The Confessions of Noa Weber Read Online Free Page A

gray sleep. We surmised that it was because of the pill, and since we were both about to be drafted into the army, and didn’t expect to see much of each other after that, even though we would “still be a couple,” be faithful to each other and so on, we decided to forgo the contraceptive pills I had very responsibly started to swallow a month before we “went all the way.” Today it’s clear to me that getting rid of the pills was
inter alia
a promise that I would remain faithful to him, faithfulness being a subject on which we conducted lengthy and solemn seminars during this period. Should we give ourselves a chance to “experience relationships with other people”? Should we “free each other” before we began our army service? Did “a love like ours close us off from other experiences”?
    At the beginning of the summer we went together to see the movie
Cabaret
, and came to the common conclusion that it was about repulsive people in a sick society, and that it was no wonder that the Germans ended up doing what they did after such appalling decadence. We weren’t lying, this was our honest opinion about which we both agreed, but an hour after we left the cinema it happened that I came on to him with a new, provocative boldness, and while I was busy doing so I also fantasized that Amikam was Michael York and that I was lying between him and a decadent German baron who was embracing me closely from behind. What Amikam’s fantasies were I don’t know. Perhaps the suppleness of Sally Bowles, perhaps the firmness of the German baron, or perhaps he didn’t fantasize at all. Everything seems possible to the same extent. What do I know about him? In any case it was good that night, except for the attack of weakness afterwards, which is the only one that I can place in the context of a specific event.
AMIKAM
    Was killed on the Golan Heights in the first week of the Yom Kippur War. He was my first boyfriend, with whom I “made love,” and that should be important. He was my boyfriend for two years. I can conjure up his appearance in words: very tall, shoulders sloping slightly forward, black hair on a chest that never got a deep tan, black hair on fingers strumming a guitar—“I’m just a poor boy …”—brows frowning in concentration like a little shelf jutting from his forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple. I can describe him in words, but I can’t really see him. Heisn’t present, and although I feel guilty towards him, there isn’t enough substance in the memory to torture and chastise me. His ghost doesn’t haunt me at night and I have never had nightmares about him.
    What is there to say about a seventeen-year-old girl? What is there to say about someone who was nineteen years and three months old when he died? He was a good student. He was an outstanding soldier and an outstanding tank commander, or so I was told. Amikam read two newspapers every day, Amikam wrote a fine essay on
Escape from Freedom
by Erich Fromm, Amikam was a counselor in the Zionist Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, he liked Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, he couldn’t dance and he could fix things, and everything he did he did seriously and with concentration, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his black brows frowning. Once, when I tried to remember his touch, I thought of a wooden board.
    I didn’t go to his funeral. When he died Hagar was already there, a baby of five months, and I was detached from my surroundings owing to my madness and my motherhood and because of the melodramatic pose I had adopted. I heard about his death weeks after he fell and it was too late to pay a condolence call to his parents. And anyway, how would I go? With the “accident” baby in my arms? I didn’t even fit the role of the ex-girlfriend, their son’s first sweetheart. And, in any case, they bore me a grudge.
    I don’t intend to dig up what happened with Amikam, the way I treated Amikam. Such things happen, when I did