The Confessions of Noa Weber (17 page)

Thanks to running or genetics, or perhaps to the fire of my madness, my body is what is referred to as “well preserved,” but it is very far from being the body of a seventeen-year-old girl. Before every
trip to visit him there is a certain moment in front of the mirror when I take note of the changes, but Alek without words somehow manages to persuade me that they only make me more interesting, and to the signs of aging that appear on my skin from one visit to the next he relates the way a woman is supposed to relate to a man’s scars of honor.

In recent years, ever since my first visit to Russia, I began to attribute this identification with the body to the landscapes of his motherland, perhaps because it was very pronounced over there. He always enjoyed feeding me, but in Moscow it seemed that the simplest act of eating gave him immense pleasure, as when he raised a forkful of food to my mouth and said: “Taste this, see how you like it,” and never took his eyes off me as I bit and chewed, and kissed me without being ashamed of the taste of food in his mouth.

“In Israel the food is tasteless, in Paris they know how to cook the best, but food only has a real taste here.” Perhaps because I saw Moscow through his eyes, and through the rest of his senses, I too began to sense the “real taste of food.” Like the taste and the smell of the sex, which were sharper there than anything I had known before. I had never lived my body as I did there, and it had never dissolved and evaporated as it did there.

All this is true, the truth as far as I am capable of formulating it, and still it revolts, it disgusts me, it utterly disgusts me to have to put the sex with him and my body with him into words. “The sights penetrate him,” “he undergoes a transformation,” “he is intent on guessing and serving.” Why do I do it? Because only in this way can I exorcise the demon and smear it like tar with treacherous phrases. Smear it and smear it until I make myself sick.

When he thought I had calmed down he said: “I’ll go down and call Yoash now to come with the pickup,” and I clung to him and said: “No, don’t go. I don’t want to. I don’t want to drive,” and then he stroked me a little more and raised my chin and gave me a look that brought a reluctant smile to my lips. “Five minutes,” he said, “five minutes and I’ll be back with you again.”

By the time he returned I was already dressed and I had also cleaned myself up a bit. I still felt nauseated, but I was already able to think of the drive without wanting to throw up. On the way out to the pickup he draped his brown corduroy shirt over my shoulders, and, wrapped in his shirt with his arm around me all the way, I rode between the two men to the hospital to give birth to Hagar.

The drive to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem took maybe twenty minutes, and when he put me in the nurses’ hands my mood was already greatly improved, as if I had been infected by Alek’s festivity, and had risen to the importance of the occasion. And nevertheless he lingered a little longer, gazing at me in admiration, as if at the ultimate mystery, and then he kissed me gravely on the forehead, as if he were sending me on some important mission.
“Ti molodetz,”
he said to me before he left.

Months later I asked him: “What’s
molodetz?”
“Say it again … ah,
molodetz
. Where did you hear that word?” he was suddenly curious.

“Someone said it to me.”

“Molodetz
is … hero, person who overcomes. You say this of a man, but it may also be said of a woman. It could be said about you, that you are
molodetz
. The someone who said it to you, he said it about you?” I didn’t answer. It was a few weeks after Yom Kippur, the two of us had invaded Yoash’s apartment in Yarkon Street, and instead of answering I asked him if he had heard anything more about Yoash, who was still in the agricultural buffer zone on the other side of the Suez Canal.

A birth is a birth, millions of women all over the world give birth every day in worse conditions than I did, and I really have no intention of turning my delivery into something heroic. After being handed over to the nurses the usual procedure began, what was then the “usual procedure.” I know from my girlfriends that a few things have changed since then. They gave me a nightgown, shaved me, gave me an enema, lay me on a bed in the labor room, stuck an IV into my arm, and attached me to a monitor to wait. On the other side of the screen was an empty bed, and beyond that empty bed a woman with a middle-aged voice was wailing fearsomely. At a certain point, when I had already lost my sense of time—they had taken away my watch—they wheeled her out, and after that there were other voices belonging to other women. From time to time a relation came in to visit one of them, and every few minutes the midwife came to see “how we’re coming along.” Two or three times she accompanied me, tottering and hanging on to the IV stand, to the toilet.

In years to come, when my friends began comparing the tales of their deliveries, I understood that I had apparently made good progress, i.e. at a normal pace, for a first birth. What I especially remember is the fear of how much worse the pain could get that came with every wave
of contractions, and the graph on the monitor representing the climb from contraction to contraction, like an abstract threat of torture. How much more could I take? The same pain, presumably, was experienced by all the women beyond the screen, and by every woman in the world who has ever given birth, and it is of no particular interest, at least in the context of the story that I am telling here.

What is pertinent to the story is my perverse feeling that I was somehow handing myself over as a willing sacrifice for the sake of something of surpassing importance, which was not only the baby about to be born. Suffering pain and nausea and shivering with cold—for some reason I felt cold all the time—my mind filled with confused, hallucinatory images of ancient rituals, in my folly I saw the daughter of Jephthah and the daughter of Montezuma, and somehow it all connected to Alek and his kiss on my forehead, as if he had sent me to the sacrifice.

Pain is pain is pain, what else can be said of it? But I hadn’t resolved to “bear it with honor” for nothing, my gritted teeth and clamped jaw were connected to the thought that Alek was somehow watching me, and this is what he expected to see. To see me “bearing it with honor.” As the hours passed I gradually lost all control over logic, until at a certain point it seemed to me that Alek himself had inflicted this agony on me, and since he had inflicted it I accepted it, breathing quietly, barely sighing, and hugging his corduroy shirt.

Ten years ago, after my sister gave birth to her twins, a few of her girlfriends were visiting her at home, and, as was usual on these occasions, reminisced like war veterans about battles waged in the delivery room. One of them, orange-haired and ample-bosomed, was
burping Noam on her shoulder, and at the same time making us all laugh with reports of how she had made her husband suffer during her labor, and how she had screamed at the top of her voice. “I had a ball, believe me, I really went to town, people must have heard me screaming miles away.”

“Didn’t they give you an epidural?” “You bet they did. Right at the beginning I screamed so loudly that they didn’t have a choice, they came running to give it to me. What am I, a wounded soldier, to lie there and suffer in silence? How many opportunities do I have in my life to scream? So the minute I get the chance I do it with all my heart.”

In the midst of all the joking and laughter, I envied the funny redhead, who appeared to me the embodiment of female mental health.

The story of my own delivery I kept to myself, of course, even after Talush threw out “In comparison to Noa our stories are jokes for children. My sister gave birth in the Middle Ages.”

Perhaps people have a kind of reflex that makes them try to endow pain with significance, but how could I explain to this group of women hilarious with anarchic mirth—laughing at their husbands, joking about the hospital, bad-mouthing their mothers, giggling at themselves and their newfound motherhood—how could I explain to them the perverse meaning which I had given to pain? This meaning belonged to another world, very far from the living room heated for my sister’s offspring, and though I was sitting there in that living room, it was also far from me. What happened to me during the birth was that I began to think about pain as a kind of sacrifice I was making for Alek, as if I had surrendered myself to pain for his sake. And to my sorrow I must point out that this warped idea was quite detached from the knowledge that
at the end of the process I would have a baby. In other words, I didn’t think that I was suffering for the sake of the child, the way that women in labor are at least supposed to think, but found a point in the pain itself, a point which was somehow connected to Alek. And thus with every contraction that racked my body, I imagined that I was taking the pain and offering it up, dedicating it, I have no idea to whom, all I know is that this dedication was connected to some absolute of love. As if all I had to do was take it upon myself, and I would be rewarded in the end by absolute love, which was not simply Alek-will-love-me, but something more tremendous. Something infinite.

At some point, I think it was already afternoon, the midwife came in and after examining me—“Good girl. Not yet, but we’re coming along nicely”—she asked me if I wanted them to “give me something.” Of course I wanted them to give me “something,” but I didn’t know what this “something” was, I only understood from her voice that it would lessen the pain. In my defense I have to say that even in my warped mental state I didn’t wish myself still more pain, and I was very frightened of the pain to come.

Looking back I suppose they must have given me Pethidine, and that while it dulled the pain it somehow increased the hallucinations, because at that point I really went completely off the tracks.

Although the curtains in the room were closed, light still came in, and in addition they had left a light on over my head, on which my hallucinations became fixed. At first I imagined that the light was growing stronger, and at the same time that the shape of the lamp was changing and becoming limitless and unfocussed like the sun. The spreading sun/lamp warmed me and banished the cold shivers, and gradually it came to seem that it was this that was banishing the pain
from my back and stomach. As if a sweet warm light were seeping into me until my whole being was full of light, from top to toe, and still it went on welling up and filling me. Gratefully, I let go of Alek’s shirt, and silently thanked the lamp, that is to say the sun, that is to say the face which had begun to appear inside it and which I really cannot describe, except that it was surrounded by a halo like a figure in an icon or that it was itself the aura of something else hidden in its light, which was far more radiant and present than a figure in an icon. The face was very clear, like that of a very familiar personality, clearer and more vivid than any familiar personality … and nevertheless like a familiar personality, and nevertheless, for some reason, impossible to describe. All I know is that this figure revealed itself to me like love, and that with its appearance I felt completely loved, as if I had been made one with my love and now it was inside me, and I dwelt safely within it forever, or something to that effect.… And it was still somehow connected to Alek. As if I had prostrated myself before it like a supplicant, and been promised that my yearnings would be fulfilled. And as if the light was the happiness filling me to overflowing.

It was with the sensation of this superabundance of light, I think, that the change started, and the same thing that was pouring and pouring into me began to arouse my fear. It seemed as if the light was converted inside me into some other substance, and although it was still light, this dense light was crystallizing inside me into something hard and blazing. The light grew stronger, the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the face of the figure turned into a burning presence. And the heat increased even further, until I felt the burning light on my skin, in a minute it would be inside me, melting my bones, boiling my blood, turning the fluid in my eyes to steam. Glued to the bed I pleaded with
the figure to withdraw its light, whether it was an expression of wrath, or simply the annihilating effect of its powerful presence, which was growing more powerful all the time.

Like a frightened child I covered my face with the shirt and folded my hands on top of it, but even thus, with my eyes closed, the harsh light and heat increased to terrifying proportions. And only when it seemed that I could bear it no longer, the light and the fear gradually began to grow dimmer.

Three times this experience returned. A benevolent light converted into a burning one, dying down into sweetness, sweetening my blood, pouring into me with infinite gentleness, and then intensifying and hardening inside me and above me with blind indifference.

In days to come, when Talush was getting ready to give birth, I read in one of her manuals about the existence of a defined stage, before the appearance of the major contractions, when it sometimes happens that for a few minutes a woman enters something like a psychotic state. Since in the middle of this hallucination I was rapidly wheeled into the delivery room, I imagine that this is the stage I was in, and that the “stage” and the Pethidine produced their effects on me. But neither the “stage” nor the Pethidine can explain the specific content of my hallucination, and the way in which it was related to Alek and the obsessive thoughts of love that accompanied me throughout.

After the birth I did not give the experience much thought. The baby’s presence and Alek’s absence were more compelling, and it was only half a year later, on one of our invasions of Yoash’s apartment, that I told Alek. Not what preceded the hallucination or followed it, but only
the visionary delusion, with his presence expurgated. Alek, his hands clasped behind his neck, listened as if what I was telling him was the most natural thing in the world, and although it was interesting, even very interesting, there was nothing strange or surprising about it. “It happens that a person dreams a dream that seems not to belong to him,” he said quietly, as if stating a fact, and reached under the blanket for the packet of cigarettes. There was no mystical mumbo-jumbo or gush in his reaction, and this made it easier for me to talk. “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said, “although it wasn’t exactly a dream … but that’s what it felt like, as if I dreamt somebody else’s dream.” “Except that now it’s your dream, too,” he replied with a smile, and pulled me onto his chest.