Free The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven

dividing the rooms up between us.
    To my astonishment, Alek fasted, shutting himself up for the evening and the day and drugging himself on Sibelius, played softly so as not to disturb the neighbors. I spent the time staring at the pages of a book, sleeping and daydreaming alternately, disturbed by the lack of the routine sounds that divided the day into clear units of time and notified the body of its functions. There are three synagogues near thehouse, and in the bedroom the sounds mingled, with one prayer rising and then another, and all the time the subterranean current of Sibelius, coming to the surface only in the hot, heavy silence of the afternoon break, and giving rise in me to a miserable little whimper that punctured my trance.
    At the end of the day, when the music stopped, Alek still didn’t open his door and I fell asleep again, and when I woke up sweating in the middle of the night I discovered that he hadn’t come to bed, that he must have gone to sleep on the sofa in his room.
    I saw him again only the next day at noon, when he came in with a few of the regulars. The academic year was about to begin, and they were angry about some survey courses they were obliged to take and some teacher whose contract hadn’t been renewed, for reasons which were only too clear: because of the way he talked about Dayan and because of that joke he told about Golda Meir. The heat wave had not yet broken, and they all looked worn out by the heat. Someone I didn’t know suggested going on strike or publishing a statement, and this time it was Dalit who said: “Yeah, sure. You’ll all go on strike, just like you’ll all marry Noa.” Alek was standing opposite her, clenching one fist in another in front of his chest, cracking pecan nuts which Yoash had brought from his parents’ farm. A silence must have fallen, because I heard the sound of the crack, and then his voice saying: “Marry Noa … okay … Noa, do you want to get married?”
ALEK ASKED
    Alek asked: “Do you want to get married?” And he didn’t add, “to me.”But at the same time he said: “Do you want to get married?” and not “Do you want me to exempt you from serving in the army?” Which is perhaps a slightly different question.
    Did I want to be exempt from army service? Until I met him it wouldn’t have occurred to me for a minute not to be drafted, and apart from one classmate who had polio, I didn’t know anybody who avoided army service, including those present in the room, including Alek himself.
    The idea of serving in the army of occupation and oppression didn’t bother me particularly, what troubled me was the new awareness that the IDF was about to oppress me. Girls from my year who had been drafted in August had already concluded their basic training and been sent to all kinds of bases to serve as clerks. And somehow it was clear to me that the new me couldn’t be sent anywhere to serve anyone. That I would simply get up and run away if they tried to squeeze me into some asbestos office. It had no connection to ideology, or only a tenuous connection—my criticism of women’s service in the IDF developed years later—I only knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear it: I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Jerusalem, and I wouldn’t be able to bear being sent away from Alek. Because I didn’t have an ounce of attention to invest in anything that wasn’t charged with my love.
    Jerusalem was charged with love for me. The map of the city was imprinted in me with illuminated areas where the air grew bright and the vibration of my inner waves intensified, the concentrated areas where we had wandered together, and the further I receded from them in my imagination, the grayer I grew inside, disappearing from myself into the gray, flat nothingness.
    Alek was going to leave for Germany in July, I had no doubt that he would leave, but until July there was still more than nine months to go, a short time, a long time. I