Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Sometimes I think that it is this transformation that drives me crazy. Sometimes I like to look at him in public. To look at his restrained public movements, and then to remember their opposite.

On a number of occasions I have heard Alek describing an old woman as “beautiful,” or an official beauty as “not interesting,” and altogether it seemed that most of the conventional ways of judging women had passed him by. For example, he likes women’s perfumes, and knows how to distinguish between them, too, his favorite is “White Shoulders,” on my neck at least, but in our first month together, when we once emerged from the shower together, he took the deodorant out of my hand, put it back on the shelf, and said: “Not yet, with your permission, we haven’t finished yet,” and it wasn’t an empty gesture. Over the course of time I really became convinced that this clean man really loved the odors of my body, and in our day and age maybe this is enough to win a woman’s heart.

I remember how on my fourth visit to him in Moscow, it was summer then, we were already in his apartment in Ordenka, and I had forgotten my razor blades at home. And since we’re talking about Moscow here, there was no way I could just walk into a shop and buy one. In the end I found a packet of razor blades in a bookshop, in a locked display case next to Ajax cleaning fluid, but before I did so, the stubble that had sprouted on my legs during the course of the week did not stop Alek from rubbing his face on them and smiling to himself as if he was innocently delighting in the new touch.

Thanks to running or genetics, or perhaps to the fire of my madness, my body is what is referred to as “well preserved,” but it is very far from being the body of a seventeen-year-old girl. Before every trip to visit him there is a certain moment in front of the mirror when I take note of the changes, but Alek without words somehow manages to persuade me that they only make me more interesting, and to the signs of aging that appear on my skin from one visit to the next he relates the way a woman is supposed to relate to a man’s scars of honor.

In recent years, ever since my first visit to Russia, I began to attribute this identification with the body to the landscapes of his motherland, perhaps because it was very pronounced over there. He always enjoyed feeding me, but in Moscow it seemed that the simplest act of eating gave him immense pleasure, as when he raised a forkful of food to my mouth and said: “Taste this, see how you like it,” and never took his eyes off me as I bit and chewed, and kissed me without being ashamed of the taste of food in his mouth.

“In Israel the food is tasteless, in Paris they know how to cook the best, but food only has a real taste here.” Perhaps because I saw Moscow through his eyes, and through the rest of his senses, I too began to sense the “real taste of food.” Like the taste and the smell of the sex, which were sharper there than anything I had known before. I had never lived my body as I did there, and it had never dissolved and evaporated as it did there.

All this is true, the truth as far as I am capable of formulating it, and still it revolts, it disgusts me, it utterly disgusts me to have to put the sex with him and my body with him into words. “The sights penetrate him,” “he undergoes a transformation,” “he is intent on guessing and serving.” Why do I do it? Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.

BIRTH

When he thought I had calmed down he said: “I’ll go down and call Yoash now to come with the pickup,” and I clung to him and said: “No, don’t go. I don’t want to. I don’t want to drive,” and then he stroked me a little more and raised my chin and gave me a look that brought a reluctant smile to my lips. “Five minutes,” he said, “five minutes and I’ll be back with you again.”

By the time he returned I was already dressed and I had also cleaned myself up a bit. I still felt nauseated, but I was already able to think of the drive without wanting to throw up. On the way out to the pickup he draped his brown corduroy shirt over my shoulders, and, wrapped in his shirt with his arm around me all the way, I rode between the two men to the hospital to give birth to Hagar.

The drive to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem took maybe twenty minutes, and when he put me in the nurses’ hands my mood was already greatly improved, as if I had been infected by Alek’s festivity, and had risen to the importance of the occasion. And nevertheless he lingered a little longer, gazing at me in admiration, as if at the ultimate mystery, and then he kissed me gravely on the forehead, as if he were sending me on some important mission. “Ti molodetz,” he said to me before he left.

Months later I asked him: “What’s molodetz?” “Say it again … ah, molodetz . Where did you hear that word?” he was suddenly curious.

“Someone said it to me.”

“Molodetz is … hero, person who overcomes. You say this of a man, but it may also be said of a woman. It could be said about you, that you are molodetz . The someone who said it to you, he said it about you?” I didn’t answer. It was a few weeks after Yom Kippur, the two of us had invaded Yoash’s apartment in Yarkon Street, and instead of answering I asked him if he had heard anything more about Yoash, who was still in the agricultural buffer zone on the other side of the Suez Canal.

A birth is a birth, millions of women all over the world give birth every day in worse conditions than I did, and I really have no intention of turning my delivery into something heroic. After being handed over to the nurses the usual procedure began, what was then the “usual procedure.” I know from my girlfriends that a few things have changed since then. They gave me a nightgown, shaved me, gave me an enema, lay me on a bed in the labor room, stuck an IV into my arm, and attached me to a monitor to wait. On the other side of the screen was an empty bed, and beyond that empty bed a woman with a middle-aged voice was wailing fearsomely. At a certain point, when I had already lost my sense of time — they had taken away my watch — they wheeled her out, and after that there were other voices belonging to other women. From time to time a relation came in to visit one of them, and every few minutes the midwife came to see “how we’re coming along.” Two or three times she accompanied me, tottering and hanging on to the IV stand, to the toilet.

In years to come, when my friends began comparing the tales of their deliveries, I understood that I had apparently made good progress, i.e. at a normal pace, for a first birth. What I especially remember is the fear of how much worse the pain could get that came with every wave of contractions, and the graph on the monitor representing the climb from contraction to contraction, like an abstract threat of torture. How much more could I take? The same pain, presumably, was experienced by all the women beyond the screen, and by every woman in the world who has ever given birth, and it is of no particular interest, at least in the context of the story that I am telling here.

What is pertinent to the story is my perverse feeling that I was somehow handing myself over as a willing sacrifice for the sake of something of surpassing importance, which was not only the baby about to be born. Suffering pain and nausea and shivering with cold — for some reason I felt cold all the time — my mind filled with confused, hallucinatory images of ancient rituals, in my folly I saw the daughter of Jephthah and the daughter of Montezuma, and somehow it all connected to Alek and his kiss on my forehead, as if he had sent me to the sacrifice.