Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

The mattress was very soft, snow went on falling and falling outside the white lace curtain, and between us there was a kind of weariness that sets in after everything is over, like a kind of pity or pardon. When he made love to me, the repertoire of movements had not changed, but the violent demand had disappeared, as if we were becoming reconciled, becoming one. As if becoming one was our purpose on earth.

Alek, one hand under my head, the other on my breast, breathed slowly, perhaps he was sleeping, and I with my eyes open saw visions of white infinity measured step by step, white vales of despair extending without a sign. Then breathing under his hand, slowly and surely I took off, slow and low; as if gathered up in the mist, I glided over infinity. Even if I dived into the white I would be gathered up, even if I dived down I would rise again like mist, even if I fell I would not fear.

When I awoke from the vision I looked from the side at the sleeping cubist profile: a single gray hair bristling from the arc of the eyebrow, thick boyish lashes on a heavy drooping eyelid, and a soft wrinkle shaped like a crescent moon beneath it. I put my hand on his hand lying on my breast, and then I thought: perhaps this man is only a gateway through which to pass. Perhaps he is only matter through which to see beyond matter. Perhaps he is only a stair to another love which no longer needs anyone.

I cannot justify these thoughts, or explain a single word. Matter and beyond matter … love which needs no one … vales of despair.… The yellowish light of a Passover heat wave should be enough to dissolve these phrases. Just saying them out loud should be enough to annihilate them with laughter. Where did they come from? And where did I get the feeling that like a precognition they were always there inside me?

In Blood Money I gave the contractor’s repulsive brother a mystical turn of speech, like that of the messianic settlers’ movement, and all through the plot he breathes a fog of verbal vapors on the reader that covers up the suspect and the murder; in Compulsory Service there’s Sylvie, a particularly silly soldier who complicates the investigation when she consults spirits and energies. My better judgment cannot bear them and their talk, they truly and instinctively repel me; in the same way, I should be repelled and disgusted by myself, and nevertheless I am not disgusted. Not at the right time, and not to the required degree. Life in the underground lets you do this: fall foolishly in love without having to listen to yourself talking, and without paying the price of shame.

NIRA WOOLF

If I send her to Moscow she’ll learn Russian first, which I never did, apart from a few words I picked up from Alek.

Nira Woolf will learn the language in two or three months, perhaps dialects, too, and if I send her into the white and gold church, she will even understand the liturgy sung there in Old Slavonic. Perhaps I’ll give her a guide, an intellectual like Borya, who will also fall in love with her, but very soon she’ll learn everything there is to learn from this teacher, and from about the first third of the book she will no longer be dependent on him. Mastering the language will come easily to Nira, like the knowledge of immunology she acquired in The Stabbing , like the understanding of bank fraud in Birthright , like her five martial arts. And studying the map at home will suffice for her to navigate the complex city and to locate herself even when she emerges from the Metro station in the middle of the night at some remote suburb.

Nira Woolf is “more like a fairy tale,” as Miriam said, but why shouldn’t women have fairy tales of their own? Tales of women who never know panic in the street and the fear of footsteps following them in the dark; legends about heroines who do not fall in love with their teachers and officers, and who are never impressed by rich, strong, mature, famous, tall men.

“It’s important for us to have role models to identify with,” Hagar lectures me, “but it’s impossible to identify with such an unrealistic character.” “What about the role models men identify with?” I type indignantly in reply, “Does James Bond look realistic to you? Do Indiana Jones, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger look realistic to you? Half the men in the movies aren’t in the least realistic. Much more than half, almost all of them.”

This morning she called me unexpectedly from Boston, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her until she returned to New York. She had just finished reading What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? and she didn’t want to wait, she had to tell me that this time she had really, really liked it. “Even though you write books for entertainment, the message gets across.… I think it’s just wonderful how you managed to get in so much information.… You know what? In the last chapter, when Nira gives Svedka the revolver? Even I felt ready to shoot him, that swine, if he couldn’t be brought to trial, that is.” “She could have brought him to trial,” I corrected her slowly, “but the punishment didn’t seem harsh enough to her.” “That’s because the judges are men and the law is made by men, and even now that there are women judges, they learn to think like men.” I was glad to hear her voice, but after two whole days in which I hadn’t spoken to anyone, even at the grocer’s, dragging the words out was an effort. “Did I wake you up? Aren’t you on summer time?” Everyone who called me that Passover asked me if they had woken me up, but the truth is that when she rang I hadn’t gone to bed yet. “You’re not sick? … Are you sure you’re not sick? … Is the holiday hard? … Are you eating, Mommy? Are you taking care of yourself? Going out? … Are you meeting your friends, or have they all gone away? What about Tami? Is she back yet?” Where are all these worries coming from all of a sudden? I’m forty-seven and healthy, active up until recently, my planner is full of addresses and phone numbers, I am interviewed in the papers, my book is on display in shop windows, and even though Hagar is my only child and I am a single parent, a mother is a mother and a daughter is a daughter and the roles should not be reversed. “I’m fine, just busy writing.” “So soon? It used to take you longer to start a new book.”

“Just playing with ideas. Now tell me, how does it feel being without Peter for two weeks?”

In the winter of 1980 the fund ceased its activities for a period of three weeks, and everyone except for me flew to the United States to meet the donors and consult with a battery of experts on how to go on, if at all. I composed most of the first draft of Blood Money then, on a baby Hermes borrowed from the office.

Ute gave birth to Daniel in November, Hagar was invited to the brith —in view of the Viking appearance of the mother, it seemed strange to me that they were having a brith at all — and in the following three months Alek disappeared from our lives. From our overt lives, I mean, and as far as Hagar’s covert life is concerned I have no idea. She said that the baby was cute, that it was impossible to talk to Ute because she didn’t know any Hebrew, and when she was brushing her teeth before going to bed she suddenly asked with her mouth full of toothpaste if we could also have a baby like that, to which I replied “We’ll see,” even though I had made up my mind never to have any more children. In any case, Hagar with her healthy instincts appeared to have come to terms quite happily with reality.

Serious writers describe themselves as suffering when they write; I, who have no pretensions to seriousness, have never suffered in the course of the work itself, and my difficulties only arise at the stage of publication. Writing held me together when I felt I was coming apart, and solved the problem of time when it began to unravel at the edges. Constructing a plot, like reading, in fact, gives time a direction, and when Nira Woolf began to take action, I was animated by a happy feeling that I too was making progress.