There was no mystical mumbo-jumbo or gush in his reaction, and this made it easier for me to talk. “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said, “although it wasn’t exactly a dream … but that’s what it felt like, as if I dreamt somebody else’s dream.” “Except that now it’s your dream, too,” he replied with a smile, and pulled me onto his chest.

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

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

NIRA WOOLF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE DAY AFTER GIVING BIRTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALEK DIDN’T COME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anushka?” “You didn’t read The Master and Margarita? You did read it? Take a good look at that bench. On that bench Berlioz met the devil.”

I went on shaking my limbs, stamping on the slushy snow on the pavement, skipping onto the fresh snow piling up next to it, and breathing into my gloves. And the next time I approached him he took hold of my hands to rub them and said: “I don’t think you have problem with weather. You should see yourself with snow on your eyelashes. I think you just don’t know how to wait. They didn’t teach you to wait, over there in Israel?”

As often happens to me with Alek, the sentence took on a meaning beyond the concrete complaint. No, they didn’t teach me to wait. You taught me to wait. I taught myself to wait. I taught myself until I became such an excellent apprentice that I didn’t even cross off the days any more. Women excel at this activity. Thousands of years of history, a long genealogy of spinning wool and waiting at the window lies dormant in our blood just waiting for an opportunity to break out. I noticed this when after a regrettable developmental delay I finally acquired a circle of women friends. And when I finally started to listen to other women — all of them, by the way, strong and successful — I discovered that not one of them had escaped the experience of intensive inaction. But I had taken it further than any of them.

In my book The Stabbing I have a nice little scene in which the doctor who is a client of Nira’s comes late to a meeting. “I’ll say this once and once only,” says the lawyer Nira Woolf after he gets into the car. “I’ll say it once, and there won’t be a next time. I don’t care why you’re late; I don’t care if you were locked up in the laboratory; I don’t even care if three hooligans in white chased you with syringes full of poison. Anyone who comes late for an appointment robs me of my time, and I don’t take robbers as clients. And by the way, since I’ve broached the topic, from the beginning I noticed that you have the look of a serial latecomer.” A clever woman, my Nira, especially in view of the fact that she suspected this serial latecomer from the beginning of being the person who had falsified the results of the AIDS test.

With all my woman friends who had wasted their time waiting for a man sooner or later the natural instinct that distances people from pain kicked in, and they all liberated themselves in the end from brooding about their relationships with variations on the lament: “What an idiot I was.” I on the other hand never regarded waiting as a waste of time, perhaps because I never had the same expectations that they did — for him to “show that he was serious,” “leave his wife,” “move in together,” etc. You could say that I expected “less” and in a certain sense that would be true, except that what I yearned for always seemed to me to be “more,” and perhaps this is the essence of the disease.

The hospital was a shock-treatment, a concentrated dose of waiting, worse than anything I had experienced up to then, in the hours when he was away from home, the hours when he shut himself up in his room, or even in the month of May when he was called up for emergency reserve duty and released only two weeks later. Later on, over the course of the years, I learned that it is possible to conduct all kinds of relationships with waiting. Sometimes I turn my back on it flirtatiously and amuse myself with something else; sometimes I confront it and fight it by fanning the flames of self-disgust so as not to wait, not to wait, not to wait any more; and sometimes I convert my anger into its opposite and let myself go completely. I don’t spin my wool, I don’t glean the straw, I just lie down and let my personality bleed out of me until I reach a state of such emptiness and helplessness that I can hardly rise to my feet again.

Most of the time waiting accompanies me like a kind of presence, which only goes away under defined conditions. Like this Passover, for example, when I know that Alek has taken his wife and Mark first to Prague and from there on to Germany, to meet Daniel and Ute’s parents. On days like these when the phone rings and I pick it up, and a second of whispering silence announces a long distance call, I expect only the voice of Hagar.

“And you, wait for me to return, wait well.…” Not one of the works that glorify the waiting of women was written by a woman, and nonetheless the woman waits well. I wait very well.

IN THE HOSPITAL I THOUGHT

In the hospital I thought that I was seen as a snob, but the nurses apparently saw something else, too, for on the fourth day the head nurse said to me: “Someone will come and talk to you,” and in the wake of this obscure sentence, immediately after the midday feed, the social worker appeared from behind the curtain. Her name was Deborah Rubin, I remember because for most of the talk I kept my eyes fixed on the nametag pinned to her white uniform. Her face has been wiped from my memory together with the faces of all the other women in the ward, but I remember a salt-and-pepper braid coiled round her head, the glint of her gold spectacle frames, and most of all the way she sat there, as heavy and authoritarian as Queen Victoria. She did not fit any preconceived idea I had of a “social worker,” she looked severe and intelligent, and she frightened me from the get-go. Looking back I think that the fear helped me; it pierced the dullness and weakness and forced me to pull myself together, to respond and to act.

“Officially you’re supposed to leave tomorrow, but we’re asking ourselves if it would be right to discharge you.” A cacophony of paranoid thoughts clamoured in my head: They’ve found me out. They’re not going to let me go. They’ll let me go, but they’ll take the baby away and give her up for adoption. What nonsense had escaped me when I was having that vision? And what else did I say? And what else did I do? I shouldn’t have shut the curtain, because that’s what annoyed them, and now they’re going to take their revenge. I should have gotten up for meals when they called me and not stayed in bed. I should have acquired a toothbrush and not stolen toothpaste from my neighbour and brushed my teeth with my finger. She must have noticed, the miser, and told on me: “She hasn’t even got toothpaste. She’s completely out of it. How is someone like her going to look after a baby?” For the first time I experienced the cunning of the mad, a quality that I developed strongly later on.

“But why? What’s wrong? Everything’s fine, really … it’s just that I’m young so it’s a little difficult,” I said to the social worker, but Queen Victoria was not impressed, as evidenced by her silence, and by the way she lowered her spectacles from the bridge of her nose. “I’m thinking of your situation.… Each of the women here comes from a different situation, and I would like — if you agree to tell me — to hear something about yours …,” she said in the end, and her authoritative voice turned the mild ending of the ellipses into an order.

“My situation … is that … I’m happy, naturally. Naturally I’m happy, naturally. It’s just that I haven’t completely recovered yet.”

“Did you have a regular birth?” She forced me to concentrate and fall into step with her.

“Regular?”

“Was there anything unusual about the delivery? A vacuum? Forceps? Did anything else happen that you can think of?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Nothing … and nevertheless … we would like to know: if you’re discharged tomorrow, if you go home, what will you be going back to?”

“Home,” I answered stupidly, folding the sheet with Alek’s shirt underneath. And then I had a sudden inspiration and said into the silence: “My husband’s on reserve duty, perhaps I should have told you at once. My husband’s on reserve duty in the army, and that makes things a little difficult for me, too, him being in the army now.”

“Didn’t they let him know that you’ve given birth?”

“I think that … they must have probably informed him already. But he’s serving in Sinai, in some hole in Sinai, so maybe it’s taking them a long time. Yes, of course, it must be taking time, but he’ll definitely come soon, today or tomorrow.”

“Your husband, my dear, is entitled to forty-eight hours leave,” she informed me with a hint of rebuke in her voice, “even the army understands how important his presence is to you now. And what about your parents? What about your family and his? Where are they in all this?”

“My husband is a new immigrant,” I replied, and what next? Should I tell her that my parents were abroad? Someone here in the hospital staff might recognize me. Maybe they already had. The whole world knew my parents. They would catch me out in a lie and then they would definitely take my baby away from me. Or send me to the psychiatric ward. Alek didn’t come, he didn’t come, but I wanted to go home to Alek. It was only when she said the words “about to be discharged” that I understood that this was indeed what I wanted. And now this was the only thing I wanted: to get out of here, out of this nightmare, to go home, to see Alek, to be with Alek, when everything would settle down and I would be okay. “My parents were very unhappy about my marriage,” I improvised. “They thought I was too young to marry, they wanted us to wait, and for me to go to the army first. The truth is that since the marriage they’ve more or less broken off relations with me.” The ring of truth in these words finally convinced the social worker. “Things change when a baby is born,” she said, “I’ve seen it again and again. Perhaps you should try to make contact with your parents in spite of everything. I’m not promising you that it will succeed, nobody can make any promises, but maybe you’ll be surprised.” I promised her I would think about it, and she gave me a card with her room number and phone extension. She said that she would be in her office all the next morning, perhaps before I left I would like to come up with the baby and say goodbye, and I could phone her from home as well, if I thought she could be of any help. I was about to relax with the thought that the conversation was over, but Deborah Rubin was not yet satisfied. “And when you get home, who will be with you until your husband returns? Who is there to help you? Who’s getting everything ready for the baby? A woman who’s just given birth shouldn’t be by herself, certainly not a sweet young girl like you.” To this I hastily replied that we had tons of friends, my husband and I, they simply didn’t know that I’d had the baby because there was nobody to let them know, but as soon as they knew — they would do whatever needed to be done, that is to say, my husband would definitely do whatever needed to be done first, but they would do it too afterwards.

“By the way, my child, you haven’t told me yet what you’re going to call the baby. Have you already decided on a name?” the social worker asked as she stood up to go.

“A name … of course …,” I paused for a moment, “she has a name. Hagar. Her name is Hagar.”

Until that moment not only had I not chosen a name, I hadn’t even thought properly about names, only that at some stage I would have to solve this problem too.

I don’t know where the name came from, but from the moment I said Hagar, it was clear to me that this was her name, as if she had come into the world with it. My daughter Hagar. Baby Hagar.

NAMES

Since I was legally married, she was registered at the Ministry of Interior as Hagar Ginsberg, daughter of Alexander and Noa Ginsberg.

It was only when I went to register her, when she was already almost a year old, that I discovered that the Ministry of Interior was kept up to date by the Rabbinate, and that without my knowledge they had changed my name from Weber to Ginsberg, which meant that as far as the state was concerned I had been Ginsberg now for over a year and a half without anyone taking the trouble to inform me. When the situation became clear to me, I didn’t even try to find out whether I could change it. On my first ID card, which I had received just before I got married, my name was given as Weber, and I simply continued to sign my name and introduce myself as Noa Weber. The struggle for the right of married women to keep their maiden names was unheard of then, I had no ideological reasons against taking my husband’s name, but because it was “only a fictitious marriage” it had never occurred to me to use his name.

Whenever the subject of the name came up, for example before the elections in December ’73, when my mother noticed that the voter’s notification they sent me was addressed to “Noa Ginsberg,” it led automatically to talk of divorce—“Really, Noaleh, isn’t it about time you resolved the matter and asked him for a divorce?”—I would say, “I haven’t got the strength to take care of it now,” and “I’m in no shape to make contact with him now,” and it was only at the end of the seventies, when I was already working for the human rights fund, that I adopted the avant-garde position: I don’t care what my name is at the Ministry of Interior, and I’m not interested in their opinion regarding my marital status. As long as there’s no separation between state and religion in Israel, we should take no notice of their registrations, and the more anarchy we create the better. My name is Noa Weber, I’m as single as I ever was, and I have no intention of entering into negotiations with some official in order for him to confirm my true identity.

In 1984 things became a little more complicated, after my bag was stolen with my ID card inside it. The new ID they issued me was in the name of Noa Ginsberg, and the same went for the passport I obtained at the end of the eighties. As a result, to this day I have to explain myself when I sign checks — the name printed in my checkbook is Noa Weber — but all my plane tickets are in the name of Ginsberg, and Ginsberg is my name at airline check-ins.

The fact is that at the end of the eighties I could have registered myself again as Weber, without requiring a divorce or waging a legal battle — other women had already won the battle — and the other fact is that I failed to do so.

Openly I mock the “bureaucratic joke” of my name, and say that “I haven’t got the strength for the Ministry of Interior,” but what I haven’t told a soul is that because of this “bureaucratic joke” that I am ostensibly cultivating for anarchist reasons, I have wasted more than a little time on solving problems with the Income Tax and National Insurance authorities. My “bureaucratic name” is like a secret, illicit thrill, a thrill I feel whenever I get official mail from the government.

My daughter appears like me as Weber. At the daycare I registered her as Weber, friends and neighbors have known her as Weber since the day she was born, and the questions began only when she entered the education system, where she appeared under the name registered at the Ministry of Interior. In ’91, when she turned eighteen, she asked to be registered under the name of Weber on her ID card, and to both of our surprise, her request was granted after filling in a single standard form.

“I belong to you more than to Alek. I even belong to Granny and Grandpa more than to him,” she kept on explaining, as if anyone needed an explanation. During that period she was preoccupied by thoughts of Mark and Daniel, the half-brothers she didn’t know, once every few years she would begin to brood about them, and it seemed to me that adopting my name was an act intended to put an end to this futile preoccupation. “I even belong to Granny and Grandpa more than him.…” But I belong in secret to Alek. And in the secret of the bureaucratic joke I am still called by his name.

• • •

Alek, as I said, is spending Passover or Easter with Ute and the children in Germany, and in my inner language I call such times my “white days.” White days because of their clarity, uncolored by any expectation. As if the mind has retired and is free to take up all kinds of hobbies.

At times like these not only the suspense of concrete expectation declines — for there were long periods, years, during which I had no expectations of any concrete contact — but it is as if Alek has removed his withdrawn gaze from me, and for days or weeks I hardly see myself through his eyes.

A great silence reigns over this Passover, as if the street has emptied of its inhabitants. In recent years quite a lot of well-off people have moved into the neighborhood and they have apparently all gone away on vacation. Once, it was different here on religious holidays.

My parents are in London, Talush is with the children on the kibbutz, my women friends — who almost all have young children — have been swallowed up by family affairs, Hagar is spending the holiday with a girlfriend in Boston. On the eve of Passover she called to wish me a happy holiday, and until she returns to New York I don’t expect even an e-mail. I haven’t annoyed her enough for her to write to me from Boston.

In the mornings the air is still clear, a uniform blue sky without a scrap of clouds is painted strongly over the clean white and green of the street, and only towards midday, when it begins to grow hazy, a kind of sensuousness invades the air, presaging the heat wave.

What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? is already in the shop windows, and until the more or less anticipated reviews appear, thoughts of “the next book” remain unfocused. I sleep a little, wake up early, and go early to the grocery, even though there is nothing I need, or need early in the morning, on the half-empty shelves. The short morning walk does not banish the gloom of awakening, and the transparency of the air and the view only ferments my self-loathing. Yesterday on the way home the outside stairs of the houses looked to me like tongues sticking out.

“White days” I said … but this time around my mind refuses to divert itself with hobbies, and when I wake up I feel depression covering me like a heavy blanket that I push off, but after an hour or two it returns, and drives me back to bed.

For two weeks I haven’t gone out to run, writing has become the backbone of my day, as if it has taken the place of running, or any other activity keeping me upright, but it is only after dark that I can summon up the energy to sit down in front of the computer and poison myself with an unreasonable amount of cigarettes.

What am I doing? What do I want? What have I taken it on myself to want?

Forty-seven years old, Alek turned fifty-seven this year, and never again will I see how he has changed, and how to me he is unchanged, to me he is never changed as he comes towards me at the airport.

Timelessness is an illusion. Timelessness is a derivative of love, a derivative of faith, a concrete derivative of a state of mind which I no longer have any idea what to call. Alek, according to his age, could already be a grandfather, Hagar at her age could turn me into a grandmother, and eternity is nothing but an illusion. There is nothing timeless in me or in him or in us or in anyone.

What am I doing? Telling. For there to be a beginning and an end. For there to be an end.

What did I take upon myself to want?

He will never look into my eyes and bring to my lips that familiar smile which acknowledges everything and wipes out everything.

I’ll never try on a new dress and think: I’ll wear it when I walk with him, if I walk with him in summer in the street.

There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself.

Love will never expand me.

The one right body will never come to me.

GOING HOME

I promised to parcel myself out in the proper order, even though I have no idea what I will do with this parceled self when I bring it to the end of the story.

In the meantime: Hadassah Hospital, maternity ward. Deborah the social worker has gone, and I collect myself around a new wish, to go home, home to Alek; fortified by my mad cunning, I go to the newborns room, ask the nurses to show me how to give the baby a bath. “I’m so sorry I missed the demonstration, I didn’t feel well.” Prattle any nonsense that comes into my head, with them and the other women in my room and their afternoon visitors; picking sentences out of the air of the room, fermenting them in my mouth, and bubbling over in an exaggerated gush: “Show him to me … show her to me … show me how you … what a cutie … oh, what a sweetheart … what a little darling!” Broadcasting youthful maternal energy and joy.

After supper I lurked in the corridor until the nurse with the mean face left the nurses station, and then I asked the one with the nice face to let me use their telephone. “I’m not supposed to, so do it quickly.” With Yoash on the phone I was brisk and cool, and suddenly he was the one gushing and hardly letting me get a word in edgeways: “Wonderful news … I never got a chance.… I had that renovation, and you know what it’s like with the year-end audits … so Baruch says to me … I’ll tell you … how Baruch … yes, sure … I’ll come tomorrow … sure thing … in the morning, with pleasure.” I didn’t ask him about Alek, somehow it was clear to me that he didn’t want to be asked, but in any case, I thought, I would know tomorrow, and what could Yoash really tell me? What did he know? He would think that I was taking advantage; but the way I arrived at the hospital, without telephone tokens or money in my purse, I needed him. I simply couldn’t think of anyone else.

Yoash showed up at ten o’clock in the morning, appearing in the corridor in his eternal overalls, with his ungainly walk, and without the Hamida file under his arm. But then, when we were already on our way to the infants a new obstacle popped up: in my stupidity it hadn’t occurred to me that without something to wear, they wouldn’t release Hagar from the hospital. Dear Yoash looked as if he was delighted with the situation — to this day, I think, nothing pleases him more than the prospect of “driving the authorities crazy.”

“Idiot that I am,” he said to the nurse and hit himself on the forehead, “idiot, idiot, idiot … forgive me, Noa, I’m an idiot. How you got such an idiot for a brother I don’t know, but I forgot the whole parcel at home.” He went off for an hour, I waited on a bench in the shade at the entrance, and when he came back he was carrying a few swollen bags, whose contents he spread out with a conjurer’s pride before the astonished eyes of the nurse. A pile of tiny white garments, a pile of diapers, a tube of ointment for the baby’s bottom, a cloth clown with bells on its head, a yellow rattle, a parcel of paper bibs. One by one he whipped them out and showed them, and in the end, with a triumphant flourish, he fished out three pacifiers and hung them around his fingers. “In case she loses one. My sisters were always throwing their pacifiers out. You know what it’s like with pacifiers. They’re always vanishing and you can’t find them and it’s a big mystery, one of the greatest mysteries in the universe.”

All the way out he didn’t stop chattering. Like some dopey spy he boasted of how he had cut all the price tags off the garments, “so they wouldn’t suspect me of only just buying them.” And only after he brought the pickup round from the parking lot, and only after he helped me climb in with Hagar, and only after he got in himself and inserted the key, only then did he lean back and ask without looking at me: “So where am I taking you?”

“Home,” I replied, but it was a question more than an answer, because I already knew that there was bad news in the offing.

“Home … Alek said you’d want to, that’s to say, that you can if you want to. Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. Alek … brought forward his trip. What I mean to say is that he’s leaving today.” Since I was silent Yoash went on talking, and his voice — I remember his voice — grew rude and abrupt, almost hostile: “In any case, you know, he had to be there in August, and if you ask me, with all due respect to you both, all of this is a bit too much for him. Seeing the baby, I mean. Seeing her — it’s too much for him.” And when I remained silent he went on: “Alek thought that perhaps you might want to get in touch with your mother in spite of everything.”

“I want to go home,” I said. “I want you to take me home.” And we drove to the empty house.

I don’t remember feeling anything, I don’t remember thinking anything, I was like a hollow body propelled into motion by a push from an invisible hand. When we entered the house — I held Hagar, and Yoash opened the door — I was surprised to see everything in its place, but this too was at a remove, like a kind of curiosity outside myself. At the fringes of my mind I was apparently expecting to see empty rooms and bare walls, and in these same margins I noted to myself that everything was the same as before. Only later on, whenever Hagar fell asleep, I examined and re-examined every inch of the house. The record player was standing in its place, the records — I discovered afterwards — he had given to Yoash. The bookshelves in his room were empty and striped with dust. I found some of the books later in boxes in the storage space under the roof. His shelves in the closet were bare. His desk was cleared. In the drawers there were only a few pins and a pen without a refill. No crumpled note in the wastepaper basket. And no note anywhere. He didn’t take anything from the kitchen, there was a big sack of potatoes stuffed into the wicker basket, and a few packets of sausages and cheese and seven bags of milk in the fridge. Perhaps he thought that this was what babies drank. Perhaps he thought that this was what a nursing mother needed.

Yoash: I really have to go now. Are you sure you’re okay?

Me: It’s okay.

Yoash: Are you sure you don’t want to get in touch with your parents? I can get in touch for you, if you like.

Me: It’s okay.

(And then, when he was already standing at the door, it seemed to me that I read something in his slightly averted face, or perhaps in his raised shoulders, or perhaps in the way he twisted his feet.)

Me: Yoash? You said Alek was leaving today? What time is his flight?

Yoash: What time is his flight … is it important? What difference does it make to you, in fact? Okay. Okay. Don’t look at me like that, just don’t look at me like that. His flight’s at 4:20, which means that at half past one, in another … forty-five minutes I have to pick him up and take him to the airport. From my place.

FROM A DISTANCE

From a distance of twenty-nine years I don’t feel a drop of pity for that girl. Not because “she got herself into it”—people “get themselves” into all kinds of trouble and they still deserve to be pitied — I don’t feel any pity for her because of the blank expression on her face, rejecting the hand reaching out to her even from the distance of these years.

Blankly she moves about the rooms, barely glancing at her baby daughter lying on the big double bed. Nothing moves in her even when she finds the envelope he left on the kitchen table. There are six hundred and fifty shekels. He cleaned out his bank account, put the money into the envelope, licked it, closed it, and put it under the salt shaker, without even writing her name on it.

Now she sits down in the wicker armchair in the living room, looks at her watch and tries to trap the movement of the minute hand, hypnotizing herself not to blink and miss the second that it moves. The baby is sleeping, if she wakes and cries maybe she won’t hear, and if she does hear maybe she won’t react. The time is thirty-three minutes past one, thirty-four minutes past one. They have already loaded his luggage onto the pickup. Gone back to get the shoulder bag and sunglasses. Locked the door. Detached from feeling she senses his departure from the city like a change taking place in the nature of matter. He’s leaving, he’s getting further away, already he’s at the turn in the road descending from the city, still close, in another two and a quarter hours he’ll be on the plane. She notes the change in matter with every breath she takes, as if the touch of the air is different and objects are less present. She follows his departure as if she has been made responsible for studying the effect of his departure on matter, which is fading and becoming thinner as the minutes go by.

I don’t pity her, because she is wrapped up in her belief, and she still believes that she has no salvation outside his love.

And if I try to leap into the picture, to reach out to her and break the tension, she’ll bite my hand to stop me from disturbing her hypnotized concentration.

She’s suffering, true, and in the hours to come when her sorrow runs riot, she will suffer more, but for the time being there is no sign that she wants to keep the sorrow at bay. I want to make the sorrow go away. And she, the mad girl, receives it into her. She won’t let me rob her of it.

The days that followed, until the rescue team arrived, are difficult to reconstruct in an orderly way, and in fact also the weeks after them. Somewhere before I mentioned the kibbutz education that I refuse to see as the seedbed of my sickness, and the fact that I functioned then I attribute precisely to that despised education. “Pull yourself together, control yourself,” was the message of my childhood, and I did my best to conform to it. I was always taught that in all circumstances it was important to function, and perhaps thanks to this I functioned, a strange, partial functioning, but functioning nevertheless.

Hagar was what in days to come I learned to define as an easy baby; contact with the world did not dismay her, it did not invade her or disturb her, she slept for hours on end and cried only when she was hungry. I did not concentrate on her, I did not smell her head, I did not wait for the seconds when she opened her eyes in order to inspect their color, but when she cried I put her to my breast exactly as I had been told to, and somehow or other I also changed her diapers, although I didn’t clean her properly. Most of the time, I remember, I sat next to her on the double bed where I had placed her in the beginning; I sat — because of the fear that if I lay down a last barrier inside me would be breached, and I would drown in what burst out. I don’t remember day and night, but I do remember that I piled up the pillows at the top of the bed and propped up against them like a sick person I dozed and woke without distinguishing clearly between one state of consciousness and another. Only once in the dark I know that I got up, took a pail and cloth and for some reason began to wash the floor. It would have been better to wash myself and Hagar, because we were both no doubt in need of bathing by then, but that’s what happened and that’s what I did. And in the meantime the soiled diapers accumulated in a bag, without my giving a thought to what I was going to do when the clean ones ran out.

My sleeping and waking states were visited by all kinds of sensations and hallucinations, some of which still come back today. The pain cutting through my diaphragm, because of which I can’t lie down. The grayness crawling over my body and threatening to cover me completely if I lie down. Fragments of myself floating in the cavities of my body like lumps of broken ice.

Looking back it is clear to me that I put my daughter into a situation that could have been dangerous, and I don’t take any credit for the fact that we emerged unscathed.

HANDS OF MERCIFUL WOMEN

Hands of Merciful Women is the name of a painting I once saw in an art book; the painting itself did not remain in my memory, but the name stuck in my mind. Most of the actual good in my life came to me at the hands of women, and if I could choose whom to love with all my soul, I would choose a woman and not a man. With the passage of the years I have learned to love my mother and my daughter, and I love my girlfriends, but in my opinion I should love them differently, because even if I can’t do without the folly of “he-makes-me-come-alive” and “I-can’t-live-without-him,” the feeling of love should be directed towards those I can’t live without in reality. And in reality the man isn’t there, and the hands of merciful woman always appeared in time.

When I was still pregnant, towards Passover, it was my sister who appeared like an angel on a bicycle, accompanied by a tiny little friend who turned out to be her classmate. Perhaps she had been sent by my mother to put out feelers, I didn’t ask, but in any case Alek wasn’t home, and I seated the pair of them in the living room and put on a show for them. They sat close together on the mattress, like two little birds, looking around with birdlike curiosity at everything, and when I went into the kitchen to make them tea — there were no cookies in the house — I heard the tiny friend whisper: “If she only got married to get out of going to the army, how come she’s pregnant?” And my sister answering with a pride that brought sudden tears to my eyes: “That’s how it is when you’ve got a bohemian sister.”

Those were bad days, the days before Passover, days of Schubert symphonies, when nobody talked to Noa; Hagar lay high and pressed on my diaphragm, I only dragged myself out of bed when the little girls knocked on the door, and nevertheless in my capacity as the bohemian big sister I put on a Gershwin record for them, drew them out with amused superiority — what’s new at school and what’s new in the youth movement — and threw out anarchistic remarks about this and that. In the course of putting on this act of a free-spirited woman of mystery my mood somewhat improved, but Talush somehow saw through me, or maybe not, but in any case, for whatever reason, she turned up again the next day on her own behalf, and took out of her jeans bag two papayas and a giant pineapple that our father had brought back from Africa, and a few bars of chocolate from the airport, all of which she had swiped from our parents’ kitchen. “You probably have to eat a lot if you’re pregnant,” she said, and her face was bright pink, and her nostrils and upper lip trembled, as they do to this day when she’s excited.

On the third evening after my return from the hospital, I think it was the third evening, the downstairs neighbor Miriam Marie, who now that she no longer lives downstairs is regarded by Hagar and myself as a member of the family, and who up to then hardly impinged on the fringes of my consciousness, knocked on the door. She realized that a baby had been born, and came with a plate of cookies to congratulate me, and after seeing me she went downstairs again and came back with a little pot of chicken and rice which without asking she put on the stove to heat up.

Before this I had hardly exchanged more than a couple of sentences with her, in my eyes she was just one of the extras cast to play a bit part on the margins of my drama, but it quite soon became apparent to me that Miriam had taken in more than a little of the drama, and that her understanding of what was happening with me was closer to reality than anyone else’s. So close to reality that in the future, whenever Alek showed up, I was afraid that she would see him and despise me. So that when she moved to Maaleh Adumim on the outskirts of Jerusalem to be close to the grandchildren on the way, I felt relieved. And even though I missed, and still miss, the warmth of her closeness, I was relieved to be rid of her look.

Miriam Marie. If I was a real writer and a proper human being, I would have written her story and not mine, because whichever way you look at it she’s the true heroine and I’m the phony. When she came up the first time she was forty-four, only a little younger than my mother, but she looked years older. She hasn’t changed much since then, as if her appearance had been fixed at a certain age, before old age and after the stage at which femininity, consciously or unconsciously, is directed towards men. Today, too, when she dyes her hair with raven black henna, wears three-piece outfits of cheap gaudy velvet and “artistic” brooches pinned to her bosom, she gives the impression that she is only dressing up to broadcast her feeling of well-being to the world.

When I met her she had one son, called Avi, who was already studying for his master’s degree in education. When the boy was seven she had been abandoned by the husband—“the engineer” she sometimes calls him scornfully, though he really was an engineer — who ran away to France with a relation of hers. A little girl of sixteen from the immigrants transit camp in Talpiot. The main outlines of her story she told me that first evening, I think, holding Hagar securely while she bustled about the kitchen. “If I ever tell you the story of my life …,” she said. Or perhaps she didn’t tell me everything then, as I sat with her weak and dizzy in the kitchen, and my memory is filling in the details from later installments. How he abandoned her to her fate as an aguna, a woman whose husband’s whereabouts are unknown. How the rabbis over there searched for him, how it took them nine years to find him. And how she, with very little Hebrew, went to work, first as a cleaning lady, then taking a course to qualify as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant, which didn’t pay enough to care for the child, so that even with the steady kindergarten job she always took on extra work. Over the years I heard these stories again and again: how she managed to put food on the table, how she made sure that Avi went to school, and how in the end she moved to the center of town just so he would get into a good high school. “All his reports were ten out of ten, ten out of ten for everything. One day I’ll show you, you’ll see what they write about him there. But the principal didn’t want to let him into the gymnasium, just because he was from Nachlaot. Every day I went to the municipality and sat there to make them look me in the face, and in the end what do you think? They took him, they didn’t want to, but they did. Just because of my character, that I don’t give in.” What I remember clearly is that at some moment of that monologue I suddenly wanted a cigarette badly. I hadn’t smoked since the birth, and suddenly for some reason I was dying for a cigarette, so that although I knew I wouldn’t find one, I got up and began opening all the empty drawers in the house, one after the other. When I had despaired of the closet, with my hands still fumbling inside it, Miriam came and stood behind me, my daughter folded in her arms. “You shouldn’t be left alone,” she said. “It’s not normal. There are women that get a psychological depression from it. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.” Then she put her hand in her pocket and offered me a packet of Europa cigarettes. “Promise me you won’t smoke next to the baby.”

In time I began to respond to this woman with the admiration she demanded and richly deserved, but on that first evening I didn’t have the strength to utter a word, as if the road from their origins somewhere inside me to my mouth was too long for me to lead them along it. Nevertheless I was grateful that somebody was talking to me.

When she came to me she already knew that Alek had left—“that one of yours with the eyelashes” she called him — and when she placed the plate whose steam made my face damp before me I somehow understood that she was offering me her biography on a steaming plate as well. That she was laying her past before me not only as “a personal example of willpower and character,” but mainly in order to make this spoiled young girl open her mouth at last and give her a clue as to her situation.

When Miriam’s husband went off with his teenage mistress and with Miriam’s gold bracelets, she had nobody to lean on: her father was already sick when they arrived in the country, her mother had three more young children at home, and in comparison to these facts I know that my unhappiness was like a pampered parody of distress.

A pampered parody of distress — that’s what I was then, and that in many ways is what I still am today. And then, too, when she asked me straight out over a cup of tea where my family was — Wasn’t that your father who hooted for you downstairs then, driving the whole street mad? — I knew how ridiculous I was in the comparison between us: she a penniless immigrant, and I the daughter of parents who may not have been rich, but who were getting richer all the time, and who had never lacked for connections or the sense that the country belonged to them.

I have no idea whether Miriam loved her man before he ran away, or how she loved him, I never dared to ask. History as she tells it begins on the day he deserted her, and from the beginning of this history he is referred to in derogatory terms. Perhaps she called him different names once, and perhaps not, but in any case it was clear that she would not be sympathetic to the kind of reckless madness that led “that poor girl” to run away with her husband.

“You could make a movie out of my life,” she sometimes says, with absolute justice. If I had to choose a heroine, I would definitely choose her, myself I don’t even see as a candidate, but if that’s what I think, and I really do think so, then how is it that to this day I still feel that I have a certain advantage over her? Not because I am better educated, not because I know more words, but only because in my folly love makes me superior in my own eyes. As if it has exalted me to some lofty pinnacle, as if I have been branded by a hallucinatory fire, and as if I have been privileged to touch what she and others have not touched.

Miriam Marie loves her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren, two of her brothers and most of her nephews and nieces. She loves most of the toddlers in her nursery school, and some of their mothers. And to my good fortune, I don’t know why, she loves me too and she loves Hagar. When Miriam says that someone loves, she almost always adds proofs to her statement; practical proofs, not cliches about feelings: “You should see how he helps her,” “the way he looked after her,” “he would do anything for her.” “His heart goes out to her,” or “her heart goes out to him” are phrases which do not appear in her lexicon, and certainly not “soul mates combining into one androgynous creature.” In all the years that we have known each other, I have never heard any such highfalutin drivel from her.

Miriam is occupied with real people: the asthmatic Itamar, Dror who is about to be drafted, Yaron and Liron who are building a house; whereas I am occupied with the fictions of my books, and with my ever-present absentee. And from this point of view as well I believe that she is superior to me.

But what do I really know about her fantasies and her nights? I know nothing, and I have no right to patronize her in this way.

After I had given her a few mumbled details about my situation, she pronounced that I had to “forget everything that had happened” and turn to my parents, because “what do quarrels mean now? This sweet little baby is their granddaughter, wait and see what they say after they see her.” I promised her that I would think about it, and I realized that she wouldn’t leave me be, and she didn’t, even after my parents showed up.

PARENTS

My parents showed up the next day. Without thinking about it I had given my name as Weber in the hospital, and one of the nurses who knew my mother made the connection and got in touch with her. I have already said that my parents know everybody and everybody knows them, and it was only to be expected that they would hear the news, sooner rather than later. I think that they had prepared themselves for it, for as they told me afterwards with a reasonable degree of resentment, when the nurse phoned my mother was able to hide her ignorance of the fact that she was a grandmother from her. She didn’t repeat the text to me word for word, but I can imagine it: “Our Noa … she’s so stubborn … got it into her head that she didn’t want any visitors … you know how it is, it’s so important to them to be independent … she feels fine … everything’s fine … the difficulties are behind us … we’re looking to the future.”

I could easily write the memory of their appearance at my door as a “shtick,” and to tell the truth I actually did so a number of times over the course of the years: little Talush, a scouting party of one little girl, is sent to knock on my door. My mother takes up her position as backup halfway down the stairs. My father sits in the getaway car without switching off the engine.

When it transpired that the “Russian nihilist,” as Grandma Dora called him, was gone, the family gathered round me, and in a matter of minutes, without any overt negotiations, formulated an agreed version of the state of affairs. Our Noa came under a bad influence, our Noa was kidnapped by the wicked wolf, and now that the wicked wolf is gone, the past is forgotten and we’re “looking ahead to the future.” My father, who apart from the embarrassments I’d caused resented the scene in the street, found it a little difficult to accept this agreement, but from the moment the Weber team made it into the apartment, and from the moment it transpired that Noa Weber looked the way she looked — in other words, a mess — it was clear that Mother Batya would take command. Armed with my new cunning of the mad I was relieved at not having to answer any questions about “that man,” that I was not being required to pay with a confession, and weak as I was I surrendered myself to their efficient care. Because at that stage I really did feel sick. Sick and very frightened.

My mother was at her best, performing her role as a nurse, and although her experience with babies was not great, she applied herself fearlessly to the operations of bathing and diapering. Methods of suckling, pacifiers for and against, and ointments for diaper rash supplied us with sufficient subjects of conversation, and the rest of the time we dealt with my “recovery”—of my body, that is. I was a good patient, just as my mother was an excellent nurse. Lying between clean bedclothes, my shampooed hair on the raised pillow, my hands on the blanket, I did whatever I was told. When I was told to eat, I ate. When I was told to drink juice, I drank juice. When I was led to the bathroom, I washed myself. Days and nights ran into each other, and my memory from then is mainly of a sensation of dripping; drops of milk and blood and tears that didn’t stop flowing from the moment they started taking care of me. Dripping into the shower water. Dripping into the steam of the soup.

The tears were genuine, I didn’t have the strength to stop them, but at the fringes of consciousness I was also aware of the fact that crying helped me. The child is weak and traumatized. Leave the child alone. Don’t remind her, don’t ask any questions. Can’t you see that she’s suffering enough as it is?

Talush was sent to fetch and carry, my father dropped in every day “to see how you’re getting on,” and my mother took leave from work and took over the house and reorganized it. I accepted everything with mute, grateful nods: when she converted Alek’s room into a nursery, when she brought the rest of my clothes from home and arranged them in the closet, when she ordered Yoash, who came to visit, to “give a hand” and move the table here and the closet there — she didn’t let him go even when he provoked her by asking her in the name of the principle of self-determination to call him Hamida. She called him Hamida, and still insisted that he help her move the closet. Even when she asked my permission to remove Klimt’s dead floating women from the kitchen wall—“that picture gives me the creeps”—I nodded.

My part in the new agreement was easy, I accepted it willingly: no more cheekiness with my parents, and no more ideological deviations. Our Noa has learned her lesson, and sadder but wiser she has come back to us. Sadder and wiser, and the roots of her hair hurt. Until then I never knew that the roots of your hair could hurt, but this is one of the strange things that I discovered. It hurt me even to cut my nails, and with every sip of soup I took I heard a wave breaking inside my ears.

Only once did I voice any opposition, and this was on the evening they first appeared, when my mother proposed taking me and Hagar home with them. I don’t know if my first burst of tears prevented a big argument, or if they weren’t so keen on putting the two of us up in the first place, but in any event, the result was that for two weeks or more my mother slept in Alek’s bed.

I didn’t explain the reasons for my objections; in days to come my mother noted that “that was a sign to me that you were recovering, and that it was important to you to stand on your own feet”—but the real reason was different, completely different, it was the feeling of the gaping void around which I was crystallizing. The feeling was and still is completely physical. And under my swollen breasts I then felt the void all the time. As if an amputated internal organ was still hurting me. And in my heart I sobbed that Alek, Alek, Alek was hurting me.

The stronger this feeling grew, so too did the idea that as if by some law of nature the void had to be filled with what accorded with it, in the only manner that accorded with it; in other words, I began to believe that Alek would return. Of course I also formulated more reasonable and realistic reasons for this belief to myself, such as: “He has a daughter he will want to meet one day,” or “Alek may be angry with Israel, but he’s not indifferent to it”—they proved to be correct more quickly than I imagined — but at the basis of the belief was the feeling of a void, and Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t it?

Since I believed that Alek would return, I had to remain on Usha Street to wait for him, nothing could prevent me from waiting for him there.

I don’t know where I got this romantic nonsense from, as if I were the heroine of a black-and-white movie, waiting for my lover in the place where the war had parted us, but even if anyone had ridiculed me along these lines, or said that Alek was perfectly capable of opening a telephone directory and locating me, there were no words in the world with the power to move me from my stubborn refusal to budge. Alek would return here, and I had to be here when he came.

When this irrational certainty crystallized inside me, I buried it inside me and wrapped myself around it in the dark, drawing secret strength from my madness. When Alek came back he would find me worthy of him. I had to make myself worthy of him.

IN A CROOKED WAY

Much of what I am today stems in a crooked way from this wish to be worthy in his eyes, equal in power to his imaginary power. At the beginning this ambition related mainly to basic functioning: to start taking care of myself and of Hagar so that he wouldn’t despise me, to gradually limit my mother’s presence; and gradually more and more ambitions were added, until my will to prevail was extended also to the area of my mood, in which I also began to see a measure of my strength. Alek was doing his thing in Heidelberg, I was doing mine in Jerusalem. Alek was not suffering from “psychological depression,” therefore I too would hold my head up high.

At first, of course, I pretended: Get up. Stand up straight. Lift up your chin. Raise your eyes from the pavement. Take a deep breath. Straighten your shoulders. Stretch your neck. Look up. Go out to run, at least for a few blocks. Until the pretense took over, and with my chin up and my eyes on the horizon, I really did begin to feel better.

Most of my achievements over the years I measured under the imaginary gaze of Alek’s eyes, and to this day it remains fixed on me in both small and great events. I remember for example the gradual change that took place in my appearance in the first year as a law student, when I began to wear buttoned shirts and for the first time in my life went to a salon. The lightheaded feeling that came with my shoulder-length haircut and the touch of air on my nape like a new nudity were connected to his touch in my mind.

I remember my first staged court case, it was a damages case, the show I put on in order to impress precisely the person who wasn’t there, and the paradoxical way in which his imaginary gaze helped me to relax, as if the imaginary audience of one enabled me to ignore the real one. Alek’s imagined gaze steadied my voice and my arguments, and concentrating on it distanced the lecturer and class in front of me, turning them into the spectators of a play not really intended for them.

The whole episode of my legal studies was connected to the imagined eye of Alek, and my desire to impress him. Actually, Miriam too played a part here, a far from inconsiderable part, for from the start she urged me to study. My father offered to get me a job with one of his friends “until we see what’s happening with your life”—translation: “until you meet someone normal and marry in a normal way.” My mother said that a profession was definitely important for a woman, too, and “in my situation”—in other words, as a single parent — teaching could fit the bill, and only Miriam insisted that I had to “believe in myself,” and set up a meeting for me with the only lawyer she knew, the mother of a toddler who had attended her nursery school the year before, who she still sometimes babysat for in the afternoons.

In those days there were not yet television series about glamorous and neurotic female lawyers, but Miriam very much admired this lawyer, who was dealing with a protracted court case about building in the yard on her behalf, and she made up her mind that law was the profession for me and nothing else would do. For months she kept at me: “You’ve got a head on your shoulders,” and “You know how to talk,” and “You were lucky to go to high school, don’t waste your luck,” and for months I kept at my parents to agree and for the assistance they were unwilling to provide—“A plan, Noaleh, must first of all be realistic”—until Aunt Greta arrived and contributed her share and compelled my father to contribute his. In all this time Miriam kept on at me, but what really decided the issue was the thought of Alek.

For almost a year I worked in a little soup restaurant that catered mainly to art students. It was relatively pleasant work, in a relatively pleasant place. The owner of the establishment, Tami, is a friend of mine to this day. And nevertheless when I served the customers, some of whom I recognized from Alek’s social evenings, and most of whom did not recognize me, I began to feel like Cinderella. As is usual with students, they worked at all kinds of odd jobs, but according to their definition and also their self-perception, they were something else: the future of Israeli academia, the future of the local avant-garde, activists in all kinds of left-wing and protest movements; even Tami was studying part time for a degree in economics. Only I was a real waitress. A mother, waitress, and a vegetable peeler. Sometimes I would imagine Alek coming into the restaurant and sitting down next to the window with some female intellectual, and then the humiliation was insufferable. So that after a few months of peeling carrots and wiping tables, I was determined to “make something” of myself, and when Miriam continued to insist that “something” meant lawyer, I decided to think so, too.

My idea of the profession was of course absurd: a combination of Robin Hood and Clarence Darrow, doing justice and solving all Miriam Marie’s problems with the municipality. Two days after the beginning of the academic year I realized how grotesque this image was. But without an alternative direction, I continued to study law.

Sometimes during interviews I feel a kamikazi urge to crash into the truth. The bit about Clarence Darrow and social justice sounds good, even charming, I’ve used it a number of times, but I take good care to censor all the rest.

Interviewer: So how did it happen that you went to study law?

Feminist writer: It was a coincidence. With women, you know, things happen by chance. There was a man I wanted to impress.

Interviewer: Did you want him to fall in love with you?

Feminist writer: I knew I didn’t have a hope.

Interviewer: But surely he must have been impressed.…

Writer: He didn’t even know I was studying. You see, he wasn’t in the country at all, there was no contact between us. I just imagined that he was looking at me all the time.

Interviewer: And afterwards?

Writer: What afterwards? There is no afterwards. There is no earlier and later in love. When he felt like summoning me, I went to be his mistress. That’s the way it still is.

What’s missing in this confession is the benefit I derived from his imaginary gaze. Apart from the intense color of the world, apart from the sharpening of senses that comes with love, apart from the increased energy, there was also a specific benefit, a lot of specific benefits: what I described before as “holding my head high.” Under Alek’s imaginary gaze I couldn’t be a floor rag. And so in some strange way his gaze helped me push the baby carriage nobly up Tiberias Street when a heat wave had already pushed me out of the house, and helped me drag myself out of bed in the dark to light the kerosene stove in the kitchen and summarize “The Development of the Concept of Good Faith in German Law.”

The funny thing about it is that Alek, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t give a damn about the way I or any other woman looks when she pushes a baby carriage, and studiousness was never one of his qualities. And nevertheless I mobilized his gaze in order to brush my teeth, dress properly, get onto the bus, photocopy legal precedents and understand what exactly Reuben and Simeon had done to Levi.

“NOT THE LOVELORN MAIDEN”

In the winter when we were still living together I found a copy of Eugene Onegin in a second-hand book store, and on good days I amused Alek by learning whole stanzas off it by heart, to which he would respond by quoting from the poem in Russian. Pushkin in his eyes was the prince of princes; the “poet of the golden age” was beyond any criticism or irony, which gave the poem such magical status in my eyes that in his absence I would read passages from it to myself out loud. The symbolists he was working on had not been translated into Hebrew — or if they had I never succeeded in finding the translations — and Dostoevsky he hated, so I was left with Onegin, who I saw as a key. Another way of touching Alek.

From reading it so many times I absorbed the story into myself to such an extent that when I fantasized about the return of my man, I imagined the scene in the words of the poet. When he returned I would be someone impossible to ignore. When he returned, a new Noa Weber would be revealed to his eyes. “Not the plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden whom he’d known” but Noa Weber, a duchess who not only “never shivered, / paled, flushed, or lost composure’s grip—/ no, even her eyebrow never quivered, / she never even bit her lip.”

Even at the height of my fantasy I never deluded myself that in the light of my new incarnation my Onegin would suddenly fall in love with me. But when I sat poring over “Constitutional Law” at night, and when I stood up in my first staged trial to defend Levi against Reuben and Simeon, and when I walked into my literary editor’s office for the first time to talk about the manuscript of Blood Money—vulnerable and nervous as a child of eight on my first day at the town school — I mobilized his imaginary gaze, I sensed his imaginary eyes on me and heard his imaginary words: “could it be she … or had he dreamed? / the girl he’d scorned in what he deemed the modesty of her condition, / could it be she, who had just turned / away, so cool, so unconcerned?” And upon my word it made me noble. In my eyes at least.

The motif of the late return it’s called: when she languishes in love, he is indifferent or amused. And when he languishes in love, she no longer responds. In non-literary reality I don’t know of a single case where this trick worked. Later on I did make a number of genuine attempts not to respond, but in those first years all my Duchess fantasies were directed towards a very different end than that of Eugene Onegin. I wanted to meet him “cool and unconcerned” only so that he would strip me of my false indifference. I wanted not to flush and pale only in order for him to make me flush and pale again. It’s true that I wanted him to admire my small and great triumphs, but it’s also true that in my imagination I saw the lawyer’s gown as one more garment that he could strip me of.

NIRA WOOLF

“Female lawyers are sexy,” says Dr. Miles to Nira Woolf as he accompanies her on the courthouse steps, “I like strong women.” “Forget it,” replies my heroine. “Forget what?” asks the charming doctor. “Forget what’s in your head. I’m not interested in egos that want to lay feminist lawyers,” and neither of course in idiots who have no respect for a woman’s achievements, but this Nira Woolf doesn’t say.

In this world there is no Noa Weber who did not go to Usha Street on the second of July 1972 so that I have no control group for myself. Perhaps even without Alek the drive to achieve would have appeared in me, I don’t know, but what’s certain is that the initial urge was connected to Alek. To the desire to awaken his admiration and the desire to please him. In other words, it wasn’t some nobody who was in love with him, and it wasn’t with some nobody that he went to the Rabbinate, but with someone who was somebody. Someone whose love was a credit to him, because it was only with him that she turned into a floor rag.

Blood Money, the first in my Nira Woolf series, came out in 1982, and from then on the straightening of my spineless back proceeded at a considerable pace. But I’m putting the cart before the horse again, because in the summer of ’73 the era of holding my head high was far in the future, and I was still busy with the emergency patching up of Noa Weber, who cried a lot then; she cried day and night without any shame. I was only ashamed with Miriam, but Miriam retreated before my mother, telling me tactfully that I was welcome to visit her with the baby whenever I wanted to. My crying was real, my helplessness was not a total lie, and nevertheless there was an element of bribery in it. As if I was buying myself time with hysterical behaviour.

I remember how underneath the hysteria I imagined myself coming out cold and sober on the other side, and at the height of my depression, weeping between the starched sheets, I knew very well what I was doing, and what was happening inside me and around me. In the time that I bought with my weakness I allowed myself to indulge in all kinds of wild schemes. I would slip out of the house, take a taxi at dawn to the airport, and just as I was, without luggage or money, get on a plane to Heidelberg. I would join the foreign service or the Mossad, and they would send me to Heidelberg. I would get out of bed, go somewhere or other, and then I would walk and walk and walk until I fell. A small item in the newspaper would say: Young Israeli woman found dead on street in Heidelberg. Or a small item in the newspaper would say: The body of a young woman was found lying in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, cause of death unknown. I had these visions, not of actual suicide, but of walking and losing myself on my way to him, losing myself until I came to his door, and then perhaps he would let me in.

In the end of course nothing of the sort happened. My suicidal tendencies are limited, my Adele H. qualities are restricted to the realm of fantasy, and in reality there is little chance of my turning into Victor Hugo’s retarded daughter. But the fantasy of turning into someone like her did not go away as I grew older, and it still happens, too often and for too long, that I think about Alek and feel that ignominious urge to lose myself rising in my heart again.

HAGAR

In the weeks after giving birth to her I hardly thought about her. When they gave her to me to feed I fed her. When they handed me a soiled diaper, I dropped it into the trash. When my mother gave her a bath, I stood next to the bath, and when she put the baby in my arms I held her. I didn’t deny her, I wanted her to exist, and at the same time her presence seemed to me like a temporary matter. As if sometime someone would come to take her, and then I would be able to devote myself entirely to the one who wasn’t there.

Maternal love, they say, is a part of nature. From the moment you lay eyes on your baby the instinctual programming begins to operate, and the feedback with the cub gives rise to infinite devotion and inevitable tenderness in you.

I love Hagar. She makes me happy, she even makes me proud. With time I developed the devotion, the tenderness, the pleasure and so on and so forth, so that even in her absence she occupies my thoughts. If I were put to the test, to the best of my knowledge I would say: My life for hers. But such theoretical tests are not necessarily proof of love.

In reality, I raised her and took care of her to the best of my ability, with all the unavoidable mistakes of a too young and very busy mother, mistakes that do not necessarily stem from coldness.

What I’m trying to say with all this beating around the bush is that I didn’t fall in love with my daughter in the same way as I fell in love with her father, and I never had the same stunned sense that the feeling was inevitable with her as I had in relation to him. I learned to do the things that a mother has to do, and as I did them the feeling developed, and this is the reason why it is precisely maternal love that seems to me a matter of choice. I never chose to love Alek.

When she was a little girl Hagar said to me more than once: “When I grow up I’ll only have children when I love someone and marry him,” and now too, as far as I know, she keeps to this decision. Sometimes I think that it’s my daughter’s good fortune that her father was not with us. Because it was only in the void that he left with his departure that I could learn to love her. I don’t think that I could ever have “grown used” to him, and it’s clear to me that his daily presence would have stopped any other presence from growing inside me.

“Do you know what great love gave birth to Columbus?” he asked me one night in Moscow when I, at least, was quite drunk. “You don’t know because there is no such story. A great man like Columbus, something as tremendous as discovering America by mistake, is not the result of love. Love has no results.”

“And great results don’t come from love,” I wisecracked in the treachery of drunkeness.

“Something like that, but don’t you believe it. It’s only Symbolists’ talk. Not something really connected to life.” At this point I already knew, if I didn’t know from the outset, that the ideas he spouted were to be taken no more seriously than his retraction of them.

The Yom Kippur War was the first time that I paid my daughter any real attention. My father put on his uniform on the first day of the war and drove to the staff headquarters to find himself a job in the chaos. My mother plunged immediately into the hospital, and hardly emerged to go home. Talush was deposited with neighbours and Miriam moved temporarily to Kiryat Yovel to help her sister-in-law who had been left alone with three small children. In September I had started work in Tami’s restaurant, Soupçon, and Hagar had started going to daycare, but with the outbreak of war both the restaurant and the daycare were closed, and with all the horror around, I no longer seemed so important even to myself.

I once read a story in an American magazine, maybe made up, about a flood in a Scandinavian mental asylum. According to this story, when the water began rising the catatonics emerged from their paralysis, came to life and began to evacuate the building with exemplary efficiency, ingenuity, and mutual aid. All the way to their new temporary facilities, with the water still rushing behind them, they kept on making merry, sat wrapped in their blankets and sang, threw candies at each other — or so I imagine the scene — and only early in the morning, when they were taken off the truck and led into the new building, did the lunatics return to their lunacy, the catatonics to their catatonia.

Two thousand six hundred soldiers were killed in the Yom Kippur War, Amikam among them, I already knew, and two of my peers from the youth movement, and four members of the kibbutz. Most of my classmates were at the front, Yoash was in Sinai with the reservists; almost everyone I knew plunged into the war, and the whole horror passed me by.

All that happened to me was that I started to think about Hagar, and that too came from a primeval fear. Suddenly the two of us were alone, and with all the unclear information and rumors flying around, I started fantasizing about how I would flee with her to the forests. The forests? Yes, I regret to say that for some reason I saw myself fleeing the shelling with the baby to the forest.

Among other nonsense I thought that it was a good thing she was still breast-feeding, because when the Syrian stormtroopers ran riot in the streets — for some reason I had Syrians in my head — I would be able to lock the door without having to worry about food for her. I remember that I even checked the lock. At the end of all these adventures was of course an emotional reunion with Alek who came to look for us; but until the emotional reunion, I was at least with her both in fantasy and reality.

Someone will have to explain to me one day why people make propaganda for love: we have our heads stuffed with it from infancy, as if this particular lunacy is an important Zionist value. Get ready, get set, here it comes … like a flash of lightning … your personal earthquake … don’t let it pass you by, you too deserve to experience it … love at first sight for every citizen!

When I was a child it wasn’t so bad: “love” was mentioned almost only at bedtime; “love” appeared in the fairy tales that Yochi sometimes read aloud to us from the passage, when we were all already tucked into bed in our rooms, with our faces to the wall. But Yochi usually preferred stories of a different kind, and it was only rarely that she read us fairy tales.

Later on we discovered Hollywood romances for ourselves, in the movies for adults screened in the dining room and in hidden copies of Movie World. The girls read Daddy Longlegs, the boys restricted themselves to volleyball.… On the door of a cupboard in the dentist’s clinic Rhett Butler held Scarlett O’Hara’s chin as if he were about to examine her throat, and when I opened my mouth wide Shoshana Damari sang on the radio, “He knew there was no lighthouse on the shore.…” On the whole, I think, most of the time we were free of romantic preoccupations. Not like today when the propaganda is more and more pervasive, and every click of the remote control brings you propaganda for epilepsy or some weird jingle in praise of being struck by lightning.

In a thousand years I will never understand why they sell us this stuff: as if emotional epilepsy is something charming and lightning strikes are good for the environment.

The worst damage done by romantic love is the coldheartedness that it creates. Because when love seizes you, however much you struggle and kick, you are no longer capable of truly thinking about anyone else, because nobody else is truly real to you any more.

In 1981 my father had a heart attack, and my mother and Talush and I took turns sitting in the corridor outside the Intensive Care Unit. The day after the heart attack was a Wednesday, and I remember that it was a Wednesday because on Friday I was supposed to go on a trip to the north of the country with Alek, and the main thought in my mind was how I was going to get away now, because as things stood I didn’t have an alibi for disappearing for a couple of days, and I had no one to look after Hagar. Ute had gone to visit her parents in Germany with baby Daniel, she was due back the coming Tuesday — you see, I remember everything — and I, with the ice of love surrounding my heart, walked around with a styrofoam cup from the coffee machine in my hand, biting the rim of the cup and thinking, among other things, that if my father died, and they sat shiva on the kibbutz, I wouldn’t be able to spend any time with Alek.

If there was any logic in the world, the radio would bleep every time the word “love” was mentioned. The censors would blacken the television screen and warn that the material in question is not suitable for children, that it is subversive, dangerous. That anyone who seriously succumbs to this madness is definitely not friendly to the environment. But nobody apart from me seems to see things this way.

MY HAGAR, FOR EXAMPLE

My Hagar, for example, tends to chew on the word “love” interminably, and in recent years she has also developed the irritating habit of remarking “I love you” at the end of every conversation with me, casting the two of us in some American television drama.

This is the recurrent pattern: first she provokes some argument with me on e-mail, and then she calls to say, “Mommy, I just want you to know that I love you.”

“Yes.… Same here,” I echo in embarrassment. And only once I said: “Look, surely we can have an argument without pinning this tail to it. It wouldn’t kill us.”

“And it won’t kill you to hear that I love you. Why is it so hard for you to hear me say it? When I have children, I’ll tell them that I love them ten times a day.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“And I want to make it clear to you that I know that you love me.”

“I very much hope that you know.”

When she was here over the summer I almost vomited at the conversations she conducted with her boyfriend on the phone: I love you. I miss you so much. I know you care for your brother. I know it hurts. I wish I could share it with you. More than once she stood opposite me in the kitchen with the cordless phone, she didn’t even take the trouble to go to her room, and against the background of the synthetic music of these phrases I cut the cucumbers and tomatoes on the chopping board into tiny pieces so that my daughter would have a proper Israeli salad after a winter in New York.

Hagar sincerely believes that “love is communication,” and that “love is above all friendship and shared values,” and that “love is growing together”; she recites these theses to me without a hint of irony, and since “Peter’s aggressive-depressive silences sabotage their love” she doesn’t think she’ll marry him, even though for the time being they’re not breaking up, either. Peter hurts her feelings, and you don’t marry someone who hurts your feelings, right? No, my clear darling, says her mother, on no account should you marry someone who hurts your feelings, even if those feelings sound to your mother like commercially packaged nothing.

ALEK

Alek came on the night of the twentieth of November. At half past ten on the night after the war.

How can I convince myself that love is an insane delusion, when Alek appears at my door in the dark as in a vision?

His face is white as that of a tense clown, and he is wearing something white under his army coat. “May I?” he asks, standing so passively in the doorway. You don’t ask “May I?” about something that belongs to you anyway, I thought afterwards, when I drew back to get my breath between heartbeats. My heart had gone completely haywire, it had expanded to alarming dimensions leaving no room for my lungs. Alek let me go for a minute and put his Kalashnikov down on the marble counter. “What are you doing here?” I asked when he pulled me back into his embrace. “What am I doing?” he mumbled to my forehead, and without seeing or hearing — perhaps only from the touch of his lips — I made out the words, “What am I doing here? Apparently trying to be Hemingway.”

“No,” he added immediately and tightened his grip, “no. That’s not it. I was a soldier here, and there’s you and the child and Yoash and a few others. It wouldn’t be normal not to come.” And later on, at dawn, he said too that “as soon as the war began I couldn’t stand the anti-Semites. Understand, I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semites and they just hate Israel.” Only then, at dawn, I discovered that he hadn’t gone to Heidelberg at all, and had flown straight to Paris when he left in June.

Heidelberg: One of the most beautiful cities in Germany. Known for its famous university, which was founded in the Middle Ages. Tchernikhovsky and Klausner studied there. I know, I looked it up in Grandma Dora’s encyclopedia one Saturday when I traveled to the kibbutz with Hagar to show ourselves and stand the test of gossiping tongues. For five months I had imagined Heidelberg at the foot of the Odenwald mountain range, until I could walk down the cobbled streets in my imagination and make my way to the river. I sometimes went into travel agencies simply in order to see the name of the city on a poster. Before I went to sleep I would look at the atlas and measure the distance in days of walking. And whenever they said “West Germany” on the radio, I would turn up the volume. And all that time he had been in Paris.

Alek didn’t ask about Hagar sleeping in her room that was once his room. Not right away. First he led me to bed and sank himself in my body, and gave me back my body that had as if been taken from me after the birth. Gave me back my body so that I would lose it under him and above him and this way and that, and then I would fill it up again until the tips of my fingers and toes dripped happiness.

“We weren’t Jewish heroes,” he mumbled when I rested on his arm, and his fingers dripped with milk from my breasts.

“We weren’t?”

“No. My father is a Jewish hero. Official hero. Two years he fought at Leningrad, you know: blocked the canon with his body. He himself breached the blockade.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the same place, apparently. In Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg, where they killed the Czar.”

“And you, where have you come from now?”

Years later, too, when he became a full-time journalist, he wasn’t in the habit of volunteering information in answer to questions of the who-what-when-where kind. “In the area of the enclave. The Golan Heights,” he answered reluctantly.

“Was it hard?”

“For those who were there at the beginning it was hard. This week they finally brought coats for everyone.”

As always happens with him, to this day, Alek opened up time for me and stripped the moment of all its specific attributes. Amikam was dead, that I already knew. The IDF was positioned forty kilometers from Damascus, Golda was conducting talks with Kissinger, Tami’s brother was in Tel Hashomer Hospital, Yoash was still serving in the reserves, and in Alek’s arms, in the clean smell of his body, I was far away, in a place consisting only of the absolute raw materials. Man, woman, war, baby.

Even when I saw his white face in the doorway I knew that he would not stay with us, but I was like a person whose faith has found confirmation: nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum is filled with what fits it. Alek had not left me, and he would never really leave me.

At some point or other Hagar began to whimper and Alek didn’t get up with me, he waited; I went to her and waited, dense sweet heart-trembling moments, until he came and stood silently next to the wall over us. I didn’t switch on the light, and I didn’t need to. I saw everything like a cat in the dark. My vision has never been clearer. Alek was dressed — perhaps he was cold, perhaps he felt it wasn’t fitting to enter this scene naked. I think that’s what he felt. He stood hugging himself in that so familiar position, and from the armchair I could see his fingers gripping his ribs. Something happened to time, which slowed down and spread out between the beats: Hagar’s sucking. My breathing. My heartbeats. His breathing presence in the dark. As if infinity could enter between the beats. I don’t have the right words to describe it, but I know for certain that in those moments I wanted nothing, I hoped for nothing, my thoughts stayed still. I was all gathered in, all wrapped up, and it was enough for me to know that the moment indeed existed, and since it existed, it would never ever be denied.

Only when I put Hagar back to bed did Alek come up and stand next to me and reach out to put one finger on her hand, which immediately clenched around it. I didn’t dare look at his face, I didn’t look until he whispered something and I turned my head to read his lips. “Fingernails,” he whispered, “I didn’t think of this. Of this I didn’t think. I didn’t think she had fingernails.”

During all the years to come I made sure that Hagar never saw the two of us together, except for the unavoidable moments when she went out to him, on the rare occasions when he came to get her at the house. Does she have some unconscious memory in which this picture is stored? Her mother with an open flannel pyjama top, her father in white, standing together over her crib.

My feet were frozen, and when we got back into bed Alek put them on his chest to warm them. And then he asked me about Yoash. He had a gentlemanly order of priorities. First me, his full attention, then Hagar, and then Yoash. When had I heard from him last? I hadn’t heard anything from Yoash, Alek was much better informed than I was. Before he booked a flight to Israel he managed to get him on the phone, and Yoash who was already in uniform left him a key in the regular place under the flowerpot. And the first chance he got to make a call, Alek called Yoash’s mother on the farm. Yoash was in Africa, on the other side of the canal, with Brigade 421, they hoped to see him safe and sound next week.

ALEK

Alek stayed in the country for nearly three more weeks before returning to Paris, and from the first morning we established a routine which had never existed before and which was never repeated afterwards. The procedure came into being as if of its own accord on the first day, when Alek went to get his discharge from the army. I took Hagar to her daycare, and from there I went to meet him at Yoash’s apartment, where he had settled in the night before, before coming to me. I spent the afternoon with Hagar, and at night when she was already asleep he came to me, knocking on the door and staying for a few hours. But after Yoash returned, it sometimes happened that he came with him and left with him.

When Hagar woke up, he would sometimes come with me and touch her with renewed wonder, but he never picked her up. Even on the one night she spent in my arms with the two men in the kitchen, when she was suffering from a prickly rash. Because of this, when I had to go to the toilet, without giving it any thought I handed her to Yoash, who took her naturally, put her on his shoulder, and was in no hurry to give her back to me when I returned.

Without saying anything, Alek made it clear that he was a guest in our house, and nevertheless he tried to spend as much time as he could with me. With me and with Yoash.

One Saturday I took Hagar to my parents for lunch, and we all made a big effort to create an atmosphere of normality, but nothing was normal. The newspapers were black with mourning notices, the telephone kept ringing with news of friends’ sons, and rumors of what had really happened and what had definitely happened, and my father looked as if he had shrunk. He never picked up the phone himself, he just stood there with his eyes fixed on the instrument until my mother handed it to him, and to us he hardly spoke at all. It was his friends who were responsible for the fiasco, and he realized the full extent of the catastrophe more than any of us.

Talush, in a childish track suit already too small for her that for some reason she insisted on wearing, withdrew with Hagar to the sofa, ignoring the three of us, and from the look in my mother’s eyes she seemed not to see us at all. On the first day of the war she had closed the diet clinic and gone back to working as a nurse in the wards.

And in the midst of this sorrow, of all this sorrow, Noa Weber sat at the table reeking of sex, silent in idiotic satisfaction, and nobody thought for a moment of attributing her silence to compulsive sexual gratification. On the contrary, they thought that I was with them, depressed to the point of speechlessness by the torrent of bad news, and in fact I seemed so depressed to them that at one point my mother put her hands on my shoulders from behind and said: “Cheer up a bit, Noa. It doesn’t help to be depressed. In the end, we won a great victory.”

For a moment I was tempted to tell them that Alek was in Israel and that he was really a good guy, one of the best of our boys, doing the right thing by rushing to the defense of the motherland, but I immediately rejected the thought. Alek was not a good guy, not in their sense, and I was already deep in an emotional underground, too deep to be able to conduct a public relations campaign on Alek’s behalf.

Two days before, on Thursday afternoon, I had gone with him and Yoash to drink coffee in the Old City. When we came out of the cafe it began to pour, the merchants retreated into their empty shops, but we ran through the water cascading from the awnings, embracing, skipping crazily up the wet steps, eliciting peals of laughter from the spectators, who also seemed to forget the time and events for a moment.

Something was happening between the three of us, and when I thought about it — and I thought about it most of the time — I felt a kind of conspiratorial warmth spreading through me.

In the days preceding Yoash’s release from the army I understood the intensity with which Alek related to him. He called up to find out what had happened to all kinds of friends and acquaintances, but as far as Yoash was concerned it was evident that he was really worried, a worry that never left him. “I love him,” he said. The best of our boys didn’t say such things then.

About the events of his own war Alek was unwilling to talk, and it was only gradually that I gathered information. On the first day of the war he tried to get onto a plane, but reservists from Golani were not a high priority, so it was only on the fourth day that he reached brigade headquarters. For some reason they kept him at Acre for three days, and from there they sent him to Rosh Pina, it’s not clear why. In the end he went up to the Golan Heights to escort a convoy of supplies to the enclave, but by that time the worst of the fighting was already over. I have no idea what he saw and what he did, perhaps he talked about it to Yoash, but with me he just shrugged his shoulders. “We weren’t Jewish heroes.”

When Yoash came back Alek was the first to notice that there was something wrong, it took me time, and all I saw at the beginning was that Yoash was in high gear, and it was nothing new for Yoash to have attacks of speedy hyperactivity. He talked a lot, he talked without stopping, rapid strings of words, and Alek sat next to him and listened. The words were the same words that everybody was repeating then: Golda, the Chief of Staff, they came in from here, they attacked us from there, the bridgehead, the breakthrough, General Gonen.… I didn’t pay attention to the exact content and the details of the complaints which were endlessly, monotonously repeated, but after Alek pointed it out to me I began to notice that there really was something wrong with Yoash. He hardly slept, none of us slept much in those days. Alek my insomniac prince never needed much sleep, I made up a little sleep in the mornings, but Yoash was different, he looked like a clockwork mouse which had been wound up and couldn’t stop. He would get up in the middle of a sentence and say that he had to go here or there, volunteer unnecessarily to go to the corner store and buy us butter or salt. The Hamida file had been replaced by petitions and manifestos that he had to fetch and return and duplicate in the middle of the night. As if at every moment there was something else that had to be done. Even before, he used to jiggle his foot nervously when he sat, but now it seemed that the agitation had taken over his whole body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what about me?” I asked.

“What — what about you?”

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

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

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

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

“So what’s happening in Moscow?”

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

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

YOASH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I KNOW WHAT

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

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

Late at night, after I got up to feed Hagar and came back to bed, he succeeded in completing while half-asleep what he hadn’t managed to do before, but the act did not improve the situation. Alek was no longer there to turn us both on, and for all our strenuous efforts to fan the feeble flame, the fetish lost its spell. For the sake of his honor, out of consideration for the battle-weary state of the warrior, for Alek’s sake, or for God knows what reason, we didn’t stop, I didn’t stop him in the middle, but even as Yoash pushed and pushed himself into me, I felt the old void opening up inside me. And it was only then that I really understood that Alek was gone.

We remained friends, Yoash and I are friends to this day, and as such we can sometimes relate explicitly to the third person who isn’t there. “You know, Alek phoned last week, it sounds as if he’s living in Moscow semi-permanently. He’s renting an apartment there.” “What do you say? What, he’s not going back to Paris?” “He went back in the summer and stayed with his family for a few months, but for Ute and the boys moving to Russia is out of the question, and it seems to me that Alek isn’t too enthusiastic about having them with him all the time either. Tell me, do you have any idea if that maniac ever contacts Hagar? In your next book you should make the murderer someone who doesn’t relate to his children. Mark and Daniel don’t get too much attention from him either.”

Yoash was good to Hagar, and the truth is that she was good for him, too, and it was only when she grew up that the ties between the three of us loosened a little. In many senses he was the man in her life, even more than my father. And even during the two years when he tried to escape from everything and wandered around Australia as a backpacker before his time, he took care to send postcards addressed to the infant who had only recently learned to stand without support. To this day they are preserved in one of her boxes in the storage space under the roof.

NIRA WOOLF

Blood Money came out in 1982, was taken up by the new local papers, and won both exaggerated praise and exaggerated condemnation, which took me equally by surprise. It would never have occurred to me that my manuscript, rejected by two publishers, was “welcome evidence of the normalization of Hebrew literature,” it had never occurred to me that I had “appropriated the Palestinian narrative and exploited Palestinian suffering for profit,” and I hadn’t even thought of Nira Woolf as a “feminist heroine.” At that period I had hardly even started to identify myself as a feminist.

Woolf’s feminism gave rise to strange reactions, which I might go into more thoroughly one day. The reactions to the first books praised the perfection of the heroine as a fictional creation: her independence, her brilliant mind, her five martial arts and her liberated female sexuality — until, more or less since The Stabbing, both of us began to get it in the neck. “Nira Woolf with her big breasts and her convict’s cropped blonde hair is actually a man’s wet dream,” “the blonde Nira Woolf is James Bond disguised as a female lawyer,” “Nira Woolf is a product of the male power ethos.”

Comments like these, mainly from women critics, but also from men, explaining that my feminism wasn’t “true feminism,” one of them even stating explicitly that it was “false” because Nira Woolf/Noa Weber “does not offer us an alternative ethos and in fact undermines its development.”

But this isn’t what I want to talk about now, I want to talk about Nira’s sexuality.

I began to conceive Nira in my second or third year in the law faculty, between “Changes in English Law” and “Corroboration in the Rules of Evidence,” while the lecturers droned on and on about what we already had written down on our cheat-sheet anyway. At the beginning of our lives together I did not yet make Nira a protagonist in any plot, or even think of doing so, I only played with her in my head as a kind of private amusement, enjoying myself by attributing various virtues to her as the spirit took me. When Hagar complains that Nira Woolf looks more like a Swedish sexpot than any woman lawyer she’s ever come across, it doesn’t help me to say that my books are entertainments and that the whole thing started as an amusement. But this is exactly how it happened. I looked around me, and as I followed the legal entanglements of Foxy-Dopey-Smarty and the depressing characters trying to resolve them, I invented someone who was the complete opposite. Someone who without any scruples or inhibitions planted a well-aimed kick on Foxy’s behind. And who had great legs as well.

My Swedish sexpot, as Hagar calls her—“But why does she have to have such big breasts?” “What do you want me to do? Send her to a plastic surgeon to have them made smaller?”—my Swedish sexpot has a happy, adventurous sex life, and even though I have never actually described a fuck in any of my books, what happens between one chapter and the next is quite clear to everyone.

“The best sex is on the second date,” my Diva says to the gloomy pathologist, “it’s a law of nature,” but in the end she agrees to a third date, as well. Part of the sensation caused by the first books was due to Nira’s sexuality. In American literature women were already fucking for pleasure then, consciously or unconsciously, but in Hebrew, a woman who fucked for the sake of it was somehow seen as an innovation.

Never mind all that now, because the point I want to make here is only that I bestowed all this sexual freedom on Nira at a time when I wasn’t having any sex at all. A contemporary woman is not supposed to admit to such a disgrace. A contemporary woman is supposed to take care of her sex life in the same way that she takes care of brushing her teeth. And if you don’t go to bed with anyone for four years, and you don’t even feel the urge to do so, it means that something about you is simply not normal and you should see a psychologist. In the present state of the market, admitting to the lack of a sex life lowers the value of your shares and leads to a heavy loss of prestige. Even between girlfriends who tell each other everything.

Four years of abstinence I had after the miserable fuck with Yoash — that is, if we don’t count masturbation as actual sex — and the reason for my abstinence was absolutely clear to me: not the fact that I was tired most of the time, not the technical difficulty posed by being a single mother — even though a few nonentities in the law faculty lived with their parents, some of them at least had apartments or pigsties of their own — and certainly not a “fear of relationships” or any other psychobabble of that kind. I abstained because from my point of view there was only one right body and one right touch and smell: one unique model that had been imprinted in all my cells, engraved in my bones, which made every other contact wrong. On several occasions I had in fact tried to go the way of all flesh, for the sake of my self-respect and release, petting that had failed to ignite any joy in me and had succeeded only in making me feel very remote from my body. As if I were perching on the branch of a nearby pine tree, on the roof of the car outside, on the lampshade, on one of the fat clouds in the sky, and observing myself from there as in a movie. The hands weren’t right. The height wasn’t right. And the contour of the hips. The mouth tastes of wine, sweet and revolting. Bob Marley doesn’t do it for me. And the wrong things are said in the wrong tone. I, unlike my Nira, escaped not after the second fuck, but after the first one.

Even without these attempts my body seemed rubbed out. And not only my body, but also my soul. As if I had retired from myself and I was now operating mainly on automatic pilot, obeying the instructions of some higher authority. Now go to the photocopying machine. Now you have an hour in the library, concentrate. Now go to the bus stop to pick up Hagar on time, and don’t forget to pop in at the grocery store on the way home.

My memory is a trash can, I stuff it with whatever rubbish I like, and the studies which did not demand much thought came easily to me — when I was told to read verdicts I read them, I didn’t look for someone with a cheat-sheet, and when I was told to regurgitate the material, I did so. In the human landscape of the law faculty I was an outsider and I felt like an outsider. Female, younger than everyone else, the mother of an infant who woke up at night with an earache, and who had to be provided with dried fruits to celebrate Arbor Day in nursery school. Somehow I managed, and in fact, not “somehow” but mainly thanks to the help of my mother and to Miriam who came to the rescue, but now, from a distance, those years are covered in fog with scarcely a landmark, as if I had walked through them in my sleep.

Two or three times a day, I remember, I would close my eyes, and as a reward for the functioning of the previous hours, I would conjure up Alek. In the library. For a moment or two while Hagar was playing quietly. And it was as if I were retrieving my soul. Even when I was overwhelmed with sorrow.

TAMI

Tami called in the morning, waking me up after I had gone back to bed. She was on vacation in Eilat with her husband and her three young ogres, the four lunatics had gone to the beach again, her back was burned to a frazzle, the ogres had insisted on going to flay themselves some more, thank God, she herself had stayed behind in the air-conditioned room, and she was in dire need of hearing a human voice actually talking instead of grunting at her in bass. “Are you all right? Were you sleeping?”

“No, of course not. What’s the time?”

“Eleven o’clock. Why do you sound so strange?”

“That’s what a human voice sounds like, you must have forgotten. That’s what happens to a girl who spends too much time with boys.”

“Go on, laugh at me. Not everyone gives birth when they’re minors, and not everyone has daughters. I saw you in the paper. It was a good interview. How’s the book doing? Is it selling?”

“I very much hope so.”

“What do you mean ‘you hope’? It’s a great book. Write us another one. Exactly like this one. I finally realized what you got out of all those trips to Moscow. Dalya and I were already sure that you had a lover in the Jewish Agency, but after this book we decided that it’s a lover in the Russian Mafia.”

“Benya Krik.”

“What?”

“Benya Krik, that’s the name of my lover. Benya is a king. The king of the Mafia.”

“Benya Krik is the name of someone from the Jewish Agency and not the Mafia. Benya Krik isn’t the name of someone you fuck. Benya is the name of an old man from Bat Shlomo.… You don’t know how I’m dying to get back to work. You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have to worry about holidays any more.”