Late at night, after I got up to feed Hagar and came back to bed, he succeeded in completing while half-asleep what he hadn’t managed to do before, but the act did not improve the situation. Alek was no longer there to turn us both on, and for all our strenuous efforts to fan the feeble flame, the fetish lost its spell. For the sake of his honor, out of consideration for the battle-weary state of the warrior, for Alek’s sake, or for God knows what reason, we didn’t stop, I didn’t stop him
in the middle, but even as Yoash pushed and pushed himself into me, I felt the old void opening up inside me. And it was only then that I really understood that Alek was gone.
We remained friends, Yoash and I are friends to this day, and as such we can sometimes relate explicitly to the third person who isn’t there. “You know, Alek phoned last week, it sounds as if he’s living in Moscow semi-permanently. He’s renting an apartment there.” “What do you say? What, he’s not going back to Paris?” “He went back in the summer and stayed with his family for a few months, but for Ute and the boys moving to Russia is out of the question, and it seems to me that Alek isn’t too enthusiastic about having them with him all the time either. Tell me, do you have any idea if that maniac ever contacts Hagar? In your next book you should make the murderer someone who doesn’t relate to his children. Mark and Daniel don’t get too much attention from him either.”
Yoash was good to Hagar, and the truth is that she was good for him, too, and it was only when she grew up that the ties between the three of us loosened a little. In many senses he was the man in her life, even more than my father. And even during the two years when he tried to escape from everything and wandered around Australia as a backpacker before his time, he took care to send postcards addressed to the infant who had only recently learned to stand without support. To this day they are preserved in one of her boxes in the storage space under the roof.
Blood Money
came out in 1982, was taken up by the new local papers, and won both exaggerated praise and exaggerated condemnation, which took me equally by surprise. It would never have occurred to me that my manuscript, rejected by two publishers, was “welcome evidence of the normalization of Hebrew literature,” it had never occurred to me that I had “appropriated the Palestinian narrative and exploited Palestinian suffering for profit,” and I hadn’t even thought of Nira Woolf as a “feminist heroine.” At that period I had hardly even started to identify myself as a feminist.
Woolf’s feminism gave rise to strange reactions, which I might go into more thoroughly one day. The reactions to the first books praised the perfection of the heroine as a fictional creation: her independence, her brilliant mind, her five martial arts and her liberated female sexuality—until, more or less since
The Stabbing
, both of us began to get it in the neck. “Nira Woolf with her big breasts and her convict’s cropped blonde hair is actually a man’s wet dream,” “the blonde Nira Woolf is James Bond disguised as a female lawyer,” “Nira Woolf is a product of the male power ethos.”
Comments like these, mainly from women critics, but also from men, explaining that my feminism wasn’t “true feminism,” one of them even stating explicitly that it was “false” because Nira Woolf/Noa Weber “does not offer us an alternative ethos and in fact undermines its development.”
But this isn’t what I want to talk about now, I want to talk about Nira’s sexuality.
I began to conceive Nira in my second or third year in the law faculty, between “Changes in English Law” and “Corroboration in the Rules of Evidence,” while the lecturers droned on and on about what we already had written down on our cheat-sheet anyway. At the beginning of our lives together I did not yet make Nira a protagonist in any plot, or even think of doing so, I only played with her in my head as a kind of private amusement, enjoying myself by attributing various virtues to her as the spirit took me. When Hagar complains that Nira Woolf looks more like a Swedish sexpot than any woman lawyer she’s ever come across, it doesn’t help me to say that my books are entertainments and that the whole thing started as an amusement. But this is exactly how it happened. I looked around me, and as I followed the legal entanglements of Foxy-Dopey-Smarty and the depressing characters trying to resolve them, I invented someone who was the complete opposite. Someone who without any scruples or inhibitions planted a well-aimed kick on Foxy’s behind. And who had great legs as well.
My Swedish sexpot, as Hagar calls her—“But why does she have to have such big breasts?” “What do you want me to do? Send her to a plastic surgeon to have them made smaller?”—my Swedish sexpot has a happy, adventurous sex life, and even though I have never actually described a fuck in any of my books, what happens between one chapter and the next is quite clear to everyone.
“The best sex is on the second date,” my Diva says to the gloomy pathologist, “it’s a law of nature,” but in the end she agrees to a third date, as well. Part of the sensation caused by the first books was due to Nira’s sexuality. In American literature women were already fucking for pleasure then, consciously or unconsciously, but in Hebrew, a woman who fucked for the sake of it was somehow seen as an innovation.
Never mind all that now, because the point I want to make here is only that I bestowed all this sexual freedom on Nira at a time when I wasn’t having any sex at all. A contemporary woman is not supposed to admit to such a disgrace. A contemporary woman is supposed to take care of her sex life in the same way that she takes care of brushing her teeth. And if you don’t go to bed with anyone for four years, and you don’t even feel the urge to do so, it means that something about you is simply not normal and you should see a psychologist. In the present state of the market, admitting to the lack of a sex life lowers the value of your shares and leads to a heavy loss of prestige. Even between girlfriends who tell each other everything.
Four years of abstinence I had after the miserable fuck with Yoash—that is, if we don’t count masturbation as actual sex—and the reason for my abstinence was absolutely clear to me: not the fact that I was tired most of the time, not the technical difficulty posed by being a single mother—even though a few nonentities in the law faculty lived with their parents, some of them at least had apartments or pigsties of their own—and certainly not a “fear of relationships” or any other psychobabble of that kind. I abstained because from my point of view there was only one right body and one right touch and smell: one unique model that had been imprinted in all my cells, engraved in my bones, which made every other contact wrong. On several occasions I had in fact tried to go the way of all flesh, for the sake of my self-respect and release, petting that had failed to ignite any joy in me and had succeeded only in making me feel very remote from my body. As if I were perching on the branch of a nearby pine tree, on the roof of the car outside, on the lampshade, on one of the fat clouds in the sky, and observing myself from there as in a movie. The hands weren’t right.
The height wasn’t right. And the contour of the hips. The mouth tastes of wine, sweet and revolting. Bob Marley doesn’t do it for me. And the wrong things are said in the wrong tone. I, unlike my Nira, escaped not after the second fuck, but after the first one.
Even without these attempts my body seemed rubbed out. And not only my body, but also my soul. As if I had retired from myself and I was now operating mainly on automatic pilot, obeying the instructions of some higher authority. Now go to the photocopying machine. Now you have an hour in the library, concentrate. Now go to the bus stop to pick up Hagar on time, and don’t forget to pop in at the grocery store on the way home.
My memory is a trash can, I stuff it with whatever rubbish I like, and the studies which did not demand much thought came easily to me—when I was told to read verdicts I read them, I didn’t look for someone with a cheat-sheet, and when I was told to regurgitate the material, I did so. In the human landscape of the law faculty I was an outsider and I felt like an outsider. Female, younger than everyone else, the mother of an infant who woke up at night with an earache, and who had to be provided with dried fruits to celebrate Arbor Day in nursery school. Somehow I managed, and in fact, not “somehow” but mainly thanks to the help of my mother and to Miriam who came to the rescue, but now, from a distance, those years are covered in fog with scarcely a landmark, as if I had walked through them in my sleep.
Two or three times a day, I remember, I would close my eyes, and as a reward for the functioning of the previous hours, I would conjure up Alek. In the library. For a moment or two while Hagar was playing quietly. And it was as if I were retrieving my soul. Even when I was overwhelmed with sorrow.
Tami called in the morning, waking me up after I had gone back to bed. She was on vacation in Eilat with her husband and her three young ogres, the four lunatics had gone to the beach again, her back was burned to a frazzle, the ogres had insisted on going to flay themselves some more, thank God, she herself had stayed behind in the air-conditioned room, and she was in dire need of hearing a human voice actually talking instead of grunting at her in bass. “Are you all right? Were you sleeping?”
“No, of course not. What’s the time?”
“Eleven o’clock. Why do you sound so strange?”
“That’s what a human voice sounds like, you must have forgotten. That’s what happens to a girl who spends too much time with boys.”
“Go on, laugh at me. Not everyone gives birth when they’re minors, and not everyone has daughters. I saw you in the paper. It was a good interview. How’s the book doing? Is it selling?”
“I very much hope so.”
“What do you mean ‘you hope’? It’s a great book. Write us another one. Exactly like this one. I finally realized what you got out of all those trips to Moscow. Dalya and I were already sure that you had a lover in the Jewish Agency, but after this book we decided that it’s a lover in the Russian Mafia.”
“Benya Krik.”
“What?”
“Benya Krik, that’s the name of my lover. Benya is a king. The king of the Mafia.”
“Benya Krik is the name of someone from the Jewish Agency and not the Mafia. Benya Krik isn’t the name of someone you fuck. Benya is the name of an old man from Bat Shlomo.… You don’t know how I’m dying to get back to work. You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have to worry about holidays any more.”
“You just like complaining. Kisses to the boys, or regards.”
“Kisses, I’ll pass them on. And you’re right, on the whole it’s fun here. They’re coming to clean the room in a minute, you won’t believe what a mess the boys have left, at least I don’t have to clean it up.”
“Look after yourself, have a good rest.”
“You too, and write me another book, you hear? So the girls will have something to read when the next holiday comes round.”
Children are stuck with their parents and as a last resort they don’t have any alternative to bonding with them, but Tami and Miriam and my mother—I shall never understand all the goodness they showered on me when I had so little to return. My mother set Hagar in the center of her world, and she remains just about there to this day. And in spite of all her efforts to treat us all equally, she doesn’t relate to Talush’s twins in the same way, with the same pride and surprising tenderness.
It was only at the beginning of the nineties, when I met a few Russian families, that I realized what a joke Alek had played on us, that
indirectly and without any intention on his part he had maneuvered the Weber family into a Russian pattern: the wife works, the wife studies, the wife has important business, and the grandmother suspends her no less important affairs, and takes care of the grandchild. My mother continued working at her clinic, but two or three times a week she finished early to pick Hagar up from her daycare, and in later years from school. My old room at home was turned into a second room for my daughter, with toys “for there” and books “for there,” and to this day it remains hers and she keeps things there.
Very late in the day, only after Hagar had left home, it occurred to me that a situation of double motherhood invites all kinds of conflicts, is a recipe for the development of tensions, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t remember any tension between my mother and myself. Perhaps I was too drained to be angry or jealous, and whatever she told me about my daughter I accepted. For the most part.
Self-condemnation can turn very easily into a kind of boasting in reverse—look at me, look at me, see what an incredible monster I was—and therefore I have to say that there wasn’t a drop of anything monstrous in my treatment of Hagar. I dressed her, I put her shoes on, I listened, I reacted, I thought about … I remembered to.… When she was small I braided her hair, and when she was in high school I picked her up at the youth movement center when she came back from hikes.
With time I also began to breathe in the smell of her hair, to delight in the warmth of her little body in her pajamas and to admire her sayings. She was a sturdy child, with penetrating logic, and when she learned to talk—she began to speak fluently at an early age—I enjoyed talking to her. You could say that I enjoy it to this day.
One winter Saturday, when Hagar was nearly two, I took her in her stroller to the Old City, and went into the church of the Holy Sepulchre with her. In the hall where the picture of my Madonna hung in one of the niches, a large group of tourists was gathered, and a guide was standing with his back to the picture and speaking to them in German. I let Hagar, who had just woken up, out of her stroller, and despite the Germans I approached the painting, wanting to confirm or refute something, hoping perhaps that something would return to encompass both of us together, but nothing of the sort occurred. Hagar turned her head right and left on my shoulder, the tourists’ cameras flashed, and the same place was completely different. Whatever it was that I wanted to check, I wasn’t disappointed. There was an athletic, middle aged German woman standing next to me, with pale freckles on her arms and a red-checkered
keffiyeh
covering her shoulders. Hagar weighed heavily on my arms, and when I tried to put her down she arched her back and refused to stand. The guide in his silly hat kept repeating the same word, the only one I recognized. Jews, he said. Juden. He had a stick in his hand, it too was crowned with a hat.