Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Alek (meekly): You know. If you say so it must be true.…

I said that we were playing a game, and now that I think about it, it isn’t clear to me where I got my knowledge of the game from; where did the knowledge of the rules and the movements come from, then when I had not yet been exposed to any pornography, certainly not of that kind. My sexual education proceeded from What Sex Are We? to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fear of Flying , and none of them included this material. When Emanuelle and Last Tango in Paris were playing in the cinemas I didn’t have time to go to the movies, and I never dared approach the plastic-covered magazines in Steimatzky’s Bookstore, so where did I get it from, and why does it seem to me that it was always there inside me? Inherent in the very nature of sexuality?

Nira Woolf fucks gladly, so do I more or less, sometimes, but when I come to the sexy parts in the plot I restrict myself to the cheerful before and the happy after, as if in obedience to Hollywood’s Hays Code. Not only because of the embarrassment of the language, and not only because of what-will-my-mother-think-when-she-reads-it, and how will Miriam react, but also and mainly because there is no way I can get around the terrible vulnerability of sex.

A friend of Hagar’s came to consult me once, a wild and quite disturbed girl, she spoke tensely about how her sister fucked boys. I’ve heard this expression from older women, too, and even though I have never used it in my writing, my readers will assume that this is precisely what Nira does: beds them and fucks them.… I myself have no doubt that this is what Nira does, only I’m damned if I understand exactly what she does, or how a woman can fuck.

It doesn’t matter who rolls onto whom, and who performs the movements, and who pushes whom away afterwards, nothing can change the fact that at a certain moment of this event you are utterly abandoned, vulnerable and abandoned. And it is the man who possesses you, and not you him.

Sometimes my vulnerability was such that I felt I was dying; that’s how I felt, as if my soul was departing my body, and in my perversity it was precisely to this that I gave myself up, to the vulnerability and the departing soul, and the ritual abandonment of the body.

Sometimes I thought: he no longer treats me like a child.

The strange thing is that parallel to these developments, to the addiction to vulnerability and sex, my sense of control in the time outside of it increased — control over myself, I mean — until it was no longer possible to see me as that “plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden.” I polished my opinions until they gleamed, though failed to achieve clarity of mind. With the love and the far out sexual experiences I grew further and further from my mind, or my mind grew further from me, drawing out the distance to the edges of fear, which always disappeared with his touch.

I never refused to meet him, sometimes I would keep myself in suspense and put him off for a week, until after my exams, after the seminar paper — I wasn’t even kidding myself — but when we met I was no longer afraid to argue with him, and after I realized that he was sure that I “understood everything,” I finally began to open my mouth, and even to use the phrase “I don’t understand” to good effect.

Alek: Tell me who was your policewoman.

Me: What policewoman?

Alek: Who came to guard you when I took Hagar.

Me (assertively, it’s called being assertive): She’s not a policewoman, her name is Liora and she’s my friend.

Alek: Sorry, I apologize, do you forgive me? … When is she due to give birth, your friend?

Me: How did you know? (Liora was then in her fourth month, her pregnancy was still a secret.)

Alek: You can see on her face. When a pregnant woman is happy, you can see it on her face, also in how she sits.… I wish your friend good luck. (She would not have good luck. Liora had a miscarriage in her fifth month, and it would be eight years until she had Asaf.)

I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in hearing what he thought of Hagar, out of an embarrassing feeling that if I let myself listen and get into a discussion about her — never mind what was said — I might somehow be betraying my daughter. To this day when he asks me how she is, I tend to be miserly in my answers, and on the isolated occasions when I did say more or let him talk, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Most of our arguments to this day concern the sociopolitical, as if it doesn’t really touch us, although how this can be possible when I become increasingly sociopolitical as time goes by is not quite clear to me.

In the summer of ’81, before the elections, Alek went to Kiryat Shmoneh without me — I stayed with my father, who was still at Hadassah Hospital after having been transferred from Intensive Care to the cardiology department — and when he returned we argued about Begin again. “Of course he incites, of course he does, what else? I don’t deny it, but what I don’t understand is why you on the left enjoy it so much, as if he turns you into saints.” “Who said we enjoy it? Where did you get that from?” “What do you mean, ‘Who said?’ Switch on television.” In the family and among friends it was agreed that Begin was responsible for my father’s heart attack. The day before, I had knelt by his bed to help him put his slippers on. On the plastic chairs in the corridor two old friends were waiting, good people, who had brought us all fruit from the kibbutz. “You switch on the television, look who his people are, look at the characters they drag to their demonstrations.” Alek put on his shirt. In a minute we would go into the kitchen and have something to drink, and ten minutes later he would leave. “Lumpenproletariat,” he said as he buttoned his shirt, “that’s who you mean. You know, I haven’t been lazy, I drive all the way up to Kiryat Shmoneh, I go to demonstrations, and I see all kinds, including, you’re right, lumpens, real rags, people with no connection to culture. But lumpens, if you don’t mind me saying so, you also have on the left. You remember Menachem, who used to come to the house here and burn down museums?” I remembered two. “One of them. He lives now in Paris. I met him, to my regret, and what can I tell you, even if somebody lives in a European capital and associates with Third World and Palestinians, it makes no difference, lumpen is still lumpen.… He was with some student, Palestinian, never mind what his politics are, I saw immediately that this is a man with self-respect, who knows where he comes from. Menachem, on the other hand, is completely different story.… The way he fawned there, in a minute he would have dropped to the ground and kissed his feet just because he was Palestinian.… So they want to burn down museums? You know what? For my part they can burn what they like, let them burn.… But for an avant-garde too you need culture.”

I didn’t understand this speech fully, or why he was so angry — he was only a guest here after all — I didn’t know where his anger came from, but I did know that Alek was leaving soon, and even though he was already dressed I still hadn’t put a foot out of the sheet. Suddenly, I remember, I detested them all equally: Peres and Begin, Aridor and Meridor, Kiryat Shmoneh and the kibbutzim and the atomic reactor, Shulamit Aloni whose book Women as People had opened my eyes, my sociopolitical insulted parents, and that Menachem and this one — all the Menachems in the world, together with all their friends and enemies: everyone who forced me over and over again to stand up and be counted, to take a stand; everyone who made him close his face to me.

In the state of Israel you have to take a stand, in this world you have to take a stand, in this world you are your stand, only sometimes, what can I do, I get sick and tired of all these stands, they turn my stomach and make it hard for me to breathe. Alek never expected me to take a stand, not in that way, and it was I who usually introduced the outside noise, in order to test what? Who?