Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

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

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

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

The light of the computer screen is the best disinfectant.

• • •

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

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

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

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

A PANORAMIC PICTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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