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
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?