Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Me: I just wanted you to know … and for Alek to know, too, that this is his house. And that nobody tells him what to do in his house.

Tamara (More alarmed than ever. The lenses of her glasses are covered with steam): I don’t understand.

Me (Pulling the cardigan more tightly around my body. My hands folded above my high stomach.): I don’t know what you’ve been told about us, but you should know that Alek and I are only married fictitiously, because I didn’t want to go to the army.

Tamara: Oh, but you’re mistaken. It isn’t like that. You’re completely mistaken. There’s nothing between me and Alek. Rani (or Dani) is my boyfriend.

Me: What I wanted to say is that you don’t have to behave like a couple of thieves, because that’s what’s unfair to me. And if you really want to know what hurts me, then that’s what hurts me. It insults me that you try to hide it.

In the course of this dialogue I suddenly realized what it means to be crazy: I attached myself to her like some crazy beggar woman seizing the sleeve of a passerby in the street, and I clearly sensed how she instinctively recoiled in fear. Instinctively she wanted to pick up her heels and run away from me, not because I had “caught her out” and “discovered her secret,” but because of what I was, which could be dangerous. And nevertheless I could not stop. As if only the explicit confirmation that it had happened and was happening would bring me relief. The devil knows what kind of relief, because I didn’t have even the vaguest notion of what I would do when I knew. When I knew for certain. When I knew what for certain? That he was fucking her? How he was fucking her? Slowly and looking at her to see? What her little breasts looked like when he rolled her on top of him; how he wound her long hair around his hand and smiled at her; if he kissed her eyes and stroked her back too when she fell asleep on his shoulder?

Above all, I think, I wanted it to be different with me. To know that something different happened to him with me. Because it was impossible that it could be the same with me and this phony Gauguin fake.

It sounds funny, but what aroused my jealousy most, even more than the imagined sex, was the fact that Tamara knew French and was studying Russian. That she sat next to him during classes and afterwards, gossiping about Leah Goldberg and reading Verlaine and Baudelaire, and Bely, and Blok, and Ivanov, all the poets he could only tell me about. That he talked to her about “Schopenhauer’s perception of music” and what exactly an important thinker called Eduard von Hartmann thought, and what exactly someone else, I can’t remember who, said. For some reason it was clear to me — a crumb of consolation — that he talked to her, while all she contributed to the conversation was her affected cultured expression. I brooded a lot about how he made her laugh with all kinds of misquotations and never had to interrupt with “that I really can’t translate.”

Of course I never found the certainty I sought. And after Purim, when Alek’s trance of sociability calmed down a bit, he simply started to stay away from home more and more. Once when I came back from work the two of them were sitting in his room with the door open, and he had his arm around her shoulder. “Noichka … come and join us. Tamara’s tried to translate something we read in class here, and with my Hebrew I can’t even tell her how it sounds.” He said this quite naturally, without removing his arm from her shoulder that had turned to stone. And then, too, what hurt most of all in this scene was the apparently trivial fact that he called me “Noichka,” a name that up to then had been reserved for only the most intimate moments between us.

TWENTY-NINE YEARS LATER

Twenty-nine years later, the jealousy was no longer alive. It died down after the shock of the birth, and after he left and came back and left again, and I went to visit him abroad. Perhaps I grew accustomed to being one of a number of Alek’s women. And perhaps the distance and the longings dulled the other pain. From the outset I should never have allowed myself to be jealous, for what right did I have to be jealous of him? And for lack of any alternative, what I wanted above all was only to believe that I was in some way special to him. That something not given to others was given only to me.

With more than twenty-nine years behind us, I am entitled to believe that I am, indeed, special to him. That my perseverance has borne fruit, and there is a place reserved exclusively for me in his heart. But at what price?

Now too I do not think that I fell in love with a man unworthy of me, and that if only I woke up from a twenty-nine-year-old dream I would to my horror see a donkey’s head. Alek turned fifty-seven in December, and still, with his angular thinness and his graying hair, he is more worthy in my eyes than any other man, and so I know he will always remain. The problem isn’t that he’s unworthy, but that perhaps it isn’t worthy to love anyone the way I love him.

I said that the birth and everything that followed it dulled my jealousy. But it happened a few times that it bit me again, and I didn’t succeed in loosening its teeth immediately.

My Hagar (aged six): What do you think, that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?

Me: You know better than me. You went for a walk with him.

And thus from my worried daughter I learned that Ute was about to give her a baby brother. This was in ’79, after Alek had returned to Israel as a correspondent for Radio Luxembourg and a couple of European newspapers, and I was already leading the life of a mistress. Waiting for him to phone me. Not phoning him. Deserting my job on all kinds of pretexts to keep appointments with him. Looking for babysitters for Hagar, simply in order to accompany him when he went to cover a demonstration. Arranging for another mother to pick Hagar up from kindergarten and waiting for him bathed and ready at home, afraid that the phone would ring and it would be him, to say that he was sorry but he couldn’t come. Maybe next week? I’ll call you.… The whole humiliating package.

Soon after Alek’s return, I had dropped in for coffee at Yoash’s picture-frame shop on Agrippas Street, and he said to me: “She’s a restorer, he met her in Paris. Her name’s Ute.” I already knew this, but Yoash, bending over his work table, went on, more slowly than usual and surprisingly hostile: “The way Alek tells it, she came to the newspaper office to pick up a parcel her cousin had left there for her, and a second after she entered the room he already knew that he wanted to have children with this woman. Do you believe that? Or is he just rewriting history?”

Alek and Yoash didn’t see a lot of each other at this time. Perhaps the political atmosphere strained relations between them: the rise of the right to power that appalled Yoash and pleased Alek the foreign correspondent—“Changing the government is always a good thing”—and perhaps there was some other reason. I didn’t see a lot of Yoash, either. But that Friday morning, for no particular reason, I dropped into his shop for a cup of coffee on my way to the market. Or perhaps the reason for my visit was that I had already met Alek since his return, and I wanted to hear what Yoash knew, and to feel I was touching him again through someone who might have met him too.

“He wanted to have children with this woman.” The sentence cut right through my stomach to the sound of the cardboard splitting in two as Yoash slowly and intently sliced through it with his box-cutter knife. I already knew about Ute, but I didn’t know this, and suddenly I understood that in my foolishness I had seen my pregnancy with Hagar and the night of her birth as a kind of covenant between us.