Gail Hareven - The Confessions of Noa Weber

Aunt Greta came to Israel not in order to make her peace with us, and returned to New York.

Abram Ginsberg came to Israel after he had “crossed too many names off his address book,” as his son put it, and Alek himself lost interest in Israel and was living alternately in Paris and Moscow, without making either of these places his.

Around what spine of words can these stories be organized? The victory of Zionism? The failure of Zionism? Post-Zionism? Jewish psychology? A new national reality at the end of the millenium? Hagar tries to organize them for herself in precisely these terms, while I succumb to an attack of nervous boredom whenever anyone opens his mouth and talks to me in sociopolitologish, which has been happening more and more frequently over the years. Government ministers, professors, rabbis, and writers, the man in the street in his capacity as “the man in the street” and the taxi driver in his capacity as “the taxi driver”—all of them chew over reality in sociopolitologish: they talk about “strata,” “ethnic groups,” “elites,” they speak of “cultures,” “immigrations,” and “populations” which suffer from “complexes” and “traumas.” I myself speak in sociopolitologish, and not only to others but also to myself. But there has to be, I know there has to be, another language.

This illusion that people’s private destinies can be explained at all; what makes them go and what makes them stay.…

What makes them go and what makes them stay? The beating of a butterfly’s wings in Korea. An old taste suddenly coming into the mouth. Unrequited love. Hidden rage. Sensitivity to some invisible molecule that was in the air at a particular moment in time. Sometimes a great wind blows up, an evil wind which sweeps people away, and then too there is no point in words, which cannot really capture the victims.

No evil wind swept us away in the Gulf War, which from day to day degenerated into a kind of sticky, hysterical farce, but what happened from my point of view was that in a strange and completely unexpected way I entered a new incarnation with Alek. We became friends. And then I went to visit him in Moscow.

PASSOVER

The last day of Passover ended tonight, with a din of cars hooting for pita bread and falafel. The most vulgar and crowded secular seder of all. With the smells of family and cooking ingredients and scouring kettles. All the smells of the Jewish incense that keep the danger of spring at bay.

Long ago, at the beginning of the holiday, when I had just begun to write, I thought of purifying myself until I concluded with a great hymn of praise to everyday secular reality. To a reality without illusions, to the empty yellowish summer sky, to the Zionism of the soul planting itself in history with the morning paper. When I finish my confession, I imagined to myself, I’ll begin to quietly praise. I’ll bow my sinful head and sing a modest hymn to the only reality there is: a ray of sunlight creeping over the table … a child’s hug … a loaf of bread … the tired eyes of my friends … the tired laughter of mothers … a pot wrapped in a kitchen towel … the voice of the newscaster.… Thus, stitch by stitch, I would embroider the fullness and the richness.

Tomorrow they’ll be holding the traditional “Maimouna” celebrations at the Saker Garden, two streets below my house. Am I supposed to praise and extol this mass cookout, too, the carcasses of beef, the fullness of the chewing mouths, the melting ice cream and the screeching loudspeakers?

If this is the good, then the good is urgently in need of redemption.

On second thought, it’s clear to me that I’ll never take Nira to Moscow, not in a fur coat and not in a summer dress. If I took her there it would only be to kill her off, to push her under the midnight train to Saint Petersburg, a development my editor would on no account be willing to accept.

In 1999, when we wandered ’round at night among the fantastically illuminated, newly painted aristocratic mansions, Alek explained that it was the Mafia that had cleaned the streets of the small time gangsters. “Thanks to the big crooks we can walk here in safety.” What would Nira Woolf, Lady Justice-for-All, do in this chaotic free-for-all, where even seven martial arts would not help her? And what would I do with Lady Justice-for-All and her martial arts?

In order to get rid of Nira there was no need to drag her all the way to Moscow, it was enough for me to want it, to make a decision, and then I could finish her off right here, in my house.

I enjoyed writing Voice of a Dead Woman and What Did Mrs. Neuman Know? more than The Stabbing . I went to visit Alek, I returned from visiting Alek, we held long and short telephone conversations, I was so aroused that my plots, too, raced ahead on light-footed, quick-tempered sentences. Now I think that with the use I made of incest, slavery, and rape I really did scrape the bottom of the barrel, because what other systematic rage could I provoke within myself? And for Nira and me systematic rage against the “system” is essential; rage with a theory, not simply rage focused on a person.

I didn’t stop hating evildoers and detesting evil — Alek: “The easiest thing is to hate the villains”—outbursts of focused anger still make reality vividly present to me, but Nira from her inception aspired to more, and the elimination of the oppressors in her exploits always signifies the possibility of eliminating oppression itself.

Russia put an end to that for me, Alek put an end to it for me, it’s hard to say exactly how and exactly what changed in me.… It’s not that I stopped deriving infantile satisfaction from destroying scoundrels, but that everything seems infantile to me now.

Systematic rage needs a sense of direction: with justice behind you and evil confronting you, forward to progress and down with the system! Down with Western imperialism, death to the patriarchal oligarchy, out with oppressive capitalism, let the ground burn, let a social earthquake topple the class pyramid, let the mighty and terrible heroic God fall from His throne, bring on the Great Mother who nourishes and sustains all living creatures in His place. “Spiritual nourishment,” too, as my only beloved daughter says. I don’t care, I don’t care — more than that, I’ll even rejoice. From the bathtub I’ll join in singing the anthem. I’ll stick my head out of the window and sing as prettily as a tame canary. Second voice, millionth voice, I’ll sing in harmony with them if they wish.

But the despair, that other despair, that can’t be removed from the skin by the whitest teeth, what will eradicate it? And when the soul, the backward soul, begs for redemption, what will I say to it? Shut your mouth, you’re just a fiction? Or will I shut it up with social redemption, because that’s all there is?

Even when evil has been defeated and the good has triumphed — when foreign workers are not cheated, and women are not beaten, and the poor are not oppressed — then, too, when justice has been done, man will still be in need of mercy.

MOSCOW

Once upon a time I talked about a short-winded confession without perspective, and about Russia in my ignorance I have no perspective at all. I neither loved Moscow nor hated it. I did not understand this city, where I kept on losing my sense of direction, and whenever it seemed to me that the river was behind us, I suddenly saw it in front of us. I didn’t love Moscow, I love Alek, and I loved him there.

We became friends, but that was only “an added layer,” as they say, I still loved my master, like a willing slave, and every time he said to me: “It’s not normal … you should be here now, why don’t you come?” I bought a plane ticket, packed a bag and lied to all my friends and relations. I lived from conversation to conversation and from trip to trip, as if on cold oxygen that I stored up in my lungs, and the thought of the next breath, the next call, was intoxicating.