The Confessions of Noa Weber (13 page)
And thus, like an Ayn Rand heroine, I came out to him at my leisure, washed and combed, with the gestalt mantra tasting of peppermint toothpaste repeating itself in my throat: I do my thing and you do yours, because you’re you and I’m me. As far as I remember, this nonsense of I’m me and you’re you was a big hit in those days, people repeated it all the time, and always as if it were an amazing, original discovery flung at their interlocutors in order to open their eyes to a vital truth. But in those moments in the bathroom this piece of nonsense gave me strength. And I mean strength. I was an independent personality capable of anything, and I went out to him like a resolute goddess of free will.
Afterwards we sat in the kitchen. “It has nothing to do with you,” repeated the independent, all-powerful personality, “you’re leaving for Heidelberg in July and I … I’ll do whatever I like.” I couldn’t even pronounce the sentence “I’m going to have the baby,” it sounded so embarrassing to me.
“You have to be realistic,” he said and made me lemon tea without being asked. “Normal human beings should be realistic, and you’re not being realistic now.” “Realistic?” I sneered, suddenly sure of my strength. “Since when, exactly, Alek Ginsberg, have you been a realist?” I was great, no doubt about it, I didn’t only impress myself, I impressed him, too, because he flashed me a smile and seemed to reassess me. “So you still love me?” he asked quietly. “I love you.” He looked at his fingers which for a moment touched my face, and on his face there was a new and strange expression of humility. “I can’t be anybody’s father,” he said.
“I know that.”
“You know that,” he repeated.
“Yes, I know, and I also know that you’re leaving, and I don’t want anything from you.”
“You don’t want anything or you’re not asking for anything?” He always had the shocking ability to put his finger right on the spot.
Was it the madness of love that led me to think that although he was afraid of being bothered, he was somehow also fascinated and even delighted by the whole thing? I’m still sure that it was Alek himself, not the illusions of love, who secretly made me think so. By his expression. By the fluctuations in his voice. By the movements of his fingers. As if he were conducting two conversations with me at once. In one language he says to me, with that lip-narrowing disgust, which looks to
me like self-disgust, again: “If you want … to end it, Gido—remember him?—the redheaded guy who was with us at the Rabbinate … he’s doing his residency at Hadassah, he could tell us where go to.” And in the other language he applauds the madness, the holy and actually rather surprising madness of Noa Weber.
“Forgive me,” he says in the end in a gentle voice, “I shouldn’t have spoken like that. A man has no right to tell a woman what to do about her pregnancy.”
I, to the best of my knowledge, am a realist, but how realistic I was at the age of eighteen it’s hard to say. If one of Hagar’s girlfriends from high school had come to me, if Hagar herself had come to me, and said: (a) I’m pregnant, and I’m not going to have an abortion; (b) I’m in love; (c) he doesn’t love me; and (d) he’s leaving the country in nine months time—I would have made her see reason right then and there. First I would have knocked the nonsense out of her and then I would have accompanied what remained of her to a reputable gynecologist to have an abortion.
Yes, and just how do you think you’ll manage with a child? Have you got any idea of what it means to be a single parent? What makes you think that you’ll be able to study and work at the same time? And where exactly will the money come from? And the strength to get up at night? And when the child suddenly gets sick, which happens quite often, and you’re all alone, and there’s nobody else to take care of him but you … or if you get sick, or heaven forbid if you break your arm, and
that happens too, have you any idea of the stress, the anxiety, of being without any safety net at all? Now explain to me exactly what you have in mind. That your parents will bring him up? That your parents will support you both until you grow up and stand on your own feet? Aha, very good, you say you want to be independent. So tell me, exactly how much money have you earned in your life up to now? A hundred shekel as a babysitter? And apart from babysitting, my dear, have you ever taken care of a baby in your life?
Since no friend of Hagar’s ever came to ask my advice about an unwanted, in-these-circumstances pregnancy, I never had a chance to test the effectiveness of this rebuke. On me, in any case, it didn’t work. And I could no more consider getting rid of the fetus than Mary could have sat on a rock in the hills of Nazareth to consider getting rid of Jesus. Which isn’t to say that I thought I was pregnant with the Messiah or any such psychotic delusion, but that the pregnancy itself was sacred to me. Sacred not because I decided that it was, I didn’t decide anything, it was simply self-evident to me.
The word “sacred” is difficult for me, it’s difficult for me to use it without mockery, without being witty at my own expense, but I don’t have any other word, and even today and even now, I can still relive the feeling of hard grace that came with my love and was embodied in the developing fetus.
Since I was young but not entirely stupid, or not entirely detached from reality, I was scared stiff, and the fear naturally increased the closer the due date approached. And although I may not have had a serious grasp of what it meant to be a single mother at eighteen—I couldn’t possibly have known—I can testify that I certainly tried to guess. In other words, at first I just wondered vaguely, and later on
I imagined, and then I imagined more, until towards the end I spent most of the day and night agonizing over completely realistic worries, which, especially after darkness fell, appeared insolvable. It would be reasonable to assume that the worry would banish the grace, but this did not happen, and throughout that winter I existed as if on two planes: one of fearful thoughts going round in circles—birth, hospital, pain, baby; money, profession, baby, money; birth, pain, pain, profession, loneliness, parents, baby—and another plane, on which I had as if been chosen to be blessed. Blessed I say now, and blessed I thought then too, but there was nothing saccharine-sweet in this consciousness. No bliss-azure-skies-plump-cherubs. It was more like a mission or a sign that marked me out, like a burn on my skin, which could not be denied even in great fear. What I’m trying to say is that grace does not banish the fear, but on the contrary, grace can be terrifying.
I have to talk about money, a few words at least. Because if I’m boasting about the courage with which I accepted the pregnancy—which in a sense is what I’m doing—it must be remembered that the courage demanded of me wasn’t so very great. And in order to deflate my heroism a little, I must give an account of the economic circumstances, as they say, in which I cultivated my love.
“Cultivated my love,” I say, “cultivated my love.” To the best of my knowledge I never “cultivated” it. And I only said so in order to needle myself and be sarcastic at my own expense. It would be much more accurate to say: the economic circumstances in which I loved.
When I left my parents’ home in an adolescent tempest, all I had was a small savings account at the postal bank. A little money I received for my bat mitzvah, money I saved from babysitting and counseling at summer camps, and the symbolic dollars my Aunt Greta sent on my birthdays. Since I deluded myself that the rift with my parents was final, and since I had been brought up to work, that same week I applied to the labor bureau, which sent me to an old bed and breakfast in the suburb of Talpiot. Until the end of the month of February, when I could no longer hide my pregnancy and I was fired, I worked there from quarter to seven in the morning to quarter to four in the afternoon. Two Arab women from East Jerusalem cleaned and tidied the upstairs rooms, and I, looking more presentable to the proprietors, laid the tables, cut up vegetables, fried omelets, poured drinks, served meals, and in general provided the guests with “homey service.” At eleven o’clock, when breakfast was over, I mopped the floors in the dining room, the lobby and the stairs, and all I had to do after that was to sit and answer the phone. The work was relatively easy, the owners, an elderly couple, were quite friendly until they fired me—at that period I did not yet have a clue about “legal rights”—and there isn’t the slightest justification to see me as the pregnant-servant-heroine. I certainly am not trying to present myself as such. And even if it happened that I was overcome by weakness or nausea while frying the omelets, these attacks were not severe and passed quickly.
My difficulty with the work was different. I have to admit that the smell of the frying in my hair and of the detergent in my clothes, and all the “go, do, bring,” were quite damaging to my self-image. It’s true that I was brought up to work. I was taught that all forms of work were deserving of respect, but even on a kibbutz scale this was close to the
bottom of the ladder. Service work. Not productive labor that a person could be proud of, definitely not something that brought credit to the kibbutz. And let’s not forget that while I was busy not bringing credit to the kibbutz, Alek was plowing through Nietzsche with the help of a Russian-German dictionary, poring over his mysterious Soloviev and his symbolist poets, or catching the eye of his teacher, the poet Leah Goldberg, in class. I know that he tried to attract her attention in class, she interested him, I guessed that he interested her, too, and this too did nothing to add to my sense of worth.
What Alek’s financial situation was I did not know, and it never occurred to me to ask. That is to say, I knew that sometimes he had money, because then he took taxis and threw money around at Fink’s Bar, and that shortages of cash would last until he got fed up and he would go to work with Yoash. Further details I learned only later, after he left, and after the repulsive Hyman came to inform me of my legal husband’s intentions and of my rights: As of this moment, Alek, even if he so desired, is unable to pay child support, you have to understand this, and since he is abroad in any case, my advice to you is not to enter into a fight because you won’t get anything out of it. At the time, as you probably remember, I advised you to talk to him in order to secure your position, but there’s no point in crying over spilt milk now. Under the circumstances, and if we’re already talking, have you got some arrangement for the child already? They’re looking for an extra girl to work in our office in the mornings, and if you’re interested I’ll be happy to recommend you. Just take into account that you’ll have to learn to type, because presumably they didn’t teach you to type at school, ha ha ha.
I didn’t understand if Hyman had been sent by Alek or if he had appointed himself to the task, if he was trying to represent me or my husband, and the truth is that I wasn’t interested, either. At the end of all the talk he informed me that Alek had paid a deposit for the apartment in which I was living, and that I could go on living there as long as I wished. Hyman also tried to hint that it would be a good idea to “regularize the situation” and draw up a written agreement, but neither then nor in the future did I have the faintest desire for any kind of “written agreement.” Perhaps simply because there was no need for it, perhaps because a contractual procedure of this kind didn’t fit in with my lofty standards and exalted love.
Over the years, partly through Hagar, I discovered that Alek was not a complete beggar, at least not in terms of his home. From bits of stories I pieced together it transpired that Jenia, Marina’s husband, evidently a capable man, had had a hand in some textile business in Poland, and he had not only made a profit but also succeeded in getting the money out of the country, and afterwards, in France, he had made more. I don’t know if Alek took money from him, perhaps he had managed to save something during the period when he was a student with a job in Paris, perhaps he received money from the state as a new immigrant to Israel. The important thing from my point of view is that even before he enlisted in the army he acquired the apartment on Usha Street and renovated it, and it was in the course of the renovations, by the way, that he met Yoash. The quarter of Nachlaot had not yet become fashionable then, prices were relatively cheap, and as a result of all of the above it came about that I and my daughter had, and still have, a home. This fact was not yet known to me when I decided to
have the baby, but even without it, I can’t deny that I made my leap of faith with a safety net spread out beneath me. A safety net consisting of parents, I mean, and with parents like mine there was no real possibility that I would turn into an abandoned-pregnant-maidservant-heroine. Even in my mental state of adolescent melodrama, I think that I knew this.
A few words about my parents’ situation. After leaving the kibbutz we lived austerely for a while, without property or savings, on the salaries of a nurse and an officer in the standing army. The change came two years later, when my father left the army and started to exploit the connections he had made on various sales and acquisitions missions in order to broker private arms deals.
Connections are Benjy’s strong point. Connections and a kind of greedy lust for life, expressed among other things in overpowering energy and dynamic industriousness. My father, Benjamin Weber, is a man whose sense of responsibility borders on megalomania, who slaps everyone on the back and looks after everyone. “Everyone” came to Talush’s bat mitzvah and he went to “everyone’s” celebrations, flashing them, me, all of us, the cheerful, bright blue looks of a tanned, wrinkled little boy. After the Yom Kippur War, and again after the Labor Party lost the elections, and after his heart attack, and when Bibi Netanyahu rose to power—he seemed to have emptied out, with his shirt empty at the shoulders, to have turned into a nostalgic whiner who had lost his back-slapping cheerfulness and his natural ability to fix things with a couple of phone calls. But whenever we thought that old age had finally caught up with him, he pulled himself together, jumped back into the saddle and returned to his hail-fellow-well-met ways.
