The Confessions of Noa Weber Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 mandriving 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.
    It took some time before anyone paid us any attention. We sat down low and looked at the sandaled feet of the debaters taking the floor opposite us, and in the air was a strong scent the name of which was then unknown to me. Patchouli, I later learned.
    Amikam looked as if he was concentrating hard, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, trying to focus on one of the discussions out of the several taking place simultaneously. Simultaneity wasn’t his strong point, but nevertheless he managed to turn to look at me and scowl when I lit one cigarette with another; despite the nausea induced by the unaccustomed amount of nicotine, I was chain-smoking. The person who addressed me in the end was a very fat girl, with a vast heaving bosom and agitated gestures, someone swaying above me and enthusing about her experiences at a “La Mama” workshop. She wanted to know what I did; I said I