Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

“I know that.”

“You know that,” he repeated.

“Yes, I know, and I also know that you’re leaving, and I don’t want anything from you.”

“You don’t want anything or you’re not asking for anything?” He always had the shocking ability to put his finger right on the spot.

Was it the madness of love that led me to think that although he was afraid of being bothered, he was somehow also fascinated and even delighted by the whole thing? I’m still sure that it was Alek himself, not the illusions of love, who secretly made me think so. By his expression. By the fluctuations in his voice. By the movements of his fingers. As if he were conducting two conversations with me at once. In one language he says to me, with that lip-narrowing disgust, which looks to me like self-disgust, again: “If you want … to end it, Gido — remember him? — the redheaded guy who was with us at the Rabbinate … he’s doing his residency at Hadassah, he could tell us where go to.” And in the other language he applauds the madness, the holy and actually rather surprising madness of Noa Weber.

“Forgive me,” he says in the end in a gentle voice, “I shouldn’t have spoken like that. A man has no right to tell a woman what to do about her pregnancy.”

BEING REALISTIC

I, to the best of my knowledge, am a realist, but how realistic I was at the age of eighteen it’s hard to say. If one of Hagar’s girlfriends from high school had come to me, if Hagar herself had come to me, and said: (a) I’m pregnant, and I’m not going to have an abortion; (b) I’m in love; (c) he doesn’t love me; and (d) he’s leaving the country in nine months time — I would have made her see reason right then and there. First I would have knocked the nonsense out of her and then I would have accompanied what remained of her to a reputable gynecologist to have an abortion.

Yes, and just how do you think you’ll manage with a child? Have you got any idea of what it means to be a single parent? What makes you think that you’ll be able to study and work at the same time? And where exactly will the money come from? And the strength to get up at night? And when the child suddenly gets sick, which happens quite often, and you’re all alone, and there’s nobody else to take care of him but you … or if you get sick, or heaven forbid if you break your arm, and that happens too, have you any idea of the stress, the anxiety, of being without any safety net at all? Now explain to me exactly what you have in mind. That your parents will bring him up? That your parents will support you both until you grow up and stand on your own feet? Aha, very good, you say you want to be independent. So tell me, exactly how much money have you earned in your life up to now? A hundred shekel as a babysitter? And apart from babysitting, my dear, have you ever taken care of a baby in your life?

Since no friend of Hagar’s ever came to ask my advice about an unwanted, in-these-circumstances pregnancy, I never had a chance to test the effectiveness of this rebuke. On me, in any case, it didn’t work. And I could no more consider getting rid of the fetus than Mary could have sat on a rock in the hills of Nazareth to consider getting rid of Jesus. Which isn’t to say that I thought I was pregnant with the Messiah or any such psychotic delusion, but that the pregnancy itself was sacred to me. Sacred not because I decided that it was, I didn’t decide anything, it was simply self-evident to me.

The word “sacred” is difficult for me, it’s difficult for me to use it without mockery, without being witty at my own expense, but I don’t have any other word, and even today and even now, I can still relive the feeling of hard grace that came with my love and was embodied in the developing fetus.

Since I was young but not entirely stupid, or not entirely detached from reality, I was scared stiff, and the fear naturally increased the closer the due date approached. And although I may not have had a serious grasp of what it meant to be a single mother at eighteen — I couldn’t possibly have known — I can testify that I certainly tried to guess. In other words, at first I just wondered vaguely, and later on I imagined, and then I imagined more, until towards the end I spent most of the day and night agonizing over completely realistic worries, which, especially after darkness fell, appeared insolvable. It would be reasonable to assume that the worry would banish the grace, but this did not happen, and throughout that winter I existed as if on two planes: one of fearful thoughts going round in circles — birth, hospital, pain, baby; money, profession, baby, money; birth, pain, pain, profession, loneliness, parents, baby — and another plane, on which I had as if been chosen to be blessed. Blessed I say now, and blessed I thought then too, but there was nothing saccharine-sweet in this consciousness. No bliss-azure-skies-plump-cherubs. It was more like a mission or a sign that marked me out, like a burn on my skin, which could not be denied even in great fear. What I’m trying to say is that grace does not banish the fear, but on the contrary, grace can be terrifying.

I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT MONEY

I have to talk about money, a few words at least. Because if I’m boasting about the courage with which I accepted the pregnancy — which in a sense is what I’m doing — it must be remembered that the courage demanded of me wasn’t so very great. And in order to deflate my heroism a little, I must give an account of the economic circumstances, as they say, in which I cultivated my love.

“Cultivated my love,” I say, “cultivated my love.” To the best of my knowledge I never “cultivated” it. And I only said so in order to needle myself and be sarcastic at my own expense. It would be much more accurate to say: the economic circumstances in which I loved.

When I left my parents’ home in an adolescent tempest, all I had was a small savings account at the postal bank. A little money I received for my bat mitzvah, money I saved from babysitting and counseling at summer camps, and the symbolic dollars my Aunt Greta sent on my birthdays. Since I deluded myself that the rift with my parents was final, and since I had been brought up to work, that same week I applied to the labor bureau, which sent me to an old bed and breakfast in the suburb of Talpiot. Until the end of the month of February, when I could no longer hide my pregnancy and I was fired, I worked there from quarter to seven in the morning to quarter to four in the afternoon. Two Arab women from East Jerusalem cleaned and tidied the upstairs rooms, and I, looking more presentable to the proprietors, laid the tables, cut up vegetables, fried omelets, poured drinks, served meals, and in general provided the guests with “homey service.” At eleven o’clock, when breakfast was over, I mopped the floors in the dining room, the lobby and the stairs, and all I had to do after that was to sit and answer the phone. The work was relatively easy, the owners, an elderly couple, were quite friendly until they fired me — at that period I did not yet have a clue about “legal rights”—and there isn’t the slightest justification to see me as the pregnant-servant-heroine. I certainly am not trying to present myself as such. And even if it happened that I was overcome by weakness or nausea while frying the omelets, these attacks were not severe and passed quickly.

My difficulty with the work was different. I have to admit that the smell of the frying in my hair and of the detergent in my clothes, and all the “go, do, bring,” were quite damaging to my self-image. It’s true that I was brought up to work. I was taught that all forms of work were deserving of respect, but even on a kibbutz scale this was close to the bottom of the ladder. Service work. Not productive labor that a person could be proud of, definitely not something that brought credit to the kibbutz. And let’s not forget that while I was busy not bringing credit to the kibbutz, Alek was plowing through Nietzsche with the help of a Russian-German dictionary, poring over his mysterious Soloviev and his symbolist poets, or catching the eye of his teacher, the poet Leah Goldberg, in class. I know that he tried to attract her attention in class, she interested him, I guessed that he interested her, too, and this too did nothing to add to my sense of worth.