Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

BIRTH

On the night of the tenth of June I woke up with wet panties, a strong feeling of nausea, and a pain no worse than the pain that had been coming and going intermittently during the previous days. As soon as I woke up I knew that it had begun, and I was completely unready.

When my sister Talush was born I was not yet six, and all I remembered of the event was that my mother went away to Afula and returned five days later with the baby, and how for some time my father would take me to the children’s house to put me to bed, because my mother had gone to feed the baby. All my girlfriends today gave birth in their thirties, and from their prenatal courses, and from the stories they told and retold afterwards, I learned things I had no idea of even after I had already given birth myself. Contraction length, dog pants, dilation, epidural, Pitocin, head presentation, breech presentation, vacuum, forceps — an entire vocabulary of combat experience that could certainly have been useful. Only once, when I was already in my ninth month, I paged through some manual in Stein’s Bookshop, and the black-and-white photographs disgusted or alarmed me to such an extent that I closed it immediately. And so I came to give birth in a state of total ignorance, with only the vaguest notion of what was happening to me.

They say that women forget the pain of giving birth, which is absolute nonsense and I don’t know why people keep repeating it. Because what does it mean to remember pain? You remember pain in exactly the same way as you remember pleasure, which is also not exactly re-experienced with the memory, and nevertheless is implanted firmly in your body.

It was dark in the room and I was feeling too nauseated to get up and look for clean panties in the closet, so I simply took off the wet ones and went on lying half naked on the bed under the piqué blanket. Alek’s door was shut, he had returned after I had already fallen asleep, and for some stupid, stubborn reason I got it into my head that whatever happened, I was on no account to wake him up. Maybe he had come home late from Tamara. Maybe he was with Tamara now. He had never hidden behind the door with Tamara, and the couch in his room wasn’t big enough for two, but nevertheless this piece of idiocy stuck in my head, that the two of them might be there together now, and that nothing on earth would make me call him or knock on the door.

You could argue that my stubbornness was actually an expression of anger. That instead of punishing him I punished myself, and that what I was really doing was trying to make him feel as guilty as I could: “Look how much I love you, and look what you’re doing to me.” Maybe. I don’t know. I only know that together with the thought that he was in the room with Tamara, I was afraid of the possibility that he wasn’t home at all, that his door was still closed from the day before, and that I was mistaken in thinking that it had been open when I went to bed. Apart from which I have already said that I was unprepared, and waking Alek meant admitting that this was it, it was beginning. So even though I really knew it was beginning, at the same time it seemed to me that if I didn’t wake him up, perhaps I would fall asleep again and somehow or other I would wake up in the morning as if nothing had happened.

I don’t know how much time passed in this way until, at a certain point, I tried to reach the bathroom to vomit, and in the darkness I threw up on the passage floor. When I squatted down with my bare bottom to clean up the mess, a whine like a dog’s suddenly escaped me and took me by surprise. This whine seems to have breached the dike, because after it, and when I returned to sit on the bed, I gave myself up entirely to self-pity and tears. I wailed and rocked, rocked and wailed, even though the contractions were not yet of an order that could not be borne in silence.

Through closed lids I saw the light go on, and even before I opened my eyes I located him standing in the doorway.

“Noichka … has it started?” For some reason I shook my head, but Alek took no notice of my denial. “What a swine I am,” he exclaimed and punched the doorpost with his fist. And even before I recoiled from the violence of the gesture he was already at my side, tucking the blanket around me, embracing me tightly, brushing a sticky lock of hair off my face, whispering tender words to me in Russian: “Shhh … shhh … shhh … devuchka … harosheya maya … shhh, child, don’t cry.”

Nothing will help me, because even today this memory is dear to my heart, and all I have to do is remember Alek, concentrating intently, holding me between his hands, one hand on my breast, the other between my shoulder blades, imprisoning the sobbing inside me — all I have to do is remember it and I melt. As if the importance of those moments is far greater than everything else. Very slowly, as if we had all the time in the world, he helped me to steady my breath and pull myself together, and then he gathered me to him gently and rocked me slowly. “It’s all right … vsyo harasho … it’s all right, don’t be afraid.” Nothing will help me — because even now, when I think of complete and utter consolation, it is personified for me in that cradling in his arms and his voice whispering “don’t be afraid.” Because with that touch and that movement I felt that I was being lapped by a wondrous oceanic sensation, being filled with a sweet oceanic sensation, which was utterly and completely consoling. To this day, whenever I feel the need of consolation, I try to conjure up that sensation, and mostly I only succeed in touching its edges.

The sheet was wet with the amniotic fluid. I was sticky and stinking of vomit, I hadn’t even brushed my teeth, and nevertheless he gathered me up and held me in his arms.

ALEK WASN’T DISGUSTED

Alek wasn’t disgusted by me. On the contrary, he was completely absorbed in me. Not as if he were rushing to the aid of some “emergency” but as if he was intensely moved, and yet he was able to perform all the necessary operations without fear, without being paralyzed by this intensity of emotion.

I can’t say why I love Alek. My love is not a function of any one of his attributes, not of those that I admire, and certainly not of those that are not to my liking. And nevertheless, when I think of my sexual addiction to him, I attribute it at least to a certain extent to his attitude towards the body. I say his attitude towards “the body” and not “my body,” because it is perfectly clear to me that this attitude, which is an essential part of Alek’s nature and being, is not reserved for me alone, and that he treats other women in the same way.

In the four years that he was in Israel with Ute, and I played the part of the classic mistress, I fucked not a few other men. In order to keep my balance, I think, and to even the score. But in all these experiences, and all the experiences that came later, I never met another man like him. I’m not talking about the fact that fucking someone you love is a completely different experience, and I’m not talking about his repertoire of sexual stunts, either. I’ve met a few sexual athletes in my life, the kind who’ve read all the manuals and wear your orgasms on their chests like medals, and without denying the pleasure I had with them, with Alek it was different.

The thing is that Alek really loves the body, he loves the body as if he’s never seen a movie in his life, or a TV commercial; he is free of the external eye and aesthetic perception. It’s difficult to explain properly, because Alek actually likes looking, but it seems as if the sights penetrate him and are beautiful in his eyes and gladden his heart not in the conventional way, not because of “what they look like.” Somehow, almost always when sexual moves are initiated, he seems to undergo a transformation; he fills then with a kind of wonder, and seems to be intent only on guessing and serving — not because it swells his ego, even though in some way of course it swells his ego, of course it does — but the main thing is that he is entranced. Entranced — perhaps this is the right word, as if we are the first people in the world to perform the act, sinking deeper and deeper into it, and the spell is so potent that my external eye too closes until I am all body and until the body vanishes.