by Batya Gur
“But Callas didn’t have a child. She had an abortion. That was her choice. That’s not an insignificant decision, It’s a tragic step. It isn’t what you did. Maybe you’re not Callas after all, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.”
“But how many times can a thing like that happen in a person’s life?”
“A thing like what? Falling in love? Trusting someone absolutely? Meeting someone who looks into your eyes and tells you that he can’t live without you? It depends.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t know you,” he said carefully. “I’ve only heard you play, and seen you with your baby. You play so beautifully, I mean it, so . . . How can you doubt that you’ll be able to love again? And if you choose to fall in love with the wrong person again? Is that what you’re asking? It’s possible.” He stretched out his legs and rested his chin on his hand.
“What are you talking about?” She was offended. I’ll never . . . under any circumstances . . .”
He smiled. “So that’s what it’s all about,” he said, and he dipped a piece of bread in the salad dressing. “Maybe it’s the thought of getting over it too quickly that offends you, the fact that you can live without him. And maybe even live better without him. After all, he’s a married man, it was a clandestine affair—that’s no picnic, more like one long humiliation. Maybe you’re better off without him. It’s certainly a relief. But maybe the fact that it seems like such a good, sensible idea frightens you.”
She swallowed the last piece of her omelet. “What do you know about it?” she said at last. “You can just laugh at me.”
“God forbid. I’m not laughing at you. I know exactly what I’m talking about. In the first place, I’m divorced myself, and besides, I’ve been in love, too, and I’ve heard a thing or two in my life.”
“There you are!” she said triumphantly. “You live alone. That’s a fact. Do you know how old I am?”
He shook his head.
“Thirty-eight!” she cried. “How many more times will I be able to trust someone?”
He threw his head back and burst out laughing. There was something so sweet about her, like a little girl. He would have hugged her if he could have let himself touch her now. Her face fell, she looked hurt. He stopped smiling. “A wonderful age, thirty-eight, fantastic. And now, as long as the babies are asleep, why don’t I help you tidy up the kitchen? And maybe you can put on some music.”
And so it was. In the living room Alfred Brendel played Haydn’s Andante and Variations. From time to time Nita stopped and listened. Once she said: “That’s so beautiful!” She hummed with the music, and she said: “What a wonder that Haydn was! Not a stupid bone in his body!”
Michael was silent. This music, which he had never heard before, with its delicacy and its surprising melody, gave rise in him to longing and sadness. He listened to the slow, stately sound of the piano, and he knew that he would always be able to recognize this piece, from the very first note. Again he felt ashamed of his drive to keep the baby, and also a sharp feeling overcame him that the impulse reflected a hidden side of his character and was grossly contrary to his image. Maybe he was simply using the baby as a way, as Nita had said, of giving a new meaning to his life. Suddenly the music—surprising, delicate, and sad, and so different from everything he knew of Haydn—gave rise in him to a strong desire to cry. The sink was already empty. Nita poured water from the kettle into the two bottles and mixed in the yellow powder. Their eyes met, and she smiled. The music came to an end.
“Again, please,” said Michael.
“Yes, it really is beautiful,” she said as she returned to the kitchen and the music began again. “I wish I could play with Brendel sometime. I’ve played with good pianists,” she said shyly. He really is magnificent.”
The chairs were piled on the kitchen table. The floor was almost dry. Everything shone with cleanliness. From Ido’s room not a sound was heard. It seemed to Michael that years had passed since he had last experienced friendship, had a normal connection with someone. The pleasant feeling that flooded him was so strong as to alarm him. “Should I wake her to feed her?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” she pronounced. “How old is your son?”
“Almost twenty-three.”
“And when he was a baby did they still let them cry and only feed them every four hours?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember.” He smiled. “It seems to me I remember he was fed all the time. His business was feeding and crying. His grandparents thought I spoiled him, picked him up too much instead of letting him cry. I didn’t have the heart to do that.”
“When did you get divorced?”
“A long time ago.”
“Why?”
“We should never have married in the first place. We weren’t suited. We didn’t love each other.”
“And since then? You never remarried?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It never came up.”
“It never came up?”
He said nothing and went into the living room, returned to the kitchen, took down the chairs, pulled one out and sat on it, pulled out another and stood it next to his. Then he put the blue ashtray on the table in front of him, lit a cigarette, and pointed at the empty chair. He was about to tell her at that very moment, but a loud wail burst from Ido’s room. The baby girl had awakened and her wails silenced the music and also woke Ido.
“What do you do for a living?” she asked him as they sat side by side with the babies in their arms.
“I’m in the police force,” he said without taking his eyes off the pink mouth stuck to the nipple. Suddenly he imagined that he felt a tingling in his own nipples as she sucked. The sensation cast him into confusion, and he turned his attention to his body, trying to find out if some frightening sex transformation was happening, that alarming intensification of female characteristics he had heard took place in middle-aged men. Or were these only old wives’ tales?
As he had expected, Nita was astonished by his laconic reply. She had never met anyone in the police. She had thought they were all . . . Searching for the right word, she remained silent.
“Prejudices,” he muttered. She put Ido back in his crib and he put the baby girl into the stroller. He could tell her tomorrow, he said to himself when he saw that it was almost midnight.
“What do you do in the police?” she asked him as he stood hesitating by the stroller.
“I’ve just come back from a two-year leave, I was studying.”
“What did you study?”
“Law.”
“And did you graduate? In two years?”
“No. I’ll finish in another year or two, while I’m working.”
“And what are you going back to? Something connected with your studies?”
“To the investigation of major crimes. I’m usually in charge of a team investigating murder cases,” he said, anticipating her next question.
“That’s an important job. It’s scary,” she said with childish awe, her eyes wide.
“Very important,” he replied. She looked at him so seriously that he couldn’t help smiling. “Don’t you have a sense of humor, you Dutch?”
She thought for a moment. “No. I don’t know about the Dutch in general, but there was no humor in our family. There was a lot of irony, if you regard that as humor.”
“You need a sense of the ridiculous, at least a creative intelligence, for irony,” he said after some thought, “but in fact . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“Irony and humor are opposites. Irony’s always aggressive. It has to be, because it’s actually a defense.”
“In that case, my father is a very aggressive man.”
Michael was silent. The moment didn’t seem appropriate to him. He moved the stroller. The baby lay with her light blue eyes open and gurgled. It seemed to him that she was looking into his eyes.
“Look h
ow good she is,” Nita marveled, “and so beautiful.”
“Don’t say that,” he said, reaching out to knock on the wooden frame of the sofa.
“Are you superstitious? With all the logic you were lecturing me with just now, you’re superstitious?”
“I am,” he confessed, and in the tone he remembered from the village women in his Moroccan birthplace, he added: “What can I do?” He stood up to go.
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “Stay a little longer. We’ll have a brandy or something.” He didn’t sit down again, but he didn’t make a move, either. “As long as you’re here bad thoughts don’t come back to torment me,” she explained with downcast eyes. “But only if you want to, if you’re tired or anything . . .” she muttered.
The baby seemed contented. Now the apartment gave off a clean smell. There was no reason to hurry. Over a glass of brandy he could tell her. When he told her he’d feel better. Maybe. It would be a relief. Now he was completely sure of it, at least until the moment he sat down again and lit a cigarette. With his eyes fixed on the brandy in his glass he weighed the pros and cons again. He imagined how she would go pale, blush, how she would be appalled, how she would demand that they do something immediately, inform the authorities, find the baby’s mother. She would ask him why he wanted what he wanted. Again he was filled with a mixture of shame and distress at the wish itself and at the fact that he himself didn’t understand it. She was sitting quietly, her legs tucked under her. After they cleaned up she had changed her clothes. The blue blouse she was now wearing was creased, but it was unstained. Now her thinness was very apparent. She rolled the glass between the palms of her large hands and looked at him kindly.
“What kind of a name is Nita? Is it short for something?” he asked to gain time.
“No. That’s my full name. I’m named for Nita Bentwich, Thelma Yellin’s sister. They wanted to call me Thelma, but my mother knew a Thelma she hated, someone she’d gone to school with, so they decided to named me after Thelma Yellin’s sister, who died before her.”
“Thelma Yellin? The one with the school named after her?” She nodded.
“Wasn’t she a cellist, too?”
“An exceptional cellist. She played with Schnabel, Feuermann gave her his cello, and Casals was her teacher.”
“The Bentwich family are from Zichron Yaakov. Didn’t Nita Bentwich commit suicide?”
“I don’t know exactly. I only know that she was ill,” she said evasively.
“So your parents decided in advance that you’d be a cellist?”
“They always claimed that they didn’t,” she said with a laugh. “They said that it was their small tribute to Thelma Yellin’s memory. She was a great figure. My mother always used the word ‘great’ when she spoke of her. She knew her well. She often told me how Thelma had established an orchestra, about the chamber music she played, about her influence on musical life, how vital she was, things like that. They imagined that I’d play the piano, like my mother. But I chose the cello. Family legend has it that when I was four years old I heard a cello and I demanded that they get me one. My connection with Thelma Yellin was a later addition.”
Was it possible to trust with his story someone who had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth? This was the question that nagged at him now. There was no conceit about her, he reminded himself, but to be on the safe side he waited. “And your mother?”
“What?”
“What did she play?”
“I told you—the piano. But her career was cut off. First there was the war and then emigrating here, and then she was busy running the shop with my father. They did everything together.” The corners of her lips pursed in a wry expression. “It was because of the shop that she stopped playing. She’s a classic example of a woman who sacrificed her career. The war was part of it too, of course. When she was asked, she always said that she was happy. She played only at home.”
“Was she ironic, too?”
“No.” Nita laughed and took a sip of brandy. “She was anxious. She worried about me all the time. I could never let her know that I was having difficulties with anything. When I was studying in America she was more tense about my exams than I was. And when I had a concert she was a nervous wreck. She was always afraid that I would be mugged in New York. You know,” she said thoughtfully, “It’s awfully hard to grow up like that. You’re not allowed to be unhappy because it destroys your mother. When you’re the spoiled darling of elderly parents, and everyone adores you, why should you be unhappy?”
“Why, indeed?”
“I . . . I always had a hard time taking things lightly. Maybe some people are born like that, oversensitive. I’m not bragging about it, It’s simply a fact.”
“Maybe It’s connected to your being an artist.”
“Maybe, but then I should be a really serious artist.”
He could have postponed the moment of truth, but he couldn’t stand any longer the suspense of not knowing how she would react. And precisely at the moment when a pleasant silence filled the room, he heard himself say: “About the baby . . .”
She looked at her glass. “Do you mean Noa?”
“It may as well be Noa.”
“What do you mean, it may as well be Noa? That’s her name, isn’t it?”
“It’s not clear,” he said carefully. His heart pounded, and he felt short of breath.
She unfolded her legs, sat up straight in the blue armchair, put the glass down on the copper serving table, frowned, and finally said: “I don’t understand.”
He explained.
“I don’t believe it!”
He nodded.
“In a cardboard box? In the bomb shelter? Who could leave a baby, a nursing baby, in a bomb shelter? Are you telling me the truth now? Is this the true story?”
He nodded.
“But she’s so beautiful . . . and fair . . . and so good and . . .”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Who would want to abandon a baby like that? Do you know how many people would be willing . . . would be happy . . . would jump at the chance . . . Who would want to abandon her?”
“Someone who had no choice.”
“They could have given her up for adoption,” she protested. “If they had to.”
“Not if they didn’t want anyone to know she existed,” he said.
She was silent. He lit another cigarette.
“What are you going to do?”
For a long moment he didn’t answer. She waited. Her eyes were fixed on him in tense, cautious anticipation. There were words ready in his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to say them out loud: I want her to stay with me. Even when he said them to himself, they had an irrational, crazy sound. They made him feel disgusted with himself. He coughed. At last he only said: “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I have to sleep on it. Meanwhile she’s here, and it has to remain a secret.”
“I don’t talk to anyone anyway,” she reassured him.
“Even if you do,” he warned.
“Even if I do, I won’t say a word,” she promised.
2
Rossini, Vivaldi, and Nurse Nehama
How solemn and beautiful the solo cello sounded in Rossini’s William Tell Overture, the first piece performed that evening, and how much sorrow there was in the response of the five orchestral cellos. Deep and dark was the opening note. And after it, like a waterfall, came the lament of the others. By now Michael already knew every pause, every breath, every note. And every touch of the bow on the strings, every sweep of the arm in its black sleeve, echoed the words spoken by Nita late this afternoon, as she stood by the French windows looking out at the hills beyond. She had held the cello in one hand and the bow in the other, and she gestured toward the view. “Sometimes I . . .” her voice broke. She swallowed hard. “They come suddenly, with no warning, I feel such longings, undefined longings . . .” She had touched her chest with the tip of the bow. “And then,” her eyes glitter
ed with tears, “I ask myself why things turned out like this, and what I did wrong. And what I could have done differently, if anything, why it has to be this way, and . . . My mother’s dead . . .” She sobbed.
Michael sat in the corner of the little sofa with the baby girl in his arms while Ido banged a red block against the bars of the playpen. He grumbled when it slipped out of his hand, and he took hold of his foot, trying to get his toe into his mouth. Nita glanced at him, choked back a sob, and said in a broken voice: “And then what I want is to go back to trusting,” she said, smiling, or, more precisely, stretching her lips. The dimple did not appear. “And then I hate myself. I know I can’t afford to be so full of longings and desires, that I have to channel everything into music and that I’m lucky, as you said. Most people don’t have my talent. But I can’t help it, I’m addicted, consumed by those banal romantic wishes.” You could see the disgust in her eyes. She lowered them. “You certainly must despise me,” she blurted out.
“No, I don’t,” he said quietly, in order not to wake the baby. “How could I despise you? It hurts so much, and I see you suffering and struggling against the pain as if you could avoid it. You can’t. Whatever you do, it hurts. That’s what happens to people who dive into love. Into the idea of love. Into the fantasy of love, which has no connection to its object—he might as well be a scarecrow, as you said yesterday.”
She wept soundlessly. With the back of the hand holding the bow she wiped away big tears, and then she sniffled and wiped her nose. Its turned-up tip turned red, the freckles on the bridge faded.
“I’m always astonished at how people, especially women, can love or long for someone for whom they have no respect at all.” Again she wiped her eyes. “Actually,” she said soberly, “it’s as you said yesterday. I miss being a little girl, close to someone, dependent.” Suddenly she shivered and looked at him: “Why are your eyes so sad?”
Now, in the concert hall, Michael smiled, remembering the frightened, guilty tone of the question. “Do I make you sad? Are you giving up on me?” she had probed.
“No, I’m not giving up on you. How could I give up on someone who plays the Double Concerto like you do? I was thinking of my son.”
