Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Abram Ginsberg died on the first night of the missiles, without regaining consciousness; early in the morning they phoned me from the hospital and I phoned Hagar, and Alek again, who already knew. He was in Marina’s apartment — it was her number he had given me — waiting with her to hear the news. During the night of the missiles itself, after listening to my breathing in the gasmask and to the pounding of my heart, which was beating faster from fear at the sound of my breathing, I spoke to them both. I spoke to everyone I knew that night, whenever the line was freed, but to Alek I went on talking all night long, so that I hadn’t had more than a few minutes sleep when the call from the hospital woke me up.

We buried him at one o’clock in the afternoon. Hagar, brave and stubborn, ignored the police recommendations and the general panic and came by bus from the Negev, but by the time she arrived the funeral had already set out for the cemetery, so we drove straight there.

It had rained heavily in the early hours of the morning, the first serious rain of the year, and the roads were washed and deserted as if it were a winter Yom Kippur. I remember: nervous clouds moved low over the hilltops, pierced by long rays of light, and I drove fast between the tatters of gray and the light. The day before, when it seemed that the Americans were going to eliminate Saddam Hussein with a quick, strong, elegant strike, Hagar and her friends had gone to a Hilula, a celebration held under the auspices of the popular religious leader Baba Baruch, in his home town of Netivot, and she started to tell me about it and suddenly interrupted herself: “It seems so absurd now, the Hilula. Like a minute before the end of the world.” “The world’s not going to end,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “Are you sure?” “As far as I possibly can be. But still it would be better if you stayed in Jerusalem. If you’re worried what your friends will think, you can tell them you’re sitting shivah for your grandfather.”

The dwellings of the dead on the cemetery slopes were deserted, as if the last corpse had already been buried here, it took some time until we found the plot, and we found it not by signs but by the distant figures who looked as if they didn’t belong there or anywhere else, either. Four black silhouettes, of the undertakers from the Burial Society, and another three people standing next to them, all with boxed gasmasks hanging from their shoulders and protruding from their hips like strange alien growths under their coats. When we approached they had already finished piling earth on the pit and on the one-legged old man made of iron and also perhaps on his amputated leg that had been thrown in for good measure, and a thin man from the Burial Society read in a high, rapid voice El Malei Rahamim . O Lord, who art full of compassion … shelter him for evermore under the cover of thy wings, and let his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.… The Lord is his inheritance, may he rest in peace. Big drops of rain fell intermittently on the loose soil. A mist advancing from the east covered Jerusalem. Yacov Rudin opened an umbrella over his wife and the young woman with them, and only Hagar said Amen with the grave diggers, but when the man from the Burial Society laid a little stone on the grave, we all approached and bent down after him. We ask your pardon if we have not acted in accordance with your dignity … go in peace … and meet your fate at the end of days.

When the service appeared to have come to an end, Hagar roused herself, went up to the Rudins and the young woman accompanying them, and explained to them with her hands that we wanted them to stay there with us. The undertakers left, in the silence that descended we heard their van driving away, even though it was parked quite far from us, and my daughter who was then at the beginning of her Jewish development took a Bible out of her rucksack and in a strained hoarse voice began to conduct a little ritual of her own. “A golden psalm of David. Preserve me O God; for in thee do I put my trust,” she read, “… I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest without fear.” The rain grew heavier, Jerusalem disappeared, the surrounding hills disappeared, and in the mud between the tombstones above the muddy earth of the fresh grave we stood, three strangers in heavy coats and I, listening to a girl’s brave voice trembling slightly at the edges as she read: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.…”

“All according to the rules of the genre,” Alek would have said, but what was the genre we were in? The war had not yet turned into a farce, our flesh was not resting without fear, hell seemed like a real possibility, and Abram Ginsberg had died not of biological warfare but simply of an ordinary aggressive germ.

We returned the Rudins and the woman with them to their depressing apartment block in Kiryat Menachem — later I would see similar housing projects but on a much larger scale in Russia — and I dropped Hagar the good soldier off at the Central Bus Station after in a sudden gesture of good will she had presented the embarrassed Rudins with her Bible. She refused to stay over even one night or even to have lunch with me—“I have kids I’m responsible for, their counselors can’t just go off to Jerusalem”—and I went back to bed and the telephone and Alek.

We talked a lot in those first three days of the war, before Tami came up with her two boys from Tel Aviv — Avner hadn’t been born yet — and they took over the house. In the nature of things our conversations were bogged down by “events” but nevertheless they were like a magical continuation, and somehow also completely relaxed.

When Hagar was small, she would sometimes crawl into bed with me; and when she grew up, too, when she came home from hikes, or from the army, or evening classes at the university, she would sometimes lie down next to me to tell me something, and fall asleep in the middle. I liked her physical closeness, I liked her smell and sleeping next to her felt good, and my daughter was an excellent excuse not to let a man sleep in my bed. In all my years I’ve only fallen asleep next to one man, and sometimes his voice leads me into sleep. “Are you already dreaming?” “Perhaps.” “Are your eyes closed?” “Yes.” “If they’re closed, then you’re already dreaming.” And so he followed me into my dreams.

After the first night of the missiles I hardly felt any fear. Alek sounded as if he had a cold, he laughed and said he’d caught it from me. And once Marina cut into our conversation, and Alek explained that she was asking how her granddaughter was, and then I heard-saw him answering her rather impatiently, after which she left the room.

His voice wrapped the events in his presence and turned everything that was “inconceivable” into a part of the general disorder of the world. The world according to Alek … where in the midst of chaos and helplessness, you can sometimes find a different security and a different consolation.

THE SPINE OF WORDS

Miriam Marie went to Cairo in the spring of ’82, and returned looking blooming and astonishingly youthful with a pile of photographs. “This woman was my best friend … and this is her granddaughter … this is where we went to the synagogue … and here, this is the Corniche, you can’t see it properly in the picture, this is where we ran away when two boys were following us.” Miriam wouldn’t have dreamed of returning to live in Cairo, she would have laughed at me if I’d brought up the idea, but the very possibility of “smelling the air again,” and the knowledge that the places where she had once walked were still more or less there, took about twenty years off her age.