Free The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven Page A

couldn’t consent to this time being taken away from me. Love had mobilized my entire being, love ruled me like a tyrant, and love would allow for no other master.
    I reread the last couple of paragraphs and it’s all true: I couldn’t imagine myself leaving Jerusalem, I couldn’t part from Alek, I wanted to buy more time, true and true and true, but there’s one simple and shameful thing I haven’t yet said. I loved Alek, and therefore I wanted to marry him.
GOING TO THE RABBINATE
    I didn’t look at him or at anyone else when I said: “Yes, I want to.” And the next thing he said was: “Okay, then let’s go and do it now, just tell me where to go.”
    At that moment he was a king, he was their prince, they admired him more than ever, and some of that admiration was directed at me too, so that the doubts as to whether we were “really going to do it” were addressed to us in the plural. For a few minutes “you” meant both of us, and that “you”—the crazy, impulsive, glamorous, free-spirited you—was intoxicating. At the first words of doubt Alek threw the cracked pecans into the basket, and on the spot, accompanied by all of them, we set out for the Rabbinate on Havatzelet Street.
    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, slenderand 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