Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

“Home,” I replied, but it was a question more than an answer, because I already knew that there was bad news in the offing.

“Home … Alek said you’d want to, that’s to say, that you can if you want to. Listen, there’s something I have to tell you. Alek … brought forward his trip. What I mean to say is that he’s leaving today.” Since I was silent Yoash went on talking, and his voice — I remember his voice — grew rude and abrupt, almost hostile: “In any case, you know, he had to be there in August, and if you ask me, with all due respect to you both, all of this is a bit too much for him. Seeing the baby, I mean. Seeing her — it’s too much for him.” And when I remained silent he went on: “Alek thought that perhaps you might want to get in touch with your mother in spite of everything.”

“I want to go home,” I said. “I want you to take me home.” And we drove to the empty house.

I don’t remember feeling anything, I don’t remember thinking anything, I was like a hollow body propelled into motion by a push from an invisible hand. When we entered the house — I held Hagar, and Yoash opened the door — I was surprised to see everything in its place, but this too was at a remove, like a kind of curiosity outside myself. At the fringes of my mind I was apparently expecting to see empty rooms and bare walls, and in these same margins I noted to myself that everything was the same as before. Only later on, whenever Hagar fell asleep, I examined and re-examined every inch of the house. The record player was standing in its place, the records — I discovered afterwards — he had given to Yoash. The bookshelves in his room were empty and striped with dust. I found some of the books later in boxes in the storage space under the roof. His shelves in the closet were bare. His desk was cleared. In the drawers there were only a few pins and a pen without a refill. No crumpled note in the wastepaper basket. And no note anywhere. He didn’t take anything from the kitchen, there was a big sack of potatoes stuffed into the wicker basket, and a few packets of sausages and cheese and seven bags of milk in the fridge. Perhaps he thought that this was what babies drank. Perhaps he thought that this was what a nursing mother needed.

Yoash: I really have to go now. Are you sure you’re okay?

Me: It’s okay.

Yoash: Are you sure you don’t want to get in touch with your parents? I can get in touch for you, if you like.

Me: It’s okay.

(And then, when he was already standing at the door, it seemed to me that I read something in his slightly averted face, or perhaps in his raised shoulders, or perhaps in the way he twisted his feet.)

Me: Yoash? You said Alek was leaving today? What time is his flight?

Yoash: What time is his flight … is it important? What difference does it make to you, in fact? Okay. Okay. Don’t look at me like that, just don’t look at me like that. His flight’s at 4:20, which means that at half past one, in another … forty-five minutes I have to pick him up and take him to the airport. From my place.

FROM A DISTANCE

From a distance of twenty-nine years I don’t feel a drop of pity for that girl. Not because “she got herself into it”—people “get themselves” into all kinds of trouble and they still deserve to be pitied — I don’t feel any pity for her because of the blank expression on her face, rejecting the hand reaching out to her even from the distance of these years.

Blankly she moves about the rooms, barely glancing at her baby daughter lying on the big double bed. Nothing moves in her even when she finds the envelope he left on the kitchen table. There are six hundred and fifty shekels. He cleaned out his bank account, put the money into the envelope, licked it, closed it, and put it under the salt shaker, without even writing her name on it.

Now she sits down in the wicker armchair in the living room, looks at her watch and tries to trap the movement of the minute hand, hypnotizing herself not to blink and miss the second that it moves. The baby is sleeping, if she wakes and cries maybe she won’t hear, and if she does hear maybe she won’t react. The time is thirty-three minutes past one, thirty-four minutes past one. They have already loaded his luggage onto the pickup. Gone back to get the shoulder bag and sunglasses. Locked the door. Detached from feeling she senses his departure from the city like a change taking place in the nature of matter. He’s leaving, he’s getting further away, already he’s at the turn in the road descending from the city, still close, in another two and a quarter hours he’ll be on the plane. She notes the change in matter with every breath she takes, as if the touch of the air is different and objects are less present. She follows his departure as if she has been made responsible for studying the effect of his departure on matter, which is fading and becoming thinner as the minutes go by.

I don’t pity her, because she is wrapped up in her belief, and she still believes that she has no salvation outside his love.

And if I try to leap into the picture, to reach out to her and break the tension, she’ll bite my hand to stop me from disturbing her hypnotized concentration.

She’s suffering, true, and in the hours to come when her sorrow runs riot, she will suffer more, but for the time being there is no sign that she wants to keep the sorrow at bay. I want to make the sorrow go away. And she, the mad girl, receives it into her. She won’t let me rob her of it.

The days that followed, until the rescue team arrived, are difficult to reconstruct in an orderly way, and in fact also the weeks after them. Somewhere before I mentioned the kibbutz education that I refuse to see as the seedbed of my sickness, and the fact that I functioned then I attribute precisely to that despised education. “Pull yourself together, control yourself,” was the message of my childhood, and I did my best to conform to it. I was always taught that in all circumstances it was important to function, and perhaps thanks to this I functioned, a strange, partial functioning, but functioning nevertheless.

Hagar was what in days to come I learned to define as an easy baby; contact with the world did not dismay her, it did not invade her or disturb her, she slept for hours on end and cried only when she was hungry. I did not concentrate on her, I did not smell her head, I did not wait for the seconds when she opened her eyes in order to inspect their color, but when she cried I put her to my breast exactly as I had been told to, and somehow or other I also changed her diapers, although I didn’t clean her properly. Most of the time, I remember, I sat next to her on the double bed where I had placed her in the beginning; I sat — because of the fear that if I lay down a last barrier inside me would be breached, and I would drown in what burst out. I don’t remember day and night, but I do remember that I piled up the pillows at the top of the bed and propped up against them like a sick person I dozed and woke without distinguishing clearly between one state of consciousness and another. Only once in the dark I know that I got up, took a pail and cloth and for some reason began to wash the floor. It would have been better to wash myself and Hagar, because we were both no doubt in need of bathing by then, but that’s what happened and that’s what I did. And in the meantime the soiled diapers accumulated in a bag, without my giving a thought to what I was going to do when the clean ones ran out.

My sleeping and waking states were visited by all kinds of sensations and hallucinations, some of which still come back today. The pain cutting through my diaphragm, because of which I can’t lie down. The grayness crawling over my body and threatening to cover me completely if I lie down. Fragments of myself floating in the cavities of my body like lumps of broken ice.