The Confessions of Noa Weber (8 page)

Jerusalem was charged with love for me. The map of the city was imprinted in me with illuminated areas where the air grew bright and the vibration of my inner waves intensified, the concentrated areas where we had wandered together, and the further I receded from them in my imagination, the grayer I grew inside, disappearing from myself into the gray, flat nothingness.

Alek was going to leave for Germany in July, I had no doubt that he would leave, but until July there was still more than nine months to go, a short time, a long time. I couldn’t consent to this time being taken away from me. Love had mobilized my entire being, love ruled me like a tyrant, and love would allow for no other master.

I reread the last couple of paragraphs and it’s all true: I couldn’t imagine myself leaving Jerusalem, I couldn’t part from Alek, I wanted to buy more time, true and true and true, but there’s one simple and shameful thing I haven’t yet said. I loved Alek, and therefore I wanted to marry him.

I didn’t look at him or at anyone else when I said: “Yes, I want to.” And the next thing he said was: “Okay, then let’s go and do it now, just tell me where to go.”

At that moment he was a king, he was their prince, they admired him more than ever, and some of that admiration was directed at me too, so that the doubts as to whether we were “really going to do it” were addressed to us in the plural. For a few minutes “you” meant both of us, and that “you”—the crazy, impulsive, glamorous, free-spirited you—was intoxicating. At the first words of doubt Alek threw the cracked pecans into the basket, and on the spot, accompanied by all of them, we set out for the Rabbinate on Havatzelet Street.

I recall the movement with which he aimed the pecans and hold it in my imagination, and Alek in his white tee shirt looks like a boy, slender
and cropped. He was then twenty-eight, almost as old as Hagar today. But even today when the touch of his thinness sometimes feels like the touch of old age—and only rarely like the touch of a slender boy—he is still the same Alek who clenched fist over fist, and so he will apparently always remain, never mind the metamorphoses of his body.

Dalit, Hyman, and two others I barely knew, dropped out on the way on various pretexts. Perhaps things had gone further than they intended, perhaps they had been infected by some other embarrassment, but three of them, surrounding the pair of us like tipsy bodyguards, accompanied us into the Rabbinate building and testified that they had known us from early childhood, and that they knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Alexander Ginsberg and Noa Weber were single. And when the officials of the Holy One Blessed Be He began to inquire as to the exact date of Alek’s arrival in Israel, it turned out that one of our witnesses was also a Ginsberg, just like Alek, and this Ginsberg quickly improvised all kinds of fibs about the family connection, about uninterrupted correspondence and frequent visits in Paris. “Alexander Ginsberg,” babbled the ginger-haired Ginsberg, imitating the gossipy tone of the clerks, “Alek, as we call him in the family, is a confirmed bachelor. To such an extent that his mother began to worry that she wouldn’t have any grandchildren, and my mother told her, send him to Israel, and you’ll see that he’ll soon find himself a nice Jewish girl to marry.” And we all smothered hysterical giggles.

Alek was surprised to discover that we couldn’t finish what we had come to do on the spot. The men were sent outside, and I was sent to have a talk with the rabbi’s wife as a necessary preliminary to setting the date.

In the years to come I told the story of this interview countless times, it became part of my anecdotal stock-in-trade, which I polished up from time to time, perfecting the details of the scene, the asides and the timing. Now I’ll be brief and stick to the facts: A short woman with her hair covered in a brown snood greeted me from the other side of a scratched office desk and without any preliminaries began to explain to me what a mistake it would be to bake my husband a chocolate cake every day, even if he hinted that he wanted it and even if he demanded it, because you get tired of even the best cake if it’s served up every day. She reminded me of my mother with her nagging about the proper eating habits—“Chew, Noa, chew before you swallow.”—except that my mother is a thin woman, and this one had a double chin tucked in over a swelling bosom. In my innocence I replied that I didn’t know how to bake, and only when she sighed, and I, suddenly embarrassed without my male support group, stared at the bucket someone had left by the door, only then did I realize what the woman was talking about.

In the face of my surprising naiveté she abandoned the culinary metaphors and asked for details about my menstrual cycle. Was it regular? How long did it last? And when exactly was it due? I thought about the four who were presumably waiting for me outside, about Alek’s impatience, and about what I would have to tell them in a few minutes, and with this to inspire me, as soon as I realized where all these questions were leading, I whispered that there was a problem, you understand, we have a problem because I’m pregnant. That’s why we have to get married as quickly as possible, a quick, discreet wedding … perhaps right here in the Rabbinate? My face burned with a shame whose origins were different from what the rabbi’s wife supposed.

Overflowing with concern she waddled with me to the clerk, who set the date for ten days’ time, right after the holiday of Simchat Torah. “Light Sabbath candles,” she recommended in parting, “forget the past, and explain to your husband that this is the time to make a new beginning and fortify yourselves with tradition. It’s important to him too for his child to grow up like a Jew, why else did he come to Israel? … The mother is the foundation of the home, the wife is the foundation of the home, you’ll see how your husband will respect you when you make him a Jewish home. You’ll make him a Jewish home, and he’ll make you a queen.”

The really crazy joke in this story, the joke I never tell when I’m delivering the shtick, is that while I was inventing my urgent dilemma for the benefit of the rabbi’s wife, the first cells of Hagar were already dividing inside me. And that I didn’t have the faintest idea that I was pregnant.

I loved him and I yearned to marry him. Even worse, I yearned for him to marry me, to take me to be his wedded wife, to sanctify me.

The rabbi’s wife’s double chin, the nagging tone of the clerks, the desks piled with cardboard files, the mop bucket—these details helped me to cover up my true desire for him to single me out to have and to hold, forever. The decor bespoke a seedy bureaucratic secularity, and I welcomed the ugliness. Since the marriage was not a true marriage, it was better this way, I thought, in all the ugliness of reality, in the harsh summer light, without any atmospherics to soften the facts, without any illusions. It was right, it was fitting, I was happy with it.

I loved him. And Alek wasn’t in love with me. And in spite of my youth, I did not give way to the temptation to interpret various gestures of his as possible manifestations of love. I did not count my steps to the refrain of “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not …” And even when I read between the lines—lovers will always read between the lines, they are never satisfied with the manifest content—I did not deceive myself by discovering signs of a feeling he did not possess. I loved him, and precisely for that reason, I knew that he didn’t love me.

In the nature of things, according to the rules of the game laid down from the start, I did not try to hold seminars with him about the nature of our feelings for each other, their origins and destination. I saw that I aroused his curiosity, I saw that the curiosity and the enjoyment bordered on amusement, and as far as I was able I tried to join in the style of provocative flirtatiousness stemming from these feelings. To behave as if we were brother and sister up to some naughtiness.

It took me years to understand that in Alek’s eyes I, Noa Weber, was the ultimate stranger, foremost because I was a woman. And for all his experience with the members of my sex, to this day he still tends to attribute a kind of alien mystery to us—as if we belonged to a completely different species, governed by incomprehensible inner laws, which a man, however hard he tried to penetrate the mystery, would never succeed in deciphering.

Beyond that—and this was something that was harder for me to understand—not only were we from different cultures, but he was the immigrant and I was the “WASP.” Not just a WASP, but a descendent of the “Mayflower” in Israeli terms, forty-eight on my father’s side, the pioneers of the early twenties on my mother’s side. Which in itself was a reason for curiosity and investigation.

But nevertheless, in spite of the strangeness, it was clear to me that the cloak of naughty flirtatiousness I wore and the ideological reasons I spouted, did not deceive him. Alek knew that I was possessed, he knew it very well, and he chose to marry me nevertheless. Why did he do it?

Twenty, no, nearly twenty-one years later, the first time I went to visit him in Moscow—Hagar had already completed her army service—it happened that I asked him. In January one of the European newspapers he worked for sent him to write a series of articles on the upheavals in Russia, and Alek invited me to join him, and we were there together for a whole week.

One night I was standing in the hotel opposite the wide window sill, drunk with sex, sleeplessness, and vodka, and looking down from the thirty-sixth floor at the configurations of the cracks in the ice on the river below. Alek had parted the heavy curtains for me, climbed up, and opened the upper section of one of the tall double windows, and the icy air cleared my breathing body.

From the moment I had landed, my sense of distance had gone haywire, and at that moment it seemed to me that I could have put out a finger and touched the cracks in the ice, or the white marble of the parliament building on the other side of the river and the six-lane road. Something opened inside me, something opened and spread and adapted itself to the vast dimensions of the place. Alek lay on the bed behind me and smoked. I was electrified, I had wings, I was too awake even to lie down beside him. The height stimulated me. And ghosts of previous guests in the Stalinist tower, people who were once alive and were now dead. The privileged of the regime. The dead man on holiday who hung his suit up in the closet, the dead man who sat
writing opposite the mirror, the dead man who, like me, dried his wet stockings in the bathroom—who were they? What nightmares did they have here on this bed? What nightmare did they imagine in detail when they were awake?

I thought: If somebody pushed me out of the window now I wouldn’t fall. Weightless, I would glide over the city like a bird.

There is a pose that may well only exist in old movies: a man and a woman exchange important declarations while standing not face to face, but face to elegant back. If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the dialogue in
Casablanca
takes place this way, and I apparently had a romantic echo of that kind in my head when I asked Alek: “October ’72 … I didn’t ask you then, but why did you propose marriage to me?” I imprisoned the cold air inside me until he answered me, and when he answered I could hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe I wanted to see how far you would go with it.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking about my politics. “Did you have any doubts?” I asked.

“Yes, I think I did.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it all seems very small to me.”

“It all seems small to you … if you say so. I remember things differently.”

“What do you remember?” Alek sighed and didn’t reply. “What? Tell me,” I turned around to face him. “What do you remember?”

“I think it was hard for you.”

“So what if it was hard? Maybe it wasn’t hard for me at all. Maybe that was exactly how I wanted it.”

“Really?” He examined me with narrowed eyes.

“Yes, really. Why are you laughing?” I asked, laughter in my voice too, and I sat down on the windowsill with my profile to him.

“You’re beautiful.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Actually I do believe. That’s beautiful too.”

“What? What? What’s beautiful?” The click of a lighter, and no answer. I put my hand on the window pane, tilted my head slightly, and with three fingers blocked the river. “You’re wrong. It was never hard for me, not really,” I said and examined the new window picture, “and on Wednesday too, when we say goodbye and I get on the plane, it won’t be hard for me.”

“If it isn’t hard for you, good. I’m glad.”

I freed the river and hid the road. “Have you noticed that someone could shoot straight into the President’s residence from here?”

“There’s already been a shooting here. But in the opposite direction. During the August putsch a photographer was shot in the window here. What are you doing there?”

“Looking at things,” I answered like an intoxicated child. “You know what I think? I think I have a lot of strength. You know how much strength I have?”

“Enough to stop a bolting horse and enter a burning house.”

“You’re making fun again.”

“I’m not making fun. Nekrasov wrote it. He wrote it seriously.”

“Try me.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want me to try your strength? That’s what you want?”

“Yes.”

The next movement looked like a response to my “Yes,” it was impossible to think anything else. It was close to three o’clock in the morning, and Alek got up and got dressed, and as he put the key to the room in his pocket he said, “I’ll be back. Don’t let anyone in.”

The Moscow Alek was the same person, but nevertheless different. When he met me at the airport, at first glance he looked tired, and only afterwards, in the taxi, I realized that the eyelids which were beginning to droop a little gave him a new look of weariness or sad resignation, but that this deceptive expression was contradicted again and again by a lively smile, because Alek, at least during my visit, was as intoxicatingly alert as I was. Not only did he play the gentleman more attentively than ever—I already knew exactly what these gestures were worth—but from the moment he picked me up at the airport he made it clear in many little ways that, more than acting as my tour guide, he intended to be my bodyguard here. In the street he was careful to take my arm so that I wouldn’t slip on the ice. He tied the strings of my fur hat under my chin, carried my handbag, chose for both of us the moment to leap into traffic and cross the road. In addition to all this, he insisted, to my surprise, that I accompany him to all his meetings at the Journalists’ House, and to apartments steeped in the smell of smoke and wet old clothes, all of them either too cold or overheated. “I’m an egoist,” he said one night as we descended stairs stinking of cooking and urine in the dark, “maybe I shouldn’t have told you to come.”