Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

Amikam and I sat on a mattress while a passionate debate about the Organization of African Unity stormed above our heads. Anyone listening might have gained the impression that the question of whether Africa should unite would be determined on Usha Street, and if so, around what principles, for example whether the spread of Islam was a stage that could be skipped, or whether “we had to go through it.” Someone lectured with astonishing knowledge about colonialism and Liberia, colonialism and Cameroon, colonialism and Ethiopia, Somalia, the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and I remember thinking that I should know something about all these places; my father traveled a lot to those parts of the world, to make devil-knows-what connections and to negotiate all kinds of deals. The business he had entered a few years before was called the Agricultural Development Corporation, and from then on the hall table was covered with shiny brochures in English and French, with photographs of a black man driving a red tractor, and a black scientist holding up a test tube like a wine glass and flashing a white smile from ear to ear. During all his years on the kibbutz my father had never worked in agriculture, except for the seasonal mobilizations it was impossible to get out of, and his partners in the enterprise had retired from the army only a little while before he did so himself, but to this day he continues to insist that “although the company had expanded its interests from grain storage to heavy equipment and other areas of aid,” it had never sold anything shady to any shady regime. What do I know? What did I know then? Only that from the day he became a civilian the house filled up with all kinds of junk from Africa — families of carved elephants, masks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, stinking leather gourds — and nevertheless I couldn’t place Liberia on the map. But why am I dwelling on my father? And who cares about Liberia? And what do I care today about which theoretical organizations that group was debating then? I didn’t sit down to tell nostalgic tales about the Jerusalem folklore of student radicals in Nachlaot in the seventies — and here I am already dragging in “jasmine bushes” and “Bezalel” and “Yoash-Hamida”—and with this kind of decor, in a couple of pages I’ll have turned myself and my life into something affected and anecdotal. It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere,” which in any case I have no desire to remember.

It took some time before anyone paid us any attention. We sat down low and looked at the sandaled feet of the debaters taking the floor opposite us, and in the air was a strong scent the name of which was then unknown to me. Patchouli, I later learned.

Amikam looked as if he was concentrating hard, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, trying to focus on one of the discussions out of the several taking place simultaneously. Simultaneity wasn’t his strong point, but nevertheless he managed to turn to look at me and scowl when I lit one cigarette with another; despite the nausea induced by the unaccustomed amount of nicotine, I was chain-smoking. The person who addressed me in the end was a very fat girl, with a vast heaving bosom and agitated gestures, someone swaying above me and enthusing about her experiences at a “La Mama” workshop. She wanted to know what I did; I said I was in the middle of my final exams, I was being drafted in November, and of course I didn’t know yet what I was going to do in the army. It was one of those moments when for no evident reason an interval of silence suddenly comes into being in all the conversations being conducted in the same space at the same time, so that everyone heard me saying: “What I’d like most is to be an operations room clerk in a commando unit and the thing I most dread is being stuck in an office in Tel Aviv.” This was not the right thing to say to a girl just back from six months in New York in a “La Mama” workshop. And it wasn’t the right thing to say in that place. The owner of the heaving bosom puffed out her already swollen cheeks, holding back her laughter, and in the embarrassing silence a “tsss” of ridicule was heard from the direction of the kitchen.

“It’s important to me to contribute,” I added, in a panic, aware of the looks recognizing my panic. The only matches left in my matchbox were burnt.

“Contribute to whom? Contribute to what?” A boy in ostentatiously ugly thick black glasses looked both amused and irate. I tossed my bangs out of my eyes and, without any idea of what I was about to say, avoided the question in a defiant voice, with a statement that was completely new to me: “Obviously if I can’t really contribute, then I’d prefer not to serve at all.” Without looking at Amikam I felt him turning his head, and this was also the moment that I saw Alek.

“There’s nothing funny about what.…” He was standing directly opposite me, leaning on the kitchen door frame, the leaning hand holding a closed book, with one finger inside it marking his place.

“Noa.”

“What she says isn’t funny. Her voice doesn’t make me laugh.” His pronunciation was very clear, with almost no trace of a foreign accent, except for certain soft vowels; only his pronunciation was excessively clear, separating the words; and when he paused they waited for him to continue. “Noa is a woman,” he continued at his leisure, “you don’t laugh at what happens to a woman. An authentic person would understand what she’s saying … what it means … and what her voice is saying to him.… What is it saying?” he repeated the question obediently echoed back to him by one of the girls in his audience. “It’s saying that she needs to be freed. It’s saying that a man has to marry her, and all the other girls who are beginning to think like Noa. There have to be men to go with all of them to the Rabbinate and free them from the army by marrying them.”

AND THEN HE SAID TO ME AND THEN I SAID TO HIM

I reread the “he said and I said,” and “then he asked me, and then I answered him”—the description is accurate, but nevertheless I can’t find even the nucleus of an explanation of what happened afterwards in it. Perhaps I should have run the moments like a silent movie. A very young woman sits on a mattress on the floor, hugging her knees and smoking. The camera follows the woman’s look, a look from below, takes in bits of detail: dirty toes, thick ankles, cutoff jeans ragged at the edges, a heaving bosom, a jaw moving in speech, a jaw moving in mastication. An orchestra accompanies the pictures with a cacophony of sound and suddenly stops. The young Valentino, he was so young then, stands in a relaxed pose in the frame of an open door. He has black hair cropped as short as a convict’s, he is wearing a very white tee shirt, and is standing far enough away so that the woman’s look, still from below, can take him in at full length. The man speaks, without marked expressions, without gesticulations, a restrained foreign body, and when he stops talking the orchestra begins to play again, but now the music has one clear theme. The man lingers in the doorway and his look rests on the girl, who is fiddling with a packet of cigarettes. After a long moment he reaches out his hand and beckons her to him with two fingers. The girl gets up and goes to him, he lights her a cigarette, and they both disappear into the kitchen.

Love can be described as compulsive thinking. The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture. And in the days to come I would be stuck on two gestures from the opening scene:

The man signals “come here” with his finger, and the girl gets up and comes. It’s the kind of gesture with which you beckon a child. Or a servant. Or a waitress, if you haven’t got any manners. Is the girl not aware of this? And how she is. And nevertheless — oh, the shame of it — she gets up. Not “in spite of” the gesture but because of it. Let’s admit that the nonchalant movement of the finger turns her on, as if it’s moving between her legs.