Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

“Wasted on me,” I write to Hagar, “I was born deaf to God and the sublime, eternity, the soul and redemption, and I definitely regret it. If you want your mother ‘to accept you as you are’ you’ll have to accept me as I am, and stop looking for my nonexistent religious sentiments. I have no such latent sentiment, I have never had them, and, if you ask me, the world would look a lot better without eternity, redemption, and so on.” I refrain from adding that her god of social justice bores me, and that her “congregation” that comes to get a taste of “Jewish spirituality” before Saturday brunch makes me sick.

What would my daughter say about the sexual-religious sessions in the course of which she was created? I sometimes wonder if their shadow is sailing in her blood.

If you were to ask my opinion today, that is to say my official opinion, then fucking is for fun, fucking is for the simple joy of it, and all the rest, dear sisters, is pure and total bullshit. That’s what I think, that’s what I think I think, but if that’s what I think, how come certain sounds make my fingers breathe? And how come I revive the pain inside me as willingly as I revive the pleasure? And how come for years I haven’t found any fun for its own sake in fucking for its own sake?

I can mock Alek’s bands of angels until tomorrow, I can talk about the ostensibly illegitimate way he used church music in order to “create an atmosphere” conducive to getting me into bed. And in fact, perhaps not only me. So what? Others used protest songs against the war in Vietnam, or against the atom bomb, or against capital punishment, as a smooth slide into bed, and that’s not the point. A musical accompaniment is only an accompaniment, and it accompanies what exists without it too.

The point is that with Amikam I waited for the earth to shake, which is bad enough to begin with, and with Alek I expected even more, I went even further, from bad to worse. The earth wasn’t enough for me, suddenly there were the heavens above too. And with all my soul I longed for that heaven to open, and even though I don’t recognize the existence of that heaven, for a moment it seemed that it had opened and that lux, lux, lux perpetua was illuminating my soul, whose dubious existence I don’t admit to either.

I should have written to my daughter: At the age of eighteen you were much wiser than me. You knew how to identify your evil instinct, and to tame it like a cute puppy whose name is “need.”

“God,” my daughter repeatedly explains to me, trying to appease my anti-religious feminism and annoying me with the increasingly educational tone taking over her letters, “my God isn’t a man.” And she also writes: “If you would find the time to read at least a few chapters of the collection I sent you (from your last letter I understand that you haven’t read it yet) you would discover that in our culture God has a feminine aspect, too. And this feminine aspect can be stressed in study and developed in interpretation.”

My darling daughter, my sweet and kosher Hagar, first cuts off God’s prick, and then fakes a religious orgasm, and in English what’s more.

But my daughter with her castrated God — does she really believe in His existence? I’ve never been able to understand it — my daughter with her emasculated Sublime, divested of both His prick and His wrath, will never turn love into religion or confuse a man with God like her mother did.

THE WINK

When most of the guests had already left, Amikam came into the kitchen. “Are we going?” he asked me. When I try to remember his face, it’s the way it looked then that I remember: frowning, worried, slightly downcast, not looking me in the eye.

A devil got into me. Or I grabbed a devil by the tail and jumped onto its back. I swear, a minute before I opened my mouth I had no idea what I was going to say. “We’re not going, you’re going. You’re going and I’m staying.” He didn’t deserve such a slap in the face. He had never done anything to justify it. Or the cold smile that appeared on my face when he failed to react immediately. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alek leaning against the marble counter, hugging himself with one hand and smoking with the other.

And Amikam left. For some reason I turned to the window and watched him going down, down, down the steps. I didn’t know that he was going to die. How could I have known? Who was I to know? Even the head of military intelligence didn’t know that a war was going to break out. And in any case Amikam’s death has nothing to do with this scene, and the death does nothing to change the nature of the deed. But what exactly was the deed? What did I think I was doing? A cold, arrogant gaiety bubbled inside me like an unfamiliar drug, and my voice too was new in my ears.

Strange that I felt no guilt for that gratuitous cruelty, only shame, a cringing shame, especially for the gesture that came afterwards. Because when Amikam was already at the bottom of the stairs he turned his head and looked straight at the window, and when his eyes met mine, suddenly and for no reason, in a kind of clownish grimace, I winked at him. As if we were both party to some kind of practical joke, as if it was only a joke, and as if he had some part in this trick I was playing. A thousand years have passed since then, and to this day when I remember it that grimace distorts my face. An unformed seventeen-year-old putting on — what character exactly? One minute I was the reckless Sally Bowles, the next minute I was somebody else, and the next the devil knows who.

In those days, as far as I can remember, the phrase “no big deal” was not yet part of our vocabulary, but that’s what that clownish grimace of a wink was apparently meant to convey to Amikam. “Relax, I was only joking, it’s no big deal.” But it was a lie. It was a big deal, and I knew it even then.

Because it’s a fact that seconds afterwards I turned to Alek as if I’d proven something, and as if I was now worthy.

A lot’s happened since then, a whole history has happened since then, more important things than a stupid wink, than some whim of no significance whatsoever. Only my fixated brain would be capable of latching on like that to a momentary grimace, and I still have to cover my face with my hands and wait and wait, quietly, quietly, quietly, until the spasm passes.

A few words nevertheless about what happened afterwards. Love has its own cruel and banal laws, and in the wake of my scorpion bite, as if doomed by these laws, Amikam was truly poisoned. It was no longer a matter of feeling “the right thing” for a boy and a girl to go to bed together. And it was no longer a matter of a “healthy, normal feeling.” He haunted me, he felt haunted by me, in spite of and in opposition to his declared contempt for me. How predictable are these shameful moves — first he waited for me to come and explain and apologize, I could see the tense anticipation and the anxious awareness of my presence, I saw it in his posture, even when he engaged himself in conversations at the school gate before and after exams. And when he saw that I had no intention of approaching him, because what could I say, he came up to reproach me, and when I still had nothing to say except for I can’t help it, he haunted me.

For months he wrote me from the army, scornful and imploring letters, delving and searching for words that would change my heart, clinging to the hope that somewhere, in some nook or cranny the magic words existed, and all he had to do was search diligently to find them.

But there were no such words because no such words exist, and when his letters arrived I was already enmeshed in my misery and I read them and threw them away without being touched by them. In love, I think I have already said, there is no solidarity, and his clumsy, stilted style — and also, I have to confess to my shame, his spelling mistakes — embarrassed me; they embarrassed me as if they were a parody of myself and my own unique love. In any case, I thought, it isn’t me he loves, but the capricious, reckless character I was playing then. Like falling in love with a character in a movie.