Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

The foreign man looks into her eyes, and with a foreign gesture he lights her cigarette. And afterwards too, in the kitchen, he keeps on watching her and offering her a light, instead of giving her the lighter so that she can light up herself.

Compulsive thinking latches on to details and dwells on them as if they hold enormous significance which cannot be grasped in a moment. It keeps returning to them again and again as if there is still something left to understand. The more I think about the meaning of these gestures the sicker I get of my thoughts and of myself for thinking them. Mulling over the subtleties of gestures and their erotic nuances like some idiotic character in a genteel English romance.

You won’t find any such absurd courting rituals in my Nira Woolf stories. No luuuve and no brooding thoughts. Not with Nira. Since she’s my character and I invented her, obviously I constructed her according to my taste: my heroine would never go in for such nonsense as “and then I said to him” and “and then he kept quiet and didn’t say anything.” And nobody would beckon my heroine with his finger—“come here.” Because if anyone ever uses that gesture in my books — and I don’t think anyone will — it will only be Nira herself. She’ll beckon and the man will come, and they’ll fuck on the carpet before anybody can say Jack Robinson. And she won’t spend too much time thinking about it afterwards either, because my James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about.

Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t conduct myself according to them, and although I can argue in my defense that at the age of seventeen I didn’t know what I believed yet, that argument lost its validity a long time ago.

I can imagine Nira Woolf listening to my “he looked at me” and “he went on looking at me,” stroking one of her monstrous cats under its chin, flexing a muscle in her arm and yawning with boredom. At some point she would cut me short and say: “Okay, okay, okay, I get the point, so what happened? Did you fuck on the carpet?”

Yes, I went to bed with Alek that night, not on the carpet but in his carved wooden bed that I still sleep in to this day.

I could have written that in the way my heroine would have approved of, in other words, wittily. I could have mocked him and the foolish girl I was until Nira Woolf split her sides laughing. But that’s not the reason why I sat down to write.

THE MARKETPLACE OF ANECDOTES

The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of faux pas , because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick, the best thing about a good shtick is that like a hawker in the marketplace you can dish it out to people like a tasty morsel of yourself.

So I could sell you this wild shtick about how I got turned on by Alek, and how from the thing we had together I got pregnant, and how afterwards I got back into that whole scene again; and it’ll all be terribly flippant and witty, how I’ll laugh at her, and for a few moments perhaps I’ll even feel healed, because I’ll be really capable of laughing at “her,” who by then is already not completely me.

The truth is that emotional seriousness involves not a little stupidity. The stupidity lies in that toad-like inflation itself, as if vis-à-vis all the terribly painful and terribly important and terribly, terribly terrible things happening in the world, Noa Weber jumps up and croaks out loud: Listen, listen, look, look, I too have something terribly painful and terribly important to tell. Something about my tortured soul. Something about my delusions.

Nira Woolf, for example, would not make that mistake, because my Nira is first of all a moral being, and it’s quite clear to her what’s important and what’s not. Fighting for the rights of dispossessed Arabs, defrauded patients, oppressed women, abused children, and so on, exposing the “system,” saving the innocent and stamping out evil — that’s important. But pining and whining about luuuve when your heart’s broken, all that’s just self-indulgence and nonsense as far as she’s concerned.

“Your heart aches because of some man?” she would say. “Nonsense, darling, just hypochondria, a little twinge you’ve decided to blow up out of all proportion. But never mind, sweetie, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, you go right ahead. And I hope you never know what real pain feels like.”

SO WHAT IF

So what if the soul stole its trembling from a body trembling with terror? And what if the aching of the heart was plundered for metaphorical purposes from those suffering the agonies of real pain? And if I say: there is no soul, there’s no such thing, the trembling soul is nothing but literary bullshit, will the trembling of that non-existent entity stop? Like hell it will.

Because what does it help me to know that the heart is a muscle, just a blood-pumping muscle, if my heart still goes out to him, and the bloody muscle still yearns and swells?

IN SHORT, WHAT HAPPENED

Noa: Where are you from?

Alek: You don’t want to know. Too many places.

Noa: What places?

Alek: It won’t mean much to you. I was born in Sverdlovsk, later we lived in Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and there were a few more on the way. A Jew’s story.

1) He made me coffee in a thick glass and served it on a saucer. Afterwards he opened the iron shutters and watered the pink geranium on the bars. In spite of all the glasses and plastic bottles piled up there during the evening, the kitchen looked clean.

2) When he filled the finjan with water to make coffee he put his book down on the marble counter. It was a German book. Alek said that when he finished everything he intended doing, next July, in one year exactly, he was going to fly from here to Heidelberg, and I, without any justification or logic, felt a little vacuum of surprise and insult opening inside me. “Heidelberg?” I asked, and Alek said: “Why not? All kinds of interesting things started from there. And anyway, I have a scholarship for Heidelberg.”

3) People who were in the kitchen before us gradually left, and those who came in after us took what they wanted and quickly went out again. Because of us.

4) I asked him what he meant when he talked about my voice, and Alek said: “It has to do with slavery and also inner freedom. People, as you know, speak in several voices, you can distinguish by the sound and the content.” When I said “an operations room clerk in a commando unit” he heard the foreign, banal voice, we all have foreign voices like that that speak from our mouths and they are what make us slaves. But when he heard me suddenly say that perhaps I didn’t want to serve in the army at all, something changed, and for a moment he thought that he was hearing my authentic voice. Like a clean note.

All these are distant memories, twenty-nine years is a long time, and I remember exactly only because in the days and hours that came afterwards I returned to them again and again and again, like learning a lesson by rote.

I remember that although I didn’t really understand what he said, it seemed to me that I understood, and in any case I had no desire to break the atmosphere of clandestine understanding in which we had wrapped ourselves. Because of this atmosphere of secret, self-evident understanding it seemed we were only talking for the sake of talking and that there was actually no need for words at all.