Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Pain is pain is pain, what else can be said of it? But I hadn’t resolved to “bear it with honor” for nothing, my gritted teeth and clamped jaw were connected to the thought that Alek was somehow watching me, and this is what he expected to see. To see me “bearing it with honor.” As the hours passed I gradually lost all control over logic, until at a certain point it seemed to me that Alek himself had inflicted this agony on me, and since he had inflicted it I accepted it, breathing quietly, barely sighing, and hugging his corduroy shirt.

Ten years ago, after my sister gave birth to her twins, a few of her girlfriends were visiting her at home, and, as was usual on these occasions, reminisced like war veterans about battles waged in the delivery room. One of them, orange-haired and ample-bosomed, was burping Noam on her shoulder, and at the same time making us all laugh with reports of how she had made her husband suffer during her labor, and how she had screamed at the top of her voice. “I had a ball, believe me, I really went to town, people must have heard me screaming miles away.”

“Didn’t they give you an epidural?” “You bet they did. Right at the beginning I screamed so loudly that they didn’t have a choice, they came running to give it to me. What am I, a wounded soldier, to lie there and suffer in silence? How many opportunities do I have in my life to scream? So the minute I get the chance I do it with all my heart.”

In the midst of all the joking and laughter, I envied the funny redhead, who appeared to me the embodiment of female mental health.

The story of my own delivery I kept to myself, of course, even after Talush threw out “In comparison to Noa our stories are jokes for children. My sister gave birth in the Middle Ages.”

Perhaps people have a kind of reflex that makes them try to endow pain with significance, but how could I explain to this group of women hilarious with anarchic mirth — laughing at their husbands, joking about the hospital, bad-mouthing their mothers, giggling at themselves and their newfound motherhood — how could I explain to them the perverse meaning which I had given to pain? This meaning belonged to another world, very far from the living room heated for my sister’s offspring, and though I was sitting there in that living room, it was also far from me. What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered myself to pain for his sake. And to my sorrow I must point out that this warped idea was quite detached from the knowledge that at the end of the process I would have a baby. In other words, I didn’t think that I was suffering for the sake of the child, the way that women in labor are at least supposed to think, but found a point in the pain itself, a point which was somehow connected to Alek. And thus with every contraction that racked my body, I imagined that I was taking the pain and offering it up, dedicating it, I have no idea to whom, all I know is that this dedication was connected to some absolute of love. As if all I had to do was take it upon myself, and I would be rewarded in the end by absolute love, which was not simply Alek-will-love-me, but something more tremendous. Something infinite.

At some point, I think it was already afternoon, the midwife came in and after examining me—“Good girl. Not yet, but we’re coming along nicely”—she asked me if I wanted them to “give me something.” Of course I wanted them to give me “something,” but I didn’t know what this “something” was, I only understood from her voice that it would lessen the pain. In my defense I have to say that even in my warped mental state I didn’t wish myself still more pain, and I was very frightened of the pain to come.

Looking back I suppose they must have given me Pethidine, and that while it dulled the pain it somehow increased the hallucinations, because at that point I really went completely off the tracks.

Although the curtains in the room were closed, light still came in, and in addition they had left a light on over my head, on which my hallucinations became fixed. At first I imagined that the light was growing stronger, and at the same time that the shape of the lamp was changing and becoming limitless and unfocussed like the sun. The spreading sun/lamp warmed me and banished the cold shivers, and gradually it came to seem that it was this that was banishing the pain from my back and stomach. As if a sweet warm light were seeping into me until my whole being was full of light, from top to toe, and still it went on welling up and filling me. Gratefully, I let go of Alek’s shirt, and silently thanked the lamp, that is to say the sun, that is to say the face which had begun to appear inside it and which I really cannot describe, except that it was surrounded by a halo like a figure in an icon or that it was itself the aura of something else hidden in its light, which was far more radiant and present than a figure in an icon. The face was very clear, like that of a very familiar personality, clearer and more vivid than any familiar personality … and nevertheless like a familiar personality, and nevertheless, for some reason, impossible to describe. All I know is that this figure revealed itself to me like love, and that with its appearance I felt completely loved, as if I had been made one with my love and now it was inside me, and I dwelt safely within it forever, or something to that effect.… And it was still somehow connected to Alek. As if I had prostrated myself before it like a supplicant, and been promised that my yearnings would be fulfilled. And as if the light was the happiness filling me to overflowing.

It was with the sensation of this superabundance of light, I think, that the change started, and the same thing that was pouring and pouring into me began to arouse my fear. It seemed as if the light was converted inside me into some other substance, and although it was still light, this dense light was crystallizing inside me into something hard and blazing. The light grew stronger, the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the face of the figure turned into a burning presence. And the heat increased even further, until I felt the burning light on my skin, in a minute it would be inside me, melting my bones, boiling my blood, turning the fluid in my eyes to steam. Glued to the bed I pleaded with the figure to withdraw its light, whether it was an expression of wrath, or simply the annihilating effect of its powerful presence, which was growing more powerful all the time.

Like a frightened child I covered my face with the shirt and folded my hands on top of it, but even thus, with my eyes closed, the harsh light and heat increased to terrifying proportions. And only when it seemed that I could bear it no longer, the light and the fear gradually began to grow dimmer.

Three times this experience returned. A benevolent light converted into a burning one, dying down into sweetness, sweetening my blood, pouring into me with infinite gentleness, and then intensifying and hardening inside me and above me with blind indifference.

In days to come, when Talush was getting ready to give birth, I read in one of her manuals about the existence of a defined stage, before the appearance of the major contractions, when it sometimes happens that for a few minutes a woman enters something like a psychotic state. Since in the middle of this hallucination I was rapidly wheeled into the delivery room, I imagine that this is the stage I was in, and that the “stage” and the Pethidine produced their effects on me. But neither the “stage” nor the Pethidine can explain the specific content of my hallucination, and the way in which it was related to Alek and the obsessive thoughts of love that accompanied me throughout.