Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Talush was sent to fetch and carry, my father dropped in every day “to see how you’re getting on,” and my mother took leave from work and took over the house and reorganized it. I accepted everything with mute, grateful nods: when she converted Alek’s room into a nursery, when she brought the rest of my clothes from home and arranged them in the closet, when she ordered Yoash, who came to visit, to “give a hand” and move the table here and the closet there — she didn’t let him go even when he provoked her by asking her in the name of the principle of self-determination to call him Hamida. She called him Hamida, and still insisted that he help her move the closet. Even when she asked my permission to remove Klimt’s dead floating women from the kitchen wall—“that picture gives me the creeps”—I nodded.

My part in the new agreement was easy, I accepted it willingly: no more cheekiness with my parents, and no more ideological deviations. Our Noa has learned her lesson, and sadder but wiser she has come back to us. Sadder and wiser, and the roots of her hair hurt. Until then I never knew that the roots of your hair could hurt, but this is one of the strange things that I discovered. It hurt me even to cut my nails, and with every sip of soup I took I heard a wave breaking inside my ears.

Only once did I voice any opposition, and this was on the evening they first appeared, when my mother proposed taking me and Hagar home with them. I don’t know if my first burst of tears prevented a big argument, or if they weren’t so keen on putting the two of us up in the first place, but in any event, the result was that for two weeks or more my mother slept in Alek’s bed.

I didn’t explain the reasons for my objections; in days to come my mother noted that “that was a sign to me that you were recovering, and that it was important to you to stand on your own feet”—but the real reason was different, completely different, it was the feeling of the gaping void around which I was crystallizing. The feeling was and still is completely physical. And under my swollen breasts I then felt the void all the time. As if an amputated internal organ was still hurting me. And in my heart I sobbed that Alek, Alek, Alek was hurting me.

The stronger this feeling grew, so too did the idea that as if by some law of nature the void had to be filled with what accorded with it, in the only manner that accorded with it; in other words, I began to believe that Alek would return. Of course I also formulated more reasonable and realistic reasons for this belief to myself, such as: “He has a daughter he will want to meet one day,” or “Alek may be angry with Israel, but he’s not indifferent to it”—they proved to be correct more quickly than I imagined — but at the basis of the belief was the feeling of a void, and Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t it?

Since I believed that Alek would return, I had to remain on Usha Street to wait for him, nothing could prevent me from waiting for him there.

I don’t know where I got this romantic nonsense from, as if I were the heroine of a black-and-white movie, waiting for my lover in the place where the war had parted us, but even if anyone had ridiculed me along these lines, or said that Alek was perfectly capable of opening a telephone directory and locating me, there were no words in the world with the power to move me from my stubborn refusal to budge. Alek would return here, and I had to be here when he came.

When this irrational certainty crystallized inside me, I buried it inside me and wrapped myself around it in the dark, drawing secret strength from my madness. When Alek came back he would find me worthy of him. I had to make myself worthy of him.

IN A CROOKED WAY

Much of what I am today stems in a crooked way from this wish to be worthy in his eyes, equal in power to his imaginary power. At the beginning this ambition related mainly to basic functioning: to start taking care of myself and of Hagar so that he wouldn’t despise me, to gradually limit my mother’s presence; and gradually more and more ambitions were added, until my will to prevail was extended also to the area of my mood, in which I also began to see a measure of my strength. Alek was doing his thing in Heidelberg, I was doing mine in Jerusalem. Alek was not suffering from “psychological depression,” therefore I too would hold my head up high.

At first, of course, I pretended: Get up. Stand up straight. Lift up your chin. Raise your eyes from the pavement. Take a deep breath. Straighten your shoulders. Stretch your neck. Look up. Go out to run, at least for a few blocks. Until the pretense took over, and with my chin up and my eyes on the horizon, I really did begin to feel better.

Most of my achievements over the years I measured under the imaginary gaze of Alek’s eyes, and to this day it remains fixed on me in both small and great events. I remember for example the gradual change that took place in my appearance in the first year as a law student, when I began to wear buttoned shirts and for the first time in my life went to a salon. The lightheaded feeling that came with my shoulder-length haircut and the touch of air on my nape like a new nudity were connected to his touch in my mind.

I remember my first staged court case, it was a damages case, the show I put on in order to impress precisely the person who wasn’t there, and the paradoxical way in which his imaginary gaze helped me to relax, as if the imaginary audience of one enabled me to ignore the real one. Alek’s imagined gaze steadied my voice and my arguments, and concentrating on it distanced the lecturer and class in front of me, turning them into the spectators of a play not really intended for them.

The whole episode of my legal studies was connected to the imagined eye of Alek, and my desire to impress him. Actually, Miriam too played a part here, a far from inconsiderable part, for from the start she urged me to study. My father offered to get me a job with one of his friends “until we see what’s happening with your life”—translation: “until you meet someone normal and marry in a normal way.” My mother said that a profession was definitely important for a woman, too, and “in my situation”—in other words, as a single parent — teaching could fit the bill, and only Miriam insisted that I had to “believe in myself,” and set up a meeting for me with the only lawyer she knew, the mother of a toddler who had attended her nursery school the year before, who she still sometimes babysat for in the afternoons.

In those days there were not yet television series about glamorous and neurotic female lawyers, but Miriam very much admired this lawyer, who was dealing with a protracted court case about building in the yard on her behalf, and she made up her mind that law was the profession for me and nothing else would do. For months she kept at me: “You’ve got a head on your shoulders,” and “You know how to talk,” and “You were lucky to go to high school, don’t waste your luck,” and for months I kept at my parents to agree and for the assistance they were unwilling to provide—“A plan, Noaleh, must first of all be realistic”—until Aunt Greta arrived and contributed her share and compelled my father to contribute his. In all this time Miriam kept on at me, but what really decided the issue was the thought of Alek.

For almost a year I worked in a little soup restaurant that catered mainly to art students. It was relatively pleasant work, in a relatively pleasant place. The owner of the establishment, Tami, is a friend of mine to this day. And nevertheless when I served the customers, some of whom I recognized from Alek’s social evenings, and most of whom did not recognize me, I began to feel like Cinderella. As is usual with students, they worked at all kinds of odd jobs, but according to their definition and also their self-perception, they were something else: the future of Israeli academia, the future of the local avant-garde, activists in all kinds of left-wing and protest movements; even Tami was studying part time for a degree in economics. Only I was a real waitress. A mother, waitress, and a vegetable peeler. Sometimes I would imagine Alek coming into the restaurant and sitting down next to the window with some female intellectual, and then the humiliation was insufferable. So that after a few months of peeling carrots and wiping tables, I was determined to “make something” of myself, and when Miriam continued to insist that “something” meant lawyer, I decided to think so, too.