The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven Page A

hands, as if by succeeding in doing so, I would know what was happening inside him. It seemed to me that if only I emptied my mind and cleaned out my body, Alek’s thoughts would seep by some magical osmosis into the void formed inside me, where they would take shape as the picture, the memory, the ancient experience that he was seeking. Because for some reason it seemed to me that he was searching for something inside him, not actively but the opposite; that he was stilling his thoughts and making room for something to rise up inside him, as if he were trying to call it up and waiting for it to come.
    As always, I had to piece bits of information together. “My mother lives in this,” he said to me one night as we descended the Mount of Olives in the direction of the onion-domed church. “Lives in it?” “In Jesus.”
    “Is your mother a Christian?”
    “She’s a Jew. She’s a Jew in her own eyes, and everyone who sees her sees a Jew.”
    “Sometimes when we walk here I try to imagine what it would be like to believe that—”
    “You can’t.”
    “Just to imagine, what it’s like to really believe that Jesus—”
    “Impossible. People like my mother, and all her friends from the sixties, they don’t believe ‘that Jesus,’ they believe
in him
, which is completely different. They believe in Jesus, and ‘believing that Jesus’ only comes—or doesn’t come—afterwards.”
    “But you would like to.”
    “What?”
    “Know how it feels? To believe?”
    “No, certainly not.” He lied, and after a few steps he added, “You and I, we don’t come to these questions from the same place. It’s not a question of what a person wants at all. You don’t choose the direction of the movement of your soul. I don’t choose the direction of mine. There’s nothing you can do about it. So the most a person with intellect can do is to curse all the way, to yell at his soul: Why did you take me here? And why did you take me there? It’s normal, it just doesn’t really help, all that yelling.”
    The moon whitened the stone walls lining the path and cast long shadows behind us. From a distance the city returned to its primeval sounds. A dog barking and a dog replying. The voice of a woman calling over rhythmic metallic blows. Far-near sounds as if we were walking in a country village. I wanted to linger longer, not to go down into the field of vision of the new city. But Alek took hold of my elbow, hastened his steps and said dryly, “Such talk … the direction of the movement of the soul … don’t trust a man who invites you to come up to his apartment to listen to Vivaldi, and don’t believe a man who talks to you about God.”
    So on the morning of my wedding I bought a white dress, and with the dress rolled up in my shoulder bag, without really thinking, I arrivedat the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Straight from the autumn heat into the cool halls below and the dim little room with the single icon hanging in it, the one that Alek loved and belittled.
    To this day I have no explanation for what happened there. I was very tired and very alert. I was high on the smell of the incense. Dazed by the transition from glaring light to gloom. I really don’t know, but I remember how the flickering candlelight lent a strange life to the young Madonna’s face, and I remember how quietly and gradually the longer I looked at her the more present she became to me, until she was more real than the tourists moving overhead. She was a timeless Mary, the one who received the annunciation and the one who gave birth, the one at the foot of the cross and the one ascending to heaven to be the bride of God. All the paintings I had seen with Alek combined in her, just as if she was a familiar personality and the object of private memories beyond time. So present to me was she in her infinite serenity, that it came about that I smiled, not to myself, but at her.
    What is there to say about this scene? I was eighteen, in