Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

When Hagar, not reassured, finally left, I flew for the third time to Moscow, and when I returned I spent two or three months cleaning out and reorganizing the apartment. It was only in the middle of this fit of activity that I realized what I was doing, that I was returning the house to how it had been in 1972. My daughter’s room, Alek’s room, was turned into my study, and according to the logic imposed by the room itself, my new desk with the computer now stood in the place where his desk had once stood. Hagar’s things were boxed and stored in the space under the roof. The picture of the greenish woman was brought down and hung in the newly painted bedroom, and Klimt’s watery dead women were taken to Yoash to be reframed and returned to the kitchen. I brought them back on the day that bus number eighteen blew up, the day that bus number eighteen blew up for the second time, and the explosion shook the windows of the house, but I walked down Agrippas Street to Yoash to fetch the picture and continued about my business. I realized what I was doing, but its purpose escaped me, and as I packed and unpacked, moved furniture, took pictures down and hung them up, I enjoyed waiting for the understanding to come. Waiting for something that I felt would come later.

At the age of forty-two and a bit I started life as a semi-retiree. Reading in the morning paper about how we were settling accounts in Lebanon. Reading books in the morning. Going nowhere in particular without a shopping bag or a purse. I didn’t disappear from the world or shut myself up in my lair: from time to time I took freelance jobs, which I still do, and wrote applications for support from various funds on behalf of various organizations. I sat on the board of a public committee, and I do a little volunteer work for two non-profit justice-seeking organizations. Family and friends come to visit and I visit them, Talush comes to lie in my bed and get some rest from her twins. On Friday afternoons people often drop by, their children run up and down the stairs, shaking the rail and threatening to fall with it.

My financial situation is stable and my health is excellent. At least four times a week I go out to run, and with time my route has grown longer, so that it reaches the Israel Museum, passes the Knesset, and returns via the Supreme Court. It was on such a night run with my walkman that I heard the news of Rabin’s assassination — Hagar was there in the square, I had let myself off going to the demonstration — and when I got home and switched on the television, under the rush of adrenaline surging through me and the flood of phone calls to me and to her, I was still waiting to hear from him.

After the murder, when everyone jumped up to make declarations and beat their chests and point their fingers, and at the fund, too, when people asked themselves where we had gone wrong and what more we could have done, all I wanted to do was retire. Young people, my daughter among them, lit candles in the square and fell on each others’ necks in an orgy of shocked and weepy self-indulgence; at the fund people talked a lot of nonsense then about “the youth,” they seemed to believe that singing sentimental songs, waving candles, and holding “dialogues” would really bring about a new reality here, and I no longer knew what was true and what was false, everything seemed false to me — or at moments that were far worse, like a kind of banal and uninteresting truth. I would switch on the television then and without turning down the volume I would stop hearing the words. Faces on the screen were distorted as if by crooked mirrors, until for seconds at a time I was overcome by panic at not being able to recognize them. I thought that if I screamed the picture would come right and I would see human faces again, and human beings would start talking a human language that I could hear again — why were they talking to me like this? — but in the end the picture straightened out without my screaming, or I switched it off, and only the lump in my throat remained.

I retired from my job, and at the age of forty-two, for the first time in my adult life, I had all the time I wanted in which to think. But grace did not visit my thoughts. Grace did not come from my thoughts.

ONE NIGHT

One night this week I woke up when I heard him calling me from outside my dream. I had fallen asleep late, at about four in the morning, and apparently soon after falling asleep I dreamt that some woman was chasing me, I was being chased by a woman, and I was hurrying down a winding street behind the Natural History Museum. In the dream I didn’t see my pursuer, I didn’t know where she would appear from, but I knew that she was chasing me or lying in wait for me, and so I was walking quickly. I walked quickly, but the street kept growing longer and longer, as if it would never end, even though it was still the very same street behind the Natural History Museum, which I knew well and which you could walk down in a minute. In the way you know things in a dream, I knew what she wanted, too. When she caught up with me, the woman would bend down and with two movements she would cut my ankles.

At some stage of my lengthening flight from her I heard him call my name, not in the dream but from outside it, from the room, as if he wanted to tell me something or ask me something, some everyday thing, and that was why he was standing in the doorway and calling me, and when I opened my eyes to answer, I could on no account convince myself that his voice, too, was part of the dream. If his voice belonged to the dream then I was no longer able to distinguish between dream and reality. I couldn’t fall asleep again and so I got up and got dressed and went outside to walk around the streets in the direction of the open market.

Before dawn the black of night changed to a deep blue darker than the darkness, though the streetlights were already switched off. There were a few trucks parked on the oily wet asphalt of Agrippas Street, and two men were loading empty crates onto one of them, with a kitten wailing like death beneath it. Next to the roadblock outside the market two border guards stopped me with, “Hey, lady, you looking for us? You lose something? …” and one of them held out a floral scarf. For a moment I imagined for some reason that they had pulled it from my neck when I walked past them, but when I left the house I wasn’t wearing a scarf, and anyway this scarf wasn’t mine and it didn’t look like any scarf of mine. I summoned Nira Woolf to my aid, I grew six feet tall and asked for a cigarette, which I smoked in their company. They asked me if I had a problem, and I said that no, I lived nearby in the neighborhood, I wrote at night. A reporter? No, a writer. The taller one said that he had a story, one day perhaps he would write it himself, and the short one said that the market at Passover without pita bread wasn’t the same market. The air was warm, with a faint smell of jasmine blossoms and rotting fruit. Stripes of gold-blue were painted above the city when I left them.

This wasn’t the first time I had heard his voice calling me: “Noia.…” It had already happened a number of times. He never called urgently, he never called sorrowfully, he only said my name, and then I woke.

If I doubt that I really heard him, I will have to doubt the Japanese knife in the dream as well, and also the unshaven border guard who tomorrow evening, actually this evening, will be able to buy himself pita bread.

TEN YEARS

Alek left Israel in the spring of 1982, without guessing that Sharon was about to invade Lebanon and invent a new Middle East for us. So that apart from our two meetings when he was staying in the Petra Hotel, I didn’t hear from him or see him for ten years. What does it mean to love someone who isn’t there? If it weren’t for my highly developed memory, I would say that it is simply clinging to an idea, but the sensual memory that grew stronger as it dwelled on every scene was so vivid and detailed that on no account is it possible to speak of an idea, and in fact it often pierced me more sharply than reality itself.