The Confessions of Noa Weber Read Online Free Page B

what I did I didn’t know that he was going to get killed, and, anyway, it isn’t him I’ve been carrying around for the past twenty-nine years. Amikam comes intothis story only because one evening he took me to an apartment on Usha Street, in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot, where I still live today.
THE SECOND OF JULY
    Amikam related to politics with the same thoroughness and deliberation with which he prepared for his final exams, with which he mended a coil in the electric heater, with which he “went all the way” with me. When he was asked about his political views he was in the habit of replying that he “saw himself as part of the New Left,” and for months before his conscription he was engaged with the question of whether he should “go even further to the left,” in other words, left of his parents who were active in MAPAM, the Zionist-Socialist United Workers Party.
    Amikam took me to Usha Street because a graduate of the youth movement who had “gone even further left” told him about an interesting group that met there in the evenings. History students. Activists from poor neighborhoods. Artists. Students at the Bezalel Academy of Art. And so on. I didn’t want to go. In arguments I couldn’t get out of I showed the proper degree of enthusiasm, but the truth is that politics interested me less than they did Amikam, and the thought of entering a strange house with a group of people older than myself embarrassed me. We lived mainly among our peers, and the world of the free spirits who had already completed their army service seemed to me like a vague and distant dream. A magical stage which would no doubt arrive, but which we were still too callow to be fit to enter. I knew that I would be ashamedof my very presence in their space, and I knew that I might very well, however unjustly, also be ashamed of Amikam. And nevertheless I went. I went because I was his girlfriend. And I went because the next day we were due to take our final exams in literature; and on the pretext that we were going to study late into the night, I received permission from my mother to sleep over at his house, in his sister’s room.
    Thirty-six steps of an external stairway led to the apartment on the second floor. I didn’t count them then. Forget the prophecies of the heart: No premonition told me that for the next twenty-nine years I would go up and down them about seventy thousand times, a few hundred of them with a baby carriage; no tingling of my toes hinted that I would wound my exposed big toe four times on the rusty can holding the sick jasmine bush that refused to die; that in certain moods I would decide to change the soil and plant a new bush there, and in others I would plan to drag it to the dumpster, and that I would never do either; I had no inkling that I was to see the top of the shaky iron banister covered with a strip of snow, and that its unsteadiness would worry me from time to time, and that about this too, I would do nothing.
    Entering the apartment was as embarrassing as I had imagined. The noise inside was so loud that the students/artists/neighborhood-activists did not hear us knocking, and when they finally opened the door it turned out that Amikam’s acquaintance “who had gone even further left” wasn’t there. The bearded man who opened the door identified himself as “Hamida,” and when we said together “What?” and “Sorry?” he barred our way and demanded to know whether or not we recognized the right to self-determination.
    His real name was Yoash, and Yoash, as an expression of his right to self-determination, had gone to the Ministry of Interior and demanded to have his name changed to “Hamida.” The Ministry of Interior, for its part, had argued that “Hamida” was the name of an Arab woman, that a Jewish male could not call himself “Hamida” on the grounds of fraud and imposture, but Yoash insisted on his right to call himself whatever he liked, and his