Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

HOMO SAPIENS

I was cheating a bit when I glorified my Homo sapiens . Something is lacking in my daughter, something is being taken away from her, but what it is has no name.… My better judgement tells me that what my enlightened daughter lacks is only the slavish curvature of the spine, and the Neanderthal superstitions, and in spite of myself I sense a lack in her, and without any justice I see her as not a whole woman.… Strange that the more Hagar persists in her enlightened and verbose religiosity, the more she prattles on about “soul,” “spirituality,” “God,” and “love,” the more sterile she seems to me. As if she has sterilized the words by removing some secret from them, and in so doing also sterilized herself.

Secret, God, and soul — words that befuddle thought, words that it would be better not to say … or perhaps the opposite, perhaps they should be used as frequently as Hagar uses them, until they cause an inflationary spiral, and lead to bankruptcy, used precisely in order to sterilize. Sunlight is the best disinfectant for mystery and nonsense.

Alek, I remember, once spoke about the “mystery of the Russian soul.” With ridicule and his lips almost closed he spoke. “Chaadaev, there was once such a man, an adjutant of Czar Alexander, who invented the mystery of the Russian soul, and ever since people who don’t really think repeat this endlessly, mainly Frenchmen but not only … and with them there is no longer evil plain and simple or chaos for its own sake, because just to be evil isn’t nice, but mystery of the Russian soul, this is something else.” It was in the spring of 1988, during the bad visit when Alek came and took a room in the Petra Hotel, as if they weren’t throwing stones from the Old City walls, and as if there were no merchants’ strike, and no slogans painted on the walls and rubbed out and repainted in the alley below, and no white signs on the doors of the shops. He stayed in the Petra Hotel because that was where he wanted to wake up in the morning, and he even bought himself a hookah, I saw it when I came there. He remained in Israel for two weeks, most of which he spent driving around the territories with the television crew he was accompanying, and collecting impressions of his own for his reports for a number of French newspapers. I was busy at the fund, involved in research for Birthright , and under the overly observant eyes of an adolescent daughter who knew that her father was in the country. I didn’t want her to see or hear when I spoke to him on the phone, so that even the telephone became a problem. When we finally met, after he had already met Hagar, it was cold and bad. A handsome stranger in a thin black turtleneck sweater received me politely, a stranger in a black sweater saw me out of the Jaffa Gate towards evening. That year he let his hair grow, afterwards he cut it short again, but that spring I was met by a curly-haired Alek.

If this is how he wants it, so be it, I thought as we parted, and I imagined a stone thrown at us and me crouching down and making a dash, like Nira Woolf, for the wall and flattening myself against it like a cat. Only after taking a few steps along the outer wall, my knees suddenly gave way beneath me, and I turned back into his embrace in the gateway and with his arm around me back into his bed again.

Before this, with small almost malicious smiles on our faces, we talked about politics, I remember how I protested when he said something about the “Arab mentality,” and he retorted with the Israeli mentality and the Russian mentality and from there to the “mystery of the soul.” With a politeness intended to hurt we competed to push each other away, and so it seemed to me that it was not the “mystery of the Russian soul” that he was mocking, but Noa Weber, only I, no longer “the plain, timorous, dejected / and lovelorn maiden whom he’d known,” imagined that I was stroking a big cat, one of Nira’s monsters, fastened one of my jacket buttons, and with affected calm replied: “As far as that’s concerned I agree with you completely. You know, when you make a big deal out of the soul it leads people to ignore their actual living conditions.”

“You mean … like religion is the opium of the masses?” he asked and stretched his tight-lipped smile a little further. “I mean that the assessment of the depths of the soul is greatly exaggerated,” I said and adopted Nira’s voice, too, the three-hundred-dollars-an-hour voice. “People exaggerate the depths, and the darkness, and the uniqueness of what is to be found inside it. Because tell me, what can there really be in the depths of the soul? Take a hundred people who live in the same society, and you’ll find more or less the same garbage in all of them. The same crap stuffed into our brains by the people with the power to stuff things into our brains.”

Last February, during my last visit, the same subject of the “Russian soul” came up again. We had returned from a walk along the Kremlin walls and again we didn’t go into the church on Alek’s street, it had already become a joke between us, not to go into the church again, and when he made me tea I asked him about Borya and his Anna, his new woman, God’s handmaiden. “It seems that you’re falling in love with the Slavic soul,” he said disapprovingly, “and you’re not the first. It happens to people who don’t understand much about this country.” And this time it seemed to me that he was actually saying something about the two of us. No, I didn’t fall in love with the Slavic soul, don’t worry. I love Alek. I loved him ages before he brought me to the violent, heart-rending, merciless expanses of the country he does not call his. It’s his soul I love, and the dark, famished, howling element in mine.

THERE’S A KIND OF LIE

There’s a kind of lie in this linear writing which does not encompass all the details. I remember how on the way back I sat withdrawn in the window seat of the plane, how I waited for the takeoff so that I could withdraw into myself and let my thoughts glide, among other things, over this last conversation with Alek. The flight’s four hours were not enough. I have already said: love does not need much to feed it. And what of this abundance of small things can be described at all, when I enlarge some picture and it goes on and on subdividing into more and more pictures ad infinitum? Should I focus on his hands holding the tin kettle? I love his hands, I love to watch them when they do something apart from caressing me. When they touch ordinary objects. When he hugs himself. Holds a cigarette between thumb, index, and middle finger. But what can be said about this that isn’t totally dumb?

Easier to talk about the mental alertness, the scurrying thoughts, and actually this too is difficult when every thought involving him splits into so many strands that it is impossible to follow them all. I didn’t fall in love with the Russian soul, I cleaved to Alek as to the missing half of my own soul, as if it were ordained by the very nature of my being and the very nature of his being, and as if this cleaving was an attribute of matter.

Sometimes at the height of illusion a hallucinatory thought about the last incarnation crosses my mind, as if I have known him in other bodies, men’s bodies.… Perhaps I was like Yoash or Borya to him, and it was impossible to become whole and complete the cycle then, and only now is it possible, and this is therefore an opportunity for the final incarnation.

For some reason it is easier for me to imagine myself metamorphosing into a man than to imagine him metamorphosing into a woman, and in any case it’s only a metaphor. The belief in the transmigration of souls is nonsense.

“There is something about this place that cannot be grasped by normal thought,” I said to him then when we walked under the Kremlin. A plane taking off from Saint Petersburg had exploded in the air that morning, and Alek like others had suspicions about it, none of which would be investigated, and he, too, as a journalist, would not investigate them. A local paper reported that Lenin’s mummy was putting on weight, and a hysterical, consumptive medium appeared on television that night with a daughter with braids like rats’ tails, who was also a medium. Trotsky spoke from the mother’s throat, and Zorge the Spy from the throat of her daughter.