Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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