Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  Maybe he should have bowed to his sister Yvette’s pressure and gone to her place for the seder. All this vacillation, he said to himself then, was the result of rigidity, which in itself was a sign of age, and perhaps, as Shorer said, it was also one of the inevitable results of living alone. Like the recurring disappointment of hopes pinned on sitting around a table with a lot of people, and on the empty conversations entered into to kill time.

  He was already filling up with the self-pity that would soon lead to anger at himself and his isolation, which when all was said and done was a sign of nothing but conceit and arrogance. “You’re no better than anyone else,” he had said to his reflection in the mirror, and he tugged at a new strand of gray hair. “Take it easy. What happens out there is often meaningless. The mind is free to wander at will,” he said to himself as he quickly dressed. He had even found a bottle of French wine, which he held out to Matty at the door. With a glowing, radiant face she told him he shouldn’t have, and after that he sat down obediently among the celebrants sitting around the table for a traditional Orthodox seder.

  Between courses he made an effort to talk to Matty Balilty’s niece. He remembered that the first time he was there, Danny Balilty had tried to fix him up with his sister-in-law. He tried to mobilize whatever was left of his sense of humor to confront the encouraging looks sent in their direction by Balilty as he ran between the kitchen and the seder table. Matty Balilty, on the other hand, tried not to look at them at all. It was only when he complimented her on the food that she gazed at him with her brown, anxious eyes and asked: “Really? Do you really like it?” As her brother’s daughter blushed and played with the edges of her napkin, it was clear to him that it wasn’t only the food Matty was talking about.

  Michael had presented himself at work a week ago after an absence of two years, during which Balilty had been careful to “keep in touch,” as he announced every time he phoned to invite him over. Since Balilty had phoned him just a few days before, he had rushed past him in the second-floor corridor without so much as stopping to welcome him back, only clapping him on the arm and shouting as he passed: “Live it up, Ohayon, live it up. Life is short. Next week you’re coming to us for the holiday meal. Matty’s making couscous.” And so—because Balilty had completely ignored Michael’s “But I told you I’m going out of town,” Michael couldn’t counter Balilty’s eagerness with the polite reserve that would be interpreted as supercilious coldness and offend against his sincere desire for a kind of closeness—that morning Michael had disconnected the phone.

  Now he looked at the phone cord and wondered why he had put up such a fight. What was so great about his determination to spend the holiday alone, if in any case he was spending all his time agonizing about the ceiling stains and about the note he had found in his mailbox? It was a summary demand to go up to the third floor and receive from Mr. Zamir the Tenants Committee regulations. At the meeting the day before yesterday, which Michael had as usual not attended (the words “as usual” had been added by hand to the typed note), it had been decided that it was his turn to represent the tenants in his wing.

  For a moment Michael thought that perhaps he should talk to someone, anyone, before he drowned in a puddle of misery. He picked up the cord but refrained from reconnecting it.

  Balilty could come bursting in even if the phone was disconnected, but no one else would dare. If he connected it and phoned Emanuel Shorer, it would end with another invitation to a festive family meal. In any event, they couldn’t have a meaningful conversation over the phone. It would only be one more example of Shorer’s contention that Michael shouldn’t go on living alone.

  “So what do you suggest,” Michael had asked aggressively at their most recent meeting, just before he returned from his study leave. “Do you want to send me to a therapist,” he asked sarcastically after Shorer finished listing the signs of what he called the “deformations stemming from continued solitude.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” said Shorer with a you-don t-frighten-me expression. “I don’t believe in psychologists, but apart from wasting money it can’t do any harm. Why not?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued: “As far as I’m concerned, you can go to a fortune teller. The main thing is to see you settled down. A man of your age! You’re almost fifty.”

  “Forty-seven,” said Michael.

  “It’s the same thing. And still trying to find yourself. Hanging around with all kinds of . . . Never mind, it’s not important.”

  “What do you mean, not important?” demanded Michael. “It’s very important. All kinds of what, precisely?”

  “All kinds of non-starters, married, unmarried—above all, the kind of women nothing can come of, even Avigail. . . . A man needs a family!” he pronounced.

  “Why, exactly?” said Michael, mainly in order to say something.

  “What do you mean by that?” said Shorer, taken aback. “A man needs . . . what do I know? Nobody’s found a better solution yet—a man needs children, a man needs a framework. It’s human nature.”

  “I already have a child.”

  “He’s no longer a child. A big young fellow wandering around the world looking to find himself in South America. He’s no longer a child.”

  “He’s already arrived in Mexico City.”

  “Really? Thank God!” said Shorer with undisguised relief. “A civilized place at last.” Suddenly he was angry: “You know what I mean, don’t try to make me give you a lecture now about family values. A man needs someone to talk to when he comes home. Not just four walls. Not just affairs with women. For God’s sake, it’s over twenty years since your divorce. It’s ten years since you had anything really serious going, if we don’t count Avigail. How long are you going to wait? I thought that when you were studying, two years at the university, you’d meet people. . . .”

  Michael kept quiet. He had never spoken to Shorer about Maya, and to this day he didn’t know what he knew about her.

  “I’m not saying you look bad,” added Shorer cautiously. “It’s not that you’ve gone bald or put on weight. And it’s true that you’re a big success with women. All the women around here tell me that as soon as they see you they want to . . .” He made a vague gesture.

  “Yes, what do they want to do?” mocked Michael. Again the thought struck him that it was not only concern for his welfare but also simple jealousy that kept his friends awake at night.

  “How should I know? They want! It’s a fact. Even the new typist. She’s maybe twenty-five, but she looks like a teenager, pretty, no?”

  He had rolled his eyes. At that moment Shorer reminded Michael of Balilty. He wondered what it was about the subject that made them both talk in the same tone. What was it that suddenly gave Shorer’s voice pimplike overtones? Did it have anything to do with a feeling that their lives were over, while he still had untold possibilities before him? In their eyes at least, it might seem so. If only he could speak openly, he would tell them a thing or two about his anxieties, about his despair.

  “You’ve already asked me if I like her.”

  “Because she asked about you,” Shorer apologized. “It’s the way you look, tall, polite, quiet, with that sadness, and those eyes of yours. When they find out that you’re an intellectual, too . . . they ask . . . right away they want to . . . to make you not sad.”

  “So, what’s the problem? What are you worried about?”

  “It’s you I’m talking about, not them! Suddenly he doesn’t understand what a person says to him!”

  “What did she ask?”

  “She asked! They all ask, is he married, has he got someone, why not? Things like that.”

  “And what do you answer them?”

  “Me? It’s not me they ask! Do you think they dare to ask me? They ask Tzilla. She does her best for you, too. But nothing comes of it. You took your uncle as an example. A bad example. Jacques was a butterfly. Filled with the joy of life. But you take things to heart. And because he was a butterfly, h
ow young he was when he died. The statistics show that men who live alone die younger.”

  “Ah, the statistics!” Michael spread his arms. “If the statistics are against me, what can I say? Who am I to deny the statistics?”

  Shorer snorted. “Don’t start with your theories about statistical research.”

  Michael lowered his eyes and tried not to smile, because something about the way Shorer kept broaching this subject touched his heart. Maybe it also met his need for a father figure, a role Shorer had been playing ever since he recruited him into the police and advanced him rapidly. It showed in the way he had helped him to obtain an extra year of unpaid leave to pursue his studies, and also in the way he scolded him from time to time for what he called his irregular procedures.

  “At least if I had the feeling that you were content and happy,” grumbled Shorer. “But I can see that you’re not.”

  “And marriage will make me happy? Is it the ultimate solution?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to marry. Live with somebody. Make an agreement, as long as it’s something steady. Not just some girl where it’s obvious from the beginning that nothing will come of it.”

  “How can you tell something like that in advance?” protested Michael. “Chance comes into it, too.”

  “Really? Chance? Suddenly you believe in chance? Soon you’ll begin talking about destiny, too! Pardon me, but you’re not serious. You’re even contradicting yourself. I have a thousand witnesses who’ve heard you say a thousand times that there’s no such thing as chance.”

  “Okay, so maybe I really should consult an expert,” said Michael with a faint smile.

  “I don’t believe that people change from going to psychologists,” pronounced Shorer, who had failed to notice the sarcasm, “only maybe, maybe if they make an inner decision. Otherwise it’s like giving up smoking by external means, without wanting to inside. I don’t understand why one lousy marriage over twenty years ago should traumatize a person for his whole life. What’s past is past. Nira, her mother and father and all that, may have been Poles, but they definitely weren’t monsters.”

  “Tell me,” said Michael, with the irritation that seized hold of him whenever Shorer began talking about his ex-wife, as if he were deliberately exposing a blot on his past, as if he were confronting him again and again with a fatal mistake he had thoughtlessly made in his youth. “Do you think I don’t want to find someone, to love a woman and want to live with her?”

  Shorer looked at him quizzically: “I don’t know. Judging by your behavior up to now? Do you want the truth?”

  Michael sighed.

  “In the beginning,” complained Shorer, “it’s too soon after the divorce, and later on it’s too long after it, and there are already habits that have been formed, calculations. It’s a fact. How many years has it been?”

  “How many years has what been?”

  “How many years have you been alone? If we don’t count your affair with that woman with the Peugeot, the doctor’s wife?” Shorer looked aside.

  “Nearly eighteen, but—”

  “No buts about it,” Shorer interrupted him and went back to lamenting Avigail.

  Because of conversations like this, Michael had disconnected the phone. They took place most often at his car door on Fridays and holiday eves, when he was about to drive home. Instead of keeping things to himself, as he had always done before, he had begun to respond during them. A note of sympathy and concern had begun to creep into his colleagues’ remarks when the holidays came around. He now heard it even in the voices of Tzilla and Eli, who had started out as his subordinates but gradually had also become close friends, who, nonetheless, had always maintained a degree of respect for his wish for privacy. Because of this dreaded note, and because he knew that he would be intruding into a cozy family atmosphere, he avoided picking up the phone. He told himself that there was no point in trying to escape the situation by inventing distractions. On the contrary, it was better to surrender to his feelings until their intensity dulled of its own accord. And so he should definitely listen to the Brahms symphony until the end, because music’s consolations were not cheap substitutes. He was about to press the button to restart the music and skip to the second movement when he again heard the tiny whimpering that sounded like the faint crying of a baby.

  His certainty that it wasn’t the baby upstairs, because that baby’s cries never sounded weak, amused him. To think that there was a baby in the vicinity whose crying he knew so well! The sound he heard now was really a kind of mewling, despairing but clear, as if it was coming from beneath the apartment. But since on recent nights his sleep had been disturbed more than usual by the howling of cats in heat, or so it seemed to him, and he had been awakened more than once by what sounded like a baby crying, and laid awake in the dark listening until he was sure that it was the baby upstairs, he now tried to ignore the sound.

  But the mewling, which no longer sounded in the least like a cat in heat, definitely had something human about it, gave him the idea that perhaps that black cat had had a litter in the basement bomb shelter beneath him. He opened the door and peeped out, as if to look for newborn kittens on the doormat. There was no cat there, but there was a brown envelope. He glanced inside it. Among the papers—the most recent Tenants Committee financial statements—he found a receipt book, with a folded note between its pages wishing him good luck and Rosh Hashanah blessings for a good New Year. Michael quickly pushed the receipt book back into the envelope, as if it would disappear if he stopped thinking about it. He threw the envelope inside his door, because the sound of the wailing had become sharper and clearer, easily overcoming the noises coming through the closed doors into the stairwell. The stairwell amplified the sonority of a woman’s scolding and a little girl’s screaming, the television voices, the persistent chords of a low string instrument, the clatter of pots and pans. This medley of sounds did not silence the wailing from below. It was clear to him that he had to act quickly. If there were kittens in the cellar, the sooner he removed them from the building the better, before they settled in.

  The closer he came to the bomb shelter the stranger—not in the least catlike—the wailing sounded. The cellar door was wide open, and on the threshold, inside a small cardboard box, on a padding of newspapers covered with a sheet of transparent plastic, and under a shabby yellow wool blanket, a real live baby lay on its back, wailing furiously.

  When he took the baby in his arms and carried it into his bedroom, and, after removing the newspapers and unfolded clean laundry, laid it on the bed, he realized that he had not opened his door since midmorning and thus had no idea when the cardboard box had actually been deposited. Nevertheless he tried to work out when he had first heard the mewing. But he couldn’t be sure if it was cats he had been hearing on and off for the past few hours or, as it now seemed to him, this baby crying.

  The baby now lay on the bed. It looked about one month old. Its eyes were open and baby blue, and a thick down of damp fair hair covered its tiny head. It clenched its miniature fists and waved them in the air, touching its face from time to time but not succeeding in reaching its mouth. Michael took it in his arms again. For a few seconds the crying died down and turned to gasping, and then immediately into a loud, offended scream. Michael pushed the tip of his thumb gently into the tiny mouth, leaving it between the pink gums that clamped tightly around it. He realized that he was holding a very hungry baby in his arms and that he had no way of feeding it.

  He leaned over the bed and picked up the blanket, which gave off a moldy smell and shed wisps of yellow wool. But from the baby’s smooth face, which was completely wet, and from its neck, he breathed in a sweet baby smell. Even before he laid it on its back in order to remove the garment in which it was encased, he began, on an irresistible impulse, to pick from between its fingers and the folds of its neck tiny wisps of yellow fuzz. The baby wriggled and squirmed in the middle of the bed. Its arms waved in the air and its legs
kicked furiously. Michael picked it up again. He laid it on his left forearm, which held the whole body, and pressed his arm to his body. And he did all these things in a kind of compulsion, as in a dream, as if he had been taken back twenty-three years. The very recognition of the distress he felt looking at the hungry baby’s face gave rise to another, vivid emotion, which even contained a hint of joy. Unthinking, he heard his own voice talking as he used to talk to Yuval during the long nights of his infancy. He went to the bathroom, the baby clasped tightly to his chest, and let warm water run into the sink. He prefaced his actions by whispering them aloud into the tiny red ear, dipped his elbow into the water, and spread a big, faded pink towel on top of the washing machine. Then he rummaged in the medicine chest for talcum powder, and in a distracted voice informed the baby that he couldn’t find it.

  He didn’t stop whispering into the tiny ear, in the belief that the ceaseless flow of words would silence the baby’s hunger. The blue eyes stared at him as if hypnotized. But this fascination, Michael knew, would not last long, for when he finished washing and changing the baby, he would have no means to supply what was really needed, because he had neither a bottle nor baby formula.

  When the water was the right temperature, he laid the little body on the towel he had spread on top of the washing machine. He left one finger in each tiny fist. Only later did he wonder at the power of the instincts that had dictated his actions in those moments. The baby coiled its fingers tightly around his. It opened its mouth wide in alarm, its body, exposed to space, began to thrash about, and its lips twisted. Michael bent over and laid his own lips gently on its cheek, keeping up a steady murmur while extracting his finger from the desperate grip of one of the fists. With one hand he undid the plastic snaps of the little garment, bracing himself for the anticipated crying with the thought of a bit of cloth dipped in sugar water with which he could fill the little mouth, which trembled spasmodically in preparation for a renewed attack.