Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

When Aunt Greta landed at the Hilton and summoned me into her presence, the plot advanced as expected, but in a style which was, from my point of view at least, surprising. Aunt Greta did not display even polite affection towards the baby I brought with me, then eleven months old, togged out in a party dress, with a single tooth showing cutely when she smiled.

After ordering tea and cake for both of us, without first asking what I wanted, and even before the waiter wheeled the room service trolley out of the room, she opened a thorough, no-nonsense investigation, without any sentiment. Only when in reply to her question I said in careful English that I was “not in contact with Hagar’s father,” she sighed from the depths of her tough old breast, turned her faded blue gaze towards the view of Nachlaot, and remarked that she didn’t know what was happening to men nowadays. “Haim,” she said, “had his dreams, but at least he was a man. A real Jewish man. Not like the floor rags you bump into everywhere today who don’t know the meaning of responsibility. I can tell you, child, that I personally don’t rent apartments to hippies or psychologists.” “Hippies I understand, but why psychologists?” I asked, feeling for some reason that I could come to like her. “If I rent to psychologists, men will come to see them,” whispered my Aunt Greta in a mysterious husky voice. “Men will come, and you know what will happen then? Those men will begin to whine and wail, and that I cannot tolerate and I will not permit, not in any apartment of mine.” She too was quite an accomplished actress. A woman who lives alone for many years, I think, is compelled to adopt a few eccentric behaviors, even if only in self-defense.

When to my surprise Aunt Greta put out her cigarette on the Black Forest cake — perhaps as an expression of contempt for the margarine — all that remained was to sum up, which she did precisely and succinctly. “It’s obvious that law isn’t for you, and that you, Noa Weber, will never be a lawyer, but as far as it depends on me I will try to help you. And don’t ask me why.” And so she did. Aunt Greta would pay my tuition, my parents would help with other expenses, and I would find pupils for private coaching, because a combination of a day job and studying law — forget about it, you can understand that it just isn’t realistic.

After she returned to New York I never saw her again, “she flew away on her broomstick and disappeared,” as Alek said. Aunt Greta died at Mount Sinai Hospital in the autumn of 1983, on the day that Menachem Begin resigned, after Alek had already left Israel with his family. In her will she left Talush a few pieces of old jewelry, and to me she left her Encyclopedia Britannica together with its bookcase. The rest of her property went to Jewish charities. But even when I stood in line to pay the custom duties on this superfluous encyclopedic legacy, and when I went crazy trying to arrange for its transportation to Jerusalem, I remembered her with affection.

IF I REPEATED

If I repeated this little story about Aunt Greta it’s only because it is so pervaded by Alek’s spirit that it seems he could have composed it himself. He rejoiced in the concluding scene with the Britannica, and laughed like a child when I described my great-aunt’s rental boycott policy: “All according to the rules of the genre.” As far as the psychologists were concerned, and their male clients in particular, he and Aunt Greta were of one mind.

Hagar, for example, tells this story quite differently. In the eyes of my daughter, Aunt Greta is “an independent woman who existed before her time and paid the price for it” (how does Hagar know?), and was “one of the many tragedies of Zionism that nobody talks about.” One of the first things that my Hagar did in New York was to locate Aunt Greta’s grave and recite the mourner’s prayer over it (I wonder how the old lady would have reacted to a woman reciting Kaddish, but what does that matter?). In her lectures my daughter sometimes quotes Aunt Greta’s story as an example and symbol of the Jewish fate, which is apparently the kind of story that Americans like. I, like Alek, prefer a different story.

IN THE LAA FORUM

Tonight I entered the LAA forum again to check and see if there was anything new. Sandy, Sally, Sara, and Susan were all singing the same old tune. But for the benefit of the girls someone had gone to the trouble of sending in a whole lecture on biochemistry, “to help us become better acquainted with our bodies and understand what’s happening to us.”

So, everything had begun on the second of July 1972, with a little molecule called phenylethylamine. My brain, which was and is “about the size of a grapefruit,” had become addicted to this cunning molecule which stimulates the nerves, and in my case, as with other addicts, common dependency had turned into an addiction because of a “structural deficiency” in the “monoamine oxidase inhibitors.”

I understand, girls. Now I understand everything. And nevertheless I didn’t understand. Was Alek’s melting smile engraved on my phenylethylamine molecules? Had it been engraved there in advance? From the moment I was conceived in my mother’s womb? And the touch of his hand, and the smell of his neck, and the smell of his apartment and the smell of snowbound Moscow — are they imprinted on my monoamine oxidase?

If we’re talking about a typhoon raging in my neurons, why doesn’t the storm subside when the storm god disappears for years at a time? And how can you explain the fact that only one person, present or absent, sets this storm in motion, if indeed it is not the person whom my body craves, but only the storm?

On the second of July I drank of the love potion of Tristan and Isolde. On the second of July I drank bitter coffee mixed with phenylethylamine.

But how does that explain me, me and Alek? And the touch of heaven on the skin, how does it explain that?

Among all the babble of Sandy and Sally and Sara and Susan, among all the drivel of the dope from Detroit, there’s one thing I can’t find, pardon me, there’s one thing missing, and that is the soul. Because in my case, my stupid sisters, it is the soul that begs for a fuck, yes, precisely the soul. Believe it or not, this is my fantastic perversion: it’s not my body I want him to fuck but my brain. And it’s not the “reptilian brain” that I howl to the wicked moon for him to fuck, but the cortex of the brain.

“Most mammals pet while courting,” they write there. But this primate would forgo the petting to her last day, if in exchange she could receive her one and only into her soul.

“To her master, or rather her father; to her husband, or rather her brother; his handmaid, or rather his daughter; his wife, or rather his sister.…” In these words Eloise’s penylethylamine addresses the castrated Abelard; in words like these the sick molecules inside me cry out when the soul, the soul, the screwed up soul and nothing else addresses the absent one. For then the body and even the emotions are only an instrument and a means to reach what lies beyond them.

I’m sick, forgive me, sick and tired to death. Even my only one would laugh at me.

It was last February, in the apartment in Ordenka, we didn’t go out anywhere, we stayed in bed, Alek read a book full of old marks and quoted: “The drive to love is the drive to death,” and shrugged his white shoulders and added: “Another one of Soloviev’s exaggerations. You asked about him once. He talks about sex if it isn’t clear. Anyone who has sex like animal will die like animal, also. I completely forgot those formulations of his.” “What other exaggerations was he guilty of?” “You want me to translate for you? I won’t translate … he speaks about striving for perfection … love is from God, is perfection and most close to God, but in order for love to unite with God … for that, the whole world order must first be changed … the way we understand things.” He sat leaning against the headboard, leafing through the pages, and as he spoke his voice and face took on the weary, familiar expression of friendly, consoling self-irony. “Understand … I don’t know if you can understand, or what it could mean to you … we’re in year ten, and this man in year ten is saying that in his opinion we should construct the world, our biography, and above all, love.”