Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

When Yoash came back Alek was the first to notice that there was something wrong, it took me time, and all I saw at the beginning was that Yoash was in high gear, and it was nothing new for Yoash to have attacks of speedy hyperactivity. He talked a lot, he talked without stopping, rapid strings of words, and Alek sat next to him and listened. The words were the same words that everybody was repeating then: Golda, the Chief of Staff, they came in from here, they attacked us from there, the bridgehead, the breakthrough, General Gonen.… I didn’t pay attention to the exact content and the details of the complaints which were endlessly, monotonously repeated, but after Alek pointed it out to me I began to notice that there really was something wrong with Yoash. He hardly slept, none of us slept much in those days. Alek my insomniac prince never needed much sleep, I made up a little sleep in the mornings, but Yoash was different, he looked like a clockwork mouse which had been wound up and couldn’t stop. He would get up in the middle of a sentence and say that he had to go here or there, volunteer unnecessarily to go to the corner store and buy us butter or salt. The Hamida file had been replaced by petitions and manifestos that he had to fetch and return and duplicate in the middle of the night. As if at every moment there was something else that had to be done. Even before, he used to jiggle his foot nervously when he sat, but now it seemed that the agitation had taken over his whole body.

“Yoash had a bad war,” Alek said to me, “and Yoash, never mind how he fought and how much of a hero he was, is still exactly like a child. From this point of view, he’s a typical Israeli.” Infinitely patient, he did not argue with Yoash, but one morning when the two of us were alone in his apartment on Yarkon Street, he said a few things to me, and his mouth, I remember, twisted in a terrifying, or perhaps terrified, anger. “Oversight … I can’t bear the sound of that word any more. They found themselves a word … oversight.”

“But there was an oversight, in spades,” I objected. Motherhood, the weeks that had gone by without him, the fact of his return, had given me a new self-confidence, and I no longer hesitated to confront him, I even enjoyed it.

“Of course there was an oversight, nobody’s denying this, it’s obvious. Daddy promised that there wouldn’t be war. Daddy told me that war would only begin in the afternoon.… They said we’d be attacked at four o’clock.… How old are they, tell me, all these people who are writing and talking?”

“So are you telling me that Golda and Dayan shouldn’t resign?”

“Of course they should resign, immediately. They’re responsible for the ‘oversight.’ That’s not what I’m talking about at all.” In the background a festive concerto by Schubert was playing, one of the records he had left behind, and for a moment I felt the old inner surrender setting in. “Unbelievable that these people are Jews,” he said. “As if they’ve learned nothing, and once again Daddy promised, and once again authorities said. It’s not normal.” And almost instantly a gentler tone returned. “This is Yoash’s problem, too, that he has a daddy who makes promises, and that he is naive like most of the Israelis.” I identified the area of warmth and approached it: “So what will become of Yoash?” “Yoash isn’t right. Maybe he’ll become right, but now it’s not good. You are good for him, I am too, but a woman is something else. With you he’s calm. With you and Hagar. And with me, however hard I try, it’s not the same.”

These were the most explicit words he said to me, I don’t know how explicit he was to himself. In any case, Alek spoke in other ways, too, and in fact all three of us did. I remember that he was standing in the kitchen and peeling potatoes and chopping dill on a plate when Yoash started on one of his tirades. It went on and on, until Alek asked him to take over the peeling and chopping and handed him the knife, and when they changed places he hugged him hard and pulled me too into the embrace. His fingers rested on my cheek, and rubbing up against the smell of the dill I thought, as if in an attempt to reassure: It’s all right, I know what you’re doing now, what you’re trying to do, all three of us know, it’s all right.

During all that time, throughout that period, Alek kept close to my face: touching my cheeks, holding them when he kissed me, holding my head and turning it to him in bed. And with the same concentration he looked at Yoash, too, and Yoash looked at me. All three of us, I mean to say, looked at each other far, far too much.

I know what might be said about this. I know what Nira Woolf would say, the same thing that Talush and Tami and all my friends would have said: He found himself a convenient arrangement, that Alek, landing you with his crazy friend and taking the heat off himself. I know that this is the obvious thing to think, I understand it, but it isn’t true, it isn’t true at all, and anyone who thinks so doesn’t understand the intensity. How the three of us were really and truly more important to each other than the whole world.

Even today nobody could persuade me that Alek wanted to pair me off with Yoash, although if anything like that had happened, it would have seemed perfectly natural to him, “the most natural and beautiful thing in the world,” in his words. Inter alia because the whole notion of sexual fidelity was completely alien to him. I’m not talking about some sixties ideology of free love, Alek has no ideology, certainly not about sex. I mean that the very idea of sexual fidelity seems weird and incomprehensible to him. Not only in relation to himself, but also in relation to me and everybody else. I remember how one of those days I told him about my father and his affairs with the girls in the kibbutz high school — in general we talked a lot more then than before — and I brought this story out as if I was revealing some traumatic family secret. But in spite of my breaking voice Alek missed the traumatic point, and when I reached the bit about leaving the kibbutz — I said that I didn’t know to what extent, if at all, our leaving was connected to those affairs — he shook his head dismissively and said: “What kind of people.…” And with regard to my father all he said was that he didn’t understand men who were attracted to young girls.

“And what about me?” I asked.

“What — what about you?”

“Aren’t I a young girl?” “No, you’re not. Perhaps according to your age you are, but your age is accidental.”

A million years later I remembered this conversation. I had come home from the television studios in Herzliya, where I had heard all kinds of sanctimonious statements about the Lewinsky affair, with the emphasis on the regrettable way in which Hillary had humiliated herself, and late at night, when I was about to remove the make-up and take a shower, Alek called from Moscow. “Lucky my mother goes to bed early, she wouldn’t have enjoyed listening to a few of the things I had to say,” I said. Alek was silent. He was silent long enough to take the wind of righteous public indignation out of my sails, long enough for shame to begin gnawing at me: who was I to talk, where did I get my nerve from?

Alek was silent and then he said with painful dryness: “I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about.”

“What don’t you understand?” I held my ground against him or against myself and wiped a layer of makeup off my face. “Don’t you understand that the role of the forgiving wife is humiliating?” “I understand that too many people are interfering in something that is none of their business, and in my opinion it is this which is humiliating and hard to forgive. Apart from which, have you considered possibility that the iron lady doesn’t care that much what her husband does? This lady rules the world, and also, they say, her husband, so maybe things of interest to other women don’t interest her so much.… Once, aristocracy knew how to deal with such matters, and nobody made a scandal, but on the other hand, Clinton is certainly not an aristocrat, maybe this is what you are really saying.” That is not what I was saying, of course, but neither did it occur to me to come up with a slogan like “the personal is political” or “the President’s wife is not only a private person, she is a role model,” although these are precisely the kind of things I had said an hour and a half earlier. As was happening more and more in the course of time, I didn’t agree with him, I didn’t agree with myself, and above all I felt flawed and distorted. As if I had been caught in some falseness or stupid boasting. Everything that formulated itself in my head at those moments had a phony ring. Was this my voice? Was it an alien voice? Which of all the voices I uttered was my own?