“Yes,” the conductor goes on, “Fukushima, which is where he was found. He speaks only Japanese, but neither you nor I will have any problem with him, since he has played La Mer by Debussy a number of times as first harpist, and he no doubt knows the part by heart.”
The little old man bows again at the sound of the French composer’s name.
“So he’ll be playing the first harp part?” Noga asks anxiously, her eyes fixed on the old man, who now and again bows his head.
“No, no, you are the first harpist, and he is the second,” the conductor says. “He has not come here seeking fame, only to help. He has come from far away, two days of travel, and he is a simple and modest man, as you see, and also adorable.”
Everyone smiles at the word “adorable,” and the cultural attaché translates the adjective for the old man, who erupts with laughter, his mouth nearly toothless. Again he presses his palms together and distributes bows in a semicircle to the entire group.
“And what is his name?” asks Noga. “I should at least know his name.”
“Ichiro Matsudaira,” says the attaché, and the old man who hears his name spoken bows once again.
He just might bow to us while playing, thinks Noga, wondering if she should extend her hand to him, but thinks better of it and instead bows deeply and recites her name: “Noga, which means Venus.”
And the old man whispers reverentially, “Venus,” and bows heartily in return.
At the conclusion of the bowing a monk emerges from the temple and admits only the maestro and the Japanese harpist, and the rest of the group heads into the garden.
Fifty-Two
AS NOGA PREPARES for the night in the room she is sharing with her seatmate from the plane, her mobile phone startles her. Her brother Honi, his voice as clear and sharp as if he were next door, wishes to know if the flight went well.
“Is it you who’s concerned, or did Ima lay her worry on you?”
“I don’t worry about someone who knows how to take care of herself, but Ima is here with me, and she misses the sound of your voice.”
“Ima is still with you in Tel Aviv?” she asks, astonished. “Why, what happened?”
“Ask her, but I doubt you’ll get a reasonable answer. Anyway, before I hand you over to her—in one word, how was the flight to Japan?”
“We flew over the North Pole.”
“And what’s happening there?”
“The sun. It never sets.”
“And Japan?”
“Pleasant and strange, but it’s only the beginning.”
“Anyway, take care of yourself. Here’s Ima.”
The mother’s voice, soft and tentative, seems to have changed.
“Something happened or is happening in Jerusalem that makes it hard for you to go back there?” the daughter asks bluntly.
“Yes . . . I mean, no . . . nothing special . . . and if there is something, then it’s not clear. But don’t worry, because I realize I’m a burden here and I have to leave, that’s clear to me, so you don’t need to remind me from Japan. Not to worry, I won’t stay, it’s just that all of a sudden it’s hard for me to go back to Jerusalem, somehow because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Because ever since you left I can’t stop thinking about you . . . that dream . . . and on top of that Uriah’s visit. But wait, first you. What’s going on with you?”
“Everything’s fine. Tomorrow is the first concert in Kyoto, but it’s not worth going into at length in an overseas call to my cell. It’s very expensive, also for me—”
“Please, don’t worry about the money. I already explained to you that after my release from assisted living I’m a rich woman, so please, send me your phone bill, just don’t stop me now.”
“Okay, talk, even though it’s late here. But please, don’t talk about me, talk about you. What’s bothering you all of a sudden?”
“About me is about you, and about you is about me. After all, it’s you who promised to play me on your harp, so I’m also playing you, in my heart.”
“Lovely. In other words?”
“The dream you told me about is disturbing, painful.”
“It’s a dream, Ima, only a dream.”
“Right, only a dream, but your visit in Israel also seems like only a dream. You were here three months and I barely saw you.”
“Because you and Honi asked me to look after the apartment.”
“Right, but you looked after it too much, and I was stuck with that pointless experiment in assisted living. But it’s okay, our intentions were good, and with the same goodwill your visit flew by.”
“But Ima, what’s going on now? How’d you get stuck at Honi’s?”
“Stuck, that’s the right word. You know me, this is something new, because I don’t get stuck anywhere. I got stuck here because I’m afraid to go back to the apartment, because maybe Uriah made himself a copy of the key and he’ll surprise me there.”
“Uriah? Ima, why Uriah?”
“You weren’t fair to him. I’m telling you straight. If you’re playing me on your harp, listen to what the harp plays back. You weren’t fair. If you loved him, and you did love him, you should not have aborted his child.”
“Ima, just drop Uriah, he is irrelevant now, he came and went and won’t come back, he has a wife and two kids and he doesn’t need me, and certainly not you.”
“No, it’s not that simple. Don’t think that everyone else is an extra, without a mind of their own or power of their own. You were wrong . . . I don’t want to make you angry now, before the concert, but if you think you’re playing me, you should pick some better notes . . . That’s all. I shouldn’t have let you run away from Israel before explaining to me what’s going on with you.”
“I didn’t run away, I came to help you decide. Honi asked me to.”
“Honi has one story, I have a different story . . . Don’t worry too much about him. He’s fine, and tomorrow I’ll set him free and go back to Jerusalem. What time is it there? Morning?”
“Morning? Why morning? We’re in the Far East, not the West. The sun went down here hours ago. Now it’s late, eleven at night. I’m staying in a room with an older woman who doesn’t understand Hebrew, but would surely like to go to sleep.”
“An older woman?”
“From the orchestra, a contrabass player, a grandmother, a good woman—”
“A contrabass player must be a big strong woman.”
“She actually is as you imagine her, but skinny and delicate people can also play the contrabass, in fact any instrument. Here, for example, the second harp will be played tomorrow by a tiny Japanese man.”
“Tiny Japanese man?”
“Really tiny. A little old man.”
“So you’ll have an interesting challenge, the dialogue with him. Good thing you’re sleeping tonight in the same room as a big strong woman who’s a grandmother—it will give you confidence, as if I were sleeping beside you. Tell her hello from me, and that she should protect you.”
“Ima, what’s with you? Why protect me?”
“Because I still think Uriah won’t give up on the child you didn’t give him.”
“How?”
“Maybe he’ll come again, this time to me.”
“To you? Why? In what way are you responsible?”
“I’m responsible because I gave birth to you. I’m responsible because I didn’t know how to guide you in life. The least I can do for him is sympathize.”
Fifty-Three
THE SNORING THAT THE CONTRABASSIST had warned of in advance indeed disrupted Noga’s sleep. At first she tried to muffle her ears with a pillow, but it was no match for the snores. With no alternative, she left the room in hopes that the snoring might wake the snorer. The guesthouse was dark and silent, with a dim light in the stairway. She went down to the dining room but found it locked, and the front door was locked as well, but a rear door turned out to be open, with trees whispering in the park beyond.
The night is pleasingly cool, and she is drawn into a thicket of trees whose overcrowded roots have emerged from underground to twist around the trunks. Along the paths are bushes decorated with tiny light bulbs, apparently left over from some celebration, that calm her nerves with their childish innocence. She steps on, bathed in the sweet, familiar fragrance of fresh-mown grass. From the middle of the garden comes a murmur of human voices, borne on a bluish cloud of harsh tobacco smoke, recalling the cheap cigarettes Uriah was addicted to in his army days. She follows the smell and the voices, arriving at a handsome wooden gazebo, in front of which are gathered a dozen or so young men and women, most likely students from the university, smoking and talking, and planted among them, to her astonishment, is the little old man who came from afar to be her partner. He sits on a bench, barefoot, his legs folded under him. He wears the same gray robe, with the same pack tied to his back. But his white braid is unraveled for the night, and the mane of hair framing his face gives him the look of a sweet old Japanese woman from an American movie about World War II.
He is half asleep, half listening to the youngsters, with a small pipe stuck in his mouth. The young people, noticing the foreign woman heading their way, fall silent. But she is no stranger to the old man, and to demonstrate this she stands before him and bows deeply, in the spirit of their meeting a few hours earlier at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. But the old man merely nods his head, apparently failing to recognize her as his partner. Is he a blind musician, improvising the part of second harp? She feels a sudden pang of anxiety, but doesn’t press the issue. Touching two fingers to her lips, she offers an excuse for her presence: the craving for a cigarette. The young people oblige her, and rather than say thank you, she delights in local custom and bows to the whole group, cigarette in mouth, as if she were a soloist onstage before a cheering audience. She then walks back to the guesthouse, filled with the scent of simple tobacco that reminds her of Uriah.
The room is still, but the snoring grandma has woken up and turned on her small bedside light, waiting to apologize to the neighbor. To be honest, she hadn’t imagined that her snoring would startle and drive away the Israeli, who has evidently long grown accustomed to sleeping alone. Now she will not fall back to sleep until Noga has soundly done so. As reinforcement she offers Noga a dependable sleeping pill, whose effect is impervious even to cannon fire. “A whole or just a half?” “Whole,” says the harpist. “Half the night is gone, and tomorrow’s a big day.”
The little pill is indeed a mighty potion, and the sleep is so deep that her dreams lie dormant. And when she opens her eyes she finds herself alone in the room, her neighbor’s bed meticulously made, and morning fiercely shining through the folds of the window curtain. It is nine o’clock. Eight hours of pure sleep, which instead of alertness have produced a thick blur. Noga smiles, thinking, This sweet grandma could have killed me so she could snore to her heart’s content. She rises sluggishly, washes slowly, her head spinning, limbs heavy, and before making her bed she rushes just in time to what’s left of the breakfast buffet. The many hours of sleep did her no good, and the visit to the park seems like an illusion; she’s not even sure if the cigarette was lit or not. Since the rehearsal at the concert hall is called for one p.m., most of the musicians, encouraged by eager guides, are making a quick tour of two more temples. But the Israeli does not seek further holiness—she has more than enough in her homeland. She returns to her room, where instead of making her unruly bed she slips back into her nightgown and huddles like a fetus, no longer from fatigue but from feelings of illness and pain.
At noon Manfred arrives to wake her. What’s going on? carps the flutist. They will only be in this jewel box of a city for four days, so what’s the point of sleeping? She looks at him sadly and doesn’t reply. Her roommate is astounded: there’s no way a little innocent sleeping pill could depress somebody quite so much.
“Little but not innocent,” Noga mumbles feebly in English. “But it’s not depression, it’s memory.” Without adding a word, she banishes Manfred and goes to the bathroom, and is terrified to find two blood spots on her nightgown. Could her period conceivably be coming back, or is this a symptom of something more serious? She washes out the nightgown, rubbing the blood spots with a bar of soap, struck by a sensation of death.
The Kyoto Concert Hall is splendidly modern, resembling a giant shoe. The heel is a round structure containing the main hall and its rectangular lobby. At the back of the stage rise the lofty pipes of the organ, silvered and gilded, in the manner of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Most of the instruments have been brought onstage, and her harp has been joined by a black one the likes of which she has seen only in old photographs. “Is this the house harp?” she asks the Japanese cultural attaché, who explains that this is the private harp of the elderly Ichiro Matsudaira, which he brings with him to every performance. The rehearsal begins with Symphony No. 26 in D Minor by Haydn, a dramatic, tempestuous symphony, which an ensemble of the best players performs with vigorous precision. As they play, Herman Kroon and a woman violist, who Dennis believes has a uniquely sensitive ear, prowl about the hall to verify how its acoustics respond to a foreign orchestra. It turns out that what sounds right and good in Europe also sounds right and good in the Far East.
Next in turn, after the Haydn symphony, is Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and most of the musicians who had not been part of the previous ensemble come to the stage. Only Noga and a few percussionists stay seated in the hall. She has installed herself in the first row to get a better look at the Japanese soloist, on account of whose arm, broken in a tennis game in Berlin, Noga had been robbed of the Mozart concerto. This is a short, dark young woman in jeans and a lightweight blouse, her hands quick and dexterous, and it would seem that her self-confidence flourishes here in her homeland, for she asks, even in rehearsal, that the house be completely dark, to compel the few listeners to concentrate on her alone.
Her playing is powerful, fast, virtuosic, but uninspired. From time to time the conductor halts her racing tempo, trying to reach a compromise, not always with success. “She’s a well-known kamikaze,” Herman whispers to Noga, “who turns music into a suicide mission. But don’t worry about her, tonight they’ll love her, because she was born in a small town not far from here to a poor family, and when she studied music she supported herself as a waitress and babysitter, and soared to the top on her talent alone. Many people here still remember her from the beginning of her career, and whoever doesn’t can read about it in the program. The Japanese, unlike us, don’t just flip through the program, they read it from cover to cover. And besides,” Herman goes on, “let us not forget that this is the Emperor, and for the Japanese that’s not Napoleon but their emperor—beloved, mysterious, revered, the bedrock of their identity.”
Little noises in the darkness. Noga turns around and sees the elderly harpist feeling his way inside, a small stick in his hand. She wants to exchange a hello with him, but fears he will again find it hard to recognize her. No matter, she thinks, soon we’ll sit shoulder to shoulder and he won’t be able to deny me.
The glorious metallic tones of the piano are suddenly accompanied by the acute contraction of her lower belly, like a knife blade turning in her gut, and though she tries to distract herself from the pain, it won’t let up. The young Japanese woman is galloping like a wild horse that has thrown its rider, and the conductor is trying to slow her down with the help of the wind instruments. Noga has seen her share of young and brilliant soloists who after a few years sink into anonymity. Soloists of age sixty or seventy are less abundant than these youngsters. Personal life experience, the broader and deeper the better, is the key to fresh interpretation of the tired, crowd-pleasing classics.
The pain increases, her muscles strain. “Excuse me,” she whispers to Herman, and goes out of the hall in search of the ladies’ room, which is tucked someplace far away, and she only finds a large door with the stenciled image of a person in a wheelchair,
crowned by one word in Japanese. Does this suggest anyone, male and female? If she had access to the chair she occupied as a disabled extra, she’d roll right in, not as a man or woman, but just a human. In the absence of such a chair, does her distress confer permission? There is no one in the corridor to tell her what is and isn’t proper, so she cautiously opens the door and enters.
She finds a big, wide stall, immaculate as a doctor’s office. At one side is a diaper-changing table big enough for twins or even triplets. She unzips her pants and discovers that the same bloodstains that she removed from the nightgown have reappeared on her panties, larger and redder than before. Something is wrong with her body. Her periods are long gone. What are the odds of a return visit?
A loudspeaker tucked in the ceiling plays the music from the hall, and while she is convulsing miserably in a public washroom, the notes of the Emperor’s finale cascade from a piano above her head. In a few minutes the conductor will exchange a few more words with the soloist before moving on to the second part of the rehearsal. But Noga doesn’t budge. She waits for the pain to subside, or at least to make its intentions clear. Very slowly she tries to regulate her breathing. The new blood spots cannot be removed right now, and will alas accompany her to the stage, but with all her might she will strive to control the pain, hoping it will actually intensify her performance.
The Emperor is finished. According to the program, the time has come for the Melancholy Arabesques of Van den Broek. In which case, she has eight whole minutes to recover and calm down. Lucky for her that in the end they didn’t cut anything from the already short piece. She waits for the opening shriek of the piccolo, and now, here goes, the third time she’s heard these insane arabesques, this one through a little speaker in the ceiling, and quite miraculously, what had earlier sounded chaotic and gratuitously provocative seems cloaked in a kind of decadent beauty. Yes, despite his disdainful objections to this work, the maestro has succeeded, perhaps under the influence of his wife, in shaping it to shock listeners without repelling them.
The Extra Page 24
