Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

The worst damage done by romantic love is the coldheartedness that it creates. Because when love seizes you, however much you struggle and kick, you are no longer capable of truly thinking about anyone else, because nobody else is truly real to you any more.

In 1981 my father had a heart attack, and my mother and Talush and I took turns sitting in the corridor outside the Intensive Care Unit. The day after the heart attack was a Wednesday, and I remember that it was a Wednesday because on Friday I was supposed to go on a trip to the north of the country with Alek, and the main thought in my mind was how I was going to get away now, because as things stood I didn’t have an alibi for disappearing for a couple of days, and I had no one to look after Hagar. Ute had gone to visit her parents in Germany with baby Daniel, she was due back the coming Tuesday — you see, I remember everything — and I, with the ice of love surrounding my heart, walked around with a styrofoam cup from the coffee machine in my hand, biting the rim of the cup and thinking, among other things, that if my father died, and they sat shiva on the kibbutz, I wouldn’t be able to spend any time with Alek.

If there was any logic in the world, the radio would bleep every time the word “love” was mentioned. The censors would blacken the television screen and warn that the material in question is not suitable for children, that it is subversive, dangerous. That anyone who seriously succumbs to this madness is definitely not friendly to the environment. But nobody apart from me seems to see things this way.

MY HAGAR, FOR EXAMPLE

My Hagar, for example, tends to chew on the word “love” interminably, and in recent years she has also developed the irritating habit of remarking “I love you” at the end of every conversation with me, casting the two of us in some American television drama.

This is the recurrent pattern: first she provokes some argument with me on e-mail, and then she calls to say, “Mommy, I just want you to know that I love you.”

“Yes.… Same here,” I echo in embarrassment. And only once I said: “Look, surely we can have an argument without pinning this tail to it. It wouldn’t kill us.”

“And it won’t kill you to hear that I love you. Why is it so hard for you to hear me say it? When I have children, I’ll tell them that I love them ten times a day.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“And I want to make it clear to you that I know that you love me.”

“I very much hope that you know.”

When she was here over the summer I almost vomited at the conversations she conducted with her boyfriend on the phone: I love you. I miss you so much. I know you care for your brother. I know it hurts. I wish I could share it with you. More than once she stood opposite me in the kitchen with the cordless phone, she didn’t even take the trouble to go to her room, and against the background of the synthetic music of these phrases I cut the cucumbers and tomatoes on the chopping board into tiny pieces so that my daughter would have a proper Israeli salad after a winter in New York.

Hagar sincerely believes that “love is communication,” and that “love is above all friendship and shared values,” and that “love is growing together”; she recites these theses to me without a hint of irony, and since “Peter’s aggressive-depressive silences sabotage their love” she doesn’t think she’ll marry him, even though for the time being they’re not breaking up, either. Peter hurts her feelings, and you don’t marry someone who hurts your feelings, right? No, my clear darling, says her mother, on no account should you marry someone who hurts your feelings, even if those feelings sound to your mother like commercially packaged nothing.

ALEK

Alek came on the night of the twentieth of November. At half past ten on the night after the war.

How can I convince myself that love is an insane delusion, when Alek appears at my door in the dark as in a vision?

His face is white as that of a tense clown, and he is wearing something white under his army coat. “May I?” he asks, standing so passively in the doorway. You don’t ask “May I?” about something that belongs to you anyway, I thought afterwards, when I drew back to get my breath between heartbeats. My heart had gone completely haywire, it had expanded to alarming dimensions leaving no room for my lungs. Alek let me go for a minute and put his Kalashnikov down on the marble counter. “What are you doing here?” I asked when he pulled me back into his embrace. “What am I doing?” he mumbled to my forehead, and without seeing or hearing — perhaps only from the touch of his lips — I made out the words, “What am I doing here? Apparently trying to be Hemingway.”

“No,” he added immediately and tightened his grip, “no. That’s not it. I was a soldier here, and there’s you and the child and Yoash and a few others. It wouldn’t be normal not to come.” And later on, at dawn, he said too that “as soon as the war began I couldn’t stand the anti-Semites. Understand, I’m allowed to hate this country, but what is permitted to Ginsberg is forbidden to an anti-Semitic goy, and Paris is full of such anti-Semites, even if they don’t know that they’re anti-Semites and they just hate Israel.” Only then, at dawn, I discovered that he hadn’t gone to Heidelberg at all, and had flown straight to Paris when he left in June.

Heidelberg: One of the most beautiful cities in Germany. Known for its famous university, which was founded in the Middle Ages. Tchernikhovsky and Klausner studied there. I know, I looked it up in Grandma Dora’s encyclopedia one Saturday when I traveled to the kibbutz with Hagar to show ourselves and stand the test of gossiping tongues. For five months I had imagined Heidelberg at the foot of the Odenwald mountain range, until I could walk down the cobbled streets in my imagination and make my way to the river. I sometimes went into travel agencies simply in order to see the name of the city on a poster. Before I went to sleep I would look at the atlas and measure the distance in days of walking. And whenever they said “West Germany” on the radio, I would turn up the volume. And all that time he had been in Paris.

Alek didn’t ask about Hagar sleeping in her room that was once his room. Not right away. First he led me to bed and sank himself in my body, and gave me back my body that had as if been taken from me after the birth. Gave me back my body so that I would lose it under him and above him and this way and that, and then I would fill it up again until the tips of my fingers and toes dripped happiness.

“We weren’t Jewish heroes,” he mumbled when I rested on his arm, and his fingers dripped with milk from my breasts.

“We weren’t?”

“No. My father is a Jewish hero. Official hero. Two years he fought at Leningrad, you know: blocked the canon with his body. He himself breached the blockade.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the same place, apparently. In Sverdlovsk, Ekaterinburg, where they killed the Czar.”

“And you, where have you come from now?”

Years later, too, when he became a full-time journalist, he wasn’t in the habit of volunteering information in answer to questions of the who-what-when-where kind. “In the area of the enclave. The Golan Heights,” he answered reluctantly.

“Was it hard?”

“For those who were there at the beginning it was hard. This week they finally brought coats for everyone.”

As always happens with him, to this day, Alek opened up time for me and stripped the moment of all its specific attributes. Amikam was dead, that I already knew. The IDF was positioned forty kilometers from Damascus, Golda was conducting talks with Kissinger, Tami’s brother was in Tel Hashomer Hospital, Yoash was still serving in the reserves, and in Alek’s arms, in the clean smell of his body, I was far away, in a place consisting only of the absolute raw materials. Man, woman, war, baby.