Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

Perhaps because of our lengthening silences, perhaps because the others began to leave, perhaps because he had spoken before about voices — I suddenly became aware of the record which had apparently been playing for some time in the background. Not the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, and not Joni Mitchell. Not Judy Collins or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich. Something completely different was playing there. Something I’d never heard before, the angelic voices of women singing to God.

A MUSIC SEMINAR

The months to come were, among other things, a concentrated seminar on music, or to be more precise on Alek’s forty-something records. My musical experience up to then consisted of one year of recorder lessons on the kibbutz, shrieking community singing on bus trips, and Amikam’s not absolutely tuneless vocal accompaniment to his guitar strumming.

With my lack of any musical education I had no possibility of identifying the “irony” Alek found in Stravinsky, of relating to his “inner freedom” or his “playfulness,” nor to compare different performances on the music programs on the radio. But nevertheless I learned what I could as quickly as a dog, both because of the sensitized senses of love, and because I had no choice, a simple matter of conditioning. I very quickly learned that Schubert’s symphonies fulfilled the role of elevator music for him, something played in order to hear neither the music nor anything else. And with the Fifth or the Eighth Symphony in the background, pulled over his head like a helmet, it was better for me not to be seen or heard if I didn’t want to see a blank face or hear a formal voice, flat to the point of sarcasm, answering me.

One degree further than Schubert — I’m talking about degrees of torture here — were hours of Sibelius, with a couple of works by Dvorák thrown in. Because they were the sign that Alek had opened the sluice gate of despair, not reading, not working, just lying in bed and smoking. If anyone knocked at the front door, he wouldn’t answer. Would he be angry if I opened it? Would he be angry if I didn’t? Because if there was anyone at the door it wasn’t me they were coming to see. Nobody came to see me.

My musical conditioning was such that to this day it’s enough for me to overhear a couple of notes from a radio, or the window of a house, for my whole body to react immediately. Or sometimes it happens the other way around: first the body reaction and the images return, and only seconds later do I become aware of the sound stimulus in the background. One morning last summer when Hagar was visiting I woke up with an old joy, smelling a whiff of the Flex shampoo that I didn’t have in the house and hadn’t bought for years. A Debussy piano sonata was playing and announcing a morning of the good morning to you kind, a morning promising a day of cheerful well-being in our abode. Soon the winter sun would warm my shoulders in the kitchen. “Yesterday I bought us strawberries in the market,” and “Why don’t you slice some bread? Should I put cream and sugar on the strawberries?” And at those moments of waking my whole body was invaded with a sense of youthful joy, until a woman’s voice on the “Voice of Music” interrupted the fantasy and identified the stimulus.

Of the forty-something compositions constantly playing then in the background, I taped only one in the days to come, and it too I only play very rarely, in a kind of bitter surrender to sweetness. Gregorian Chants was written on the brown record sleeve.

The low pealing of a single great bell, low voices slowly gathering as if coming from a great distance, and the sense of infinite space opening up a window open to the rain opens to … and slanting rain wets the gas ring and nobody cares. Alek embraces me from behind and puts his hand on my rounding belly. I listen, closing my eyes and putting my hand on my flat stomach, and like then, with my head falling back, I slow time down on the waves of the slow singing over an infinite expanse. Like then, I slow time down, delaying and at the same time waiting for the return of a certain note and a certain moment. Because before he goes back to his room Alek turns me round to face him and his face is completely open. He turns me to him and looks at me as if he admits everything, and as if he is thankful for everything, and a great grace envelops us both.

For some mysterious psychological-biographical reason rooted in the distant past, in those days he associated church music with erotic feelings, as if religion permitted sex, and as if sex had no value unless it connected you to the wings of angels.

It’s difficult for me now to think of this religious eroticism in its raw, youthful, “consumer” incarnation; to think of how we “consumed” this music, to think of all the tours of churches we “consumed.” His favorite was the one in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the descent on foot from the Mount of Olives. He never touched me there, but when we stood there I knew how he would touch me later.

It’s strange to think of that particular music as a “substance” to be consumed, but that’s how I opened up to him then, by “using” this “substance.” That’s how I felt I was opening up. And the world actually opened up again and again, in this mystical pretension, as if the contact of body with body brought us into contact with something greater than we were. Bringing down Bach’s “Joy” on us, bringing down joy on all the world.

Because we were really into it, boy were we into it: with the heavenly sex, with sex and heaven, and the Kyrie eleison, oh God, have mercy on us, oh Agnus Dei, save us, yes, yes, just so, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus . Until we came together on this pretentious trip. On the third movement of Bach’s Mass, on the first night.

We came together, I say, but the truth is that the first time only Alek came, while I had the mental equivalent of an orgasm. Our movements weren’t yet sufficiently coordinated, the coordination came later, and somehow coming wasn’t in the least important. A faint orange light illuminated the room from outside. An orange light illuminated his face. And the sight of his slender face looking tortured in the light was important.

Something in me was no doubt screwed up before that, and Bach is not to blame for the fact that from the beginning I fucked Alek, from the beginning I cleaved to Alek, as if I was seeking salvation.

IF YOU ASKED ME TODAY

My daughter turned twenty-nine this spring, and she’s almost eleven years older than I was then. Sometime or other, when she was serving in Training Camp 12, I think, she began talking solemnly about something she called my “spiritual needs,” and whenever my daughter returns to the subject of her “spiritual needs,” we get into a fight. However hard I try to stop myself I can’t suppress the aggression this combination of words arouses in me. Once, six or seven years ago, she tried to explain to me something about the “spiritual need,” or maybe it was the “cultural need,” because of which she chose to study Judaism, and in response to this I remarked that “If we’re already talking about needs, haven’t you noticed that the toilet paper in the bathroom’s finished?” Afterwards, for a month, consistent as usual, Hagar ignored my attempts to butter her up and refused to speak to me, and when in the end she relented, I almost pushed her into a renewed silence when I remarked that “needs” sounded like the jargon of politicians or social workers.

Since in the end I satisfied her needs by financing her studies, we ended up with a fashionable agreement to disagree. “Tolerance,” they call it.

Today my daughter is studying in New York, for the rabbinate, God help us, and intends to take responsibility for the “spiritual, religious, and cultural needs” of others. From time to time she sends me papers, articles, or little sermons she has written, and in all of them God appears, with complete naturalness, in one form or another. “Redemption” and “the soul” are frequently featured too. Chaos neatly packaged and filed in a clear card-index with an enlightened message. Social justice, relationship, community, responsibility, love, and peace.