Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

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Alek, as I said, is spending Passover or Easter with Ute and the children in Germany, and in my inner language I call such times my “white days.” White days because of their clarity, uncolored by any expectation. As if the mind has retired and is free to take up all kinds of hobbies.

At times like these not only the suspense of concrete expectation declines — for there were long periods, years, during which I had no expectations of any concrete contact — but it is as if Alek has removed his withdrawn gaze from me, and for days or weeks I hardly see myself through his eyes.

A great silence reigns over this Passover, as if the street has emptied of its inhabitants. In recent years quite a lot of well-off people have moved into the neighborhood and they have apparently all gone away on vacation. Once, it was different here on religious holidays.

My parents are in London, Talush is with the children on the kibbutz, my women friends — who almost all have young children — have been swallowed up by family affairs, Hagar is spending the holiday with a girlfriend in Boston. On the eve of Passover she called to wish me a happy holiday, and until she returns to New York I don’t expect even an e-mail. I haven’t annoyed her enough for her to write to me from Boston.

In the mornings the air is still clear, a uniform blue sky without a scrap of clouds is painted strongly over the clean white and green of the street, and only towards midday, when it begins to grow hazy, a kind of sensuousness invades the air, presaging the heat wave.

What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? is already in the shop windows, and until the more or less anticipated reviews appear, thoughts of “the next book” remain unfocused. I sleep a little, wake up early, and go early to the grocery, even though there is nothing I need, or need early in the morning, on the half-empty shelves. The short morning walk does not banish the gloom of awakening, and the transparency of the air and the view only ferments my self-loathing. Yesterday on the way home the outside stairs of the houses looked to me like tongues sticking out.

“White days” I said … but this time around my mind refuses to divert itself with hobbies, and when I wake up I feel depression covering me like a heavy blanket that I push off, but after an hour or two it returns, and drives me back to bed.

For two weeks I haven’t gone out to run, writing has become the backbone of my day, as if it has taken the place of running, or any other activity keeping me upright, but it is only after dark that I can summon up the energy to sit down in front of the computer and poison myself with an unreasonable amount of cigarettes.

What am I doing? What do I want? What have I taken it on myself to want?

Forty-seven years old, Alek turned fifty-seven this year, and never again will I see how he has changed, and how to me he is unchanged, to me he is never changed as he comes towards me at the airport.

Timelessness is an illusion. Timelessness is a derivative of love, a derivative of faith, a concrete derivative of a state of mind which I no longer have any idea what to call. Alek, according to his age, could already be a grandfather, Hagar at her age could turn me into a grandmother, and eternity is nothing but an illusion. There is nothing timeless in me or in him or in us or in anyone.

What am I doing? Telling. For there to be a beginning and an end. For there to be an end.

What did I take upon myself to want?

He will never look into my eyes and bring to my lips that familiar smile which acknowledges everything and wipes out everything.

I’ll never try on a new dress and think: I’ll wear it when I walk with him, if I walk with him in summer in the street.

There will never be a summer for us. Never in any summer will I walk with him along foreign streets, with their desperate squalor and their desperate splendor that I seem to know from some previous incarnation. And never will I experience again the consciousness of infinite expanses where everything seems pointless but love itself.

Love will never expand me.

The one right body will never come to me.

GOING HOME

I promised to parcel myself out in the proper order, even though I have no idea what I will do with this parceled self when I bring it to the end of the story.

In the meantime: Hadassah Hospital, maternity ward. Deborah the social worker has gone, and I collect myself around a new wish, to go home, home to Alek; fortified by my mad cunning, I go to the newborns room, ask the nurses to show me how to give the baby a bath. “I’m so sorry I missed the demonstration, I didn’t feel well.” Prattle any nonsense that comes into my head, with them and the other women in my room and their afternoon visitors; picking sentences out of the air of the room, fermenting them in my mouth, and bubbling over in an exaggerated gush: “Show him to me … show her to me … show me how you … what a cutie … oh, what a sweetheart … what a little darling!” Broadcasting youthful maternal energy and joy.

After supper I lurked in the corridor until the nurse with the mean face left the nurses station, and then I asked the one with the nice face to let me use their telephone. “I’m not supposed to, so do it quickly.” With Yoash on the phone I was brisk and cool, and suddenly he was the one gushing and hardly letting me get a word in edgeways: “Wonderful news … I never got a chance.… I had that renovation, and you know what it’s like with the year-end audits … so Baruch says to me … I’ll tell you … how Baruch … yes, sure … I’ll come tomorrow … sure thing … in the morning, with pleasure.” I didn’t ask him about Alek, somehow it was clear to me that he didn’t want to be asked, but in any case, I thought, I would know tomorrow, and what could Yoash really tell me? What did he know? He would think that I was taking advantage; but the way I arrived at the hospital, without telephone tokens or money in my purse, I needed him. I simply couldn’t think of anyone else.

Yoash showed up at ten o’clock in the morning, appearing in the corridor in his eternal overalls, with his ungainly walk, and without the Hamida file under his arm. But then, when we were already on our way to the infants a new obstacle popped up: in my stupidity it hadn’t occurred to me that without something to wear, they wouldn’t release Hagar from the hospital. Dear Yoash looked as if he was delighted with the situation — to this day, I think, nothing pleases him more than the prospect of “driving the authorities crazy.”

“Idiot that I am,” he said to the nurse and hit himself on the forehead, “idiot, idiot, idiot … forgive me, Noa, I’m an idiot. How you got such an idiot for a brother I don’t know, but I forgot the whole parcel at home.” He went off for an hour, I waited on a bench in the shade at the entrance, and when he came back he was carrying a few swollen bags, whose contents he spread out with a conjurer’s pride before the astonished eyes of the nurse. A pile of tiny white garments, a pile of diapers, a tube of ointment for the baby’s bottom, a cloth clown with bells on its head, a yellow rattle, a parcel of paper bibs. One by one he whipped them out and showed them, and in the end, with a triumphant flourish, he fished out three pacifiers and hung them around his fingers. “In case she loses one. My sisters were always throwing their pacifiers out. You know what it’s like with pacifiers. They’re always vanishing and you can’t find them and it’s a big mystery, one of the greatest mysteries in the universe.”

All the way out he didn’t stop chattering. Like some dopey spy he boasted of how he had cut all the price tags off the garments, “so they wouldn’t suspect me of only just buying them.” And only after he brought the pickup round from the parking lot, and only after he helped me climb in with Hagar, and only after he got in himself and inserted the key, only then did he lean back and ask without looking at me: “So where am I taking you?”