Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

My memory is a trash can, I stuff it with whatever rubbish I like, and the studies which did not demand much thought came easily to me — when I was told to read verdicts I read them, I didn’t look for someone with a cheat-sheet, and when I was told to regurgitate the material, I did so. In the human landscape of the law faculty I was an outsider and I felt like an outsider. Female, younger than everyone else, the mother of an infant who woke up at night with an earache, and who had to be provided with dried fruits to celebrate Arbor Day in nursery school. Somehow I managed, and in fact, not “somehow” but mainly thanks to the help of my mother and to Miriam who came to the rescue, but now, from a distance, those years are covered in fog with scarcely a landmark, as if I had walked through them in my sleep.

Two or three times a day, I remember, I would close my eyes, and as a reward for the functioning of the previous hours, I would conjure up Alek. In the library. For a moment or two while Hagar was playing quietly. And it was as if I were retrieving my soul. Even when I was overwhelmed with sorrow.

TAMI

Tami called in the morning, waking me up after I had gone back to bed. She was on vacation in Eilat with her husband and her three young ogres, the four lunatics had gone to the beach again, her back was burned to a frazzle, the ogres had insisted on going to flay themselves some more, thank God, she herself had stayed behind in the air-conditioned room, and she was in dire need of hearing a human voice actually talking instead of grunting at her in bass. “Are you all right? Were you sleeping?”

“No, of course not. What’s the time?”

“Eleven o’clock. Why do you sound so strange?”

“That’s what a human voice sounds like, you must have forgotten. That’s what happens to a girl who spends too much time with boys.”

“Go on, laugh at me. Not everyone gives birth when they’re minors, and not everyone has daughters. I saw you in the paper. It was a good interview. How’s the book doing? Is it selling?”

“I very much hope so.”

“What do you mean ‘you hope’? It’s a great book. Write us another one. Exactly like this one. I finally realized what you got out of all those trips to Moscow. Dalya and I were already sure that you had a lover in the Jewish Agency, but after this book we decided that it’s a lover in the Russian Mafia.”

“Benya Krik.”

“What?”

“Benya Krik, that’s the name of my lover. Benya is a king. The king of the Mafia.”

“Benya Krik is the name of someone from the Jewish Agency and not the Mafia. Benya Krik isn’t the name of someone you fuck. Benya is the name of an old man from Bat Shlomo.… You don’t know how I’m dying to get back to work. You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have to worry about holidays any more.”

“You just like complaining. Kisses to the boys, or regards.”

“Kisses, I’ll pass them on. And you’re right, on the whole it’s fun here. They’re coming to clean the room in a minute, you won’t believe what a mess the boys have left, at least I don’t have to clean it up.”

“Look after yourself, have a good rest.”

“You too, and write me another book, you hear? So the girls will have something to read when the next holiday comes round.”

HAGAR AND MY MOTHER, TAMI, AND MIRIAM

Children are stuck with their parents and as a last resort they don’t have any alternative to bonding with them, but Tami and Miriam and my mother — I shall never understand all the goodness they showered on me when I had so little to return. My mother set Hagar in the center of her world, and she remains just about there to this day. And in spite of all her efforts to treat us all equally, she doesn’t relate to Talush’s twins in the same way, with the same pride and surprising tenderness.

It was only at the beginning of the nineties, when I met a few Russian families, that I realized what a joke Alek had played on us, that indirectly and without any intention on his part he had maneuvered the Weber family into a Russian pattern: the wife works, the wife studies, the wife has important business, and the grandmother suspends her no less important affairs, and takes care of the grandchild. My mother continued working at her clinic, but two or three times a week she finished early to pick Hagar up from her daycare, and in later years from school. My old room at home was turned into a second room for my daughter, with toys “for there” and books “for there,” and to this day it remains hers and she keeps things there.

Very late in the day, only after Hagar had left home, it occurred to me that a situation of double motherhood invites all kinds of conflicts, is a recipe for the development of tensions, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t remember any tension between my mother and myself. Perhaps I was too drained to be angry or jealous, and whatever she told me about my daughter I accepted. For the most part.

Self-condemnation can turn very easily into a kind of boasting in reverse — look at me, look at me, see what an incredible monster I was — and therefore I have to say that there wasn’t a drop of anything monstrous in my treatment of Hagar. I dressed her, I put her shoes on, I listened, I reacted, I thought about … I remembered to.… When she was small I braided her hair, and when she was in high school I picked her up at the youth movement center when she came back from hikes.

With time I also began to breathe in the smell of her hair, to delight in the warmth of her little body in her pajamas and to admire her sayings. She was a sturdy child, with penetrating logic, and when she learned to talk — she began to speak fluently at an early age — I enjoyed talking to her. You could say that I enjoy it to this day.

One winter Saturday, when Hagar was nearly two, I took her in her stroller to the Old City, and went into the church of the Holy Sepulchre with her. In the hall where the picture of my Madonna hung in one of the niches, a large group of tourists was gathered, and a guide was standing with his back to the picture and speaking to them in German. I let Hagar, who had just woken up, out of her stroller, and despite the Germans I approached the painting, wanting to confirm or refute something, hoping perhaps that something would return to encompass both of us together, but nothing of the sort occurred. Hagar turned her head right and left on my shoulder, the tourists’ cameras flashed, and the same place was completely different. Whatever it was that I wanted to check, I wasn’t disappointed. There was an athletic, middle aged German woman standing next to me, with pale freckles on her arms and a red-checkered keffiyeh covering her shoulders. Hagar weighed heavily on my arms, and when I tried to put her down she arched her back and refused to stand. The guide in his silly hat kept repeating the same word, the only one I recognized. Jews, he said. Juden. He had a stick in his hand, it too was crowned with a hat.

It was a long way back, almost all uphill, I had to get Hagar something to drink, and whatever I had been looking for, if at all, had nothing to do with her and would never have anything to do with her. Because for some reason which I would never be able to explain, Hagar did not belong to Alek, and from the time she was a few days old it was already clear that she didn’t belong to him. So obvious was this to me that the relation between them sometimes struck me with a shock of surprise.

Tami: When will you be done in the library? Should we meet in the cafeteria? No, I have a better idea. I’ll be in the restaurant this afternoon. Are you picking Hagar up today? Bring her here. Does she still eat soup? We’ll find her something without carrots. You look as if you could do with a good bowl of soup, too.