by Batya Gur
“What time exactly did van Gelden die? What does the pathologist say?”
“The pathologist puts it in the afternoon—four o’clock, half past four, five, six, no later than seven.”
Michael hesitated. In a certain sense, the very question would be a betrayal. “Where were they at that time, his children?”
“You know where she was,” said Balilty, puffing out his lips. “At the hairdresser.”
“And the others?”
Balilty narrowed his eyes, and he pressed the cigarette lighter and examined the flame. “Why get into it?” he asked reluctantly, raising his eyes and looking at Michael. “You don’t have to. Do you really want to?”
Michael shrugged.
“Theo van Gelden is the number-one fucker in town, if you’ll excuse the expression. That afternoon he had a date with a woman of fifty and a girl of nineteen. Both of them he . . .” The gesture of his hand and elbow left no doubt as to the nature of Theo van Gelden’s activities with the women in question. “And his brother, his brother is something else again.” Balilty’s face clouded over.
“He didn’t want to say anything,” said Michael indiscreetly
“He didn’t want to say anything because he didn’t want his brother and sister to know that he had a meeting with his father’s lawyer. Neither of them, neither he nor the lawyer, is willing to say what it was about. For the time being I don’t have a way to force them.”
“There’s a certain Scotsman . . .” said Michael.
Balilty tapped the desk. “I’ve heard of him. McBrady is his name,” he said. “I heard about him on the first night, but it turns out that he’s in a hospital in Edinburgh. He’s diabetic and has had a leg amputated. He’s not interested in paintings at the moment. What can I tell you? It’s better to be young and healthy than old and sick. Even if you’ve got money.”
“So what do you think the chances are of solving the case?”
“Not good,” admitted Balilty. “However much I’d like to, what with the lodge and everything. But if it’s a foreign job, there isn’t much chance. Unless something unforeseen happens. As you often used to say, ‘Wonders will never cease.’ Something might happen.”
Michael looked at his watch. “I have to go,” he said uncomfortably. “I promised to take—”
“Look at you,” said Balilty with a laugh. “You’ve become a family man overnight.”
“I have to relieve the babysitter early today.” He felt himself blushing as he walked to the door. Balilty stood up and hurried to open it. He looked up and down the corridor, took Michael by the arm, and conspiratorially asked him: “Haven’t you told Shorer anything?”
“Not a word,” said Michael, appalled. “And don’t you say anything to him!”
“Me?” exclaimed the offended Balilty. “I only wanted to know if you’d told him. I thought he knew everything about you.” The gratification in his smile was unmistakable.
The babysitter closed the front door behind her as he was changing Ido’s diaper. Ido was kicking his legs and cooing happily. The doorbell rang. Michael quickly pressed the adhesive strips together and, holding Ido in his arms, opened the door to Nurse Nehama, who was panting as she looked at him in surprise. “I spoke to the babysitter on the phone only half an hour ago. Didn’t she tell you?” He almost choked with panic. With difficulty he stopped himself from asking her if she had come to take Noa away. He opened the door wider and with an effort smiled at her. “You look pale,” she said, concerned, as she sank into the same armchair in which she had sat on the previous visit. “It must be hard for you,” she added with evident sympathy. “It’s a terrible thing that happened to you.”
Michael sat down on the chair next to hers and seated Ido on his lap. Fascinated by the nurse’s long necklace, Ido tried to reach it. Nehama held out her arms. “Do you want Nehama?” she cooed. “Come to Nehama,” she said, removing the necklace and the chain from which her glasses dangled. Ido’s eyes followed the necklace, which she put on the table. He squirmed in her arms as he tried to grab hold of the green beads. Nehama returned him to Michael’s lap.
“Noa’s just fallen asleep,” he said, finally finding his voice.
“How is she?” asked the nurse, wriggling her shoulders and rubbing the back of her neck as if to relieve tension. Then she again put on her necklace and chain.
“I think she’s all right,” said Michael, and he rebuked himself for the paralysis that had overtaken him. “I don’t think what’s happened has affected her any,” he ventured.
“We have no way of knowing how they feel,” stated Nurse Nehama. “They don’t tell us anything,” she said, winking and chuckling. “The question is only if her behavior has changed. Is she eating well? Sleeping? Is she calm?” Michael nodded, but he immediately realized that this would not be enough.
“Come and see,” he said, and he stood up with Ido in his arms. “She looks wonderful to me,” he said persuasively from the doorway. He tried to see the tiny room, in which there wasn’t even space for two cribs, through Nurse Nehama’s eyes.
“Sleeping, my eye!” Nehama’s laughter rang out. “She’s wide awake! Look at her.” The baby was lying on her back, cooing at the musical rabbit dangling from the roof of the stroller. The nurse pulled the string. At the sound of the first notes of Brahms’s Lullaby, the baby waved her arms. Nurse Nehama exclaimed admiringly: “How she’s developed in the two weeks I haven’t seen her! She’s grown so much and she’s calm and alert. Really, it’s as if nothing had happened to her. It’s a pity I can’t see the mother. Aren’t they sitting shiva here?” she inquired sharply.
Michael muttered unintelligibly. Finally he said: “We’re doing our best. We didn’t want all that commotion here. You know her brothers are very—”
“Yes, I can imagine,” said the nurse respectfully. There you are, he reassured himself, she’s impressed by important people. But his body refused to quiet down, and his knees shook.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” she said, and he stopped breathing. “This isn’t an official visit. We just thought, in the office, that you might need help.” She looked around. “Advice, or something like that. In another couple of days the Child Welfare Bureau inspector will come, and she’s the one who’ll make the decision. And how is Miss van Gelden feeling? We can send her a psychologist if the police don’t—”
“She’s fine,” Michael assured her. “She’s even playing the cello again. Everything’s as usual,” he said, and he felt he had gone too far. “Relatively speaking, that is,” he quickly added. “Of course it’s very hard for her. The police will probably send her a psychologist. They’ve already spoken to her about it.” He stared at the lamp. How hard exactly should Nita be taking her father’s murder both in order to appear normal and in order not to give them a reason to take the baby away? He put Ido down on the carpet and picked Noa up.
“We thought that if it was difficult for you, maybe you would prefer to give her up—”
“Certainly not!” cried Michael, alarmed at the force of his cry. “Look,” he said, and he gripped Nurse Nehama by the arm. “For us she’s a consolation, a great joy, a real help. It would shatter us if they took her away from us now.” He looked into her eyes, which narrowed to two slits. “It would really shatter us. Especially Nita. I know you understand me, I can sense that you feel for us,” he said. He made his tone as desperate as he could and again looked deeply into the dull pale green of her eyes.
Nurse Nehama opened her eyes wide. “I’m glad you feel like that,” she said, and she turned to leave the room, drawing herself up to her full height with a dignified air. “It’s true, I do feel a lot of sympathy for you and your case. I promised you that everything would be all right, didn’t I? I’m still promising you that, except that it doesn’t only depend on me. The inspector will be here in a day or two. The baby is really adorable. There shouldn’t be any problems.”
“We’re really attached to her, we want to take care of her,”
pleaded Michael, and he felt his face burning.
“All we can do is hope for the best, as they say,” said Nurse Nehama. “I believe that things usually work out for the best for all concerned,” she concluded, and she made for the door. “We’ll be in touch,” she promised reassuringly. She set the straps of her bag firmly on her shoulder and stretched her lips into a bright, professional smile.
Serves you right, he said to himself as he dressed Ido and put him in his carrier. Serves you right, he repeated as he got Noa ready to go out. When you want something, anything, so much, you become easy prey to anyone. Anyone can intrude on you now. Balilty and Nurse Nehama are only the beginning. What do I actually want? “What do I actually want?” he said aloud to Noa as he fastened the snaps of her blue corduroy outfit. She looked at him gravely with eyes that seemed to have grown bigger and darker during the past few days. They were now blue-brown. Suddenly she smiled. This wasn’t the automatic spasm of parted lips he had seen the week before, but a real, gum-showing smile that also involved the eyes, which never left his face.
A second passed before he said: “You’re smiling at me, you already know me.” His eyes were moist as he smiled back at her. “I have to write it down,” he announced as he laid her in the carrier that he removed from the stroller. “I have to write down that today, on the twentieth? The twenty-first? Of September nineteen ninety-four, at the age of, let’s say, six weeks, you smiled a real smile for the first time.” He carried both babies to the door. “Come on,” he said solemnly, “let’s go tell Nita that you smiled at me. Maybe you’ll smile at her, too.”
He went into the concert hall through the artists’ entrance, pushing the heavy wooden door with his shoulder, since he was holding Ido’s baby seat in one hand and, in the other, Noa’s carrier, at the foot of which was stuffed a bag holding diapers, bottles, and other baby equipment. He sat down in the second row, at the end closest to the doors of the half-dark hall, and set the portable baby seat and the carrier down on either side of him. Then he looked at the stage. The rehearsal should have been over a few minutes ago, but it seemed to be in full swing. On the seats around him various instrument cases were scattered, on the seat in front of him a gaping violin case, with photographs pasted on the inside of the lid and a semitransparent envelope of spare strings in a corner of the space intended for the instrument. A light jacket had been casually thrown over the seat behind him, with an instrument case visible beneath it. The orchestra was on the stage at full strength. Some of the musicians had placed their instrument cases under their chairs, and others had left them at the foot of the stage.
Facing the orchestra and seated on the edge of a tall, narrow stool sat Theo van Gelden, who now stamped his foot and clapped his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried out. “We’re not leaving until the syncopations are right.” A murmur of protest arose from the back of the stage. The regular concertmaster, a gray-haired man with his glasses pushed up to the top of his high forehead, tapped his bow on the belly of his violin. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he echoed, “we can’t finish until the radio people are finished with their tests. But we’ll start late tomorrow.” The grumbling did not die down, and one very young man holding a clarinet came up to Theo, turned to the orchestra, and shouted: “Why are you behaving like timid bureaucrats?” A violinist in the back row said something and everyone around him laughed. “Listen to the greenhorn!” cried a trumpet player from the rear. “We were like that, too, once.” Again laughter broke out.
Nita shaded her eyes, looked into the hall, and waved to Michael. She and Gabriel were sitting at the front of the stage, very close to Theo. From the distance the bottom half of her body in the full skirt pushed in by the cello looked like a kind of blue hill. Now, as he looked at her, she seemed very beautiful, absolutely radiant. For a moment he felt a breath of the scent of the nape of her neck. Two days before, when they had met in the doorway to her kitchen, he had suddenly kissed her. Her lips were soft, and her total submission had taken him by surprise. Nita had the habit of touching those nearby. From that moment on she touched him all the time, small, gentle touches. When she looked at him the next morning her face was illuminated by a tender, yielding light, and the joyful signals of her body—especially coming after Avigail’s reserve—held great promise. She could be a home for him, he thought now in happy surprise, and the knowledge that they were so close to each other filled him with pride.
Gabriel held his violin with his shoulder and cheek as he rubbed his bow with rosin. Someone bumped into the cello case lying between Gabriel and Nita. “May I take this away from here?” he asked loudly. When Nita nodded he picked it up and carried it off the stage. Theo looked impatiently at his brother. Gabriel put the rosin away in the case under his chair. The concertmaster stood next to Theo, looking at him expectantly. Theo said: “Just a minute, Avigdor.”
“From the beginning?” asked the concertmaster, and though Michael tried hard, he could make out only a mumble from Theo, who took off the jacket draped over his shoulders and laid it at his feet.
“Bar one,” called the concertmaster. “What, from the beginning?” protested the woman standing behind the timpani. “Number one,” said Theo, raising his hands. “Four bars tutti, and then the cello solo. We’ll do the whole first movement, and then we’ll see.”
Two technicians dragged cables down the hall and stopped at the foot of the stage. Michael turned his head. At the end of the hall, above the last row of seats in the balcony, there was a light on behind a big glass window. Looking as if they were creatures in an aquarium, three figures moved silently in the broadcast booth, signaling at the technicians down below. The latter went down on their knees and pulled cables under the stage. Theo van Gelden brought his arms down and the entire orchestra played the opening notes. With the first loud sound Ido’s head jerked in the baby seat, his eyes opening and his lips parting. Michael quickly put one hand on his cheek, while with the other he searched the seat for the pacifier, fished it out, and pushed it into the child’s mouth. Ido’s body relaxed, but his eyes remained wide open. He seemed to be listening intently to the entrance of the cello, which now began to play its opening solo.
Theo stopped Nita after a few bars. “What does Brahms write here?” he asked rhetorically. ‘In the style of a recitative, but always in tempo.’ Not so freely, Nita, please. From the beginning!” He clapped his hands and the orchestra played the first bars again. Nita, her lips tight, repeated the notes she had been playing night and day for the past couple of weeks, twenty-two bars in all, at the end of which—Michael knew, she never stopped talking about it—there was a sustained f that descended to e. And then the four horns and a clarinet entered, and Theo stopped them after two bars. Noa moved in her carrier. Michael put his hand on her stomach. Theo called out: “Once again, cello solo just from the f, from the f to the e, come in again.”
This time he let them play the complete phrase without interruption. Gabriel held his bow above the violin, let it glide over the strings, and hinted at the theme with a warm, clear tone. This was the first time Michael had heard him play. Nita had told him that Gabi could have had a big career as a solo violinist if he hadn’t been overcome by what she called a “mania for historical performance on period instruments.” He also remembered her saying: “He can’t stand Brahms anymore. Only Baroque music exists for him. The nineteenth century makes him sick, but maybe on our behalf he’ll come back to it now. After all, he agreed to play the Double Concerto with us.”
Gabriel’s violin sounded very beautiful to Michael, but it didn’t tug at his heart the way Oistrakh did in the recording of the piece he had known for years. He rebuked himself for his inflexibility. Then the orchestra entered to present the theme in full. A few seconds later, Theo slapped his thigh and shouted: “No! No! No!”
The orchestra stopped playing. A technician climbed onto the stage, adjusted the microphones, and signaled the men in the booth.
“What do we have here?” asked T
heo. He got off his high stool. “We have triplets in the violins and flutes. Instead of two quarter notes, you must squeeze in three! Please! I beg your pardon,” he said, leaning toward the violas, “forgive me for sending you back to elementary school. Leave emotions and Brahms aside for a minute. I’m simply asking you to learn to count! Oboes, clarinets, trumpets, violas!” He paused for a moment and pointed at the wind instruments. “You’re being drawn into playing the two quarters with the triplets instead of against them! It’s two against three! Let me remind you again: Don’t listen to the triplets in the flutes and violins. Don’t listen! Avram,” he said, bending toward the principal violist, “do you hear what I say? Don’t listen to their triplets!” The principal violist nodded and turned to the group of musicians behind him to repeat the instruction. Theo went on: “Just count! Please count! Once more from fifty-seven, from the end of the violin and cello solos. And Gabriel, I want strong violin, not historical violin.”
Gabriel said something. Theo got off his chair and stood before his brother. “Gabriel,” said Theo, very loud and threatening. “What do you want me to do? What Leonard Bernstein did before his performance with Glenn Gould? Should I stand up in front of the audience and explain that I’m playing in your tempo against my own better judgment and the way I understand the music? Is that what you want?” There was something artificial about Theo’s behavior, as if he had staged the scene in order to create an opportunity to tell the anecdote about Bernstein and Gould.
Again Gabriel said something.
“At the next rehearsal,” pronounced Theo. Gabriel filled his cheeks with air, tugged at his beard, and let the air out noisily.
“Again!” cried Theo. They played a few bars, and then suddenly the big wooden doors were flung open, the lights went on in the hall, and everybody froze. With a stunned expression on his face, Theo turned his head toward the entrance and stared at the large group of people bursting in with television lights and cameras in the wake of a young woman leading by the arm the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. He entered the hall with a slow, heavy tread, dragging his feet and with his head down as if to make sure of his footing on the marble floor. Looking neither left nor right, his creased blue cotton jacket flapping, he carefully mounted the steps to a row of seats in the center of the hall. His arm was gripped by the young woman, who was talking loudly. He let himself down into a seat. After him came two cameramen and two men in gray overalls dragging huge television lights.
