The Confessions of Noa Weber (27 page)
It was a long way back, almost all uphill, I had to get Hagar something to drink, and whatever I had been looking for, if at all, had nothing to do with her and would never have anything to do with her. Because for some reason which I would never be able to explain, Hagar did not belong to Alek, and from the time she was a few days old it was already clear that she didn’t belong to him. So obvious was this to me that the relation between them sometimes struck me with a shock of surprise.
Tami: When will you be done in the library? Should we meet in the cafeteria? No, I have a better idea. I’ll be in the restaurant this
afternoon. Are you picking Hagar up today? Bring her here. Does she still eat soup? We’ll find her something without carrots. You look as if you could do with a good bowl of soup, too.
Miriam: The skinny man with the sideburns was here again this afternoon, asking about you, if I know when you’ll be back. Now listen to me and believe me when I tell you: study, work, study, work, day in day out, it’s no good. A person isn’t a machine, and a woman especially has to find the middle way.
Noa: It’s not my fault that I haven’t got any time.
Miriam: I’ll tell you what, you leave the little one with me, all night long, and go to a movie. And don’t hurry back. A gift from me.
Noa: With you it’s work, work all day long, and you don’t go to the movies either.… How’s Avi? Is he still with that nice girl I met?
Miriam: Don’t talk to me about her, I don’t want to say anything bad. She’s not nice at all, she just wants to butter me up.
Noa: The man with the sideburns isn’t nice at all either.
It took a few weeks, but during Hanukah, when Miriam’s nursery school was closed and Hagar’s daycare was open, we went to the cinema together to see a matinee of
The Godfather
. Both of us groaned in chorus at the sight of the severed horse’s head, we both relaxed together in our chairs when Michael finally put two bullets into the police captain—something, not in his appearance but in his body tension, reminded me of Alek—and only when we walked down the street and peeled the paper off the chocolate bar we had forgotten to eat inside the movie theater did I realize that Miriam Marie had understood the movie completely differently from me. She said that it
was very sad how Michael had been dragged into a life of crime just because of his family, and how come his mother as the mother of the family didn’t have a word to say about the ways of her menfolk?
“Didn’t you enjoy watching Sonny beating up Connie’s husband?” I knew she’d enjoyed it, I was sitting next to her, but I wanted to hear her say it. “I enjoyed it, of course I enjoyed it,” she admitted. “And don’t you think it was just?” “Just?” she exclaimed with majestic disdain, “Just? Believe me, if there was any justice in this world, half the men would be in wheelchairs. Including my engineer and including that one of yours, who doesn’t pay a penny for his daughter. But what good will it do us to say so?” Suddenly, I remember, I had a tremendous urge to hug her, but hugs weren’t part of our repertoire, so I just broke a piece off the bar of chocolate she was holding in her hand and put it in my mouth.
Miriam would read all my books, nobly pass over the passages that embarrassed her, and generously forgive my and Nira’s lust for revenge and justice. My books would stand in a neat row behind the glass doors of her display cabinet, and she would enjoy showing people the dedications, but nevertheless I was destined to hear the most accurate criticism of them from her. She would ask about the sales, I would mention that most of the people who bought the books were women, and then she would say consolingly: “It’s the same thing in the nursery school when we tell the children fairy stories. You can see how it grabs the girls, and the boys start squirming and making noise right from the beginning. Boys are more into reality. And your books are more naive, like fairy tales.”
Alek didn’t pay child support, and even if he’d had the wherewithal he wouldn’t have paid it, he would simply have given us as much as we needed without keeping accounts. I know it. But the way things turned out, when I needed money Alek didn’t have any either, and when Alek’s situation improved I was no longer in need.
Before he returned to Paris I said something about thinking of studying law, and that without help from my parents there was no way I would be able to do it, not in the next few years at least. I didn’t mean to hint, but for a moment an expression appeared on his face which somehow reminded me of the way he looked standing in the door on the night my labor started. I understood that he was condemning himself for not being able to help and I was sorry for the misunderstanding.
He helped me in another way, however, by his reaction to the story about Aunt Greta. Aunt Greta had announced that she was coming on a visit to Israel to check out her donation to Hadassah, and up to Alek’s departure it was not yet clear whether she intended summoning all or only some of us to her presence, and the discussions and conjectures about this question, and about Aunt Greta in general, injected a little of the old vitality into the family. The fact of the donation to Hadassah was unprecedented in itself, because up to now she had totally rejected the state that had robbed her of my father. Not that she denied its right to exist, she simply ignored its existence completely. Perhaps the war had provided her with the pretext for a reconciliation she had desired even beforehand, there was no way of knowing.
To my surprise Alek showed a keen interest in this story, he liked family mythologies, and so it happened that I told him the whole legend in detail.
Aunt Greta was my grandmother’s sister, and when my father was a small child they packed him up and sent him by ship from Hamburg to New York to stay with her. His mother, Grandma Hannah, had died, apparently of a complication of influenza, and in a certain, terrible sense it could be said that this was his good fortune, since but for Grandma Hannah’s fatal attack of influenza, it is doubtful if my father would have survived and I would have been born.
Aunt Greta’s husband, Uncle Haim who was a socialist, “went and killed himself,” in his wife’s words, as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and he wasn’t even killed by a bullet, but died there two weeks after his arrival from dysentery. Uncle Haim’s death, and perhaps also the manner of his death, gave rise in Aunt Greta to an impatient skepticism with regard to volunteers in general, as well as the general foolishness of the world, and armed with this angry skepticism she sold her late husband’s laundry and devoted herself to bringing up her nephew and to the real estate business. Buying apartments, dividing them up, and renting them out. In 1948, when my father announced that he was going to fight the Arabs, Aunt Greta reacted with disapproval, to put it mildly, and when he met my mother and informed her that he was getting married and remaining in Israel—perhaps one day she too might consider joining him there?—she broke off relations with him. My father went on writing to her from time to time anyway: greeting cards for the New Year, announcements of the birth of his daughters, photographs, drawings made by Talush and me, and various items of family news, to which she eventually began to reply, albeit coldly. Towards my mother,
on the other hand, there was no attempt at politeness, only obdurate, unrelenting hostility, and the letters my mother wrote in her broken English were returned unopened. The question now on the family agenda was whether Aunt Greta was about to effect a reconciliation only with the state or also with the wife, or whether perhaps she had no intention of reconciling with anybody, and the visit and the donation to Hadassah were intended only to provoke us.
Alek was evidently fascinated by this story. He said that my Aunt Greta sounded like “someone worth knowing, not at all like an American person,” and added that “every family needs one rich Aunt Greta to make life interesting.” His lighthearted, literary attitude to something I saw as a complicated family dynamic inspired me after he left to write to Aunt Greta and tell her about myself, about baby Hagar, about my keen desire to study law and about my parents’ opposition to this project. Shamelessly, I even hinted that the main obstacle was my mother. This wasn’t true, and it wasn’t fair, but I simply couldn’t see myself working at Soupçon until I managed to save up enough money to finance my studies, and I couldn’t think of any other way out. When I wrote my manipulative letter to Aunt Greta, I imagined myself reading it aloud to Alek. I knew that he would find it entertaining and appropriate to the story and character of the rich, tight-fisted aunt, who every family should possess.
When Aunt Greta landed at the Hilton and summoned me into her presence, the plot advanced as expected, but in a style which was, from my point of view at least, surprising. Aunt Greta did not display even polite affection towards the baby I brought with me, then eleven months old, togged out in a party dress, with a single tooth showing cutely when she smiled.
After ordering tea and cake for both of us, without first asking what I wanted, and even before the waiter wheeled the room service trolley out of the room, she opened a thorough, no-nonsense investigation, without any sentiment. Only when in reply to her question I said in careful English that I was “not in contact with Hagar’s father,” she sighed from the depths of her tough old breast, turned her faded blue gaze towards the view of Nachlaot, and remarked that she didn’t know what was happening to men nowadays. “Haim,” she said, “had his dreams, but at least he was a man. A real Jewish man. Not like the floor rags you bump into everywhere today who don’t know the meaning of responsibility. I can tell you, child, that I personally don’t rent apartments to hippies or psychologists.” “Hippies I understand, but why psychologists?” I asked, feeling for some reason that I could come to like her. “If I rent to psychologists, men will come to see them,” whispered my Aunt Greta in a mysterious husky voice. “Men will come, and you know what will happen then? Those men will begin to whine and wail, and that I cannot tolerate and I will not permit, not in any apartment of mine.” She too was quite an accomplished actress. A woman who lives alone for many years, I think, is compelled to adopt a few eccentric behaviors, even if only in self-defense.
When to my surprise Aunt Greta put out her cigarette on the Black Forest cake—perhaps as an expression of contempt for the margarine—all that remained was to sum up, which she did precisely and succinctly. “It’s obvious that law isn’t for you, and that you, Noa Weber, will never be a lawyer, but as far as it depends on me I will try to help you. And don’t ask me why.” And so she did. Aunt Greta would pay my tuition, my parents would help with other expenses, and
I would find pupils for private coaching, because a combination of a day job and studying law—forget about it, you can understand that it just isn’t realistic.
After she returned to New York I never saw her again, “she flew away on her broomstick and disappeared,” as Alek said. Aunt Greta died at Mount Sinai Hospital in the autumn of 1983, on the day that Menachem Begin resigned, after Alek had already left Israel with his family. In her will she left Talush a few pieces of old jewelry, and to me she left her Encyclopedia Britannica together with its bookcase. The rest of her property went to Jewish charities. But even when I stood in line to pay the custom duties on this superfluous encyclopedic legacy, and when I went crazy trying to arrange for its transportation to Jerusalem, I remembered her with affection.
If I repeated this little story about Aunt Greta it’s only because it is so pervaded by Alek’s spirit that it seems he could have composed it himself. He rejoiced in the concluding scene with the Britannica, and laughed like a child when I described my great-aunt’s rental boycott policy: “All according to the rules of the genre.” As far as the psychologists were concerned, and their male clients in particular, he and Aunt Greta were of one mind.
Hagar, for example, tells this story quite differently. In the eyes of my daughter, Aunt Greta is “an independent woman who existed before her time and paid the price for it” (how does Hagar know?), and
was “one of the many tragedies of Zionism that nobody talks about.” One of the first things that my Hagar did in New York was to locate Aunt Greta’s grave and recite the mourner’s prayer over it (I wonder how the old lady would have reacted to a woman reciting Kaddish, but what does that matter?). In her lectures my daughter sometimes quotes Aunt Greta’s story as an example and symbol of the Jewish fate, which is apparently the kind of story that Americans like. I, like Alek, prefer a different story.
Tonight I entered the LAA forum again to check and see if there was anything new. Sandy, Sally, Sara, and Susan were all singing the same old tune. But for the benefit of the girls someone had gone to the trouble of sending in a whole lecture on biochemistry, “to help us become better acquainted with our bodies and understand what’s happening to us.”
So, everything had begun on the second of July 1972, with a little molecule called phenylethylamine. My brain, which was and is “about the size of a grapefruit,” had become addicted to this cunning molecule which stimulates the nerves, and in my case, as with other addicts, common dependency had turned into an addiction because of a “structural deficiency” in the “monoamine oxidase inhibitors.”
I understand, girls. Now I understand everything. And nevertheless I didn’t understand. Was Alek’s melting smile engraved on my phenylethylamine molecules? Had it been engraved there in advance? From the moment I was conceived in my mother’s womb? And the
touch of his hand, and the smell of his neck, and the smell of his apartment and the smell of snowbound Moscow—are they imprinted on my monoamine oxidase?
If we’re talking about a typhoon raging in my neurons, why doesn’t the storm subside when the storm god disappears for years at a time? And how can you explain the fact that only one person, present or absent, sets this storm in motion, if indeed it is not the person whom my body craves, but only the storm?
