Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Even when I saw his white face in the doorway I knew that he would not stay with us, but I was like a person whose faith has found confirmation: nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum is filled with what fits it. Alek had not left me, and he would never really leave me.

At some point or other Hagar began to whimper and Alek didn’t get up with me, he waited; I went to her and waited, dense sweet heart-trembling moments, until he came and stood silently next to the wall over us. I didn’t switch on the light, and I didn’t need to. I saw everything like a cat in the dark. My vision has never been clearer. Alek was dressed — perhaps he was cold, perhaps he felt it wasn’t fitting to enter this scene naked. I think that’s what he felt. He stood hugging himself in that so familiar position, and from the armchair I could see his fingers gripping his ribs. Something happened to time, which slowed down and spread out between the beats: Hagar’s sucking. My breathing. My heartbeats. His breathing presence in the dark. As if infinity could enter between the beats. I don’t have the right words to describe it, but I know for certain that in those moments I wanted nothing, I hoped for nothing, my thoughts stayed still. I was all gathered in, all wrapped up, and it was enough for me to know that the moment indeed existed, and since it existed, it would never ever be denied.

Only when I put Hagar back to bed did Alek come up and stand next to me and reach out to put one finger on her hand, which immediately clenched around it. I didn’t dare look at his face, I didn’t look until he whispered something and I turned my head to read his lips. “Fingernails,” he whispered, “I didn’t think of this. Of this I didn’t think. I didn’t think she had fingernails.”

During all the years to come I made sure that Hagar never saw the two of us together, except for the unavoidable moments when she went out to him, on the rare occasions when he came to get her at the house. Does she have some unconscious memory in which this picture is stored? Her mother with an open flannel pyjama top, her father in white, standing together over her crib.

My feet were frozen, and when we got back into bed Alek put them on his chest to warm them. And then he asked me about Yoash. He had a gentlemanly order of priorities. First me, his full attention, then Hagar, and then Yoash. When had I heard from him last? I hadn’t heard anything from Yoash, Alek was much better informed than I was. Before he booked a flight to Israel he managed to get him on the phone, and Yoash who was already in uniform left him a key in the regular place under the flowerpot. And the first chance he got to make a call, Alek called Yoash’s mother on the farm. Yoash was in Africa, on the other side of the canal, with Brigade 421, they hoped to see him safe and sound next week.

ALEK

Alek stayed in the country for nearly three more weeks before returning to Paris, and from the first morning we established a routine which had never existed before and which was never repeated afterwards. The procedure came into being as if of its own accord on the first day, when Alek went to get his discharge from the army. I took Hagar to her daycare, and from there I went to meet him at Yoash’s apartment, where he had settled in the night before, before coming to me. I spent the afternoon with Hagar, and at night when she was already asleep he came to me, knocking on the door and staying for a few hours. But after Yoash returned, it sometimes happened that he came with him and left with him.

When Hagar woke up, he would sometimes come with me and touch her with renewed wonder, but he never picked her up. Even on the one night she spent in my arms with the two men in the kitchen, when she was suffering from a prickly rash. Because of this, when I had to go to the toilet, without giving it any thought I handed her to Yoash, who took her naturally, put her on his shoulder, and was in no hurry to give her back to me when I returned.

Without saying anything, Alek made it clear that he was a guest in our house, and nevertheless he tried to spend as much time as he could with me. With me and with Yoash.

One Saturday I took Hagar to my parents for lunch, and we all made a big effort to create an atmosphere of normality, but nothing was normal. The newspapers were black with mourning notices, the telephone kept ringing with news of friends’ sons, and rumors of what had really happened and what had definitely happened, and my father looked as if he had shrunk. He never picked up the phone himself, he just stood there with his eyes fixed on the instrument until my mother handed it to him, and to us he hardly spoke at all. It was his friends who were responsible for the fiasco, and he realized the full extent of the catastrophe more than any of us.

Talush, in a childish track suit already too small for her that for some reason she insisted on wearing, withdrew with Hagar to the sofa, ignoring the three of us, and from the look in my mother’s eyes she seemed not to see us at all. On the first day of the war she had closed the diet clinic and gone back to working as a nurse in the wards.

And in the midst of this sorrow, of all this sorrow, Noa Weber sat at the table reeking of sex, silent in idiotic satisfaction, and nobody thought for a moment of attributing her silence to compulsive sexual gratification. On the contrary, they thought that I was with them, depressed to the point of speechlessness by the torrent of bad news, and in fact I seemed so depressed to them that at one point my mother put her hands on my shoulders from behind and said: “Cheer up a bit, Noa. It doesn’t help to be depressed. In the end, we won a great victory.”

For a moment I was tempted to tell them that Alek was in Israel and that he was really a good guy, one of the best of our boys, doing the right thing by rushing to the defense of the motherland, but I immediately rejected the thought. Alek was not a good guy, not in their sense, and I was already deep in an emotional underground, too deep to be able to conduct a public relations campaign on Alek’s behalf.

Two days before, on Thursday afternoon, I had gone with him and Yoash to drink coffee in the Old City. When we came out of the cafe it began to pour, the merchants retreated into their empty shops, but we ran through the water cascading from the awnings, embracing, skipping crazily up the wet steps, eliciting peals of laughter from the spectators, who also seemed to forget the time and events for a moment.

Something was happening between the three of us, and when I thought about it — and I thought about it most of the time — I felt a kind of conspiratorial warmth spreading through me.

In the days preceding Yoash’s release from the army I understood the intensity with which Alek related to him. He called up to find out what had happened to all kinds of friends and acquaintances, but as far as Yoash was concerned it was evident that he was really worried, a worry that never left him. “I love him,” he said. The best of our boys didn’t say such things then.

About the events of his own war Alek was unwilling to talk, and it was only gradually that I gathered information. On the first day of the war he tried to get onto a plane, but reservists from Golani were not a high priority, so it was only on the fourth day that he reached brigade headquarters. For some reason they kept him at Acre for three days, and from there they sent him to Rosh Pina, it’s not clear why. In the end he went up to the Golan Heights to escort a convoy of supplies to the enclave, but by that time the worst of the fighting was already over. I have no idea what he saw and what he did, perhaps he talked about it to Yoash, but with me he just shrugged his shoulders. “We weren’t Jewish heroes.”