Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

You may say that I could have told her the truth, that the truth is best, and the truth is actually an excellent story to tell a child. You want the truth? Here it is. The truth, my child, is that I loved your father, that I still love him, I loved him so madly that I never imagined for a moment, I couldn’t have imagined, getting rid of his child. The truth, my darling daughter, is that at first you were only a fetish to me, the object most charged with Alek, something that would remain after he disappeared into wicked Germany.

You should know, my little one, that if I had become pregnant by somebody else, Amikam for instance, this story would have ended completely differently, in the gynecologist’s trash can. That’s what you would have done to me, Mommy? Killed me and thrown me into the trash? Go confuse a little one of three, four, or five with philosophical arguments along the lines of: If you had a different father you wouldn’t be you and you wouldn’t exist at all, so that your claim that you could have ended up in the trash is meaningless. You go and put a three-year-old to bed with arguments like those.

Apart from which, even though when she was small I was not yet a fully-fledged feminist, a declared feminist I mean, I was instinctively averse to raising a little girl on the basis of the drugged love of a man. I think that what was at work here was a protective maternal instinct to distance her from my addiction, joined by the simple motive of pride. I didn’t want her to know that her mother was a downtrodden doormat. A worm eaten up by longings for a man who was her father. I didn’t want her ever to see her mother eating the leftover scraps of affections from his table. I wanted her to have respect for me, and I had no intention of passing on my weakness to the younger generation.

Over the years, therefore, my version for Hagar was composed as follows: Your mother and father were very young when they met, and even when people love one another, it’s not a good idea to marry so young. So Daddy loved you? Yes. And you loved him? Yes, but not like I love you; you, pumpkin, I love always and forever, because that’s the way mothers love their children. And fathers? Fathers what? Fathers don’t love their children? Fathers do love their children, but sometimes somebody has a child when that somebody isn’t ready to be a father yet. When that somebody is still a bit of a child himself.

The idea of her father’s immaturity sank into Hagar’s mind, so that when she was five or six years old, during the period when Alek was living in Israel again, she once asked me: “What do you think, do you think that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?”

“And what do you think?” I evaded her question with a question.

“I didn’t ask you what I think,” my logical daughter replied, “I asked you what you think. I know what I think.”

“You know better than I do. You went for a walk with him, not me.”

TELLING ALEK THE NEWS

By the end of October I more or less knew that I was pregnant, and in November, right after my birthday, I went to be examined. I didn’t tell Alek about the test and I didn’t have to tell him about the results either. A few days after my visit to the gynecologist, and after I had already obtained the results from the lab, he found out for himself. It wasn’t the first time I threw up, and I always tried to do it quietly. I knelt down and bowed my head over the toilet bowl, but early on this particular morning when I emerged from the toilet with my mouth full of nausea, Alek was standing opposite me in the passage.

A similar scene takes place in a lot of movies and television series. A woman tells her lover that she’s pregnant, a pregnancy which all the circumstances known to the audience lead them to believe is unwanted, and at these moments we always see the woman in close-up: the camera lingers on her facial expressions, on the nervous movements of her hands, and then draws it out to keep us in suspense. What’s going to happen, what’s going to happen now? Will the lover’s face light up in joyful pride when his paternal instincts are unexpectedly aroused? Will he reject the woman rudely? Will he meanly cast doubt on his paternity of the child she is bearing in her womb? Offer her money for an abortion?

In my case there were no lingering moments of suspense. And before either of us uttered a word, questions and answers passed between our eyes. As still happens to this day, it seemed that everything was conveyed before it was spoken. And nevertheless he asked, and nevertheless I answered. “I’m pregnant,” and immediately added, “but it doesn’t concern you.” I had prepared the position, the words, in advance, I had worked on them for hours, but saying them out loud for the first time, standing weakly in the toilet door, they sounded quite pathetic.

“How doesn’t it concern me?” He spoke almost without moving his lips, in a dry, disgusted tone. This gave me a second chance to speak my piece.

“It doesn’t concern you, because I definitely don’t want anything from you,” I replied and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. This time I had been more successful, the words “I don’t want anything from you” had come out without any female hysteria.

Strange how small sounds and movements can have an effect: from the moment I pronounced these calm, uplifting words, from the moment I closed the door behind me, the fact that I had said the words and closed the door, and the knowledge that Alek was waiting outside — these little things filled me with a feeling of power. I remember, I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror, I brushed my hair thoroughly, wet air came in through the window and banished the last of my nausea. All that remained was the rather pleasant, disembodied feeling that comes after vomiting. I inspected my face in the gray light and I liked what I saw: absolute detachment and calm. As if I had been enveloped in a chilly halo, as if a cool blue halo had enveloped my heart. I love you, I thought, I love you infinitely, and you, my love, relax, relax, because none of this has got anything to do with you.

And thus, like an Ayn Rand heroine, I came out to him at my leisure, washed and combed, with the gestalt mantra tasting of peppermint toothpaste repeating itself in my throat: I do my thing and you do yours, because you’re you and I’m me. As far as I remember, this nonsense of I’m me and you’re you was a big hit in those days, people repeated it all the time, and always as if it were an amazing, original discovery flung at their interlocutors in order to open their eyes to a vital truth. But in those moments in the bathroom this piece of nonsense gave me strength. And I mean strength. I was an independent personality capable of anything, and I went out to him like a resolute goddess of free will.

Afterwards we sat in the kitchen. “It has nothing to do with you,” repeated the independent, all-powerful personality, “you’re leaving for Heidelberg in July and I … I’ll do whatever I like.” I couldn’t even pronounce the sentence “I’m going to have the baby,” it sounded so embarrassing to me.

“You have to be realistic,” he said and made me lemon tea without being asked. “Normal human beings should be realistic, and you’re not being realistic now.” “Realistic?” I sneered, suddenly sure of my strength. “Since when, exactly, Alek Ginsberg, have you been a realist?” I was great, no doubt about it, I didn’t only impress myself, I impressed him, too, because he flashed me a smile and seemed to reassess me. “So you still love me?” he asked quietly. “I love you.” He looked at his fingers which for a moment touched my face, and on his face there was a new and strange expression of humility. “I can’t be anybody’s father,” he said.