Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

Sex is supposed to wake you up, love is supposed to wake you up, but me, a healthy and athletic young girl — first in the thousand- and two thousand-meter races — it put to gray sleep. We surmised that it was because of the pill, and since we were both about to be drafted into the army, and didn’t expect to see much of each other after that, even though we would “still be a couple,” be faithful to each other and so on, we decided to forgo the contraceptive pills I had very responsibly started to swallow a month before we “went all the way.” Today it’s clear to me that getting rid of the pills was inter alia a promise that I would remain faithful to him, faithfulness being a subject on which we conducted lengthy and solemn seminars during this period. Should we give ourselves a chance to “experience relationships with other people”? Should we “free each other” before we began our army service? Did “a love like ours close us off from other experiences”?

At the beginning of the summer we went together to see the movie Cabaret , and came to the common conclusion that it was about repulsive people in a sick society, and that it was no wonder that the Germans ended up doing what they did after such appalling decadence. We weren’t lying, this was our honest opinion about which we both agreed, but an hour after we left the cinema it happened that I came on to him with a new, provocative boldness, and while I was busy doing so I also fantasized that Amikam was Michael York and that I was lying between him and a decadent German baron who was embracing me closely from behind. What Amikam’s fantasies were I don’t know. Perhaps the suppleness of Sally Bowles, perhaps the firmness of the German baron, or perhaps he didn’t fantasize at all. Everything seems possible to the same extent. What do I know about him? In any case it was good that night, except for the attack of weakness afterwards, which is the only one that I can place in the context of a specific event.

AMIKAM

Was killed on the Golan Heights in the first week of the Yom Kippur War. He was my first boyfriend, with whom I “made love,” and that should be important. He was my boyfriend for two years. I can conjure up his appearance in words: very tall, shoulders sloping slightly forward, black hair on a chest that never got a deep tan, black hair on fingers strumming a guitar—“I’m just a poor boy …”—brows frowning in concentration like a little shelf jutting from his forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple. I can describe him in words, but I can’t really see him. He isn’t present, and although I feel guilty towards him, there isn’t enough substance in the memory to torture and chastise me. His ghost doesn’t haunt me at night and I have never had nightmares about him.

What is there to say about a seventeen-year-old girl? What is there to say about someone who was nineteen years and three months old when he died? He was a good student. He was an outstanding soldier and an outstanding tank commander, or so I was told. Amikam read two newspapers every day, Amikam wrote a fine essay on Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, Amikam was a counselor in the Zionist Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, he liked Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, he couldn’t dance and he could fix things, and everything he did he did seriously and with concentration, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his black brows frowning. Once, when I tried to remember his touch, I thought of a wooden board.

I didn’t go to his funeral. When he died Hagar was already there, a baby of five months, and I was detached from my surroundings owing to my madness and my motherhood and because of the melodramatic pose I had adopted. I heard about his death weeks after he fell and it was too late to pay a condolence call to his parents. And anyway, how would I go? With the “accident” baby in my arms? I didn’t even fit the role of the ex-girlfriend, their son’s first sweetheart. And, in any case, they bore me a grudge.

I don’t intend to dig up what happened with Amikam, the way I treated Amikam. Such things happen, when I did what I did I didn’t know that he was going to get killed, and, anyway, it isn’t him I’ve been carrying around for the past twenty-nine years. Amikam comes into this story only because one evening he took me to an apartment on Usha Street, in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, where I still live today.

THE SECOND OF JULY

Amikam related to politics with the same thoroughness and deliberation with which he prepared for his final exams, with which he mended a coil in the electric heater, with which he “went all the way” with me. When he was asked about his political views he was in the habit of replying that he “saw himself as part of the New Left,” and for months before his conscription he was engaged with the question of whether he should “go even further to the left,” in other words, left of his parents who were active in MAPAM, the Zionist-Socialist United Workers Party.

Amikam took me to Usha Street because a graduate of the youth movement who had “gone even further left” told him about an interesting group that met there in the evenings. History students. Activists from poor neighborhoods. Artists. Students at the Bezalel Academy of Art. And so on. I didn’t want to go. In arguments I couldn’t get out of I showed the proper degree of enthusiasm, but the truth is that politics interested me less than they did Amikam, and the thought of entering a strange house with a group of people older than myself embarrassed me. We lived mainly among our peers, and the world of the free spirits who had already completed their army service seemed to me like a vague and distant dream. A magical stage which would no doubt arrive, but which we were still too callow to be fit to enter. I knew that I would be ashamed of my very presence in their space, and I knew that I might very well, however unjustly, also be ashamed of Amikam. And nevertheless I went. I went because I was his girlfriend. And I went because the next day we were due to take our final exams in literature; and on the pretext that we were going to study late into the night, I received permission from my mother to sleep over at his house, in his sister’s room.

Thirty-six steps of an external stairway led to the apartment on the second floor. I didn’t count them then. Forget the prophecies of the heart: No premonition told me that for the next twenty-nine years I would go up and down them about seventy thousand times, a few hundred of them with a baby carriage; no tingling of my toes hinted that I would wound my exposed big toe four times on the rusty can holding the sick jasmine bush that refused to die; that in certain moods I would decide to change the soil and plant a new bush there, and in others I would plan to drag it to the dumpster, and that I would never do either; I had no inkling that I was to see the top of the shaky iron banister covered with a strip of snow, and that its unsteadiness would worry me from time to time, and that about this too, I would do nothing.

Entering the apartment was as embarrassing as I had imagined. The noise inside was so loud that the students/artists/neighborhood-activists did not hear us knocking, and when they finally opened the door it turned out that Amikam’s acquaintance “who had gone even further left” wasn’t there. The bearded man who opened the door identified himself as “Hamida,” and when we said together “What?” and “Sorry?” he barred our way and demanded to know whether or not we recognized the right to self-determination.

His real name was Yoash, and Yoash, as an expression of his right to self-determination, had gone to the Ministry of Interior and demanded to have his name changed to “Hamida.” The Ministry of Interior, for its part, had argued that “Hamida” was the name of an Arab woman, that a Jewish male could not call himself “Hamida” on the grounds of fraud and imposture, but Yoash insisted on his right to call himself whatever he liked, and his correspondence with the Ministry of Interior and with the lawyers he badgered to represent him for nothing, as a public service, filled a shiny orange folder which he took with him wherever he went. I learned these details later; at the threshold, the exchange was confined to Amikam’s declaration that we did indeed recognize the right to self-determination, a slogan which served as the “open sesame” that let us in to the apartment.