Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

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

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

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

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

HOW DID I GET HERE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE MARRIED IN OCTOBER

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

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

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