The Confessions of Noa Weber Read Online Free PDF

was in the middle of my final exams, I was being drafted in November, and of course I didn’t know yet what I was going to do in the army. It was one of those moments when for no evident reason an interval of silence suddenly comes into being in all the conversations being conducted in the same space at the same time, so that everyone heard me saying: “What I’d like most is to be an operations room clerk in a commando unit and the thing I most dread is being stuck in an office in Tel Aviv.” This was not the right thing to say to a girl just back from six months in New York in a “La Mama” workshop. And it wasn’t the right thing to say in that place. The owner of the heaving bosom puffed out her already swollen cheeks, holding back her laughter, and in the embarrassing silence a “tsss” of ridicule was heard from the direction of the kitchen.
    “It’s important to me to contribute,” I added, in a panic, aware of the looks recognizing my panic. The only matches left in my matchbox were burnt.
    “Contribute to whom? Contribute to what?” A boy in ostentatiously ugly thick black glasses looked both amused and irate. I tossed my bangs out of my eyes and, without any idea of what I was about tosay, avoided the question in a defiant voice, with a statement that was completely new to me: “Obviously if I can’t really contribute, then I’d prefer not to serve at all.” Without looking at Amikam I felt him turning his head, and this was also the moment that I saw Alek.
    “There’s nothing funny about what.…” He was standing directly opposite me, leaning on the kitchen door frame, the leaning hand holding a closed book, with one finger inside it marking his place.
    “Noa.”
    “What she says isn’t funny. Her voice doesn’t make me laugh.” His pronunciation was very clear, with almost no trace of a foreign accent, except for certain soft vowels; only his pronunciation was excessively clear, separating the words; and when he paused they waited for him to continue. “Noa is a woman,” he continued at his leisure, “you don’t laugh at what happens to a woman. An authentic person would understand what she’s saying … what it means … and what her voice is saying to him.… What is it saying?” he repeated the question obediently echoed back to him by one of the girls in his audience. “It’s saying that she needs to be freed. It’s saying that a man has to marry her, and all the other girls who are beginning to think like Noa. There have to be men to go with all of them to the Rabbinate and free them from the army by marrying them.”
AND THEN HE SAID TO ME AND THEN I SAID TO HIM
    I reread the “he said and I said,” and “then he asked me, and then I answered him”—the description is accurate, but nevertheless I can’t find even the nucleus of an explanation of what happened afterwardsin it. Perhaps I should have run the moments like a silent movie. A very young woman sits on a mattress on the floor, hugging her knees and smoking. The camera follows the woman’s look, a look from below, takes in bits of detail: dirty toes, thick ankles, cutoff jeans ragged at the edges, a heaving bosom, a jaw moving in speech, a jaw moving in mastication. An orchestra accompanies the pictures with a cacophony of sound and suddenly stops. The young Valentino, he was so young then, stands in a relaxed pose in the frame of an open door. He has black hair cropped as short as a convict’s, he is wearing a very white tee shirt, and is standing far enough away so that the woman’s look, still from below, can take him in at full length. The man speaks, without marked expressions, without gesticulations, a restrained foreign body, and when he stops talking the orchestra begins to play again, but now the music has one clear theme. The man lingers in the doorway and his look rests on the girl, who is fiddling with a packet of cigarettes. After a long moment he reaches out his hand and beckons her to him