Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

“Anushka?” “You didn’t read The Master and Margarita? You did read it? Take a good look at that bench. On that bench Berlioz met the devil.”

I went on shaking my limbs, stamping on the slushy snow on the pavement, skipping onto the fresh snow piling up next to it, and breathing into my gloves. And the next time I approached him he took hold of my hands to rub them and said: “I don’t think you have problem with weather. You should see yourself with snow on your eyelashes. I think you just don’t know how to wait. They didn’t teach you to wait, over there in Israel?”

As often happens to me with Alek, the sentence took on a meaning beyond the concrete complaint. No, they didn’t teach me to wait. You taught me to wait. I taught myself to wait. I taught myself until I became such an excellent apprentice that I didn’t even cross off the days any more. Women excel at this activity. Thousands of years of history, a long genealogy of spinning wool and waiting at the window lies dormant in our blood just waiting for an opportunity to break out. I noticed this when after a regrettable developmental delay I finally acquired a circle of women friends. And when I finally started to listen to other women — all of them, by the way, strong and successful — I discovered that not one of them had escaped the experience of intensive inaction. But I had taken it further than any of them.

In my book The Stabbing I have a nice little scene in which the doctor who is a client of Nira’s comes late to a meeting. “I’ll say this once and once only,” says the lawyer Nira Woolf after he gets into the car. “I’ll say it once, and there won’t be a next time. I don’t care why you’re late; I don’t care if you were locked up in the laboratory; I don’t even care if three hooligans in white chased you with syringes full of poison. Anyone who comes late for an appointment robs me of my time, and I don’t take robbers as clients. And by the way, since I’ve broached the topic, from the beginning I noticed that you have the look of a serial latecomer.” A clever woman, my Nira, especially in view of the fact that she suspected this serial latecomer from the beginning of being the person who had falsified the results of the AIDS test.

With all my woman friends who had wasted their time waiting for a man sooner or later the natural instinct that distances people from pain kicked in, and they all liberated themselves in the end from brooding about their relationships with variations on the lament: “What an idiot I was.” I on the other hand never regarded waiting as a waste of time, perhaps because I never had the same expectations that they did — for him to “show that he was serious,” “leave his wife,” “move in together,” etc. You could say that I expected “less” and in a certain sense that would be true, except that what I yearned for always seemed to me to be “more,” and perhaps this is the essence of the disease.

The hospital was a shock-treatment, a concentrated dose of waiting, worse than anything I had experienced up to then, in the hours when he was away from home, the hours when he shut himself up in his room, or even in the month of May when he was called up for emergency reserve duty and released only two weeks later. Later on, over the course of the years, I learned that it is possible to conduct all kinds of relationships with waiting. Sometimes I turn my back on it flirtatiously and amuse myself with something else; sometimes I confront it and fight it by fanning the flames of self-disgust so as not to wait, not to wait, not to wait any more; and sometimes I convert my anger into its opposite and let myself go completely. I don’t spin my wool, I don’t glean the straw, I just lie down and let my personality bleed out of me until I reach a state of such emptiness and helplessness that I can hardly rise to my feet again.

Most of the time waiting accompanies me like a kind of presence, which only goes away under defined conditions. Like this Passover, for example, when I know that Alek has taken his wife and Mark first to Prague and from there on to Germany, to meet Daniel and Ute’s parents. On days like these when the phone rings and I pick it up, and a second of whispering silence announces a long distance call, I expect only the voice of Hagar.

“And you, wait for me to return, wait well.…” Not one of the works that glorify the waiting of women was written by a woman, and nonetheless the woman waits well. I wait very well.

IN THE HOSPITAL I THOUGHT

In the hospital I thought that I was seen as a snob, but the nurses apparently saw something else, too, for on the fourth day the head nurse said to me: “Someone will come and talk to you,” and in the wake of this obscure sentence, immediately after the midday feed, the social worker appeared from behind the curtain. Her name was Deborah Rubin, I remember because for most of the talk I kept my eyes fixed on the nametag pinned to her white uniform. Her face has been wiped from my memory together with the faces of all the other women in the ward, but I remember a salt-and-pepper braid coiled round her head, the glint of her gold spectacle frames, and most of all the way she sat there, as heavy and authoritarian as Queen Victoria. She did not fit any preconceived idea I had of a “social worker,” she looked severe and intelligent, and she frightened me from the get-go. Looking back I think that the fear helped me; it pierced the dullness and weakness and forced me to pull myself together, to respond and to act.

“Officially you’re supposed to leave tomorrow, but we’re asking ourselves if it would be right to discharge you.” A cacophony of paranoid thoughts clamoured in my head: They’ve found me out. They’re not going to let me go. They’ll let me go, but they’ll take the baby away and give her up for adoption. What nonsense had escaped me when I was having that vision? And what else did I say? And what else did I do? I shouldn’t have shut the curtain, because that’s what annoyed them, and now they’re going to take their revenge. I should have gotten up for meals when they called me and not stayed in bed. I should have acquired a toothbrush and not stolen toothpaste from my neighbour and brushed my teeth with my finger. She must have noticed, the miser, and told on me: “She hasn’t even got toothpaste. She’s completely out of it. How is someone like her going to look after a baby?” For the first time I experienced the cunning of the mad, a quality that I developed strongly later on.

“But why? What’s wrong? Everything’s fine, really … it’s just that I’m young so it’s a little difficult,” I said to the social worker, but Queen Victoria was not impressed, as evidenced by her silence, and by the way she lowered her spectacles from the bridge of her nose. “I’m thinking of your situation.… Each of the women here comes from a different situation, and I would like — if you agree to tell me — to hear something about yours …,” she said in the end, and her authoritative voice turned the mild ending of the ellipses into an order.

“My situation … is that … I’m happy, naturally. Naturally I’m happy, naturally. It’s just that I haven’t completely recovered yet.”

“Did you have a regular birth?” She forced me to concentrate and fall into step with her.

“Regular?”

“Was there anything unusual about the delivery? A vacuum? Forceps? Did anything else happen that you can think of?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Nothing … and nevertheless … we would like to know: if you’re discharged tomorrow, if you go home, what will you be going back to?”

“Home,” I answered stupidly, folding the sheet with Alek’s shirt underneath. And then I had a sudden inspiration and said into the silence: “My husband’s on reserve duty, perhaps I should have told you at once. My husband’s on reserve duty in the army, and that makes things a little difficult for me, too, him being in the army now.”