The Confessions of Noa Weber

“You just like complaining. Kisses to the boys, or regards.”

“Kisses, I’ll pass them on. And you’re right, on the whole it’s fun here. They’re coming to clean the room in a minute, you won’t believe what a mess the boys have left, at least I don’t have to clean it up.”

“Look after yourself, have a good rest.”

“You too, and write me another book, you hear? So the girls will have something to read when the next holiday comes round.”

HAGAR AND MY MOTHER, TAMI, AND MIRIAM

Children are stuck with their parents and as a last resort they don’t have any alternative to bonding with them, but Tami and Miriam and my mother — I shall never understand all the goodness they showered on me when I had so little to return. My mother set Hagar in the center of her world, and she remains just about there to this day. And in spite of all her efforts to treat us all equally, she doesn’t relate to Talush’s twins in the same way, with the same pride and surprising tenderness.

It was only at the beginning of the nineties, when I met a few Russian families, that I realized what a joke Alek had played on us, that indirectly and without any intention on his part he had maneuvered the Weber family into a Russian pattern: the wife works, the wife studies, the wife has important business, and the grandmother suspends her no less important affairs, and takes care of the grandchild. My mother continued working at her clinic, but two or three times a week she finished early to pick Hagar up from her daycare, and in later years from school. My old room at home was turned into a second room for my daughter, with toys “for there” and books “for there,” and to this day it remains hers and she keeps things there.

Very late in the day, only after Hagar had left home, it occurred to me that a situation of double motherhood invites all kinds of conflicts, is a recipe for the development of tensions, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t remember any tension between my mother and myself. Perhaps I was too drained to be angry or jealous, and whatever she told me about my daughter I accepted. For the most part.

Self-condemnation can turn very easily into a kind of boasting in reverse — look at me, look at me, see what an incredible monster I was — and therefore I have to say that there wasn’t a drop of anything monstrous in my treatment of Hagar. I dressed her, I put her shoes on, I listened, I reacted, I thought about … I remembered to.… When she was small I braided her hair, and when she was in high school I picked her up at the youth movement center when she came back from hikes.

With time I also began to breathe in the smell of her hair, to delight in the warmth of her little body in her pajamas and to admire her sayings. She was a sturdy child, with penetrating logic, and when she learned to talk — she began to speak fluently at an early age — I enjoyed talking to her. You could say that I enjoy it to this day.

One winter Saturday, when Hagar was nearly two, I took her in her stroller to the Old City, and went into the church of the Holy Sepulchre with her. In the hall where the picture of my Madonna hung in one of the niches, a large group of tourists was gathered, and a guide was standing with his back to the picture and speaking to them in German. I let Hagar, who had just woken up, out of her stroller, and despite the Germans I approached the painting, wanting to confirm or refute something, hoping perhaps that something would return to encompass both of us together, but nothing of the sort occurred. Hagar turned her head right and left on my shoulder, the tourists’ cameras flashed, and the same place was completely different. Whatever it was that I wanted to check, I wasn’t disappointed. There was an athletic, middle aged German woman standing next to me, with pale freckles on her arms and a red-checkered keffiyeh covering her shoulders. Hagar weighed heavily on my arms, and when I tried to put her down she arched her back and refused to stand. The guide in his silly hat kept repeating the same word, the only one I recognized. Jews, he said. Juden. He had a stick in his hand, it too was crowned with a hat.

It was a long way back, almost all uphill, I had to get Hagar something to drink, and whatever I had been looking for, if at all, had nothing to do with her and would never have anything to do with her. Because for some reason which I would never be able to explain, Hagar did not belong to Alek, and from the time she was a few days old it was already clear that she didn’t belong to him. So obvious was this to me that the relation between them sometimes struck me with a shock of surprise.

Tami: When will you be done in the library? Should we meet in the cafeteria? No, I have a better idea. I’ll be in the restaurant this afternoon. Are you picking Hagar up today? Bring her here. Does she still eat soup? We’ll find her something without carrots. You look as if you could do with a good bowl of soup, too.

Miriam: The skinny man with the sideburns was here again this afternoon, asking about you, if I know when you’ll be back. Now listen to me and believe me when I tell you: study, work, study, work, day in day out, it’s no good. A person isn’t a machine, and a woman especially has to find the middle way.

Noa: It’s not my fault that I haven’t got any time.

Miriam: I’ll tell you what, you leave the little one with me, all night long, and go to a movie. And don’t hurry back. A gift from me.

Noa: With you it’s work, work all day long, and you don’t go to the movies either.… How’s Avi? Is he still with that nice girl I met?

Miriam: Don’t talk to me about her, I don’t want to say anything bad. She’s not nice at all, she just wants to butter me up.

Noa: The man with the sideburns isn’t nice at all either.

It took a few weeks, but during Hanukah, when Miriam’s nursery school was closed and Hagar’s daycare was open, we went to the cinema together to see a matinee of The Godfather. Both of us groaned in chorus at the sight of the severed horse’s head, we both relaxed together in our chairs when Michael finally put two bullets into the police captain — something, not in his appearance but in his body tension, reminded me of Alek — and only when we walked down the street and peeled the paper off the chocolate bar we had forgotten to eat inside the movie theater did I realize that Miriam Marie had understood the movie completely differently from me. She said that it was very sad how Michael had been dragged into a life of crime just because of his family, and how come his mother as the mother of the family didn’t have a word to say about the ways of her menfolk?

“Didn’t you enjoy watching Sonny beating up Connie’s husband?” I knew she’d enjoyed it, I was sitting next to her, but I wanted to hear her say it. “I enjoyed it, of course I enjoyed it,” she admitted. “And don’t you think it was just?” “Just?” she exclaimed with majestic disdain, “Just? Believe me, if there was any justice in this world, half the men would be in wheelchairs. Including my engineer and including that one of yours, who doesn’t pay a penny for his daughter. But what good will it do us to say so?” Suddenly, I remember, I had a tremendous urge to hug her, but hugs weren’t part of our repertoire, so I just broke a piece off the bar of chocolate she was holding in her hand and put it in my mouth.

Miriam would read all my books, nobly pass over the passages that embarrassed her, and generously forgive my and Nira’s lust for revenge and justice. My books would stand in a neat row behind the glass doors of her display cabinet, and she would enjoy showing people the dedications, but nevertheless I was destined to hear the most accurate criticism of them from her. She would ask about the sales, I would mention that most of the people who bought the books were women, and then she would say consolingly: “It’s the same thing in the nursery school when we tell the children fairy stories. You can see how it grabs the girls, and the boys start squirming and making noise right from the beginning. Boys are more into reality. And your books are more naive, like fairy tales.”

STUDYING LAW

Alek didn’t pay child support, and even if he’d had the wherewithal he wouldn’t have paid it, he would simply have given us as much as we needed without keeping accounts. I know it. But the way things turned out, when I needed money Alek didn’t have any either, and when Alek’s situation improved I was no longer in need.

Before he returned to Paris I said something about thinking of studying law, and that without help from my parents there was no way I would be able to do it, not in the next few years at least. I didn’t mean to hint, but for a moment an expression appeared on his face which somehow reminded me of the way he looked standing in the door on the night my labor started. I understood that he was condemning himself for not being able to help and I was sorry for the misunderstanding.

He helped me in another way, however, by his reaction to the story about Aunt Greta. Aunt Greta had announced that she was coming on a visit to Israel to check out her donation to Hadassah, and up to Alek’s departure it was not yet clear whether she intended summoning all or only some of us to her presence, and the discussions and conjectures about this question, and about Aunt Greta in general, injected a little of the old vitality into the family. The fact of the donation to Hadassah was unprecedented in itself, because up to now she had totally rejected the state that had robbed her of my father. Not that she denied its right to exist, she simply ignored its existence completely. Perhaps the war had provided her with the pretext for a reconciliation she had desired even beforehand, there was no way of knowing.

To my surprise Alek showed a keen interest in this story, he liked family mythologies, and so it happened that I told him the whole legend in detail.

Aunt Greta was my grandmother’s sister, and when my father was a small child they packed him up and sent him by ship from Hamburg to New York to stay with her. His mother, Grandma Hannah, had died, apparently of a complication of influenza, and in a certain, terrible sense it could be said that this was his good fortune, since but for Grandma Hannah’s fatal attack of influenza, it is doubtful if my father would have survived and I would have been born.

Aunt Greta’s husband, Uncle Haim who was a socialist, “went and killed himself,” in his wife’s words, as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and he wasn’t even killed by a bullet, but died there two weeks after his arrival from dysentery. Uncle Haim’s death, and perhaps also the manner of his death, gave rise in Aunt Greta to an impatient skepticism with regard to volunteers in general, as well as the general foolishness of the world, and armed with this angry skepticism she sold her late husband’s laundry and devoted herself to bringing up her nephew and to the real estate business. Buying apartments, dividing them up, and renting them out. In 1948, when my father announced that he was going to fight the Arabs, Aunt Greta reacted with disapproval, to put it mildly, and when he met my mother and informed her that he was getting married and remaining in Israel — perhaps one day she too might consider joining him there? — she broke off relations with him. My father went on writing to her from time to time anyway: greeting cards for the New Year, announcements of the birth of his daughters, photographs, drawings made by Talush and me, and various items of family news, to which she eventually began to reply, albeit coldly. Towards my mother, on the other hand, there was no attempt at politeness, only obdurate, unrelenting hostility, and the letters my mother wrote in her broken English were returned unopened. The question now on the family agenda was whether Aunt Greta was about to effect a reconciliation only with the state or also with the wife, or whether perhaps she had no intention of reconciling with anybody, and the visit and the donation to Hadassah were intended only to provoke us.

Alek was evidently fascinated by this story. He said that my Aunt Greta sounded like “someone worth knowing, not at all like an American person,” and added that “every family needs one rich Aunt Greta to make life interesting.” His lighthearted, literary attitude to something I saw as a complicated family dynamic inspired me after he left to write to Aunt Greta and tell her about myself, about baby Hagar, about my keen desire to study law and about my parents’ opposition to this project. Shamelessly, I even hinted that the main obstacle was my mother. This wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair, but I simply couldn’t see myself working at Soupçon until I managed to save up enough money to finance my studies, and I couldn’t think of any other way out. When I wrote my manipulative letter to Aunt Greta, I imagined myself reading it aloud to Alek. I knew that he would find it entertaining and appropriate to the story and character of the rich, tight-fisted aunt, who every family should possess.

When Aunt Greta landed at the Hilton and summoned me into her presence, the plot advanced as expected, but in a style which was, from my point of view at least, surprising. Aunt Greta did not display even polite affection towards the baby I brought with me, then eleven months old, togged out in a party dress, with a single tooth showing cutely when she smiled.

After ordering tea and cake for both of us, without first asking what I wanted, and even before the waiter wheeled the room service trolley out of the room, she opened a thorough, no-nonsense investigation, without any sentiment. Only when in reply to her question I said in careful English that I was “not in contact with Hagar’s father,” she sighed from the depths of her tough old breast, turned her faded blue gaze towards the view of Nachlaot, and remarked that she didn’t know what was happening to men nowadays. “Haim,” she said, “had his dreams, but at least he was a man. A real Jewish man. Not like the floor rags you bump into everywhere today who don’t know the meaning of responsibility. I can tell you, child, that I personally don’t rent apartments to hippies or psychologists.” “Hippies I understand, but why psychologists?” I asked, feeling for some reason that I could come to like her. “If I rent to psychologists, men will come to see them,” whispered my Aunt Greta in a mysterious husky voice. “Men will come, and you know what will happen then? Those men will begin to whine and wail, and that I cannot tolerate and I will not permit, not in any apartment of mine.” She too was quite an accomplished actress. A woman who lives alone for many years, I think, is compelled to adopt a few eccentric behaviors, even if only in self-defense.

When to my surprise Aunt Greta put out her cigarette on the Black Forest cake — perhaps as an expression of contempt for the margarine — all that remained was to sum up, which she did precisely and succinctly. “It’s obvious that law isn’t for you, and that you, Noa Weber, will never be a lawyer, but as far as it depends on me I will try to help you. And don’t ask me why.” And so she did. Aunt Greta would pay my tuition, my parents would help with other expenses, and I would find pupils for private coaching, because a combination of a day job and studying law — forget about it, you can understand that it just isn’t realistic.

After she returned to New York I never saw her again, “she flew away on her broomstick and disappeared,” as Alek said. Aunt Greta died at Mount Sinai Hospital in the autumn of 1983, on the day that Menachem Begin resigned, after Alek had already left Israel with his family. In her will she left Talush a few pieces of old jewelry, and to me she left her Encyclopedia Britannica together with its bookcase. The rest of her property went to Jewish charities. But even when I stood in line to pay the custom duties on this superfluous encyclopedic legacy, and when I went crazy trying to arrange for its transportation to Jerusalem, I remembered her with affection.

IF I REPEATED

If I repeated this little story about Aunt Greta it’s only because it is so pervaded by Alek’s spirit that it seems he could have composed it himself. He rejoiced in the concluding scene with the Britannica, and laughed like a child when I described my great-aunt’s rental boycott policy: “All according to the rules of the genre.” As far as the psychologists were concerned, and their male clients in particular, he and Aunt Greta were of one mind.

Hagar, for example, tells this story quite differently. In the eyes of my daughter, Aunt Greta is “an independent woman who existed before her time and paid the price for it” (how does Hagar know?), and was “one of the many tragedies of Zionism that nobody talks about.” One of the first things that my Hagar did in New York was to locate Aunt Greta’s grave and recite the mourner’s prayer over it (I wonder how the old lady would have reacted to a woman reciting Kaddish, but what does that matter?). In her lectures my daughter sometimes quotes Aunt Greta’s story as an example and symbol of the Jewish fate, which is apparently the kind of story that Americans like. I, like Alek, prefer a different story.

IN THE LAA FORUM

Tonight I entered the LAA forum again to check and see if there was anything new. Sandy, Sally, Sara, and Susan were all singing the same old tune. But for the benefit of the girls someone had gone to the trouble of sending in a whole lecture on biochemistry, “to help us become better acquainted with our bodies and understand what’s happening to us.”

So, everything had begun on the second of July 1972, with a little molecule called phenylethylamine. My brain, which was and is “about the size of a grapefruit,” had become addicted to this cunning molecule which stimulates the nerves, and in my case, as with other addicts, common dependency had turned into an addiction because of a “structural deficiency” in the “monoamine oxidase inhibitors.”

I understand, girls. Now I understand everything. And nevertheless I didn’t understand. Was Alek’s melting smile engraved on my phenylethylamine molecules? Had it been engraved there in advance? From the moment I was conceived in my mother’s womb? And the touch of his hand, and the smell of his neck, and the smell of his apartment and the smell of snowbound Moscow — are they imprinted on my monoamine oxidase?

If we’re talking about a typhoon raging in my neurons, why doesn’t the storm subside when the storm god disappears for years at a time? And how can you explain the fact that only one person, present or absent, sets this storm in motion, if indeed it is not the person whom my body craves, but only the storm?

On the second of July I drank of the love potion of Tristan and Isolde. On the second of July I drank bitter coffee mixed with phenylethylamine.

But how does that explain me, me and Alek? And the touch of heaven on the skin, how does it explain that?

Among all the babble of Sandy and Sally and Sara and Susan, among all the drivel of the dope from Detroit, there’s one thing I can’t find, pardon me, there’s one thing missing, and that is the soul. Because in my case, my stupid sisters, it is the soul that begs for a fuck, yes, precisely the soul. Believe it or not, this is my fantastic perversion: it’s not my body I want him to fuck but my brain. And it’s not the “reptilian brain” that I howl to the wicked moon for him to fuck, but the cortex of the brain.

“Most mammals pet while courting,” they write there. But this primate would forgo the petting to her last day, if in exchange she could receive her one and only into her soul.

“To her master, or rather her father; to her husband, or rather her brother; his handmaid, or rather his daughter; his wife, or rather his sister.…” In these words Eloise’s penylethylamine addresses the castrated Abelard; in words like these the sick molecules inside me cry out when the soul, the soul, the screwed up soul and nothing else addresses the absent one. For then the body and even the emotions are only an instrument and a means to reach what lies beyond them.

I’m sick, forgive me, sick and tired to death. Even my only one would laugh at me.

It was last February, in the apartment in Ordenka, we didn’t go out anywhere, we stayed in bed, Alek read a book full of old marks and quoted: “The drive to love is the drive to death,” and shrugged his white shoulders and added: “Another one of Soloviev’s exaggerations. You asked about him once. He talks about sex if it isn’t clear. Anyone who has sex like animal will die like animal, also. I completely forgot those formulations of his.” “What other exaggerations was he guilty of?” “You want me to translate for you? I won’t translate … he speaks about striving for perfection … love is from God, is perfection and most close to God, but in order for love to unite with God … for that, the whole world order must first be changed … the way we understand things.” He sat leaning against the headboard, leafing through the pages, and as he spoke his voice and face took on the weary, familiar expression of friendly, consoling self-irony. “Understand … I don’t know if you can understand, or what it could mean to you … we’re in year ten, and this man in year ten is saying that in his opinion we should construct the world, our biography, and above all, love.”

“Which has no connection to sex.”

“Not necessarily. He isn’t against sex. But this is already related to the subject of androgyny, the missing half of every one, and also to the question of how ready is the soul. How high soul can lift … no, not lift, raise.…”

“Rise?”

He smiled. “Something like that.”

I took the book out of his hands. “In that case,” I said, “come and raise me up.” And he raised me, and how, or lifted me, whatever you like, and I definitely rose. Even my only one would laugh at me, I said, but Alek saw and knew and he never laughed.

ALEK RETURNED

Alek returned to Israel in the spring of ’77, this time as a journalist, an official observer from the side. He had a job with Radio Luxembourg, he freelanced for a number of European newspapers, and nevertheless you couldn’t say that he was “sent” here, because Alek wasn’t the kind of person that anybody “sent.” In recent years the interest he had once had in Israel is dwindling, and he no longer asks questions and gets angry as he did then, but when he left after the war in ’73, it was clear that there was something unresolved in his relations with the country that wouldn’t let him be, and it had to be this which prompted his return.

Alek came with Ute. First they lived on Palmach Street, a fifteen-minute walk from me, and then they moved to Musrara, about the same distance in the opposite direction, and I sensed nothing and guessed nothing. It took him nearly two months to get in touch.

When he returned I was already in my third year of legal studies, and ostensibly three and a half years more mature. I am referring to all the behaviors I had acquired by observing the women in the law faculty and imitating them. There weren’t many women in the faculty then, and with the exception of one girl in the ROTC, they were all older than I was, and most of them were good girls with fathers who were lawyers or judges. I imitated the way they dressed — clothes from the Old City were out — I imitated the way they spoke in seminars — intelligent and restrained — I imitated their expressions — intelligent and attentive — and I imitated their attitude to politics — that it was for students from other departments, who had time. Once in a while I would run into someone from my other, former life — Dalit from La Mama lived nearby and dropped in to see the baby once, the slimy Hyman would pop up occasionally on Ben Yehuda Street — but except for Yoash, they all seemed as if they belonged to another incarnation. Emotionally anesthetized, with a new, careful persona, I advanced steadily, on automatic pilot, towards goals I did not really desire. I had longings, of course. But the longing was no longer a threat. It could be lived with, the way one lives with a chronic disease; morning and evening you tether it under your ribs, and morning and evening you make all kinds of deals with it. Leave me alone now, and I’ll devote myself to you later. Let me be now, and I’ll let you loose later. If you just leave off now, I’ll unleash you when night comes. I had no doubt that Alek would return, so that in the end it was simply a question of how to pass the time, and I, with my Tatyana fantasy—“not the plain, timorous, lovelorn maiden whom he’d known.…”—and my kibbutz education, I simply tried to do it with dignity.

Longings. What is there to say about longings that hasn’t already been said? Perhaps only that in spite of all the negotiations and the postponement deals that I made with them, I wouldn’t really give them up. The void was Alek’s void, the absence wore Alek’s form, and therefore the absence was also a kind of presence with which I made love. The touch of his absence. Its clutch.

After he left — I know how ridiculous it sounds — I developed a foolish sensitivity to airplanes, I mean that I couldn’t resist looking up to follow their flight. “Airplane, Hagar … over there, above the tower, look, an airplane.…” But even when she wasn’t there I looked.

“And now the international weather forecast. Rome fifteen degrees, fine to partly cloudy. Paris nine degrees, fine and cold.…” Perhaps the Boeing was coming from that fine cold weather. In our part of the world it was the eve of the festival of first fruits, my mother had taken Hagar to the kibbutz, and I had forgotten to close the window, and by the time I came home the table would be covered with desert dust.

In the year 1977 I already had a telephone, a gift ordered by my parents which arrived in time for my twenty-second birthday and Hagar’s third. As far as I can remember people didn’t phone each other much in those days, and the conversations were shorter and more functional than they are today. And perhaps precisely for this reason I was already in the mindset of someone waiting for the phone to ring. For the phone to ring rather than for a knock at the door. From the mailbox, on the other hand, I didn’t expect anything; Alek who was fluent in Russian and French, and who read German and English, often said that he was unable to read and write in our language, that it was too frustrating, and it was clear that he wouldn’t try.

He said “Shalom” without identifying himself, and I said, “Where are you?” “Where am I? In phone booth on Zion Square, that’s where I’m standing now.” “What are you doing in Zion Square?” I asked, infected by the smile on the other end of the line. From the tone of his voice it seemed as if we had met yesterday and the day before, as if we hadn’t stopped talking, and this was exactly the confirmation I needed.

“It’s long story, I’ll tell you everything.… How are you?” His voice sounded very far away, intermittently drowned out in the noise from the street. “Where have you been?” “Where have I … nowhere. I’m here.” “It sounds as if you were running from somewhere.” “Most of the time I’m running.” “What did you say? It’s hard to hear.…” “I asked how you are.” “Fine.… All kinds of changes happened … plans … I have a woman I live with now … she’s here … we rented an apartment in Musrara, I signed a lease this week. When can I see you? It’s too long since I saw you.” “I’m studying law,” I said suddenly as if without any connection into the wind, for that was how it seemed to me, as if the two of us were snatching sentences from a roaring wind. “I’m studying law. In the end I succeeded in getting in. I have one more year to graduate.” “Law is good. It’s good … be so kind to tell me, please, when can we meet?”

All the time I knew that he had other women in Paris, women in long black raincoats, women in aromatic cafes smoking Gauloise, women who lived in attics with pigeons flying from the pediment when Alex went to shut the window. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it, I simply took it for granted, and only when I averted my face from another man’s kiss the images would sometimes arise. But somehow, in my foolishness, “I have a woman I live with” had never entered my head.

I told him that I would meet him at lunchtime the next day at Fink’s Bar. “You want Fink’s? Okay, if you want Fink’s, let it be Fink’s. I’ll wait for you there.”

Outside it was a heavy summer dusk, I was wearing a long tee shirt with only panties underneath it … one remembers such trifles. And when I replaced the receiver I felt a sudden panic at the silence in Hagar’s room, and I rushed to her. As if a catastrophe could have happened during this conversation, due to this conversation.… But my daughter was sitting on the rug surrounded by her stuffed animals and feeding them with a teaspoon.

In the four years that they lived in Israel I saw Ute twice. The first time, it was the first summer, they were standing together at the entrance to the Jerusalem Theatre, waiting in line for a Friday matinee film show. And a year or two later, also in summer, she came up Ben Yehuda Street and walked past me in the opposite direction. I was with Hagar.

A big, blonde woman, a little taller than I was, yellow hair piled on top of a head held high. A graceful walk, a long neck gracefully bearing her head over her Viking breast. I knew that she would be beautiful, it was inconceivable that she wouldn’t be, and in some perverse way I took comfort both in her beauty and in her complete difference from me. She was one thing, I was another. She was one story, I was a completely different one. However strange it may sound, I hardly ever thought about her, and I still don’t. A German by birth. Worked here in the Rockefeller Museum. Had two sons with him. Her father, I know, owned a chain of retirement homes in Switzerland, and at a certain stage he offered Alek a job working for him. “Of all things in world, can you imagine me calling some laundry to find out when they’re returning those Nazis’ sheets?”

Even when Alek began meeting Hagar, and avoided taking her to their home, I wasn’t angry, even though I guessed that it wasn’t his idea not to take her there. I was one thing, and Ute was a different world, and just as I had no wish to know about her, it seemed natural to me that she wouldn’t want to be reminded of my existence.

All these thoughts, all this blocking out, actually came later, in the course of many days to come. But then he said, “I have a woman I live with now,” and so I said “At Fink’s.…”

I detest all those twitters of “he said,” “and so then I said,” all those little female pecks in words. I detest them when it comes to me and Alek, and in spite of that and just because of that I’ll repeat it again.…

He said “I have a woman I live with now,” to which I replied, “At Fink’s,” but the words had no connection to the transparent radiance flooding me under my skin. Or the tender liveliness of his voice.

Two o’clock in the afternoon at Fink’s was a new despair; not because the “real” Alek paled in comparison to the imaginary one. Not at all. In days to come I developed an intimate acquaintance with the particular despair of meeting the one who is present in your thoughts all the time. The impossibility of collecting all the times into this one time, and the pointlessness of it.

Alek occasionally says: “I remembered you …” or: “And then I thought of you, what you would have said.…” I myself cannot pick out moments like this, because I remember him and think of him all the time.

I hadn’t been in Fink’s for over four years, it was still shrouded in the same dim light in the afternoon, with the exotic coolness of the first air conditioner in Jerusalem. The atmosphere of a black-and-white spy movie. When I was already seated opposite him I found it difficult to look into his face, as if afraid of being burnt, and opened with a political speech, of all things, as if it wasn’t Alek sitting there. “Do you really believe that?” he asked me in polite surprise when I parroted that now-Begin-was-going-to-annex-all-the-occupied-territories-set-the-Middle-East-on-fire-and-isolate-us-from-the-world. “Don’t you?” “Propaganda is one thing and action is another, but when people like you … when even you begin to believe in propaganda, perhaps there really is problem. In any case,” his voice smiled, “you’ll agree with me that a man like Begin who thanks his wife so nicely, and in the language of the Bible what’s more, can’t be all bad.”

“What made you leave the university?” I asked. “Nothing really made me leave, things just took their course. You tell me, what do you think, could you spend whole year debating where Baudelaire is more symbolist and where he is more decadent?” I couldn’t because I’d never read Baudelaire. At the table next to the curtained window looking onto King George Street three men were speaking German, they didn’t look like tourists, apparently foreign correspondents, or maybe spies. It was quarter past two in the afternoon, and Alek ordered wine.

A silence that lasted too long obliged me to choose between looking at him and talking. “I suppose you want us to finalize the matter of the divorce?” “The matter of … if we need to … how did you say? … finalize? If you say then we’ll finalize it.… You haven’t told me how you are yet.”

The next item on his gentlemanly agenda was to ask me about Hagar, and in the middle of an adorable story about how she sat up in her sleep with her eyes closed and said — I suddenly faltered, not knowing if I was trying to endear my daughter to her father, or using her to make me seem sweeter in his eyes. And then Alek, all attention, very carefully, leaned over and took the salt shaker out of my hand. “Not like this,” he said, “no … not like this.” “Not like this — what?” I protested angrily. “To talk like this, to meet you like this, it’s not normal.” I could say that it was this sentence that broke me up, or the touch of his fingers on my cheek, or the almost voiceless murmur of “Noichka,” but in truth I had come to him defeated in advance, helpless to deny.

The next morning Alek came to me at home, held me patiently when I sobbed over his shoulder with clenched teeth, and came again later in the week, until a pattern of clandestine life was established, if it could be called a pattern at all. Sometimes we would meet every two or three days, sometimes weeks passed without my seeing him, and it also happened that he once disappeared for almost four months. I could never point to a reason for his comings and goings, and when we parted I usually didn’t know whether I was going to see him in two or three days or whether weeks would pass again.

What is there to say about the humiliations of being somebody’s mistress that hasn’t already been said? Actually, perhaps I do have something new to contribute: a kind of gradual recognition that, without any connection to Ute and “I have woman I live with now,” Noa Weber needs the underground. That the clandestine procedures of a humiliating secret protect me and my soul no less than they protect him and her, for I could not bear a stranger to see me naked with him, and almost every moment with him feels like nakedness.

Not for a moment did I fantasize that Alek would leave Ute and move in with me. Our meetings left me exhausted, prickly with a cold energy, unable to sleep. From the memory of our first year together I could imagine how staying with him for any length of time would devour me, how there would be nothing left of me, no human image but Alek’s. And when Nira Woolf became part of my life, and my life began to take on an identity, and when I already had “talents” and “opinions” and “achievements” of my own, this awareness grew even stronger.

ALEK ASKED

When Alek asked my permission to see Hagar I couldn’t deny him, let alone her. But this permission, which I didn’t give at once, cut me into pieces, because it obliged me to tell real lies.

And so I roped in as consultants Tami and Liora — the oldest student in the law faculty, who before starting to study law had completed a degree in social work — and even though I didn’t tell the truth in this consultation, I needed it. And despite the deception, it helped me.

Me: And you don’t think it will be too confusing for her? He’s not going to stay here forever.…

Tami: The idiot … what does he have to see her for in the first place? Just to satisfy his ego?

Me: Believe me I have no idea.

Liora: The problem is that he has the right, from the point of view of visiting rights I mean.

Me: As far as I know him, I don’t think that he’ll demand visiting rights.…

Tami: The idiot … the question is what’s right, what’s good for Hagar.

Liora: What’s right for Hagar is for her to meet him, even if nothing comes of it, and even if it’s a disappointment. Besides, it’s impossible to know what will happen in the long term, with him, I mean, parental competence can change over the years. But even if nothing changes, in my opinion the best thing for her is to face up to reality, because in my eyes at least, the most harmful thing is to live in a fantasy.

Me: Perhaps you’re right, but up to now I haven’t noticed any fantasy on her part.

Liora: I hear what you’re saying, but what makes you think that she would tell you if there was one?

My mother was so horrified by the news that Alek was in the country and wanted to get to know her little darling that when she suddenly rose from her chair I thought that she was going to call my father abroad to get his friends or the secret service to take care of the problem. But she only went to take the milk out of the fridge and broached another subject: “Once he’s here already, why don’t you finally get divorced from him?” “Because I don’t want to go to court with him.” “You won’t have to go to court with him, Daddy will make an appointment for you with Nelkin.” “You don’t understand. The apartment is registered under his name, if we go to court we might be left without a roof over our heads.” “What are you talking about? What right does he have to throw you out of the house? Nobody in the state of Israel will throw you out of the house.” “Tell me, Mother, which of us is studying law?” My mother pursed her lips. “This is what happens when people make a laughing stock of the law,” she said with a resentment that I was surprised to discover she still nursed. “At least you’ve learned your lesson. It’s just a pity that the child has to pay the price.” And when she resumed her seat and saw my face she added: “All right, maybe it won’t be so terrible for her. Because what can already happen? He’ll come, he’ll see her, and he’ll go. That man wouldn’t dare make trouble for us.”

Miriam realized at once that no salvation would be forthcoming from my father’s buddies, the secret service, or the attorney Zachary Nelkin, and took pity on our vulnerability in light of the traitor’s sudden invasion. “What does he want to confuse the little one for? Such a good little girl, she doesn’t deserve a yo-yo for a father … the main thing is that he doesn’t start mixing you up again.” As opposed to my parents, who firmly denied that love played any part in the story, Miriam saw me as the youthful victim of a harmful teenage love affair. I never mentioned the business of the exemption from military service to her, Miriam respects the IDF and those who serve in it, and I was afraid of losing her respect. “How could he mix me up?” I reassured her. “Believe me there’s no chance of that any longer.” And I averted my face from her gaze.

I stayed in bed with him until twelve o’clock — it was the summer vacation, the exams were over and only two of my private pupils were still coming, so I had far too much time on my hands — until after twelve o’clock I was with him, and then he left and returned at five to meet Hagar. I planned the protocol of the visit with Liora, who came to support me and remained sitting in the kitchen, and Alek — Alek fell in with everything I laid down. If I had refused to let him meet his daughter, too, he would have accepted that as well.

Hagar’s father nodded at Liora, almost bowed to her, and handed his daughter a gift which she did not hurry to open: The Great Stories of the Ballet. He was pale, he stood and waited for me to invite him to sit down, he accepted my offer to stay and have “something cold” to drink, as agreed, and I noticed that he had shaved since noon. Hagar, aged four, seemed paralyzed, obedient and paralyzed, and she went out with him obediently for half an hour to eat date ice cream. I watched them from the window as they descended the stairs together. She didn’t take his hand, he didn’t try to take hers, only went down the stairs by her side with his head lowered, as if he were trying to make himself shorter. My sturdy daughter in a blue sleeveless dress … in the middle of the stairs she suddenly turned round and waved to me with a courage that broke my heart. I waved back to her, and then I collapsed onto the marble counter, pressing my ribs against it. I didn’t remember, at that moment I didn’t think about anything, but a week or two before he had fucked me on that counter. Never mind the counter, to hell with the counter, the counter’s not the point, the point is that you’re not supposed to fuck like that with the father of your daughter. Not with shouts smothered on a wet shoulder. Not with that kind of desperation, come to me, come, come, take me, take me to oblivion. Not with only you, nobody else but you in the world. And with more, more, fuck me more, fuck me out of my mind.

Not with her father. Not like that.

Am I the only one in the world who distinguishes between the husband and the father?

ONCE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT SEX

Once we’re on the subject of sex, this is the moment to say that something in this regard also changed when he returned. The change didn’t happen immediately, it came about gradually, in a kind of theatrical building up of suspense; from the start it seemed to me that he had returned with sexual experience, with tricks he didn’t have before — he didn’t have them with me, anyway — but the sexual experience isn’t the point. New movements appeared, in both of us simultaneously, a kind of conscious, coordinated game whose purpose was conquest, mastery and surrender: pinning my arm above my shoulder to the wall, grabbing hold of my hair when I turn my face to the right or the left, pulling off my clothes in one sharp movement, slapping me lightly when I’m on top of him, making me turn my face from side to side, and stopping — always stopping — at the first sign of fear; stopping and waiting for the sign. Hints of violence, symbols of violence, never actual violence. Sometimes marks would appear on my skin hours later, but at the time I hardly felt pain. I loved the marks he left on me, and sometimes I would deliberately provoke him to leave them. They almost always disappeared before the next time. And it wasn’t always like that, of course, sometimes it was slow and gentle, too.

Me (in his arms, with him behind me on the mattress in the living room, for some reason we hardly ever sat in the living room): Tell me about Paris.

Alek (into my hair): Paris … Paris is the city of everybody’s dreams.

Me: “The city of everybody’s dreams” isn’t telling.

Alek: So what is telling?

Me: Taking me to one particular place in Paris.

Alek: To tell you about one place … not far from where I lived there is an old cemetery. Baudelaire’s grave is there and also the graves of all kinds of other famous people. Tourists like visiting there, once I went in too when I was passing, they gave me a map … never mind … around this cemetery is high wall, and gate, and next to the gate is rusty iron bell, like a bell should be, quarter of an hour before closing a guard rings this bell. One evening, it was spring when the city is very lovely, two students I knew ignored the bell, and they stayed there on purpose to spend the night next to grave of Baudelaire. I have no idea what they did there, read poems, performed some ritual with candles, maybe without candles … no, they would have to have candles, those people … Both of them wrote terrible poetry, absolutely shocking, before, and they both continued writing terrible poetry afterwards, too. But if you ask me about Paris, it is a city with the grave of a great poet where trash poets can make a pilgrimage, and even if it’s funny, it’s still great thing.

Me (smiling): Just once I’d like to hear you say something that isn’t a paradox.

Alek (genuinely surprised): I speak in a paradox?

Me: Yes, always (at which point he did all kinds of things to me which I have no intention of describing, and which it makes me moan just to remember).

Alek (afterwards, into my face): That isn’t a paradox.

Me (mumbling): The greatest paradox possible.

Alek (meekly): You know. If you say so it must be true.…

I said that we were playing a game, and now that I think about it, it isn’t clear to me where I got my knowledge of the game from; where did the knowledge of the rules and the movements come from, then when I had not yet been exposed to any pornography, certainly not of that kind. My sexual education proceeded from What Sex Are We? to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fear of Flying, and none of them included this material. When Emanuelle and Last Tango in Paris were playing in the cinemas I didn’t have time to go to the movies, and I never dared approach the plastic-covered magazines in Steimatzky’s Bookstore, so where did I get it from, and why does it seem to me that it was always there inside me? Inherent in the very nature of sexuality?

Nira Woolf fucks gladly, so do I more or less, sometimes, but when I come to the sexy parts in the plot I restrict myself to the cheerful before and the happy after, as if in obedience to Hollywood’s Hays Code. Not only because of the embarrassment of the language, and not only because of what-will-my-mother-think-when-she-reads-it, and how will Miriam react, but also and mainly because there is no way I can get around the terrible vulnerability of sex.

A friend of Hagar’s came to consult me once, a wild and quite disturbed girl, she spoke tensely about how her sister fucked boys. I’ve heard this expression from older women, too, and even though I have never used it in my writing, my readers will assume that this is precisely what Nira does: beds them and fucks them.… I myself have no doubt that this is what Nira does, only I’m damned if I understand exactly what she does, or how a woman can fuck.

It doesn’t matter who rolls onto whom, and who performs the movements, and who pushes whom away afterwards, nothing can change the fact that at a certain moment of this event you are utterly abandoned, vulnerable and abandoned. And it is the man who possesses you, and not you him.

Sometimes my vulnerability was such that I felt I was dying; that’s how I felt, as if my soul was departing my body, and in my perversity it was precisely to this that I gave myself up, to the vulnerability and the departing soul, and the ritual abandonment of the body.

Sometimes I thought: he no longer treats me like a child.

The strange thing is that parallel to these developments, to the addiction to vulnerability and sex, my sense of control in the time outside of it increased — control over myself, I mean — until it was no longer possible to see me as that “plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden.” I polished my opinions until they gleamed, though failed to achieve clarity of mind. With the love and the far out sexual experiences I grew further and further from my mind, or my mind grew further from me, drawing out the distance to the edges of fear, which always disappeared with his touch.

I never refused to meet him, sometimes I would keep myself in suspense and put him off for a week, until after my exams, after the seminar paper — I wasn’t even kidding myself — but when we met I was no longer afraid to argue with him, and after I realized that he was sure that I “understood everything,” I finally began to open my mouth, and even to use the phrase “I don’t understand” to good effect.

Alek: Tell me who was your policewoman.

Me: What policewoman?

Alek: Who came to guard you when I took Hagar.

Me (assertively, it’s called being assertive): She’s not a policewoman, her name is Liora and she’s my friend.

Alek: Sorry, I apologize, do you forgive me? … When is she due to give birth, your friend?

Me: How did you know? (Liora was then in her fourth month, her pregnancy was still a secret.)

Alek: You can see on her face. When a pregnant woman is happy, you can see it on her face, also in how she sits.… I wish your friend good luck. (She would not have good luck. Liora had a miscarriage in her fifth month, and it would be eight years until she had Asaf.)

I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in hearing what he thought of Hagar, out of an embarrassing feeling that if I let myself listen and get into a discussion about her — never mind what was said — I might somehow be betraying my daughter. To this day when he asks me how she is, I tend to be miserly in my answers, and on the isolated occasions when I did say more or let him talk, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Most of our arguments to this day concern the sociopolitical, as if it doesn’t really touch us, although how this can be possible when I become increasingly sociopolitical as time goes by is not quite clear to me.

In the summer of ’81, before the elections, Alek went to Kiryat Shmoneh without me — I stayed with my father, who was still at Hadassah Hospital after having been transferred from Intensive Care to the cardiology department — and when he returned we argued about Begin again. “Of course he incites, of course he does, what else? I don’t deny it, but what I don’t understand is why you on the left enjoy it so much, as if he turns you into saints.” “Who said we enjoy it? Where did you get that from?” “What do you mean, ‘Who said?’ Switch on television.” In the family and among friends it was agreed that Begin was responsible for my father’s heart attack. The day before, I had knelt by his bed to help him put his slippers on. On the plastic chairs in the corridor two old friends were waiting, good people, who had brought us all fruit from the kibbutz. “You switch on the television, look who his people are, look at the characters they drag to their demonstrations.” Alek put on his shirt. In a minute we would go into the kitchen and have something to drink, and ten minutes later he would leave. “Lumpenproletariat,” he said as he buttoned his shirt, “that’s who you mean. You know, I haven’t been lazy, I drive all the way up to Kiryat Shmoneh, I go to demonstrations, and I see all kinds, including, you’re right, lumpens, real rags, people with no connection to culture. But lumpens, if you don’t mind me saying so, you also have on the left. You remember Menachem, who used to come to the house here and burn down museums?” I remembered two. “One of them. He lives now in Paris. I met him, to my regret, and what can I tell you, even if somebody lives in a European capital and associates with Third World and Palestinians, it makes no difference, lumpen is still lumpen.… He was with some student, Palestinian, never mind what his politics are, I saw immediately that this is a man with self-respect, who knows where he comes from. Menachem, on the other hand, is completely different story.… The way he fawned there, in a minute he would have dropped to the ground and kissed his feet just because he was Palestinian.… So they want to burn down museums? You know what? For my part they can burn what they like, let them burn.… But for an avant-garde too you need culture.”

I didn’t understand this speech fully, or why he was so angry — he was only a guest here after all — I didn’t know where his anger came from, but I did know that Alek was leaving soon, and even though he was already dressed I still hadn’t put a foot out of the sheet. Suddenly, I remember, I detested them all equally: Peres and Begin, Aridor and Meridor, Kiryat Shmoneh and the kibbutzim and the atomic reactor, Shulamit Aloni whose book Women as People had opened my eyes, my sociopolitical insulted parents, and that Menachem and this one — all the Menachems in the world, together with all their friends and enemies: everyone who forced me over and over again to stand up and be counted, to take a stand; everyone who made him close his face to me.

In the state of Israel you have to take a stand, in this world you have to take a stand, in this world you are your stand, only sometimes, what can I do, I get sick and tired of all these stands, they turn my stomach and make it hard for me to breathe. Alek never expected me to take a stand, not in that way, and it was I who usually introduced the outside noise, in order to test what? Who?

He looked down at me and then he lay down next to me again. He allowed me to crease his shirt in silence a little longer, but he didn’t let me off completely. “Your friend, Miriam, who moved to Ma’ale Adumim, why don’t you ask her what she thinks of Begin? Or do you also prefer for the people to keep quiet?” I didn’t have to ask Miriam because I already knew. “Miriam isn’t an example, in many senses she’s even more left-wing than I am, but she has her own personal story, her own private score to settle for what happened to her when she arrived in the country.” “And the left doesn’t have, right? They don’t have private scores to settle, and that’s why they’re the only ones who know how to understand history and how to make progress. What a pity that there are people like your friend Miriam who get in the way of historical progress.”

ON THE BRINK

This is the phrase that comes to mind because that’s how it felt then, as if I was teetering on the brink, and sometimes I stumbled. With three or four hours of sleep at night, giddy and aroused to the point of being unable to concentrate, there were moments when objects seemed to lose their solidity, and then I would stumble, and bruised toes and cut fingers were quite a common occurrence then. I would linger with Hagar for a long time on the curb before crossing the street, afraid that I wasn’t assessing distance and speed correctly.

Strange how you get accustomed to walking on shifting ground, too. Absorbed in mapping my own inner swamps, I was careful not to arouse suspicion, I adapted my movements to my loosening grip on reality, and the only attention I provoked was of the “you look tired” variety. In a certain sense everything became easier, because nothing seemed completely real except for the hours I spent with Alek — closing the door with a backwards kick, trapping my eyes as I stepped back, not letting them go as he came closer, and when I expected his quick, hard movement, touching me rather with a slow, long one.

When everything becomes a little abstract, the concrete stops resisting you, and movements grow lighter, like those of an astronaut in space. During the weeks when he disappeared I would make up for lost sleep, and somehow or other I must have been born lucky, because even when the phenylethylamine rioted through my brain, my memory went on functioning like a separate disk.

As the end of my last year in the law faculty approached, it was clear that I wasn’t a candidate for internship, that no legal firm I knew would take on a single mother as an intern — in those days I don’t think the term “single mother” was yet in use — and even if someone would have accepted me, I wouldn’t have been able to organize myself to cope with twelve- and fourteen-hour workdays. A few of the women graduates applied to be prosecutors for similar reasons, but I looked for a way out. Armed with a self-confidence that was paradoxically nourished by my new sexual exploits and the dramatic externalization of my sexual vulnerability, and under Alek’s imaginary eyes, which turned every test into a trifle and at the same time also challenged me to win, I went to be interviewed for a job with a human rights foundation. They weren’t necessarily looking for a lawyer, but legal articulateness and articulateness in general was seen as an advantage, and in the end I impressed them to such an extent that they agreed to keep the job for me and wait for almost two months until I graduated. I worked for the fund for over sixteen years, from the days when a staff of five were crowded in a noisy little office on Aza Street, until 1996 when it had grown into an empire, with a magnificent house in Talbiyeh and professional departments. According to the mandate defined by our donors we were supposed to assist in the development of local organizations dealing with the rights of … only such organizations barely existed then. I have had a number of occasions to say that most of the upheavals undergone by Israeli society from the end of the seventies to today can be described by the growth of such bodies, but what is relevant here is that the work consumed me to an extent that I never imagined, and that everything I learned during its course about the reality underneath the reality became a part of my being.

In the beginning I made all the mistakes usually made by beginners. All of us except for Jeff were new at the job, and Jeffrey’s American experience didn’t suit the situation in Israel. We wasted months enthusiastically and inefficiently monitoring the activities of the so-called “Green Patrol” in their harassment of the Bedouins. At the height of these futile endeavours I found myself driving round the Negev with Yossi Lenk in the vain attempt to identify a stolen herd, as well as conducting furious and no less futile telephone conversations with my father’s friends, who naturally denied all knowledge of what I was telling them.

Months were wasted in vain attempts to organize the residents of what was once the picturesque slum of Yemin Moshe, all with the aim of obtaining legal representation for these people who had been evicted from their homes when it was decided to gentrify the neighborhood and turn it into a tourist attraction. During the razing of the Shama’a Quarter to make room for the Cinematheque we compiled a thick dossier, which we didn’t know what to do with, and our initial contacts with a few doctors in the Gaza Strip were abruptly broken off, for reasons we were unable to understand. We also had no firm policy at that stage as to whether the occupied territories were part of our mandate or not.

In internal seminars held by the fund I am sometimes called upon to tell anecdotes from those pioneering days: before the era of directors and research assistants, of nonprofit associations and volunteers and organizational consultants, of project descriptions and project funding and spreadsheets, when goals were not yet printed on recycled paper and human suffering was not yet parceled out among us in groups. As greenhorns we let the experiences swallow us up, let them make demands on our time without consideration of working hours, and this was exactly what I needed. I met people, I spoke to people, I traveled to places, the phone began to ring a lot, I made a lot of phone calls myself, and for a change I was doing something that seemed important to me.

The year that I left the fund, when I held down two-thirds of a full-time job and was in charge of a number of well-formulated projects, it happened that I removed a young woman from dealing with damaged children. We were in the car on our way back from Haifa, after visiting one of the hostels whose financing the fund was then investigating, and this young woman, whose name was also Noa, told us how after previous visits to similar institutions she had woken at up night with horrible nightmares and gone to sleep with her daughter. “The strangest thing,” she said, “is that after not being able to tear myself away from her all night, after lying next to her and praying to God that nothing terrible happens to her, as soon as she wakes up I haven’t got any patience for her. She’s a little slow in the morning, she always dawdles in the morning, it’s nothing new, but precisely on this morning, I don’t know why, I lost my temper and behaved like a monster.”

“If that’s the situation, it’s a sign that the job isn’t for you,” I pronounced from the front seat. “It doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help the work for you to get into trouble at home.” And the next day, in spite of her objections, she was transferred to working with groups assisting foreign workers.

I was never in danger of over-identification. Suffering, wickedness, stupidity, injustice, cruelty — I learned things about reality that I could never have imagined, but the main feeling simmering inside me was anger, which didn’t always explode in the right place, and not always in a helpful way. My father was often an object of my anger, especially in the first years, as if he, as a representative of the “oligarchy,” was responsible for Israeli reality and could be called on to account for it.

“Good material for the KGB …,” Alek said once, when he picked up one of the illustrated publications of the Agricultural Development Company lying next to my bed. Hagar had scribbled a red beard and mustache on the face of the scientist in the photograph and made red flowers bloom from his test tube. “You want to pass it on to them?” I asked. “What? To whom?” he said, in alarm or revulsion. As far as I was concerned he could have been a spy, I didn’t care whom for. I was ready to be his agent, his field worker, taking his questions and presenting them to my father — Alek wouldn’t fuck me until I brought him the answers — I was ready to mingle with my parents’ friends, to question them and get the required information out of them, to blow the whole rotten system up from the inside.

But Alek said: “It isn’t funny. KGB and its informers, Noia, it isn’t funny.” “Informer” was apparently the worst word in his lexicon, and once we had a nasty argument about it, when in the wake of ideas we were tossing around in the fund I mentioned to him a proposal for a sweeping law making it mandatory to report the abuse of minors, women, and the elderly. “Someone who does something like that, who abuses defenseless people, has no rights and should be shot. I would shoot him myself. But to inform, and even to make this law, that is something else.” “You’re an anarchist,” I said, as if a minute before I hadn’t had fantasies of blowing the system up from inside. “I am not an anarchist. You know what? Okay, I am. Better to be an anarchist and to shoot, than for neighbors to start informing on each other.”

But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about now. I was living with injustice, cruelty, stupidity, and sadism, with this cocktail of the social system, and with the fact that my heart was hardly ever crushed like the other Noa’s. The anger got through to me, and I was good and angry with whomever and whatever I needed to be, but I couldn’t feel the pain of the victims.

For a considerable part of the time however I did succeed in attaining one thing, and I sought it more and more: the awareness that in this world I and my entire range of feelings were not of the slightest importance, because touching heaven didn’t change anything in the real world.

I went on meeting Alek whenever it suited him, he still pushed me to the edge and he still unraveled my heart and sharpened my edges, but in another separate part of my brain I grew indifferent. Not to him, no, never to him, but to myself and to what was happening to me.

One minute I was with him with the blinds closed, with take me, take me already, ready to fall to his feet as long as he took me, and half an hour later with the Association of the Victims of.… Or the Committee for the War against.… Switching off my face and saying: “Let’s hear how you define your aims,” saying: “We’ll take it up with the board of directors,” saying: “But the most important thing is for you to start showing independence.” Sometimes I would lay my hand on my skirt, under the table, press a fingerprint left on my thigh to see if I could produce a pain, try to deepen the mark; the desire didn’t diminish, but gradually it began to seem worthless.

The heavens could open to me, divinities could manifest themselves to me, my soul could fly out of my abandoned illuminated body, and all this would not change anything in the intermittently disembodied but nevertheless villainous world in which I moved.

HAGAR

I said that the work didn’t get to me like it did to others, but in the end I think it may have had an effect on Hagar. I don’t mean only that it took up all my time, and that I kept on sending her at the last minute to my mother, to Miriam, to girlfriends; I mean mainly that all the great injustices we dealt with at the fund somehow dwarfed her childhood, which suffered from an excessive sense of proportion. When her mother is going to visit a shelter for battered women or to meet the representatives of an organization for the disabled, a wise daughter — and Hagar was always wise — will not complain about the fact that it is her grandmother who accompanies her to the end-of-the-year party. As compensation, I would talk to her a lot about my work, tell her where I had been, who I had met and what I had done, and she was always interested. Sometimes more than in what was happening at school or in the youth movement.

During school vacations she spent quite a lot of time in the office, where she always asked for explanations about what we were doing, and there was always someone who offered to explain. At the age of nine she inhaled tear gas at the demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s house in the wake of the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon. At the age of sixteen she was spat upon on Paris Square at the Women in Black vigil against the occupation.

If today my daughter sometimes looks to me as if she is made entirely out of ideas and principles, I have only myself to blame.

If I hadn’t met my soul, if not for Alek, perhaps I would have been just like her.

Me: Hello, darling, how are you? What was it like with your father?

Hagar: All right.

Me (carefully, as if absentmindedly, looking for something in my blazer pocket): All right — how?

Hagar: Just all right. But I don’t like date ice cream any more, and anyway it’s not healthy to eat ice cream in winter.

Me: Why don’t you tell him?

Hagar: Next time he comes it may be summer already, and maybe I’ll like the taste again.

In the spring of ’88 Alek arrived for a short, bad, two-week visit, accompanying a television crew which was preparing a film about women in the Intifada, and he took a room apart from the crew in the Hotel Petra next to the Jaffa Gate. “I’ve wanted for a long time to wake up in the morning in the Old City.” Hagar, who was almost fifteen and very active, accepted his invitation to meet him at the YMCA, and came back to me with the angry conclusion that, “That man is a right-winger, a male chauvinist, and a racist.”

“Now that I’ve met him,” she said to Tami who was in a huddle with me in the kitchen, “now I’m really beginning to understand why my mother can’t stand men.”

Alek to the best of my judgment is not right-wing, chauvinistic, or racist, but there is no doubt that he succeeded in infuriating her with the question: “Is it permitted to tell a feminist girl how pretty she is?” with his tasteless remark about “shots of a Palestinian yingeleh,” and who knows what else. My little feminist, by the way, was not exactly pretty at that period in her life. Adolescence made her clumsy, her body looked embarrassed, and it was only in the summer before going to the army that she recovered her grace. In any event, I imagine that he was trying in his way to flatter her. I couldn’t tell her that her father, too, thought that we were waging a war of Goliath against David, that personal liberty was more important to him than anything else, far more important than national liberation — either ours or the Palestinians’—and that he detested propaganda of any sort; in doing so, I would be giving myself away. And in any case it was clear that the two of them rubbed each other the wrong way: she made inflated declarations, and he deflated them. He could have, should have, restrained himself, but in the end perhaps it was for the best, and when she went to visit him in Paris both of them were already careful to avoid provoking arguments.

Alek is not a father to Hagar, and he is a bad father to Mark and Daniel, the sons of the woman whose children he wanted to sire from the moment he set eyes on her. If Hagar needed something big, for him to bring her the golden-hearted flower, to pluck the moon from the sky for her, I have no doubt that he would do everything in his power and beyond it, that he would turn the world upside down for her sake, and the same goes for his sons, but the daily business of fatherhood is something beyond his comprehension or his capacities. And in any case, it seems that his women and children get along very well without him.

Should I bear a grudge against him for what he deprived his children of? In my opinion I definitely should: men are responsible for their offspring, both parents bear equal responsibility, and so on and so forth, and nevertheless I don’t bear him a grudge.

When she was a little girl Hagar tried touchingly to attach me to Yoash. When he raised her to his shoulders she would kick and ask me to hold her from behind, and we would walk down the street like Siamese triplets; she would demand that I phone him now, why not now, and invite him over; she would ask why Yoash wasn’t married, say it would suit him to have a baby, and quiz me as to whether in my opinion he seemed “in love.”

When she grew older she became more explicit, and when she despaired of Yoash and his eccentricities, she began questioning me about others, especially Jeff. “How long has he been divorced already?”, “I think his daughters are really nice, it feels as if we’ve always known each other,” and finally: “If he’s such a good friend of yours, why can’t he be your boyfriend?” If Tami had asked me the same question I would have replied that I’d tried, “for my sins I’ve tried, and I really can’t recommend it, six out of ten on the Noa Weber scale,” but small daughters are not girlfriends, and therefore I replied: “It’s impossible and it will never happen because he’s my boss.” “So what if he’s your boss?”

“If you go to bed with your boss your children are born with a squint.” Hagar was not amused, to this day she tends to take everything literally and is offended when she discovers her mistake.

This year Alek became the father of a baby girl in Moscow. Dasha, or Dashka, is her name and I know nothing about her mother. Somehow I understood that the pregnancy was unplanned, by him at any rate, and that he sees her from time to time and also supports her financially, but Alek, always the gentleman, did not go into details. Was I upset? And how I was upset, mainly, in some strange way, because the baby was a girl. Ute is big, blonde and ample, I am small, short and relatively dark. Ute is German, European, and I am the Middle Eastern minx. The German woman has sons, and the Israeli minx gave birth to a daughter. Something in this division of roles helped me to separate between the worlds, to separate myself from the other woman, and to remove the sting of jealousy. Ute was one thing, I was another, and whatever there was between him and her did not touch me. And now he had a daughter, like Hagar, with twenty tiny nails, and another young woman who might be like me. How was she like me? And how was she with him? And how was he with her?

We were on the way from Sheremetyevo, on the Moscow Ring Road encircling the city. It was a quarter past eight in the morning, and outside the taxi window was a gray fog so thick that you could hardly see the white of the snow. It was my seventh visit, and when I stood in line for customs I noticed how the airport had changed since the first time I came to him, in 1993.

I was all aroused in anticipation of meeting Alek, but without the fear crawling under my skin that had diluted the arousal of the first visits. No shady character tried to take my bags from me, nobody offered the devil knows what services, and the airport employees no longer looked like gray corpses on leave. In another year or two maybe they would begin to smile and even to wish the passengers a “nice day.” What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? had already been sent to the printers, and it occurred to me that perhaps in my next book I should bring Nira here, in winter. I would dress her in a black fur like the one displayed in the shop window upstairs. The flat-faced passport controller knew no English, but she took my visa without making me wait nervously, and without fixing her long narrow eyes on me or the computer screen, she stamped it with a hammer blow. Over the loudspeaker system, too, there was not a word to be heard in English, and when I stood in the next line I suddenly felt goose bumps at the sound of the names: “Irkutsk … vosem tridzat. Habarovsk … vosem tridzat pyat. Tallinn … Samarkand … Vladivostok.…” Expanses of cold, imaginary forms of existence, all poured into the airport, and in this heart-rending vastness, present and tangible and standing patiently in line, there was nothing that it made sense to cling to except for the one waiting for me with a flower in his hand beyond the next set of doors.

“They say that at my age a child makes you younger, but what can I tell you, Noia, it’s not exactly like that.” The taxi driver had a slender neck, suddenly I wondered how the coarse wool of his sweater didn’t drive him crazy with its touch, and when he opened the window to move the stuck windshield wiper, he did it without gloves. I had gloves, but Alek didn’t, and when he wrapped my hands in both of his, hands no longer young, I was defeated again by the old rebellious helplessness; the helplessness that told me that in all the infinite expanses, in all the infinity confronting me, there was no point in anything, anything except for this. What could I say to him? “Congratulations”? “You’re a maniac”? What could I ask? “Is she like me? Does she love you in the same way?”

“Tell me about Borya,” I said. “What’s he up to? How is he?” Alek leaned back and took out cigarettes for both of us. “Nobody can talk to Borya any more he’s become such pravednik … kind of saint. And his new woman, complete svyatosha, with her it’s even worse. You know how she answers telephone? You don’t know, you can’t even guess. The handmaiden of God.” “Hello, this is the handmaiden of God?” “Exactly. Even my mother, who knew her mother when she was a baby, even she can’t stand it.” “So Borya doesn’t drink any more?” I asked, and I nestled in his arm, happy and relaxed. “Why not? He drinks all right, but drinking with saints, you know, isn’t such a pleasure.” And I laughed heartily and felt great love, for both of us.

ONCE I IMAGINED

Once I imagined telling everything to Miriam, to her and nobody else. Perhaps she would have pitied me: Look how he took advantage of your love, you wasted the best years of your life on him and what did you get out of it, tell me? Perhaps she would have said: I felt that there was something wrong in your life, but I didn’t want to poke my nose in. Only when Hagar changed her name did Miriam find out that I had been and still was an officially married woman, and my declared indifference to the formalities of the situation shocked her deeply. In her affection for me she had surmised that I had been done some injustice that I didn’t want to talk about, and while she was wrong, of course, regarding the injustice, she was right in assuming that I couldn’t possibly be truly indifferent to my legal position.

Miriam might have been angry with me: How could he lead you astray like that and how could you let him — she would certainly have been a little angry — but at least she would not have provided me with the telephone number of “an excellent psychologist.” For some reason it seems to me that Miriam, more than anyone else, is capable of thinking of love as one of the afflictions of fate.

There was relief in the fantasy of confession. The thought of baring the soul brings relief, but sometimes the price to be paid for that relief is the soul itself, whose life seems to demand darkness.

As opposed to Miriam, I never for a moment thought that Alek was taking advantage of me in any way whatsoever, and sometimes it even occurs to me that the one taking advantage is me.

Last February, when we were already in his apartment in Ordenka, after he had told me about Dasha and after he had made me rejoice from head to toe, I reminded him that on my previous visit he had promised to take me into the refurbished gilded white church three buildings away from us, but he was too lazy to get up. “I’ll put on some music for you instead, all night prayers, I’ll find the disc in a minute … there you are, with your permission.” And then, after all those years, like on Usha Street, like from the record he played me on Usha Street, rose the low male voices — slowly gathering, parting, like walking slowly in the dark, not actually growing stronger or louder, simply bearing stubborn, undefeated, sonorous testimony.

The mattress was very soft, snow went on falling and falling outside the white lace curtain, and between us there was a kind of weariness that sets in after everything is over, like a kind of pity or pardon. When he made love to me, the repertoire of movements had not changed, but the violent demand had disappeared, as if we were becoming reconciled, becoming one. As if becoming one was our purpose on earth.

Alek, one hand under my head, the other on my breast, breathed slowly, perhaps he was sleeping, and I with my eyes open saw visions of white infinity measured step by step, white vales of despair extending without a sign. Then breathing under his hand, slowly and surely I took off, slow and low; as if gathered up in the mist, I glided over infinity. Even if I dived into the white I would be gathered up, even if I dived down I would rise again like mist, even if I fell I would not fear.

When I awoke from the vision I looked from the side at the sleeping cubist profile: a single gray hair bristling from the arc of the eyebrow, thick boyish lashes on a heavy drooping eyelid, and a soft wrinkle shaped like a crescent moon beneath it. I put my hand on his hand lying on my breast, and then I thought: perhaps this man is only a gateway through which to pass. Perhaps he is only matter through which to see beyond matter. Perhaps he is only a stair to another love which no longer needs anyone.

I cannot justify these thoughts, or explain a single word. Matter and beyond matter … love which needs no one … vales of despair.… The yellowish light of a Passover heat wave should be enough to dissolve these phrases. Just saying them out loud should be enough to annihilate them with laughter. Where did they come from? And where did I get the feeling that like a precognition they were always there inside me?

In Blood Money I gave the contractor’s repulsive brother a mystical turn of speech, like that of the messianic settlers’ movement, and all through the plot he breathes a fog of verbal vapors on the reader that covers up the suspect and the murder; in Compulsory Service there’s Sylvie, a particularly silly soldier who complicates the investigation when she consults spirits and energies. My better judgment cannot bear them and their talk, they truly and instinctively repel me; in the same way, I should be repelled and disgusted by myself, and nevertheless I am not disgusted. Not at the right time, and not to the required degree. Life in the underground lets you do this: fall foolishly in love without having to listen to yourself talking, and without paying the price of shame.

NIRA WOOLF

If I send her to Moscow she’ll learn Russian first, which I never did, apart from a few words I picked up from Alek.

Nira Woolf will learn the language in two or three months, perhaps dialects, too, and if I send her into the white and gold church, she will even understand the liturgy sung there in Old Slavonic. Perhaps I’ll give her a guide, an intellectual like Borya, who will also fall in love with her, but very soon she’ll learn everything there is to learn from this teacher, and from about the first third of the book she will no longer be dependent on him. Mastering the language will come easily to Nira, like the knowledge of immunology she acquired in The Stabbing, like the understanding of bank fraud in Birthright, like her five martial arts. And studying the map at home will suffice for her to navigate the complex city and to locate herself even when she emerges from the Metro station in the middle of the night at some remote suburb.

Nira Woolf is “more like a fairy tale,” as Miriam said, but why shouldn’t women have fairy tales of their own? Tales of women who never know panic in the street and the fear of footsteps following them in the dark; legends about heroines who do not fall in love with their teachers and officers, and who are never impressed by rich, strong, mature, famous, tall men.

“It’s important for us to have role models to identify with,” Hagar lectures me, “but it’s impossible to identify with such an unrealistic character.” “What about the role models men identify with?” I type indignantly in reply, “Does James Bond look realistic to you? Do Indiana Jones, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger look realistic to you? Half the men in the movies aren’t in the least realistic. Much more than half, almost all of them.”

This morning she called me unexpectedly from Boston, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her until she returned to New York. She had just finished reading What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? and she didn’t want to wait, she had to tell me that this time she had really, really liked it. “Even though you write books for entertainment, the message gets across.… I think it’s just wonderful how you managed to get in so much information.… You know what? In the last chapter, when Nira gives Svedka the revolver? Even I felt ready to shoot him, that swine, if he couldn’t be brought to trial, that is.” “She could have brought him to trial,” I corrected her slowly, “but the punishment didn’t seem harsh enough to her.” “That’s because the judges are men and the law is made by men, and even now that there are women judges, they learn to think like men.” I was glad to hear her voice, but after two whole days in which I hadn’t spoken to anyone, even at the grocer’s, dragging the words out was an effort. “Did I wake you up? Aren’t you on summer time?” Everyone who called me that Passover asked me if they had woken me up, but the truth is that when she rang I hadn’t gone to bed yet. “You’re not sick? … Are you sure you’re not sick? … Is the holiday hard? … Are you eating, Mommy? Are you taking care of yourself? Going out? … Are you meeting your friends, or have they all gone away? What about Tami? Is she back yet?” Where are all these worries coming from all of a sudden? I’m forty-seven and healthy, active up until recently, my planner is full of addresses and phone numbers, I am interviewed in the papers, my book is on display in shop windows, and even though Hagar is my only child and I am a single parent, a mother is a mother and a daughter is a daughter and the roles should not be reversed. “I’m fine, just busy writing.” “So soon? It used to take you longer to start a new book.”

“Just playing with ideas. Now tell me, how does it feel being without Peter for two weeks?”

In the winter of 1980 the fund ceased its activities for a period of three weeks, and everyone except for me flew to the United States to meet the donors and consult with a battery of experts on how to go on, if at all. I composed most of the first draft of Blood Money then, on a baby Hermes borrowed from the office.

Ute gave birth to Daniel in November, Hagar was invited to the brith—in view of the Viking appearance of the mother, it seemed strange to me that they were having a brith at all — and in the following three months Alek disappeared from our lives. From our overt lives, I mean, and as far as Hagar’s covert life is concerned I have no idea. She said that the baby was cute, that it was impossible to talk to Ute because she didn’t know any Hebrew, and when she was brushing her teeth before going to bed she suddenly asked with her mouth full of toothpaste if we could also have a baby like that, to which I replied “We’ll see,” even though I had made up my mind never to have any more children. In any case, Hagar with her healthy instincts appeared to have come to terms quite happily with reality.

Serious writers describe themselves as suffering when they write; I, who have no pretensions to seriousness, have never suffered in the course of the work itself, and my difficulties only arise at the stage of publication. Writing held me together when I felt I was coming apart, and solved the problem of time when it began to unravel at the edges. Constructing a plot, like reading, in fact, gives time a direction, and when Nira Woolf began to take action, I was animated by a happy feeling that I too was making progress.

The background data of the story didn’t present any problems, they were all taken from testimonies I heard at work before the decision to limit the activities of the fund to this side of the Green Line: the bribes paid to the Military Government, the harassment and frequent arrests, the contractor seen riding in the company commander’s jeep, the medic’s suppressed evidence, the pen in which the young boys were confined, the scene of the nocturnal burial.… The scene of the boys behind the barbed wire and the picture of the night burial annoyed a lot of people.

Nira Woolf already existed in my head before Blood Money as an infantile fantasy. In 1974 she solved the murder of the soldier Rachel Heller; in ’75 I sent her to the Savoy Hotel as a resourceful hostage; in my night runs, when men bothered me with disgusting lip-smackings, Nira Woolf would fell them to the pavement with one graceful blow, without even stopping. She still does it, and to this day I still summon her to deal with male pests. The mere thought of her helps me to radiate something that sends them packing.

Once Nira Woolf put a man in a wheelchair after he raped an old woman in Ramat Gan and got off with community service; and once I sent her to the High Court of Justice to eloquently plead the case of the people evicted from their homes in Yemin Moshe, and she won. As I said: an infantile fantasy, a completely infantile gratification, but from the moment I sent her into action in a well-constructed plot, the fantasy became a little less shameful. My last doubts concerning Nira, strangely enough, were about her hair, and in the end, after dying it and shortening it and lengthening it, I gave her an Annie Lennox look that was before its time. For some reason I was bothered by this matter of her hair.… Now I don’t know anymore if her cropped head speaks of fragility or strength, but this was the look I decided on in the end, and this is how she has remained ever since. Forty-five years old, big breasts that won’t develop cancer, and a close-cropped, almost shaved, blonde head.

Two publishers rejected the book in letters of one and a half lines. I was prepared for this, what I wasn’t prepared for was the extent of the response after the publication, and the way in which people began to identify me with Nira. At fund meetings my colleagues began to make remarks in my presence such as: “Maybe we should get Nira Woolf on the case,” or: “Let’s not be carried away into adopting Nira Woolf solutions,” and on a number of occasions Jeff warned me that, “What we need here is quiet, in-depth work,” and, “Forgive me for saying so, but this is a matter that demands exploration and negotiation, not a militant style.” As if I had ever given him any reason to doubt my “in-depth work.” All of a sudden I needed to prove that I was “serious,” that I was “realistic,” that I wasn’t trying to cut corners and shorten procedures with a kick, and at the same time, to my embarrassment, they seemed to imagine that I actually could take advantage of all the publicity to get things done without going through the proper channels, which was far from being the case. It didn’t help for me to repeat that I wasn’t Nira and Nira wasn’t me, people simply refused to listen; Nira was a symbol, I was seen as a standard-bearer, and for want of an alternative I decided to enjoy playing the role and put it to use wherever possible.

I’m not trying to say, God forbid, that Nira Woolf’s opinions were far from my own, and since Nira Woolf acted more than she voiced opinions, I was obliged to formulate the views that justified her actions — which, in the last analysis, certainly did me no harm. Suddenly I was asked for my opinion on oppression in general and in particular, on the state and the individual, on the state and Zionism, on Zionism and women, on women and the patriarchal structure, on women’s literature and the representation of women in literature, and so on and so forth — and it seemed that even those close to me attributed a new importance to my words, as if they “represented something.”

Nira Woolf improved my financial situation, Nira made me “opinionated”—as people began later on to call any woman who had an opinion — Nira Woolf prompted me to read and think; so that in the final analysis it could be said that I, at least, was empowered by her character. She was born from the voice of an infantile fantasy, but from the moment she began to make her way in the world, she made me into what people today call a “voice.”

LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION

My editor, who is more literary than I am, once quoted me something that Schiller is supposed to have said: All women writers write with one eye on the page and the other eye on a man, except for the Countess Von So-and-So who has one glass eye.…

With me it’s the complete opposite. I never wrote with one eye on Alek, I never attacked him, and with both eyes on the page I was actually free for a while of his imagined gaze. With the years and the additional books I sometimes regretted writing so fast, so that the truce never lasted long enough.

Alek left for Paris in 1982, before the IDF invaded Lebanon, and from my point of view before the publication of Blood Money, so that he missed my transformation into a “public figure,” and he also didn’t read the book. It was only when they sent me the contract — the first, bad one — that I told him I’d written a book, and he was glad for me and congratulated me and came round with a bottle of fine wine. After he had refilled my glass until I was too drunk to return to the office, he asked me to tell him something about the book I had written — even today, with all my experience, I find it difficult to answer this question — and then, when the embarrassment was still new to me, I said something like: ‘Well, look … it’s not actually literature … it’s more like a thriller … with a strong heroine, a lawyer, not exactly a lawyer, not only … but a woman with power. My editor says that on the jacket blurb they’re going to call it a feminist thriller.”

“Feminist thriller is good,” he said and smiled and leaned over me and took a cigarette, “thriller is good, and feminist thriller is even better. It’s a pity I can’t read it.” And inserting his hand under my neck he added: “You know what they say … in time of revolution the relation of literature to life is a relation of incest.”

“What revolution?” I asked, drunk and vague.

“Today this is your revolution, the women’s revolution.”

A thousand times since then I’ve used this phrase, “the feminist revolution,” and since I was asked, I’ve learned all kinds of illuminating things about its relation to literature and literature’s relation to it. Sometimes now, in an intimate rather than a public setting, when I’m listening to Hagar, it occurs to me that this worn out word, “revolution,” explains something in relation to her. In my relation to her, I mean. My darling Hagar is to a great extent the product of this revolution: good, clear-minded, and emotionally focused; and I am a daughter of the generation of the wilderness, not like her.… I got stuck in the middle and only half of me has made it. The good half, I say. I look at her in the same way as the hairy Neanderthal no doubt looked at Homo sapiens, lurching at a four-legged crouch, and however hard he tried to stand up straight and speak like a human being, he went on blurting out ancient, unintelligible grunts.

Hagar will never ferment underground and poison herself underground, and everything that bubbles inside her rises to the surface and is clarified in the light of day. I should have missed my transparent, enlightened daughter more.

But why “should” I? Who says I “should have”? When she left home for the first time with her boyfriend to do a year of national service in Ofakim, I wasn’t sorry. They were like two clumsy, happy cubs, they romped around the house, they talked without stopping, they conducted long ideological seminars in the kitchen. I admit that I needed quiet, that I was tired of clarifying and explaining and answering so many questions at home as well. Afterwards I sometimes missed her. Actually, what do I know about the Homo sapiens I brought up? Perhaps she too.…

When she was here last summer she fell asleep one night on my bed, and when she was sleeping deeply and breathing quietly, I looked at the curve of her cheek, and for some reason I touched her temple. I needed to feel her pulse, I laid three fingers on her temple, and with the delicate pulse beating on my fingers came a feeling of wonder, both sad and tranquil. What did I know about her? What could I possibly know? But then she turned over and went to sleep on her back.

Another time, I remember, when she was in the army, I came home one afternoon, I didn’t know that she was there and she didn’t hear the door opening, and when I came in I saw her lying in her room, on her bed, in the place where her father’s couch once stood, her wet hair spread over the pillow. The Walkman was lying on her stomach, she was wearing earphones, and on her face packed between them was a strange expression, flickering, illuminated … as if she were lit up from within. My daughter lay straight, uncovered, her hands folded on her chest and her eyes closed — seeing what? And suddenly, still and full of light, she looked like him. And then too, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, she was like a miracle.

TALKING ABOUT THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION

Talking about the feminist revolution, Alek good-humoredly called it “your revolution,” but at other times, when we weren’t celebrating a book, he pronounced it quite differently. Dryly and sarcastically. On the subject of feminism, as on a number of others, he had, and still has, completely reactionary opinions—“How do you know what’s good for other women? Why impose the liberation of feminists on all of them? Are women cripples, that you have to fight for their rights?”—but somehow or other we often agreed on specific cases, and if he had been required to beat up some chauvinist bastard, I think that he would have done it without too much hesitation. The absurdity of all this is that in a certain sense Alek liberated me, from dependency on a man, I mean, and when I said that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” it wasn’t a complete lie. I needed only the one, and since this one was not there but was nevertheless present, I was freed from getting involved with others. There were times when I wanted to be free of him too, but never in order to free myself for someone else, never in order to make myself available for the “healthy” and “meaningful” relationships so dear to the hearts of the members of LAA.

“Meaningful relationships,” “support,” and “equality” I had with my women friends, and with Talush who grew even sweeter as she grew up, and for these things I did not need — and I still do not need — a man.

Some time at the beginning of my years of active mistresshood I began to turn into a tramp. Not in the heavyweight league, my way of life didn’t permit it, but I definitely turned myself into a serial slut, and I did so quite quickly.

“A nun and a tramp are two sides of the same coin produced by the patriarchal culture,” my Hagar would have said sagely if she had known, but what the hell am I supposed to do with these words of wisdom? To lament and confess and grovel and beg for help in reforming my nature? Throw myself out of the window and smash myself up? I won’t grovel for help and I won’t throw myself out of the window, either.

At the beginning of my years of active mistresshood I started to work at the fund. The fund was a respectable place, but all the meetings and the debates with the groups and the initiatives and the sociopolitical fervor led so easily to sex that it sometimes seemed as if that was their main reason for existence. Later on, when people began confusing me with Nira Woolf, an additional element came into play, with all kinds of idiots seeing me as a challenge; they were eager to prove something to me, they were eager to prove something to themselves. One of them, a community worker I remember particularly — I had tutored him for his final exams a few years before — stood up after the event with a smug smile, proud as a peacock, as if he had just been decorated with a medal for gallantry. Since they were so dumb, these idiots did not always know that it was this they were looking for, but I always knew. It didn’t bother me particularly, in a certain sense it was more convenient with them: they wanted Nira Woolf, they got Nira Woolf, and just like Nira I refused to meet them a second or third time — a fair deal, in my eyes at least. And from the sweet, innocent guys I usually, not always, kept my distance.

It was quite a dirty business, all this. It was dirty from the start and it got dirtier. I became a seductress. I became capricious and deliberately impossible. I discovered that men, like dogs, smell each other on your skin and the smell arouses them. Even Alek is not exempt from this doggishness, and part of the ritual violence of the sex then was related to this, too. He never questioned me about other men, he never demanded sexual ownership of me. I have already said, repeatedly — Alek didn’t love me, Alek doesn’t love me — but just as I can guess the presence of others in his touch, he could guess them on me, too, and the guess spurred him on. To touch me so that no other hands would erase his hands. To kiss me so that no other lips would erase his lips.

As far as sexual morality is concerned, Alek doesn’t have double standards, it doesn’t even occur to him to connect “sex” with “morality,” and anything I or any other woman might do in this area seems okay to him, not because he has convinced himself of our rights, but because this is how he really feels. This is how he feels, and nevertheless, without ever putting it into words, he would come to take back his own. To take back my body and exorcise other bodies from it. When I realized this, I was delighted by the discovery, and I really began to use the others, to fornicate mainly for effect. How much would he sense? How much would I feel? Perhaps it was possible not to feel at all. At the height of this activity it was no longer completely clear to me what I was trying to do: to chase him out of me. To bring him into me. To wallow in others as in a smell in order to make him stick to me or in order to drive him away.

Alek had Ute and I’m sure he had other women, too; in ’79 Daniel was born, and I had Hagar and there were others to even the score between us. The more I bled strength between his appearances, the more I needed it. And after he came I needed it in order to regain my balance. Like a drug to counter a drug, it only made me more addicted, and perhaps this is what I really wanted. As if I were performing rites in his honor. For him or against him. I really don’t know.

The sex was sex, sometimes better sometimes worse. But sex in itself is nonsense. By the age of close to thirty, with a reasonably attractive man a woman is supposed to know how to enjoy herself, and coming is trivial, so that what distinguished one time from another was only the proximity of despair. Pleasure touches quickly on despair, removes its muzzle and sends it racing towards you, especially when you have sent your soul to perch on the ceiling while you abandon your flesh to its pleasures.

I wasn’t trying to disgust myself, I usually chose well; sometimes I emerged into the street afterwards with a light step, which is what I wanted, to walk down the street with a light step.… I really wasn’t trying to do myself any harm, and nevertheless it seems that I did. The gaze of another was stamped on my soul, nothing was closer to me than this gaze, and only it, in its absence and its presence, was capable of redeeming the sex.

Was Alek the best of them all? My girlfriends sometimes make these cheerful comparisons, and perhaps I should have made myself grade him, too. Alek made my soul manifest to me, he gave me back my soul, he filled my body with my soul without taking his eyes off me, until he made me lose my body. Not always, but often. So what is there for me to grade?

HOMO SAPIENS

I was cheating a bit when I glorified my Homo sapiens. Something is lacking in my daughter, something is being taken away from her, but what it is has no name.… My better judgement tells me that what my enlightened daughter lacks is only the slavish curvature of the spine, and the Neanderthal superstitions, and in spite of myself I sense a lack in her, and without any justice I see her as not a whole woman.… Strange that the more Hagar persists in her enlightened and verbose religiosity, the more she prattles on about “soul,” “spirituality,” “God,” and “love,” the more sterile she seems to me. As if she has sterilized the words by removing some secret from them, and in so doing also sterilized herself.

Secret, God, and soul — words that befuddle thought, words that it would be better not to say … or perhaps the opposite, perhaps they should be used as frequently as Hagar uses them, until they cause an inflationary spiral, and lead to bankruptcy, used precisely in order to sterilize. Sunlight is the best disinfectant for mystery and nonsense.

Alek, I remember, once spoke about the “mystery of the Russian soul.” With ridicule and his lips almost closed he spoke. “Chaadaev, there was once such a man, an adjutant of Czar Alexander, who invented the mystery of the Russian soul, and ever since people who don’t really think repeat this endlessly, mainly Frenchmen but not only … and with them there is no longer evil plain and simple or chaos for its own sake, because just to be evil isn’t nice, but mystery of the Russian soul, this is something else.” It was in the spring of 1988, during the bad visit when Alek came and took a room in the Petra Hotel, as if they weren’t throwing stones from the Old City walls, and as if there were no merchants’ strike, and no slogans painted on the walls and rubbed out and repainted in the alley below, and no white signs on the doors of the shops. He stayed in the Petra Hotel because that was where he wanted to wake up in the morning, and he even bought himself a hookah, I saw it when I came there. He remained in Israel for two weeks, most of which he spent driving around the territories with the television crew he was accompanying, and collecting impressions of his own for his reports for a number of French newspapers. I was busy at the fund, involved in research for Birthright, and under the overly observant eyes of an adolescent daughter who knew that her father was in the country. I didn’t want her to see or hear when I spoke to him on the phone, so that even the telephone became a problem. When we finally met, after he had already met Hagar, it was cold and bad. A handsome stranger in a thin black turtleneck sweater received me politely, a stranger in a black sweater saw me out of the Jaffa Gate towards evening. That year he let his hair grow, afterwards he cut it short again, but that spring I was met by a curly-haired Alek.

If this is how he wants it, so be it, I thought as we parted, and I imagined a stone thrown at us and me crouching down and making a dash, like Nira Woolf, for the wall and flattening myself against it like a cat. Only after taking a few steps along the outer wall, my knees suddenly gave way beneath me, and I turned back into his embrace in the gateway and with his arm around me back into his bed again.

Before this, with small almost malicious smiles on our faces, we talked about politics, I remember how I protested when he said something about the “Arab mentality,” and he retorted with the Israeli mentality and the Russian mentality and from there to the “mystery of the soul.” With a politeness intended to hurt we competed to push each other away, and so it seemed to me that it was not the “mystery of the Russian soul” that he was mocking, but Noa Weber, only I, no longer “the plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden whom he’d known,” imagined that I was stroking a big cat, one of Nira’s monsters, fastened one of my jacket buttons, and with affected calm replied: “As far as that’s concerned I agree with you completely. You know, when you make a big deal out of the soul it leads people to ignore their actual living conditions.”

“You mean … like religion is the opium of the masses?” he asked and stretched his tight-lipped smile a little further. “I mean that the assessment of the depths of the soul is greatly exaggerated,” I said and adopted Nira’s voice, too, the three-hundred-dollars-an-hour voice. “People exaggerate the depths, and the darkness, and the uniqueness of what is to be found inside it. Because tell me, what can there really be in the depths of the soul? Take a hundred people who live in the same society, and you’ll find more or less the same garbage in all of them. The same crap stuffed into our brains by the people with the power to stuff things into our brains.”

Last February, during my last visit, the same subject of the “Russian soul” came up again. We had returned from a walk along the Kremlin walls and again we didn’t go into the church on Alek’s street, it had already become a joke between us, not to go into the church again, and when he made me tea I asked him about Borya and his Anna, his new woman, God’s handmaiden. “It seems that you’re falling in love with the Slavic soul,” he said disapprovingly, “and you’re not the first. It happens to people who don’t understand much about this country.” And this time it seemed to me that he was actually saying something about the two of us. No, I didn’t fall in love with the Slavic soul, don’t worry. I love Alek. I loved him ages before he brought me to the violent, heart-rending, merciless expanses of the country he does not call his. It’s his soul I love, and the dark, famished, howling element in mine.

THERE’S A KIND OF LIE

There’s a kind of lie in this linear writing which does not encompass all the details. I remember how on the way back I sat withdrawn in the window seat of the plane, how I waited for the takeoff so that I could withdraw into myself and let my thoughts glide, among other things, over this last conversation with Alek. The flight’s four hours were not enough. I have already said: love does not need much to feed it. And what of this abundance of small things can be described at all, when I enlarge some picture and it goes on and on subdividing into more and more pictures ad infinitum? Should I focus on his hands holding the tin kettle? I love his hands, I love to watch them when they do something apart from caressing me. When they touch ordinary objects. When he hugs himself. Holds a cigarette between thumb, index, and middle finger. But what can be said about this that isn’t totally dumb?

Easier to talk about the mental alertness, the scurrying thoughts, and actually this too is difficult when every thought involving him splits into so many strands that it is impossible to follow them all. I didn’t fall in love with the Russian soul, I cleaved to Alek as to the missing half of my own soul, as if it were ordained by the very nature of my being and the very nature of his being, and as if this cleaving was an attribute of matter.

Sometimes at the height of illusion a hallucinatory thought about the last incarnation crosses my mind, as if I have known him in other bodies, men’s bodies.… Perhaps I was like Yoash or Borya to him, and it was impossible to become whole and complete the cycle then, and only now is it possible, and this is therefore an opportunity for the final incarnation.

For some reason it is easier for me to imagine myself metamorphosing into a man than to imagine him metamorphosing into a woman, and in any case it’s only a metaphor. The belief in the transmigration of souls is nonsense.

“There is something about this place that cannot be grasped by normal thought,” I said to him then when we walked under the Kremlin. A plane taking off from Saint Petersburg had exploded in the air that morning, and Alek like others had suspicions about it, none of which would be investigated, and he, too, as a journalist, would not investigate them. A local paper reported that Lenin’s mummy was putting on weight, and a hysterical, consumptive medium appeared on television that night with a daughter with braids like rats’ tails, who was also a medium. Trotsky spoke from the mother’s throat, and Zorge the Spy from the throat of her daughter.

Alek laughed and said that I was quoting again. “Quoting who?” I asked. “Lermontov. It’s impossible to understand Russia with the intellect. Another sentence quoted by the wrong people at the wrong time. You can say that the Empire of Evil is something the intellect cannot comprehend, and the Israeli intellect never comprehended, but from your mouth it sounds completely different.”

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. And perhaps it is not him whom my soul loves that I am seeking, but simply my soul.

With the years, I think, I have been purified. Facing him, or on his behalf, for him or because of him, in one way or another, I have been purified. At night, on many nights, I am able to let the longings go, to touch them, and then to dispel them inside me. Able to touch the absence as if it were a presence. Jealousy was never cruel as the grave for me, and for some reason I hardly tasted bitterness. Perhaps it was only for this that he was given to me.

Sometime close to the meeting in the Hotel Petra I stopped sleeping around, which is another way of saying that in all the many years since then I have abstained from other men. I don’t know why, or why precisely then, it wasn’t a decision because I didn’t decide, the need to go the way of all flesh simply disappeared. Not owing to disgust, because I wasn’t disgusted, I simply lost the taste for it; if it had disgusted me perhaps I would have carried on.

The urge itself didn’t go away, perhaps it didn’t even diminish, but like a nun I choose to resolve it, or to rid myself of it, with my own hands. From time to time I still find myself turned on by the idea of a little fling, but everything needed to get there, and in fact also the imaginary act itself, seems like a ridiculous hassle: the smell of a strange scalp, crackling curls, strange breath, wet lips, the wetness of strange lips on my breast, the wrong touch and bodyweight thrusting into me — what is it all for? The body will do what bodies do — but for what?

In my wild decade I gained such a reputation that nobody noticed when I stopped having sex; and of the possibility of finding me a life partner all my friends had despaired long ago. That “Noa needs a man in her life like a fish needs a bicycle” could be a statement of praise or of resignation, but the absence of sexual need and renunciation of the spasms of pleasure is for some reason unforgivable. Did I say unforgivable? So let them not forgive me, and I won’t forgive myself either, because what does it really matter? I, if I haven’t noticed, am increasingly evading the eyes even of those I invited to hear my confession. Escaping the impediment of words. And it is not their peace that I seek, but a different peace, a peace of my own.

OVER THE COURSE OF THE YEARS

Over the course of the years I kicked out in all kinds of directions in an attempt to “liberate myself from dependency,” and what I did definitely succeed in liberating myself from was the concrete dependency. I don’t need him to support me. I don’t need him to protect me. And I don’t turn to him for advice and encouragement, not even in my imagination. Sometime around Daniel’s birth I brought up the subject of the divorce again, I even went to the Rabbinate, where they opened a file and set a date for a hearing. And when the date arrived Hagar was sick and I couldn’t find a babysitter, and after that we didn’t bother to set a new date. If he had asked me, if he had shown any interest in the subject, we would have been officially divorced, he would have married his common law wife officially, and that too would not have made any difference. Today it’s clear to me that it wouldn’t have made any difference, and perhaps I knew it then too.

The paradox of love is that it enslaves you to one person, and by so doing liberates you from other things. It liberates you to the point of indifference, which increasingly seems to me to be true liberty.

I did not adopt Alek’s views, his instinctive detestation of sociopolitical ideology, I still believe in “equality,” in “rights,” in “social responsibility,” and in “justice,” only justice is too obvious to arouse my curiosity, and the idea of a “healthy, decent society” doesn’t make heaven and earth breathe and animate the world for me. In the end all that remains is the utterly unthrilling work required to get there. Official forms in five copies on recycled paper.

Anger still comes to me more easily than human compassion, and anger still makes reality forcefully present to me, but over the course of the years the anger too has increasingly become an automatic response; and perhaps in this too I have been influenced by Alek, who is never astonished like me by human wickedness.

It would have been reasonable to assume that the dulling of my senses in this respect would undermine Nira Woolf’s pursuit of justice, but the truth is that it had no effect on my writing. I have already said that I am not a real writer.

As with the writing so too with the work at the fund, the emotional unresponsiveness only improved the quality of my work, so that if previously I had wallowed in self-accusation for what I called my coldheartedness, I did so for no good reason and without justice.

The problem in leading a double life has nothing to do with justice — with the proper allocation of emotional resources, with the right investments and fair trade in feeling. Very little feeling can suffice to behave decently and be of use.

The problem with leading a double life is that the everyday part of that life seems to you — not less real, I was always realistic — but somehow less true. As if lacking inner light and seeking a crack through which the light from outside can stream in and rise.…

I should have said now: Light … what light are you talking about? Neon light? The blinding summer sunlight at noon today? The orange light of the street lamp?

I should have said: A kettle is a kettle and a table is a table, and neither of them needs a light and certainly not a crack.

I should have said it and now I’ve said it, so what? I’m tired of these wisecracks. Which of course aren’t wisecracks but wisdom. But I’m tired of this wisdom, too.

When I resigned from the fund in January of ’96, I had the feeling again that I needed to clean myself and my life out a little. This was how I thought of it then, in terms of cleanliness, even though I had no idea of what this cleanliness I was seeking might be. Mainly, I remember, I wanted to talk less. Before this there were days when I had seven meetings in my planner, days when I met dozens of people, and the outside world had begun to make me ill. More and more I felt sickened by so many contacts and so much talk, sick of myself and my talking, and tainted, until I sometimes felt as if a moldy lump was sitting in my throat and incorporating more and more particles of pollution with every additional sentence I uttered.

In the months before I left, Nira Woolf took up most of my leisure hours, but the plot of The Stabbing unfolded reluctantly, as if I was serving one more tour of duty in the reserves. In a fit of spite I destroyed one of her monstrous cats, and laid its carcass at the entrance to her apartment. In another fit of spite I decided to leave her at the end waiting for the results of an AIDS test, without telling her that she hadn’t been infected. If I said before that the world doesn’t need my feelings, The Stabbing is one of my proofs, because when the book came out none of the readers noticed the change.

For the second time the movie rights to Compulsory Service were acquired by the same producer, and this time too I assumed that nothing would come of it, but in the meantime a handsome sum was about to be transferred to my bank account. The manuscript of The Stabbing was handed to the editor. For almost seventeen years I had been putting money into a pension fund. I have an apartment that I can’t be thrown out of, my needs are modest, and I could afford to stop working. Hagar, who was planning to go to America and had already applied for a grant which she would no doubt get, expressed reservations: “But what will you do all day?” And I reassured her by saying that now I would have time to research and write in the mornings, which was what I had wanted for a long time — to write in the mornings. Perhaps I would register for a course at the university, I would find a new field of interest, and who knows, maybe I would come to bother her with a prolonged visit to New York, because I had never been there.

When Hagar, not reassured, finally left, I flew for the third time to Moscow, and when I returned I spent two or three months cleaning out and reorganizing the apartment. It was only in the middle of this fit of activity that I realized what I was doing, that I was returning the house to how it had been in 1972. My daughter’s room, Alek’s room, was turned into my study, and according to the logic imposed by the room itself, my new desk with the computer now stood in the place where his desk had once stood. Hagar’s things were boxed and stored in the space under the roof. The picture of the greenish woman was brought down and hung in the newly painted bedroom, and Klimt’s watery dead women were taken to Yoash to be reframed and returned to the kitchen. I brought them back on the day that bus number eighteen blew up, the day that bus number eighteen blew up for the second time, and the explosion shook the windows of the house, but I walked down Agrippas Street to Yoash to fetch the picture and continued about my business. I realized what I was doing, but its purpose escaped me, and as I packed and unpacked, moved furniture, took pictures down and hung them up, I enjoyed waiting for the understanding to come. Waiting for something that I felt would come later.

At the age of forty-two and a bit I started life as a semi-retiree. Reading in the morning paper about how we were settling accounts in Lebanon. Reading books in the morning. Going nowhere in particular without a shopping bag or a purse. I didn’t disappear from the world or shut myself up in my lair: from time to time I took freelance jobs, which I still do, and wrote applications for support from various funds on behalf of various organizations. I sat on the board of a public committee, and I do a little volunteer work for two non-profit justice-seeking organizations. Family and friends come to visit and I visit them, Talush comes to lie in my bed and get some rest from her twins. On Friday afternoons people often drop by, their children run up and down the stairs, shaking the rail and threatening to fall with it.

My financial situation is stable and my health is excellent. At least four times a week I go out to run, and with time my route has grown longer, so that it reaches the Israel Museum, passes the Knesset, and returns via the Supreme Court. It was on such a night run with my walkman that I heard the news of Rabin’s assassination — Hagar was there in the square, I had let myself off going to the demonstration — and when I got home and switched on the television, under the rush of adrenaline surging through me and the flood of phone calls to me and to her, I was still waiting to hear from him.

After the murder, when everyone jumped up to make declarations and beat their chests and point their fingers, and at the fund, too, when people asked themselves where we had gone wrong and what more we could have done, all I wanted to do was retire. Young people, my daughter among them, lit candles in the square and fell on each others’ necks in an orgy of shocked and weepy self-indulgence; at the fund people talked a lot of nonsense then about “the youth,” they seemed to believe that singing sentimental songs, waving candles, and holding “dialogues” would really bring about a new reality here, and I no longer knew what was true and what was false, everything seemed false to me — or at moments that were far worse, like a kind of banal and uninteresting truth. I would switch on the television then and without turning down the volume I would stop hearing the words. Faces on the screen were distorted as if by crooked mirrors, until for seconds at a time I was overcome by panic at not being able to recognize them. I thought that if I screamed the picture would come right and I would see human faces again, and human beings would start talking a human language that I could hear again — why were they talking to me like this? — but in the end the picture straightened out without my screaming, or I switched it off, and only the lump in my throat remained.

I retired from my job, and at the age of forty-two, for the first time in my adult life, I had all the time I wanted in which to think. But grace did not visit my thoughts. Grace did not come from my thoughts.

ONE NIGHT

One night this week I woke up when I heard him calling me from outside my dream. I had fallen asleep late, at about four in the morning, and apparently soon after falling asleep I dreamt that some woman was chasing me, I was being chased by a woman, and I was hurrying down a winding street behind the Natural History Museum. In the dream I didn’t see my pursuer, I didn’t know where she would appear from, but I knew that she was chasing me or lying in wait for me, and so I was walking quickly. I walked quickly, but the street kept growing longer and longer, as if it would never end, even though it was still the very same street behind the Natural History Museum, which I knew well and which you could walk down in a minute. In the way you know things in a dream, I knew what she wanted, too. When she caught up with me, the woman would bend down and with two movements she would cut my ankles.

At some stage of my lengthening flight from her I heard him call my name, not in the dream but from outside it, from the room, as if he wanted to tell me something or ask me something, some everyday thing, and that was why he was standing in the doorway and calling me, and when I opened my eyes to answer, I could on no account convince myself that his voice, too, was part of the dream. If his voice belonged to the dream then I was no longer able to distinguish between dream and reality. I couldn’t fall asleep again and so I got up and got dressed and went outside to walk around the streets in the direction of the open market.

Before dawn the black of night changed to a deep blue darker than the darkness, though the streetlights were already switched off. There were a few trucks parked on the oily wet asphalt of Agrippas Street, and two men were loading empty crates onto one of them, with a kitten wailing like death beneath it. Next to the roadblock outside the market two border guards stopped me with, “Hey, lady, you looking for us? You lose something? …” and one of them held out a floral scarf. For a moment I imagined for some reason that they had pulled it from my neck when I walked past them, but when I left the house I wasn’t wearing a scarf, and anyway this scarf wasn’t mine and it didn’t look like any scarf of mine. I summoned Nira Woolf to my aid, I grew six feet tall and asked for a cigarette, which I smoked in their company. They asked me if I had a problem, and I said that no, I lived nearby in the neighborhood, I wrote at night. A reporter? No, a writer. The taller one said that he had a story, one day perhaps he would write it himself, and the short one said that the market at Passover without pita bread wasn’t the same market. The air was warm, with a faint smell of jasmine blossoms and rotting fruit. Stripes of gold-blue were painted above the city when I left them.

This wasn’t the first time I had heard his voice calling me: “Noia.…” It had already happened a number of times. He never called urgently, he never called sorrowfully, he only said my name, and then I woke.

If I doubt that I really heard him, I will have to doubt the Japanese knife in the dream as well, and also the unshaven border guard who tomorrow evening, actually this evening, will be able to buy himself pita bread.

TEN YEARS

Alek left Israel in the spring of 1982, without guessing that Sharon was about to invade Lebanon and invent a new Middle East for us. So that apart from our two meetings when he was staying in the Petra Hotel, I didn’t hear from him or see him for ten years. What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.

Perhaps this is how we continue to love the dead, but Alek wasn’t dead, and the living Alek gave me strength.

I did not lack for enthusiasms in those years, but all these sometimes even feverish enthusiasms were accompanied by an awareness of transience. As if they were flare-ups that had to be experienced until … until what? I don’t know. Until the flammable matter was consumed. Until matter was consumed.

I said to myself that a table was a table was a table, that a wolf moon was only a moon … that if there was a purpose at all its name was justice, and that the taste of heaven was my daughter laughing in the sea.

For weeks or months I succeeded in turning ordinary everyday existence into a manifesto and a creed: I believe in one single reality and no other. I believe in doing good: now I have to solve problems in the office, to locate Jeff, to buy meat at the butcher’s on the way home, to check if Tami has invited Miriam, too, to remember to say I’m sorry to Hagar. That is the good. But then there was a shift in the weather, a different air blew in, a ray of light vanished, a thin, mean moon hung in the sky, and all of a sudden I filled with that oceanic yearning that absolute justice cannot satisfy.

I missed Alek, his voice, his accent, his concentrated body, the touch of his hand on my face, the way he leaned against the marble counter in the kitchen, today too I fold in half when a concrete memory and a no less concrete absence clutch at my diaphragm, only now I can sometimes rise on a wave and ride with it, and from the height of the wave it seems that my longing for him is only a gateway to some other yearning, to which this yearning happened to attached itself.

What did I want? For what was I yearning? What do I wish for now? I have already said: for some crack in the sky, nothing less. For some crack which will open up to me for eternity. When the absolute will be revealed and everything will be filled with the absolute and the streaming and the sealed light which will rise out of matter. Increasingly I see acts as a way, increasingly I see the body as a vessel … sometimes for hours I can feel the light imprisoned inside it, waiting for the light from above which will never disappear again. In this light sometimes for hours I see stones giving birth to stones and trees giving birth to trees.

In Moscow about which I know nothing, in Moscow where I am wordless as a baby and helpless as a baby, I keep seeing this vision of objects without a name and without a background, and there and with him I too with the harsh light inside me give birth to myself as a being without a background.

“Yearning,” however “oceanic,” is not evidence of the existence of something to yearn for, and the body is not a vessel.… I haven’t got the strength any more to say everything that should be said, like a reflexive apology after an epileptic fit, and nevertheless here I have said it again.

Like a dog running around in circles after its own tail and biting it, I try to get rid of the delusion that I experience as my soul.

I could have resigned myself to the “oceanic yearning,” and in the end no doubt I will resign myself.

I could have resigned myself to the sickness of my secret love.

But what I will never resign myself to, and the reason why I keep tearing at myself and my flesh, is the fact that in my visions there is a guard at the gates of heaven. That a man stands between me and what cannot be described in words.

Even if I stood myself up against the wall, I would not be able to give any comparative description of him, but I can put it like this: if at the age of seventeen, eighteen, I saw him as the wisest of men, Alek of the year ’72 seems to me now touchingly young and confused, perhaps like I seemed to him then. Since then I have met wiser men, and especially women, handsomer men and so on and so forth, and none of it matters a damn, because only he in all his appearances splits open the spine of words in me, and only he makes trees burst forth from trees and stones burst forth from stones for me.

If these words have any meaning … the spine of words … what lies beyond … I want to see the stone and the tree and myself bursting forth without him. I have to learn to see them without him.

On the second of January 1991, when the world crossed off days from the American ultimatum, Alek phoned and his voice sounded so close that for the first moment I thought that he was in Jerusalem. He said that what was happening in the gulf didn’t look good to him, that Saddam Hussein was totally insane, the West apparently didn’t know how insane, it was hard to understand when somebody was totally insane. And perhaps he was worrying for nothing, but maybe I should come with Hagar to Paris? …

Where would he put us up? At his mother’s? With friends? Had he talked to Ute about it? I didn’t ask. Hagar was in the Negev on a year’s national service, I was in bed with bronchitis which may have infected my lungs. I told him that it was impossible for us to come, but it would be all right, perhaps Saddam Hussein was insane but we at least were quite sane in our way. Only after he had repeated his invitation and I had declined it again, he asked if I thought it would interest Hagar to meet her grandfather, and since my feverish head was stuck in Paris, I thought that he was talking about Marina’s husband Genia, and that it was to them that he was suggesting we come.

But Alek wasn’t talking about Genia but about his father Abram Ginsberg, who had immigrated, it transpired, to Israel at the end of that summer. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much trouble? He’s living with friends now in Kiryat Menachem.” “Yes … of course,” I said still confused, “I’m sure Hagar would be happy to go and see him, it would interest her, I’m sure she’d be happy, but how exactly will she talk to him? Do those friends of his know a bit of Hebrew?” His friends, said Alek, were old and didn’t know a word of Hebrew, and apparently they wouldn’t learn any now, but Abram might remember something. “Where did he learn Hebrew?” I asked, and then he told me his father’s story, or at least the outline that he knew, and it was the most fluent story I had ever heard Alek tell.

Abram Ginsberg was a student at gymnasium, not yet sixteen and already wild and rebellious, when he forged some papers and ran away from Vilna to the Land of Israel. For two years he worked and knocked around here, in the Galilee apparently, before he decided that nothing serious would come of the Zionist experiment and went to join the real revolution in Russia. Others who did the same thing were liquidated or died slowly or quickly in camps and resettlement plans, but Abram survived, it wasn’t clear how, “I didn’t ask questions, and when I did ask I never got answer, I know that for some time he worked as a truck driver, transporting timber in the North, in the taiga, the devil knows.… Up to the war and after he was on the move most of the time.”

Alek was born “in the war, during an evacuation, almost in a railway station,” and when his father returned as an “official hero” he joined his wife, her mother, and their son, and “registered in Sverdlovsk. My mother was studying at university, he studied a little at the Agricultural Institute, but then he left again, after the war he had friends in all kinds of places, and my mother met Genia, who had a room in Moscow.” Alek was five when they moved to Moscow, and he remembered his father mainly from photographs. “He looked like a real Russian, not like me, completely different from me. You can’t tell he’s Jewish.”

Ten o’clock at night, for over two and a half years I hadn’t heard from him, and Alek was giving me the outline of a five-hundred-page novel over the phone, strewn with allusions I couldn’t interpret and full of gaps I had no idea of how to fill in. Dazed by fever and pills, under the threat of chemical missiles which Alek’s concern made me take more seriously — this time I didn’t feel young, healthy, white-toothed, rudely constructive and far from any comprehension of the tragic, as I sometimes felt with him. The history that had devastated other places was coming closer, gathering force as it advanced, and threatening to reach my home.

I told him that I was sick and that when I was better I would go to visit his father. “Sick? What’s wrong with you?” He sounded alarmed. “Nothing serious, just bronchitis and a fever.” “You’re sure it’s not serious?” And when I said yes he said: “In that case, I wish I could feel your fever.” On the other end of the line I heard him light a cigarette, and in the moment of silence that followed, both of our breathing. “Who are the people he’s staying with?” I asked and pulled the telephone under the blanket. “Friends, Yacov Rudin, also a veteran, and his wife Fanny. Perhaps it’s hard for you to write down the number now?” “Tell me what it is, I’ll remember it. Do you know if they’re organized? Have they got gasmasks, plastic sheets for the windows, masking tape? Should we take them something?” “There’s no need, really. These people you don’t have to worry about, believe me. I just thought it might be interesting.” “And how interesting it is.…” I said, dizzy with over sixty years of history, “I’d be interested to hear what your father thinks about the Zionist experiment now.”

More than two and a half years had passed since we last met, and I still saw his smile as clearly as I heard it in his voice. “Warn the little idealist that she’s not going to meet a Zionist activist. I spoke to him on the phone, the most he is prepared to say is that the whole world is in a mess now, and if he already has to die, then better to die in a Jewish mess.” “To die in the Holy Land? Is that the idea?” “What Holy Land? For my mother, yes, even though she’ll never come to Israel, but for him there’s no such concept as a ‘Holy Land,’ why don’t you wait and hear for yourself?”

In the winter of ’89 Alek was eager to go to Berlin, he was very interested in Berlin then, but both the newspapers he was writing for then had their own correspondents there, and in the end, after “we didn’t stop nagging them,” they sent him to Russia, to cover the elections to the Duma and report on what was happening there in general. In the winter of ’89—to his mother Marina’s horror — he went there for the first time, and then twice more, and on his third trip he found his father, which on the face of things should have been difficult in a country without telephone directories, but in fact “wasn’t difficult at all. For years we heard that he was in Sverdlovsk.” Immigrants, it appears, have information channels of their own.

Alek arrived in Sverdlovsk a few months before the city took back its old name, and found that his father had already applied for an exit visa and was “sitting on his suitcases.” Abram Ginsberg landed in Israel on the night after Yom Kippur.

I didn’t ask: “So what was it like meeting him?” or “So what did you talk about?” or “How did you feel?” You don’t ask Alek questions like these, but I promised to talk to Hagar and to go with her to visit him when she came home. For the first time in the history of our long-distance relations Alek gave me a phone number where I could get hold of him in Paris, and said that he would phone again during the week.

Since I had to talk to Hagar, the story wasn’t confidential, and I repeated it to everyone who came to pay me a sick visit and to everyone who phoned, with a strange enjoyment and without boring myself.

A friend of mine who writes for a local paper said that it was “a great story, only it wouldn’t interest anyone, especially not now.”

Tami said: “Be careful, it would be typical of that maniac to dump his father on you to look after.”

My father said on the phone: “Go know who this man is at all and who he served. If Grandma Dora were alive today, maybe she could have told us … a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve suddenly remembered to sign on as Zionists at this stage of the game.” My mother intervened on the other phone and said: “Excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anybody can remember whenever he likes.” And Talush who was sitting on the armchair next to my bed concluded with: “As long as you don’t end up stuck with that old man in a sealed room.”

Hagar was the only one who was truly excited, and she phoned every day from her group in the Negev while I was still sick in bed to ask how I was and if I had succeeded in making contact with Abram yet. A few months before, towards the end of summer, she had changed her name to “Weber,” and the hostility her last meeting with her father had aroused in her seemed to have subsided as a result. Perhaps the act of changing her name calmed her down, perhaps it was only the symbolic conclusion of an ongoing process, I really don’t know. Among the many subjects that we talk about all the time, Hagar keeps her thoughts about Alek mainly to herself, but even so I knew that she was hungry for information about her father, collecting scraps discreetly so as not to alarm me, my parents, and Yoash, and in any case she was already obsessed with “roots” and “identity,” and I know that she shared this obsession with all her friends.

In a certain sense it was a story of missed opportunity, a series of missed opportunities in fact. I phoned the number Alek had given me four or five times, and every time a woman answered in excited Russian, which grew more excited every time I repeated, “Alek Ginsberg … Abram?” With all her heart she wanted to cooperate, but she couldn’t, all she could do was repeat in varying nuances of interrogation and emphasis the two words: “bolnitza” and “bolnoi.” My fever went down but I was still too weak to get into the car and drive to Kiryat Menachem.

A few days before the beginning of the American attack Alek called again and said that his father had been hospitalized at Hadassah, he apparently needed surgery, but Fanny and Yasha couldn’t understand a word the doctors said and Marina was worried. And how are you? Have you recovered by now?

I arrived at the hospital when they were sending everyone they could home to free beds for an emergency. Outside the ER, soldiers were busy building terrifying showers, and a row of gurneys blocked the pavement. From Information they sent me to Surgery 2, at Surgery 2 they told me that the patient in question wasn’t with them, maybe he was in Surgery 1, or maybe he was at Hadassah Mount Scopus, I had better check it out. In the elevator were a group of tense reservists who looked as if they were getting ready to jump out and run the minute the elevator hit the ground floor. In the end I found a young doctor who had read a few of my books and recognized me, and then it turned out that they had registered him under the wrong name.

“A rotten leg” certainly doesn’t sound like a medical term, but those were the words she used as we stood next to the nurses station. Abram Ginsberg — for some reason they had registered him as “Zaltsburg”—had arrived with “an old wound and a completely rotten leg, which nobody here could understand how he had trodden on all those years, how a person could walk around in such pain … some people are made of iron.…” They had rushed him to the operating room for an amputation, but, she explained, we had to be prepared for the worst, they may have been too late, because we were talking about an aggressive germ that had spread from the wound. At the moment the patient was in intensive care, unconscious, and the prognosis, to be honest, wasn’t brilliant, but with these old guys you can never tell, they’re made of different stuff.

I didn’t go to see Abram Ginsberg in the Intensive Care Unit. Perhaps they wouldn’t have let me in, perhaps they would have.… When my father was there they let one visitor in at a time at certain hours. I was still not free of germs, I was still taking antibiotics, I drove home and told myself that I would go back another day.

Abram Ginsberg died on the first night of the missiles, without regaining consciousness; early in the morning they phoned me from the hospital and I phoned Hagar, and Alek again, who already knew. He was in Marina’s apartment — it was her number he had given me — waiting with her to hear the news. During the night of the missiles itself, after listening to my breathing in the gasmask and to the pounding of my heart, which was beating faster from fear at the sound of my breathing, I spoke to them both. I spoke to everyone I knew that night, whenever the line was freed, but to Alek I went on talking all night long, so that I hadn’t had more than a few minutes sleep when the call from the hospital woke me up.

We buried him at one o’clock in the afternoon. Hagar, brave and stubborn, ignored the police recommendations and the general panic and came by bus from the Negev, but by the time she arrived the funeral had already set out for the cemetery, so we drove straight there.

It had rained heavily in the early hours of the morning, the first serious rain of the year, and the roads were washed and deserted as if it were a winter Yom Kippur. I remember: nervous clouds moved low over the hilltops, pierced by long rays of light, and I drove fast between the tatters of gray and the light. The day before, when it seemed that the Americans were going to eliminate Saddam Hussein with a quick, strong, elegant strike, Hagar and her friends had gone to a Hilula, a celebration held under the auspices of the popular religious leader Baba Baruch, in his home town of Netivot, and she started to tell me about it and suddenly interrupted herself: “It seems so absurd now, the Hilula. Like a minute before the end of the world.” “The world’s not going to end,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “Are you sure?” “As far as I possibly can be. But still it would be better if you stayed in Jerusalem. If you’re worried what your friends will think, you can tell them you’re sitting shivah for your grandfather.”

The dwellings of the dead on the cemetery slopes were deserted, as if the last corpse had already been buried here, it took some time until we found the plot, and we found it not by signs but by the distant figures who looked as if they didn’t belong there or anywhere else, either. Four black silhouettes, of the undertakers from the Burial Society, and another three people standing next to them, all with boxed gasmasks hanging from their shoulders and protruding from their hips like strange alien growths under their coats. When we approached they had already finished piling earth on the pit and on the one-legged old man made of iron and also perhaps on his amputated leg that had been thrown in for good measure, and a thin man from the Burial Society read in a high, rapid voice El Malei Rahamim. O Lord, who art full of compassion … shelter him for evermore under the cover of thy wings, and let his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.… The Lord is his inheritance, may he rest in peace. Big drops of rain fell intermittently on the loose soil. A mist advancing from the east covered Jerusalem. Yacov Rudin opened an umbrella over his wife and the young woman with them, and only Hagar said Amen with the grave diggers, but when the man from the Burial Society laid a little stone on the grave, we all approached and bent down after him. We ask your pardon if we have not acted in accordance with your dignity … go in peace … and meet your fate at the end of days.

When the service appeared to have come to an end, Hagar roused herself, went up to the Rudins and the young woman accompanying them, and explained to them with her hands that we wanted them to stay there with us. The undertakers left, in the silence that descended we heard their van driving away, even though it was parked quite far from us, and my daughter who was then at the beginning of her Jewish development took a Bible out of her rucksack and in a strained hoarse voice began to conduct a little ritual of her own. “A golden psalm of David. Preserve me O God; for in thee do I put my trust,” she read, “… I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest without fear.” The rain grew heavier, Jerusalem disappeared, the surrounding hills disappeared, and in the mud between the tombstones above the muddy earth of the fresh grave we stood, three strangers in heavy coats and I, listening to a girl’s brave voice trembling slightly at the edges as she read: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.…”

“All according to the rules of the genre,” Alek would have said, but what was the genre we were in? The war had not yet turned into a farce, our flesh was not resting without fear, hell seemed like a real possibility, and Abram Ginsberg had died not of biological warfare but simply of an ordinary aggressive germ.

We returned the Rudins and the woman with them to their depressing apartment block in Kiryat Menachem — later I would see similar housing projects but on a much larger scale in Russia — and I dropped Hagar the good soldier off at the Central Bus Station after in a sudden gesture of good will she had presented the embarrassed Rudins with her Bible. She refused to stay over even one night or even to have lunch with me—“I have kids I’m responsible for, their counselors can’t just go off to Jerusalem”—and I went back to bed and the telephone and Alek.

We talked a lot in those first three days of the war, before Tami came up with her two boys from Tel Aviv — Avner hadn’t been born yet — and they took over the house. In the nature of things our conversations were bogged down by “events” but nevertheless they were like a magical continuation, and somehow also completely relaxed.

When Hagar was small, she would sometimes crawl into bed with me; and when she grew up, too, when she came home from hikes, or from the army, or evening classes at the university, she would sometimes lie down next to me to tell me something, and fall asleep in the middle. I liked her physical closeness, I liked her smell and sleeping next to her felt good, and my daughter was an excellent excuse not to let a man sleep in my bed. In all my years I’ve only fallen asleep next to one man, and sometimes his voice leads me into sleep. “Are you already dreaming?” “Perhaps.” “Are your eyes closed?” “Yes.” “If they’re closed, then you’re already dreaming.” And so he followed me into my dreams.

After the first night of the missiles I hardly felt any fear. Alek sounded as if he had a cold, he laughed and said he’d caught it from me. And once Marina cut into our conversation, and Alek explained that she was asking how her granddaughter was, and then I heard-saw him answering her rather impatiently, after which she left the room.

His voice wrapped the events in his presence and turned everything that was “inconceivable” into a part of the general disorder of the world. The world according to Alek … where in the midst of chaos and helplessness, you can sometimes find a different security and a different consolation.

THE SPINE OF WORDS

Miriam Marie went to Cairo in the spring of ’82, and returned looking blooming and astonishingly youthful with a pile of photographs. “This woman was my best friend … and this is her granddaughter … this is where we went to the synagogue … and here, this is the Corniche, you can’t see it properly in the picture, this is where we ran away when two boys were following us.” Miriam wouldn’t have dreamed of returning to live in Cairo, she would have laughed at me if I’d brought up the idea, but the very possibility of “smelling the air again,” and the knowledge that the places where she had once walked were still more or less there, took about twenty years off her age.

Aunt Greta came to Israel not in order to make her peace with us, and returned to New York.

Abram Ginsberg came to Israel after he had “crossed too many names off his address book,” as his son put it, and Alek himself lost interest in Israel and was living alternately in Paris and Moscow, without making either of these places his.

Around what spine of words can these stories be organized? The victory of Zionism? The failure of Zionism? Post-Zionism? Jewish psychology? A new national reality at the end of the millenium? Hagar tries to organize them for herself in precisely these terms, while I succumb to an attack of nervous boredom whenever anyone opens his mouth and talks to me in sociopolitologish, which has been happening more and more frequently over the years. Government ministers, professors, rabbis, and writers, the man in the street in his capacity as “the man in the street” and the taxi driver in his capacity as “the taxi driver”—all of them chew over reality in sociopolitologish: they talk about “strata,” “ethnic groups,” “elites,” they speak of “cultures,” “immigrations,” and “populations” which suffer from “complexes” and “traumas.” I myself speak in sociopolitologish, and not only to others but also to myself. But there has to be, I know there has to be, another language.

This illusion that people’s private destinies can be explained at all; what makes them go and what makes them stay.…

What makes them go and what makes them stay? The beating of a butterfly’s wings in Korea. An old taste suddenly coming into the mouth. Unrequited love. Hidden rage. Sensitivity to some invisible molecule that was in the air at a particular moment in time. Sometimes a great wind blows up, an evil wind which sweeps people away, and then too there is no point in words, which cannot really capture the victims.

No evil wind swept us away in the Gulf War, which from day to day degenerated into a kind of sticky, hysterical farce, but what happened from my point of view was that in a strange and completely unexpected way I entered a new incarnation with Alek. We became friends. And then I went to visit him in Moscow.

PASSOVER

The last day of Passover ended tonight, with a din of cars hooting for pita bread and falafel. The most vulgar and crowded secular seder of all. With the smells of family and cooking ingredients and scouring kettles. All the smells of the Jewish incense that keep the danger of spring at bay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOSCOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONCE

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

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

“What about him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And then I’ll fire you from your role,” and I smiled, too.

I never asked him why he returned to Moscow. Presumably he had questions that required him to go back to the point of departure, like I needed to return the apartment to how it was in 1972. Only it’s impossible to actually go back because in the meantime the continent has shifted.

THE PRIVATE THEATER

I have mentioned my resignation from the fund a number of times, and now I think that in this move too there was a certain dramatization, as if I wanted to impress myself. I felt worn out and grubby, I felt like a stinking old sack of words, Hagar was about to leave home, for years I had hardly had any time for myself.… All this is true, but apparently not the complete truth, because there was also the matter of the inner theater, my private theater in which the heroine said to herself: “Get thee to a nunnery,” and picked up the hem of her skirts and retired, which is of course ridiculous.

I did not seclude myself in a cave, I did not take a vow of silence, and I did not sustain myself on bits of carobs. I simply started living like a semi-retiree with time to meet for coffee in the mornings. I didn’t even stop reading the papers or watching soccer on television.

When the phone rings, I can allow myself not to answer; my parents are well and have gone on a trip — my mother had a cataract removed just before they left, but if they haven’t been in touch up to now it means that all is well. Hagar and my friends are all fine, nobody needs me, and I, so it seems to me, no longer need anybody.

And this too in a certain sense is a foolish illusion. I pay taxes, the municipality provides me with water, the IDF guards my borders, and the finger of the Galilee is still perched like a pointed hat atop my pensioner’s head. So what have I done, and what have I actually achieved?

With my first trips, coming back was still bearable. Like a mole, like a spy under deep cover recharging his batteries through meetings with his controller, I derived strength from being with him over there, and then I converted that secret fuel into a different energy. At about the third time back the transition began to jar me, each time more and more, and from then on I have found it harder to return to my pensioner’s freedom, and after every landing days pass before I am able to see people or be seen by them. This time, for days I let the answering machine pick up my calls, and like the old Alek, I didn’t get up when people knocked at the door. Let them think what they will of me. But after that, too, after I have already been out and seen and been seen, reality refuses to return to what it was, and like a famished dervish I am still whirling around his absence. A skin separates me from my shadow, and I am desperate to remove it. I tear and tear in desire for some other place where it will be possible to merge with the shadow. Only at night does it become easier, for then I can abandon myself to the dark; in recent years I have begun to live more and more at night. When I started writing this I thought that I would retrieve the day. Perhaps I was wrong to start.

It happened on the trip before last, the plane was half-empty, but both seats next to me were occupied. I left my seat, and a flight attendant who recognized me from television — that week I had taken part in some argument on prime time — allowed me to infiltrate the business class. She even brought me wine. We were flying low, I think, in the moisture of the clouds, and with the faint vibrating hum of the floor under my feet, cradled in the reclining chair, I was visited by a vision that told me that the plane was not really necessary, and that the metal body was intended only to provide those of little faith with something to cling to, so that they would not be alarmed by the actual possibility, or shocked by it. Floating slowly, the speed hardly perceptible, gliding towards him.… How easy it was to glide slowly through the air, how easy, the metal body encompassing me wasn’t really necessary, it was only a matter of convention. It suddenly made me want to laugh, this metal body which was only there for the sake of propriety, like a polite gesture, it really amused me and I smiled. This was a convention of travel, and I was availing myself of it, but there was another possibility, too: if the window cracked, if the door was torn off and I was sucked out, I would go on floating just as I was now, I would still float towards him. Because it was only for the sake of appearances that I was coming to him in a metal body.… I could have come in the light and the wind, I could have come as vapor and smoke and cloud, changing shape as the fancy took me.

There is nowhere in the world where I can wrap myself in my shadow, there is no such place, and the body is not simply a polite convention … but even so, even so, I will not praise what I have no wish to praise, and I do not wish to praise and I will not praise, I will not praise the metal body.

Even if it’s impossible in a cloud, even if it’s impossible in smoke, even if it’s impossible to walk on water, I will not praise the body.

Alek was waiting passively for me at the airport, a body wrapped in a gray coat, the cigarette in his hand had gone out, and I can swear that he touched me with all of himself as soon as he saw me, as soon as I began to be sucked towards him, when there were still a few steps left, none but a few steps left, only a few steps left.

EPILOGUE, SUMMARY

She won’t go anywhere; not to a more monastic monastery, nor to him to be taken to oblivion, because there is nowhere to go.

She won’t kill herself in a foolish attempt to float from the window, and she won’t crush her Nira Woolf under the engine of a train. Already in the weeks to come Weber will make Woolf dance like a graceful bear in the squares of the city of J and the coastal plain. And she herself will applaud her, clap her hands.

Already in the coming months she will find herself some new job that will take her out of the house on a regular basis, because living like this without any order isn’t good for her.

• • •

Something else will happen, something else will happen one night, when a voice calls her from outside her dream. It will happen when a mean, mad orange moon hangs in the sky, and absence calls her name from the threshold. Perhaps her hair will stand on end, perhaps she will want to howl to him like a she-wolf, surely she will howl like the last she-wolf, surely she will arch herself to him when he comes. With eyes of darkness I will be able to see him coming closer, with eyes of darkness I will see his face taking on substance, and the body of shadow becoming tangible like a last need.

Something else will happen one night, when a voice calls, and a crouching body hides the mean orange moon and the sky in the window. Then with eyes of shadow I will gaze at his flesh, and I will rise and hold out arms of shadow to touch him. Like a last need I will shed my body before him, and as from a last need my soul will flee from him. Alone I will pass through the gate.

Outside the sky streams onto the city. Outside the night glimmers and clears. My vision clears of itself. But there is no face between myself and the streaming. And there is no longer a face between myself and the night.

A man will remain behind in my house, in his house, and I will not look back at the gate. It is not him I seek, it is not him I sought, not a man. Wrapped in the streaming I shall go, consoled by the abundance, by the awakening night, in the light of the moon I shall see by myself how the city bursts forth.

Now even if they come to seek my soul, they will not be able to take it.