Warm wind, cold wind, drafty wind, wind with a whiff of diesel oil, and no wind at all, they can all do it to me, and my love stirs within me with every change in the light and every movement in the air. Occasionally, I have to admit, it feels like grace, his presence suffused in everything. My awakened senses. The objects quickened into life. The touch of everything he touched. Alek’s spirit in inanimate objects.
WHEN YOU GIVE BIRTH AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN
When you give birth at the age of eighteen, you have no choice but to explain yourself: So tell me, didn’t anybody teach you about contraceptives? An intelligent girl like you, didn’t you realize that you were pregnant? So how come you didn’t have an abortion? Weren’t you afraid that you were going to ruin your life? What on earth were you thinking?
I began to invent excuses while I was still pregnant, clearly aware that I was lying, and when I didn’t have anyone to tell them to, I told them to myself: Look, my period was never regular. Listen, in October I bled (true, a little spot of blood which I didn’t really think was a period). Understand, we did use contraceptives, but nothing is a hundred percent effective, by the time I realized what was happening it was already too late to have an abortion. These were my first rationalizations, and they were all intended to explain to the world that I wasn’t an utter fool, that I was a rational person, that I had worthy goals in life and that I had no intention of losing control of my life. Because this, of course, is what teenage pregnancy means to the public: irresponsible stupidity and losing control over your life. And if you don’t want to be seen as a stupid fool who has lost control over her life, you have to inform people what happened in your underpants when.
Over the course of the years, as Hagar grew up, I began to tell, especially to my girlfriends, a slightly different version: My period was never regular, blah-blah-blah, when I found out it was already too late, blah-blah-blah, Alek actually wanted me to have an abortion, an abortion would have suited his convenience — but why should a woman do something just because it’s convenient for a man? It was my pregnancy, my body, my reproductive system. Understand me, girls, in the end I wanted the baby, and as far as I’m concerned the father had nothing to do with it.
Girls: What, you really didn’t think of letting him share in the decision?
Me (so arrogant, so heroic): No, I didn’t. From the outset I didn’t think it was any of his business, and I gave him to understand as much.
Girls: And you weren’t afraid? To be a single mother at that age?
Me: Of course I was afraid, obviously I was afraid, what am I, an idiot? But I decided that if that was what I wanted to do, that’s what I was going to do.
A girl (suspicious): And you really had no feeling for him?
Me (in an amused voice): No feeling? Look, of course I had a certain feeling. That is to say, we were quite close, and all kinds of things happened between us, obviously they did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant. But the pregnancy was much more important to me than the being-in-love bit, and the being-in-love bit was over anyway.
The bottom line of all these conversations, and later on in my life of a number of newspaper interviews:
A woman needs a husband like a fish needs a bicycle! “Okay … maybe there are some fish who need bicycles, I’m not judging them, I only hope that this is a problem that evolution will solve …” Me, in one of those interviews. Sometimes I sound exactly like my Nira Woolf.
Long live the eternal, true, pure, and meaningful tie between a mother and her offspring, to which no other love can compare.
Telling Hagar the story of her conception and birth was the most complicated. Because what could I say to the child? My daughter, my marriage to your father was only fictitious? What’s fictitious, Mommy? My daughter, I never loved your father? So how did I get born to you, Mommy? You should know, my daughter, that your father didn’t love me and that he didn’t want you either.
You may say that I could have told her the truth, that the truth is best, and the truth is actually an excellent story to tell a child. You want the truth? Here it is. The truth, my child, is that I loved your father, that I still love him, I loved him so madly that I never imagined for a moment, I couldn’t have imagined, getting rid of his child. The truth, my darling daughter, is that at first you were only a fetish to me, the object most charged with Alek, something that would remain after he disappeared into wicked Germany.
You should know, my little one, that if I had become pregnant by somebody else, Amikam for instance, this story would have ended completely differently, in the gynecologist’s trash can. That’s what you would have done to me, Mommy? Killed me and thrown me into the trash? Go confuse a little one of three, four, or five with philosophical arguments along the lines of: If you had a different father you wouldn’t be you and you wouldn’t exist at all, so that your claim that you could have ended up in the trash is meaningless. You go and put a three-year-old to bed with arguments like those.
Apart from which, even though when she was small I was not yet a fully-fledged feminist, a declared feminist I mean, I was instinctively averse to raising a little girl on the basis of the drugged love of a man. I think that what was at work here was a protective maternal instinct to distance her from my addiction, joined by the simple motive of pride. I didn’t want her to know that her mother was a downtrodden doormat. A worm eaten up by longings for a man who was her father. I didn’t want her ever to see her mother eating the leftover scraps of affections from his table. I wanted her to have respect for me, and I had no intention of passing on my weakness to the younger generation.
Over the years, therefore, my version for Hagar was composed as follows: Your mother and father were very young when they met, and even when people love one another, it’s not a good idea to marry so young. So Daddy loved you? Yes. And you loved him? Yes, but not like I love you; you, pumpkin, I love always and forever, because that’s the way mothers love their children. And fathers? Fathers what? Fathers don’t love their children? Fathers do love their children, but sometimes somebody has a child when that somebody isn’t ready to be a father yet. When that somebody is still a bit of a child himself.
The idea of her father’s immaturity sank into Hagar’s mind, so that when she was five or six years old, during the period when Alek was living in Israel again, she once asked me: “What do you think, do you think that Daddy is more mature now, or less mature, or the same?”
“And what do you think?” I evaded her question with a question.
“I didn’t ask you what I think,” my logical daughter replied, “I asked you what you think. I know what I think.”
“You know better than I do. You went for a walk with him, not me.”
TELLING ALEK THE NEWS
By the end of October I more or less knew that I was pregnant, and in November, right after my birthday, I went to be examined. I didn’t tell Alek about the test and I didn’t have to tell him about the results either. A few days after my visit to the gynecologist, and after I had already obtained the results from the lab, he found out for himself. It wasn’t the first time I threw up, and I always tried to do it quietly. I knelt down and bowed my head over the toilet bowl, but early on this particular morning when I emerged from the toilet with my mouth full of nausea, Alek was standing opposite me in the passage.
A similar scene takes place in a lot of movies and television series. A woman tells her lover that she’s pregnant, a pregnancy which all the circumstances known to the audience lead them to believe is unwanted, and at these moments we always see the woman in close-up: the camera lingers on her facial expressions, on the nervous movements of her hands, and then draws it out to keep us in suspense. What’s going to happen, what’s going to happen now? Will the lover’s face light up in joyful pride when his paternal instincts are unexpectedly aroused? Will he reject the woman rudely? Will he meanly cast doubt on his paternity of the child she is bearing in her womb? Offer her money for an abortion?