Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

I have seven trips behind me, and I can’t say that I’ve seen much of Moscow. We took walks here and there, sometimes for hours. We ate at little restaurants where they served caviar sandwiches on formica tables, where they were generous with the vodka and stingy with the coarse paper napkins. On a number of occasions, without embarrassment or the need for explanations, he took me to meet his friends; but most of the time he wanted to stay at home and refrained from treating me like a tourist. He says that Moscow can tire you to death. That “anyone who didn’t grow up here all his life, his body can’t take it,” and that without going back to Paris he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

It sometimes happens that when he starts talking he addresses me in French and immediately interrupts himself with ‘ “I don’t know already which language I’m talking.” Sometimes he loses a word in Hebrew and clenches his fist impatiently, until I find the missing word and offer it to him. From visit to visit the soft “sh” and wet “r” which hardly appeared in his Hebrew once become more pronounced. On one of my visits he was about to fly to Paris to his family a few hours after my departure, his suitcase lay open on the sofa.

In spite of his complaints about the city, Alek stayed there for longer periods from year to year. He installed new locks in the apartment on Yakimanka Street, which he had initially rented for only a few months, exchanged his laptop for a regular computer, collected books in amounts that were impossible to transport—“at that price impossible not to buy.”

I was full of energy, and nevertheless I too felt no great need to go anywhere, his view was enough for me. A filthy inner courtyard visible from the kitchen window. Rows of windows in the building opposite, some of them curtained in white lace. One ugly wooden chest. A wall covered in old wallpaper with a pattern of leaves with a single picture hanging on it: a fake icon that Borya had given him, a proper forgery, not a reproduction; a tortured Jesus, golden and big-eyed in the style of Rublev, only Rublev hadn’t painted it.

Moscow left me naked. However much Alek tried to explain — and he doesn’t tend to explain a lot — and however much I read, I was left without a language and without an opinion, without the usual ability to discuss and make judgements. I have heard about similar sensations from people visiting the Far East, but Russia isn’t India, we learned something about it in high school, most of the veteran members of the kibbutz came from there, the language sounds familiar, and so I had a kind of presumption that I was supposed to understand, and this presumption was almost always refuted. The strange thing is that I enjoyed this failure, the alarming difficulty in organizing reality, and the inability to make judgements in general or at all. Helpless and with my mind empty of opinions, very concentrated, it seemed to me that I was stretched by a kind of vibration which was existence itself — the devil knows what “existence itself” means, maybe it doesn’t mean anything — but it held intense despair and renunciation and a wild and fearful joy, which expanded inside me, pulsing and stretching my ribs, until I could scarcely contain it.

Moscow left me naked, and I was naked anyway, in a nakedness so terrifying that sometimes I would close my eyes in the childish illusion that for a moment he would not see me. But it was for the sake of this nakedness with him that I kept on coming. Because of the gaze that turns all of me into soul and fills my body with soul, so that I never, ever want to escape from it or perch on the ceiling. Never to be in a place where his gaze can’t reach me and give my body life.

Once it happened that we were sitting in the kitchen, and when he looked at me I thought that it was a good thing he didn’t love me, because even so it was almost impossible to bear.

It’s impossible to exist like this for any length of time. My longest stay was in 1995, eleven days, part of which we were with Borya, and when I returned to the city of J in the hills of J I was like a madwoman gathering her cunning to hide what she sees and hears. Alek spent that summer with his family somewhere outside of Paris, for over four months we didn’t speak to each other, in Oslo talks were taking place with the Palestinians, settlers were demonstrating and blocking the roads.… Hagar wanted to know what I thought about the “right-wing” Russian immigration — how it would affect politics in Israel, and how the Jewish Agency was influencing the immigrants, and how I explained the fact that a fighter for human rights like Natan Sharansky displayed contemptuous indifference to human rights in the territories? So who do you think will influence him in the end? — and I to the best of my ability talked and discussed and debated, and felt myself growing scabs of words until my skin was as dry as a lizard’s, which was the only way I could go out in the sun that was obliterating the city the further we advanced into summer. Jerusalem bleached in the light looked as insubstantial as a ghost town, and the air was so heavy that on my night runs I found it hard to breathe. And precisely for this reason I ran longer, but I obtained no relief even after the effort. I needed the darkness in which I could breathe. And then I began to think, too, of giving up my job at the fund.

ONCE

Once we came out into deep snow from an old monastery whose name I have forgotten — maybe he never told me its name — he took me there to “see a real Rublev.” There were a few cars on the side road, none of the drivers was interested in moonlighting as a taxi, and then he took me to one of those little windowless restaurants which on my own I would never have identified as a restaurant.

“Our Yesus Yosifovich is apparently a blessing the world can’t cope with,” he said as I tried to re-establish my connection to my frozen toes, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Jesus Christ,” he said with a smile. “Yeshua in your language.”

“What about him?”

“What about him? What indeed? What do you do with a blessing people can’t cope with?” I know when to keep quiet, so I kept quiet, and Alek went on and penetrated my thoughts without foreplay, or after the foreplay of years. “God, as I understand it, can never accept human beings or really understand them, and this led to the mistake of Yeshua.… World, as I understand, was created to be different from God, the complete opposite of him, and for this reason there are laws of nature and of morality. But with Jesus what happens is that God entered this world to take part in it, as if he got tired of talking to people about their behavior from distance. As if not only the world needs God for its salvation, but also God needs human beings … he needs a place in their souls for his development, which is a blasphemous thing to say … but God made a mistake.…” I succeeded in moving my toes in my shoes, while Alek ordered vodka for himself and tea for me — I had had too much to drink the night before. “You said that God made a mistake,” I said quietly, suddenly aware of the men at the table behind us and the foreign sound of the Hebrew. “Yes. He made a mistake. Because he is God and because of his love for human beings. Love of God is a hard thing. Hard when it enters between people, and Jesus in spite of sacrifice and forgiveness is hardest love of all.”

“So was God only mistaken in the timing, or was it a fundamental mistake?”

“Now you asked the big question.” Alek drank his vodka in one gulp, and then in an uncharacteristic pose he planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands.

“I asked the big question, what’s the answer?”