The days that followed, until the rescue team arrived, are difficult to reconstruct in an orderly way, and in fact also the weeks after them. Somewhere before I mentioned the kibbutz education that I refuse to see as the seedbed of my sickness, and the fact that I functioned then I
attribute precisely to that despised education. “Pull yourself together, control yourself,” was the message of my childhood, and I did my best to conform to it. I was always taught that in all circumstances it was important to function, and perhaps thanks to this I functioned, a strange, partial functioning, but functioning nevertheless.
Hagar was what in days to come I learned to define as an easy baby; contact with the world did not dismay her, it did not invade her or disturb her, she slept for hours on end and cried only when she was hungry. I did not concentrate on her, I did not smell her head, I did not wait for the seconds when she opened her eyes in order to inspect their color, but when she cried I put her to my breast exactly as I had been told to, and somehow or other I also changed her diapers, although I didn’t clean her properly. Most of the time, I remember, I sat next to her on the double bed where I had placed her in the beginning; I sat—because of the fear that if I lay down a last barrier inside me would be breached, and I would drown in what burst out. I don’t remember day and night, but I do remember that I piled up the pillows at the top of the bed and propped up against them like a sick person I dozed and woke without distinguishing clearly between one state of consciousness and another. Only once in the dark I know that I got up, took a pail and cloth and for some reason began to wash the floor. It would have been better to wash myself and Hagar, because we were both no doubt in need of bathing by then, but that’s what happened and that’s what I did. And in the meantime the soiled diapers accumulated in a bag, without my giving a thought to what I was going to do when the clean ones ran out.
My sleeping and waking states were visited by all kinds of sensations
and hallucinations, some of which still come back today. The pain cutting through my diaphragm, because of which I can’t lie down. The grayness crawling over my body and threatening to cover me completely if I lie down. Fragments of myself floating in the cavities of my body like lumps of broken ice.
Looking back it is clear to me that I put my daughter into a situation that could have been dangerous, and I don’t take any credit for the fact that we emerged unscathed.
Hands of Merciful Women
is the name of a painting I once saw in an art book; the painting itself did not remain in my memory, but the name stuck in my mind. Most of the actual good in my life came to me at the hands of women, and if I could choose whom to love with all my soul, I would choose a woman and not a man. With the passage of the years I have learned to love my mother and my daughter, and I love my girlfriends, but in my opinion I should love them differently, because even if I can’t do without the folly of “he-makes-me-come-alive” and “I-can’t-live-without-him,” the feeling of love should be directed towards those I can’t live without in reality. And in reality the man isn’t there, and the hands of merciful woman always appeared in time.
When I was still pregnant, towards Passover, it was my sister who appeared like an angel on a bicycle, accompanied by a tiny little friend who turned out to be her classmate. Perhaps she had been sent by my mother to put out feelers, I didn’t ask, but in any case Alek wasn’t
home, and I seated the pair of them in the living room and put on a show for them. They sat close together on the mattress, like two little birds, looking around with birdlike curiosity at everything, and when I went into the kitchen to make them tea—there were no cookies in the house—I heard the tiny friend whisper: “If she only got married to get out of going to the army, how come she’s pregnant?” And my sister answering with a pride that brought sudden tears to my eyes: “That’s how it is when you’ve got a bohemian sister.”
Those were bad days, the days before Passover, days of Schubert symphonies, when nobody talked to Noa; Hagar lay high and pressed on my diaphragm, I only dragged myself out of bed when the little girls knocked on the door, and nevertheless in my capacity as the bohemian big sister I put on a Gershwin record for them, drew them out with amused superiority—what’s new at school and what’s new in the youth movement—and threw out anarchistic remarks about this and that. In the course of putting on this act of a free-spirited woman of mystery my mood somewhat improved, but Talush somehow saw through me, or maybe not, but in any case, for whatever reason, she turned up again the next day on her own behalf, and took out of her jeans bag two papayas and a giant pineapple that our father had brought back from Africa, and a few bars of chocolate from the airport, all of which she had swiped from our parents’ kitchen. “You probably have to eat a lot if you’re pregnant,” she said, and her face was bright pink, and her nostrils and upper lip trembled, as they do to this day when she’s excited.
On the third evening after my return from the hospital, I think it was the third evening, the downstairs neighbor Miriam Marie, who now that she no longer lives downstairs is regarded by Hagar and myself as
a member of the family, and who up to then hardly impinged on the fringes of my consciousness, knocked on the door. She realized that a baby had been born, and came with a plate of cookies to congratulate me, and after seeing me she went downstairs again and came back with a little pot of chicken and rice which without asking she put on the stove to heat up.
Before this I had hardly exchanged more than a couple of sentences with her, in my eyes she was just one of the extras cast to play a bit part on the margins of my drama, but it quite soon became apparent to me that Miriam had taken in more than a little of the drama, and that her understanding of what was happening with me was closer to reality than anyone else’s. So close to reality that in the future, whenever Alek showed up, I was afraid that she would see him and despise me. So that when she moved to Maaleh Adumim on the outskirts of Jerusalem to be close to the grandchildren on the way, I felt relieved. And even though I missed, and still miss, the warmth of her closeness, I was relieved to be rid of her look.
Miriam Marie. If I was a real writer and a proper human being, I would have written her story and not mine, because whichever way you look at it she’s the true heroine and I’m the phony. When she came up the first time she was forty-four, only a little younger than my mother, but she looked years older. She hasn’t changed much since then, as if her appearance had been fixed at a certain age, before old age and after the stage at which femininity, consciously or unconsciously, is directed towards men. Today, too, when she dyes her hair with raven black henna, wears three-piece outfits of cheap gaudy velvet and “artistic” brooches pinned to her bosom, she gives the impression that she is only dressing up to broadcast her feeling of well-being to the world.
When I met her she had one son, called Avi, who was already studying for his master’s degree in education. When the boy was seven she had been abandoned by the husband—“the engineer” she sometimes calls him scornfully, though he really was an engineer—who ran away to France with a relation of hers. A little girl of sixteen from the immigrants transit camp in Talpiot. The main outlines of her story she told me that first evening, I think, holding Hagar securely while she bustled about the kitchen. “If I ever tell you the story of my life …,” she said. Or perhaps she didn’t tell me everything then, as I sat with her weak and dizzy in the kitchen, and my memory is filling in the details from later installments. How he abandoned her to her fate as an
aguna
, a woman whose husband’s whereabouts are unknown. How the rabbis over there searched for him, how it took them nine years to find him. And how she, with very little Hebrew, went to work, first as a cleaning lady, then taking a course to qualify as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant, which didn’t pay enough to care for the child, so that even with the steady kindergarten job she always took on extra work. Over the years I heard these stories again and again: how she managed to put food on the table, how she made sure that Avi went to school, and how in the end she moved to the center of town just so he would get into a good high school. “All his reports were ten out of ten, ten out of ten for everything. One day I’ll show you, you’ll see what they write about him there. But the principal didn’t want to let him into the gymnasium, just because he was from Nachlaot. Every day I went to the municipality and sat there to make them look me in the face, and in the end what do you think? They took him, they didn’t want to, but they did. Just because of my character, that I don’t give in.” What I remember clearly is that at some moment of that monologue I suddenly
wanted a cigarette badly. I hadn’t smoked since the birth, and suddenly for some reason I was dying for a cigarette, so that although I knew I wouldn’t find one, I got up and began opening all the empty drawers in the house, one after the other. When I had despaired of the closet, with my hands still fumbling inside it, Miriam came and stood behind me, my daughter folded in her arms. “You shouldn’t be left alone,” she said. “It’s not normal. There are women that get a psychological depression from it. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.” Then she put her hand in her pocket and offered me a packet of Europa cigarettes. “Promise me you won’t smoke next to the baby.”
In time I began to respond to this woman with the admiration she demanded and richly deserved, but on that first evening I didn’t have the strength to utter a word, as if the road from their origins somewhere inside me to my mouth was too long for me to lead them along it. Nevertheless I was grateful that somebody was talking to me.
When she came to me she already knew that Alek had left—“that one of yours with the eyelashes” she called him—and when she placed the plate whose steam made my face damp before me I somehow understood that she was offering me her biography on a steaming plate as well. That she was laying her past before me not only as “a personal example of willpower and character,” but mainly in order to make this spoiled young girl open her mouth at last and give her a clue as to her situation.
When Miriam’s husband went off with his teenage mistress and with Miriam’s gold bracelets, she had nobody to lean on: her father was already sick when they arrived in the country, her mother had three more young children at home, and in comparison to these facts I know that my unhappiness was like a pampered parody of distress.
A pampered parody of distress—that’s what I was then, and that in many ways is what I still am today. And then, too, when she asked me straight out over a cup of tea where my family was—Wasn’t that your father who hooted for you downstairs then, driving the whole street mad?—I knew how ridiculous I was in the comparison between us: she a penniless immigrant, and I the daughter of parents who may not have been rich, but who were getting richer all the time, and who had never lacked for connections or the sense that the country belonged to them.
I have no idea whether Miriam loved her man before he ran away, or how she loved him, I never dared to ask. History as she tells it begins on the day he deserted her, and from the beginning of this history he is referred to in derogatory terms. Perhaps she called him different names once, and perhaps not, but in any case it was clear that she would not be sympathetic to the kind of reckless madness that led “that poor girl” to run away with her husband.
“You could make a movie out of my life,” she sometimes says, with absolute justice. If I had to choose a heroine, I would definitely choose her, myself I don’t even see as a candidate, but if that’s what I think, and I really do think so, then how is it that to this day I still feel that I have a certain advantage over her? Not because I am better educated, not because I know more words, but only because in my folly love makes me superior in my own eyes. As if it has exalted me to some lofty pinnacle, as if I have been branded by a hallucinatory fire, and as if I have been privileged to touch what she and others have not touched.
Miriam Marie loves her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren, two of her brothers and most of her nephews and nieces. She loves most of the toddlers in her nursery school, and some of their mothers. And to my good fortune, I don’t know why, she loves me too and she loves Hagar. When Miriam says that someone loves, she almost always adds proofs to her statement; practical proofs, not cliches about feelings: “You should see how he helps her,” “the way he looked after her,” “he would do anything for her.” “His heart goes out to her,” or “her heart goes out to him” are phrases which do not appear in her lexicon, and certainly not “soul mates combining into one androgynous creature.” In all the years that we have known each other, I have never heard any such highfalutin drivel from her.
Miriam is occupied with real people: the asthmatic Itamar, Dror who is about to be drafted, Yaron and Liron who are building a house; whereas I am occupied with the fictions of my books, and with my ever-present absentee. And from this point of view as well I believe that she is superior to me.
But what do I really know about her fantasies and her nights? I know nothing, and I have no right to patronize her in this way.
After I had given her a few mumbled details about my situation, she pronounced that I had to “forget everything that had happened” and turn to my parents, because “what do quarrels mean now? This sweet little baby is their granddaughter, wait and see what they say after they see her.” I promised her that I would think about it, and I realized that she wouldn’t leave me be, and she didn’t, even after my parents showed up.
My parents showed up the next day. Without thinking about it I had given my name as Weber in the hospital, and one of the nurses who knew my mother made the connection and got in touch with her. I have already said that my parents know everybody and everybody knows them, and it was only to be expected that they would hear the news, sooner rather than later. I think that they had prepared themselves for it, for as they told me afterwards with a reasonable degree of resentment, when the nurse phoned my mother was able to hide her ignorance of the fact that she was a grandmother from her. She didn’t repeat the text to me word for word, but I can imagine it: “Our Noa … she’s so stubborn … got it into her head that she didn’t want any visitors … you know how it is, it’s so important to them to be independent … she feels fine … everything’s fine … the difficulties are behind us … we’re looking to the future.”