The Confessions of Noa Weber (3 page)
A parody of self-interpretation will not bring me the self-disgust I’m looking for.
I say a parody of self-interpretation, partly because my childhood wasn’t as miserable as I described it, but mainly because I, in contrast to my sisters-who-love-too-much, do not believe that my dybbuk has a “psychological background.” My father, my mother, and Yochie the kibbutz children’s caretaker, have no part in this story, and if not for the psychobabble they hear on the television or read in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to the love-addicts of LAA to shove their parents into the picture, either. Think of Romeo and Juliet, for instance: it’s true that Romeo and Juliet had parents, and logic demands that before the play begins they had some kind of childhood too, but nobody would seek the reason for Juliet’s love in Mrs. Capulet’s eating
disorder, the love came of its own accord, the love seized hold of her, the love made her what she was. And in the face of such a lightning bolt only an idiot would insist on asking, “Why?”
So even if I could easily offer a psychological explanation for my dybbuk, and not only just one but a few, in this matter you won’t get even a hint of a clue from me. Accept it, dear reader, or not; here I stand, and this is not a psychological novel.
And if, like some stubborn interviewer, you go on nagging me about the “why,” I’m prepared to throw out the hypothesis that on the second of July, nineteen-hundred and seventy-two, somebody put a love potion into my coffee. It was black Turkish coffee, and I drank it from a thick glass purchased in the Machaneh Yehuda market in Jerusalem. The kind of love potion imbibed by Tristan and Isolde, who as far as I know had no psychological reasons for their love either.
Nineteen seventy-two was an eventful year. Richard Nixon defeated McGovern. Bobby Fischer defeated Spassky. The Pope visited China. Brezhnev was taken for a ride on Apollo 15. Terrorists poisoned the pandas in the Washington Zoo. I’m not being serious here. I could have done a bit of research to refresh my memory, but I don’t leave the house now, and what do I need research for? I’ve already warned you that there isn’t going to be any historical panorama here, only me, me and my life, that in the summer of ’72 received its present form.
I can’t describe what I was like before the second of July, but if it’s really necessary, think of a formless entity of a girl. Naturally I did
various things, like most of the people around me, and voiced opinions like them—more emphatically than most, as a matter of fact—but these deeds and words did not shape the entity I was into any particular form.
Because what can you already say about a seventeen-year-old girl? That she’s a good student, but not a nerd? That she’s athletic? That she collects stamps? I didn’t collect stamps. That her relations with her parents are strained and her relations with her younger sister a little less so? Open any teen magazine and you’ll find hundreds of girls described in precisely the same terms.
When I say formless, I mean mainly in the bodily sense. My measurements haven’t changed much since then, only my style of dressing has undergone changes; in the summer of ’72 I went about mainly in batik skirts and Arab kaftans, and my sense of my body underneath them was as loose and fluid as the garments. In hindsight, that body seems to me like a sea mollusk without edges, as if it hadn’t been properly packed into my smooth girlish skin.
Of course I didn’t think of myself in those days as a formless mollusk. In April I began to fuck and in May I discovered how to come. The earth didn’t shake, even though I wanted very much to convince myself of a certain tremor, but in any case at the beginning of July, with the experience of about ten orgasms behind me, I saw myself as a model of decadent sensuousness, Liza Minelli playing Sally Bowles.
I began to fuck, I say, but in those days in our school nobody “fucked,” not even the boys. “Going to bed with,” we called it politely, or “going all the way,” or best of all: “making love.” And since I had “made love,” or more precisely in order that I could at long last “make love,” I was naturally obliged to assume that I was “in love.” My boyfriend’s name was Amikam, and he too was officially in love.
In order to “make love” we would go for hikes in the countryside on holidays and weekends. On ordinary weekdays, we would go to the Jerusalem forest, a place which should more properly be called the Jerusalem woods, and it was all as nice and delightful and enjoyable as it was supposed to be, except for an alarming weariness that sometimes overcame me on the way back. This weariness sometimes came over me without any connection to anything: a gray heaviness that poured in and overpowered me so that I had to sit down on the curb. My head like a hot sponge, my eyelids stuck together, hearing the cars go past, smelling asphalt and gasoline, and losing my limbs that refused to take messages from my brain. How many times did it happen? Five or six, I don’t remember, but I do remember Amikam’s hands massaging my shoulders, invading my bra and retreating with the noise and heat of another passing car, the hands of a boy trying to awaken Sleeping Beauty.
Sex is supposed to wake you up, love is supposed to wake you up, but me, a healthy and athletic young girl—first in the thousand- and two thousand-meter races—it put to gray sleep. We surmised that it was because of the pill, and since we were both about to be drafted into the army, and didn’t expect to see much of each other after that, even though we would “still be a couple,” be faithful to each other and so on, we decided to forgo the contraceptive pills I had very responsibly started to swallow a month before we “went all the way.” Today it’s clear to me that getting rid of the pills was
inter alia
a promise that I would remain faithful to him, faithfulness being a subject on which we conducted lengthy and solemn seminars during this period. Should we give ourselves a chance to “experience relationships with other people”? Should we “free each other” before we began our army service? Did “a love like ours close us off from other experiences”?
At the beginning of the summer we went together to see the movie
Cabaret
, and came to the common conclusion that it was about repulsive people in a sick society, and that it was no wonder that the Germans ended up doing what they did after such appalling decadence. We weren’t lying, this was our honest opinion about which we both agreed, but an hour after we left the cinema it happened that I came on to him with a new, provocative boldness, and while I was busy doing so I also fantasized that Amikam was Michael York and that I was lying between him and a decadent German baron who was embracing me closely from behind. What Amikam’s fantasies were I don’t know. Perhaps the suppleness of Sally Bowles, perhaps the firmness of the German baron, or perhaps he didn’t fantasize at all. Everything seems possible to the same extent. What do I know about him? In any case it was good that night, except for the attack of weakness afterwards, which is the only one that I can place in the context of a specific event.
Was killed on the Golan Heights in the first week of the Yom Kippur War. He was my first boyfriend, with whom I “made love,” and that should be important. He was my boyfriend for two years. I can conjure up his appearance in words: very tall, shoulders sloping slightly forward, black hair on a chest that never got a deep tan, black hair on fingers strumming a guitar—“I’m just a poor boy …”—brows frowning in concentration like a little shelf jutting from his forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple. I can describe him in words, but I can’t really see him. He
isn’t present, and although I feel guilty towards him, there isn’t enough substance in the memory to torture and chastise me. His ghost doesn’t haunt me at night and I have never had nightmares about him.
What is there to say about a seventeen-year-old girl? What is there to say about someone who was nineteen years and three months old when he died? He was a good student. He was an outstanding soldier and an outstanding tank commander, or so I was told. Amikam read two newspapers every day, Amikam wrote a fine essay on
Escape from Freedom
by Erich Fromm, Amikam was a counselor in the Zionist Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, he liked Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, he couldn’t dance and he could fix things, and everything he did he did seriously and with concentration, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his black brows frowning. Once, when I tried to remember his touch, I thought of a wooden board.
I didn’t go to his funeral. When he died Hagar was already there, a baby of five months, and I was detached from my surroundings owing to my madness and my motherhood and because of the melodramatic pose I had adopted. I heard about his death weeks after he fell and it was too late to pay a condolence call to his parents. And anyway, how would I go? With the “accident” baby in my arms? I didn’t even fit the role of the ex-girlfriend, their son’s first sweetheart. And, in any case, they bore me a grudge.
I don’t intend to dig up what happened with Amikam, the way I treated Amikam. Such things happen, when I did what I did I didn’t know that he was going to get killed, and, anyway, it isn’t him I’ve been carrying around for the past twenty-nine years. Amikam comes into
this story only because one evening he took me to an apartment on Usha Street, in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, where I still live today.
Amikam related to politics with the same thoroughness and deliberation with which he prepared for his final exams, with which he mended a coil in the electric heater, with which he “went all the way” with me. When he was asked about his political views he was in the habit of replying that he “saw himself as part of the New Left,” and for months before his conscription he was engaged with the question of whether he should “go even further to the left,” in other words, left of his parents who were active in MAPAM, the Zionist-Socialist United Workers Party.
Amikam took me to Usha Street because a graduate of the youth movement who had “gone even further left” told him about an interesting group that met there in the evenings. History students. Activists from poor neighborhoods. Artists. Students at the Bezalel Academy of Art. And so on. I didn’t want to go. In arguments I couldn’t get out of I showed the proper degree of enthusiasm, but the truth is that politics interested me less than they did Amikam, and the thought of entering a strange house with a group of people older than myself embarrassed me. We lived mainly among our peers, and the world of the free spirits who had already completed their army service seemed to me like a vague and distant dream. A magical stage which would no doubt arrive, but which we were still too callow to be fit to enter. I knew that I would be ashamed
of my very presence in their space, and I knew that I might very well, however unjustly, also be ashamed of Amikam. And nevertheless I went. I went because I was his girlfriend. And I went because the next day we were due to take our final exams in literature; and on the pretext that we were going to study late into the night, I received permission from my mother to sleep over at his house, in his sister’s room.
Thirty-six steps of an external stairway led to the apartment on the second floor. I didn’t count them then. Forget the prophecies of the heart: No premonition told me that for the next twenty-nine years I would go up and down them about seventy thousand times, a few hundred of them with a baby carriage; no tingling of my toes hinted that I would wound my exposed big toe four times on the rusty can holding the sick jasmine bush that refused to die; that in certain moods I would decide to change the soil and plant a new bush there, and in others I would plan to drag it to the dumpster, and that I would never do either; I had no inkling that I was to see the top of the shaky iron banister covered with a strip of snow, and that its unsteadiness would worry me from time to time, and that about this too, I would do nothing.
Entering the apartment was as embarrassing as I had imagined. The noise inside was so loud that the students/artists/neighborhood-activists did not hear us knocking, and when they finally opened the door it turned out that Amikam’s acquaintance “who had gone even further left” wasn’t there. The bearded man who opened the door identified himself as “Hamida,” and when we said together “What?” and “Sorry?” he barred our way and demanded to know whether or not we recognized the right to self-determination.
His real name was Yoash, and Yoash, as an expression of his right to self-determination, had gone to the Ministry of Interior and demanded to have his name changed to “Hamida.” The Ministry of Interior, for its part, had argued that “Hamida” was the name of an Arab woman, that a Jewish male could not call himself “Hamida” on the grounds of fraud and imposture, but Yoash insisted on his right to call himself whatever he liked, and his correspondence with the Ministry of Interior and with the lawyers he badgered to represent him for nothing, as a public service, filled a shiny orange folder which he took with him wherever he went. I learned these details later; at the threshold, the exchange was confined to Amikam’s declaration that we did indeed recognize the right to self-determination, a slogan which served as the “open sesame” that let us in to the apartment.
Amikam and I sat on a mattress while a passionate debate about the Organization of African Unity stormed above our heads. Anyone listening might have gained the impression that the question of whether Africa should unite would be determined on Usha Street, and if so, around what principles, for example whether the spread of Islam was a stage that could be skipped, or whether “we had to go through it.” Someone lectured with astonishing knowledge about colonialism and Liberia, colonialism and Cameroon, colonialism and Ethiopia, Somalia, the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, and I remember thinking that I should know something about all these places; my father traveled a lot to those parts of the world, to make devil-knows-what connections and to negotiate all kinds of deals. The business he had entered a few years before was called the Agricultural Development Corporation, and from then on the hall table was covered with shiny brochures in English and French, with photographs of a black man
driving a red tractor, and a black scientist holding up a test tube like a wine glass and flashing a white smile from ear to ear. During all his years on the kibbutz my father had never worked in agriculture, except for the seasonal mobilizations it was impossible to get out of, and his partners in the enterprise had retired from the army only a little while before he did so himself, but to this day he continues to insist that “although the company had expanded its interests from grain storage to heavy equipment and other areas of aid,” it had never sold anything shady to any shady regime. What do I know? What did I know then? Only that from the day he became a civilian the house filled up with all kinds of junk from Africa—families of carved elephants, masks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, stinking leather gourds—and nevertheless I couldn’t place Liberia on the map. But why am I dwelling on my father? And who cares about Liberia? And what do I care today about which theoretical organizations that group was debating then? I didn’t sit down to tell nostalgic tales about the Jerusalem folklore of student radicals in Nachlaot in the seventies—and here I am already dragging in “jasmine bushes” and “Bezalel” and “Yoash-Hamida”—and with this kind of decor, in a couple of pages I’ll have turned myself and my life into something affected and anecdotal. It’s very easy to present yourself as a charming bunch of anecdotes, but it wasn’t for the sake of being charming that I sat down to write, nor was it to capture the “period” and its “atmosphere,” which in any case I have no desire to remember.